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Right now if you look at the Trump base, 63 million strong. The latest polls I've seen, that even though he's now being accused of being a racist and accused of having blood on his hands in light of this invasion rhetoric that helped to propel El Paso, his base does not seem to be crumbling at all. In fact, I think if you were to do a cold-blooded analysis, which is rarely done in this country, you might come to the conclusion that in some ways the base to the right of the leaders. I think oftentimes some of my friends on the left, they act like if you get rid of Fox News, people will stop being right-wing in this country.
MARC STEINER: Right, right.
GERALD HORNE: I wish it were that simple. And so, that also underscores the uphill climb that we have in terms of beating back what could only be called a neo-fascist wave, because it reminds me of the 1930s when you had the New Deal under FDR. Then those to their left, say the Communist Party, they were called New Dealers in a hurry. Now I think today, you have the neo-fascists who are moving step by step, packing the courts, shredding the safety net, cutting taxes on the wealthy. Then you have the fascists in a hurry such as the ones going to El Paso and start massacring people. This is something that I'm afraid we're going to have to come to grips with.
MARC STEINER: Let's talk about, before we have to conclude, what coming to grips what that means? I too sometimes when I think about this and interview and write about this and work on these things, can let myself fall into pessimism. That we're in trouble here. When you just said, and what you said, 63 million Americans backing Trump that's the majority of white people in this country we're talking about politically backing Donald Trump.
GERALD HORNE: The right-wing has won the white vote steadily for the last half century. That's before Fox News, by the way.
MARC STEINER: Way before Fox News.
GERALD HORNE: Right.
MARC STEINER: The only thing that I remember ever putting a blunt in that in my own work in the '60s was down to earth, hard work of organizing in poor white communities that made alliances with black communities and Native communities and Latino communities, like in Chicago and other places with Young Patriots. But these are small examples of things that have happened, or Fannie Lou Hamer taking former Klansmen and putting them into her co-op work in Mississippi. Those things worked and they really were, but that had to do with this common struggle. The unions had a role in that as well, but we don't have that now. None of that. Then, you have mostly liberal, moderate Democrats, moderate Democrats and these very conservative right-wing Republicans, which is the world we're caught in. Are there strategies from the past that speak to us about what we need to think about doing to confront all of this?
GERALD HORNE: Well, we faced a similar dilemma in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s when Ronald Wilson Reagan vetoed the Conference of Anti-apartheid Act during his reign from 1980 to 1988 and spoke very sympathetically about neo-fascism and apartheid in South Africa, in Pretoria. Of course we relied very heavily on unions. We had relied very heavily on students. We relied very heavily on the black community to push back against this pro-apartheid policy. Ultimately we prevailed because Congress overturned his veto and the Anti-Apartheid Act was enacted, which was a huge leap forward in terms of bringing the first democratic elections to South Africa by 1994.
It seems to me that in addition to understandably and justifiably this concern about the elections of 2020, we also need to be concerned about the mass movements that oftentimes propelled the candidates, particularly those who see themselves as being the anti-Trump coalition. That would once again include unions, students, and the black community, and I would now say the Latinx community because there's a lot of energy right now in the Latinx community in light of El Paso, understandably and justifiably. The positive aspect amongst many of this community are the organic connections to Latin America, particular to the government of Mexico City under Lopez Obrador who's been walking softly with regard to a confrontation with Mr. Trump, which I wholly and fully understand. But this latest outrage might be the prelude to opening more doors in Mexico City, which would be a game changer.
MARC STEINER: Well, this is fascinating just because I think the perspective of history you're bringing it here, especially the international aspects of history, the international aspects of the struggle for human rights and the struggle to end slavery and segregation is something we don't think about it, nor do we put together with a struggle here in this country and how these things are interconnected. Unless we do it in very narrow ideological ways, it's not really seen as how impactful it was on the world we're in.
Before you have to run, just on a closing note, you look at the movements we have in this country from the young congressional representatives and young people elected all over this country, new voices in city councils and state legislators. You see a kind of a bubbling up of a new union movement from the very bottom that's taking place. Sometimes I'm not sure how powerful it is, but I'm watching it grow and the resistance in the black community, the resistance in the Native community. You can let yourself become pessimistic that all is lost, but there is a movement growing in this country that has a different vision of who we are as a people and as a nation. Do you have any sense of what that future might be? I know you're not prescient. None of us are prescient, you know? But, I meanBecause they do, they're the ones where we hold the hope that something's going to happen.
GERALD HORNE: Well, part of the good news, ironically enough, is the reinvisioning of the past. And I see this in particular in the people in Native American Studies who are becoming much more vigorous in protesting what they correctly refer to as settler colonialism. A term that is largely absent from conversations and discourses even on the US left. If you're not invoking the term of settler colonialism, you cannot begin to understand how we've reached the precipice of disaster, which is we're just where we're now standing.
Like yourself, I too am not pessimistic in light of these movements. I'm particularly heartened by the rise of the Climate Change Movement, the Sunrise Movement in particular because I think what it portends is a kind of mass action. That is to say, disruptive mass action, which you also had in terms of felling F-E-L-L-I-N-G both Jim Crow and apartheid. For example, in my book on Southern Africa, I talk about how you had aerial freedom rides. That is to say, that anti-apartheid activists, they flew planes into illegally-occupied Namibia, southwest Africa, then under illegal South African occupation. They refused to get visas and dropped leaflets, almost crashed, but it was that kind of novel strategy and tactic that ultimately won the day. When I see the Sunrise Movement, I envision activists in the mold and the mode of the aerial freedom riders.
MARC STEINER: That's really just fascinating. Gerald Horne, I wish we had more and more time. We don't, but glad you were in Baltimore. Glad we're doing this face to face. Thank you so much for your work and your thoughts. I look forward to doing this much more.
GERALD HORNE: Thank you.
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