Progressives Know How to Turn the Page on the Trump Years. Biden Should Listen.

Progressives Know How to Turn the Page on the Trump Years. Biden Should Listen.

Progressives Know How to Turn the Page on the Trump Years. Biden Should Listen.

It is vital that the incoming president launch his administration with immediate, bold reforms to address the cascading crises facing the country.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Last week exposed both the poison and the promise of America. Not surprisingly, the poison—Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol by a mostly white mob that looked, as Mike Davis noted, much like a “big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians”—received global attention. Meanwhile, the promise—the stunning election of an African American and a Jew to represent Georgia in the Senate—was virtually lost in the universal condemnation of the mob and President Trump. Yet, while prosecution of the perpetrators and repudiation of Trump are imperative, the incoming Biden administration should focus on building on the success in Georgia.

Democrats’ wins last week demonstrated that, with intensive organizing and passionate mobilization, the emerging majority can overcome both historical and current obstruction. As Eric Foner wrote for The Nation, Georgia’s history includes the 1915 lynching of the Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, the turn of populist Tom Watson into a rabid racist and anti-Semite in wake of electoral defeat, and the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 in which white mobs killed between 25 and 40 African Americans. Wednesday’s runoff resulted from a 1963 law that required office seekers to receive more than 50 percent of votes, a measure enacted to block the victory of a Black-supported candidate if several conservatives split the white vote. More recently, the state’s beleaguered Republican Party has systematically deployed modern mechanisms to suppress the vote, from purging the voter rolls to reducing early voting days to closing polling places.

Overcoming these obstacles required extraordinary long-term organizing, led by Stacey Abrams and LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter among others, courageous candidates and a majority of Georgians rejecting Republicans’ hysterical claims that a GOP-controlled Senate was the last redoubt against radical socialism. But the victories of the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic church, and Jon Ossoff were more than symbolic. They displaced Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the master of obstruction, as majority leader and elevated Democrats to Senate control and committee chairmanships. That Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will likely head the Budget Committee demonstrates the sea change involved.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

We can not back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I urge you to stand with The Nation and donate today.

Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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