Elections won’t solve the problems we face in the US, but organized resistance can

In November there will be more elections and with that comes the same dynamics we have seen repeatedly in terms of where we should place our focus and energy.

The mid-terms are upon us and many people and organizations are placing a great deal of hope in those elections. Not only are groups wanting to center the upcoming elections they want us to participate with the usual mantra of anybody but the Republicans. Ironically, this blind devotion to voting for the lesser of evils is exactly how we got here in the first place.

Ask yourself if the Democratic Party has demonstrated any real and substantive resistance to the Trump Administration over the past twelve months? I don’t mean speeches or statements, rather how have Democrats voted and more importantly, how much are they following the lead of those doing the actual organized resistance across the county? The Democratic Party in the past 12 months has not engaged in real resistance, and more often than not they have tried to either undermine organized resistance through proxy groups and they have gone out of their way to defend systems of power and oppression, like ICE.

Undermining organized resistance

The Democratic Party has undermined movement work in recent decades, often using the language of on the ground movements, but always with the goal of not doing what movements are demanding. Remember of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was challenging the Capitalist Class and calling for radical economic change that would not only benefit families, but address the climate crisis. Remember, the Occupy movement happened during the Obama Administration, which bailout out banks and forced autoworkers into taking concessions during contract negotiations.

Then there was the Movement for Black Lives, which was a direct response to brutal killings of Black people by cops. Again, the Obama Administration did little to address this matter, often chastising those in the streets and practicing respectability politics. This same national movement erupted in 2020 with the largest protests in US history after the police murder of George Floyd, with calls to defund and abolish the police. Again, Democrats tried to change the narrative and make it so cops had more diversity training, using body cams or they needed even more funding, like what happened under the Biden Administration.

In the past twelve months under the Trump Administration we have seen economic attacks against working class people, continued support for the Israel genocide and direct US military intervention in places like Venezuela. Again, the Democratic Party has responded by simply offering more oversight or mild reforms to capitalism and they continue to vote to provide nearly roughly $1 trillion to fund US militarism.

A large percentage of the public is calling for ICE to be abolished and yet the Democratic Party wants to make it about ICE agents wearing masks, calling for body cams additional oversight. What the Democratic Party is not calling for is the abolition of ICE.

Undermining organized resistance through proxy groups

The other main strategy of the Democrats is to use proxy groups to undermine the incredible organized resistance happening across the country. Some of those proxy groups are MoveOn (which was created during the Bush Admin.), 50501 or Indivisible.

In a recent weekly Email, the GR Indivisible group wrote the following:

Protests, rallies, calling our elected representatives, letter and postcard writing, supporting affected communities and mutual aid efforts, helping with food insecurity, and showing up for our neighbors are all incredibly important actions that we should continue to do. But if we do not turn Congress around in the 2026 midterm elections by getting progressive candidates elected, our society will continue to break down, increasing hardship for people not just in the U.S. but also around the globe.

Ok, so this is an instructive statement from Indivisible. What I take from this statement is that before the Trump Administration most people in the US were doing pretty good. This kind of thinking is so problematic, because 1) it fails to acknowledge how millions of people in the US have been suffering for a very long time regardless of who sits in the White House, and 2) it demonstrates that Democrats and Democratic Party front groups like Indivisible are in denial of the tremendous suffering and injustice that happens under Democratic administrations.

Here is a question, why wasn’t Indivisible organizing during the Biden Administration. Why weren’t they making similar statements during the Biden Administration? Here is a very short list of what happened during the Biden Administration that were also rather heinous:

• There were more deportations in the last four years than there were during the first Trump Administration.
• The Biden Administration approved more fossil fuel extractions on US soil than the Trump Administration did.
• The wealth gap has expanded during the Biden Administration, especially amongst the Billionaire Class.
• The Biden Administration increased US military funding every year for the past 4 years.
• The Biden Administration increased funding for policing, even in the era of Black Lives Matter.
• The Biden Administration was completely and utterly complicit in the war crimes and genocidal policies of Israel, refusing to end weapons sales to Israel, being complicit in allowing Israel to block humanitarian aid to Gaza and always voting against most of the rest of the world when the United Nations condemned what Israel was doing.
• The Biden Administration was not only silent, but did not actively oppose the repression of the US campus Pro-Palestine movement.
• Rent increases went up during the Biden Administration, which did very little to address the current US housing crisis.
• The Biden Administration did not raise the federal minimum wage, they did not eliminate Citizens United, the did not release the Epstein files, and they didn’t codify Roe v Wade.

Last Saturday, the Kent Dems held an anti-ICE rally in Grand Rapids, but the Kent County Dems do not support the sanctuary policies that Movimiento Cosecha has been demanding over the past 12 months and none of the local Democratic politicians support Cosecha’s demands either. More importantly, they did not center affected communities during their anti-ICE rally or even bother to have Cosecha speak.

Instead, the Kent Dems invited the Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow to speak. McMorrow has NO history of demanding that ICE be abolished and her stance on ICE and immigration includes the following:

• Support legislation to require all ICE officers to wear uniforms and clear identification to prevent fear and distrust with plain-clothes officers conducting raids in communities
• Focus our immigration enforcement dollars on keeping violent criminals off of our streets, not bullying legal immigrants who came here for a better life
• Secure the border with more agents, better technology like sensors and scanners, and modernized ports of entry to stop trafficking and bring order to entry

This is the same weak reformist proposals that will do nothing to effectively stop ICE from arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants.

Now, I’m not telling people to not vote or how to vote, but what I am saying is that never in the history of the US has the federal government ever done anything good on their own. To the degree that there has been any fundamental changes at the federal level it has always been because of organized resistance and organized movements throughout history.

The radical historian Howard Zinn once said:

But before and after those two minutes it takes to vote, our time, our energy, as concerned citizens, should be spent in educating, agitating and organizing in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools.

Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House and in Congress into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate, that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.