This is it, friends. No turning back. The elections are finally here, and we are preparing for every possible outcome. You should, too.
Listen, our political system has given us all the reasons in the world to cynically scoff when pundits or canvassers, or anxious friends and family members, tell us this could be “the most consequential election in our lifetime,” but it’s possible that everyone is right here to some degree. Two things can be true at the same time: Our corporate-captured, duopolistic “democracy” is worthy of all the righteous scorn it has trained us to feel, and things can still get a lot worse.
That’s what immigrant residents and immigrant-justice organizers in Baltimore explained to me and Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernández of Belly of the Beast in this collaborative report we published last week. “My community is so afraid, saying that if Donald Trump wins, they’re going to leave the country,” Lucia Islas, president of Comité Latino de Baltimore, told us. “They are afraid. They don’t want to be here. Even professionals—they say, ‘If he wins, I’m leaving…’”
That’s what three veteran railroaders explained to me when I spoke to them on Working People about how workers in the rail industry are approaching the election after President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress infamously blocked them from striking two years ago. “I don’t think what Biden did to us in 2022 is even a thought at this stage of the game, because of the threat from Donald Trump,” Hugh Sawyer, a locomotive engineer in Atlanta, told me. “Forget about our pathetic problems in the rail industry… We’re talking about the theoretical dismantling of this country if Donald Trump gets elected.”
Two months after Biden and Congress broke the rail strike and forced workers to accept a contract that did not address the serious issues putting them, our supply chain, and our communities at hazard, railroaders’ worst nightmare came true in East Palestine, Ohio. From the moment a Norfolk Southern ‘bomb train’ derailed in East Palestine on Feb. 3, 2023, traumatized and chemically exposed residents became another political football to be kicked around by Republicans, Democrats, and the media.
Like in 2020, the majority of voters in this part of Ohio and Pennsylvania will likely vote for Donald Trump in 2024, though plenty have given up on the whole system. In this on-the-ground documentary report, we went to East Palestine to speak with residents face to face, deep in the heart of so-called “Trump Country,” and what we found is a stark reminder that partisan politics haven’t helped this poisoned community, and that working-class people have way more in common than corporate media and corporate politicians want us to believe.
I hope, more than anything, that people take that message to heart this week. “Don’t listen to all the mainstream media,” Chris Albright, a resident of East Palestine, said to me when we were sitting on his doorstep. “Go talk to your neighbors. Go talk to your friends. Go talk to people in your community. You’ll find out that the differences that [mainstream media] is pushing down our throats, and the political parties are pushing down our throats… to divide us are not true.”
What we are about to find out is if people in this country are ready and willing to allow themselves to be further divided and further convinced that their fellow workers and neighbors are the enemy. Trump and right-wing media have masterfully exploited people’s real pains and anxieties, captured their attentions, and shaped their worldviews to this end. As I wrote in this deeply personal piece, “the only thing more frightening than the view of the world as seen through the Trumpian lens is the prospect of a society ruled and supported by enough people who believe it’s all true and that the obvious and necessary solution is just around the corner.”
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