Toward Liberation or Ruin?

The Editors

Posted June 25, 2026

America at 250: Our rights and our lives are on the line!

THE UNITED STATES of America marks its 250th anniversary in July 2026 with its multiple divided legacies. As we know, the country was founded in the perpetuation of racial slavery, in genocide of the Indigenous nations, in ambitions of vast colonial dominion — and simultaneously in the struggles against those things, producing contradictions persisting throughout its history.

How then will this momentous occasion be remembered? No doubt for the UFC (mixed martial arts) extravaganza on the White House lawn and a Grand Prix race on the streets of the nation’s capital. Coming soon, if the godfather in the presidential chair gets his wish, will be a 250-foot arch to dwarf existing memorials and permanently alter the view of the National Mall.

This celebration is happening in a country where rural hospitals are hemorrhaging, measles outbreaks are spreading while hundreds of thousands lose their health care, and millions are financially crippled by fuel and food inflation accelerated by Trump’s war on Iran. It is a country ruled by arguably the most openly corrupt political elite and greed-consumed capitalist class in U.S. history.

How did we get here, and what’s the way out? The inseparable nexus of imperial war abroad and the wars on the people at home is an important key. That’s a connection that few if any politicians, even Democratic liberals, will explicitly state. Yet Trump’s Iran war, after his lying promise to his base about ending “forever wars,” has created angry dissonance between his MAGA loyalists and neoconservatives demanding that he “finish the job.”

Equally central is the extreme racism that’s essential to the rise of authoritarian and incipient fascist politics. Importantly indicative of the country’s condition are the American gulag of detention-and-torture camps where tens of thousands of immigrants are held facing deportation with little if any legal recourse, access to representation or even decent food, housing and medical care. Among more than 50 recorded deaths, 10 are listed as suicide.

The United States is also heading toward midterm November elections where voting rights and safeguards against fraud are under multiple existential challenges. These range from court-enabled extreme political-racial gerrymandering, and federal Justice Department demands for state voting records, to intimidation of local election officials (including death threats) and potential rightwing mob and terror attacks.

American Dysfunctions

The criminal rampages of U.S. imperialism abroad, or the social destruction at home, aren’t hidden from view. And anger and opposition have grown, from majority antiwar opinion to (for example) the outraged protests at the Newark, New Jersey Delaney Hall detention-torture facility.

Begin with the Iran war mess, with its potential to crash the entire world economy with the paralysis of the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint. Trump’s war was unpopular from day one, all the more deeply reviled as its futility and costs became evident. The visible role of Israel’s government and prime minster Netanyahu, Trump’s cheerleader and manipulator, gave rise to the mistaken but understandable notion that the United States “went to war for Israel.” (These tangled issues are explored in a Solidarity webzine article “A ‘War for Israel’? Notes on a Catastrophe and Fiasco,” April 14, 2026.)

Running far ahead of political elites and pundits, U.S. public opinion for the first time in history is more sympathetic to Palestine than to Israel as its genocide in Gaza and military-settler ethnic cleansing in the West Bank continue without pause. Israel’s demolition and population removal in Lebanon, and its use of white phosphorus in dense civilian areas, deepens the outrage.

Except among older Republicans, pro-Palestinian sentiment is expanding within almost all popular sectors — even among young Jews and evangelical Christians. The Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions campaign against Israeli apartheid and U.S. corporate complicity is gaining ground.

This powerful trend explains the virulence with which BDS as well as campus solidarity activism for Palestine is persecuted and criminalized. At college commencement ceremonies, applause for support of pro-Palestinian activism (when speakers are allowed to express it) is matched only by derisive booing of speeches promoting the benefits of Artificial Intelligence. In communities across the country, revulsion is spreading against the plague of those energy-and-environment-destroying AI data centers.

That’s some good news. Regrettably, the incredible destruction in Lebanon under Israel’s occupation and annexationist invasion hasn’t really registered quite yet. And most people aren’t properly aware of the Trump gang’s ambition to hand Vladimir Putin a bloody amputated piece of Ukraine.

People are increasingly aware, although perhaps still somewhat vaguely, that cuts in domestic public health budgets are part of the global Trump-Musk massive U.S. defunding of health programs — cuts that contributed, for example, to the undetected spread of the new Ebola outbreak in central Africa with its appalling consequences.

These are selected cases among many others. And even if a lot of massive graft of the Trump family and cronies remains half-hidden, plenty of it is known (to say nothing of the coverup of whatever’s in those Epstein files) and widely covered in mainstream and liberal conventional and social media.

Barriers to Understanding

The United States is not North Korea, or Putin’s Russia, or the Islamic Republic of Iran — access to information is hardly the fundamental problem.  And as the many examples of resistance show, popular apathy isn’t really the answer to how a discredited regime and political system remain dominant. It’s conventional discourse that there’s “political gridlock” because “America is deeply polarized” — but that doesn’t do much to explain how it got that way.

Attention span can be an obstacle. The sheer complexity of cascading crises, of which we’ve only cited a few —without even touching on deadly consequences of climate change — can make it difficult even for activists, let alone the broader public, to focus.

Another problem, including with liberal media critique (look at CNN or MS-NOW formerly MSNBC for example), is that their programs frequently look either at threats to democracy, civil rights, public heath etc. at home — OR the devastation and strategic bankruptcy of Trump’s Iran war and annexationist insanities abroad — yet too rarely both.

An elementary observation goes unstated: A government that blows up civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, mostly small fishing vessels, on the lying pretext that they’re “running drugs,” will of course murder its own citizens on the street.

A society that imprisons nearly one percent of its adult population (1.8 million incarcerated) will allow that government to set up immigration concentration-detention torture centers on its home soil.

And what should be equally self-evident: A government that does all that has no legitimate standing to prosecute a former Cuban president and defense minister in Cuba’s shooting down exile planes 30 years ago. (Whether or not those “Brothers to the Rescue” represented a security threat isn’t relevant to the illegitimacy of any U.S. prosecution.)

 How many prominent Democrats make these elementary points, or pledge that if returned to power they’ll immediately close Trump’s entire gulag of immigrant detention prisons — let alone shut down the monstrous DHS machine?

That imperialist war abroad and war against the people at home are inseparably twinned, as we’ve stated above, should be entirely obvious. Yet the majority of the population is systematically conditioned not to recognize it — even now when the wars abroad and at home are both deeply unpopular. With some exceptions, even progressive congressional Democrats — let’s not even talk about the encrusted Schumer-Jeffries leadership and the party’s permanent parasitic consultant class — don’t make that deep connection even if they seize every opportunity to point to Trump’s corruption and cognitive decline.

The Democratic-aligned organizers of the mass “No Kings” demonstrations do make the connections to a certain extent, and due to the power of the activist movement they’d be unable to keep Palestinian flags and chants out of the rallies and marches even if they might want to do so. But it’s not adequate to the task we face.

The role of unions in the May Day Strong actions was a step forward, although not the dramatic breakthrough that might have been hoped in the buildup.

What’s Needed

It’s seductive but disastrously wrong to assign blame to the population at large on grounds that they’re intoxicated by social media, conspiracy nutcase theories, Fox Newschannel or its farther-right competitors. More relevant is addressing the situation of a U.S. left that can’t yet do effective mass-scale communication or mobilize for an independent, progressive political alternative.

Such an alternative can’t be conjured up. It remains to be built from the ground up. The absence of an alternative leaves today’s movements tragically chained to the Democratic Party in every electoral cycle — which in today’s environment has become an uninterrupted campaign and fundraising cascade. The situation is made worse since the Supreme Court wiped out the Voting Rights Act.

What needs to be built begins with understanding that Donald Trump is the symptom, not the underlying disease of a violently unequal racial capitalist society. The treatment will be necessary when he’s gone, not only after 2028 but well beyond.

What follows will not be new to most readers, but remains of central importance. The left’s appeal must be both moral and material — attacking the horror of immigrant detention, and demanding public heath care for all, etc. It means fighting tooth and nail to preserve and expand voting rights, while making clear that the Democratic Party isn’t and can’t be an alternative to corporate capitalism and imperialism.

Right now, the low ceiling on the gains that can be won — and preserved in the long run — is manifested in the substantial, although minority, support inside the working class for Trump and his policies. And here we don’t mean only among white workers.

Take for example the tangled relations of the United Auto Workers, under its leadership propelled to office by an activist reform movement, to Trump’s nationalist tariffs.

Union president Shawn Fain proclaims of the car industry, “If it’s sold here it should be built here.” Who believes that the U.S. economy can realistically exist inside a protectionist bubble? Fain recalls the prophetic warnings that North American “free trade” would grease the skids toward destroying U.S. manufacturing jobs. So it did! That doesn’t mean, however, that a now-integrated industry across national borders can be dismantled by policy fiat.

Endorsing Trump’s version of tariffs means supporting his out-in-the-open intentions to destroy the Canadian economy and to subjugate Mexico, along with the rest of Latin America, to his whims and orders. It is not difficult to understand how Canadian and Mexican workers will feel about these assaults, or how they’ll affect the possibilities for labor solidarity. (See Dianne Feeley’s detailed discussion of “UAW: Mixed Reform Results.”)

For the left and for socialists in particular, addressing the conundrum of support for Trump among working-class people — whose lives his rampages are systematically destroying — requires being present in the workplaces, unions and communities where the assaults are occurring and grassroots resistance efforts are mounted.

It means linking those struggles — from the anti-ICE Minneapolis victory and Delaney Hall mobilizations to the movements in communities across America against the data center plague. That includes places where people have heavily voted for Trump — to a vision of a different social order where they would have power over their own lives and the decisions that affect them.

It’s the anti-capitalist vision of a system that doesn’t require the destruction of communities, essential services, and nature to fund the gigantic permanent war machine and corporate profit. It requires building working-class solidarity and extending it to a global level.

Readers of this magazine don’t need lectures about this socialist goal. What we need to help build is a movement capable of bringing it to life in today and tomorrow’s real struggles — in short, a force that can point toward liberation rather than U.S. and global capital’s roads to ruin.

July-August 2026, ATC 243

Go to article on the ATC website.