Against the Current, No. 240, January/February 2026

HISTORIAN VAN GOSSE writes: “The many forms of despotism crowding in around us… represent a fundamental counter-revolution whose only counterpart would be the decades-long ‘Redemption’ that overturned Reconstruction’s biracial democracy in the former Confederacy and locked in White Supremacy for three-quarters of a century.” ("Red Scares — and a Blue Scare? A Brief History of Repression in the United States")

That specter of enormous rollbacks in the long struggle for racial justice will be our focus here, even though it’s hard to see past the headlines of the Trump regime’s nonstop atrocities and swirling chaos....

DONALD TRUMP’S GIANT back hoes have knocked down the east wing of the White House to construct a ballroom in his own honor....

Providing a meal for people experiencing homelessness. (jimwestphoto.com)

“Housing is the key to reducing intergenerational poverty and increasing economic mobility…increasing access to affordable housing is the most cost-effective strategy for reducing childhood poverty and increasing economic mobility in the United States.” —National Low-Income Housing Coalition

THE UNITED STATES is deep in the midst of a worsening affordable housing crisis, reverberating throughout thousands of communities and millions of lives, and the Trump administration has struck what might be a fatal blow.

Stable, affordable, long-term housing is a key....

(Howard Zinn Project)

This article is edited from a talk on the 2024 Presidential Election that Paul Ortiz gave at a roundtable session sponsored by Historians for Peace and Democracy at the American Historical Association annual meeting in New York City on January 4, 2025. Paul Ortiz is a Professor of Labor History at Cornell University and an affiliate faculty member of Cornell’s Latino Studies Program. He joined Cornell in 2024 and previously served as director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and Professor of History at the University of Florida.

DURING THIS CRISIS moment....

Defending the Hollywood Ten: filmmakers blacklisted during the Red Scare. (Howard Zinn Project)

WHEN I TITLED this talk “A New McCarthyism?” I had in mind some of the recent, shocking attacks against free speech, particularly those centered on educational institutions and the media.

As the Federal Communications Commission investigated news networks, Trump filed spurious lawsuits and interfered with the business dealings of their parent companies, leading to an observable rightward drift in coverage. Similar tactics led Columbia University....

“I don’t want someone else’s, but I won’t give away my own.” Bogush Shippih, 1917. Poster depicting a woman as the Ukrainian People’s Republic defending its child against the Imperial Russian Eagle.

USUALLY THE HISTORY of the 1917 revolution is told from the perspective of Russia. But its most radical and transformative currents emerged from the empire’s colonized peoples.

Ukraine was first among equals. It managed to create a majority council based socialist and democratic republic, and provided an example of multi-parties, cooperative-based and decentralized socialism, that was later defeated by Russia. It was the forefront of a revolutionary shift — offering a bold vision of what politics could be.

Now is an ideal time for leftists and progressives to learn about Ukraine, about the bold, emancipatory, and radical projects spearheaded by people enslaved by Russia, and return these pages to socialist history....

José Antonio Kast, the far-right candidate won decisvely against Jeanette Jara.

WITH THE SECOND round of the Chilean election, José Antonio Kast won a decisive victory over the progressive candidate Jeanette Jara (58% to 42%). When Kast is sworn in as president on March 11, he will be the first far right-wing president since 1990....

Albert Matz saw his desire for freedom and artistic integrity as similar to those of Soviet dissidents.

THE CULTURAL-POLITICAL movement known as the Prague Spring came into being on January 5, 1968, when reformist statesman Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Dubček’s liberalizations — freedom of speech, multi-party elections, an uncensored media, and constraints on the dreaded secret police — amounted to an ambitious program that promised to reinvigorate democratic socialism and offer citizens “a fuller life of the personality” than was possible in the capitalist West or in the increasingly illiberal Soviet Union....

The Black Tax:
150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America
By Andrew W. Kahrl
University of Chicago Press, 2024, 456 pages, $20 paperback.

ANDREW W. KAHRL, professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, has authored a valuable book that is important for understanding the relationship between national oppression and white supremacy. That relationship is a key to how the billionaire class dominates the working class in the United States.

The author asks: “Why has racial equality remained such an enduring problem in America, and what forces fuel its persistence?”

Freedom Train
Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity
By Cedric De Leon
University of California Press, 2025, 352 pages, $29.95 paperback.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago on August 25, 1925 Black Pullman car porters streamed into the Elks Hall in Harlem. They gathered to hear the socialist A. Philip Randolph speak about the need for porters to form a union.

This meeting wasn’t just the beginning of a union drive; it was the start of a long battle to organize Black workers into unions and root discrimination out of the existing labor movement. It’s a fitting time to look back on the history of interracial unionism and how Black workers fought so hard to build it....

Savings and Trust:
The Rise and Fall of the Freedmen’s Bank
By Justene Hill Edwards
New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 2024, 336 pages. $19.99 paperback (to be published).

JUSTENE HILL EDWARDS’ illuminating book examines the significant decline in Black wealth that occurred following the Civil War. Savings and Trust: The Rise and Fall of the Freedmen’s Bank painstakingly uncovers a neglected history: how the Freedmen’s Bank, envisioned initially as a secure institution for Black wealth accumulation, was systematically plundered by white financiers like Henry Cooke, who exploited its deposits for risky personal ventures.

Edwards reveals the bank’s transformation....