Arun Gupta – Page 2 – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

Vote–but then Get Organized to Beat American Fascism

By Arun Gupta (October 25, 2018)

Trump is a (white) nationalist.
FOX News is his ministry of propaganda.
Journalists are being murdered.
Transgender people may be eliminated.
13,000 children are in concentration camps.
Bombs are being sent to political opponents.
Brownshirts violently attack people in three cities in a week.
Families fleeing violence and poverty are dubbed terrorists and criminals.

Fascism IS happening here. The debate is over. Go ahead and vote on Nov. 6. It’s important. But voting is not going to stop American fascism from growing and spreading. Neither are the Democrats.

I have always advocated for an inside-outside strategy. Go vote. Then get organized. Get in the streets. With a compelling vision. Patiently build support. Defy authority nonviolently. Take risks. Be willing to make tremendous personal sacrifices.
That is how we stop Trump’s fascism.

If you think it’s bad now. You ain’t seen nothing if Trump is re-elected.

Imagine the worst history has to offer. Now add in the computer revolution, nukes, and climate change. That bad.

Everyone is an organizer. Everyone is an activist. No excuses. No exceptions.

Get active. Get involved. Be creative, loving, and generous. And smash fascism.

Bezo’s Plan for Space Intensifies Misery on Earth

By Arun Gupta (July 20, 2018)

Consider this.
Jeff Bezo’s wealth has surpassed $150 billion.
There are at least 11,600 homeless people in King County, where Amazon is located.
Amazon recently strong-armed the Seattle City Council to repeal a small $275 annual head tax on large corporations to address the soaring homelessness in the wealthiest city in the Western Hemisphere.

Bezos sees no use to spending his fortune on planet Earth. His explicit plan is to sell $1 billion of stock a year to colonize space.

“I get increasing conviction with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work that I’m doing. Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune.”

A grumpy old German bro described all of this nearly two centuries ago:

“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

If you’re not a Marxist, you’re not paying attention.

This Treatment of Immigrants is a Dark Stain on US History

By Arun Gupta ( June 18, 2018)

Immigrants are not your bludgeon to use against Democrats.
Immigrants are not an object for your history lessons.
Immigrants are not numbers in your game.

Your argument that “it happened before” is utterly inhumane and shows complete contempt for solidarity for millions of immigrants in peril.

What is happening now is unprecedented. Trump promised a war on immigrants from the moment he began his campaign three years ago. That is exactly what is going on now.

Here is what is unprecedented:
Concentration camps for children.
The rescinding of DACA for 800,000 Dreamers.
Removal of temporary protected status for 248,000 refugees.
Administrative closure has been revoked for 350,000 more immigrants.
Refugee admissions have dropped from 95,000 in 2016 to less than 11,000 in the first half of 2018.
Domestic violence is no longer grounds for asylum.
Asylum seekers in general are being illegally turned away at the U.S. border.
Green card holders — legal residents — are being advised by immigration lawyers not to apply for any government aid, even Medicaid for an injured child, or their application will be refused.
Even more breathtaking, the Trump White House is moving to strip naturalized U.S. citizens of their citizenship and deport them.

You know what happens when people are deported? They die. Many die right away. Go spend some time in Tijuana among the armies of homeless deportees being preyed on, going mad, and being killed there by cops and criminals alike. Others die slowly, like the man in Tijuana who told me within a year of being deported, his wife got cancer and died because she was so devastated. Nearly all will see their life expectancy cut short because of a lack of healthcare, of basic services, of food, or from violence.

So when you claim this is nothing new, this happened before, America has always been racist, this is Obama’s fault, you are deliberately downplaying the gravity of what is happening now. This is more than 2 million lives at stake, given how many people are forced to leave with deportees.

2 million people and growing. And your response is “it’s not unprecedented.” This is nearly 20 times the size of the Japanese internment. And you say “it’s not unprecedented.”

Look at the picture below.

This is the bridge into Tijuana where deportees come through day and night. Stand where I stood. No one will bother you. Stand there and tell deportees:

This is nothing new.
It’s Obama’s fault.
It’s the white-supremacist settler-colonial ruling class.
It’s not unprecedented.

You are really saying you don’t give a shit about immigrants. It’s more important to you to minimize what is happening than acknowledge this moment is a unique dark stain on American history. Because if you admitted this was uniquely terrible, you would have to shed your fossilized dogmas and revolutionary fantasies.

So you would rather lend aid and comfort to Trump, to Stephen Miller, to Joe Arpaio, to all the nativists and racists and Neo-Nazis who want to make America white again.

You are showing which side you are on. You are not on the side of 43 million American immigrants like me.

Bourdain was Right: Food is About the Human Connection

By Arun Gupta (June 14, 2018)

After immersing myself in Bourdain’s work for days — his books, interviews, hundreds of articles, a dozen shows — I did some cooking with my mom.
Bourdain is right that the best food is to be found within the home. The most elaborate, artistic, and expensive, is in restaurants, but the food there is more an exercise in the purity of science, commerce, and aesthetics than human connection.
When I make food with my mom, every ingredient, technique, and dish comes with a detailed back story: where the food was grown, the types of markets and shops they purchased the ingredients from, how her mother taught her to make them, how they were prepared in the home, and the rituals as to how they were eaten and food was shared, many decades ago.

None of that is present with restaurant food, no matter how sublime. It is a commodity severed from the social relations that make us human.The simplest of foods can connect us to where we came from and who we are. When shared, the food allows others to experience a different culture sensually and it is the gateway to conversations about everything that makes that culture distinct and what we share in common.

One dish I recently learned to make is bhalla, which is almost exactly the same as vada in South India.
First we made a batter of split urad dal that had been soaked in water until it was soft (about 6 hours) and then ground into a thick batter.I whipped air into it. Then wetting my hand, I made small balls.

That’s the master chef at work deep frying the balls.

We ate it two different ways. One is with sambar, the South Indian spicy dal and vegetable stew. In South India, the batter has psices added to it and is made into a donut shape before being fried.

The second way is to eat it in yogurt. To prepare, the cooled, fried bhalla are soaked in warm water for 30 minutes. They are gently squeezed and flattened, which removes much of the oil. Homemade yogurt that has been whipped with salt is spooned over the balls. It is finished with imli (tamarind) chutney and garam masala. All homemade, of course.

We don’t live in a society that gives people the time, the means, the social stability to learn and transmit knowledge. Neither is ours a society which respects communal ways of living or culture expression outside the market.
In a world where we are nothing but commodities — our labor, ideas, and bodies exist for profit — then the same is true of how we reproduce ourselves. Everything we need in our daily lives exists as a product to be brought and sold, not as an expression of our humanity.

Having a culturally rich, diverse, and healthy food system has little to do with individual choice for most people.
It is the conditions that determine what’s on our plates. It’s not what’s on our plates that determine our conditions.

(Photos by Arun Gupta)

We Have More Serious Things to Worry About Than Russian Meddling

By Arun Gupta (February 21, 2018)

I’m convinced the Russian state did/does have the intention to stir the pot in the U.S., sabotage elections, create chaos. But that is mainly because we destroyed their country during the shock therapy of the 1990s. There was a staggering decline in life expectancy on the scale of a full-blown invasion. Then Clinton lent U.S. support for anti-Russian unrest in the Ukraine and anti-Putin protests in Russia.

So I think anyone on the left trying to deny Russian meddling is hiding their head in the sand.

That said, my opinion of it is, “Meh.” There is a huge gulf between the intent to meddle vs. how much if it has really happened, and, then, most important, whether it has any actual effect. On the last part, I think the evidence thus far shows the impact is pretty much nonexistent.

It’s amusing and sad to watch so many liberals itching for a new Cold War with Russia and calling Trump a traitor. Because long before the Russians supposedly tried to hack the 2016 election, the U.S. electoral process was a shitshow.

Part of that shitshow is due to partisan right-wing gerrymandering that goes back years.

Part of it is due to voter suppression and the disenfranchisement of millions of Black and Brown folk criminalized under the bipartisan war on drugs and war on crime that go back decades — and which the Clintons bear considerable responsibility for.

And part of it is embedded in the U.S. Constitution going back centuries, specifically the anti-democratic nature of the Senate at the federal (and state) level, and the unitary executive with veto power from the municipal level to the federal.

Either of these are far more damaging to a functioning representative democracy than not just Russian intervention, but the bugaboo of money in politics.

As for the Russian troll and bot armies on social media, they are laughable. Liberals, progressives, leftists, “revolutionaries,” don’t need help attacking each other with hammer and tongs. I can’t open Facebook without seeing conversations where people — who know each IRL — are cursing and slandering each other.

It’s understandable, the stakes are high and we seem powerless. I am certainly not an innocent in this internecine warfare online. But I’ve concluded the problem is not Russians stirring the pot, it’s social media itself. It valorizes strident rhetoric and snarky slogans, both of which damage genuine organizing and base-building.

I prefer to hang out and talk to people in person, whether in a formal organizing setting or shooting the shit over good food and drink.

We build a better world by building better relationships.

OK Maybe The Markets Are in a Downturn

By Arun Gupta (February 10, 2018)

If you care about what’s happening in the financial markets, now is the time to panic. But then again, if you care, you are probably in the top 10% in terms of wealth in America as they own 84% of the stock.

On Monday, I shrugged at the 4% drop in the markets in one day as there was nothing unusual about that in historical terms. But things change fast in such a volatile market. The major indices were unable to make a recovery on Tuesday and Wednesday, and have now plunged to new lows, putting them into correction territory. That means a drop of 10%. If they drop 20%, that is the definition of a bear market, though in the last 20 years the two major bear markets saw brutal downturns, with a 50% drop in the S&P500 from 2000-02, and then a 60% drop from 2007-09.

A 10% drop is a long way from that, but indicators are looking ugly. This can turn out well, actually, as Trump has tied his fortunes so closely to the market, a downturn will hurt his and Republicans political standing.

Effects on the economy should be muted because it is doing about as well as a kleptocratic neoliberal system can be expected to do. But if the markets keep falling, going into a 30% or more decline, then it’s likely unemployment will increase. Which Trump will, of course, blame on immigrants, Democrats, Obama, and antifa.

On a personal note, I find the financial markets to be infinitely more fascinating than sports. About the worst thing that happens in sports are white bros rioting, as in Philadelphia. But the financial markets stoke wars and revolutions, topple governments, create widespread social and ecological chaos. It’s ugly, but it’s a lot more interesting, to me at least, than events like the Stupid Bowl.

Capitalism Isn’t Collapsing…Yet

By Arun Gupta (February 6, 2018)

If you are hoping capitalism is going to implode because the markets tanked today, don’t hold your breath.

The drop on Monday, February 5, in percentage terms was far from historic. If you look at the first picture, a six-month chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it looks like it fell off a cliff. 1175 points sounds big, but it’s only a 4.6% loss.

Now look at the third picture. Today’s loss is nowhere close to the 20 biggest drops in history, the lowest of which was about 7%. I saw one report that said today’s drop barely cracked the top 300 in terms of single-worst daily losses.

The second picture tells the real story. This chart starts in 1987, right before the Black Monday crash that obliterated 22% of market value in one day. And it goes up to the present, a 31-year span. At the far left, you can barely see the blip that was the 1987 crash.

Since tangerine dumpster fire squeaked into the Oval Office by his tiny hands, the DJIA has jumped 45%. That’s a yuuuge run in just 14 months. But look at the middle of the 31-year chart, starting in January 1995. That’s the beginning of the “irrational exuberance” phase of the Clinton-Summers-Rubin-Greenspan market. It peaked in March 2000.

During that five-year stretch the Dow Jones nearly tripled, gaining almost 200%. In the same period, the Nasdaq soared nearly 600%. That 45% gain suddenly looks like a lot less.

So while the Trump bump happened fast, this type of rise is not unusual in the era of neoliberalism and financialization that began with Reagan. The explosion of financial instruments like options, futures, derivatives — which play an important role for capitalists to hedge risk — increase stock price movements, whether up or down, as do trading algorithms.

Financialization is marked by bubbles and crises, so it’s natural to conclude one is inflating right now. And capitalism can be thought of as a bubble going back centuries. But there isn’t a sign of a catastrophic bubble on the horizon. There have been lots of predictions of a global bubble over the last decade: property values, emerging markets, government debt, energy prices, but there are no impending signs of disaster as there was in the later stages of the last two major bubbles: the internet/tech bubble and the housing bubble. The internet bubble wiped out about $6 trillion in value, while the financial crisis cost something like $22 trillion. The first caused a mild recession that was worsened by the 9/11 attacks, and the second, well, the global economy still hasn’t recovered from that. Though the .01% engineered it to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of humanity and the planet.

It’s also worth remembering that these bubbles didn’t pop overnight. The Internet bubble took about 18 months to go from peak to trough, while the housing bubble, in the stock market at least, had a decline of nearly two years. This downturn is not even two weeks old.

Currently, the only obvious bubble is cryptocurrencies, and that’s popped. It’s shed 65% of its value in two months, around $550 billion. All cryptocurrencies combined are now worth barely $300 billion. While everyone should enjoy some schadenfreude at the expense of the libertarian cryptoassholes who’ve taken a beating in their Bitcoin as they dream of a disruptive currency that would eliminate the state, an $850 billion bubble is a dot in a $76 trillion global economy.

As for what will happen, I don’t have a crystal ball. But if you look at the bottom of the first chart, there are two indicators from February 5 (relative strength indicator and stochastics) that have plunged, which indicate the market is in an oversold condition. It can keep going down, but the Dow is unlikely to drop much further. In technical terms, the 200-day moving average is around 22,800, and at that point a lot of big banks, technical traders, quants, hedge funds will pour in money seeking short-term profits. That alone would likely stabilize the markets. And lo and behold, the next day, Tuesday, February 6, the markets jumped, erasing half the losses of the previous day.

There are numerous problems with the U.S. economy — such as low savings rates, widespread poverty, stagnation in wage growth, extreme bullishness and complacency in the markets, perception of inflation affecting the bond market, the budget deficit and government debt — but these are nothing new or severe enough to trigger a general economic crisis. There is no existential problem evident that means this downturn is the start of a gut-wrenching years-long plummet on the scale of the internet and housing bubbles that spilled over into the global economy. Most likely this will be forgotten about in a few weeks.

The only prediction I’ll make is my analysis will upset left-wing collapsitarians who pin their political hopes on the deus ex machina of a breakdown in capitalism because they lack any hope in being able to achieve progress through collective mass action.

When It Comes to Protecting Immigrant Workers, Strategic Organizing is the Answer

By Arun Gupta (February 4, 2018)

This is an insightful report on how to organize against Trump’s deportation regime. Here are some important lessons.

One: Immigration is as much about labor as about race. Trump won by racializing working-class conflict, stoking white nativism and resentment against all immigrant workers from farms to high tech. A few years ago I interviewed Ana Cañuenguez, an undocumented worker who cleans hotel rooms in Utah. She left El Salvador in 2003. Ana told me, “It was a very difficult decision to flee from my country and leave behind my family and all my people. But I had six children and one died because of severe malnutrition. I did not earn enough to feed them.”
https://www.telesurtv.net/…/The-Refugee-Crisis-in-the-Ameri…

U.S. policy has devastated El Salvador for more than 100 years, particularly during the Reagan era when it funded and armed a death-squad government that massacred tens of thousands of peasants and workers fighting for some measure of justice. That’s why hundreds of thousands Salvadorans have fled their country. I have interviewed refugees from more than half-a-dozen countries. Not one wanted to leave their home. What would you do if the U.S. destroyed your country and you watched helplessly as your child starved to death? These people are coming here to make better lives for themselves and their families. It’s the least the U.S. owes them.

The notion immigrants come here for welfare is a racist lie. For one, there is virtually no social welfare for anyone to get. It’s just crumbs at best. And there are all sorts of state and federal laws that bar undocumented immigrants from receiving assistance. More significant, the labor force participation rate for all Americans over 16 years old is 60.2%, but for undocumented immigrants? There are about 10.1 million undocumented immigrants over 16 and of those, 8 million are in the workforce. In other words, they have a labor force participation of 80%. That is staggeringly high. They want to work. They are doing jobs native-born Americans won’t do, and the fact they are being terrorized by the state, police, and racists is what would suppress wages, not their presence here.
http://www.pewhispanic.org/…/size-of-u-s-unauthorized-immi…/
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/…/unauthorized-imm…/state/US

Second: Organizing is not an either/or. This campaign against the bakery in Queens that fired undocumented workers used letter writing, flyering, protests, boycotts, *and* direct action. A tactic is just that: a tactic. Tactics should never be elevated to a strategy or a way of life.

Third: Organization matters. Brandworkers played a crucial role in helping the immigrant workers receive severance. Brandworkers has links to the Industrial Workers of the World, the storied anarchist union. Despite the fact New York is one of the last remaining strongholds of unions, it was a scrappy leftwing labor group that threw down with the workers. Not one of the big national unions with a billion-dollar war chest.

Fourth: The campaign was unable to stop the firings, but is now agitating for greater legal protection for undocumented workers.* The only way to fight state power right now in the U.S. is through exercising other forms of state power. That does not have to mean electoral politics, but it does mean organizing has to be focused on figuring out how to pressure state institutions, especially at the municipal level, to throw up roadblocks to federal policy., particularly barring local police cooperation with the federal immigraiton police. The reality is these campaigns will be much more effective in liberal enclaves, which is why it does matter who is in office. It’s easier to force neoliberal Democrats to the left on the immigration issue than it is to force white nationalist Republicans.

It is impossible to protect millions of immigrants solely through protest and direct action. It’s like the foreclosure crisis. There were millions of illegal foreclosures that happened in the last decade. All the various anti-foreclosure groups, including Occupy Our Home groups, prevented maybe a couple hundred families from being evicted. It was heroic work, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the problem.

Strategic organizing gets the goods.

*From the article, some ideas for how cities can give greater protection to immigrants.
“In addition to its work with the fired employees, Brandworkers is fighting to establish an immigrant-protection policy for businesses that would notify workers about audits and provide safeguards against warrantless raids. The blueprint for such legislation has already emerged in California, where the Immigrant Worker Protection Act just took effect. The new law prohibits employers from allowing ICE agents to enter non-public areas or obtain records without a warrant. It also requires warnings before and after audits take place. California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra has even warned that he will prosecute businesses that voluntarily hand employee information over to ICE.”

Trump is Dangerous for His Policies, Not His Manners

By Arun Gupta (January 17, 2018)

Trump is a unique danger given everything from embracing neo-Nazis to threatening genocide, but his manners are in no way uniquely offensive for an American president.

That great American president loved by liberals, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who oversaw passage of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and implementation of the Great Society, makes Trump look like a neophyte in hurling racist slurs and insults. Here are some examples:

LBJ to the Greek ambassador: “Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good.”

LBJ after the Organization of American States protested the illegal U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. “[The OAS] couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.”

LBJ about Vietnam: “Without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife.”

LBJ on Nixon: “Boy, I may not know much, but I know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad.”

LBJ on underlings: “I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window and stand up and say, ‘Boy, wasn’t that sweet!'”

It’s well known Johnson would sit on the crapper while talking to aides, but biographer Robert Caro dug up an anecdote of LBJ pissing in his Senate office sink while dictating to a young female secretary. Johnson was notorious for groping and ogling female aides, he had long affairs with at least two women, “flings” with other female aides, and treated his wife, Lady Bird, like a servant. LBJ stole his 1948 Senate victory with manufactured votes, and him and Lady Bird came by their wealth through blatant graft and corruption.

There is so much more. Johnson would call his chauffeur, Robert Parker, “boy” or “nigger.” LBJ said of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, “Let’s face it. Our ass is in a crack. We’re gonna have to let this nigger bill pass.” When he nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, he told an aide, “Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

LBJ is not unique. Clinton, Nixon, Cheney were all world-class foul-mouths and racists, and Clinton is also a rapist. While I do admit to enjoying the shitshow about the Shithole-in-Chief — OK, only a little I’m not that interested in how Trump comports himself given his predecessors’ behavior. All that matters is his policies and provocations. No doubt, Trump insults like “Little Rocket Man” heighten the risk of war. But his policies of war games, sanctions, dispatching bombers and nukes and Special Forces to the Korean peninsula are the means of war. Not Twitter or Oval Office rants.

Everything else is Trump’s Live Reality TV show in which we are all imprisoned as audience members whether we like it or not. The one thing we can do is choose to direct our attention and energy elsewhere.

Lessons on the Acquittal of the J20?

By Teka Lark and Arun Gupta (December 22, 2017)

Teka Lark:

We are celebrating people being acquitted of being charged with a crime for exercising their First Amendment rights against Trump?! We are celebrating that?! I am pissed! They should not have been charged in the first place.

If anyone on the left think this is a win for us, I hope to god you aren’t leading anything.

This is what it has come to please let me protest, please allow me sleep on the street, please let me work 20 hours a day with no health insurance….

Get off your damn knees and stop begging for your humanity, it is embarrassing.

Arun Gupta:

The first six defendants in the Trumped-up inauguration mass arrests have been found not guilty of all charges. This is a great relief, but at best it’s a highly qualified victory, and until the Left learns some basic lessons it will never progress beyond its impotent isolation.

This case was a blatant instance of not just prosecutorial overreach, but naked state repression.
For a year, about 200 defendants have been charged with bogus crimes that would put them in jail for 70 years. It was highly unlikely they would ever be found guilty because the arrestees were kettled and the state admitted there was no evidence they participated in the window smashing and limousine burning. But it was that level of property destruction enabled the prosecutors to file the felony riot charges.

In other words, it was the nihilistic smashy-smashy brigade that gave the state the hammer to use against the left. If there was no property destruction, those charges could not have been filed.

If you’ve never faced criminal charges, even false ones, you don’t know what it’s like to live under that fear and anxiety. Activists say this show trial has undermined organizing in the Washington-Baltimore region, where many of the arrestees live. In New Orleans, one young man charged with felonies related to J20 actions there committed suicide earlier this year.

These trials suck up resources. They require enormous fundraising and support networks

All of this is vital and necessary. But for the Left it’s a no-win situation. If convicted, people’s lives are destroyed. Even if everyone is found innocent, the state still wins because all that energy that could have gone into organizing is instead redirected into a purely reactive, defensive struggle. And for those who are acquitted, it doesn’t matter how much money they may get. This type of experience stays with you for the rest of your life, and colors all your future political activity. For the state, any settlement is just the cost of doing business.

The worst part is this didn’t have to happen.

Talking with other journalists and longtime organizers, there is evidence this may have been a state set-up from the beginning. I am not ready to name names, but given statements that were made before the protest by some involved, alarm bells should have ringing that J20 might be entrapment. (Please don’t speculate openly as to who or what I am referring to.)

Remember that J20 is the same demonstration where so many leftists were giddy that Richard Spencer got punched in the face. I hope half as much attention is paid to learning organizing lessons and how to confront state power in these dangerous times as was given to chuckling over Nazi-punching memes.

Democrats Fold on the Dreamers: Where Does This Leave the Left?

By Arun Gupta (December 13, 2017)

It is a great relief that Roy Moore lost. If he had won that would have emboldened Bannon and Trump even more: “Hey, if they elected a child molester, who cares about a rapist president?”

Meanwhile, the opportunism of Kirsten Gillibrand is helping channel the energy from the Pussy March and #Metoo movement into the 2018 elections.That is what the “Resistance” amounts to: Ground troops to elect more power-hungry Democrats.

Those same Democrats are now maneuvering to throw Dreamers under the bus. Either there will be no deal or a shitty deal that gives Trump new powers and resources to hunt, imprison, and deport immigrants, destroying thousands of lives. Trump’s war on immigrants is just one among many reasons why he and his proto-fascist forces are so dangerous and must be stopped.

The only way to do that is through the electoral process. While the left should expose the Democrats’ shitty politics, most anti-Trump forces will ignore that message.

Anyone who equates the Democrats with Republicans, saying it doesn’t matter who wins, as many did last year, won’t just be ignored, they will be ridiculed and completely isolated.

Meanwhile, the movements that were making strides in 2016 — Black Lives Matter, Climate Justice and pipeline blockades, low-wage workers, and immigrant-rights activists — are all on the defensive.

This is the dilemma the left is in.