A left Unity Plan to Defeat Trump

​Introduction to Seed the Vote
Jason Negrón-Gonzales, Organizing Upgrade
The Trump era has been all about the naked aggression of the far right, but cracks are appearing. Trump is battling impeachment, a result not only of his criminality but of the changes that the blue wave brought to Congress. Last month we saw further losses for the right in Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania – the result of sustained organizing by hundreds if not thousands. That work didn’t start this year; it’s the culmination of many years of work.  None of this was spontaneous. When we organize, we can win. When we step up to fight, we can win. 
… The possibility of Trump’s re-election in 2020 is a real one. And it’s one we are determined to stop. When we – a group of left activists rooted in community and labor organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area – gathered this spring, it was with the urgency that came from seeing our communities under relentless assault from a white nationalist, authoritarian administration. But we also knew that 2020 – with the size, energy, and leftward shift among the opposition to Trumpism – would give us an opportunity: if we plan carefully and think big, we can make a difference at the ballot box in 2020, the kind of difference the Left failed to make in 2016. And we thought we could do this while building a stronger and more cohesive Left.

1. Background to Trumpism’s Ascent to Power:

1. The Right-Wing/Trumpist Goal: A Racialized Authoritarian State:
2. A Broad but Politically Diverse Opposition, and Tensions Within It.

Since 2016, a growing number of people have thrown themselves into efforts to defeat Trumpism by advocating a broadly left politics. What does this opposition look like?
Social justice efforts have been able to activate significant mass actions in opposition to Trump and right-wing policies, from the Women’s March to airport protests to the more recent teacher strikes. Mass mobilization played a particularly important role through 2018, in stalling or rolling back many of Trump’s assaults on communities of color and democratic rights. Alongside the energy in the streets, progressive institutions have gotten renewed energy.

1. Vulnerabilities and Challenges

Then there are specific challenges facing the social justice wing of the opposition:
The Democratic establishment makes consistent efforts to squelch progressive electoral insurgencies, for example proposing bans on consultants who work with radicals challenging incumbents in the primaries. And the ‘moderate’ forces use their command of the media to undermine or even smear left candidates and grassroots non-electoral organizations. 

1. Key Take-Aways:

**The majority of the country is opposed to Trumpism, but this opposition is much more heterogeneous sociologically and politically than the Trumpist bloc. This reality poses big challenges to a Left that is challenged to both build and maintain the broad unity necessary to defeat the Trumpist-GOP in the 2020 election AND build the independent strength of the social justice forces.
**The influence of progressive ideas and the reach of organizations espousing a social justice agenda have grown substantially since 2016, but a realistic assessment of the balance of forces tells us that the progressives remain fragmented in many ways and, even if we were more united, remain weaker and far less resourced than the long-established centrist and corporate forces in the opposition to Trump and, specifically, within the Democratic Party.
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