The new ‘Beyond Resistance’ initiative will elevate the concerns of rural Americans and the working class.
By Anthony Flaccavento
Beacon Media
My friend, Jack, is a hard-working man, a part-time farmer, and a mechanic who teaches at the local vocational school.
Earlier this summer, he was helping me finish up some wiring in my greenhouse when we started talking politics.
A Christian, Jack voted for President Donald Trump reluctantly, as he believes that many of the president’s words and actions are “reprehensible,” as he put it. His problem was that he didn’t see the Democrats presenting any kind of alternative.
“All they do is complain about Trump,” he told me. “They never say what they’re going to do to help the working man.”
Since Trump began his second term, millions of Americans have joined rallies and protests against his administration’s many harmful actions, all part of a national “resistance” taking place in big cities and small towns alike. I’ve been to several of the protest rallies myself in southwest Virginia.
One of the organizational leaders of the resistance, Indivisible, made its strategy clear in their “Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink”, which states in part, “for the next two years, ‘no’ is a complete sentence. This is a time for defense,” they advise, rather than “proposing our own policies.”
That pretty well sums up what I’ve seen of most of the resistance thus far.
But where does that strategy leave Jack? Or the millions of other working-class and rural folks looking for answers at a time of shrinking job markets, rising prices, family farms and small businesses barely hanging on? Where do they go and to whom do they turn?
As director of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, I believe that this near-singular focus on defense, on only fighting the fire hose of bad stuff coming from the Trump administration is a grave mistake.
There’s no doubt that we need to take to the streets, the courts and the ballot box to fight these injustices and attacks on our democracy. At the same time, however, there must be an equally robust effort to put working people’s concerns at the center of our fight and to put forward a clear, compelling and implementable platform that addresses the needs and grievances of working people.
This is why we have joined forces with Rural Democracy Initiative, Rust Belt Rising, the Center for Working Class Politics and others to launch Beyond Resistance: Reclaiming Our Nation for the Workers Who Build it.
The campaign gets going today beginning at 7 pm EST with an event featuring U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna along with several speakers fighting for rural people and communities.
You can register for the launch event here, and learn more about many other events and actions taking place over the next few months. We anticipate that some of those events will be in North Carolina and neighboring states.
Many on the left talk about people ‘voting against their self interest,’ but the truth is they support the candidates they believe are speaking to their concerns. Most people are equally or more concerned about bread and butter issues, about reversing the declining economic opportunities they’ve been facing for more than a generation than they are about this administration’s anti-democratic acts.
Whether a small business owner, a construction worker, a family farmer or someone working in manufacturing, these folks understand that the system has been rigged against them for more than 40 years. Their own struggles, and in many cases the shocking deterioration of their communities, is all the evidence they need to know that our economic and political system has betrayed them.
Is it any wonder that calls to “save our democracy” have largely failed to motivate people who wonder whether such a broken system is worth saving?
This has to change and that’s what Beyond Resistance is all about. This initiative will turn the resistance script on its head in two ways: First, by elevating the concerns, especially economic, of rural and working-class people struggling to get by. We’ll be doing this in a number of ways, from a “rural harms tracker” we’re developing to document the many betrayals of this administration, to helping launch pro-worker, pro-farmer, pro-union rallies and events.
We are also offering signs and social media posts that lift up the concerns of these communities to people organizing resistance-type rallies.
Secondly, and every bit as important, we’re putting forward a positive vision, backed up by concrete policies to address these concerns and help rural communities solve their own problems through better policies and targeted investment. As part of this, we’ll be lifting up “rural success stories” to showcase what’s possible, and providing well-grounded, rural-driven public policy platforms like the Rural New Deal, and the Rural Policy Action plan, an updated version of which will be released in October.
I hope you’ll join us tonight at the Beyond Resistance event. No matter your politics or who you voted for, I think we can all agree that when it comes to the working class and rural communities, we must do better. Yes, we need to stop the myriad destructive actions of this administration. But we also need to build a much better system — and we can only do that together.
Anthony Flaccavento is a small farmer outside of Abingdon, Virginia, and the Executive Director of RUBI, the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. This column is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.