What more can we say about the 2024 elections that we have not already said many times before? One thing is clear: a “garbage” political system can only produce “garbage” political results. In this particular moment, Trump’s fascist garbage has soundly defeated Harris’ liberal garbage. How could Trump (and his Project 2025) have commanded such a decisive victory in this election? His landslide began in 2023 when the democrats closed ranks to support “Genocide Joe” Biden for another term. They demanded total loyalty for a senile old man, even though 75% of democrats didn’t want Biden to run for a second term. Worse yet, the Democratic Party pushed Trump to run because they felt he was the candidate Biden could more likely defeat to get reelected as president in 2024.
After the June 2024 debate exposed Biden’s senility, Democrats quickly turned to Kamala Harris, one of the least popular political figures in the United States and a clear defender of the status quo. Almost immediately, Harris’ campaign came out as a clown car of organized duplicity and opportunism, with no political principles nor political consistency – their “coalition” included AOC and Liz Cheney. Ideologically, the Harris coalition was bankrupt, except remaining aggressively pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist, and pro-genocide.
Today, on November 5, 2024, Harris once again proved that beyond the West Coast and the Northeast, the Democratic Party is a failure as a national electoral party. Ultimately, the Democratic Party has been, and remains, an anti-liberation organization with an anti-revolutionary ideology. As working class Raza, we owe the Democratic Party nothing; even if she had won, a Harris presidency would have been more of the same wars, genocide, interventionism, and anti-Raza policies. The inept imperial opportunism and hubris of U.S. liberalism are only as insidious as its ideological bankruptcy.
On the other hand, the forthcoming second Trump presidency will be a more organized, disciplined, radical, and vengeful government than his first government. MAGA republicans will openly seize dictatorial power for Trump, and they have already destabilized and fractured ruling class power dynamics, exposing systemic contradictions and sharpening other contradictions within the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and their majorities on the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the House. Trump’s MAGA movement has destabilized previously existing political norms and “rights” and seized all the levers of state power. The worst is yet to come, and we must prepare ourselves for intensified anti-Raza fascist violence. Because the system is collapsing, it is externalizing its most homicidal colonial-imperial tendencies on a global scale. The radical right wing is advancing an agenda of collective psychosis, intent on spreading political violence in every direction.
The fact that MAGA trumpism did, in fact, make inroads among Raza working-class people is a function of ideological accessibility versus ideological acceptance. The trojan horse of religious fanaticism invited MAGA into our barrios, and it is what inevitably occupies the void left by the absence of pro-Raza working-class ideology and barrio-based leadership. Hispanic trumpistas have their own online forums and spread their MAGA poison through existing religious networks. For many brown MAGA followers, Trump was sent by god to defend their little piece of nothing. They use their religious fanaticism to rationalize their self-hate, racism, classism, homo/transphobia, pro-migra, pro-police, pro-imperialist, pro-zionist, and anti-socialist inclinations.
This false consciousness is supported by the media-saturated digital colonialism we live in, and it has only accelerated since the pandemic. This trend continued in 2024 because the authoritarian impulse behind MAGA fascism and its language of power impresses too many people in our communities, especially Raza men and barrio youth. At the same time, the barrio-based irrelevance of liberal “latinx” Democrats and so-called progressive intellectuals is fertile ground for a cultural “choque” that only accelerates the growth of hispanic- centered MAGA tendencies. The self-loathing weakness of hispanic Democrats alienated many hispanics into supporting the most unapologetic anti-Raza President in the last century.
Just wait; liberals will now blame Trump’s victory over Harris on Raza communities and on “uncommitted” Arabs who held Democrats accountable for supporting genocide. Our peoples are not responsible for, nor do we benefit from, this deranged two-party system. We must be clear that our barrios are the targets of both of these parties, and we are subject to multiple ongoing external crises that are never resolved and will only worsen over time.
Too many people in our communities identify with the two-party madness more than they identify with their own liberation struggle. That is to say, today, far too many of our people are more deeply committed to this failing system of their own oppression than there are people who understand the urgent need for a principled and organized Raza liberation struggle. We recognize that this exposes the weakness of our movement at this point in history. Therefore, it is incumbent on our movimiento to grow and to lead our communities to understand, organize against, and resist both growing reactionary antagonism towards la Raza and the threat that U.S. imperialism and global capitalism represent across Nuestra América, and around the globe against the survival of our species on this planet. To do this, we need more people to join movement organizations. To build a serious movement to defend our communities and improve our living conditions, we need more people’s power – that is, we need more recruits. In short, we need YOU to join Unión del Barrio, NOW!
The central political struggle of la Raza at this time is not to lament the defeat of the Democratic Party but instead to move past a putrid two-party system to defend ourselves and survive this generalized crisis of imploding empire. At whatever level it is possible, we must distance ourselves from any factions that form a part of this empire in decline. Raza liberation organizations must refocus, prioritize, and re-center community-based struggle to make it the heart and soul of every political action. Our movement must establish the means to identify our own regional/national political leadership. Academics, non-profits, and student services directors need to actively support independent, community-based organizations; if not, they need to be told to back away from claiming they represent “community-engaged” institutions unless they are willing to publicly privilege the community ahead of their personal, economic, and professional goals.
Unión del Barrio summed up this historical moment with a slogan that for decades has guided our critiques of the U.S. two-party system: ¡Ni Republicanos, Ni Demócratas – Solo El Pueblo Organizado Vencerá! We will continue to struggle, more than ever, strengthened, always standing to build spaces of Concientización, Organización, Acción y Liberación and build a party that defends and unites the majority of our working class Raza.
¡Ni Demócratas, Ni Republicanos! ¡Sólo el Pueblo Organizado Vencerá! ¡Somos un Pueblo sin Fronteras! ¡Aquí estamos y No nos Vamos! ¡Unidas y Unidos, Venceremos!
For a deeper analysis, see Unión del Barrio’s 2023 Final Congressional Report.