Trans Day of Visibility 2025

As I walked up to the Teslatakedown protest on Saturday, I was greeted by this guy.

The Trans Day of Visibility weekend had begun. 

This is not an observance I know much about, so I looked up what the media advocacy outfit GLADD had to share about it.

International TDOV was created in 2010 by trans advocate Rachel Crandall. Crandall, the head of Transgender Michigan, created TDOV in response to the overwhelming majority of media stories about transgender people being focused on violence. She hoped to create a day where people could celebrate the lives of transgender people, while simultaneously acknowledging that due to discrimination, not every trans person can or wants to be visible.

Given that only a minority of Americans say they personally know someone who’s transgender, the vast majority of the public learns about trans people from the media, including TV, film, and news. This is a problem because, as shown in the Netflix documentary Disclosure, the media has misrepresented, mischaracterized, and stereotyped trans people since the invention of film. These false depictions have indisputably shaped the cultural understanding of who trans people are and have modeled, often for the worse, how the average person should react to and treat trans people in their own lives.

Evident in 2025 is intensifying vitriol and attacks against trans people led by a vocal but loud minority. ... That’s why it’s still necessary for trans people to be seen through authentic, diverse, and accurate stories which reflect the actual lived experiences of trans people; both for themselves and for the people who believe they’ve never met a trans person.

Trans people care about the coup against our country as much as anyone. Maybe more, in fact, being involuntary targets on the front lines...

• • •

For the Trans Day of Visibility, Aaron Scott, Episcopal Church Staff Officer for Gender Justice, preached a sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. I'm including short excerpts here which I hope retain its power for a broad audience; there's much more. Read it in full here.

... We are, in the end, a small community, very much under the boot of repression. And yet we continue to lead.

We speak for ourselves.

We set forth our own vision for what justice means for our people—trans and nonbinary people. 

... It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

It’s a beautiful day to exist, in flagrant defiance of executive orders. January 20th came and went and I still haven’t been whisked away to Oz—like the rapture, but for trans people only. I briefly wondered, “Am I not transgendering hard enough, if two whole months have gone by and I’m still stuck here in America?!”

And then I remembered myself, and I remembered: this is a sham. Because we have always been here and we are not going anywhere, ever.

We determine what justice means for us in our bodies, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in our workplaces, in our country. And while we need everyone here to join with us in that struggle, we are the ones responsible for setting the vision. We are the experts on when we are free. Only we get to say when we are truly safe, truly honored, truly afforded our God-given dignity and rights. So thank you to every trans and nonbinary person here for the visions you put forward into the world. Thank you for standing in your power and your leadership.

... We will only get what we are organized to take. No powers and principalities are going to hand trans people our joy and our thriving ... out of their benevolence. That’s not how change happens. Change comes because we demand it, and we labor for it. So today we celebrate our joy—and tomorrow we get back to work organizing to defend our joy. Organizing to defend our young people. Organizing to defend our dignity. Organizing to draw in more and more people to stand with us, move with us.

And we can’t do all that on an empty tank, so today: We sing. We shout. We strut. We swagger. We rejoice in our trans-ness so that the memory of this joy can continue to carry us forward even in the hard times.

... Trans joy is not about marketing a false, palatable version of ourselves. It is about enjoying being alive and not dead.

... We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.

... The more that trans people stand in our joy and our full messy humanity without apology, the more powerful we become. That is why this day is important. The less afraid we are to live—even when there is so much to fear—the stronger we get.

Why attacking Tesla is a good tactic in this moment

This fantasy Boston Tesla Party is extreme, but the national impulse among those repelled by co-president Musk and all his doings is smart. 

Why?

•  Generic conscience boycotts of big retailers, especially ones with few retail outlets to disrupt, are usually poorly targeted to get results. Sure, we can "boycott Amazon" but it will likely remain impossible to quantify whether we are having any impact. (Yes, Bezos is a pig-- but his creation does deliver actual value to many people.)

• But Tesla is an ideal boycott target because it's almost more a brand than a car these days, floating on marketing hoopla. In 2008, Tesla succeeded by being a "cool" breakthrough in EV tech. Today, Elon's fascist antics make his cars "uncool." And that matters when their value proposition is has become mostly hype.

• Once upon a time, Teslas were uniquely innovative, introducing the possibility of viable EVs in car-centered American life. But Tesla has serious competitors these days. No need to buy a Tesla to get the technological and self-congratulatory ego boost that many people get from buying a less polluting car.

• And having opened the EV market, Tesla hasn't improved its product much. The cybertruck is an ugly horror. Again, there are alternatives and new classes of vehicles.

• Tesla's market includes many people repelled by Trump and Musk's antics. He hopes he can replace these buyers with Republicans? Fat chance! Trump may be dumb enough to go that way, but most of his non-MAGA followers are not.

• Even Elon's investors fear he has lost the thread with his car company in his ketamine-addled rampages. His shareholders ask questions.

Let's keep up the pressure. Consumers have hurt Tesla's stock price and thus Elon's bottom line. And his car company is still overvalued. 

Teslatakedown is working. And many people are located where they can join in. Let's make Teslas a sign of iniquity. When you live off hype, you can die from being submerged in a better story.

Muscle memory kicks in; "we already know how to do this"

On Bluesky, Rebecca Traister, journalist and chronicler of women's persisting demands for our freedom and full humanity observes: 

New generations waking up to fury and grief is how we move forward and extend centuries worth of (often circular, often maddening, often unsuccessful) work to make this country a more just and equitable place for more of the people who live in it. (Re Naomi Beinart's oped in the New York Times - gift.)

Traister's reflections for New York Magazine on the Trump election win are deep; I don't know how to share as a gift article so here are some instructive fragments:

The Resistance Is Dead. Long Live the Resistance?

The women who set out to bury Donald Trump are doing things differently now. ...

... derision of the merchandized detritus of first-stage resistance organizing often worked to obscure the seriousness of what was happening among many Americans who had never before been politically active and who had been both appalled and galvanized by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The first big public gathering, the Women’s March [of 2017], wasn’t just an Instagrammable party. It was spiky and contentious, bringing together Hillary heads and Berners, leftists and moderates, hard-core activists and wide-eyed newbies, as well as the grifters and profiteers who adhere to any mass movement. ...

... From there, women broke in a dizzying array of organizing directions. Some helped drive the wildcat teachers’ strikes that spread in 2018 across Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arizona. Others disrupted Republican-lawmaker town halls, helping to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal in Trump’s first year in office, and harried administration officials responsible for the family-separation policy.

The shared fury of women led to the Me Too movement, which resulted in powerful and abusive figures losing positions of institutional authority, and to sexual-harassment walkouts at companies including McDonald’s and Google. A historic number of women ran for office, flooding candidate-training groups like Emerge and Higher Heights. Others got to work organizing on their behalf in municipal and local races, creating Democratic infrastructure in places that the party had left unattended for generations. 

This organizing produced material results all over the country. This iteration of the resistance was the force that flipped the House to Democratic control in 2018, staved off a red wave in 2022, and won majorities in Michigan and Minnesota, where laws were subsequently passed to protect abortion access and LGBTQ rights and ensure free school lunches. It helped secure State Supreme Court seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and a streak of ballot referenda on abortion rights post-Dobbs, including in blood-red Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas — ensuring that, for a while at least, tens of millions more Americans have had access to health care they would otherwise not have had. ...

... The urge to demonize and dismiss these women, despite their impact, is strong from both party and press, neither of which has ever been eager to take seriously — or sometimes even notice — the nation-shaping political activation of women, unless they are of the right-wing Moms for Liberty variety.

There has been little acknowledgment that the almost entirely volunteer efforts of regular-degular women in communities around the country — not just the recent exertions of previously disengaged white women but the electoral labor performed unrelentingly by Black women for generations — has done more to preserve and repair the broken Democratic Party at state and local levels than the efforts of the well-paid, expensively dressed, smooth-brained Democratic consultant class or the political press, both of which tend to obsess over the shiny highest offices, forget local- and state-power building, fly quadrennially into local communities about which they know nothing, and advise candidates against embracing issues that turn out to be more popular with voters than the candidates who listen to consultants’ advice.

... Leah Greenberg [from Indivisible] said that she doesn’t mind watching the resistance being written off as dead, at least for now: “It is a very funny instance of overwhelmingly D.C./male pundits and reporters rushing to declare that things they aren’t personally paying attention to are not happening, while the actual work happens in a thousand homes across the country.” She acknowledged that there are real questions about strategy moving forward. “But our folks ... They don’t give up.”

The legacy of the past eight years is not simply a gutting presidential loss. There are tools and mechanisms in place: shield laws and sanctuary states. People new to engagement now have had practice at losing and getting back up again; that is crucial. 

“The muscle memory has kicked back in as the grief and shock has worn off,” Amanda Litman [from Run for Something which processed 7000 inquiries after Trump triumphed two weeks ago] told me. “It feels more clear-eyed about how hard this will be. But there is also a history of winning against him.”

The Resistance has now experienced both the overturn of Roe and the electoral victories that followed in its wake; they have learned about abortion funds, read Project 2025, and have some idea of what might be coming next. Nothing has to be the same this time because we are not the same.

“I think the 2016 resistance is dead and that’s a good thing,” said Nelini Stamp, director of strategy for the Working Families Party. “That style of resistance was an on-ramp for a lot of people, and a lot of people took it. Now, it is more like, Let’s get to work.... There’s an advocacy infrastructure that’s grown, an electoral infrastructure, a legal infrastructure.”

Or as Litman put it, “This time we can all jump right in without building the plane while we fly it.”

And it's not only activated women that already know how to stand up and stand together against the budding autocracy. 

When Erudite Partner went off to Nevada to work to hold that battleground state for the Dems, I stayed home, knowing I was physically too limited to work in the center of the campaign, though I could and did work the UniteHERE union phonebank. I could be confident that this would be what I call a "hot-and-cold-running-volunteers" election, drawing from the multiple activist bases that people built in the Trump years. It was; the E.P. trained 1400 canvassing volunteers in that tiny corner of the national effort. The Harris-Walz campaign did not lack for people; it lacked for a way to overcome the generalized discontent and distrust of a population thrown off center by the pandemic and the failure -- over a couple of decades -- of governments to deliver.

These activist volunteers come out of the vast infrastructure that, often, began with the 2017 #resistance and has matured into para-campaigns like Seed the Vote, the rare effective Democratic Party like Ben Wikler's WisDems, some NGOs -- and of course the more effectual parts of organized labor like UniteHERE and the United Auto Workers. 

How much of this will survive the current authoritarian challenge we don't know. But what comes now is almost certainly more widespread, more hardened, more inventive, and more durable than oblivious pundits can imagine.

"New occasions teach new duties ..."

The headline refers to James Russell Lowell's essay The Present Crisis and hymn lyrics from the America of the 1840s. That crisis was the nation's enthrallment to human bondage, to organizing itself around holding millions of humans in chattel slavery. Lowell saw clearly that this crisis would not be resolved without disruptions and death -- as the slave system was death in life.

Yesterday a small crowd gathered at Manny's in the Mission to hear and meet Marshall Ganz, practitioner and theorist of organizing of the latter part of the last century. (Like me, but teaching at Harvard.) Marshall has a new book.

I love what the man has done and built and inspired. He was vital to Cesar Chavez in the best days of the United Farm Workers Union and movement in the 1960s/70s. He's taught many organizers. 

But I couldn't help feeling he was out of touch with too much that is contemporary in the best of current organizing ... mostly led by women, almost always prominently Black women. 

The terrible Trump regime ahead is a new occasion and the fight back will be new. That's what I know these days.

Political action for efficacy: uncoordinated and very well coordinated

Political scientist Lester Spence, who describes himself as an Afro-realist, has observations about the 250,000 people who've canceled the Washington Post in outrage at Jeff Bezos' decision to kill the paper's endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.

Political scientists who study comparative politics came up with a term to describe a certain type shift from democratic states to non-democratic ones. "Democratic backsliding." They came up with that term to describe transitions that didn't happen immediately, through a military coup, or something like it, but slowly. And they've recently begun using the term to describe the US. Free press tampering is often something that comes with backsliding--either politicians or oligarchs gradually or abruptly reduce the ability of journalists to report.

What happened to the Post and the  [LA] Times is a sign backsliding is taking a turn for the worse. The Post IS NO LONGER FREE IN THE WAY IT WAS LAST WEEK. Once he makes this move, what prevents him from coming after the news next? Take a look again at the quote above. What prevents HIM from coming after those things now that he's done this?

THIS is what people responded to. And people chose this, WHILE UNCOORDINATED, because this was the best signal to send. Far better than canceling Amazon Prime (although that could be next) because an amazon prime cancellation can be read in a dozen different ways.

Now on that response. You're suggesting that mass cancellation can only hurt. But compared to what? What other action would've been better? If there's an action that could've been better...why didn't Post staffers coordinate it? why didn't you coordinate it? I'm pretty sure a draft of the endorsement exists. Why didn't the board send it out? Anonymously even?

I suggest that we're already down a dangerous path. Instead of telling people "STOP" in the absence of ANY OTHER ALTERNATIVE...the answer should be to tell people "GO." And use that energy to develop the internal institutional strength to contest the changes in the paper. ...

Like Spence, much as I doubt the efficacy of uncoordinated political actions, I am thrilled by the volume of the uncomplicated response to what feels a moral political offense.

We have a few more days to prove that Jeff Bezos bet on the wrong horse. Let's keep working.

• • •

And since I'm sharing from Spence, here are some fragments from the Johns Hopkins University professor's own first experience canvassing Philly for Harris-Walz.

I didn’t know what I’d expect to see because I’d never done door to door canvassing before. But there were about 150 or more of us, and of this group I imagine maybe four or five were paid by the campaign (not the Harris Walz campaign but by the group we were working with). The rest of us were volunteers. The youngest I met were in undergrad. The oldest I met were in their sixties and early seventies. It was a multiracial group, and, tellingly, international.

(Foreign nationals cannot donate money or participate in decision making in any domestic political committee but can volunteer their time in other ways.)

... Although the vast majority of these door knocks went unanswered, maybe about 20 percent of the time someone answered the door. The bulk of these folk were fervent Harris supporters—again this last push is about getting people we already know are likely to vote for Harris to do so. There were a few exceptions.

The white brother who answered the first door our crew knocked on spent twenty minutes telling us how scared he was of the Democratic Party, in part because of their response to the George Floyd Protests, and when January 6 was brought up, he said “that was four years ago.” ...

... Perhaps the best story of the two days happened on Saturday. Near the end of our run one of the crew ran into an elderly voter who wasn’t able to get to the polls because she wasn’t mobile, and she was concerned that her mail ballot wouldn’t get to her in time. I went to talk to the sister myself and collected her information so I could help her. My plan was to talk to people at the top of the food chain because technically there was only so much we could do. Maybe we could get a ballot and bring it back to her.

I ended up running into an election judge around the block from her. She wasn’t on our list—I think she stepped outside and saw us door knocking, and I told her what we were doing. She then told us who she was, what she did. So I took the opportunity to ask her how we could help her neighbor. She gave us permission to go back to the neighbor with her information. We told her the neighbor’s name but she didn’t recognize it.

When we went back to the neighbor, the neighbor laughed. “Oh. I know her. I taught her son!”...

 

That's how elections like this one are won -- one vote scratched out at a time, finding our people. 

This afternoon I go back to this work, calling into Pennsylvania with the UniteHERE national phonebank.

Why the turn to unions

It's no revelation that most of us have low confidence in most of the institutions of US society. So it is revelatory that one often scorned institution has been gaining in prestige over the last 15 years: labor unions.

Click to enlarge.

Michael Podhorzer, retired political director of the AFL-CIO labor federation, has some thoughts about how this came to be. 

Let’s be honest: If you’re reading this post, chances are good that you have at least some agency in your working life. You might be a knowledge worker who can telecommute, you might have pretty good pay and benefits, you might manage other people, and so on. Chances are also good that you strongly support unions. You might read about a successful UAW strike and think, “Yay! Good for them!”

That’s not the experience of most working-class people in America, especially if they do not belong to a union. They and their peers often have little or no agency in their work life – unpredictable schedules, no paid leave, dangerous working conditions, and the ever present threat of being fired at will. When they see other working-class people like them standing up to their bosses and winning, it’s a game-changer. They don’t think, “Yay! Good for them!” They think, “Fuck yeah! I want that too!” 

This “fuck yeah” is exactly what scares plutocrats like Trump and Musk the most. It’s the seed of social proof that blossoms into meaningful solidarity and powerful collective action. As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand” – and a true “demand” is much more than, say, a preference revealed on an issue poll. Entrenched power will only respond to demands that are wielded by a countervailing power. Ordinary people need institutional collective power to make their demands heard, let alone met. 

To be clear, voting is an essential democratic freedom, but it’s not the collective power I’m talking about. Voting is like going to a restaurant and choosing between entrees on the menu. Collective power is like sitting at the table deciding what’s on the menu. ...

Read the whole thing for much more explication and elaboration.

MAGA at work

Isaac Arnsdorf's Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy is a fascinating piece of election journalism, perhaps most especially to a practitioner of campaign mobilization like me. But it's also a book for anyone who, confronted by the spread and endurance of the MAGA movement, finds themselves asking, "what's wrong with these people?"

Arnsdorf is billed as "a national political reporter' for The Washington Post, but in this volume he goes local, looking at the on-the-ground antics of MAGA in Arizona and Georgia.

He explains his project: 

... The movement now called MAGA has long existed in the American political bloodstream ...this movement's ideology was and is loosely defined by nationalism and tradition social values, fierce opposition to liberalism as a slippery slope to communism, and a tendency toward paranoia and conspiratorial thinking....

... In the story of the mass radicalization of the Republican Party, Trump is a singular, indispensable actor. But his perspective is not where the drama and tension unfold. This book turns the camera around from its usual focus on politicians and operatives, focussing instead on the faces in the crowd: what makes them believe, what motivates them, what stirs them to action. ...

Arnsdorf's story has two main protagonists;

• in Cobb County, Georgia, Salleigh Grubb, previously a casual suburban Republican, was so thrown off center by the convergence in 2020 of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and Trump's loss in November, that she became a vehement "Stop the Steal" activist.

On Facebook she posted an upside-down flag, widely recognized in right-wing circles as a distress signal.

Her energy was unabated despite repeated Georgia setbacks.  Eventually she was elected county chair and even met her orange-coiffed cult leader in person.

• in Maricopa County, Arizona, Kathy Petsas had served as a district chair for the Republican Party for decades, laboriously turning out voters for GOP nominees whether she thrilled to them or not. A post-2020 influx of new MAGA militants found her leadership too accommodating and practical for their virulent politics. They voted her out and overwhelmed party old-timers.

Behind both these stories in Arnsdorf's telling lurks Steve Bannon, the podcast proponent of burning the whole country down and MAGA's evil wizard. Bannon is clearly a bad dude, but I am not sure I would ascribe quite as much agency to him as Arnsdorf does. He is, after all, a mercenary con man who grabs onto whatever looks like a good thing with showy pomposity. A very American type. Plenty of MAGAs thrill to his style.

Bannon discovered one Dan Shultz, another familiar sort of rightwing crackpot, who had found his obsession in what he called the Precinct Strategy. If he could just convince MAGA true believers that political parties needed thousands of local precinct activists to turn out their neighbors and that these precinct chairs would then participate in intra-party elections for party office, MAGA could take over the Republican apparatus and elect its candidates to public office. Shultz, through Bannon, enjoyed good timing for his nostrum; Biden had won in 2020, Trump refused to concede, and MAGAs needed something to do. Riding Bannon's cred, pretty soon the Precinct Strategy was all the rage among MAGAs.

What Dan was offering was so pure, so simple -- seventh-grade civics. Bannon knew there was a hunger out there for that. ... The Precinct Strategy could help restore that missing [social] connective tissue. ... There was already a structure, an organization, a hierarchy. ...

For Kathy Petsas in Arizona, this new crop of enthusiasts (and fantasists) engulfed her district leadership.

.. she started getting deluged with applications to become precinct committee members ... It was an obscure role and Kathy was used to getting two or three people a month who might express interest in become a PC. ... she invited the applicants to meet for coffee. ... if these strangers were asking to represent her party in her district, and she was going to exercise her discretion as chair to appoint them, then Kathy wanted to get to know them a little first. She had 132 coffees. ...

.. It was clear to Kathy from the start that Donald Trump was many things, but he was not a conservative. ... It wasn't just the Trump was rude, he brought out the rudeness in his followers; they were not winning anybody over by standing on street corners with Trump signs and guns. Kathy believed that elected officials were supposed to represent everyone, not only the people who voted for them. But everything Trump did was for his base. ... He didn't stand for anything but himself.

But she wasn't the sort of Republican to become a Never-Trumper (unfortunately). She been around long enough to suspect she might have to reconstruct the party if the fever passed. Still ...

... she wasn't going to go door to door for candidates she couldn't defend. .. [the new PCs etc] were like living, breathing manifestations of all the conspiracy theories and misinformation that had been swirling and spreading for two years now.

Neither of these two state parties -- not Georgia nor Arizona -- came out of the 2022 cycle successful. In Georgia, Trump-promoted Senate candidate Herschel Walker proved too crazy for the electorate. The Arizona party seems still fully MAGA-fied having nominated the batshit loony Kari Lake for the Senate in 2024. Trump is running again.. This story is not finished. Isaac Arnsdorf does a useful job of introducing some grassroots combatants.

• • •

I do have a major to bone to pick with this journalist however. He would have written a better book if he'd done some research into how precinct level party organization of all variants of U.S. parties have worked for decades -- perhaps even back to William  L. Marcy in New York in the mid-1840s. Smart party leaders have long known that neighbors engaging neighbors was the gold standard of electoral organizing. Dan Schultz' idea was no novelty.

My mother was Republican precinct leader in Buffalo, NY, in the 1950s and '60s; she kept a card file on every voter, recording whether she'd gotten them to vote yet! Such people were then and always the backbone of civic engagement. And she was a Nelson Rockefeller-Republican, not any kind of insurgent!

This is how functional elements of political parties have long organized themselves and their voters. Such organization is the strongest form of civic engagement this democracy knows; door-to-door canvasses from strangers, phone and text contact, and mass media don't hold a candle to year round persuasion by your neighbors. Where it exists, deep precinct organization is the way to go. Parties can seldom achieve it or maintain it over time. People get exhausted. The tone deaf MAGA antics Arnsdorf describes don't seem likely to age well ... but prediction is still foolish.

And if your door-to-door outreach is by an offensive MAGA nut ... perhaps not an attractive strategy as people like Kathy Petsas understand.

On the well organized perversion of Christian attachments

For too long now America's Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated. Most Americans continue to see it as a cultural movement centered on a set of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, preoccupied with symbolic conflicts over monuments and prayers. But the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative. It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.

Five years ago, Katherine Stewart published her exploration of the movement infrastructure of Christian nationalist right, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.

The book is a tour of that infrastructure, built, in Stewart's telling, by power hungry political entrepreneurs out of a culturally narrow -- and very white -- religiosity.

The Christian nationalist movement is not a grassroots movement. Understanding its appeal to a broad mass of American voters is necessary in explaining its strength but it is not sufficient in explaining the movement's direction. It is a means through which a small number of people -- quite a few of them residing in the Washington, D.C., area -- harness the passions, resentments, and insecurities of a large and diverse population in their own quest for power. ... From the perspective of the movement's leadership, vast numbers of America's conservative churches have been converted into the loyal cells of a shadow political party ...

Stewart seems to have had little difficulty infiltrating and observing the components of the movement. She reports on clergy trainings where Protestant pastors are taught how to mobilize their flocks to vote and work for the most wackadoodle Republicans, those who seek to repel "the humanists" and "the homosexual agenda."  

She visits megachurch leaders who make a very good living out of preaching intolerance and organizing for their own power. 

She adopts Randall Balmer's thesis that outlawing abortion became a central issue for Christian nationalists because their real beef -- racially segregated schools denied federal funding -- didn't sell as well.

Stewart reports her own experience of heavy bleeding while pregnant with a wanted child, being transported to a Catholic hospital, being left to hemorrhage alone on a gurney until she went into shock, and only being given a necessary abortion to save her life when she had lost 40 percent of her blood. This was long before Dobbs -- Catholic doctrine has long readily dictated what became a pillar of a broader Christian nationalism.
 
She introduces readers to disciples of the fascist monarchist R.J. Rushdoony who gave the movement a pseudo-intellectual gloss.

Perhaps the most obvious paradox of Christian nationalism is that it preaches love but everywhere practices intolerance, even hate. Like Rushdoony the man, members of the movement are often kind in person. They love and care for their children, volunteer in their communities, and establish long friendships -- and then they seek to punish those who are different.

The Christian nationalist movement has made up and adopted a dense false story of the United States, propagated by an unqualified charlatan of history named David Barton. This fanciful hash undergirds their anti-democratic aspirations. Most likely our crackpot Supreme Court justices get their "originalist" notions of the American past from this current.

This is all convincingly reported, fluidly written journalism about some of the scariest people now in the MAGA fascist base.

I had issues with some of Stewart's framing. She treats the mechanics of how Christian nationalist leaders activate their followers as a kind of conspiracy. Trainings in messaging and how-tos for activism are always the stuff of getting groups of people moving for collective power. This is very American. As a community and electoral organizer myself, I see movement techniques as simply how you get a lot of people engaged and effectual. But for Stewart, as perhaps for most Americans, the process is novel. Since she loathes and fears Christian nationalist ends, she slides easily into seeing organizing methods as simply evil plots.

Some of this book feels a little dated after only five hard years of MAGA. But it is still a smart window into white Christian nationalism and we only need more such understanding today.

We vote our moral injuries

A twitter comment from a Helen Kennedy has me reflecting:

I think Dobbs is this generation’s Iraq war. The first time a right is taken away is searing.

There's something in that. Mostly we just live our lives. But external events can jar us into extremely enduring political alignments. 

For my generation, early Boomers, that event was the immoral, futile war in Vietnam -- and the military draft. War bad; pols who constrain war, good. (The Democrats were weak reeds here until years later.)

There may be citizens for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Russian empire had similar valence. But is what is experienced as a distant triumph of similar enduring weight to what is felt as moral injury? That's an honest question. I don't know.

For sure, G W Bush's Iraq war scarred a generation. "Bush Lied; Millions Died!" went the chant. Only partially accurate, but heartfelt.

And now, Dobbs/abortion prohibition on top of Donald Trump, MAGA racial and gender hatefulness, climate denial, and guns galore ... these are generational moral injuries to many young people coming up these days. 

Given a means to say "no", they will throng to it. The Washington Post provides a granular account of how young people were organized to vote in the recent judge election, giving WisDems an astonishing winning margin for their candidate.

“The incredibly personal threat posed by the Wisconsin abortion ban…meant that in an election that normally has almost no resonance among young people, in this election, campus wards were packed,” [Ben] Wikler [Democratic Party chair ] said. But more broadly, the issues of democracy and personal freedoms also brought students out in big numbers.

“This generation of young people are primed to participate in the electoral process,” Mike Tate, [lead organizer,] said. “They simply need to know how to do it.”

Democrats flooded state campuses with local student organizers who tabled daily -- only moving inside when temperatures dropped below 35. They made sure students planned for the election, knowing when, where, and how to cast their ballots. Many new voters need information and support with these simple mechanics; there's a fear to be overcome of somehow doing it wrong or embarrassing themselves. 

All this organizing was cheap -- at least in election terms. The two candidates together spent $37 million on campaigns -- mostly TV ads. The Democratic campus organizing cost just $1 million.

Would that the entire Democratic Party would join WisDems in recognizing that diligent organizing, especially among young citizens, is where our future can be ensured.

East Palestine and effective neighborliness

Hard to know what to say about the train derailment disaster that has polluted the Ohio town. I've written before about how oil and chemical shipments by long distance rail are tragedies waiting to happen. And also about how communities rally to try to keep these potential bombs out of their neighborhoods.

The news cycle has moved on from the immediate Ohio nightmare, but it was good to see the horror has evoked a residual comradely spirit among people who've experienced similar calamities. 

 

From the Washington Post:

On a late February evening in East Palestine, Ohio, Melissa Mays came in from out of town — from Flint, Mich. She had driven 300 miles, and she had a message for residents: You’re not alone.

... From towns affected by an accident or spill, and in neighborhoods adjacent to polluting facilities, thousands of Americans have faced contamination and the sense of catastrophe that East Palestine residents are contending with — often with less national attention.

In towns across the country — whether a cancer cluster near a railroad facility in Houston, lead pipes in Chicago or water contamination in towns near military bases from California to New York — many are still experiencing the effects. The responses often follow similar patterns, advocates said, and residents sometimes end up in years-long efforts to ensure cleanup and fight for stricter protections.

Now, an informal network of those activists has popped up to help East Palestine, where residents are concerned about chemical contamination, cleanup, health effects and whether it’s safe to live in town.

Since government's multiple layers and bureaucracies need to be herded into getting their job done, people who've been through that wringer know they need to help each other.

Religion News Service chronicles the observations of the Rev. Steve Court, a retired pastor who coordinates disaster response in the East Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church ...

“Centenary United Methodist Church, here in town, is the host of the EPA and railroad and other local offices. We’ve set it up as a coordination center,” he said. Two other churches are hosting a health clinic and a Norfolk Southern-sponsored family assistance center.

Diane Russell, a community involvement coordinator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said local faith-based organizations are “key stakeholders” that are helping the EPA understand and meet the needs of folks on the ground.

Americans still demonstrate the instinct for collective self-help and self-organization which the traveling French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at in 1840:

"In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded."

Yet another piece of very good news from the 2022 election

Did you know that Arizona -- otherwise known as home to xenophobic politicians like Kari Lake and former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio -- just voted for a ballot measure that will allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at their public universities? 

The best evidence of Arizona’s shift away from Republican policies was the passage of a ballot measure reinstating the right of undocumented Arizonans to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities.

At 2.48 percentage points, the margin of victory for “yes” on Proposition 308 was bigger than the margin that secured the governor’s seat for Democrat Katie Hobbs over Kari Lake and broke 13 years of Republican dominance in Arizona.

How did this victory come to be? As usual, the answer was organizing, combined with building the broadest coalition possible. Dreamers even lined up the Chamber of Commerce for this effort, convincing the business group and moderate Republicans that an educated Arizona Latinx population was in their interest.

A voter-approved in-state tuition ban had made college three times more expensive for the last decade, putting it out of reach for many undocumented students. But Arizona has demonstrated it can move on from a season of fear of the newcomer.

Challenges to progressive "resistance" energy -- and some bits that work

Micah Sifry and Lara Putnam have written a powerful indictment of how progressives have wasted the enormous surge of resistance energy let loose by the Trump occupation of the White House.

They are unquestionably correct in some respects. But I think the picture is also more complex. I'm sharing some of their points here and will offer some commentary. They write:

National Democratic and progressive groups together burned through the surge of liberal organizing under Mr. Trump, treating impassioned newcomers like cash cows, gig workers and stamp machines to be exploited, not a grass-roots base to be tended. ... 

Recent studies show that the effectiveness of such approaches varies from small to nil to negative. People who volunteer on campaigns are often nothing like other Americans in their politics. The gulf is particularly wide on the Democratic side, where infrequent and swing voters of all ethnicities, ages and life experiences tend to encounter highly educated, liberal and white volunteers. ...

There are places where resistance energy has successfully built potent local efforts, starting with electing local officials. Lara Putnam reports on studying one such area, outside Pittsburgh. But overall, Democrats have not been able to harness the new energy in a way that wins elections and gains power for progressive policies.

A political party that has few, if any, year-round structures in place to reach voters through trusted interlocutors — and learn from how they respond — can do no more than lurch from crisis to crisis, raising money off increasingly apocalyptic emails, with dire warnings “sounding the alarm” about a democracy in “immediate danger of falling.”  

Republicans, of course, also treat the news as an endless series of crises. But their calls to oppose socialism or critical race theory or transgender-inclusive bathrooms generate energy that flows into local groups that have a lasting, visible presence in their communities, such as anti-abortion networks, Christian home-schoolers, and gun clubs. ... When not connected to such networks, Democrats receiving apocalyptic messages can feel more battered than activated, leading to demoralization and despair. 

... If democracy is indeed on fire, the thing to do is to stop asking people to buy water bottles and organize them into fire brigades instead. Neither the national Democratic Party nor progressive leaders seem to have learned that lesson. They aren’t wrong to call the next election the most important in our lifetimes. And abortion bans and the Jan. 6 committee hearings may well recharge their base. But it’s what the base manages to build with that energy that will matter.

This indictment seems to me to miss some real forces whose modes of organization seem invisible to these analysts.

The "resistance" in the 2020 election included (and still usually includes) a lot more forces than just middle class white progressives. In particular, most of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter eruption in the summer of 2020 lent themselves generously to the wide coalition effort to elect Joe Biden -- certainly not their candidate of choice. And though this is largely outside the radar of white progressives, there is some real organization and base building that lives under the label BLM.

Likewise, the Sunrise Movement, a very diverse assemblage of young climate activists with a plan, is a real force doing its darnedest to create a sustainable society they can hope to live in. These are not pie-in-the-sky college students; they believe they are fighting the extinction of their future. And because they know viscerally that survival requires power, many quite pragmatically threw themselves into replacing Trump.

Of course the labor movement also kept fighting through the Trump years, more and less efficaciously. The force of organized working people also disappears in this analysis. In most areas that have effective on the ground Democratic-supporting campaign programs, labor remains the key coalition component.

Progressive institutional forms may look weak or too new to matter to a broad coalition. They don't had the history of evangelical churches or gun enthusiast clubs. But the future is going to have to be different and new organizational forms are struggling to emerge.

I need to add that I have some sympathy for liberal progressives who find that their supporters are simply clustered in the wrong locations, living where it's hard to put their energy to good use. I live in such a place. Big cities can be prone to producing loud progressive noise and infighting over not much. No wonder it's attractive to aspiring resistance organizations to use people on tasks of dubious electoral effect, such as mass texting or mailing postcards.

Some of the best of emerging forces in very blue cities have organized themselves to send their members to work where organized local forces can use them well. For example, Seed the Vote in the San Francisco Bay Area does this.

This is what I've been able to do with myself for several election cycles. I am right now working in Nevada with UniteHERE/the Culinary Workers to keep this knife-edge state blue. There are paid canvasser positions still available.

And short term volunteers are also welcome. Let's get out and knock those door and talk with voters.

This insult strikes hard

A determined crowd, mostly women, strode up to the Philip Burton Federal Building Tuesday evening to proclaim loudly, "#bansoffourbodies."

They weren't there for the speeches -- at least I hope not as the sound system was not adequate for the size of the crowd.

 

A lot of women ...

Yes, there's a theme here.

 

It didn't feel like a moment for clever repartee -- but San Franciscans are always creative.

People were angry today. Can we give our anger political force? We have to.

How much direct democracy do we want?

San Francisco's current Board of Supervisors redistricting shitshow is slightly more comprehensible if we consider the history of how we got here.

Until 1977, San Francisco was one of the largest cities in the country which elected its governing body "at large." That is, in order to win a seat on the Board of Supes, candidates had to have citywide recognition and plenty of money. This suited the city fathers -- real estate developers and haute-capitalists -- just fine. But people from all over the city agitated and organized for less attenuated representation. In 1976, we passed Proposition T, instituting elections to the board from smaller, neighborhood districts where we might know our Supervisors.

The effect was immediate: in 1977, we got more women; we got Harvey Milk; we got a whole new cast of governing characters. It was a near revolutionary moment of deep polarization -- district Supervisor Dan White murdered district Supervisor Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1979. In an obscure August election in 1980, the old timers persuaded the tiny segment of people voting to repeal district elections. Progressives tried to reimpose the districts that November, but lost 48 to 52 percent.

And so the organizing to return to district elections began again. This took more than a decade and a half of patient and impatient agitation. Finally, in the November election of 1996, San Franciscans voted to return to district elections, to begin in 2000.

That meant that the city had be redistricted into 11 electoral areas. The progressives who had agitated for district elections feared they could loose the neighborhood power they had been working for if the boundary drawing went badly. We organized some more and built racial, language, and economic coalitions. (I consulted with several groups on this effort.) The redistricting commission largely listened to the organized people. The resulting districts were much like what we've lived with until this year. Then as now, District Six emerged as an arena of contention that, I was once told privately by one of the commissioners, "got most of the leftovers." Also Treasure Island, where, then as now, hardly anyone votes. That map took effect in 2000 and remained little altered by redistricting in 2010.

If I'm to believe the Chronicle, the map that this year's divided redistricting taskforce has come up with won't make much political difference. If I'm to believe Joe Eskenazi in Mission Local, the new map is a power grab by San Francisco's "moderate robber" barons. I have a long history of believing Eskenazi.

And because this is a real fight over political power and spoils in the city, we can be sure this isn't over. Look for a struggle to change the outcome by way of law suits and ballot propositions. This may go on for a few years. For as long as I've lived here, San Franciscans have rallied to local democracy. I don't see us giving up on this because some big wigs cooked the deal.

The people have spoken -- and made the pols listen

When I'm out and about wearing my Voters Not Politicians sweatshirt, I've had people call out from cars and stop me to applaud the slogan on my back. Since I'm in California, it's not surprising they don't know the campaign it promotes; it comes from Michigan where a remarkable citizen organizing movement has seen years of work come to fruition today.

I'll pass the explanation to VNP Executive Director Nancy Wang:

Five years ago, a grassroots group of concerned citizens set out on a journey to end gerrymandering in Michigan. Today, their vision was made a reality when Michigan’s Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission adopted the first maps in our state’s history drawn using the fair, impartial, and transparent redistricting process that more than 2.5 million voters approved in 2018.  

The beginning: This journey started with 33 town halls in 33 days where our all-volunteer team traveled the state to educate people on gerrymandering and explore what a fair process could look like. From there, our policy team crafted a constitutional amendment that took feedback gathered at these town halls and research from other states. What resulted was an amendment, tailored to Michigan, that put redistricting in the hands of voters - not politicians. 

During these town hall meetings, VNP also began recruiting what became a 6,500 person volunteer group of citizens who joined together with one goal in mind: to end gerrymandering in Michigan.  

The petitions:  On August 17, 2017, our people-powered movement launched one of the largest all-volunteer signature collection efforts in Michigan history. Thousands of volunteers joined the effort and collected signatures in every single one of Michigan’s 83 counties. 

On December 18, 2017, VNP turned in more than 425,000 petition signatures to put our initiative on the 2018 ballot. After winning a series of legal challenges, the initiative was officially added to the ballot as Proposal 2. 

“Yes on 2” Our massive volunteer group hit the ground running to campaign for Proposal 2. Thousands of volunteers knocked on doors all summer long asking their neighbors to vote “Yes on 2.” ...  On November 6, 2018, 61% of Michigan voters passed the Proposal 2 amendment and made fair, impartial, and transparent redistricting part of Michigan’s constitution. 

Shaping Michigan’s Future: The grassroots organization immediately reengaged volunteers across the state in a massive effort to educate voters about the new redistricting process. Through workshops, digital videos, and community outreach, VNP reached a broad audience of Michigan voters — especially those in historically underrepresented communities — with information on the Commission application process. 

VNP held more than 300 events and identified more than 12,000 Michigan voters who were interested in applying to serve on the commission. When COVID-19 hit Michigan, VNP quickly moved and held 13 virtual workshops and provided 110 applicants with free, remote notary services. 

Our organization did all of this while protecting the amendment in court from political operatives who wanted to change the amendment’s fundamental features.

So are the resulting Congressional maps some kind of pro-Democractic Party gerrymander? Nope. But thousands of Michiganders have made the electoral process their own. That's a huge exercise of engaged citizenship that the country needs more of. The redistricting Commission, which included Dems, independents, and Republicans, managed to pass a new maps by a bi-partisan vote. The Michigan news site MLive reports on the Congressional map:

When the lines drawn following the 2010 census were first put into practice, Michigan’s Congressional delegation was a 9-5 split. In 2018, Democratic candidates flipped two of those seats, bringing the delegation to a 7-7 split. 

Based on a partisan fairness analysis from experts contracted by the commission, the Congressional plan is projected to split with seven Democrats and six Republicans representing Michigan in Congress.

Fair state legislature maps, which the Commission also drew, may prove more important than the Congressional map. The disproportion in the legislature was what got people stirred up in the first place.

Being thoroughly partisan and desperate to preserve a Democratic House delegation, I might have preferred a clean, Dem-favorable, gerrymander. But Michigan is a dangerously divided state where the right has too often turned to armed thuggery. If engaged citizens can win at democratizing a usually obscure process issue, they are building a force which our enfeebled civil society needs to endure.

Organize, struggle, and organize some more

Aside from occasional great mass outpourings of raw feeling or fury -- such as, for example, the George Floyd murder protests last year -- organizing people to demand power over their own lives is hard, slow, deep work. It hurts to be powerless; why would anyone who could evade knowing their own oppression be willing to stare unflinchingly at their situation and then take action that inevitably will include some risk? It's a tough ask -- and one that no decent organizer should make without an awareness of leading some people into what will be hard for them. Union organizers know this, or learn this. So do community organizers who take on real fights. Even electoral organizers can encounter this.

Professor Robin D.G. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression is a narrative history of remarkable organizing among and by mostly rural Black workers during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was written as Kelley's dissertation in the early 1990s, but the story remains so engaging that it was reissued with a new prologue in 2015.

At its baldest level, this is a terrible chronicle of beatings, arrests, and murders of organizers, including mostly Black local residents and some northern CPUSA members. There was a pattern: organizers would encourage people to come together for a purpose, say to demand unemployment relief, or to launch a union of share croppers or tenants, or protest violence against their community. Repression -- beatings, shootings -- by the white segregationist political authorities would follow. That reaction might even inspire mobilization for wider protests. But eventually poverty and overwhelming force would tamp down any particular manifestation of Black worker resistance. Yet large numbers of Alabamans did participate in these repeated eruptions, forming a sort of Communist-influenced "invisible army" which struggled for more respect and justice. Most Communists kept their party membership secret for their own safety -- but they were there.

What seems to have delighted Kelley is way in which Communist Marxist orthodoxy, which was a real and rigid thing in the 1930s, melded with the indigenous culture of Black resistance.  The local strike leader could very well also be the local community church elder leading services on Sunday nights. The same elder might very well be studying the revolutionary thought of Stalin and making sure the rifle he kept by his bed was ready and loaded for a visit from the Klan.

Alabama Communists followed the gyrations of the international Communist line in the 1930s, working in popular front with such reformist bourgeois outfits such as the NAACP and the Roosevelt New Deal for awhile, then drawing back during the period of the Hitler/Stalin pact, then enthusiastically joining the military when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and finally the U.S. joined the war. But these currents seemed remote to southern Communists. After all, some of the rural people they were organizing explained to themselves that these agitators must be Yankees finally come to fulfill the promise of Reconstruction.

The Party did struggle for "internal interracial democracy" -- not always successfully, but aspirationally. No other force in the south was trying as hard, or even at all, for racial equality in practice.

The Cold War of the late 1940s put an end to this bout of CPUSA organizing in the South. But the "invisible army" was still there when a less ostensibly class conscious civil rights movement against segregation and for Black voting power emerged in the 1950s. Kelley has preserved the names and stories of a generation of amazing justice warriors.

• • •

One significant quibble: it's a good thing that this book comes with a glossary of abbreviations. Kelley wrote seemingly expecting readers to be able to hold all the names of organizations which he refers to just by their initials. I certainly couldn't, especially in the audio edition.

A toughened skin and a softened heart

Alicia Garza's The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart is an engaging and wise account of organizing and movement building. These two activism currents are not the same thing; it's rare to find them both described and appreciated in one volume. It's even more rare (perhaps because these topics are usually the terrain of men?) to find them melded with "a story about [Garza's] personal journey."

There's so much to learn and savor here.

Garza is nationally known as one of the three founders/inspirers of Black Lives Matter. In the Bay community where I live, she's known as one of the most committed, diligent, and often put-upon local organizers around. She comes by her high repute because she has done the work.

Because my long time engagement has been in injecting electoral expertise into community organizing and coalitions, I read with great interest her description of how corporate developers crushed a 2008 proposition sponsored by the community organization where she worked. (I was out of San Francisco for all of this campaign, I realized to my surprise.) POWER sought to curb gentrification in San Francisco's Bayview district, the last bastion of Black community here in Techvillage. Money and developers' inside track with more established, less community-based activist players overwhelmed the POWER effort -- and POWER also found they had not put down deep enough roots in the affected community.

I thought long and hard about what we could have done differently ... My organization, POWER, had always appealed to me because of its unapologetically radical politics and vision -- and yet it wasn't our radical politics that could have won the campaign, given the deep-seated beliefs community members had about how change happened and what kind of change was possible. ... If we'd had more partnerships to draw from, we might have been able to access more of the resources we needed to win ... We came close to winning by agreeing to build with organizations that we didn't consider to be radical and some that we didn't even consider to be progressive. We brought the campaign to those we did not believe would join us, and we allowed ourselves to be surprised -- and we often were. 

Building broad support did not mean we had to water down our politics. It didn't mean we had to be less radical. It meant that being radical and having radical politics were not a litmus test for whether or not one could join our movement. It meant that we created within our campaign an opportunity for more people to be part of the fight to save what was left of Black San Francisco and to see the fight as their own. 

Organizing in the Bayview forever shifted my orientation toward politics. It's where I came to understand that winning is about more than being right -- it is also about how you invite others to be part of a change they may not have even realized they needed. ...

We got all lucky. Garza came out of POWER several years later ready to build for Black freedom and ultimately all of our freedom -- at scale. The little localized organizations that incubate in the foundation-funded nonprofit industrial complex don't easily grow and intersect with genuine passions among unorganized people -- that is, with where most people live. Elections come closest to activating broad swathes of us, but usually organizing in that context is superficial, sacrificing deepening engagement for breadth of contact. It's good to win elections, but it takes an enduring, persistent movement to make much of those victories.

The second half of the book explores movement building out of her experience in Black Lives Matter. Garza discusses unity and solidarity, leadership, being a woman among male organizers, social media, political education and common sense, popular fronts for particular issues, united fronts which share strategy and a vision of power -- and much more. She'd be the first to say it's all a work in progress -- she's still learning.  She enunciates principles:

In a society were anti-Blackness is the fulcrum around which white supremacy functions, building multiracial organizations and movements without disrupting anti-Blackness in all its forms is about as good for a movement as a bicycle is for a fish. 

My feminism is Black, it is queer, and it includes men, masculinity, and manhood that is sustainable and does not depend on the subjugation of women to exist. Until we get there, I continue to expect men in general to sexualize me with or without my consent, will refuse to take me seriously, and take credit and be given credit for that to which they've made very little contribution. I expect them to have a propensity toward violence against me, even those men who claim to love me. And I work hard for the day when men who fight the racialized patriarchy are not the exception to the rule and, more than that, are not merely in solidarity with women. I work for the day when men understand that another masculinity is possible -- but not under the racialized patriarchy.

Her work with the Black Futures Lab has given her hope:

What we've learned through this endeavor is that the conditions for building effective and responsive social movements not only exist but are in their prime at this very moment. ... The most common response we hear from people who have been touched by our project is that they have never been asked what they want their future to look like ... We have launched a policy institute ... We've also created political vehicles that can contend for power inside the political arena. ... We don't believe in supporting leaders who are Black simply because they are Black ... we support Black leaders who have a transformative vision.... 

We do this work because we believe that Black communities deserve to be powerful in every aspect of our lives, and politics should be no exception. ... We are but a small part of the infrastructure that must be built in America to change the conditions that Black communities experience. ...

And Garza has shared a book that every progressive person in this country can learn from. What a gift!

Tear them down!

The Washington Post has a feel-good story today about the Biden infrastructure plan's inclusion of funding to tear down dilapidated highways that were built decades ago. In the 1950s and 60s it was conventional city policy to break up cities for the benefit of cars. This policy often had the racist benefit of breaking up thriving majority Black neighborhoods. 

“Nobody thinks you can get rid of a highway,” [Amy Stelly] said.

On Wednesday, Stelly’s effort gained a considerable boost when the White House named the highway, the Claiborne Expressway, an example of a historic inequity that President Biden’s new infrastructure plan would seek to address through billions in new spending.

Stelly, an architectural designer, is part of a growing movement across the country to take down highways bored through neighborhoods predominantly home to people of color. Most were created as the federal government worked to connect the nation after the birth of the interstate highway system. Many such highways are reaching the end of their 50-year life span, raising the question of whether they should be rebuilt or reimagined. 

“It’s the same in many Black communities, not only in Louisiana,” Stelly said. “It’s great the federal government and this administration is recognizing that this is something that must be corrected if we are to be fair and just in America.”

Freeway Revolt monument on Gough St.

I'm reminded that what's recalled as the "Freeway Revolt" has been central to the development of both the physical and political shape of San Francisco. This is a small, very compact city. If planners in the 1950s had gotten their way, it would have been crisscrossed by connected concrete behemoths, running along the north shore from Bay Bridge to Golden Gate, with a connector straight through the Mission and Western Addition, and another around the shore on Bayview landfill. Forget all those charming Victorian houses and startling views of the Bay.

Political resistance was intense. Much of the intricate neighborhood activism which gives the city its intense local politics was seeded in the freeway fight. By 1959, citizen uproar forced the cancelation by the Board of Supervisors of seven of ten planned freeway projects. 

Unhappily, the Freeway Revolt, largely led by white San Franciscans, didn't coalesce with the concurrent struggle against "urban renewal" (better called "Negro removal") centered in the Fillmore neighborhood. This urban catastrophe set the stage for the nearly complete pushout of Black San Franciscans.

And then, San Francisco got lucky. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down the Embarcadero Freeway, clearing the way for the present attractive downtown shoreline.

Let's hope the current infrastructure plan can help additional cities recover some of what they lost to cars in the 20th century.