Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Waging War at Two Levels Simultaneously

 

Waging War at Two Levels Simultaneously

 The analytical framework for of my posts since 2023 has been idea that we are in a battle for hegemony over the values that will define what it means to be American in the 21st Century. We have used the terms war of position and war of maneuver as alternative ways to conceptualize the political tools most appropriate to taking on the challenges faced in given periods in time.

I argued that ...

the conditions of liberal democracy in the US called for a Gramscian ‘war of position,’ or ‘trench

warfare’ in the institutions of the state and civil society. The war of position is a way to fight for incremental change, and sometimes fairly significant reforms, while continuing to make value-

based ‘what does it means to be an American’ arguments to support policy initiatives.[1]

 

This is in contrast to ...

           

the “war of maneuver” where military forces are in movement and ground is being taken and lost

rather swiftly ... In the war of maneuver minoritized races build cultural and institutional sources

of power to survive and also to defend themselves from the hostile larger society.[2]

 

In February as Trump 2.0 began to take effect I exclaimed that we were entering the war of maneuver as it indeed appeared that Trumpist forces were taking political and institutional ground at a breathtaking pace. I mentioned minoritized races, because, as you know, my broader research focuses on the role of race in defining Red and Blue Nation Americas. I likened the plight of Blue America to the maroons, escaped slaves who formed communities in remote mountains or swamps as one example of how people of color carved out geographical spaces where they might exercise the autonomy to live according to their own values. This is the war of maneuver, the fight for survival of our way of life against an external enemy.

 

Under Trump, the federal government has gone Red and is indeed an external enemy of our Blue way of life. But we must not abandon the dense trenches of the national state wholesale. Federal district and appeals courts have ruled against challenged Trump’s policies on several occasions already. But in the instances where his executive orders have reached the Supreme Court, it has chosen not to rule on the constitutionality of his orders, but more narrowly.

 

For example, when three federal district courts ruled that Trump’s executive order terminating birthright citizenship was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court “partially paused” the district courts rulings saying they had no authority to impose their localized rulings nationwide.[3]

 

More recently, regarding the wholesale firing of Department of Education employees, a federal judge in Boston ruled that Congressional approval was required for such a move. But the Supreme Court ruled that it was okay for the Trump administration to continue its gutting of the agency and rescinded the lower court order.  [4]

 

The high court rulings in each instance sidestepped the ultimate legal and constitutional issues. Regarding birthright, the court would eventually have to rule on the constitutionality of the 14th Amendment, of which birthright is a part. That is a ball its conservative members likely, want to kick down the road as far as they can. On the Department of Education, Trump wishes to render it unable to function It would be unconstitutional for the executive to close down the department without Congress’s approval. However, freezing the disbursement of funds already allocated by Congress is illegal --- an overreach of the executive power, and therefore also unconstitutional!

 

Pay close attention to these and other cases that could ultimately reach the Supreme Court. They illustrate that although we are in a war of maneuver, a military-styled battle against an external power we must continue to fight the war of position in institutional settings around our constitutional rights to stave off victory of the MAGA forces.

 

Institutions outside of the state in civil society are sites where dogged trench warfare must also be waged. Two examples from my home state of Ohio are salient here. The Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati is a museum dedicated to telling the heroic story of Black people escaping from slavery and the role Black and White allies in facilitating that great escape. In April Woodrow Keown Jr, the president of the center was reporting that a $500,000 federal grant to support the completion of an exhibit on social justice movements was on hold. I was not able to find out what the status of that grant was at the time of this writing. But the center, though it is a Smithsonian museum, is mostly privately funded. Keown said in April that private donations to support the exhibit were already coming in and the exhibit, though delayed, would open sometime in 2026.[5]

 

At the other end of the state the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, formerly known as the Indians, came under attack by Trump who called for the name to be changed back. The change came after a years long public education and pressure campaign. Team ownership indicated it was focused on the “opportunity to build the brand as the Guardians over the last four years and are excited about the future."[6]

 

In Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci cautioned the left about the interior defenses that often fortified oppressive regimes after the initial assault and left them intact. His words are timely today for progressives as we face a withering attack from MAGA on the systems we’ve built up over the generations. Gramsci trenchantly observes that

 

... at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a

 line of defence which was still effective ... the defenders ae not demoralized, nor do they abandon

their positions, ... nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future.[7]

 

Arts and cultural institutions, our sports franchises, universities like Harvard[8] ... these institutions are not behaving as if they are “demoralized,” nor have they lost “faith in their “strength or their own future.” As progressives we must follow these examples.

 

“Keep the Faith Baby!”[9]


[1] “From War of Position to a War of Maneuver,” Damani: Let’s Talk Politics, July 23, 2023.

[2] “War of Position, War of Maneuver and the Battle for Hegemony,” Damani: Let’s Talk Politics, February 25, 2025.

[7] Hoare, Q.  & Smith, G.N  (Eds.). (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York:
International Publishers. 1971, p. 235

[8] In reference to Harvard’s cases suing the federal government for blocking research monies awarded to it.   https://www.npr.org/2025/07/21/nx-s1-5462675/harvard-trump-court-hearing-boston

[9]Slogan popularized by activist Congressman and pastor Adam Clayton Powell in the 1960s https://www.adamclaytonpowell.com/keep-the-faith-baby

 

 

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Thursday, July 3, 2025

Trumpism and American Exhaustion

                                                  Trumpism and American Exhaustion

A lot has gone on since I’ve been on vacation! On June 9 Donald Trump sent the National Guard to quash peaceful protests opposing the ICE crackdown against immigrant workers in Los Angeles. He did this against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsome and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass who felt the Los Angeles city police and county sheriff departments had the unrest under control.

On June 12, Latino California US Senator Alex Padilla was thrown to the floor and handcuffed at a press briefing of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Padilla was in the local federal building fo r a meeting with the General Gregory Guillot, Commander of the United States Northern Command who oversees the military action in L.A. As a US Senator, Padilla was already being accompanied by FBI and National Guard officers, when he entered the press conference. He was accosted by Secret Service and other FBI officers, when he rose and began to ask Noem a question.

For the Trump administration the optics of a high-ranking Latino public official being roughed up over its immigration policies looked good. It showed they weren’t taking any s—t from those brown immigrants and their leaders!

On June 18 National Guard troops assisted the Drug Enforcement Administration in rounding up over 70 people suspected being undocumented working on illegal marijuana farms near Palm Springs. This was in neighboring Riverside County, over 100 miles from LA.

This early deployment of the US military in domestic law enforcement and its creeping spread beyond its initial mission synchs up nicely with the American bombing of Iranian nuclear sites on June 24th. That was in support of the Israeli bombings of numerous sites, military and non-military in Iran beginning June 12, which led to Iranian drone and missile attacks on Israel.

In both southern California and the Middle East Trump chose bullying and militaristic tactics: the simplistic approach that suits someone with no appreciation for the complexity of our immigration issue or how Israel and Iran ended up as enemies. Bullies just want to have things their way and are willing to beat up their adversaries to achieve their ends.

But Trump’s mean-spirited militarism has landed him in the White House again, because it speaks to the exhaustion and exasperation plaguing the American psyche after over eighty years of offering itself as a model for domestic social orders and the organization of international relations.

Domestically, people on the cultural right are tired of the incessant debate over what it means to be an American, which animates racial identity politics. In earlier posts I’ve dubbed folks on the moderate right as White assimilationists and those on the far right as white nationalists. Some White assimilationists, being more moderate, are willing to keep talking about American identity in an attempt to rebuild a pragmatic political center. White nationalists, Trump’s Red America MAGA crowd, are done with that conversation and actively seek to dismantle institutional spaces where multiracialist visions of America’s future hold sway. This is why Red nationalists oppose diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. They don’t want us to interrogate our differences, especially where inequitable or exclusionary practices might obtain. And they want to undermine democracy to get us all to stop questioning why those inequities and exclusions take place.

Globally, the US has been the leader of the White Western advanced capitalist bloc of states since the end of World War Two. The West was fighting fascist aggression in Europe and the Far East. But because Nazi fascism was racist, anti-racism became inextricably linked to the war effort. Anti-colonialism was also baked into wartime aims via documents like the Atlantic Charter signed by President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill in 1941. The charter called for self-government to be restored to peoples who had been deprived of it.[1]

The Atlantic Charter laid the framework for what would become the United Nations system and deepened the global discourse on human rights, which had been generated out of World War One and the creation of the League of Nations. But human rights including the brown mostly colonized peoples of the Global South were always a mixed bag for the White countries of the East and West. Their superpower competition for geopolitical-military dominance trumped any concern they might have had for the political aspirations of those countries emerging from colonization.

The Soviet record during the Cold War of catastrophic policies indifferent to the aspirations of Southern countries, though real, is beyond the scope of this post. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, they recognized they could no longer afford to compete with the US militarily or economically under the communist system. They sought reform, which led to the wholesale collapse of that system. Soviet state socialism was exhausted. In the period since the early 1990s, Russia has experienced decline in importance and influence in global affairs.

Today the United States is similarly enervated in its posture toward the world and Donald Trump personifies this mood. The US led Western liberal democracies in defeating fascism in World War Two, and outlasting communism in the Cold War. But in Vietnam and again in Afghanistan and Iraq its massive military power and hapless attempts to employ “soft power” proved incapable of sustaining Western-oriented regimes.

Trump accurately reflects the frustrations of many Americans who saw the country dragged into wars in “weak” Southern countries that it was unable to win. How could a country that could defeat the German Wehrmacht in WW II and Soviet Bear in the Cold War lose to “people without history” in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq?[2] Why do we keep bankrolling European security while countries in the Western Europe enjoy higher qualities of life than we do? And why have we continued to dump billions of dollars into to foreign aid programs when many Americans are suffering at home? Many Americans think it’s high time that the US excuse itself from the complexities of the world and concentrate on the problems here at home.

As is the case in domestic politics, Americans are exhausted, in these cases because the country’s outsized role in global affairs doesn’t seem to reap dividends in terms of compliance with our objectives or broader allegiance to our model for society.

But power abhors a vacuum, and commentators are already observing the ways that China (economically) and the China-Russia axis (strategically) are stepping in where the US steps away. Shares in European military producers‘ stocks are already selling higher, and European, Japanese and Chinese universities are poised to take on the research and graduate students that as Trumpism abandons US leadership in scientific and technology development.

The working class MAGA base in its surge to isolationism doesn’t seem to care about these international complexities, and the corporate elite, university leaders and Republican politicians fear Trump. So they cower in fear rather than stand up to his crazed policies.

Trump has chosen moving toward a police state at home, and his rash use of force against Iran exemplifies his effort to police the Middle East in Israel’s favor. The annals of US use of force in the global South since the 1950s is riddled with unintended consequences. I’m not here to predict what will ultimately happen with Iran now. But stay tuned both to that international crisis and the immigration one closer to home. There might be interesting shoes to drop that will expose Trump as the lunatic, rather that those in US Agency for International Development that he summarily fired a few months ago.

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Sunday, June 8, 2025

Return of the Native Son [2]

 

 On May 18th I made the long drive diagonally, across the Buckeye State. Climbing across rolling hills out of Appalachia, about an hour out of Cincinnati the terrain flattened out as I reached the great Midwestern prairie, where, if you point the car west, you can drive over a thousand miles until you reach the Rocky Mountains.

After passing through the state capitol Columbus and driving two hours on the prairie, I reached the hilly terrain of northeastern Ohio, finally dropping into Akron. Once “the Rubber Capitol of the World,” the city is showing its rust. Hardly any tires are made there anymore.[1]

I spent time with old comrades from my undergraduate days at Akron University. I was a member of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party committed to the unification of Africa under scientific socialism from 1974-80. I moved to the West Coast in 1977, not to attend graduate school, but to build the African revolution! Graduate school was just political cover for my organizing on campuses. Only one of the four folx I reunited with is still doing that radical Pan Africanist political work, but I found we were all, including myself, still committed to a vision for an Africa in which states collaborated politically and economically to uplift their countries, and where people of African descent recognize our common plight as the exploited under global capitalism.

The absolute best day of my trip to northeast Ohio was when my two sister-comrades Jinaki and Debra drove me around the city checking out old haunts and telling stories. Highlights ... Driving around I saw signs pointing to the John Brown House. I asked in curiosity, if they could possibly refer to the JOHN BROWN! The great abolitionist! Turned out that they did. So I had to go by the house. It’s a museum now but only opened on limited hours and by appointment. But there were plaques telling the story of his time in the city. John Brown and family resided in Akron from 1844-54, the years prior to him leaving for Kansas to join the battle leading to Kansas entering the Union as a “free (non-slavery) state.”  

 

My feelings rushing forth, the sisters then asked me if I knew about the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza, to which I replied “what!” Who knew that Sojourner Truth gave that famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech In Akron at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. We visited the plaza and walked the grounds (see photo below!). The Ohio Legislature has forced publicly funded institutions to stop promoting DEI, and pressured libraries to remove books with a rapidity that makes you feel like you’re in Florida or Texas. Fortunately for progressives the Brown and Truth sites are funded by private sources rather than the state of Ohio: a great example of sustaining Blue spaces in a Red state.[2]

 

On my last day in Akron, I walked the camps of my alma mater, Akron University. I miscalculated the academic schedule. It was during summer break. So the campus was dead! I had wanted to feel the buzz of students going back and forth across campus, but it was not to be. I did schedule a meeting with Bill Lyons, a political scientist and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. I was eager to discussed Ohio politics to figure out why the state had gone so red. Formerly a major manufacturing state, it was now a “major rust-belt state.” Lyons said that despite having a considerable infrastructure in higher education the state population, is growing slower than the national average. There is a high-tech bubble around Columbus and Ohio State University. Still, a disproportionate number of people with university degrees are leaving. Those who remain are less educated and poorly situated to prosper in the new economy.

The neoliberal establishment has been cutting back support for public higher education for several decades, and Ohio is no different. The Recession didn’t do anything to stimulate greater public spending to train the least advantaged for the new economy. Ohio went for Obama twice, the residual of the belief that in an economic crisis, a Democrat would be more inclined to support policies uplifting the working class. The Democrats did pass an economic stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act while they still controlled Congress. But the populist right embodied in the Tea Party came to the fore more quickly than the left and stopped any further social welfarist policy initiatives by returning the Congress to Republicans in 2010. They used demonization of the first Black president to fuel their populist outrage.

In March the Ohio legislature passed Senate Bill 1 (SB1), the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act. The law mandated the termination of Diversity Equity and Inclusion in curriculum and personnel practices. Ostensibly passed in defense of intellectual diversity, the law has already led to the scrubbing of any DEI language from program mission and vision statements and the titles and descriptions courses.

The university had hosted a Black Male Summit annually since 2015. Over the years the summit had garnered a national presence in the conversation regarding the unique challenges faced by Black men in a post-manufacturing economy. Implicit in its mission was the understanding that “systemic” factors visit hardships upon Black people, and Black men that are differ from the difficulties other men might experience. Senate Bill 1 placed the future of the summit in jeopardy. By this spring the event had been renamed  E3 Male Summit: Empower, Elevate & Excel.

Perusing their website one finds a frank admission that the change was brought about by the current political climate, but that “embracing diversity of thought” remains central to mission of the summit.[3] It will be interesting to see if they can thread the needle between the bill’s stated goal of fostering intellectual diversity and its overall thrust cancelling attention to racial and gender identity diversity.

I picked up a copy of the student newspaper: The Buchtelite. There was a letter to the editor by a recent UA graduate lamenting the chilling effect SB1 was having on higher education in the state. Identifying herself as a proud Ohioan who had planned to go to law school somewhere in the state she concluded her letter thusly.

...our legislators ... shouldn’t be surprised when classrooms become empty and talent they took for

granted builds a future somewhere else.

 

Sincerely,

Abigail Stopka

Future Law Student

(Just probably not in Ohio anymore)

 

The Abigails of the world will most likely end up in Blue states like Washington, increasing the numbers of highly educated people here, and leaving the poorly educated in states like Ohio to be led by people who don’t believe government has a role to play in improving the life-chances of the common folx. This will only serve to make the divide between the two America’s, Red and Blue, more gaping in the years to come.

 

 


[1] Goodyear, Goodrich and Firestone tire companies all once made tires and were headquartered there. Only Goodyear’s home offices remain there today.

[2] The Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza is supported by Akron Women’s Alliance, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity the Dinner Party Board, the Summit County Historical Society and the Ohio Historical Society. The John Brown Home is supported by the Summit County Historical Society.

 

[3] “E3 Male Summit: Empower, Elevate & Excel,” University of Akron, Office of Community Engagement, Opportunity and Belonging.    https://www.uakron.edu/ie/e3/

 

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