‘B4’ It’s Too Late: The Socialist Left’s Role in Fighting Autocracy

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by Bill Fletcher Jr. 
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​B4—the Broad Front Opposing the Right—can’t be about the status quo. While it must be aimed at defeating all attacks on our democratic rights, its thrust must be to expand democracy and shift US domestic and foreign policy. 
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By way of preface, it is important to be clear that the right-wing populist/authoritarian movement that has become energized since 2009 did not appear out of nowhere.  The history of the US as a racial settler-colonial project laid very firm foundations for the periodic rise of nefarious movements of the political Right, movements that are regularly racist, sexist, xenophobic and irrationalist.  The current incarnation of right-wing populism aims to create a future for the US based on a reconfigured US, something akin to the pre-1912 country, if not being a 21st century version of the Confederate States of America. A neoliberal right-wing combined with a far-right semi-fascist tendency has resulted in the development of what can be understood as a “neo-Confederate” political bloc.  This is a complicated and contradictory alliance that shares the objective of establishing a semi-apartheid system in the US along with the suppression of basic democratic rights up to and including the possibility of gutting and redoing the Constitution.

Pro-Democracy Organizing Against Autocracy in the United States takes, as its starting point, the possibility of the successful capture of government by right-wing authoritarian forces.  It does not treat this as inevitable, nor does it suggest that all is hopeless should such a scenario come into existence.  But it does argue that in order to prevent the success of right-wing authoritarians and undermine a right-wing authoritarian hegemony, there must be a new practice introduced by progressive forces. 
 
Read more at ​Convergence.

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