stands 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 pro- duce the end goal. Process for writers is outline, characterization, sentence transitions; it’s dialogue, scene devel- opment, 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 proj- ects (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 cen- trist senators with progressive ones. According to the Center for Informa- tion 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 domi- nance”), and defeat the anti-Amer- ican left. Their reference point for the crisis they’re experiencing today is the 1970s. What was happen- ing around the 70s? Political power was shifting in the country because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimina- tion in voting. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 gave women the right to sue employers for pay discrimination. The Equal Employment Oppor- tunity 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
Project 2025 closes the door for artists to make a living if they create any content that doesn’t perpetuate white cultural hegemony.
PHOTO BY HECTOR ZAVALA I ’ve been listening to the 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 Dem- ocratic party may fail to bring mean- ingful change, it’s possible to organize communities around progressive poli- cies 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 under- 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 Demo- cratic party’s willingness to support meaningful social
didn’t transform our white suprem- acist country into a beacon of equality, they did represent struc- tural 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 Founda- tion 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 vio- lence 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
THE 2024 ELECTION & ARTISTIC FREEDOM
BY EMILE SUOTONYE DEWEAVER PHOTO BY GORDON ALLEN
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in dance FALL 2024 20
FALL 2024 in dance 21
In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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