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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