To Leonard Zeskind: Anti-Fascist Icon

 

To Leonard Zeskind: Anti-Fascist Icon

Leonard Zeskind, icon of the international anti-racist/anti-fascist movement has died. He passed away on April 15 at home in Kansas City, Kansas. I learned of his passing last week as I was preparing to travel to a conference. Upon my return home on Sunday I scoured the media for obituaries for Lennie. I found them in social media outlets and the local press around Kansas City. But surprisingly, I have yet to find one in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Nor can I find evidence of his passing on Democracy Now, the leftist radio program hosted by Amy Goodman.

This is surprising, given that we have entered a period of a blatant attempt to establish a fascist regime in the United States. Leonard Zeskind was the leading intellectual and community organizer in this country and internationally against organized white supremacy since the 1980s. His 2009 book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement for the Margins to the Mainstream is a must read for anyone who wishes to understand the antecedents of Trumpism and how we got to where we are today.[1]

I first met Lennie at a conference entitled “Hands of My Neighbor” in Seattle in 1986. It had been convened following the shocking murder of the Goldmark family there (2 adults, 2 children) on Christmas Eve, 1985. The assailant, White supremacist/anti-Semitic zealot, David Lewis Rice, mistakenly believed that the family was Jewish, and that Charles Goldmark was a communist and part of any international Jewish conspiracy to control the world economy.

The Center for Democratic Renewal was invited to oversee the conference. It was founded by Reverend C.T. Vivian, a compatriot of Martin Luther King, Jr., a veteran of the Selma Alabama campaign and the marches on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965. The Center, originally the National Anti-Klan Network, was founded to provide a site for Blacks and Whites to work together to fight white supremacy.

By 1986 Lennie Zeskind was a lieutenant of Reverend Vivian as research director at the center. He attended the conference and spoke that weekend. I was among local activists who were asked to facilitate workshops. during the conference. Lik so many young Whites during the 1960s, Lennie was impressed by the force of the civil rights movement. But unlike most others, he made it his life mission to understand the roots of White supremacy, and its mistruths, in order to counter it and defeat it.

We crossed paths again in the late 1990s as a coalition of regional groups had come together to defeat White supremacists working to realize the “Northwest Imperative,” the notion that the northwest quadrant of the lower 48 US states --- the whitest part of the country --- should be conquered and turned into a “White republic.” He had formed the Institute for Research and Education of Human Rights. He was an indispensable consultant and mentor to those of us fighting the anti-government Militia movement that captured the nationalist imagination after the Whie supremacist terrorist bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, which killed 169 people.  

In 1998 Lennie received the MacArthur Foundation “Lifetime Genius” Award for his work. When I was a leader of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force in Washington during those years, we asked Lennie to do a community organizing workshop for us. In a meeting in which I was one of two people of color among the 15-18 attendees, Lennie had one simple message. He exclaimed that all of the identity politics movements of the day --- women, LGBTQ, environmental, and even labor --- were doomed to fail if they did not address racism in their work.

There was considerable pushback to Lennie’s argument on that occasion, but his unwavering stance that day left an indelible impact on me that I carry to this day. There were two other themes that he was already warning about in the 90s: was the way that far right extremism was being mainstreamed into American politics via the Republican Party, and the role of anti-immigrant passions in solidifying that far right.

As we watch and hopefully are mobilizing to fight Trumpism today mainstream Republicanism has been sidelined as far right extremism has captured the Republican Party. And ever since he descended the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015, anti-immigrant racism has been the hallmark of his hegemonic movement.

Still, Leonard Zeskind’s counsel to progressives at the turn of the century rings true today. As we engage in the intersectional political work to oppose fascism, we must be mindful that America was built upon systemic racism. Therefore, as we tackle all of the other “isms,” we must simultaneously fight racism to create the society in which we all want to live.[2]

 

 

 

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[1] Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement for the Margins to the Mainstream. New York: Macmillan, 2009.

[2] For more background on Leonard Zeskind’s life and writings see Bill Berkowitz, Leonard Zeskind (1949-2025): Author of Blood and Politics, Groundbreaking Exposé of White Nationalism, rf, Independent Media for People, Not Profits. https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/18/leonard-zeskind-1949-2025-author-of-blood-and-politics-groundbreaking-expose-of-white-nationalism/;

Leonard Zeskind, IREHR. https://irehr.org/leonard-zeskind-biography/.

 

 

 

 

Trump and Revolution from the Right

Trump and Revolution from the Right

In my February 25 post I laid out the need to move from a war of position to a war of maneuver in order to defend the Blue Nation from the excesses of Trumpism. I have been arguing that during Civil Rights Movement People of Color moved from the war of maneuver to a war of position in which they were gained the capacity to defend their constitutional rights through collective struggle.

My thoughts were that we remained in the war of position with its ups and downs ever since the 1950s. But after watching the American people return Donald Trump to office last year, I recently declared that not only People of Color, but Blue States and progressives in Blue locales across the country must dig in their heels to defend their ways of life against the onslaught of  Trumpian fascism. Without the bloodshed (though some blood may flow) progressive Americans should consider that we have entered a period akin to military conflict, or the war of maneuver.

War of maneuver is “the form of politics appropriate to conditions of dictatorship or despotism, when no terrain is available for opposition inside the system.”[1] Trump isn’t quite there yet, but by flagrantly breaking the law at every turn he is attempting to establish himself as a dictator. He has bludgeoned the Republican Party into obeisance. He has a Supreme Court that the far right has dreamed of for decades, which is being pressured by lower court rulings upholding the rule of law, but is thus far, reluctant to openly rule against him.

I began my journey into scholarship decades ago as a student of revolution. I defined it simply as ...

the overthrow of the old state by a new one by illegal means in a process attended by violence.

Political revolutions change the regime, or the constitutional-legal order. Social revolutions

change the regime, but also induce a restratification of society along class or status lines and the

transformation of the economy.[2]

A favorite shorthand description describes populists as people who are so frustrated with systems and politics that they just ‘want to blow things up!’ Radical populists who feel that way are like revolutionaries in that they seek the overthrow of the old state (or system) by a new one (if necessary) by illegal means.’

 

Trump, the right-wing populist is already pursuing a political revolution by engaging in illegal behavior that if sustained would overthrow the constitutional order. It isn’t clear yet that he can achieve his goals yet as courts, some corporations and universities are beginning to push back, and citizens are starting to take to the streets, but he’s trying his best.

 

Simultaneously though, and equally alarming, Trump and the Project 2025 Red nationalists are undertaking a wholesale ‘restratification of society’ along status lines. They envision a full-on social revolution, not in the modernist sense of class structure, but in a postmodern manner regarding race and gender hierarchies. The Trumpists seek a return to 18^th century the ‘patriarchal heteronormative racism’ that undergirded the period of the American Revolution.[3] When the Federalist Society who have dominated the nomination of federal court justices for the last generation talk about ‘originalism’ and the ideas of the Founding Fathers, that’s what they’re really talking about.[4]

 

Trump is an ultra-nationalist and isolationist. Because the United States is the world’s most powerful country politically and economically, he thinks he can bully domestic opponents and foreign countries into doing what he wishes.

 

I want to return to the discussion from my post of July 23, 2023 in which I was discussing the Gramscian “war of position” and the battle for hegemeony, this time in light of Trump’s re-election. Historian David Christian in his text Origin Story has commented on the dilemmas of globalization for those seeking home grown solutions to a nation’s problems.

 

Even harder to grasp is the staggering increase in the complexity of modern societies, the way

every detail of your life is enmeshed in networks involving millions of other people who supply

food and employment, healthcare, education electricity, the fuel for your car, the clothes you wear.

Each of these chains of interconnections may include thousands or millions of other humans linked

together in networks of fabulous complexity ... Weaken any of these links, and our worlds can

break down terrifyingly fast, as is apparent in those parts of the world where state structures have collapsed.[5]

 

Christian’s observations pose serious questions for radical populists and revolutionaries who claim a moral high ground and desire sweeping public policy solutions to address national issues. The problem is that their simple sounding solutions can cause chaos that their frustrated supporters aren’t considering or maybe don’t care about. Examples are imposing high tariffs on imports, which cause foreign countries to respond with their tariffs against us, raising the costs of purchasing globally, and driving down global economic activity including employment. Another is deporting brown immigrants, documented or undocumented, which will have a chilling effect on in key economic sectors like farm labor, meatpacking and health services.

 

Reducing the US trade deficit (the endgame for tariffs), and preventing the browning of America (the real reason for fighting undocumented immigration) involve tackling the intricacies of our economic and sociopolitical entanglements with each other and foreign countries. Blowing things up in any of these areas will damage the systems delivering goods and services, perhaps irreparably. And tariff policy and the slashing of our foreign aid programs have already destroyed the goodwill the US globally.

 

In turning mass frustrations on the right into a revolutionary movement Trump exceeds the boundaries of populism. American populism since the time of the revolution has been a method of making extreme demands upon the system and getting its proponents into positions of power in order to make significant reforms within systemic policy-making organs. Universal White male suffrage in the early 19^th century and the income tax and direct election of the US Senate in the early 20^th century are good examples. Few establishment politicians were talking either of those issues when the People’s Party advanced them, but they became the law a generation later.

 

On the left Bernie Sanders does refer to revolution in the titles of two of his books.[6]  But when you read them, he makes concrete legislative proposals and across his long career he’s made it clear that he is willing to slog it out to get incremental changes in the direction he wishes to see policies go. Moreover, if we revisit the process leading to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, we saw a gritty battle within the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives between establishment and Progressive Caucus members over how much of the ‘Green New Deal’ would be included. The Progressive Caucus includes populists such as Pramila Jayapal,  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. In the end progressive measures supporting renewable energy and reduced dependence on fossil fuel made their way into the law.

 

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act was pragmatic-left populism at its best. Not blowing up the entire system, but nudging it a few steps in a direction that conforms to a progressive vision for America.

 

As Trump tries to wreck the entire national political system and force fascism on all of us we must play a dauntless and shrewd game in Blue Spaces. We must understand that we are in a war of maneuver wherein we have no rights that the Trumpists are bound to recognize. In this regard I need my White sisters and brothers to assume a posture of communal self-defense like Black people in ghettos, Latinos in barrios, Asians in their various enclaves and the Indigenous on reservations have had to assume historically in order to survive.

 

But this time our physical spaces of self-defense must 1) be multiracial as we embrace the humans who have begun to join hands in carving out those spaces where we celebrate our differences. And 2) we must defend our progressive intellectual spaces. Keep ‘speaking our truth about their power-mongering,’ make it hard on them, create the sit-show for the whole world to see, and (hopefully) watch the entire MAGA project collapse before our very eyes.

 

So we’re in outright war for the soul of America. We must refuse to obey in our institutional settings even if doing so will cause loss of funding, jobs and personal hardships. But at the same time, we must continue to engage in the war of position in the trenches of state and civil society, because they haven’t dislodged us from those institutional sites yet. And if we keep fighting, they may not be able to.

 

Another shout out to Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg for threatening to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court over its handling of the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. Also a shout out to Federal Judge Paula Xinis who has ruled that Venezuelan Kilmar Abrego Garcia, mistakenly deported to El Salvador, must be returned to the US

 

Also kudos to Harvard University for absorbing the loss of 2.2 billion dollars in federal research grants rather than end all of its DEI efforts. And finally, a salute the all the law firms who have opposed Trump legally who sued the administration rather than do pro bono work for him following his executive order denying them access to government buildings and officials and threatening their clients' federal contracts.

 

Remember! Don’t obey in advance! And defend institutions![7]

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[1] Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. 3^rd edition. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2015, p. 142

[2] Vernon D. Johnson, The Structural Origins of Revolution in Africa. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003, p. 2.

[3] Heteronormative means “of, relating to, or based on the attitude that heterosexuality is the only normal and natural expression of sexuality.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heteronormative

[4] Steven G. Calabrese, ‘On Originalism in Constitutional Interpretation, National Constitutional Center,  https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/white-papers/on-originalism-in-constitutional-interpretation

[5] David Christian, Origin Story. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books, UK, 2017, pp. 273-74.

 [6]Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2016

[7] Timothey Snyder, On Tyranny. Tim Duggan Books, 2017