Toward Liberation or Ruin?

Against the Current, No. 243, July/August 2026

The Editors

America at 250: Our rights and our lives are on the line!

THE UNITED STATES of America marks its 250th anniversary in July 2026 with its multiple divided legacies. As we know, the country was founded in the perpetuation of racial slavery, in genocide of the Indigenous nations, in ambitions of vast colonial dominion — and simultaneously in the struggles against those things, producing contradictions persisting throughout its history.

How then will this momentous occasion be remembered? No doubt for the UFC (mixed martial arts) extravaganza on the White House lawn and a Grand Prix race on the streets of the nation’s capital. Coming soon, if the godfather in the presidential chair gets his wish, will be a 250-foot arch to dwarf existing memorials and permanently alter the view of the National Mall.

This celebration is happening in a country where rural hospitals are hemorrhaging, measles outbreaks are spreading while hundreds of thousands lose their health care, and millions are financially crippled by fuel and food inflation accelerated by Trump’s war on Iran. It is a country ruled by arguably the most openly corrupt political elite and greed-consumed capitalist class in U.S. history.

How did we get here, and what’s the way out? The inseparable nexus of imperial war abroad and the wars on the people at home is an important key. That’s a connection that few if any politicians, even Democratic liberals, will explicitly state. Yet Trump’s Iran war, after his lying promise to his base about ending “forever wars,” has created angry dissonance between his MAGA loyalists and neoconservatives demanding that he “finish the job.”

Equally central is the extreme racism that’s essential to the rise of authoritarian and incipient fascist politics. Importantly indicative of the country’s condition are the American gulag of detention-and-torture camps where tens of thousands of immigrants are held facing deportation with little if any legal recourse, access to representation or even decent food, housing and medical care. Among more than 50 recorded deaths, 10 are listed as suicide.

The United States is also heading toward midterm November elections where voting rights and safeguards against fraud are under multiple existential challenges. These range from court-enabled extreme political-racial gerrymandering, and federal Justice Department demands for state voting records, to intimidation of local election officials (including death threats) and potential rightwing mob and terror attacks.

American Dysfunctions

The criminal rampages of U.S. imperialism abroad, or the social destruction at home, aren’t hidden from view. And anger and opposition have grown, from majority antiwar opinion to (for example) the outraged protests at the Newark, New Jersey Delaney Hall detention-torture facility.

Begin with the Iran war mess, with its potential to crash the entire world economy with the paralysis of the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint. Trump’s war was unpopular from day one, all the more deeply reviled as its futility and costs became evident. The visible role of Israel’s government and prime minster Netanyahu, Trump’s cheerleader and manipulator, gave rise to the mistaken but understandable notion that the United States “went to war for Israel.” (These tangled issues are explored in a Solidarity webzine article “A ‘War for Israel’? Notes on a Catastrophe and Fiasco,” April 14, 2026.)

Running far ahead of political elites and pundits, U.S. public opinion for the first time in history is more sympathetic to Palestine than to Israel as its genocide in Gaza and military-settler ethnic cleansing in the West Bank continue without pause. Israel’s demolition and population removal in Lebanon, and its use of white phosphorus in dense civilian areas, deepens the outrage.

Except among older Republicans, pro-Palestinian sentiment is expanding within almost all popular sectors — even among young Jews and evangelical Christians. The Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions campaign against Israeli apartheid and U.S. corporate complicity is gaining ground.

This powerful trend explains the virulence with which BDS as well as campus solidarity activism for Palestine is persecuted and criminalized. At college commencement ceremonies, applause for support of pro-Palestinian activism (when speakers are allowed to express it) is matched only by derisive booing of speeches promoting the benefits of Artificial Intelligence. In communities across the country, revulsion is spreading against the plague of those energy-and-environment-destroying AI data centers.

That’s some good news. Regrettably, the incredible destruction in Lebanon under Israel’s occupation and annexationist invasion hasn’t really registered quite yet. And most people aren’t properly aware of the Trump gang’s ambition to hand Vladimir Putin a bloody amputated piece of Ukraine.

People are increasingly aware, although perhaps still somewhat vaguely, that cuts in domestic public health budgets are part of the global Trump-Musk massive U.S. defunding of health programs — cuts that contributed, for example, to the undetected spread of the new Ebola outbreak in central Africa with its appalling consequences.

These are selected cases among many others. And even if a lot of massive graft of the Trump family and cronies remains half-hidden, plenty of it is known (to say nothing of the coverup of whatever’s in those Epstein files) and widely covered in mainstream and liberal conventional and social media.

Barriers to Understanding

The United States is not North Korea, or Putin’s Russia, or the Islamic Republic of Iran — access to information is hardly the fundamental problem.  And as the many examples of resistance show, popular apathy isn’t really the answer to how a discredited regime and political system remain dominant. It’s conventional discourse that there’s “political gridlock” because “America is deeply polarized” — but that doesn’t do much to explain how it got that way.

Attention span can be an obstacle. The sheer complexity of cascading crises, of which we’ve only cited a few —without even touching on deadly consequences of climate change — can make it difficult even for activists, let alone the broader public, to focus.

Another problem, including with liberal media critique (look at CNN or MS-NOW formerly MSNBC for example), is that their programs frequently look either at threats to democracy, civil rights, public heath etc. at home — OR the devastation and strategic bankruptcy of Trump’s Iran war and annexationist insanities abroad — yet too rarely both.

An elementary observation goes unstated: A government that blows up civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, mostly small fishing vessels, on the lying pretext that they’re “running drugs,” will of course murder its own citizens on the street.

A society that imprisons nearly one percent of its adult population (1.8 million incarcerated) will allow that government to set up immigration concentration-detention torture centers on its home soil.

And what should be equally self-evident: A government that does all that has no legitimate standing to prosecute a former Cuban president and defense minister in Cuba’s shooting down exile planes 30 years ago. (Whether or not those “Brothers to the Rescue” represented a security threat isn’t relevant to the illegitimacy of any U.S. prosecution.)

 How many prominent Democrats make these elementary points, or pledge that if returned to power they’ll immediately close Trump’s entire gulag of immigrant detention prisons — let alone shut down the monstrous DHS machine?

That imperialist war abroad and war against the people at home are inseparably twinned, as we’ve stated above, should be entirely obvious. Yet the majority of the population is systematically conditioned not to recognize it — even now when the wars abroad and at home are both deeply unpopular. With some exceptions, even progressive congressional Democrats — let’s not even talk about the encrusted Schumer-Jeffries leadership and the party’s permanent parasitic consultant class — don’t make that deep connection even if they seize every opportunity to point to Trump’s corruption and cognitive decline.

The Democratic-aligned organizers of the mass “No Kings” demonstrations do make the connections to a certain extent, and due to the power of the activist movement they’d be unable to keep Palestinian flags and chants out of the rallies and marches even if they might want to do so. But it’s not adequate to the task we face.

The role of unions in the May Day Strong actions was a step forward, although not the dramatic breakthrough that might have been hoped in the buildup.

What’s Needed

It’s seductive but disastrously wrong to assign blame to the population at large on grounds that they’re intoxicated by social media, conspiracy nutcase theories, Fox Newschannel or its farther-right competitors. More relevant is addressing the situation of a U.S. left that can’t yet do effective mass-scale communication or mobilize for an independent, progressive political alternative.

Such an alternative can’t be conjured up. It remains to be built from the ground up. The absence of an alternative leaves today’s movements tragically chained to the Democratic Party in every electoral cycle — which in today’s environment has become an uninterrupted campaign and fundraising cascade. The situation is made worse since the Supreme Court wiped out the Voting Rights Act.

What needs to be built begins with understanding that Donald Trump is the symptom, not the underlying disease of a violently unequal racial capitalist society. The treatment will be necessary when he’s gone, not only after 2028 but well beyond.

What follows will not be new to most readers, but remains of central importance. The left’s appeal must be both moral and material — attacking the horror of immigrant detention, and demanding public heath care for all, etc. It means fighting tooth and nail to preserve and expand voting rights, while making clear that the Democratic Party isn’t and can’t be an alternative to corporate capitalism and imperialism.

Right now, the low ceiling on the gains that can be won — and preserved in the long run — is manifested in the substantial, although minority, support inside the working class for Trump and his policies. And here we don’t mean only among white workers.

Take for example the tangled relations of the United Auto Workers, under its leadership propelled to office by an activist reform movement, to Trump’s nationalist tariffs.

Union president Shawn Fain proclaims of the car industry, “If it’s sold here it should be built here.” Who believes that the U.S. economy can realistically exist inside a protectionist bubble? Fain recalls the prophetic warnings that North American “free trade” would grease the skids toward destroying U.S. manufacturing jobs. So it did! That doesn’t mean, however, that a now-integrated industry across national borders can be dismantled by policy fiat.

Endorsing Trump’s version of tariffs means supporting his out-in-the-open intentions to destroy the Canadian economy and to subjugate Mexico, along with the rest of Latin America, to his whims and orders. It is not difficult to understand how Canadian and Mexican workers will feel about these assaults, or how they’ll affect the possibilities for labor solidarity. (See Dianne Feeley’s detailed discussion of “UAW: Mixed Reform Results.”)

For the left and for socialists in particular, addressing the conundrum of support for Trump among working-class people — whose lives his rampages are systematically destroying — requires being present in the workplaces, unions and communities where the assaults are occurring and grassroots resistance efforts are mounted.

It means linking those struggles — from the anti-ICE Minneapolis victory and Delaney Hall mobilizations to the movements in communities across America against the data center plague. That includes places where people have heavily voted for Trump — to a vision of a different social order where they would have power over their own lives and the decisions that affect them.

It’s the anti-capitalist vision of a system that doesn’t require the destruction of communities, essential services, and nature to fund the gigantic permanent war machine and corporate profit. It requires building working-class solidarity and extending it to a global level.

Readers of this magazine don’t need lectures about this socialist goal. What we need to help build is a movement capable of bringing it to life in today and tomorrow’s real struggles — in short, a force that can point toward liberation rather than U.S. and global capital’s roads to ruin.

July-August 2026, ATC 243

1 comment

  1. # A Nexus Recognized Is Not Yet a Nexus Explained

    ## A response to “America at 250: Our rights and our lives are on the line!” (ATC 243)

    *Anthony P. Teso*

    *Draft — for submission to Against the Current as a discussion article, ATC 244*

    —

    The editorial in ATC 243 gets the most important thing right, and gets it right twice. It names the “inseparable nexus of imperial war abroad and the wars on the people at home” as the key to the American condition at 250, and it refuses the moralizing shortcut of blaming the population for failing to see it. Both commitments are correct, and the second is the harder one to hold. It is genuinely seductive, after a decade of Trumpism, to conclude that the problem is a citizenry lobotomized by Fox News and conspiracy podcasts. The editorial calls that conclusion “disastrously wrong,” and it is.

    But holding both commitments at once opens a question the editorial poses and then walks past. If access to information is not the problem — the editors say plainly that the United States is not North Korea — and apathy is not the problem, and the media-intoxication thesis is disqualified, then what, exactly, produces the non-recognition? The editorial’s answer is that the majority is “systematically conditioned” not to see the connection between the war machine abroad and the war on the people at home. Conditioned by what? Through which institutions, by what mechanism, in whose interest? The word “systematically” is doing an enormous amount of unacknowledged work in that sentence. A system is precisely what the editorial does not name.

    This is not a pedantic complaint. The strategic conclusions of the piece — build an independent alternative from the ground up, make the appeal both moral and material, be present in the workplaces and communities — all depend on a diagnosis of why the connection goes unmade. If the mechanism is misidentified, the strategy inherits the error. And the editorial’s own evidence points toward an answer it never states.

    ## The System That Does the Conditioning

    Consider what the editorial actually documents. Majority antiwar opinion on Iran. Public sympathy with Palestine exceeding sympathy with Israel for the first time in the history of polling. Outraged mass protest at Delaney Hall. Communities across the country — including Trump-voting communities — mobilizing against data centers. Booing of AI boosterism at commencement ceremonies. The No Kings demonstrations, where organizers could not keep Palestinian flags out of the marches even if they wanted to.

    This is not a portrait of a conditioned population. It is a portrait of a population that recognizes, in fragments and episodes, nearly everything the left wants it to recognize — and that possesses no political instrument through which the fragments can be assembled into a general account and acted upon. The recognition exists. What is missing is representation.

    Here the editorial’s observation about liberal media is more important than the editorial allows. CNN and MS-NOW will cover the threat to democracy at home *or* the catastrophe of the Iran war abroad, “yet too rarely both.” True — but why? Not because producers lack imagination. The segmentation of the crisis into disconnected stories mirrors, exactly, the position of the political party to which liberal media is oriented. The Democratic Party can prosecute Trump’s corruption, his cognitive decline, his assault on the rule of law. It cannot prosecute the nexus — because the party is itself a load-bearing component of the imperial state. Its leadership voted the war machine every dollar it ever asked for. Its donor base sits atop the financial and tech sectors whose global position that machine defends. Its foreign-policy cadre staffed the wars the MAGA base was promised an end to. A party so constituted can denounce the *style* of Trump’s imperialism — the recklessness, the graft, the Netanyahu sycophancy — but it cannot articulate the connection between empire and domestic immiseration without indicting itself.

    This is the mechanism. The “conditioning” is not primarily ideological fog pumped into passive minds. It is the structural effect of a two-party system in which the only mass electoral vehicle available to opposition is constitutively incapable of naming the thing opposition is about. Most working people encounter “politics” through that vehicle or not at all. The non-recognition of the nexus is manufactured at the level of representation, not cognition. The population is not conditioned to be blind; it is represented by institutions that are structurally mute.

    This reframing preserves everything correct in the editorial’s anti-moralism and gives it a foundation. The masses are not the problem, and now we can say why: the failure is located in the mediating structures, and the strategic task is therefore not enlightenment — the people at Delaney Hall did not need a lecture — but the construction of instruments of articulation. Which is, in fact, what the editorial’s conclusion gestures at. The gesture just needs its ground.

    ## A Symptom of What, Exactly?

    The editorial’s second key formulation — Trump is “the symptom, not the underlying disease” of racial capitalism — is true in the way that everyone from Bernie Sanders to the Atlantic’s editorial board finds it true, which is to say: true and inert. Everything is a symptom of capitalism. The question a Marxist analysis has to answer is what *kind* of symptom, of what *specific* crisis, taking what *determinate form* — because the answer tells us what breaks when Trump goes and what persists.

    Look again at the editorial’s own inventory of the moment. A UFC extravaganza on the White House lawn. A Grand Prix through the capital. A projected 250-foot arch to dwarf the memorials of the republic. A “godfather in the presidential chair” — the editorial’s phrase, and a better one than perhaps intended. Family graft “half-hidden” at best. A Justice Department demanding state voting records; election officials receiving death threats; an immigration gulag operating outside legal recourse.

    These are not random outrages. They are the signature features of a specific regime-form: the patrimonial capture of a bureaucratic state, in which the distinction between public office and the household of the ruler dissolves, loyalty displaces legality as the currency of administration, and the state’s coercive organs are retasked from impersonal rule-enforcement to the protection of the patron and the punishment of his enemies. (I have developed this argument at length elsewhere in these pages, in the analysis of patrimonial Bonapartism; I will not rehearse the apparatus here.) The spectacles the editorial treats as grotesque color — the cage fights, the arch — are diagnostically central: patrimonial regimes govern through the personalized spectacle of the ruler’s magnificence because they cannot govern through the legitimacy of institutions they are actively cannibalizing.

    Why does this matter strategically rather than taxonomically? Because “symptom of racial capitalism” implies that the treatment is the same before, during, and after Trump — and the editorial says as much: the treatment “will be necessary when he’s gone.” Correct. But a regime-form analysis adds what that formulation misses: patrimonial capture *degrades the institutional terrain itself*. The civil service, the courts, the electoral machinery, the statistical agencies, the public-health infrastructure — the ground on which any future struggle will be fought is being remade, and much of the damage will not self-repair under a Democratic restoration, because restorationist politics has no interest in empowering the popular forces that alone could rebuild these capacities on a different basis. The disease outlasts the symptom; but the symptom, left untheorized, is currently rebuilding the hospital to its own specifications. A left strategy for 2028 “and well beyond” needs to know that the post-Trump state will not be the pre-Trump state, and to fight now over what replaces it.

    ## The Alternative Is Not Absent. It Is Contested.

    Which brings us to the editorial’s strategic core, and to my sharpest disagreement. “Such an alternative can’t be conjured up. It remains to be built from the ground up. The absence of an alternative leaves today’s movements tragically chained to the Democratic Party in every electoral cycle.”

    Every reader of this magazine has written or endorsed some version of those sentences. I have. But in the summer of 2026 they are no longer an adequate description of the terrain. The alternative is not simply absent. Something is being built — contradictorily, on hostile ground, inside the ballot line of the party we correctly identify as a graveyard — and the editorial’s silence about it is the most conspicuous gap in the piece.

    A cohort of open socialists now sits in Congress, elected in the recent sweep. A socialist governs New York City. The Democratic Socialists of America, whatever its confusions, is the largest socialist organization in this country since the era the editors and I were formed by. None of this constitutes the independent working-class political instrument we need. All of it changes the question. The live strategic problem is no longer “how do we build an alternative where none exists” but “by what mechanisms does a movement hold its electeds to being tribunes of the class rather than careerists of the party” — accountability structures, pre-commitment, organizational discipline over legislative behavior, the willingness to discipline and if necessary disown. These are the questions the Mamdani mayoralty and the new congressional cohort pose *every single week*, and they are questions with real, contested, unsettled answers being fought out right now inside DSA and adjacent formations.

    “Tragically chained” is a conclusion presented where a problem should be. Chains are being tested from within — clumsily, with predictable co-optations and defections, but tested. A revolutionary current that responds to this by repeating that the ground-up alternative “remains to be built” is reciting a catechism the moment demands we operationalize. The editorial rightly says the left must be present where the assaults occur and the resistance mounts. The electoral arena, for better and mostly for worse, is one of those places. Presence there means having a worked-out position on discipline and accountability — the united-front logic of marching separately and striking together applied to the ballot line — not a standing declaration of the terrain’s illegitimacy that we suspend every November anyway.

    None of this concedes an inch to the strategy of permanent burrowing inside the Democratic Party. The point is nearly the opposite: the realignment strategists at least have a theory of what their electeds are for. Our side’s answer cannot be that the question is premature until the real party arrives. The real party, if it arrives, will be composed in significant part of forces currently learning politics inside these contradictions — and whether they learn tribuneship or careerism depends on whether currents like ours engage the fight over accountability or stand outside it keeping our formulations clean.

    ## Knowing What Produces the Blindness

    The editorial closes by calling for “a force that can point toward liberation rather than U.S. and global capital’s roads to ruin.” Yes. But a force capable of pointing toward liberation must first know what produces the blindness it proposes to overcome — and here the three arguments above converge.

    The blindness is not in the population; it is in the structures of representation, above all a Democratic Party constitutively unable to name the nexus of empire and immiseration. The regime those structures failed to prevent is not a generic symptom but a specific patrimonial formation actively remaking the terrain of future struggle. And the alternative instrument is not waiting to be built from virgin soil; it is being forged, badly and contestedly, in fights over discipline and accountability that our tradition is unusually well equipped to inform — if we treat them as our fights rather than someone else’s errors.

    The editorial says readers of this magazine don’t need lectures about the socialist goal. Agreed. What we need — what the moment demands of a publication with this one’s analytical inheritance — is fewer restatements of the goal and more analysis of the specific, novel, uncomfortable terrain on which it must now be pursued. The nexus of war abroad and war at home is the right key. It is time to say what lock it opens.

    —

    *Anthony P. Teso is a member of Solidarity and writes on socialist strategy and state theory. He is active with the Tempest Collective.*

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