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Business Times
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Business Times
Americans aren't isolationist; polls suggest most support the US in ‘taking the lead'
On the eve of the US attack on Iran's nuclear military sites, much of the discussion in Washington focused on the opposition to the move by members of the neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party. These isolationists argued that a new US military intervention in the Middle East would prove to be costly in terms of US military and economic interests, leading to increasing petrol prices, rising inflation and perhaps even World War III. They also accused Israel of trying to draw the US into its war with Iran. Leading right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson and former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon warned US President Donald Trump that his political base is dominated by a majority of anti-interventionists who would oppose his attempt to embroil in the US in the Iran-Israel war, and that they would see it as a betrayal of the America-First agenda. Some pundits speculated that this supposed opposition from Trump's own supporters would pressure him to not attack Iran. It did not. In retrospect, it seems the warnings by Carlson and Bannon were based on an inaccurate reading of the political map, both in terms of views of the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement and the general US public. To put it in simple terms, most Americans – including staunch Trumpists – are not isolationists. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up The polls are clear on the subject. One such survey by the Ronald Reagan Institute, taken before Israel and the US launched military strikes against Iran, found that 90 per cent of self-identified Maga Republicans believed that 'preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is important to US security'. The same poll also indicated that 86 per cent of Maga Republicans view the security of Israel as important to the US; 81 per cent wanted to maintain or increase US support for Israel's military campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah; and 64 per cent backed Israel in carrying out airstrikes to destroy Iran's nuclear reactors. The poll suggests that not only do Maga Republicans reject isolationism, they are more hawkish and supportive of the US' role in the world, with 73 per cent believing that the US should be 'more engaged and take the lead' in the world. More specifically, a clear majority of Maga Republicans support responding with military force if a member of North Atlantic Treaty Organization were attacked. They would also back the US taking military action to defend Taiwan if it were attacked by China. The same kind of interventionist sentiments were also embraced by a majority of Americans. A Jun 2 survey by Beacon Research/Shaw & Company found that 'when it comes to international events', 64 per cent of Americans believe it is better for the US to 'be more engaged and take the lead', compared with 23 per cent who disagree. Among Democrats, support for being more engaged was 65 per cent, compared with half among Independents. The biggest supporters were Republicans at 69 per cent, and among them, Maga Republicans at 73 per cent. The bottom line is that while neo-isolationists like Tucker and Bannon know how to make a lot of noise on social media, their views represent that of a minority of Americans, including Maga voters. Isolationism may sound cool, but most Americans, including proponents of America First, still do not buy into it.
The Guardian
01-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
How to fight back against Trump? Look to poor people's movements
For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' is a grotesque nightmare. The proposed legislative cuts, including historic attacks on Medicaid and Snap, come at a time when 60% of Americans already cannot make ends meet. As justification, Maga Republicans are once again invoking the shibboleth of work requirements to demean and discredit the poor, even as they funnel billions of dollars into the war economy and lavish the wealthy with tax cuts. As anti-poverty organizers, we've often used the slogan: 'They say cut back, we say fight back.' It's a catchy turn of phrase, but it reveals that for too long we've been on the back foot. In the world's richest country, in which mass poverty exists beside unprecedented plenty, we're tired of just fending off the worst attacks. Too much ground is lost when our biggest wins are simply not losing past gains. Amid Trump's cruelty and avarice, it's time to fight for a new social contract – one that lifts from the bottom of society so that everybody rises. There are no shortcuts to building the kind of popular power necessary for us to shift from defense to offense. The task is a generational one, requiring even greater discipline, sacrifice, perseverance and patience. But as we consider the best way forward, the past offers clues. In our new book, You Only Get What You're Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty, we document insights from some of this country's most significant poor people's movements. As nascent fascism continues to metastasize, these largely untold stories contain some of the very solutions we need to prevent democratic decline and overcome bigotry, political violence, Christian nationalism and economic immiseration. Today, the historic demands of the poor – for safety, belonging, peace, equality, and justice – are rapidly becoming the demands of humanity. The hard-fought wisdom of the organized poor has much to teach all of us. We're reminded of the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Largely forgotten to history, NWRO was once the biggest poor people's organization in the country. The organization, led by poor Black women, regularly staged mass marches and demonstrations and held picket lines and sit-ins at welfare offices, at a time when the poor were subject to racist, exclusionary and moralizing policies. At its height, the organization had over 100 local chapters, a sophisticated operation that offered a political and spiritual home to over 20,000 dues-paying members. In 1971 in Nevada, where the governor was cutting the social safety net, the local NWRO chapter organized 1,000 women to storm Caesars Palace, the luxury hotel and casino, and shut down the main drag in Las Vegas. The protest turned into a muti-year campaign of civil disobedience and a federal judge eventually reinstated the benefits. These women were unapologetically militant and willing to take big risks. They were also clear that forging power required the less visible spadework of movement-building – including looking after one another through networks of solidarity and collective care. At the same time as the Black Panthers were feeding tens of thousands of children through the Free Breakfast Program (and provocatively asking why the government couldn't do the same, even as it spent billions of dollars slaughtering the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), NWRO created its own innovative 'projects of survival'. The historian Annelise Orleck writes that in Las Vegas, the 'welfare moms applied for and won federal grants to open and run … the first health clinic in the largely Black, and thoroughly poor Westside of Las Vegas. Then came the neighborhood's first library, public swimming pool, senior citizen housing project, solarization program, crime prevention program, and community newspaper, all organized and staffed by poor mothers and later their young adult children.' As the experience in Las Vegas revealed, the women of NWRO were organizers, caretakers and strategists of the highest order. They were also anti-racists and feminists of an entirely new mold. At a time when many women were fighting for equality within the workplace, NWRO championed 'welfare as a right', challenging the notion that the value of a human is tied to their ability to work within the marketplace and raising fundamental questions about how a society cares for its people. This idea coalesced into their demand for a 'guaranteed adequate income', an early precursor to the expanded child tax credit in 2021. Before this pandemic-era program was abandoned by both reactionary Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats, it lifted four million children above the poverty line, the single largest decrease in official child poverty in American history. In a legendary article for the 1972 spring issue of Ms Magazine, Johnnie Tillmon, the first chairperson of NWRO and later its executive director, wrote: 'For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women's Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it's a matter of survival … As far as I'm concerned, the ladies of NWRO are the frontline troops of women's freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women–the right to a living wage for women's work, the right to life itself.' Veterans of the welfare rights movement named their model of grassroots organizing after Tillmon. In 'the Johnnie Tillmon model', poor women, and poor people more broadly, are not simply an oppressed identity group but a latent social force with potentially vast power. Because they have the least invested in the status quo and the most to gain from big change, they are strategically positioned to rise up and rally not just their own communities, but the millions more who are one paycheck, healthcare crisis, job loss, debt collection or eviction away from poverty. In order to harness this transformational power, the Johnnie Tillmon model proposes four strategic principles, as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s: The poor must unite across their differences and assume strong leadership within grassroots movements. These movements must operate as a politically and financially independent force in our public life. The leaders of these movements must attend to the daily needs and aspirations of their communities by building visionary projects of survival. These projects of survival must serve as bases of operation for broader organizing, political education, and leadership development. The women of NWRO believed there was unrecognized ingenuity and untapped brilliance within their communities. Even before the organization existed, the tens of thousands of women who made up its membership were already leaders in countless ways: they knew how to pool their meager resources, feed one another, navigate treacherous government bureaucracy and protect themselves from brutal state-sanctioned violence. When such survival skills were collectivized, networked, and politicized, these women became a force to be reckoned with. The same could be true today. As the Trump administration intensifies its attacks on life-saving programs like Medicaid and Snap, poor and dispossessed people will not passively swallow their suffering. Already, in states as far flung as Vermont and Alaska, Michigan and North Carolina, we're seeing an upsurge of resistance among Medicaid recipients. But we cannot be satisfied simply with righteous acts of protest and mass mobilization. The question is how to transform our growing indignation into lasting and visionary power. The Johnnie Tillmon model is a good place to start. The Rev Dr Liz Theoharis is the director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and co-founder of the Freedom Church of the Poor. Noam Sandweiss-Back is the director of partnerships at the Kairos Center. They are co-authors of You Only Get What You're Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon, 2025)
