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With the 2024 presidential election now over, we owe it to ourselves to find any ground truths left to hold onto. Just as the world does, just as the DNC and the GOP continue to do, factions of "The Left" attempt to discipline—or, what they call "organize"—the South and its Black communities into obedience. In this quest for control over the masses, we continue to see discursive contention about the story of this political moment—particularly the story of the left's relationship to and responsibility for electoral organizing. 

People who identify politically as "on The Left," have long displayed the extent of the dehumanization they have to offer for the people of the South. This is not new. The recent wave of "This is what you voted for" and "Maybe [you should] vote for Democrats" responses hurled at Appalachian and Southern communities underwater in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton highlights a stark reality—our elections often lead to people, especially Southerners, being viewed as nothing more than mechanized ballot punchers. The historic relationship of Black communities to the Democratic Party exacerbates this sense of entitlement, even amid abandonment.

It's critical to mention that The Left is not a monolith; rather, it is a spectrum of tendencies including "progressive" or "radical" liberals, the radical left, and leftist revolutionaries. While there are many nuanced dimensions within these distinctions worth exploring, my experience within national organizing spaces and my relationship with Northern organizing versus Southern organizing in Atlanta has clarified an important feature worth interrogating: across the spectrum of The Left, contempt for the South is consistent, even among many Southerners.

This is really to say that antiBlackness continues to structure our political culture, despite demands for unity against centrist and far-right agendas. So let's talk about antiBlackness, elections, and The Left. Specifically, the myths The Left has aimed at the South to discipline it "in line" with The Left coalition's political ends. Let's explore these myths and ask: What agenda do these myths serve? And how can we use this moment to inspire stronger organizing tendencies? 

Why is the South the intended recipient of these messages?

Elections are often theater. Opportune moments to pretend our society has "progressed" beyond the divisions that once sparked the Civil War—a time in which the peculiar institution satiated the American desire for slavery. The political rupture the country experiences today is not the only consequence or implication of elections, but it is an undeniable one. Elections are how people channel political angst that otherwise would be put to more corporeal use—if the Blues win, then we can again pretend the Civil War was settled. 

The South is treated, by the Democrats and many leftists, like a disobedient slave that might otherwise burn the house down unless properly disciplined every four years. The Northern economy has always depended upon the subjugation of the Black South, with the collaboration of select Black Southerners. This is the true democratic compromise between the regional sections after the Civil War. While Southerners and Black people with roots in the South deliver elections through votes, labor, and organizing, what does the North do in return? 

It's impossible to capture the many ways the South, as a literal collection of battlefields, is rendered as "owned." We're not talking about how to gain our ownership via elections, we're talking about choosing who owns us next. The Mastery implied here includes certain elements of The Left that also view Black folks as subhuman, and Black Southerners as suitable to be taken for granted and subjugated as obedient followers. 

In practice, this creates a paternalist dynamic between well-resourced, coastally-rooted "leftist" political formations that tell the Black South why it must be pragmatic and choose its next owners, compromising the political insurgency that characterizes Southern freedom struggle, to salvage "democracy" instead of a revolution. 

The question of whether we believe in The State at all has been obscured by those who imagine themselves one day occupying the halls of Congress. Not occupying because they are squatting—no—but because the edifice feels pragmatic. Meanwhile, others imagine themselves tearing down all the halls that slaves built. I'm curious how these two visions shoehorn themselves into one coalition. 

Those who believe in The State need the South's and Black people's unwavering investments in electoral politics to legitimize electoral democracy as the preferred mode of consolidating power, even if these formations ultimately have no plans to view Black people as anything more than capital, political or otherwise. What I'm naming is that the logic and design of movement formations focused on consolidating and centralizing power are fundamentally compatible with our existing antiBlack, anti-Southern political structure. 

The movement funding economy, for example, is just as dependent on the subjection and subjugation of the South as the rest of the economy. Similarly, those resources never seem to trickle down, and when Southern formations ring the alarm on state repression—like Georgia's recent move to outlaw bail funds in the state following the legal attack on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund—are met with non-militant responses by many on The Left, who instead mobilize support for "legitimate" (i.e. desirable) political action. In the context of leftist political organizing, this anti-South as antiBlack antagonism keeps Southern suffering and demands for freedom in the captive position of the unthought to the broader coalition. 

I have witnessed this personally, as Black organizers in Atlanta fight to maintain crumbs of solidarity in the fight to stop Cop City, as Cop City has become a national talking point detached from its initial context and the Black Atlanta neighborhoods that will suffer. 

As long as the political imagination and sovereignty of Black people remain captive, so does the Black South. 

As certain factions of The Left spread "general" pro-electoral sentiment across the nation, the role of the South in delivering their victory and Left paternalism, I fear, makes these messages far more targeted than they appear. In a world where the gravity of our votes—the density of our purported obligation—is said to be larger if we live anywhere unblue, then yes, the message is addressed to and for the South. Swing states like Georgia and North Carolina, are especially attractive spaces for Left opportunism, exploitation, and transactional political engagement.    

The Black South is even encouraged to exploit itself, the Atlanta Way, to stabilize the world. The popular saying, "As goes the South so goes the nation," reveals within it the high stakes of losing the Black South. The region's indispensable relationship to the preservation of the present order, and the stabilization of a Leftist one to come, thus requires the myths that justify Left paternalism to remain intact. It is for this reason that these myths are worth debunking.  

more from Julian Rose

The Myths

Elections don't get enough attention 

Every election cycle, national movement organizations, especially progressive left ones, do their usual song and dance to convince other leftists to care more about elections. This requires them to uphold the myth that in our movements, elections don't get enough love and attention. This ignores the reality that a large portion of the resources that progressive organizations receive are dedicated to electoral strategy. If any areas of work are undervalued or under-resourced, it certainly wouldn't be the damn elections. This framing instead obscures the actual conflicts The Left neglects. The Left's central conflict is that the focus on elections, and other non-violent or "civil" forms of combating fascism, delegitimizes as it deemphasizes the need for revolutionary militancy. 

In my experience, electoral campaigns are annual mainstays for movement organizations. The last decade demonstrates that while militant uprisings, mass protests, and issues-based political education programs have popularized Leftist organizing and radicalized new cadres of folks, electoral-centrism dominates our spaces. This status quo persists, despite an uptick in critiques and skepticism from radical organizers. 

Each year, billions are spent on elections. In the 2024 race alone, Kamala Harris raised more than a billion dollars in mere months and distributed some of that stockpile to movement organizations. Though the amounts remain undisclosed as of this writing, our lack of oversight of movement funding fails to adequately interrogate how close the relationship truly is between The Left and the Democratic Party. There are running jokes that if your organization needs funds, it could do some electioneering for a quick buck. How do we reconcile this reality with the myth that The Left is too detached from electoralism? 

While I do respect the notion that the terrains of struggle we don't adequately engage will simply be dominated by our opponents, I don't understand how that logic is used to justify existing imbalances and neglect practices more aligned with the fight for self-determination and autonomy at the heart of radical and revolutionary Left politics. 

Elections can stop fascism

Ongoing debates about the true meaning of fascism aside, many have accepted that at least the threat of fascism is present. This in turn has produced a range of perspectives about what elections can do in the face of fascism, the most common being that electing someone other than an explicit fascist will stop it. Even if this wasn't a common, oversimplified assertion, it was the fundamental logic present in a breadth of arguments about the imperative to deliver a Harris-Walz victory. I think this tendency to connect election decisions with anti-fascism sets a narrative that will be difficult to unravel when we inevitably need people to keep fighting. 

Violent intervention stops fascism. It is the primary thing that has definitively done so throughout history. Win or lose, fascists have used electoral processes to gain notoriety and legitimacy within a society, as they simultaneously make a mockery of any existing democratic processes. The Dem and "Progressive Left" assertion that it is strategic to allow Trump a fair playing field to be defeated "democratically" is ahistorical. 

Even noted liberal pundit Rachel Maddow, on her Ultra podcast, accurately highlighted the fact that America's judicial and electoral processes are ill-equipped against fascism. This is why Joe Biden and the Democrats' call for national unity and bipartisan reconciliation in the wake of the January 6 insurrection should have signaled the political trajectory of the last four years: a leftist movement that compromised necessary political insurgency for the sake of decorum and a stable democracy. 

This is due, in part, to fascism's narrow definition as a state of being rather than a method of politics—one that is inherent to America, according to Jason Stanley in his explainer on "How fascism works." We don't need to label every American leader as a "fascist" to understand that eradicating fascism from America requires ending the American settler-colonial project itself. 

Jason Stanley asserts that America is in a constant struggle between liberal democracy and fascism, and this struggle has persisted through every presidential election. Though America has historically experienced periods where fascist politics were more dominant than liberal democracy and vice versa, Black folks in the South have consistently been targets of abject terror. America's liberal democracy has always harbored fascism as its whip, noose, truncheon, taser, rifle—wielded to motivate the South to embrace its liberalism, even as it maintains Blackness as capital. Therefore, relying on fascists—whether they dwell in the shadows or in the open—to scare us into a party or Left coalitional loyalty as a viable strategy to defeat fascism is a grave mistake. 

While elections may keep particular fascists out of office, America has pioneered modern fascism and exported its innovations in fascist technologies globally. It is, after all, the subjugation of the Black South through slavery, eugenics, and Jim Crow legal doctrine that inspired the likes of Hitler and the architects of South African apartheid. To stop the spread of fascism, one would have to stop America. Neither party is interested in stopping fascism. 

Because fascism represents a diversity of tactics intended to seize and retain power, electoral defeats are insufficient. Fascist politicians understand this. Historically, there have been few red or blue political leaders who have worked to demonstrably expand democracy by promoting rank voting or supporting an end to the duopoly. If the key to ending fascism is more democracy, then neither mainstream party can claim investment in its abolition. 

Winning this election may impact Trump's political legacy, solidifying him and the MAGA faction as one of America's greatest fascist inventions, but what his defeat by Biden in 2020 and subsequent resurgence reveals is that the role of the American president is not to eradicate fascism, but to maintain the spectrum between liberal "democracy" and the fascism America relies upon. 

Elections are forms of collective action

Mobilizing the masses to the polls around a Left coalition's approved candidate is not necessarily collective action. Elections are one of the most individualized political levers available to us, and yet, they are often narrowly framed to Black people as the only means of taking a collective stand. At this, I have to laugh. Framing elections in this way functionally abdicates movement organizations of the responsibility to actually organize our communities because it allows them to use mass turnout numbers as evidence of impact, despite the reality that these communities intended to vote in the Dems' favor anyway.   

If electoral victories truly emerged from grassroots collective action they would look different. Permanently organized communities would actually advance their own self-determined demands rather than accepting whatever the platform's politicians and organizations bestow upon them from lobbyists. When was the last time you went to a movement assembly to craft demands two years ahead of an election, set red lines that are communicated to candidates, and held those lines no matter what? Exactly. What is perceived as "electoral mobilizing" is not organizing, rather, it is organizations following behind an electorate that is following behind politicians. 

It is true that we must meet people where they are, but staying there for decades—or worse, drifting to The Right along with them—is feckless. 

Election myths the

The Masses, who are otherwise alienated from one another outside of contentious elections, is a major issue facing The Left. I don't want to erase the fact that Black Southerners live more communally than most. Yet, many Black people have also been indoctrinated into a strong belief in capitalism and live their lives in accordance with that belief. There's a reason Black-owned businesses have gained a level of acclaim in Black communities that worker-owned cooperatives have not. Individualism is the norm, and the yard signs, hats, and melee of artists performing on candidate stages may obscure that reality, but those of us whose needs are consistently unmet—those most vulnerable to the threat of both Republican and Democratic policies—will never succumb to these illusions. 

What else could it look like?

So at what point do we "on The Left" reconsider how our movements relate to the electorate? I have found the overuse of the terms "strategy" and "pragmatism" particularly frustrating, especially as folks call into question the patterns from electoral organizing that now permeate throughout and stifle our larger movement.  

The executive directors of multi-million dollar "change-making" organizations have become the enlightened despots who hold a monopoly on movement strategizing, with the power to deem anyone who questions their approach out of formation and therefore moving unstrategic. At the same time, these "strategic gurus" are not held to the same level of scrutiny. As a result, they are not held accountable to deliver on the promise of their supposed wisdom.  

I do not understand what undergirds this arrogance. LOOK AROUND! I don't know if anybody in this work should feel confident enough to pretend they know what they are doing, and therefore, I do not subscribe to the oft-circulated assessment that "The Left has failed" or "The Left is being out-organized." If nothing else, organizing is humbling work, and to do it means conceding that none of us is all-knowing, or equipped to set a blanket strategy for an entire movement. 

If organizations and their leaders are not even willing to humble themselves enough to discuss how to pivot their approach to electoral organizing and redefine the movement's relationship to The State, they will likely suffer the agonizing downfall that often comes with in flexibility, as observed throughout history—be it globe-spanning empires or powerful institutions.  

We are in dire need of true collective action, but I fear these legacy organizations and their antiquated strategies will not lead us there. They lack the political will to pivot because they are satisfied with "meeting people where they are," allowing them to operate under the same paternalistic dynamic perfected between the Black South and the Left establishment since emancipation. This Anti-Southern as antiBlack paradigm enshrined at the heart of this logic allows The Left to abandon the need to empower communities to carry out their participatory strategy processes and determine a path forward for themselves. 

They neglect the need to support these communities in envisioning beyond empire, the duopoly, cops, and prisons, opting instead to lend their legitimacy to politicians who in turn call their concerns and visions illegitimate and criminal. 

It is evident that, despite the veneer of large online followings, large national membership bases, and robust annual budgets that legacy Left organizations have, the power to mobilize the masses to collective action is largely yet to be realized. It is for this reason that we must not just look to the Black South, but deploy its rich, anti-fascist traditions toward revolution, unchained from the Civil Rights Movement's electoral victories as its limit. We have a duty to evolve. 

What would it look like to agitate folks into accepting the inheritance of this resistance? I think there is a critical need to recenter militant resistance and all other tactics should be in service of this tendency. No, everyone is not and will not be a liberation soldier—but those who encourage the election of the politicians working to kill the few revolutionary militants we do have are engaging in antiBlack, anti-Southern, and counter-insurgent sentiment. I hope that is clear.

Julian Rose is a community organizer, educator, and writer originally from Hartford, CT, and currently based in Atlanta, GA. His work focuses on Black Queer Feminism, abolition, and solidarity economy movement building. Julian’s political home is Endstate ATL. Other Atlanta organizing efforts he has been involved in include the Free Atlanta Abolition Movement, a Black-run bail formation, and Barred Business’ Protected Campaign.