ORGANIZING

Beth Howard, Barn Raiser  - White people delivered this victory to Trump. Out of 76 million votes cast for Trump (2 million more than in 2020), 84% of those were white voters. To be clear, urban areas handed some of the largest margin shifts toward Trump, yet he gained even greater margins in rural white working-class counties than the last election.  

It’s tempting to blame white rural working-class Trump voters, to see them as ignorant, hateful or “less than.” It’s tempting to push them away, to signal to everyone else, “It wasn’t me. I’m one of the good ones.” That’s human, and it can feel good to lash out and to surround ourselves with those who think and act like we do. But we should not fall into this trap.

Those of us who are fighting against MAGA must be crystal clear: the people to blame are the ruling-class billionaires, the people at the top. Not other working-class people.

If you are Southern, you know that Southern mothers and grandmothers love to give you a list of rules for how to behave, whether it’s how you act in the grocery store, at church or at school. Sometimes it’s a clear list of things to do, but other times, when the task at hand is less clear, you can count on a conversation many of us might label “here’s what we’re not going to do.”

So, in honor of the age-old wisdom of working-class Southern matriarchs, here’s what we’re not going to do.

We are not going to blame voters, people of color, Palestinians and Arab Americans or white working-class people. We will not blame rural people or Southerners. We will not under any circumstances blame each other.

Instead, we should blame those at the top who are getting rich by ensuring we all suffer. Let’s blame the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, who gave over $130 million to Trump, and whose wealth jumped by more than $70 billion since Trump’s election, according to estimates from Forbes magazine. Or let’s blame the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and the biggest landlord in Los Angeles, who both gave millions to Trump’s campaign. Or how about we blame the billionaires who made their fortunes by taking advantage of the economic crisis in 2008. These are people who have a vested interest in ensuring working people do not stand together to win progressive change.

Fascism is often talked about as something that happened in Nazi Germany, something over in Europe that people are bringing here, but that’s not accurate. The Nazis studied the Jim Crow South and used it as inspiration. Fascism is American made. And because it is homegrown, SURJ has committed to the South because we know that if we want to defeat the MAGA movement, we have to defeat it where it’s strongest…. 

Instead of blaming us, let’s look to the rural South for answers, because of all the people in this country we are some of the most well equipped to deal with fascism and its origins.