Trump Resisters A New Force in American Politics, Changing the Message of the Primaries

As the US presidential election gets nearer, the media remains obsessed with Donald Trump. Not because he says anything of importance, but because of the sensationalist aspect of his demagogy and the encouragement of violence by his supporters. These media filters obscure the fact that his support comes only from a small minority of the overall electorate.

The publicity given to the mogul’s statements, however, has created a pushback against his campaign, motivating younger activists to protest his appearances together with people previously not involved in politics who have become disgusted with Trump’s attacks on immigrants and minorities. As Washington Post opinion writer Eugene Robinson commented: “These protests are important because they show that Americans will not take Trump’s outrageous nonsense lying down. The hapless Republican Party may prove powerless to keep him from seizing the nomination, but GOP primary voters are a small and unrepresentative minority — older, whiter and apparently much angrier than the nation as a whole. … Protests show the growing strength of popular opposition to Trump.”

This weekend, thousands protested at Trump Towers in New York City and demonstrators closed roads leading to a Trump rally in Phoenix, Arizona. Student Sierra K. Thomas, who drove three hours to protest an earlier rally in North Carolina, told the Washington Post: “I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit and watch someone who is trying to be our president incite violence. I could not let the progress people have made in learning to love and accept one another go to waste. … If Trump makes it to the Oval Office, I’m afraid of what will happen to this nation. I want to be a teacher after I graduate; what kinds of lessons would children learn from a president who says it’s okay to kill the families of alleged terrorists and to ban people from the country because of their religion?”

Trump’s overarching victories in the primaries reflect the seething dissatisfaction of the Republican base with the party leadership, which it sees as having reneged on its pledges of bringing down Obama and having acquiesced in the eroding of white privilege. But Trump’s rhetoric is totally in line with that of the Republican establishment: even his outrageous “birther” campaign which sought to deny Obama legitimacy through a veiled racist narrative about his birth certificate, simply extended the Republican strategy of denying legitimacy to any Democratic president as part of their efforts to downsize the federal government.

In the Super Tuesday primaries last week Hillary Clinton undoubtedly benefited from portraying herself as the candidate best placed to prevent Trump achieving the presidency. However, this does not necessarily mean support for the establishment; a better indication of the real mood in the country is the political success of racial justice groups in contesting the primaries of prosecutors who failed to conduct timely prosecutions of police who killed unarmed young black men.

Cook County prosecutor Anita Alvarez in Chicago was challenged after video footage was released that showed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 13 times by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014. Alvarez fought for a year to prevent the release of the dashcam recording to the public. According to In These Times writer Flint Taylor: “Until charging Van Dyke with murder, she had a disgraceful record of almost never prosecuting Chicago police officers for on-duty violence or perjury. … She has also consistently shown contempt for African-American victims of police torture and wrongful convictions. … After a video was released in December of 2015 showing a police officer shoot another fleeing African-American man, Ronald Johnson, in the back, Alvarez refused to charge the officer and, in a 30 minute presentation, attempted to explain away the shooting.  And more than two months after Chicago police officers shot an unarmed, mentally ill 19-year-old African-American honors student, Quintonio LeGrier, and a 55-year-old female bystander, Bettie Jones, who opened the door for the police, Alvarez has yet to bring charges.”

In Ohio, the Guardian reported, “prosecuting attorney Timothy McGinty was unseated by Michael O’Malley, a former deputy county prosecutor. McGinty last year led a contentious and drawn-out grand jury inquiry into the fatal police shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy who was playing with a toy gun in a park in November 2014. In December last year, McGinty announced that no charges would be brought against Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot Tamir within seconds of arriving at the scene in response to a 911 call. Tamir’s family and protesters expressed disgust over the handling of the case by McGinty, who confirmed in December that he had personally recommended to the grand jurors that they not prosecute the officers involved.”

Much of the organizing to unseat Alvarez was led by groups of young African-American activists, such as Black Youth Project 100, Assata’s Daughters and We Charge Genocide. In These Times notes: “These groups and many of their members had previously helped achieve major victories for racial justice in Chicago, including the passage of a bill providing reparations for victims of police torture and, most recently, the planned construction of a Level I trauma center on the city’s south side Hyde Park neighborhood to provide emergency care for victims of gunshot wounds and other life-threatening conditions. Both of those victories were the result of multi-year campaigns and required dogged determination.”

These dogged campaigners and the protesters at Trump’s rallies are linked by the increased sense of enfranchisement among oppressed communities. Bernie Sanders, despite his low polling among older African Americans, is closer to the protesters than Hillary Clinton, who along with Obama condemned both sides for violence at Trump’s rallies. Sanders was the only candidate to confront Trump’s attacks on immigrants directly. In Arizona on Super Tuesday, he gave a speech ignored by Fox News and CNN who preferred to wait for Trump to say something. Sanders said: “We’re a democracy. People have different points of view. But what is not acceptable, no matter what your point of view is, is to throw racist attacks against Mexicans. The reason that Donald Trump will never be elected president is the American people will not accept insults to Mexicans, Muslims or women. … What Trump is about and other demagogues have always been about is scapegoating minorities, turning one group against another group. But we are too smart to fall for that.”

Sanders’ campaign has meant that Clinton has had, at least rhetorically, to condemn factory closures and Wall Street financiers. The New Republic commented: “Trump’s likely nomination gives Sanders a strong incentive to continue in the race—not only to pull Clinton to the left on economic issues, but to argue that her pursuit of well-to-do Republicans is a mistake. This strategy would essentially cede the white working class to Trump, which is risky not only in immediate electoral terms but fraught with danger for the country.”

Even if Clinton wins the Democratic party nomination, Sanders has brought together a diverse and younger group of supporters who are likely to continue campaigning up to and after the election. This is a contrast to the Democratic establishment which has a horror of such unmanageable movements. Despite the media blackout on his campaign, Sanders has inspired a millennial generation with a message that rejects the inevitability of accepting neoliberal limits on the role of government and social programs.

What Victory for Bernie and Trump in Michigan Means: American Workers Vote Against Neoliberalism

What the voting in the US presidential primaries has revealed so far are some important realignments in the social consensus underlying the two-party system. A surprise win for Bernie Sanders in the key rustbelt state of Michigan upset political commentators and the Democratic establishment and has led to renewed attention on class issues submerged under decades of neoliberalism. Meanwhile,  Trump’s win in the state’s Republican primary underlines the fact that he is the only Republican candidate to address working class fortunes directly.

Sanders’ consistent opposition to free trade deals contrasted sharply with Bill Clinton’s implementation of NAFTA in the 1990s: the state lost more than 46,000 jobs in the last 25 years because of that single deal. Exit polls reported that “nearly six in 10 voters thought trade took away American jobs – and nearly six in 10 of people who said that, backed Sanders. … This echoes the Republican side of the primary. More than half of voters thought that trade cost jobs; four in 10 of them backed Donald Trump.”

Hillary Clinton had relied heavily on identity politics to give her the vote, as it had in Nevada and South Carolina, and pollsters assumed that the black population of Detroit would go for Clinton in the same way. Instead, according to Politico, Sanders’ “appeal to youth voters busted through the color line – Clinton won blacks 60-40 (not 80-20, as she did in her Tuesday win in Mississippi) – and Sanders fought her to a draw among under-40 African Americans. … And she barely held on to win Genesee County, home to Flint, the emotional focal point of her Michigan effort – and, in many ways, her entire campaign.”

Sanders campaigned through the whole state, appealing to white and black workers alike, while Clinton focused on African American communities like Flint and Detroit in east Michigan. The New York Times reported: “Mr. Sanders crisscrossed the state, speaking to more than 41,000 people, and his campaign opened 13 offices and hired 44 staffers to carry his message. He also visited places that were largely overlooked by the Clinton campaign, including Traverse City and Kalamazoo.”

The rejection of candidates favored by the Republican establishment in that party’s primaries is evidence that their voters are motivated by more than resentment of immigration, since all the candidates have voiced opposition to legalizing undocumented people; they are antagonistic to what they perceive as a corrupt political system that has betrayed them, and consider the wealthy Trump to be independent of corporate manipulation.

Trump’s rallies attract disparate groups, ranging from white supremacists to people angry about jobs being outsourced abroad.  This creates a potent mix of people susceptible to group hysteria as Trump makes his outrageous attacks on Muslims and immigrants; but while the media focus on these remarks, the bulk of his populist message denounces trade agreements and America’s economic decline.

According to Guardian reporter Thomas Frank, a study carried out by a union-affiliated group found that the main attraction of Trump for white working-class voters in Cleveland and Pittsburgh was his blunt approach to these questions. “As far as issues are concerned, ‘immigration’ placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: ‘good jobs / the economy’,” notes Frank. “‘People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,’ is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey ‘confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future’ and that ‘there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another’.”

The likelihood of Trump becoming their presidential candidate has thrown the Republican party establishment into panic mode. But the party is now too fragmented to be able to mount a strong alternative. The Republican-controlled legislature has reinforced Trump’s claim to better political management skills by its own undermining of government legitimacy, from the threat of government shutdown in 2011 to its refusal to even consider any candidate nominated by Obama for the Supreme Court. Moreover, in the debates “Trump, Cruz, and Rubio ascribe to Barack Obama any and all problems besetting the nation … the Republican critique reinforces reigning theories of presidential omnipotence. Just as an incompetent or ill-motivated chief executive can screw everything up, so, too, can a bold and skillful one set things right.”

The much more diverse Democratic voters are not in disagreement over policy so much as their judgment of the candidate most likely to defeat the Republicans. In fact, Trump has succeeded in energizing new sections of the Democratic base to prevent him coming to power. He has done more than the Democratic leadership to rouse voters’ enthusiasm since they are as guilty as the Republicans of undermining working class jobs and have moved well away from a New Deal perspective. Sanders seeks to restore this orientation, but while he appeals to millennial youth who are bearing the brunt of the continuing recession, many older Democrats see Clinton as the safer candidate to beat Trump.

Candidates’ support is also connected with their attitudes to the Obama administration: while Sanders is favored by white liberals critical of Obama’s presidency, most African Americans are supportive of Hillary Clinton, since they see Obama as having achieved small victories domestically. Black youth who face unemployment, police harassment, and huge college loan debt are far more sympathetic to Sanders.

Latinos who are critical of Obama for failing to carry out promises on immigration reform gave Sanders a victory in Colorado on Super Tuesday, where they make up nearly 15 percent of eligible voters in the state. Juan Gonzalez pointed out there has been a 40 percent increase nationwide since 2008 in the number of eligible Latinos that could vote in the coming election. He added: “You’ve seen Univision say that they’re going to use all of their television stations and their networks to promote a 3 million-voter registration drive among Latinos. I think what’s actually needed is more of a Freedom Summer campaign by the Latino youth of America, similar to what happened in the civil rights movement … where thousands of Latino youth go into their communities and say, ‘You’re not going to deport our parents. We’re American citizens, and we’re going to make a stand in terms of Basta Trump’.”

These shifts in electoral allegiances make it by no means certain that Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, but if she does, she will have to adopt much of Sanders’ platform in order to defeat Trump’s populist appeal. Either way, new sections of the American working class have been energized by the redrawing of class lines in political discourse.

The Center Cannot Hold: The US Primary Season 2016

In all the hoopla about the presidential primary season, one thing has become clear: the fractures in the Republican and Democratic parties that have surfaced will long outlive this election.

Republican establishment candidates have been resoundingly rejected – Trump and Cruz are favored because of a xenophobic turn in the the party’s declining white base that the candidates have embraced and accentuated. The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne commented that “the results in Iowa showed a party torn to pieces. Ted Cruz won because he understood from the start the importance of cornering the market on Christian conservatives who have long dominated Iowa’s unusual process. … Donald Trump has created a new wing of the Republican Party by combining older GOP tendencies — nationalism, nativism, racial backlash — with 21st-century worries about American decline and the crushing of working-class incomes. … Marco Rubio was the remainder candidate, pulling together most of the voters who couldn’t stand Trump or Cruz.”

What is more significant about Trump’s Bonapartist posturing, however, is that he has changed the alignment of conservative forces by his inflammatory rhetoric against opponents and, as a New York resident writes in Naked Capitalism, by building institutional links with the police. “This is an armed working class unionized pro-government demographic that is not especially fond of plutocrats and has no problem with the government taking responsibility for both full employment and, well, for social order. They are trusted with the legal authority to discipline citizens, and they are the basis for the enforcement of our legal system. A lot of them feel threatened by recent protests. And they are giving Trump enthusiastic endorsements.”

On the Democratic side, Sanders has confounded all predictions by matching Clinton’s vote in Iowa, despite an improbable series of coin tosses that gave her a marginal victory. However, Democrats are less divided over policy, more over who is electable. Dionne noted that most Democrats “share Clinton’s view that gradual reform is the most practical way forward. But most also agree with Sanders that even moderately progressive steps will be stymied if money’s influence is left unchecked, if progressives do not find new ways of organizing and mobilizing, and if so many white working-class voters continue to support Republicans.”

This was confirmed by Harold Meyerson, who attended a Democratic fund-raiser in New Hampshire where the supporters of both campaigns displayed a programmatic consensus. “Even as the Bernie kids erupted in a thunderstick-banging cacophony as Sanders emphatically delivered one progressive pledge after another, so, too, did the Hillary backers raise theirs and wave them about as Bernie unveiled his platform.”

The New York Times noted the differences in class alignment of the two campaigns. “Mr. Sanders has focused on class issues, unlike Mr. Obama, who focused on many of the priorities of well-educated voters, like climate change and foreign policy. Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, has adopted a more pragmatic message that may have more appeal to affluent voters than a political revolution. Mr. Sanders might have also benefited from a change in the ideological composition of working-class voters. More conservative working-class whites may have switched over to the G.O.P. over the last few years, or simply found themselves unwilling to turn out this time for Mrs. Clinton, who has run a steadfastly liberal campaign.”

But Sanders’s challenge to Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street is muted in some respects. Columnist Greg Sargent notes: “Sanders constantly points to the funding of her campaign — and her acceptance of speaking fees — as symptomatic of this problem. But Sanders does not want to take the final step and say that Clinton personally is making the policy choices she does precisely because she is beholden to the oligarchy, due to its funding of her campaign. The upshot is that Sanders is indicting the entire system, but doesn’t want to question the integrity of Clinton herself — or perhaps doesn’t want to be seen doing that. This is the central tension at the heart of Sanders’s whole argument.”

Prominent feminists like Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright have rebuked younger women for supporting Sanders over Clinton, who they want to be the first woman president. However, a special circle of hell surely awaits Albright, who when Secretary of State publicly claimed the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi children was acceptable collateral damage. And British citizens may well shudder at the memory of their first female prime minister.

Clinton has the support of the Democratic party machine and the union bureaucracy. She has already lined up several hundred so-called super delegates, who are the top elected Democratic officials in Congress and the states. In These Times reports: “She has also fielded the endorsements of a number of high-profile unions, including the American Federation of Teachers, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. … One of the most important endorsements of the race could be that of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation. A number of AFL-CIO local and state branches have endorsed Bernie, but they were rebuked in July by President Richard Trumka for doing so, as such endorsements are against the federation’s rules.” While union members tend to favor Sanders, their officials are firmly in the Clinton camp.

Sanders, on the other hand, has generated huge enthusiasm in the liberal base, especially among the generation of Occupy Wall Street. Salon notes the leftward shift in the potential future leaders of the Democratic party: “The breakdown between supporters of Clinton versus supporters of Sanders falls along shockingly clear generational lines, and should absolutely terrify any centrist Democrat holding national office. Among caucus-goers age 17-29, Sanders won 84-14; among those 65 and over, Clinton won 69-26. … Consider, briefly, the challenge facing Democratic National Convention chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz, who is facing a primary opponent for the first time in her six terms serving in the House. Shultz is opposed by a lawyer and former Occupier named Tim Canova, an almost too-perfect avatar of the changes roiling through the party base.”

Nobody can deny the adeptness of the Clintons’ grasp of the levers of power. But between now and the election, what unanticipated events might have their impact on public consciousness? Incremental progress on social issues is possible when there is a growing economy, but political shocks can change what the public demands.

What it comes down to is this: the public have rejected the oligarchical establishment. But can democracy be sustained when the electorate sees so clearly the corruption of the political system?

 

The Racist Fury Behind Trump’s “Make America Great Again” Campaign Will Break the Republicans

Donald Trump’s increasingly inflammatory statements have caused consternation among the political establishment and fear among minority groups. His media coverage, however, is out of all proportion to his actual influence in the country. He has a vociferous following of white voters, and polls continue to show him leading the Republican presidential primaries. But even after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino, his call to exclude Moslems from the United States is opposed by most Americans.

What Trump has succeeded in doing is to bring outrageous ideas like internment camps into the political mainstream. His speeches are legitimizing racist attacks on minorities and Scalia’s open dismissal of integration in colleges. His support has crystallized out of a layer of white, non-college educated workers who have lost jobs and houses through two recessions and are now facing a downward slide into poverty. They are animated by resentment of immigrants and minorities, and by hostility to government, which they see as corrupt and in the pockets of big business. This is the same demographic that between 1998 and 2013 saw a marked increase in the death rate from suicide, drugs and alcohol poisoning, while that for all other groups declined.

New industries that require semiskilled labor of the kind that in the past elevated many Americans into the middle class are no longer being created in the US. Trump references a time when the lack of a college degree was not a barrier to well-paid industrial work – and when white skin implied social privilege. In These Times writer Walid Shaheed comments: “His high poll numbers among white voters in the Midwestern rustbelt show his appeal to people in this region who have been dealing with an economic collapse that has completely changed how millions of people live their lives. As those who came before them, these white voters blame their woes on immigrants and people of color who are ‘taking over the country.’ When Trump declares he will ‘Make America Great Again,’ he appeals directly to the heart of this demographic.”

It’s important to realize that Trump didn’t create his following from scratch: his bombast has gained traction because he was able to pick up the racist subtext of the Republican party’s rhetoric and make it explicit. Political commentator Josh Marshall pointed out: “What Trump has done is taken the half-subterranean Republican script of the Obama years, turbocharge it and add a level of media savvy that Trump gained not only from The Apprentice but more from decades navigating and exploiting New York City’s rich tabloid news culture. He’s just taken the existing script, wrung out the wrinkles and internal contradictions and given it its full voice.”

However, in doing so he is also voicing and legitimizing the suppressed prejudices of people who feel themselves losing an imaginary past cultural unity because of the growth and increase in political influence of the nonwhite population. The New York Times commented: “He harnessed feelings that long predated his candidacy — feelings of besiegement and alienation, of being silenced — and gave them an unprecedented respectability. … America is living through an era of dramatic changes: its demographics shifting, its middle class contracting, its institutions grappling with the pressures of the networked age.”

His supporters come from the most rightwing Republican voters. According to CNN: “A recent poll found that three quarters of Trump’s supporters are in favor of deporting all of the 11 million-plus undocumented immigrants and banning any Syrian refugees from seeking shelter in America. In contrast, Marco Rubio only has 5% and Jeb Bush 6% of those far-right voters.” The Washington Post explains: “Trump draws strong support from the kinds of voters who see illegal immigration as eroding the values of the country and who might worry that their jobs are threatened by the influx. About half of those Republicans who favor deporting immigrants who are here illegally back Trump for the party’s nomination. These are also the kinds of voters who agree most with Trump’s call to ban the entry of Muslims into the United States until security concerns are laid to rest.”

This is by no means a majority of Republican voters, likely less than a third of them, located in areas that have been hit hardest by the economic downturn like the South and Midwest. After years of dog-whistle campaigning by Republican politicians blaming minorities and immigrants for crime and lack of jobs, this social layer is angry and contemptuous of its political leaders for their perceived inaction. It has the potential to break the Republican party apart.

Surveys show that “white working-class Republicans made clear their conviction that government policies favor minority and immigrant interests over their own, and that the nation — its economy and its culture — has gone into decline as, and because, it has become more racially diverse. It’s those beliefs that have driven a large share of the white working class into Donald Trump’s column rather than Sen. Bernie Sanders’s, even though its members plainly agree with Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s perspective that the economy is rigged to favor the wealthy and big business. … years of talk radio, Fox News and now the Trump campaign have tapped into and built a right-wing populism that focuses the white working class’s blame for its woes downward — at the racial other — rather than up.”

On the other hand, there is bipartisan agreement on whose interests the government is acting for. The same survey found “Ninety-three percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Republicans said it tended ‘very’ or ‘somewhat well’ to the interests of the wealthy; 90 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans said it did the same for big corporations.” By nearly a 2-to-1 margin Americans believe their “vote does not matter because of the influence that wealthy individuals and big corporations have on the electoral process.”

Support for Bernie Sanders among the public is actually a lot greater than for Trump, although you wouldn’t know it from the media, which has devoted 80 times more airtime to Trump than Sanders. He has the challenge of making his presidential candidacy believable to the electorate, despite the pundits’ claims of Hillary Clinton’s inevitability, and of generating enough excitement among new voters to get them to the polls. He continues to advocate a $15 hourly minimum wage and free college education, but, like Corbyn, finds it difficult to get traction for a rational policy on terrorism.

If the Republican vote indeed splits over a Trump or Cruz presidential run, this presents Sanders with an opportunity to win national support on a left populist platform that extols the contribution of immigrants and minorities to the country and advocates stringent controls on foreclosures and Wall Street speculation. He has to foreground policies that will win the less prejudiced sections of the white working class away from supporting corporate billionaires against their class interests.

Bold Expansion of Fight for $15 Campaign as it Challenges Presidential Hopefuls

Fight for 15 protesters outside the Republican primary debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday

The political process in America has become dominated by a clash between the power of big money in elections on one hand, and a deep-seated public hostility to the sway that corporations and the rich wield over government on the other, a clash intensified by the rampant growth of inequality while wages remain stagnant.

At the same time, the racial hierarchy is challenged by minority youth who are no longer prepared to accept being treated as second-class citizens by the authorities and the police. In the universities, the self-assertion of a new generation of students is an important reflection of this social change. African American students at the University of Missouri this week forced two top officials to resign over their lack of response to racist incidents on campus, and the dean of Claremont McKenna College in California also resigned amid similar protests. At Ithaca College in New York State, thousands of students, faculty and staff walked out demanding the sacking of the college president. The protesters accuse him of responding inadequately to racist incidents, including one where an African-American graduate was repeatedly called a “savage” by two white male alumni.

Meanwhile the Fight for $15 campaign is having an impact on the political dialog as it expresses growing discontent over low wages across the racial divide. Its under-reported day of action on Tuesday mobilized thousands of fast food workers who struck their jobs in 270 cities, joining many thousands more who marched on local city halls to demand that political candidates support an increase in the minimum wage if they want the workers’ votes.

Developments like this disconcert white Republicans, whose anger is driven by resentment at the loss of white privilege as well as distrust of government. But the rise of populism in the electorate coincides with skepticism that the leaders of either party can do anything to halt the slide in living standards or jobs. This is why the Republican rank and file is paradoxically supporting outlier candidates like Donald Trump and Ben Carson in the presidential primaries rather than the establishment contenders. Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz noted that “a sense of anger” at the decline of the American middle class is common to both Republicans and Democrats, but “the problem is that on the Republican side there’s anger, but it’s basically inchoate.”

Whether or not Trump continues to lead the polls, he has brought to the fore a major gulf between the Republican establishment’s policies and its ageing constituency. His slogans and demeanor resonate with voters like Steve Trivett, a newspaper editor in Florida. who told the Washington Post: “When America was great, our economy was strong. Our economy’s been shipped off to other countries. Can Donald Trump solve that? Hell, I don’t know. Somebody not as flamboyant or egomaniacal might be more effective, but I’m not sure anybody can bring us back. At least Trump gets things done.”

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich was surprised to find that many Tea Partiers and Republicans he met on a recent book tour of the Southern states agreed with his critique of capitalism. “Most condemned what they called ‘crony capitalism,’ by which they mean big corporations getting sweetheart deals from the government because of lobbying and campaign contributions,” he said. “They see Trump as someone who’ll stand up for them – a countervailing power against the perceived conspiracy of big corporations, Wall Street, and big government.” While conservative leaders want to cut Social Security and Medicare, a majority of Republican voters, along with the rest of the public, wants to keep them funded or even expanded.

Ironically, this is a major plank of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders’ platform, along with opposition to corporate control of the political process, but while he has succeeded in pushing Hillary Clinton into a more populist position, his message of defending middle class living standards is not reaching many African Americans and Latinos who in the main have historically been excluded from the middle class and instinctively turn to a stronger federal government for protection, which they identify with the Clinton dynasty.

In support of the Fight for 15 day of action, Sanders joined employees of federal contractors who gathered at the Capitol on Tuesday instead of reporting for work and then staged sit-ins at government building cafeterias. Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton tweeted that low-wage workers’ actions are “changing our country for the better.” Predictably, when Republican politicians were asked if they supported a higher minimum wage during Tuesday’s televised debate, they all replied no. But the fact the question was asked at all was due to the presence of hundreds of Fight for 15 protesters outside the Milwaukee venue. After the debate, the Fight for $15 sent out a text message to supporters: “BREAKING: Donald Trump just said: ‘Wages are too high.’ #Fightfor15 response: See you in Nov 2016.”

The core of the Fight for 15 movement is fast food workers who are overwhelmingly black and Latino, but on Tuesday they were joined by FedEx freight handlers, T-Mobile retail employees, Price Rite retail employees, auto part workers and farm workers, as well as employees of federal contractors, home-care and child-care workers and other low-wage workers.

Significantly, the campaign has expanded further into the anti-union deep South and has taken on board the police killing of African Americans and immigration rights. For the first time, protesters in Selma, Alabama and in Gainesville and Tallahassee, Florida, joined the walkouts, together with workers in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Letisha Irby, who works at a factory making car seats for Hyundai in Selma, Alabama, drove 76 miles after her shift to join a protest in Tuscaloosa. She only makes $12 an hour after working at the plant for 10 years. Irby is a supporter of the United Auto Workers, who have been trying to organize her plant in Selma and have so far not succeeded.

In Chicago, Fight for 15 protesters marched to police headquarters calling for the firing of Dante Servin, the officer who shot and killed 22-year-old Rekia Boyd three years ago. And in Manhattan, Juan Sanchez reported that “leaders of the Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights movements joined ranks in a united front with Fight for 15. Their placards proclaimed the new alliance’s slogan: ‘Economic Justice = Racial Justice = Immigrant Justice.’ ‘Black Lives Matter and Fight for $15 should be united because in both cases it’s largely about minority people,’ Shawnette Richardson, 43, said.” Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, linked the campaign against police abuse to the Fight for 15, noting it was time to “make the politicians pay attention.”

The convergence of the campaign against low wages with the Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights movements has provoked a rethink of the relation between economic and political struggles. In These Times editor David Moberg commented: “Although SEIU, which has helped to finance the Fight for $15, has been a strong advocate of immigrant and black workers’ causes, it has also—like most unions—seen economic issues as a route to solidarity among workers of all racial or ethnic heritages. But the explosion of concern in black communities over police practices—from profiling to abuse of force—has produced pressure on a group like Fight for $15 to take on a broader agenda. It is also prompting SEIU to examine more deeply how to win white workers’ support for these hot-button issues for its black members, whether it’s crime in their neighborhoods or police misconduct.”

Such a project marks a major expansion of the campaign’s horizons. It could form the nucleus of a new political movement that transcends existing racial and cultural divisions.