I’ve been listening to the discourse around the 2024 Presidential Election. Three camps emerge on the left: people voting for Kamala Harris to avoid a Trump Dictatorship, people voting independent because they’ve lost faith in the Democratic party’s willingness to support meaningful social change, and people who don’t believe voting matters because it’s impossible to get justice in the current two-party system. The common thread in the first camp is that although the Democratic party may fail to bring meaningful change, it’s possible to organize communities around progressive policies with the Democrats. It’ll be almost impossible to organize for anything but more white nationalist power if Trump becomes the first overt dictator of the United States. The second camp understands the urgent need to break the two-party monopoly on U.S. politics, and the common thread in the third camp has become a popular meme on social media: “Burn it all down.”
I’m a formerly incarcerated, Black progressive leftist. I’m also an artist, and I believe the progressive left can stave off a conservative dictatorship if we incorporate a lesson from the creative arts. When I write a book or a short story, I have a vision that will ultimately become a product for an audience, but I don’t focus directly on producing the end goal. I focus on perfecting a process that will produce the end goal. Process for writers is outline, characterization, sentence transitions; it’s dialogue, scene development, and revision. Perfect these moving parts, and together they’ll churn out your masterpiece.
People voting independent this year don’t seem to acknowledge that they’ve yet to refine a process that can produce a third party – that takes time that we don’t have between now and November. Everyone is tired of hearing that change takes time, including me, but we have to take accountability for what we haven’t been doing with our time over the past ten years. We haven’t prioritized instituting the rank-choice voting we’d likely need to establish a third party over our respective pet projects (prison and immigration reform, climate change, poverty, education). We haven’t prioritized mobilizing millennials and gen-z to vote in mid-term elections so we can replace centrist senators with progressive ones. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 87 percent of youth eligible to vote in the 2022 mid-term elections didn’t.
People who won’t vote because it’s time to “burn it down” are so focused on the possibilities they hope will arise once our current white supremacist system collapses – they don’t realize that we have been successfully burning this system down for decades. Burning down is a process, and though our current processes have deep inefficiencies, they have produced voting rights for women and people of color, LGBTQ+ rights, prison reform, housing rights, and workers’ rights. Yes, conservatives are rolling back these rights at a terrifying speed, but their current ferocity is a reaction to our successes.
In Project 2025—a 900-page plan for the next conservative president to transform the U.S. into a de facto one-party, white nationalist state—conservatives argue that they must rescue their children (from trans people), reclaim American culture (read “reclaim white male dominance”), and defeat the anti-American left. Their reference point for the crisis they’re experiencing today is the 1970s. What was happening around the 70s? Political power was shifting in the country because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 gave women the right to sue employers for pay discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 gave people of color the right to sue employers for discrimination. The Black Panthers and other anti-racist groups rose in prominence. Although these events didn’t transform our white supremacist country into a beacon of equality, they did represent structural and cultural change.
Conservatives in the 70s responded with a Mandate for Leadership, a 3,000-page plan for the next conservative president, Ronald Reagan, to unify the right and “rescue” white America from equal rights. According to one author of Project 2025, 60 percent of the Mandate for Leadership’s recommendations became policies in a year. The Heritage Foundation wrote Mandate for Leadership; they also produced Project 2025.
The progressive left talk on the news and in podcasts about the rights they fear we’ll lose or the violence the U.S. will commit against immigrants or the climate crisis Trump will exacerbate. I wish more people talked about the processes Project 2025 will create to achieve these outcomes. Trump will issue executive orders that enable him to fire all federal employees and fill their empty positions with MAGA supporters trained by the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Administration Academy. He will do an end-run around Senate confirmations for his political appointees by appointing acting heads of federal agencies like the Department of Justice, who will remain in office long enough for him to execute Project 2025.
In my upcoming book, Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine, I talk about white cultural hegemony, the process by which rulers take control of culture, producing institutions like schools, media, and churches in order to control the ideologies of populations. As a result of this hegemony, I grew up believing lies like “healthy families must be nuclear, heteronormative families.” Today, after decades dismantling white supremacist ideologies, we know that healthy families exist in multiple configurations; that budding wisdom in our country represents a rupture of white cultural hegemony, as do DEI efforts. The goal of Project 2025 is to “repair” those growing ruptures, and the one-party white nationalist state it will create will suffocate artistic practice.
Project 2025 takes control of school’s accreditation processes to control what artists can learn and debate. It puts federal grant-making directly in Trump’s hands and weaponizes the government’s power to give or revoke non-profit status to control artists’ funding streams. It regulates media to control what artists can publish and frames social justice issues as a national security threat that the Department of Justice can criminalize. Project 2025 closes the door for artists to make a living if they create any content that doesn’t perpetuate white cultural hegemony.
And it can get much worse. Trump will also immunize law enforcement from prosecution and expand the Secret Service’s law enforcement powers from the White House to all of Washington, D.C. Imagine the Republican House introduces legislation that criminalizes activism, organizations, and any community that doesn’t align with Trump’s vision for white America. On the morning of voting day, Trump sends the Secret Service to arrest half of the dissenting House representatives. When a person, even a congressperson, is arrested, there’s nothing they can do about it in the moment. They can be held without being charged with a crime for days, long enough for a Republican House to establish a quorum and vote through the legislation. The Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution, so Trump could rinse and repeat the same process when it comes time for the Senate to vote.
This machine, these processes, will transform the U.S. into a supercharged white nationalist state with exponentially more power to destroy opposition to white hegemony. These are the stakes of the 2024 Presidential Election. I don’t support the Democratic Party, and I despise Kamala Harris’ centrist politics. But I am voting for Harris, not because the Democratic Party is going to hand us justice but because I’m an artist. I understand that we need more time to perfect the processes that will produce our end goal of justice for people of color, for LGBTQ+ people, for Palestinian people, for us all.
This article appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of In Dance.
