In which Senator Malcolm King and Andre Goldman discuss the 2016 Election.

[Author’s Note: This is the third excerpt from a work titled An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. This excerpt will also provide the substance for a forthcoming RevolutionZ episode titled, NAR 3: 2016 Election. The oral version will include spontaneous interjections, questions, comments, elaborations, clarifications, whatever, made by the host on hearing the material aloud. This combination of article and episode is an experimental foray for each article/excerpt posted each Monday or Tuesday and for each follow-up augmented audio version on RevolutionZ made live the following Sunday. The hope is to make plausible the possibility of winning a new world and to simultaneously provoke and contribute to discussions about vision and especially strategy for social change.]

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Election Controversies and RPS

Malcolm, I don’t want to belabor pre-RPS elections but I would like to at least consider the 2016 Presidential Election. What role did it play in RPS later emerging?

There were a number of electoral precursors to RPS, but in my view the Sanders campaigns were most important. Sanders’ speeches, writings, and platforms leaned toward RPS positions. He got tens of millions of voters to think and hope far more ambitiously than in the past. His electoral effort gave many people confidence in communicating dissident views.

Some of 2016’s controversies also proved instructive. During the campaign Sanders’ team turned out huge, passionate crowds. In contrast, Hilary Clinton’s giant old-time machine utilized all the rules and mechanisms that had earlier been added to U.S. election law precisely to benefit wealthy, elite-connected, party-favored candidates. Getting the nomination was supposed to be a cakewalk for Clinton but became a major fight. Sanders so bested Clinton among young voters and independents in the primaries, that he won everywhere crossover was allowed, especially when late registration was able to offset that before he started campaigning Sanders was relatively unknown. Clinton won overall because the Democratic Party stacked everything in her favor as well as because of minority and ironically, especially Black votes, a very strange dynamic that befuddled many.

I have wondered about that myself—did you arrive at any conclusions?

Even now I don’t fully understand that year’s Black vote. Yes, the Clintons had a reputation of personally treating Blacks as equals. But Sanders’ positions and inclinations were clearly vastly better choices for Black and also Latino advancement and lots of young voters in those communities knew it, and some older ones too. But the Democratic party apparatus, with massive patronage to hand out played a big role. And I think an even bigger factor may have been how fear of the Republican Party seriously scared older Blacks and Latinos, and plenty of young ones too. Could Sanders beat troglodyte Republicans, and particularly Trump? Would Sanders have the apparatus and energy to campaign sufficiently? Could he overcome red baiting and defection by Democratic Party elites? Many Blacks feared he couldn’t win and so voted Clinton. Ironically, she then lost.

But what was so important about Sanders run? What did he reveal that affected you and others.

For me the lasting heart of the matter was that a dissident could raise money, galvanize volunteers, and run effectively. More, for decades very few people on the left had taken seriously the idea of actually winning not just an election, but a new society. Left activists gave nearly zero time to thinking about, discussing, and trying to agree on what a good society should contain and what its institutions should look like. Thinking a new society was impossible, they had no reason to think about the features of a new society and thus also how to win one. Sanders weakened cynicism.

What does it mean to be radical but not think you can win? Don’t misunderstand, I think you are right that that was a common feeling, even for myself, back then. But it really is odd. Malcolm, if radical can’t win, why be radical?

That’s a very good question. For decades I think the answer was you were radical to be correct, to be moral, to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, to be on the side of the angels. You were radical as a kind of moral high ground life-style. You certainly weren’t’ radical for income, since income for activists was low or non existent. And beyond a young age, you weren’t radical for fun, either. Activism, especially when you weren’t winning, had too much tedium, trouble, and sacrifice, not to mention the possibility of being repressed, to be fun. There were always things I would have more fun doing than to go to the next meeting.

My take was that other than a relative few who did believe in winning, for decades people became active for short and intense upsurges out of anger and frustration. They hoped for and anticipated quick gains. Others became active for longer durations to feel morally worthy. “Be on the side of the angels,” was a common phrase. To my ears it meant be radical, be virtuous, despite that you aren’t going to win. Do it to be able to “look at yourself in the mirror.”Winning wasn’t in those people’s calculations, and so they rarely tried to figure out what would enhance prospects of winning much less what winning should construct.

So Sanders awakened hope for a larger audience?

Yes, I think he did. For a lot of people Sanders’ unprecedented and largely unanticipated successes undid some fatalism about the possibilities of reaching a large audience and galvanizing lasting support. He also showed the fragility of the Democratic Party. He amassed huge support while explicitly using the word revolution. But a question arose. Why did so many people on the far left, as compared to folks then just getting involved, dismissively disparage Sanders? I think two factors contributed to that because I don’t think Sanders’ actual choices remotely merited even a fraction of the hostility he received from such folks.

The first and less prevalent factor, a bit subtle, I guess, was a kind of self defense. In just a few short months Sanders and his supporters arguably did more to move the national psyche in positive ways than radical activists had achieved among such a large audience in the prior twenty or even thirty years. Of course, many factors contributed and Sanders certainly built on what went before. But people who had been around and active for a long time and who had vested so much of their lives in the work, often had difficulty acknowledging just how much Sanders achieved. It was less painful to one’s self image to dismiss him, or even to rail at him, than it was to acknowledge his achievements and what they said about progressive activity in prior years. Only a few people acknowledged this, but nonetheless, I think it was a factor.

The second factor was about Sanders’ supporters, particularly the younger ones. When Clinton sewed up the nomination, Sanders supported her, albeit without much enthusiasm. He made clear his goal was to stop the neo fascist Trump. He kept emphasizing the need to organize more broadly on behalf of what he called a political revolution, and he even worked toward building an organization to that end. However, for many of his young supporters, who were sadly spurred on by a few more experienced writers and activists who certainly should have known better, his supporting Clinton smelled like a sellout.

His critics couldn’t abide Sanders saying that folks should vote for Clinton, who had used media and Democratic Party rules to defend the system against his onslaught. It seemed to me that many of his supporters felt vindictive, even a bit like jilted lovers. Many did not even contemplate that maybe this guy they so loved yesterday hadn’t changed all that much today. Maybe his call to beat Trump made good sense in a horrendously crappy context as a way to further an agenda they all believed in. Maybe Trump was that bad. And maybe if progressive organizers, activists, and writers legitimated doing anything other than voting against Trump in contested states, Trump would win. Maybe they should have paused a minute and think about that. I think perhaps one test Sanders didn’t ace was to more forthrightly and effectively address his own supporters, then again, I suspect he would have agreed about that.

Okay, but what was the impact or meaning for RPS?

Heading into the 2016 election, if you were seriously fatalistic about ever winning more than modest gains you were in the habit of not wasting time seriously assessing long term strategic consequences. You tended to ask, what is the moral thing to do? What is the radical thing to do? What matches most closely with my radical beliefs? What do I want to do right now? You didn’t ask, what will increase our prospects to amass sufficient wide support to in time win a new society? And even for those who did have their eyes on consequences, the answer for many people was quite naturally, quite understandably that you should vote for a third party candidate or for no one at all, but not for a war criminal like Clinton, even in contested states that Trump might win. This was sometimes called voting your conscience.

Advocates felt it was true to self, whereas they said that voting for the lesser evil would deny self. This was an understandable sentiment, of course, but I think in the course of these disputes, “eyes on how I feel now” versus “eyes on predictable consequences,” two insights mattered to the initial stages of how RPS later emerged and made headway. The two insights were blunted momentarily when Trump won, only to resurface in a kind of replay in 2020 and then again in 2024 with the strategic argument to vote even for Genocide Joe—even as many dismissed him over his arming, financing, supporting, alibiing, and even cheerleading the Israeli genocidal massacre against Palestinians. We could spend way too long getting into all that, I think, so instead I will get back to the 2016 case just noting that the overarching logics are almost identical. Consequences matter.

First, for some, a little over a decade before RPS really got rolling as a named entity, came a reassessment of what being true to oneself meant. Why was it more true to oneself to say “I hate both Trump and Clinton (or later Biden) so I won’t vote for either one,” than it was to say, “I hate both Trump and Clinton (or later Biden), but I believe Trump would be far worse for many constituencies, and for the whole planet, so I will vote for Clinton (or later Biden) in any state where the contest is close enough that Trump might win, just to stop him?

Put differently why was it admirable to downplay the importance of effects on others and emphasize attention to expressing “self”? Why was to be driven by one’s personal hate for Clinton (or later Biden) more moral than to address the plight of those who would suffer under Trump?

Of course there were other factors, not least to assess the impact of different approaches and outcomes on prospects for later organizing. About that, some emphasized, and it turned out accurate, that a Trump win would yield more quick activism. But others replied that such Trump-related activism would focus on defensively preventing rollback of past gains and even on preserving sanity, but not on positively winning new gains. With Clinton we would have had to actually work harder to generate activism, yes, but it would be forward-seeking.

I think that the earliest days of RPS imaginings initially surfaced heading toward Trump’s defeat in 2020 and then grew in 2024. People managed, against the odds, to help the anti-Trump opposition become more than a temporary upsurge seeking only to block fascism and regain civility, sanity, and some ameliorative reforms. They took the opposition, or parts of it, slowly but inexorably beyond limited focuses. Later, early RPS ratified the idea that politics of course required moral choices but also clarified that morality requires paying attention to more than one’s own personal feelings, paying attention to more than short-term scale.

The slow shift on this issue pushed assessments to become more strategic and less reflexive. It highlighted long-term effects over short-term feelings. It pushed focus beyond oneself and especially one’s current ideological self image. It undermined cynicism about the prospects of winning. It retained passion, rejected merely striking a pose, and elevated taking responsibility for one’s choices. But of course that makes it sound much quicker and easier than it was. The Biden years were slow to advance, yet when union activism started to surge, that, plus the pro Palestine opposition, began to nourish one another.

You said another factor was thinking about what was good for future organizing. What was that about?

I think many people gained at that time two key insights and a third set of concerns about future organizing all of which had powerful repercussions for how RPS emerged and developed. First, since Sanders did both, we all saw that it was possible to finance a campaign from the grassroots and it was possible to nearly win the Democratic Party nomination, and by extension, perhaps even to win the Presidency. After all, had Sanders won the nomination, and we could all see quite plausible ways that that could have happened, we all thought he would have beaten Trump. So, the idea of running for President to win was back on the table as a conceivable and even promising thing to someday try. This lesson was imbibed by RPS, which became positive about people running to win, and I think it is fair to say Sanders was as responsible for my becoming a Senator as I was responsible for it.

Second, in the debates about voting Clinton versus voting Trump, in addition to getting beyond people’s warranted dislike of Clinton to oppose the greater danger that was Trump, the point was repeatedly made, and finally started to gain some(but in 2016 not enough) power, that having a Democrat rather than a Republican as President would be desirable for organizing purposes and not only to suffer fewer pains. First, a Democrat would typically be at least somewhat more hampered in repressing opposition. Second, dissent against a Democrat in the White House could be about immediate gains but also about positive aspirations and even about seeking new institutions for a new society, whereas dissent against a reactionary in the White House would more likely work to rebut insanity prevent and to prevent going backwards. It would not think about, much less seek new institutions. Ironically, in that case, the opposition would be dominated by militant Democrats.

Why ironic?

Those who didn’t vote for Clinton even in contested states, for example, like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, where a total of 70,000 votes elected Trump, understandably wanted to avoid ratifying the Democratic Party as a vehicle of social change. They wanted to avoid movement energy being coopted. Trump’s election, however, did precisely what they wished to avoid, by elevating Democrats to militant guidance of the opposition, whereas Clinton’s election would have galvanized movement energy against not just Republicans, but also against Democrats as a party—and toward winning more basic change.

I remember how evident this was, how unavoidably obvious, but how long it took to get these type insights across. What made it so evident was that it was happening even while people were discussing it, even before Trump won. Not only was mainstream media constantly over-crowded with articles about Trump, so was left media. You could cull from the latter ten, fifteen, and sometimes even twenty different articles a day about what was wrong with Trump and about warding off Trump. On the other hand, the number of articles about systemic problems was modest and the number of articles that even alluded to, much less emphasized, seeking new defining social institutions was nearly none. And this was not just about writing, it was also true of speeches, of one-to-one talks, of actions, and even of thoughts—all were similarly albeit understandably unbalanced toward fighting reaction, not winning liberation.

When one stared into an abyss of going backward, one quite understandably and quite rightly tried to toe the line against reaction and later fascism. Nonetheless, some took a step further to also argue for going forward toward a new society and started to see the obstacles and to agitate to overcome them while winning and by their approach to winning gains in the present. This fledgling dynamic arguably became RPS.

A more complex matter was the efficacy of developing a third party approach to electoral politics. Of course it would make sense after a switch in the electoral system away from winner take all voting toward proportional power sharing to have a third, fourth, and fifth party. But before that, there was a huge complication. Such a third party, while unable to fully win, could, in closely contested states cause the worser of two main candidates to win. This was evident well before 2016, of course.

Some said, let’s not bother with third party politics at all. We should contest only within the Democratic Party. Others said, we have to build a third party because the Democratic Party is a graveyard for radical aspirations. We need to survive the period during which we can’t win outright and grow our alternative however we are able to do so, so in time we can win. A compromise position was to support third party developments whenever one could do that without ushering in a worse overall context due to victory by a seriously more evil candidate. Without going on too long about all this, which was argued endlessly at the time, and then again, and then still again—there was another more subtle side of the issue that also impacted RPS.

Running for office is a very muddy affair. You are, one hopes, trying to be honest, trying to speak to hearts and to minds, trying not to have bad side effects, and trying not to undermine other equally or more important activist efforts. But the pressures on candidates of trying to do as well as possible tended to outstrip understanding. Third Party candidates tended to begin thinking they were going to win or at the very least make a very good showing despite the obvious fact that they weren’t. It is that kind of impact on candidates, almost impossible to ward off, plus the tremendous pressure to minimize everything other than the campaign, and then, about the campaign, to focus only on winning votes and raising money, that RPS noticed.

From that, what later morphed into RPS learned that though it should welcome third party activism, and also welcome sincere activism inside the Democratic Party, it should not itself become an electoral party. The narrowing and distorting effect on an organization that explicitly fields candidates had to be avoided, and, indeed, when I ran for Senator it was as a Democrat even though I of course have never in my life had a single positive thing to say about the large-scale heritage of Democratic Party politics, and it was the same for a great many others who support RPS and have by now also won office, sometimes as Democrats and sometimes as Greens.

Why did anyone, much less so many people, support Trump before and even after his sexual braggadocio meltdowns, and then later, his criminal indictments and overtly fascist pronouncements? When you think about it, Trump being on a path to receive about half the votes cast in 2016, even if he had lost the Presidency certainly didn’t seem like an indicator that in the next 25 years the country would see an incredible outpouring of social activism and shift in mentalities and commitments. What was the nature of Trump’s initial support—was it not support for his racist misogyny? And pretty much the same question, I guess, how was it that his most ardent support hung on through his ugly actions even up to and through the 2024 election?

Many looked at the situation as you say—what a horrible harbinger of disaster Trump’s support augured even though they thought his support would collapse by election day. But no, his support was present four years later, and then still again. But others looked and said, hold on a minute, what about the incredible support for Sanders, just months back, that augured incredible potentials? And while Trump’s support was partly about race and gender, which was undeniably a very bad sign, wasn’t it also very much about working people suffering immeasurably and trying to get change?

Well, whatever one thinks about that face off, I think there was another learning experience aspect of the 2016 election regarding the possibilities it augured.

Trump was for sure buffoonish and grossly racist and sexist. And he indeed would have ultimately succumbed to those failings when he paraded the latter full tilt if there was not a perfect storm of factors that gave him his victory. Trump’s utterances even before the worst revelations were really quite disgusting and well beyond familiar sugar-coated support for injustice like Clinton and other presidents routinely displayed. And sure, for some people that was some of Trump’s early appeal. Indeed, from my experiences then, and from studies later, it is fair to say that virtually every racist neoNazi and otherwise fascistic group in the country supported Trump. So too did many besieged men who felt that for women to make gains meant men had to suffer unjust losses. But that was just a minority part of Trump’s early support. His support that mattered more for what happened in the then future came from disaffected workers. So the important question was actually why did so many disaffected workers vote for Trump?

Trump was a billionaire. He was known for his horrible treatment of workers. But, he was also the opposite of a typical button-down calculating politician. Most of his votes came from people who felt that his turning everything topsy turvy whether he was himself a personally vile man or personally stupid or not, offered more hope of change than Clinton or any other Democrat who would undoubtedly preserve current aspects of life. These working people had real hatred for their declining circumstances. They were sick of feeling denigrated and denied. They were tired of joblessness and drug-torn,dying neighborhoods. And those feelings were all fully warranted. Trump managed to attract a lot of angry workers even though he was, in fact, no working class hero but exactly the opposite.

Okay, but how did he do that?

Partly he scapegoated others and benefitted from myth plus racism plus sexism. Partly he lied and manipulated. Partly he benefitted from a media trying to profit but not concerned to communicate honestly. Partly he benefitted from some leftists and Greens creating a climate in which many felt that voting for Clinton was a sellout and voting Green or not voting at all was admirable. But for our purposes now, I think there was something else that had more lasting importance.

Years earlier another politician with immeasurably less showmanship, though also considerably less proclivity for disastrous stupidities, had done something pretty similar to Trump. It wasn’t yet the age of TV posturing but Spiro Agnew had also tapped a class anger to galvanize support for the right and hate for the left. He did it by ridiculing and distancing himself from what he called bullet-headed liberal intellectuals—and the word that was revealing in his approach was not “liberal,” but “intellectual.”

Agnew tapped justified anger at what were soon after called professionals and managers but what RPS still later called the coordinator class. And then later Trump did the same thing as Agnew had done but much more aggressively. Many working people felt Trump was one of them. He wasn’t establishment, and when he got into office, they thought he wouldn’t ignore them, he wouldn’t forget them, he would be their tribune.

This perception of Trump was devoid of reality, as subsequent nasty history repeatedly showed, but voters’ desperate desires to reverse working class decline were real. And Trump was a master at playing to it. And that was why the working class support that Trump surfaced, once organizers and activists got over their tendency to look down on working people and instead listened to working people and learned from their desires regarding their deteriorating circumstances, pushed RPS from being isolated from working people to being,among other things, an expression of working class desires.

What about the effect on you? Did Sanders running and Trump winning impact you later becoming a candidate?

Yes, and not only via the lessons described above and their effect on the overall situation of society. I had gone to college and majored in history and when I got out I was very radical and not at all interested in pursuing an academic career disconnected from people’s needs. I got an assembly job and next I worked as a short order cook. My focus was organizing my workmates and trying to get involved more generally in community and workplace organizing. I was very anti-war and very frightened and aroused by ecological concerns, but I couldn’t stand electoral parties or process. Yet I didn’t just like Sanders, which I did. And I didn’t just try to aid him, which I did. He got me to see that as rigged, alienated, corrupt, and mindless as our political system is, there was nonetheless some wiggle room in it in which one could fight constructively, and even win real gains. He got me thinking about elections being a part of winning major change.

And so all the above mentioned disputes and debates were important to me, but even more important was the simple fact that Sanders demonstrated that it was possible to finance an electoral run. It was possible to be truthful about serious stances for change. Despite incredibly stacked circumstances, it was possible to educate, mobilize, and even win. But only if that is what you were steadfastly focussed on doing.

I guess I decided that while there were certainly many routes to contributing to change, and that even while activism was key, by my history and circumstances I was most likely to have an impact if I took an electoral path. I think a good many folks came away from the 2016 experience with that thought, and while it was temporarily obliterated in a haze of recriminations and fears due to Trump’s victory, it then started to resurface anew. Of course not all who were inspired to run for office even ran much less succeeded, but a good many who were inspired are now in office, often doing excellent work. If Sanders were here to thank, I would thank him profusely.

There was another factor for me, I think. My working class background by birth and early upbringing, and especially due to my time as an assembly worker and short order cook including often waiting tables, was incredibly enlightening. I knew just how hard it was to not explode from the anger you felt at the customers with suits and ties and erudite language who oh so clearly looked down on you, or, really, often didn’t even do that since, for them, you were as close to invisible and inconsequential as a person could be. That anger, as well as the associated fear, is what Agnew had ridden long before, and what Trump rode too. It could clearly lead to escalating reaction, racism, sexism, and a kind of macho defense of an impoverished situation. But for whatever reasons I not only didn’t follow that path, I understood it. I could recognize it and could also empathize with it enough to be able to talk to folks one to one, who were on it. I could do that without being hostile. I could do it, in fact, liking the people I was disputing. I could hear them, respect them, but also convey to them hope and a different kind of program.

I had a feeling, I think, that’s very hard to communicate, for how to talk to workers without condescension and even more for how to do so taking their views and especially their desires seriously, not just as a tactic, not just as optics, not to manipulate, but because it was precisely what I felt. I think Sanders had something to do with all this. I also had a feel for how to talk to coordinator class types, not making believe I liked where they were coming from, because I certainly didn’t, but not condescending or manipulating them, and yet always challenging their harmful inclinations and views while understanding their motives and rationales. It was this good mix, I think, that helped me win office later.

I wonder whether Obama winning the presidency also affected you.

As a black man I would by lying if I said it didn’t. Of course he was not radical even about race relations, much less everything else. So neither he, his program, nor his administration informed my beliefs based on anything they said or did. Quite the opposite. I grew to be a very harsh critic and obviously developed entirely different aims.

But, that said, Obama’s winning did affect me. In 2008 I was 23, black, and working class. I was just out of college and working on an assembly line. My politics were gut level and certainly not yet much like RPS. Still, I did not become liberal due to voting for and being ecstatic to see Obama win. To me his victory said that people like me could step onto the stage of history. The country could rally around a black man. And I don’t know, but I think it is quite possible that had that not happened, I would have never become a candidate. I think Sanders’ effect on me would have been less than enough had not Obama had that earlier effect on me. I don’t know, but I suspect something similar is true for a great many women regarding Clinton nearly becoming president, even as they too didn’t become liberal, or remotely like her.

I am not literate enough, not good enough with words, or even myself aware enough to try to convey the maelstrom of doubts, insecurities, and temptations that someone working class, much less someone working class and black, has to navigate to stay real and not coopted, and yet simultaneously has to transcend to be productive, and on top of that, to then succeed in the utterly foreign, almost alien world of electoral politics as it then was, which was stuffed with academics and rich layabouts, buried in bigoted souls who together almost completely crowded out even visibility for the few folks worth emulating. It may be somewhat self-serving, but I would urge that radical folks not be quick to jump to judgements when folks like me disappoint them a little. For that matter, maybe sometimes give a thought to, or even try to imagine standing in our shoes, and seeing people like yourselves jump to judgements and imagine ourselves trying to not bite back.

Reacting to Trump Winning

Andre, at the risk of over-focusing on one event and its aftermath, and I promise not to repeat this all over with the later campaigns, I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your reaction to Trump winning in 2016. How did it happen, and what did you take from its having happened?

There isn’t much difference in my view of it now, from my view of it then.  Lots of people wondered why is Trump President? How did that happen? How could a soulless buffoon rise so high while being so low in all respects? My own first reaction, however, was to wonder, why ask why? Were we morbidly curious? Were we seeking someone to blame? Were we looking to escape blame ourselves? Or did we hope to find a workable path for the future? I opted for that last motive for myself and here were my thoughts which were, I think, part and parcel of what RPS also came to feel about Trump and fascism writ larger.

I blamed Mainstream media mendacity. I watched mainstream media coddle Trump throughout the primaries and well into the national campaign. I watched it sell eyes to advertisers, not truth to the public. I watched as media moguls, even when they finally saw a disaster brewing, continued to prioritize profits so that even their end game castigations of Trump the racist, Trump the rapist, Trump the fiscal felon, were shallow.

What I took from all that was that truth and commitment required developing more of our own media and also forcing better results from mainstream media. Pressing the press and building alternative media had to become paramount activist concerns for print, radio, video, and social media. Otherwise the mainstream’s mighty megaphone would always blow us away.

I felt that if all the largest megaphones were operated by unhindered elites and if our smaller megaphones were operated as a discordant cacophony rather than in thoughtful harmony with one another, we would continue to face insurmountable odds. Since to mimic the mainstream would be suicidal, we had to carve our own entirely new communicative and organizational paths.

I also blamed the Democratic Party. I was confident if Sanders had run, he could have won. I could see that mainstream Democrats feared that result more than they feared Trump. I watched the DNC torpedo Sanders’ campaign. I felt if the Democrats had not squandered grassroots white working class support over and over in prior decades, Trump would not have won no matter who he ran against. So I knew it was accurate to blame the Democratic Party but I also felt that anyone surprised by Democratic Party behavior hadn’t been watching until then. The Democratic Party was part and parcel of power and wealth. The Democratic Party did what it does. It protected power and privilege. For me, that indicated that a progressive agenda could benefit from a reconstructed Democratic Party and that a radical agenda could benefit from one or more effective new parties plus major election reform. Acting on those insights about electoral prospects while not allowing maniacs into office could win at least some Democratic Party overhaul. It could generate new parties, and could win electoral procedural changes.

I also blamed Republican off the rails tenacity. If even a fraction of the Republican base had decided to forego their party to block Trump on grounds of his special debits, then Trump would have lost. That later Republican officials went further and further to the right, moving off civilized rails onto Fascist rails, was truly cowardly. I suppose some of them may have believed the swill they presented but as but but one example, after Trump was convicted Republicans routinely yelled that it was a fix that Biden was manipulating it and so on, and I doubt that even one of them believed any of that,  though they virtually all said it. Politics as tribal loyalty, I guess, truth be damned. But other than pointing to the obvious need to “organize, organize,” did such observations lead us anywhere new? I thought about it by asking myself what if Clinton had won in a landslide, or what if Sanders had won and in the latter case we were dancing in the streets. Should Sanders or Clinton voters have then dismissed and ignored Trump voters? Should Sanders or Clinton voters have then written off Trump voters as irredeemably opposed to progressive much less radical change?

To my mind, to ask the question was to answer it. If, in this thought dream, those who voted successfully for Clinton or Sanders wanted to not only win an election but also to fundamentally change society, they would have to ask could that happen without winning over those they disagreed with? The answer would certainly be no. And so we would have to reach out. So okay, instead, Trump won, but that same question should have therefore been even more forefront and easier to answer than in the hypothetical case of Trump losing.

The lesson I drew from this thought game was that whether we win or lose, whether an election campaign or a programmatic battle for some policy change, when the dust clears the next task is to reach out energetically and congenially to those who disagreed with us but who we think ought to have agreed given their situations.

We shouldn’t ignore allies but nor should we spend all our energy listening, talking, and organizing only among our allies. We ought to solidify their support but also grow new support. Yet I knew that we all too often avoided reaching out to those we disagreed with. We had to instead collectively make that a priority. And RPS finally did just that.

Finding Causes Not Laying Blame

Malcolm, what about blaming white workers, didn’t that happen a lot too?

Yes, many people, even many progressives, blamed white workers, whether out loud or under their breath. And they were undeniably correct that had fewer white male and female workers voted for Trump, he would have handily lost. Even just voting for Clinton instead of Trump at the same level that white voters had earlier supported Obama instead of Romney would have sunk Trump’s boat. Unquestionably, therefore, the choice of a great many white workers to vote for Trump abetted Trump’s victory. But deciding why they voted for Trump was where controversy arose.

Some argued if you voted for Trump it meant you didn’t care about his misogyny and racism or that you even welcomed it. Racism and sexism were what you desired. You were a little Trump. Most who said this sort of thing totally dismissed Trump voters as being beyond communication. Urged to reach out and organize Trump voters, they replied that that was ridiculous. They thought Trump voters were lost to reason. A subset said instead that while Trump’s voters’ current views were often horrible, still, we must reach them. However this seemed to often mean we should shame people, “call out” people, confront people, label people backward, ignorant, and worse, and demand that people repent. There was no room for discussion, debate, and organizing. Repent, and we will like you. Don’t repent, and we will hate you.

Others said, hold on. Do you really believe Latinos and Blacks who voted for Trump are racist little Trumps? Do you really believe women who voted for Trump, which is most white women who voted, are misogynist little Trumps? If you don’t believe that, then presumably you think that these groups saw reasons to vote for Trump that they felt overrode even their personal distaste for Trump’s wild racism and sexism. But if you can see that for Trump’s Latino, Black, and women voters, then why should we assume that all white male working class Trump voters, or even most of them, didn’t see and weren’t moved by the same non-racist and non-sexist feelings as many Latino, Black, and the majority of white women voters?

If white workers who voted for Obama had voted for Clinton, Trump loses. But did many white workers vote for Obama but not for Clinton because they were racist? Did they vote for Obama but not for Clinton because they—and remember, this includes more than half of white women who voted—were sexist? Why wasn’t it also possible that white working class Trump voters from devastated communities who were suffering oxycodone-invaded and unemployment-saddled neighborhoods, and who were bombarded with horribly faulty media-mediated misinformation, were mainly voting against the status quo and not for racism and misogyny?

Similarly, couldn’t even better-off white working class Trump voters who feared job loss and suffered indignity, but who hated not so much the really rich as the doctors, lawyers, managers, and coordinator class elites they daily encountered, and who were inundated with confusing and contradictory information, have been voting against the status quo and not for racism and misogyny? Wasn’t their fear of continued working class decline that great?

Okay, Andre, then regarding the white working class, why did so many radicals and others, right after Trump won, assume the worst was predominant? Why not assume that other less vile albeit very confused motives dominated? And, honestly, why did Trump retain those voters right through his time as President, his subsequent crazy lunacy after losing, and more?

Right after the 2016 election was striking, I agree. Virtually all the interviews done with Trump voters by non name calling interviewers pointed toward angry but better, albeit confused motives. Vote tallies also pointed toward angry but better motives. So why did so many upset anti-Trump commentators and even left activists reject what was highly probable?

I thought that perhaps one reason some concluded only racist and sexist desires yielded Trump votes was that they lacked knowledge of the pain, suffering, and daily fear of contemporary working class life that Trump’s voters felt. If that suffering didn’t register in your perception, clearly you were unlikely to deem desires to escape it an important motive. That is an ugly picture of the reason for blaming white workers but I think it applied to many Democratic Party regulars. However distasteful, it was far more plausible to me than that half the country were little Trumps. But, at the same time, I didn’t think ignorance of or even dispassion for working class suffering was the primary reason why so many progressives and radicals were castigating white workers as irretrievably racist and sexist. At least I hoped not. But what else might have lead some progressives and radicals to aggressively disparage and dismiss white workers?

I had a notion, but not many thought it had merit. Imagine you thought that if people believed rampant racism and misogyny motivated most or all Trump voters it would lead to effective follow-up activity to reduce racism and misogyny. At the same time, imagine you also thought that if people believed most Trump voters were attracted to his claim that he would aid the “working class” by challenging trade agreements, rebuilding infrastructure, and especially turning everything upside down, it would reduce effective anti-racist, anti-sexist follow-up activity. Feeling that way, you might assert racism and sexism were the key factors not because there was some compelling case that it was so, but because it seemed that asserting it was so would keep those concerns forefront.

Some who said racist and sexist motivations were paramount seemed to feel that to deal seriously with racism and misogyny those phenomena had to become absolutely forefront. They had to be very aggressively “called out,” shamed, and even punished person by person. In this view, asserting that factors other than racism and sexism played a preponderant or even just a significant role could lead to less or no calling out and shaming of Trump voters. It might even cater to them, coddle them, and reduce prospects for improvement.

In contrast, those who said that a great many or most Trump voters were not mainly motivated by racism or sexism but by anti establishment anger funneled into supporting a candidate who at least acknowledged them, seemed to hear people’s grievances and then arrive at a very different approach for dealing with the situation. They felt activists fighting against reaction and for positive change needed to avoid adding to Trump’s voters’ feelings that liberals, progressives, and radicals reflexively dismiss white working class concerns as stupid and/or vile, which feelings would only further alienate those constituencies.

We needed to reach out, in this second view, by making clear what real action on behalf of working class and anti-racist and anti-sexist gains would include. We needed to explain, without denigration and dismissal, why Trump wasn’t an avatar of desirable change. We needed to point out the incredible injustice and harm of racist and sexist policies, but without pointing our fingers at the people we were talking with. We needed to admit the faults of Clinton and the Democrats, and agree with the need to battle those as well.

We also needed to address that economic and social support for workers faces opposition from not only owners, but also too often from managers, doctors, lawyers and many top level union bureaucrats and others who the Democratic Party catered to, and who actively defended their own massive advantages. We needed to talk not at Trump voters but with Trump voters. We needed to learn from valid views and sincerely debate important differences.

I took away that we needed to prioritize two simple insights which were, of course, part and parcel of the later emergence of RPS. First, to oppose generalized economic domination of workers but ignore or even minimize and dismiss the economic and non economic pain and suffering of women and non white communities is morally deficient and strategically disastrous. But, second, at the same time, to address the social suffering of women and non white communities but ignore or even minimize and dismiss the economic and non economic suffering of workers is also morally deficient and strategically disastrous.

So for me the big divide was would we try to shame Trump’s voters, to call them out, and to label them racist and sexist, somehow thinking that doing so would cause them—unlike virtually everyone else ever before accosted that way—to welcome and side with us? Or would we try to instead reach out, listen, hear, and when need be to forthrightly not yield an inch regarding racist or sexist policies and beliefs, but also and equally strongly address the class oppressions that both white and non white, and both male and female Trump supporters powerfully felt? Would organizers who worked with white workers and would activists in general assess our own efforts to see if anything we had been doing may have contributed to white workers willingly voting for Trump?

One lesson for me was that it is possible for wonderful, caring, courageous people to have very distorted perceptions, something we all already knew or should have known from all of history, including moments in our own personal pasts.

What I found especially striking, however, was that Sanders had no such confusions. Nor did many radicals who wrote tireless warnings of Trump’s evil and his potential to win, and who urged strategic lesser evil voting throughout the campaign. And because such clarity did exist, including coming from Sanders, it took considerable effort, I think, for even a few Sanders supporters to abstain in contested states, and yet more than a few did. I thought that however painful to dwell on, this was worth understanding and that some lessons lurked in the experience.

Simplifying a bit, I think the pattern of Trump’a voters and also of some Sanders supporters who discounted Trump’s evils was two sides of one coin. Many Trump voters discounted Trump’s racism, sexism, climate denial, and fascistic leanings. Many Sanders supporters who didn’t vote against Trump discounted the same evils (all of which Sanders supporters had every reason to be fully aware of). Both Trump’s voters and the Sanders voters who abstained seemed to have acted based on short term feelings of anger and fear. For the Trump voters it was anger at their life situation and later at what they took to be Trump’s persecution. For the Sanders abstainers it was anger at Sanders’ electoral mistreatment. I felt that both groups allowed their very warranted personal anger and fears to overcome contrary evidence and logic, and to me that suggested that organizing needed to become more compassionate, subtle, and persistent, as well as informed enough to overcome this tendency.

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[Author’s Note: I hope readers will continue with this serialization’s weekly excerpts. The next excerpt’s interviewees Andre Goldman, Bill Hampton, Senator Malcolm King, and Cynthia Parks recall the first RPS convention and its immediate aftermath of chapter building. Which is to say they finally get into some of the nuts and bolts of seeking their revolutionary participatory society. While waiting for Excerpt 4, I hope you will find some time to use Z’s Community Forum to provide reactions, criticisms, advice, and whatever else you would like to share about this article so as to help improve the project. I also hope you will listen to the next RevolutionZ podcast episode which will offer diverse interjections of additional thoughts, questions, criticisms, reasons, and hopes regarding what you have just read.]

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