The world can become a gigantic garbage can. The world can become a liberatory laboratory of fulfillment. Which will it be?

To my eyes two tasks beckon. 1. Stop Trump. 2. Advance The Long March Toward A Truly Desirable Society. To my mind, however, the two tasks are not separate. To fail to stop Trump would at best make the Long March much longer. Therefore, to stop Trump and to advance the Long March are really at least potentially one task. But if they can be one task, why the hell did I say “two tasks”?

I said they were two because in some people’s minds the Long March to a better society is one task and attempting to stop Trump isn’t part of it and will even distract from it. Those people feel that to stop Trump, to stop MAGA, points activists toward elevating election outcomes which then impedes the long march. Their most frequent and I think most effective argument runs like this. To vote for someone who you despise because his or her opponent is even further off the rails is a trap that binds people into a never ending game of electorally whack this rat or electorally whack that rat. It turns eyes only toward whacking rats, and grows attachment only to electoral activity. It thus diverts those involved away from the larger prize, which is to win a fundamentally transformed better society. 

Listening to that argument, I have to agree that people can become so enmeshed in supporting despicable Democrats against fascist Republicans that they bid goodbye to the long march. They bid hello to endless electoral limitations. They even slip into rabbit-holed Democratic Party thinking. That does sometimes happen.

But to claim, for example, that election 2026 or 2028 must distract from the long march rests on, dare I say it, a false binary: Stop Trump or March On. The truth is instead that one doesn’t have to work on the long march to the exclusion of working to stop the fascist threat that seeks persistent Washington power. Likewise, no one has to work to stop the Fascist threat to the exclusion of working on the long march. The two activities are not necessarily either/or. 

Are you fed up to the gills with the vapidity of what passes for American political discourse? Are you a radical who wants more for society than all but at most a few Democrats who might run against Trump will even contemplate? Are you indeed a revolutionary who wants an entirely new system? Do you feel in your bones that revolution, a new system, is the only real lasting solution to horrific injustice? Me too. All of that. Nonetheless, to seek to stop Trump and to seek worthy analysis, vision, strategy, and especially practice for the long march are not contrary tasks. They intersect. Each can and should abet the other. An effective movement can partake of both.

We should try to aid the long march all the time. We should also try to aid the stop Trump, stop fascism resistance until he and his minions are replaced. But how can we do both? We can’t choose who runs against Trump. We don’t even have information that lets us calculate who would have the best chance to beat Trump. More, even if we somehow knew what we don’t know, then what?

Can something we can do now impact this world now and be part of seeking a new world as well? Pending contrary evidence, I believe that voter turnout for whoever runs against Trump or Vance or whoever MAGA backs in contested states for President and for candidates against MAGA for Congress all over will be incredibly important. I also believe that voter turnout will be seriously impacted by the work of volunteers who tend to be mostly young and often, I suspect, to the left, and even to the far left of their candidate. So here is what I think every radical and revolutionary could contribute to help stop Trump over the next three years. First and foremost we can help develop and participate in activism that seeks to block or roll back Trumpian program and raise consciousness of his vile aims. We can aid rallies, marches, sit ins, occupations, and strikes. We can also help clarify, over and over, that to work to stop Trump does not require us to become Democratic Party simps. It does not require that we set aside our more radical positive beliefs.To work to stop Trump is to ward off calamity now and remove a huge obstacle to our needed long march.  

Trump must lose. MAGA must lose. Beyond that, for the long march, a very great number of Trump’s voters must be heard, understood, and communicated with until communicating with those who disagree with us becomes a central part of our organizing, and until a very great number of those who now disagree with us become part of our community of marchers. 

What I find most embarrassing, and perhaps even most scary about the Republican 2024 effort and what will undoubtedly occur in 2026 and 2028 is that Republicans are not only in it to win it. They have thought about it to enact it. They have prepared to do it their way. That is Trump 2 and, for them, if they succeed, it will inform what goes beyond.

That is, if I have understood correctly, Republicans groomed many right-wing MAGA types to immediately take over various government posts during Trump 2. They together literally laid waste to and are now working to replace existing government structures due to having learned during Trump 1 that however limited and compromised those structures are, they nonetheless place impediments on what Trumpers can get done in office. So Trump 2 erases Departments. It eliminates oversight. It dominates the Supreme Court. It assaults and bends the culture. It seeks to shock and awe the public into submission. The 2024 election was their step one. We are now enduring their step 2. But still, what is embarrassing, as compared to just being vile and horrific about all that? 

It is that the morally and seemingly mentally moribund Republicans are playing chess, as the saying goes, while the Democrats are playing with or even shooting themselves, and while much of the left has too often only been playing, I fear, checkers.

Okay, be all that as it may, suppose the resistance not only helps stop MAGA in 2026 and not only communicates effectively with Trump’s voters, but also works with growing activist and organizing efforts to pursue long march steps. Suppose it gets in gear for 2028. It organizes and demonstrates throughout communities, schools, and workplaces sufficiently to push the national discourse way to the left. It develops lasting organizational presence throughout the country’s communities, schools, unions, and families, sufficiently to give a subset of sincerely progressive Democrats a path via which to rise above the Party hacks. It provides a necessary constant push for them to do so. In that case, if invited, what might the emergent progressive 2028 presidential candidate say in a short election night acceptance speech to a gargantuan TV audience?

Perhaps her speech might go something like this:

Fellow citizens, given that the United States is the world’s most powerful purveyor of contemporary international violence and its most wealthy and chief obstructor of enlarging international law and reducing global warming as well as vile disparities in international health and wealth….

And given that the United States has massive economic resources that we could put to the well being of our own citizens and also use to redress historically imposed international injustices….

I propose in accord with the will of the movements that are responsible for my standing here before you, that in pursuit of a truly just and equitable United States and world, as the first acts of our 2028 Administration, and to lay a foundation for much more to follow, we should:

(1) Abolish the Defense Department as we know it—which is in truth of course a War Department—and establish in its place a Department of Peace and Justice overwhelmingly concerned with eliminating violent strife and pledged to provide no military aid to nations engaged for any reason at all other than immediate self defense in international military operations—pledging as well to engage in no foreign military adventures ourselves unless under direct attack. 

This step would obviously save a huge percentage of current yearly military expenditures. Closed military bases could be transformed into worker co-ops for the creation of affordable housing and other socially worthwhile products at home and abroad. The prior military members of those bases could be given jobs, should they want them. And those who work at the transformed bases, could be given drastically reduced prices to purchase new homes.

(2) Create a Department of Internationalism devoted to reversing the terms of international global exchange so that instead of most benefits of exchange accruing already rich nations, most would accrue to still poor nations. This would help reduce unjust, debilitating, and destabilizing income and power differentials. 

It  would entail replacing the old IMF, World Bank, and World Trade organization as well as NATO and the like with new institutions, rooted in international participation and seeking an equity-pursuing rather than equity-smashing agenda.

(3) Create a Department of Ecological Sanity devoted to social survival and diversity. This would include: (a) waging a massive campaign against global warming including advancing alternative solar, wind, water, geo-thermal, and clean fusion sources of energy on a national and international scale while ending fossil fuel dependency, (b) instituting and enforcing strict laws to limit pollution and waste and to facilitate collective rather than individual consumption wherever appropriate, (c) clarifying a willingness to collaborate with and to aid other nations for purposes of surviving ecological and other disasters, and (d) instituting parallel programs to ensure the well being of all affected workers and communities during this massive transition.

(4) Create a Department of Domestic Equity devoted to narrowing the gaps between rich and poor within the U.S. This would include implementing massive increases in redistributive profit and property taxes as well as parallel reductions of taxes on low income members of society, plus increases of too low and lowering of too high wages across all industries, as well as massively providing low cost, desirable housing and instituting very strict rent controls and rollbacks.

(5) Create a Department of Just Work seeking more leisure time off from work and better conditions at work. This would include: (a) to reduce the work week to thirty hours with no reduction in total weekly pay and with triple time pay for all hours worked beyond 30 for everyone who now earns below $80,000 a year, and to reduce hours to 30 with time and a half pay for overtime and with a proportionate reduction in total base pay per week for everyone who now earns more than $80,000 a year; (b) to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour, wherever the above does not immediately accomplish it, and (c) to establish a workers bill of rights including rights to assemble, engage in free speech, access financial records, unionize, collectively bargain and participate in decision making—the violation of which rights would be punishable by strict financial and organizational penalties.

(6) Create a Department of Health and Well Being to promote preventive health care policies regarding vaccinations, medicine, food, pollution, etc. This would immediately: a) nationalize and establish sound health-based polices for pharmaceutical companies, enact free health care for all, and expand and update medical infrastructure, and (b) invest bountifully in quality of life improvements like parks, playgrounds ball fields, pools and auditoriums in cities and particularly in rural areas throughout  the U.S.

(7) Create a Department of Education for youth and elders alike. This would a) guarantee equitable apportionment of education resources to communities and schools so as to redress regional, race, and class disparities, b) guarantee free higher education for all who qualify via teacher recommendation or examination success, c) open public schools for use by community residents in the evenings after the school day, including providing provisions and resources for social engagement with neighbors and for after hours learning. 

(8) Create a Department of Race and Gender Liberation. This would a) immediately establish taxation penalties for violations of at least proportionate representation of women and minorities in positions of influence throughout the entire U.S. economy, polity, and culture, or for violations of well being of those employed with zero tolerance for structural violations of rights or dignity, b) work with the Department of Political Renovation (see below) to redress and ensure that race and gender do not affect legal outcomes other than in cases that seek to redress racist and sexist outcomes, and c) institute abortion on demand and free daycare policies and an end to all child trafficking and child labor. 

(9) Create a Department of Political Renovation with the purpose of reconstructing U.S. political institutions to enhance popular participation and collective self management at the expense of corporate and elite administration. This would not only renovate voting procedures and the norms, rights, responsibilities and powers of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of national government, including, for example, an end to the Electoral College and the unrepresentative Senate, but do likewise for states and cities including initiating grassroots participatory peoples’ assemblies and federations of such assemblies.

(10) Create, in particular, a Renovated Department of Justice to move our country from being one of corrupt implementation of profit-protecting laws, to being one of accountable implementation of people-protecting justice where laws themselves are superseded whenever their implementation would thwart justice and where rehabilitation replaces vengeance as the aim of incarceration. 

The above ten-point list could obviously be substantively deeper and wiser as well as rhetorically more eloquent. It still wouldn’t fully implement the long march—the revolution—which will entail redesigning the institutions that define family life, cultural communities, political governance, and economic production, consumption, and allocation—but it would certainly be a very sweeping, energetic step in those directions as well as induce a whole lot of warranted positive support. 

Actually, now returning to realistic assessment, 2028 is highly unlikely to usher the above program into governmental power. To have the above, or something like it the agenda of government, would mark entry to a transition period toward a full fundamental renovation of underlying economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. We will need much more long march activism before a U.S. President could even urge all that. But consider, Project 2025, not least due to being Trumpian billionaire fueled and mainstream media abetted, is in fact trying to implement essentially the opposite agenda of people-hurting fundamental changes on an equally grand scale. My point? We can develop and partake of revolutionary vision, strategy, and program, electorally and extra electorally, even while we also fight off fascism. 

Stop Trump, pursue revolution. It can become one task, one struggle, and if some participants emphasize one aspect and other participants emphasize another aspect so be it. If we navigate well, if we can respect, engage with, and support one another, a massive makeover and then a fundamental transformation of society can become real. 

If MAGA can seek a reactionary transformation of defining relations—and they are doing just that by manipulation, fear, decree, and money spreading—the left can pursue a liberatory transformation of defining relations by honest organizing, solidarity, clear exhortation, and mutual aid. To quote a song from my youth, “they got the guns, but we got the numbers.” Or we will have the numbers if we can, to quote another song, “get it together.” 

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