Letters From the April 2025 Issue

Come Gather ’Round, People

Thank you for Daniel Bessner’s thoughtful review of Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson’s The Myth of American Idealism [“Empire’s Critic,” February 2025]. Bessner’s main criticism is not analytical but strategic: “The left needs to spend less time disabusing people of myths they no longer believe or organizing mass protests that go nowhere. Instead, we must formulate a more effective strategy for shaping state behavior.”

Declaring mass action ineffective on empirical grounds seems to presuppose that Chomsky and Robinson argued something like: “If there are x number of demonstrations with y number of people within a period of z months, the targeted policy will change.” Of course that would be absurd, and of course no one has ever proposed an empirical test like that. Their argument is, instead, that in a capitalist society, all the institutions of governance, opinion formation, and economic regulation are controlled by people serving a single set of goals: the formation and reproduction of capital and the promotion of a business climate and culture conducive to it. Those institutions function efficiently and do not allow significant opposition from within. The only way to counter them, then, is by large-scale, continuing popular opposition.

Is it premature to write off mass action as a dead end? The abolitionists, Populists, Socialists, early union organizers, suffragists, and civil rights activists were hardly unqualified failures. It’s understandable that one would be tempted to give up on mass action just after the masses allowed themselves to be bamboozled into voting for a charlatan. But ultimately there’s no alternative to keeping on trying to persuade the people. There is simply no other countervailing force.

George Scialabba
cambridge, ma
 

I agree with most of Bessner’s reading, including his conclusion that, pace Chomsky and Robinson, “Marches and publicity campaigns alone will not turn [America’s many revanchist] institutions around; only political—that is, state—power might.” I am, however, quite pessimistic about such an alternative long-march-through-the-institutions strategy as well.

To me the defining lesson of the 2024 US election is that even though both of the duopoly parties’ candidates pledged to continue to be enthusiastic supporters of Israel’s still ongoing genocidal actions in Gaza, when the vote totals came, in fewer than 2 percent of voters had attempted to register even a tiny moral protest by voting for any one of the anti-Zionist, pro-peace third-party candidates. The magnitude of such cowardice among the US public from repudiating both of the regnant, hardly “lesser evil” parties, made it clear to me that neither intellectual critiques, mass demonstrations, nor even institutional struggles within the state had any chance of challenging the entrenched ruling powers in the US so long as 98 percent of the electorate remained craven enough to make themselves directly complicit with genocide.

William D. Fusfield
pittsburgh, pa
 

Daniel Bessner asserts that the movement against the Vietnam War “had little policy influence.” On the contrary, numerous studies, such as Carolyn Woods Eisenberg’s recent Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia, detail how the Nixon administration constantly took the movement into account in making major decisions about the war. One example: Nixon admitted in his memoirs that he backed down on his threat to unleash a major escalation on North Vietnam, including the possible use of nuclear weapons, because of the Moratorium and Mobilization demonstrations in the fall of 1969. This story is told in the PBS documentary The Movement and the “Madman.”

Robert Levering
san francisco, ca
The writer is the executive producer of The Movement and the “Madman.”
 

Constitutional Machinations

I was pleased to read that The Nation was calling out the Electoral College as far back as the 1870s [“A Popular Opinion,” December 2024]. In his article, Richard Kreitner laments the fact that we have been unable to destroy the “decrepit piece of constitutional machinery” known as the Electoral College, citing the presidential elections it has muddied since the end of the Civil War. However, the role of that institution was even more nefarious before the war’s outbreak. The concept and design of the Electoral College established in the Constitution of 1787 was directly responsible for the stuffing of all three branches of the new central government with planter/slaveholder representation. The Constitution created and blended two forms of government, constitutional republicanism and constitutional slavery, the latter of which used the tools of representative republicanism for the protection and expansion of the ownership of human beings.

Michael Smiddy
plattsburgh, ny
 

Executive Removal

Eric Foner surveys the many precedents in US history for racialized removal, arguing that “none of them ended well” [“America Has Done Mass Deportation Before,” TheNation.com, November 25, 2024]. His crowning example is an account of Abraham Lincoln’s schemes to expatriate African Americans, notably to Central America and the Caribbean. Foner contends that the opposition of slave owners and Black leaders to the idea, as well as the president’s own epiphany on African Americans’ value as soldiers, instilled “a dramatic change in his outlook” with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. But Foner concedes that, just hours earlier, Honest Abe had arranged with a shady businessman to send hundreds of freedpeople to a Haitian island, a scheme he would revive that April.

So Foner hedges that Lincoln took “a key step toward recognizing” Black men as American citizens, and “[began] imagining the United States as a biracial society of equals.” As the awkwardly sudden but gradual transformation of Foner’s Lincoln hints, the White House had not in fact stopped trying to resettle African Americans, even as Black men donned blue uniforms. Lincoln negotiated with British diplomats through 1863 to send African Americans to what is now Belize and Guyana, and in late 1864 fought to retain his commissioner of Black emigration, despite Congress having rescinded the latter’s funding.

It takes no historian to surmise that Lincoln’s removal schemes failed, and no clairvoyant to predict that Trump’s will suffer the same fate. But Foner would have bolstered his case by avoiding a pat narrative of the 16th president’s “evolution” on race, and by stressing instead the panoply of obstacles that Lincoln faced: the resistance not just of would-be emigrants, but of legislators and lawyers, funders and functionaries, and host nations and hostile neutrals. One hundred and sixty years later, it all sounds so familiar.

Sebastian Page
oxford, united kingdom
 

Foner Replies

During the first two years of the Civil War, Lincoln promoted a plan, modeled on the views of his political idol Henry Clay, for coupling an end to slavery with monetary compensation to slaveowners, a gradual path to emancipation, and the voluntary colonization of freed slaves outside the United States. This plan was intended, in part, to gain the backing of slaveowners for emancipation.

Once he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, this plan became moot. The proclamation was immediate, not gradual; said nothing about colonization (indeed it assumed Black people would remain in the country, where they would “labor faithfully for reasonable wages”); and made no provision for payment to owners to compensate them for the loss of their human property. Lincoln did mention colonization once or twice later in the war but not publicly, as it was no longer part of a plan of emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, without colonization, compensation, or gradualism, was now his plan for ridding the country of slavery.

Eric Foner
new york city