The lotus growing out of the mud.  Photo credit: Sun Jiao [wikimedia commons]

The recent change of administration in the United States is sending shockwaves across the globe. Many mourn the harm that this administration is already inflicting and fear what will come next. This harm is real. We’ve seen and felt it before. At JTA, we are striding into the future, grounded in lessons from the past, resolute in our struggle for justice. We are armed with critical hope and multi-generational knowledge of how to resist oppression and push for just futures. This critical hope and knowledge will guide our fight against the forces that harm us and prevent immobilizing despair.

As one of our founders and current Executive Director José Bravo affirmed, it is time for us to come together to grow the lotus flower out of the mud. We must remember that our communities have experienced indiscriminate harm already. For many, the apocalypse has already happened. Moving forward, we are focused on stopping further harm and repairing the harm caused. We seek to mobilize and break siloes. It is time to build. It is time to double up on efforts to build the forces needed to fight back, to build what we want, not just play defense. Only relying on defense is a losing cause. For generations, our peoples have been developing movements that can sustain a long-term struggle for justice. The conditions for a social eruption are in place: racial and economic inequality, environmental and health crises, an abundance of experienced and motivated organizers, and organizations for social change that can convert a temporary eruption into an unstoppable tide of social change.

Of course, not everyone can fight back right now, and those who can will do so in different ways. Our struggle looks like many different things. Some are mutual aid workers responding to floods in Appalachia or fires in California. Some are cultural workers who preserve ancestral traditions that hold wisdom for our struggles and lives. Others are Amazon truck drivers who are forming a union. Our struggles also include Indigenous Peoples leaders fighting false solutions like carbon pricing and hydrogen hubs. We are stronger when we build solidarity across our communities, including the many on the frontlines of crises, such as immigrants and immigrant advocates, mutual aid workers, educators, first responders, healthcare and essential workers, and scientists under attack. Organizers, not politicians, are cultivating the lotus flower that will soon emerge from the mud.

Some need rest, some refuge, while others are ready to join and grow our struggles. We need to adapt to and embrace those different ways and paces of struggle. What is clear is that philanthropy alone cannot sustain our movement work and resistance to the growth of authoritarianism and those complicit in sustaining the status quo. Beltway groups without a grassroots base (who are often asked to speak for us), divorced from the realities experienced on the ground, concentrate the majority of organizing resources without exerting leadership and representing those experiencing the harms we seek to resist.

Graphic by Agitarte

Now more than ever, building a movement based on principles of democratic and inclusive organizing will shape whether systemic change is possible. As the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing assert, a movement built from the bottom up is a more powerful force for social change than concentrating resources in groups that do not engage the people.

Not all is lost in this world. 2024 showed a growing international solidarity movement unwilling to compromise on the fight for life and against imperialism. In my homeland, Puerto Rico, 30% of voters refused to accept the lesser of two evils. In Mexico, the electorate chose for their president a scientist who defends self-determination in the face of imperialist attacks. The fight for energy justice, food sovereignty, and a just transition continues to flourish and expand internationally. Coming out of the 2024 elections, it has become clear that the systems that govern our lives are failing us. An international movement of movements sharply focused on systems change keeps growing. We will keep nurturing it.

And yes, locally in the US there are still many of us unbowed, ardent, and energized to continue trans-local fights. We continue to see local victories from housing justice, rights to the city, Indigenous Peoples, and community-based organizations like Los Jardines Institute in New Mexico. Elections aren’t the only way for our movements to win. It is possible to win even against bad odds and in the face of repression. There are plenty of great examples of that. We will not wait for national governments to respond, and we won’t let them off the hook either. It is possible to build coordinated local, national, and transnational struggles for justice.

As policies continue to leave workers and communities behind, a just transition is key to avoiding right-wing populism. Trump’s populist rhetoric is full of empty promises. This narrative stokes divisions between identity groups to appeal to and manipulate a working class that has been left behind by the deindustrialization caused by neoliberal globalization, a political-economic logic of governing under capitalism that reduces barriers to trade by eroding the role of the state in safeguarding health and the environment. In doing so, neoliberalism enables exploitative profit maximization and environmental injustice. Further, neoliberalism seeks to diminish public participation in governmental decision-making processes, replacing real democracy with the rule of technocrats who portray the erosion of the state’s role and social safety nets as common sense, despite decades of obvious failure of this logic.

As people lose jobs, politicians who neglect to adopt policies to help transition workers into new jobs and create new sources of economic prosperity hurl the blame at marginalized groups. This is when the right appeals to voters by demonizing minorities as a way to disguise their betrayal of the working class and, with the help of some Democrats, touts protectionism as a solution to working-class economic issues. Deindustrialization and union-busting policies like Right-to-Work led to a decline in unions in key battleground states and other areas impacted by neoliberal policies such as the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Areas that lost jobs and local industries because of NAFTA were more likely to punish Democrats and shift to the right. White voters in areas impacted by deindustrialization were more likely to find Trump’s rhetoric appealing. The decline in unions in these regions helps explain this worker shift to the right, which diminished voter turnout for Democrats, traditionally reliant on unions. Not only has deindustrialization and union decline hurt the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party, but it has also hurt democracy and deepened racialized divisions in the electorate. While workers of color have slightly increased their unionization levels, white workers experienced a sharp decline in unionization. The declining power of unions has fragmented working-class participation in coalitions sustaining democracy and advancing justice.

Despite its deceitful appeal to workers, the right does not advance proposals to uplift the working class or communities impacted by deindustrialization and a transition away from fossil-fuel dependence. The right’s commitment to the working class is hollow pandering that masks a broader strategy to maintain power by any unscrupulous means available. If labor and environmental protections are removed, then technological advancements like artificial intelligence and automation will continue to put people out of jobs and deplete essential energy and water resources, all while the US fails to adopt policies to address job loss and subsequent community impacts.

Graphic by Agitarte

What helps us fight back against this right-wing shift? Unions matter. Unions have helped fight back against racist views and participated in coalitions to advance civil rights (although this wasn’t always the case). Communities and environmental groups matter. We saw that power displayed in the Battle of Seattle. The EJ movement matters. An analysis of the world system matters. Absent this systemic analysis and praxis, it will be difficult to achieve a just transition and environmental justice.

A Just Transition is essential to avoid the rightward shift among workers and deindustrializing communities. A just transition articulates a critique of capitalism because of its exploitation of workers while driving the planet to its ecological limits. A vision for a just transition proposes that it is possible to harness the benefits of technological advancements in ways that do not harm workers, communities, and the environments we rely on to live. This vision involves the notion that thriving ecosystems and economies are not mutually exclusive. A just transition means that decision-making processes must give meaningful participation to those affected by industry actions and public policies.

Democrats embraced neoliberal policies while failing to enact a just transition to address the hardships these policies caused. Major legislative efforts like the IRA were riddled with false solutions that maintained the dominance of oil and gas and allowed them to capture efforts to green the economy. In doing so, the IRA was flawed in its design but also in its implementation. In places like Puerto Rico, where major investments were supposed to rebuild the energy grid after the weight of colonial neglect and climate change crumbled the energy infrastructure, the Biden administration failed to implement an energy transition. In the meantime, disaster capitalists made their money while extracting knowledge from local institutions of higher education currently facing unrelenting austerity.

Democrat leaders have failed to adopt unapologetic stances on human rights. Everyone can see right through a party that is more interested in governing than in advancing a principled agenda. EJ communities were simultaneously expected to get out the vote as the presidential candidates left climate change unmentioned and sparred over who most liked fossil fuels (despite their unpopularity and the harm they have caused in environmental justice communities). Holding our noses through the foul-smelling road to vote for the lesser evil is not a winning strategy in a system that not only stinks but also has numerous consequential barriers to voting. A principled political agenda will not come without struggle.

The Trump administration’s attacks on marginalized groups and environmental justice communities are not race-neutral, and neither should be the counterattack. The economy is not the only thing affecting people. The right has ushered in a segregationist regime. The fight against these attacks must acknowledge and seek to address how economic and racial injustices interact. This is part of the tradition of environmental justice struggle, which has always been about environmental AND economic justice.

The right must not be allowed to capture and shape the policy debate. We have a role to play in the battle of ideas, and in that terrain, we cannot shy away from advancing our commitment to justice for all. That includes explicitly embracing policies that address the distinct issues of ethnically, racially, and economically marginalized groups—a longstanding demand of our movement. If we cede the identity conversation to the right, they will continue to use it to pit groups against each other, and they will defeat our struggle to address disparities across races and our fight for systemic change.

We hear calls for going back to a simplified, shallow focus on economic inequality. Environmental justice communities know all too well that there can be no economic justice without environmental justice. We grow the lotus flower out of the mud, and the mud includes spaces that disproportionately expose our communities to harm. Whoever wants to garner broad electoral support in an era of heightened extremism, authoritarianism, and polarization needs to have an unapologetic and principled commitment to just transitions.