Rebellion and Reaction: behind the attack on Critical Race Theory

by Justin Akers Chacón · Published December 14, 2021 · Updated December 27, 2021

The orchestrated attack on critical race theory (CRT) is one facet of the racist and reactionary response to the decade-long Black Lives Matter struggle and the tremorous uprising of the summer of 2020. The surges of protest and revolt, taking distinct and elaborating forms since the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, have grown in size, scope, and militancy. These movements have shifted anti-racist class politics and consciousness to the left, culminating into abolitionist cadence at its most organized and advanced points. Over one year on, the unified call for radical justice has been countered by the foul, cacophonous, and rage-induced dysphoria of the rattled ranks of the reactionary right.

The denunciatory campaign against CRT has been artificially manufactured, funded, and amplified through rightwing media networks. This shows both of its primary elements: its top-down and power-driven character; and its capacity to energize the bases of petty-bourgeois reactionaries and racists given far right ideological coherence and articulation through Trumpism.

While the superficially arranged and overtly white-nationalist character of the anti-CRT movement may appear to be taking place independently or divorced from the functioning of the US political economy, it is not. Rather, reactionary movements tend to work in conjunction with the operations and interests of the state and the capitalist system, especially when faced with threats or challenges to the status quo. Political reaction in this context can be defined as the organized rightwing, cross-class opposition to social movements of the working class and the racially oppressed that can impact or potentially transform existing social relations between capital and labor. Reactionary movements in the US have historically taken shape in authoritarian and often violent response to surges in racial class struggle; and this time is no different.

The machine-like reaction against racial class struggle works in service of the US state and the capitalist class that it serves. The US state is inherently a rightwing entity; the product of ongoing territorial conquest and colonization, a bureaucratic vehicle for enacting and enforcing policies of labor control and exploitation, and most significantly for the purpose of this argument—for repressing and disciplining the most oppressed and disenfranchised segments of the working classes when they rebel against their social conditions.

The political character of the state reflects the ideological hegemony of capital, which even with fractured expressions is united in the singular need to preserve the class structure as is—with them at the top and the servile classes contained in their appropriate stations. Existing class relations in the US embed racial oppressions that can be leveraged to increase the rate of exploitation of working class people of color. They have been crafted since the inception of the US nation in order the maximize exploitation in each epoch, and continue to serve as an essential function of how capital accumulation takes place. When threatened by resistance or rebellion—reaction goes on the counter-offensive—pushing back across physical and ideological planes.

The machine-like reaction against racial class struggle works in service of the US state and the capitalist class that it serves.

The attack on CRT is a tangent of the multiplanar reaction to racial class struggle. it’s also a calculated measure that works seamlessly through the state, exploiting the advanced decay and non-opposition of US liberalism (expressed by the Democratic Party) to attacks from the Right. Democratic Party officials, from those elected to municipal school boards to state and federal legislators and executives, are the only positioned force within the echelons of the state capable of opposing rightwing reaction at its vectors of multiplication and amplification. Instead of presenting a coherent or united opposition, they are instead complicit through silence and abdication. This lack of a substantial leftwing, class-based opposition to the well-placed and funded rightwing that operates hand-in-glove with the state allows the cyclical generations of reaction to achieve their objectives, and along the way become comfortably established within the architecture of governance and fortified class rule.

Therefore, the opposition can only come from social movements, unions (especially within education), and leftwing and anti-racist organizations, which have not yet organized any formidable or substantial opposition in defense of CRT and anti-racist education. Despite this political imbalance, the abolitionist struggle that forced out the big questions of the racial character of the state and ruling class structure, does not have to be crashed over by the latest regrouping effort of white supremacist movement in the service of state and capital. For this to happen, there will need to be organized resistance and abolitionist counteraction to the reactionary and white supremacist movement at all points of its manifestation.

Popular memory of unfinished revolution

The popular memory of abolitionism—the revolutionary conviction to topple and pulverize the utmost and enduring infrastructures of racial class oppression—lives on in the liberatory aspirations of the oppressed. The overthrow of racial enslavement, the dismantling of the most egregious legal architecture of racial class subjugation and dehumanization known as segregation, and the neoliberal tokenized and minoritized diversification of executive boards, legislatures, police departments, and school administrations (through the promotion of conservative, middle-class people of color) have done little to ameliorate the fundamental violence of racial capitalism and its deformative structural impacts on the working classes of color. Even incremental reform to replace or update historically racist school curriculum with multicultural additions or addendums, and the proliferation of academic versions of individualized wokeness have not transformed public education into a vehicle for justice or freedom for the majority working classes. Recurring episodes of rebellion and the persistent and the intractable defiance of freedom movements through the last several decades give testament to that. The popular memory of unfinished revolution situates the most recent wave of abolitionist struggle against the very pillars of the capitalist system.

The most recent expressions of the BLM-inspired abolitionist movement have reinvigorated and registered a reckoning with past and the unfinished revolution in both symbology and the substance of racial class rule. For instance, more than 90 of the 800 Confederate Statues nationwide were torn down or removed as part of or the result of the protests of 2020, while at least 40 statues of Christopher Columbus and Spanish military and missionary colonizers have been taken down. Even the mythologized figure of slave owner Thomas Jefferson has been removed in some quarters.

Beyond the battle of memory, the abolitionist struggle has also expanded into campaigns of structural transformation, including the call to defund and abolish police departments; remove police from schools; increase, require, or create ethnic studies programs at all educational levels; close prisons, and shift the public resources towards reparative needs for communities of color. It has resonated into fraternally-aligned campaigns to abolish other sets of policing agencies that work in tandem to target black and brown transnational migrants and refugees: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Border Patrol, detention centers, and the militarized border wall. The struggle against the repressive apparatuses of the state pit the social movements directly against the mechanisms of capital accumulation. This can explain why the forward surges of abolitionism have been met by state repression and violence, and aligned white-supremacist social violence. Nevertheless, the persistence of abolitionism as an evolving liberatory concept presses forward as the exclamation point at every phase of rebellion against racial capitalism.

The persistence of abolitionism as an evolving liberatory concept presses forward as the exclamation point at every phase of rebellion against racial capitalism.

This struggle has spread in proximation within the state education system, with the far-right targeting CRT. Critical race theory is being singled out as an opaque ideology that is somehow being mystically conveyed to school children as part of the motion of the anti-racist struggle that has been happening in the streets. As a system of critical analysis of institutional and structural racism, CRT is an important component of the anti-racist toolbox; but only when it can be connected to or associated with the action of anti-racism—or racial class struggle.

Theory is a weapon when wielded

CRT is grounded in the notion that the foundational economic, political, and social structures of the US were built to facilitate the rule of bourgeois white supremacy; that even if mitigated, modified, or reformed through the previous episodes of racial class struggle, the same underlying and overarching class structures within political economy have been permutated into the present. These include the composition and functioning of the branches of federal, state, and local government; the laws; courts; education system; police; prisons; and administrative bureaucracies; which synthesize, ideologize, and operationalize the capitalist system with the means of production controlled by a self-perpetuating class of white bourgeois.

CRT as an analytical instrument that has multiple points of origins and convergence. Its most potent and disruptive interpretations have been distilled from the experiences and episodes of racial class struggle. The most foundational of these comprise Black radical and revolutionary thought and historical analysis, a canon that includes Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Marxists such as W.E.B. Dubois, CLR James, and Amilcar Cabral. It has been since been codified into an academic instrument of analysis which has been part of legal discourse and education studies for decades, especially popularized by the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and numerous others. CRT has also been developed as an analytical framework for the study of other racialized and colonized class experiences, including in Chicanx Studies and of Caribbean and Latinx people in Latina/Latino Critical Race Theory, or “LatCrit.”

The applicability of CRT finds relevance and meaning when mass movement in the streets force a radical social and historical reckoning into the public and political sphere and is explicitly directed at both the historical representations and material sites and expressions of ongoing racial class oppression. This theory helps people understand, for instance, why statues of genocidal figures of the past continue to cast a long shadow of trauma and violence into the present; and serve as either a painful or prideful reminder for those gazing upon it depending on their racial class station within the white, settler-colonial, and capitalist national construct. It also can be used to explain the continuity of form and function between slavecatchers and modern day police; or the Klan, the Texas Rangers, and the agents of immigration enforcement in ICE and the CBP. When identified by the far-right in the context of abolitionist organizing and action, CRT becomes a wicked and nefarious weapon in the hands of the oppressed trying to slip their social constraints. This is especially the case from the point of view of the self-perceived beneficiaries of the existing system—the petty bourgeois foot soldiers of racial and colonial capitalism.

Social Polarization

The motivations of the far right mobilizations against CRT can be distilled into three aspects. The first is the penetrating fear that young, white people can be convinced that racism is real, that racism is a fundamental social problem, and that it needs to be confronted and overturned. After all, the mobilizations for Black Lives Matter included substantial participation of white and other people of color in solidarity, youth especially. Polls have shown majority support among white youth, even extending and dividing far-right households in some instances; which induces the angriest variant of panic in the white nationalist mind. A recent national poll showed the polarization in support for teaching anti-racist curriculum:

63% of all parents polled want their kids to learn about the “ongoing effects of slavery and racism as part of their education”
50% support teaching CRT; and 21% are unsure.
40% support restrictions on schools' ability to teach critical race theory.
More than 8 in 10 who identify as Democrats believed their children should learn about the ongoing impacts of slavery and racism, compared to fewer than 4 in 10 who identify as Republican.
83% of Black parents (10% unsure), 71% of Asian-Americans (5% unsure), 59% of Latinos (21% unsure), and 48% of other people of color (15% unsure) surveyed support the teaching of CRT in their children’s schools
37% of white parents are in favor of their children’s schools teaching critical race theory (25% unsure)
22% of all respondents said children should begin learning about racism in kindergarten

Second, they fear that any critical archaeology and exposure of the past will make white, petty bourgeois reactionaries like themselves and their predecessors complicit in the racial class oppression, exploitation, and settler-colonial violence that the US nation-state was founded upon and perpetuated into new forms each generation. The third aspect—and perhaps the most terrifying for the Right—is that anti-racist conditioning will contribute to further protest movements, class struggle, and the fundamental questioning and rejecting of US institutions; like that which we are seeing emerge from the most recent upsurge of the abolitionist movement.

Since the anti-CRT ideologues can neither dematerialize history and popular memory, nor can they counter the narrative and lived experiences of people of color enduring myriad forms of state violence and structural under-development in each generation; they rely on what they do best: to fan the flames of rage and indignance of white nationalist sensibility, and move anger into action. More specifically, this refers to a highly motived far right subgroup that accounts for less than 10 percent of the population, has direct support from the rightwing of the ruling capitalist class, and growing influence over larger sections of the “traditional Right”.

The impact of the anti-racist class struggle on public consciousness leads this machine of reaction to turn towards educational repression under the dubious banner of “parents’ rights”; not as a measure of countering leftwing ideas inside the classroom—but rather to defend and affirm the existing status quo of white nationalism within the dominant educational mode of social reproduction.

Capitalism and Education

Part of this well-oiled and cyclical process of rightwing reaction expressed in education has been to create and maintain the false narrative of academia as a humming production line and repository of leftwing ideology. In practice, the capitalist state-structured operations within all levels of the education system generally mirror, reproduce, and reinforce the racial class structure. Despite the widely-used categories of liberal and conservative to embellish distinctions within the cultural politics of the professoriate, for example, the education system as a whole works as a generative motor within capitalist political economy.

Higher education plays a direct role in the production of capitalist theory, technology, and ideology; and it replicates the economy in the production and reproduction of social class differentiation based on access, resource allocation, and placement. As numerous studies have shown, K-12 education is also situated within and structured by the capitalist economy; students are sorted, given disparate levels of resources, and provided with differentiated curriculum and teaching methodologies based on existing geographies of race and class. Furthermore, federal and state governments, and individual capitalists and their well-funded think tanks and foundations have disproportionate power and influence (over that of unions and other class-based groups within education, for instance) to structure and implement policy within education.

The function of state education as an engine of social production and reproduction of racial capitalism displaces the possibility for the classroom to be a neutral site of ideological battle as the Right wants us to imagine. Rather, their campaigns are designed to buttress the existing order against the resonance of social discontent. While there are pockets of intellectual resistance that also produce critical scholarship inside academia, they can only work against the norm—not with it. Most knowledge production is either commoditized, esoteric, or otherwise divorced from any practical application that can serve as a catalyst for social change or to assist in popular struggle. Radical ideas that play a role in moving people into concerted action are transmitted primarily through community-based organization, social movements, or popularizing leftwing figures; a process that occurs largely outside of academia and schooling.

The Right’s notion that the state is a colorblind instrument that can be wielded by whomever operates through it; used as a generator or propagator of radical theory that can filter anti-racist and anti-institutional theory through the channels of K-12 public education; or that can produce and institutionalize radical theory at odds with the very nature of the state itself; turns logic on its head. School children are not taught critical theory or typically encouraged to think critically; rather the opposite is the norm–and that is the point. Reaction is the forceful reaffirmation of the status quo inside the institutions of social control and conformity; not because state structures such as schools are spinning out of control, but rather the world outside of those structures is what can become destabilized by class struggle and find resonance inside state institutions. It is the real, material struggle against the structures of racialized class rule that is leading a whole generation to question the legitimacy of the state of things.

Class struggle and rebellions of the oppressed mark the chapters of the US experience, and are the drivers of possibility—but are generally not recognized or integrated into what we refer to as public education. Ideas and memory of working class and oppressed self-activity tend to exist only in the lived experiences and oral histories of family and communities and class-based organization that has a vested interest in keeping popular memory alive.

If the working classes and oppressed populations were to take control over the structures of education and determine the character of their own education, schooling would inevitably develop in a totally different direction. Instead of being hierarchal instruments of discipline, conformity, and capitalist social reproduction; they would be transformed into the opposite: revolutionary freedom schools that develop curriculums for raising class-consciousness; teaching and learning to see, understand, and dismantle systems of oppression; engaging in the practicable study of history and culture as a guide for social transformation; developing methods for building community and creating collective solutions to social problems; and the study of capitalist political economy, which engenders the normative exploitation, oppression, privation, and inequality that exists—and how to build alternatives. For this reason, the capitalist class and the capitalist state keep a close watch and guard on education.

The Reaction Machine

The manifestations of radical abolitionist consciousness and direct opposition to state violence are now facing various forms of reactionary pushback. The state has increased targeting and repression of BLM-linked organizations and activists around the country, prominent leaders have been killed, fascist groupings have ramped up racist violence and attacks, and the larger social bases of the far-right are being mobilized to wage full-scale ideological warfare against the politics of anti-racism. The targeting of CRT is one avenue of this concerted effort, not because there is a clear-headed or academic basis for the scowl-faced mobs howling against it, but because it is something that can be associated with merely teaching anti-racism; something which upsets the otherwise hegemonic functioning of a patently racist system. In this sense, the suppression of critical race theory is the maintenance and perpetuation of white capitalist nationalism as official doctrine.

Far-right reactionary mobilizations against movements of resistance to oppression always carry over into the arena of education, not against real or actual established practice, but to assert rightwing anti-education as “official education”. More recent examples include crusades against “Cultural Marxism”; performative defense of the Eurocentric conceptualization of “Western Civilization;” racial paranoic catastrophism in reaction to Mexican migration and struggles for cultural autonomy being the trojan horse of “Mexican reconquest”, or “Reconquista”, of US lands stolen from Mexico; and virulent and authoritarian opposition to multiculturalism, bilingual education, feminism, transgender access rights.

The suppression of critical race theory is the maintenance and perpetuation of white capitalist nationalism as official doctrine.

Islamophobic federal policy targeting Arab and Muslim people also generated a frenzied racial panic among the bases of reaction, leading rightwing politicians at the state level to introduce or pass anti-Islamic and “anti-Sharia” laws in over 40 states specifically designed to target, surveil, and arrest people. While Donald Trump introduced the federal Muslim Ban in 2017, it occurred in the aftermath of the Obama Administration dropping 26,171 bombs on seven predominantly Muslim countries in 2016 alone.

The reaction against immigrant rights has also followed a similar playbook. In the aftermath of the mass movement of 2006 of marches, strikes, walkouts, and boycotts calling for legalization for undocumented workers, the Bush and Obama Administrations unleashed ICE and began an aggressive campaign of repression. Between 2003 and 2016, over 5 million people were deported. The machinery of reaction moved to fortify opposition to all forms of immigrant rights and access over this period, with the street mobilization of anti-immigrant groups across the country, and governments passing hundreds of punitive and restrictive anti-immigrant laws and measures across 40 states.

A final example of this reaction phenomenon occurred in the aftermath of confrontations initiated by fascist street movements of the so-called “Alt-Right.” In response to growing anti-fascist movements that combined leftwing and BLM movement participants, Donald Trump and Republicans in congress introduced a bill to designate any organization engaging in “antifascism” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” CRT is the latest phantom menace for the big-funding torch-carriers and the reactionary counter-intelligentsia to rally against.

Cross-Class alliance in defense of white nationalism

When liberal commentators mock and ridicule rightwing ideologues for their failure to intelligibly understand, explain, or interpret CRT without reducing it to a caricature; they are missing the point of the real threat embedded within this reactionary onslaught of the far right. The suppression of anti-racist education and maintenance of a white supremacist framework serves the interests of the capitalist class and state, as it has a direct impact on class relations through social reproduction, or racialized class formation.

The normalization (and repetition) of white supremacist concepts and representation in education are designed to install and maintain the parameters of white nationalist inclusion and exclusion. This conveys the notion of superiority and advantage for being part of the “white nation,” especially within the generational configurations of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. The process does the opposite for working class students, especially racially oppressed youth of color, which instead produces the internalization of feelings of inferiority, social marginalization, and cultural subjugation. The movement against CRT intersects with and reinforces this modality.

The history and current trajectory of racist reaction is rooted in a top-down, cross-class alliance between the most determined and invested sections of the racially class-conscious bourgeoisie and the activated ranks of petty bourgeois reactionaries that serve as their shock troops. This forms the bulwark of the white nationalist movement that has historically held sway over the racial-political affairs of the state, recomposing as a reactionary force in the face of racial class struggle. Donald Trump publicly signaled this for aligned sections of the ruling class when as president he condemned all forms of anti-racist education in US schools and issued an executive order demanding the revitalization of a white nationalist educational framework with the creation of the “1776 Commission” to promote a “patriotic education.” While other sections of the capitalist ruling class—and the leadership of the Democratic Party—are not filing into the ranks of the crusade against CRT, they are not publicly opposing it or taking any measures to defend the teaching of anti-racism in education.

In the current iteration, sectors of big capital use their class authority, their media apparatuses, and stacks of cash to launch a political campaign through big media outlets, transmit strategy and messaging through the arterial networks the far right media echo chamber; and on to moving far-right foot soldiers into concerted action at all levels at the designated time and place. In the case of fighting CRT, the reaction-machine operates through corporate media, far-right and polarizing lightning rods like Donald Trump and Tuck Carlson, and through rightwing state and local legislative offices. The activated forces on ground have then pour into local school boards to intimidate, disrupt, and coerce into banning all forms of anti-racism in education.

Top-down mobilization

Fox News, for instance, has served as the megaphone inside the machinery of reaction. As the flagship amplifier of rightwing cultural projects, its hucksters have railed against CRT over 1,900 times between the period of the BLM-led rebellion in June 2020 to June 2021; while also nearly 80 segments on critical race theory from March through June 2021 relating to one single school district in Virginia, what has been seen as a model for reactionary mobilization that has been parlayed nationally.

In concert with a “conservative intelligentsia,” or a wide array of networks of far-right media and think tanks brought into existence and convergence through bourgeois investments, mainstream access points, and a highly committed partisan audience. This machine vibrates into motion, finely honed after generations of manifestation.

By November of 2021, the reaction machine moved 27 state governments to either ban CRT or introduce anti-CRT bills, with anti-CRT mobilizations to school board meetings in at least 33 cities and counties nationwide. This has enabled the weaponization of anti-anti-racism, real or imagined. It has created space for the bases of reaction to attack school officials, unions, and educators at the local level; primarily people of color. In one case from Texas, it has been used to drive out a popular African-American administrator after allegations that amounted to him being opposed to racism. The principal was placed on leave by the school board (at which point he resigned before getting fired) after reactionary “residents” accused him of supporting or tolerating the teaching critical race theory in schools, anti-racist activism after the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd, and programs on equality and diversity.

The bans on CRT are vaguely worded to allow for aligned zealots to wage campaigns across localities, sustained by rich backers that fund networking operations masquerading as “parent-based groups” such as “No Left Turn in Education.” Rightwing school board members and administrators (often responding to allegations made by dubious “parents” or “residents”) are then empowered to conduct witch-hunting campaigns against educators who are accused of teaching anti-racism.

In one example, a teacher in Tennessee was fired after parents complained that he assigned the Ta-Nehisi Coates essay “The First White President,” and showed a 4-minute video showing a poetry reading against racism. After being removed from his job, he commented that “he’d never heard of critical race theory until he was accused of teaching it.”

The anti-CRT movement has also compelled the two largest national teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) to distance themselves from CRT. The President of the AFT, Randi Weingarten, publicly disavowed that CRT was being taught in K-12 schools, a capitulation that only affirms the rightwing narrative that anti-racist curriculum does not belong in the class room. The NEA also publicly retreated from a previously announced campaign to defend CRT the teaching of antiracism in the classroom. The cumulative effect of the coordinated attack is to have a chilling effect on teachers in all quarters, to further deform and preserve rightwing and white nationalist frameworks.

Squashing the potential for development of critical thinking and analysis in young people, silencing their memory and rendering them invisible and marginal, helps preserve a bleached past that absolves the national consciousness of the heinous crimes that underwrote the rise of US capitalism and the nation-state.

Fear of the Past

Reaction is always contextualized by a retributory fear of the past; one where the eternal victims remember and carry with them the accumulations of past violence and trauma into the present, and eventually rise to seek justice and redress. For the perpetrators of past crimes, guilt of the past does not express itself in contrition. Rather, it is expressed in an endless struggle to keep the past buried and the crimes hidden—and therefore the omnipresent results of past transgressions obscured in plain sight. As the state and its agents seeks to nullify the justiciable memory of the victims of capitalist nation-building, the latent and repressed memory of the past is unlocked and takes its most tangible form in movements of resistance and rebellion.

As a nation-state built upon the boneyards of conquest, the tenacity of oppositional memory in its victims carries forward multiple and over-lapping past imprints of genocide, slavery, settler-colonialism, and the perpetuation of racialized class exploitation. So too do these historical stab wounds weigh in the minds and memories of the perpetrators, beneficiaries, and enforcers of the violence at the heart of the US capitalist project. The onset of fear and panic in the face of revolt and rebellion of the oppressed strikes terror in the oppressor, who understand that the mindset of the oppressed is a subjective determinant that can lead to the end of the world as they know it. Expressions of resurgent memory reveal themselves in the demands for reparations abolitionism and in popular slogans such as “the whole damn system is guilty!”, “Landback!”, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”, and others.

Therefore, the war on memory in the present is fought to contain a lid on the troublesome past—which hangs over the reactionary imaginary like the sword of Damocles. The ghosts of the past are stirred into painful remembrance when class struggle explodes out into the open, and past reactionary violence begets the need for more violence of state repression to physically disorganize and demobilize bodies releasing pent-up memorial resistance, opposition, and force against the past artifacts and their descendant institutions. This occurs in tandem with efforts by the reactionary right to suppress memory and try to reestablish the intellectual hegemony of white supremacy and re-impose a mindset of powerlessness and subjugation within its victims.

In the sphere of education, the anti-curriculum of white nationalism and reactionary conservatism is the indoctrination that impacts the youth at all levels and that hammers down the confidence to resist. It is this standardized curriculum of erasure that is the assault on young people’s minds, self-identities, and sensibilities; that thwarts class consciousness, discredits cultural knowledge, and strangles the inherently creative and kinetic capacity for young people to use their learning as an instrument to overthrow the objects, agents, and institutions that preside over their oppression. Instead, it props up the norms of white supremacy, conformity, hierarchical domination, self-shame, cultural ignorance, and all of the various forms of educational, structural, and interpersonal violence and discrimination that inflict trauma on working class youth and youth of color within the dominant educational model. Because these attributes of educational social reproduction are embedded within the DNA of US nation-building, structure how capital is accumulated, and give shape to the existing, resultant social relations; the pro-capitalist Democratic Party is not equipped to offer opposition or an alternative.

The Democratic Party’s complicity

Noticeably absent in the frenzy around CRT are the representatives of the Democratic Party. As co-managers of the capitalist political economy alongside their colleagues in the Republican Party, Democrats are hamstrung in opposing or countering manifestations of ideological reaction that operate in defense of the existing social class structures of capitalism. In some ways, they are explicitly complicit in fueling the reaction. While campaigning amid the nationwide protests in the summer of 2020, Joe Biden made public proclamations of support for the police and chastised Black Leaders for supporting the BLM movement’s call to defund policing. While failing to pass any of his progressive campaign promises, he recently trumpeted his role in signing a “bipartisan” package of bills called the COPS Act that includes $139 million dollars for police departments across the country to hire 1,000 new officers. At the signing, Biden even quoted a member of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA), saying that the COPS Act helps restore a “sense of valor” to cops everywhere.

Democratic mayors and city council members across the country have been at the forefront of the pro-police reaction in the aftermath of the BLM-led rebellion. While some feigned support for demands to reform or defund the police, most have since shifted back into line and have worked to restore legitimacy and increase funding to police departments across the country. The incoming mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, himself a former NYPD captain, ran a rightwing campaign calling for more cops and railing against “socialism,” which he identified as the grave threats to capitalist values and “public safety.” He won the highly contested election by less than 1%, after receiving huge sums from rightwing billionaires, the backing of the state Republican Party, and with the full support of the Democratic Party leadership nationwide.

The Democratic Party can only move with the direction of capitalist political economy, and not against it.

As both producers and products of the class system, Democrats publicly navigate a tightrope act that posits them as an “opposition,” but only in the sense that they don’t actively join into the right’s attack on CRT—yet—while simultaneously not actively opposing it either. This is the existing modus operandi of US liberalism; which is to either remain silent or to sit on the fence while the Right champions and advances the issue. According to one journalistic report critical of the Party:

Democrats have not successfully countered this disinformation campaign nor accurately reflected on its history. Indeed, in response to charges of reverse racism and the subversion of parent rights and parental say, Democrats argued that none of the things criticized by Republicans are actually part of CRT. Clearly, these kinds of logical appeals are not working.

They cannot work because the Democratic Party can only move with the direction of capitalist political economy, and not against it. The vigorous ideological defense and practical re-funding and re-legitimizing of the state repressive apparatus; the inability to pass any substantive policies to ameliorate the conditions of most working class people of color; and the incapacity to resist the reactionary movements now in play are enabling the Right to turning anti-CRT into yet another unflankable issue in the 2022 mid-term elections. The right will bring out its forces, and the majority of the rest of the population will likely stay home, ensuring the triumphal and vengeful return to state power in the next elections. Yet, the future is still unwritten. The return of the far right to state power through reactionary mobilization like the current one against CRT can be stopped—but for that we will need to organize and repel the reactionary movement at all fronts, and push forward towards the completion of the abolitionist revolution.

Justin Akers Chacón is an educator, activist, and writer in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. His recent works include No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis, Haymarket Books, 2nd edition, 2018), Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2018), and The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border (Haymarket Books, 2021).