For a People’s January 6th

Since the last time the far-right attempted to disrupt the peaceful transition of power on January 6th, only one thing has changed: they are stronger, and more emboldened, than ever. The center will do nothing to stop them. It is up to us.

by T.E. Moon

Credit: D Everett

First as a Farce

To few of us here today, this is a solemn and most momentous occasion; and yet, in the history of our nation it is a commonplace occurrence. The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

— Ronald Reagan, 1981 Inauguration Address. 

Ronald Reagan’s miracle—the peaceful transfer of power—is in fact the central pillar of America’s Constitutional Civil Religion. Yet, this pillar is entirely dependent on a strict, unwritten taboo: the absolute rejection of election denialism. You cannot have a peaceful transition unless the loser is willing to concede defeat.

For over two and a half centuries, this ritual has successfully served an invaluable function for the American state. It has produced a politics of stability and consensus-seeking, in which fratricidal civil wars and unprofitable instability are studiously avoided, and the stewing resentment over the ruling regime is consistently and safely channeled toward the electoral victory of the opposing party. Patronage networks are periodically disrupted while the underlying legal-property apparatus remains; no matter what storms rage above. The ‘system’ remains insulated by the courts and bureaucracy, not implicated by questions of political transition. 

Violence has always been an inexorable element of American politics—the annexation of Hawaii, white supremacist terrorism, mass protest, and labor strikes provide no shortage of examples. But American presidential politics, even centuries later, still jumps at the shadow of George Washington's ghost. Knowing the entire constitutional order rested on their compliance, presidential election losers—up to and including figures less inclined to value sanctity or principle, such as Richard Nixon—always accepted their losses, never willing to cross the line into outright election denialism. 

Compromise–Indeed, Harper’s Weekly, 1877

This restraint held even during the republic’s most fractured moments. In 1860, the Southern slavers chose secession rather than deny that Abraham Lincoln had won the election. In fact, they chose so explicitly because they acknowledged it.

In 1876, the violently contested Hayes-Tilden election was resolved through a cynical, backroom compromise that traded the presidency for the end of Reconstruction. Tilden never claimed Hayes’ eventual victory was illegitimate, despite the willingness of his compatriots to carry out violence in his name.

Even in 2000, when the physical machinery of the election genuinely broke down in Florida, the losing faction chose to surrender to a highly partisan Supreme Court rather than reject the system's fundamental legitimacy. Across centuries of bitter partisan warfare, the results of each presidential election were treated as an undeniable reality, no matter the victor. 

On January 6th, 2021, this tradition finally shriveled up and died. It happened like bankruptcy: gradually, and then all at once. By the start of the new millennium, institutional legitimacy had already eroded so thoroughly that the average American’s default political orientation was a mix of near-total alienation and performative apathy. Over the course of the 21st century, as the state repeatedly failed to deliver on its most basic promises, the American public truly lost faith–perfectly priming the pump for a figure willing to call the whole game a sham. 

Tree House of Horror VII, The Simpsons, (1996)

This institutional decay is structural and ongoing. The liberal establishment's instinct has always been to protect the hollowed-out norms of a dying republic, hoping that procedural fetishism will somehow save us from nationalist collapse. But the machinery is already broken. If the Left wishes to prevent the next inevitable nationalist takeover, we can no longer rely on a defensive posture. We must prepare a strategy of offensive mass mobilization. 

To understand how we reached this recent precipice, and why the public's disillusionment is so complete, we must trace the timeline back to the Presidential election held at the turn of the millennium, the first of a series of dramatic fractures and an excellent case study. 

The 2000 election demonstrated three things with pristine clarity:

1. The media possesses immense power to declare the "victor" and construct the initial political reality before the votes are even fully tabulated. In 2000, the networks famously botched this by prematurely calling Florida, establishing a sense of irreversible momentum for Bush. By 2020, populists had learned to fully exploit this media-politician dynamic. Trump utilized the media ecosystem to legitimize his narrative—whether relying on right-wing networks to explicitly amplify his denialism, or baiting the liberal press into obsessively covering his outrages. The end result? Giving the "Big Lie" the constant oxygen it needed to take root.

2. The detailed mechanisms of American democracy are opaque, ancient, and difficult to understand. The average American has no personal connection to them whatsoever. Nothing demonstrated this with more clarity than the entire nation waiting in suspended animation for weeks, their political future held hostage by the microscopic examination of "hanging chads" on Florida punch-card ballots. More than that, these archaic systems are palpably unfair, rewarding rural states with outsized influence in the Senate and Electoral College. The candidate who won the popular vote lost the election, and would again in 2016.

3. The partisan fix was in. Republican loyalists on the Supreme Court prioritized their own factional dominance over the maintenance of intangible concepts like “democracy.” The Democrats would not stand against their unapologetically biased efforts. Instead, they would stubbornly cling to the ritual: eagerly surrendering their concession to the Republicans like good little losers.

The “Brooks Brothers Riot” of Republican Staffers in Dade County

The electoral system muddled along for the next two decades without causing a major crisis. But the factions steering America's venerable parties struck one iceberg after another. The September 11th attacks sparked a period of vicious imperial terror, and American soldiers found themselves dying in occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

These wars, along with dozens of bombing campaigns in Latin America, West Asia, and Africa, were all sold through little but jingoistic racism and lies. Almost immediately, the newly constructed machinery of this global "War on Terror" came home to roost in the form of a war on domestic civil liberties. A spy camera was placed on every stoplight and inside every cell phone. The state became a privately contracted panopticon, watching us all for any sign of resistance–and selling the remaining film to marketing gurus.

Meanwhile, the structures of American governance spiraled into irreparable gridlock. While Congress became a graveyard for even the most basic social infrastructure, it remained a fixer for the interests of capital. The Republican Party served as the unapologetic vanguard of this project, ensuring the only legislation capable of moving through the gears was that which served the donor class: the massive tax cuts of 2001, 2003, 2017, and 2025, the steady erosion of the welfare state, and the bottomless, albeit bipartisan, spigots of cash for the military-industrial complex and the fortification of Israel.

When the Democratic Party briefly held the reins, this structural blockade was neatly laundered through a rotating villain strategy. The Democrats, no matter their raw seat counts, somehow always found their plans one vote short of passing. From the corporate-friendly watering down of Obamacare to the eventual death of Biden’s "Build Back Better" project, Democratic party leadership repeatedly avoided accountability by blaming arcane rules, rogue parliamentarians, and invisible norms for their failures.

The racist brutalization of Black Americans by local police was not ended. The second-class status of non-citizens was not addressed. But American crimes accelerated abroad, all the more fodder for speculation in the newly legalized gambling markets. For the Democrats, it seemed as if the state possessed a sudden, debilitating incompetence only when a bill threatened to improve the material reality of the working class.

This hollowing out reached its logical conclusion in recent years with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which formalized the destruction of state capacity under the guise of "streamlining." What remains is a state that omnipotently watches its citizens and violently protects its owners, but little else. Muskism par excellence.

As the legislature calcified, the Supreme Court abandoned the pretense of neutral arbitration. Under the banner of Citizens United, they effectively legalized the wholesale auction of American democracy to the highest bidder. As the years have worn on, the judiciary has embraced its role as the ultimate shield for the reactionary faction: systematically gutting the Voting Rights Act, overturning Roe v. Wade, and legalizing high-level corruption.

In 2024, the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States and Trump v. Anderson granted the office of the Presidency immunity from prosecution for "official acts” and refused to allow Trump himself to be removed from the ballot despite his manifest disqualification by the 14th Amendment. They had confirmed the clear message of the 2000 election, a lesson long learned by most Americans: the law was simply politics by another means.

The city of Atlanta out in force in 2020.

The public response to the decay over this period was a series of uncoordinated, democratic spasms: from the tents of Occupy in 2009, to the massive street presence of the BLM uprisings in 2013 and 2020, to the Pro-Palestine encampments of 2023 and 2024. The American masses repeatedly signaled that the consensus was dead—that they were frustrated, miserable, and unheard.

But these movements ultimately failed, and establishment leaders refused to seize upon their energy to reform the system, even to save it. Because the mass movements lacked a strategic vanguard or the stomach for genuine intimidation, they were easily ignored and co-opted by the very patronage networks they sought to dismantle. They were crowds that could disrupt traffic, but could not push a regime aside.

Despite our failures, the Right descended into panic. Driven by deep, reactionary insecurity, and fueled by the realization that the state's rules were increasingly rigged in their favor, they decided the ritual no longer served them. They watched the Left’s massive crowds fail to seize anything of substance and yet lurched ever rightward, as manifested in the Tea Party, the first Trump campaign, and, finally, on January 6th, and then Trump’s re-election.

By 2020, the right-wing internet ecosystem had long since achieved a total break with reality. The “democratization” of media meant radical nationalists were serviced by a decentralized web of online influencers, TV broadcast stations, and radio networks competing to monopolize their attention. The "Red Mirage" created by pandemic-mandated mail-in ballots provided the perfect aesthetic for conspiracism. So when Fox called Arizona for Biden, it was viewed as a high-level betrayal, and the furious Republican voters found plenty of grinning grifters ready to sell them the fantasy of Trump’s victory.

Fueled by QAnon myths and a visceral terror of the 2020 protests—instinctively identified by reaction as the embryonic democratic revolution—the nationalist base decided they would no longer tolerate loss.

At the center of this was Donald Trump, a figure whose personal dread of public humiliation and criminal indictment proved the perfect vessel for a nationalist base that had already abandoned democracy. Their shared desperation birthed "Stop the Steal," an ideological fever dream that sought to overturn the transition of power by any means necessary. 

Dozens of lawsuits were launched all over the nation, sycophantic politicians and Trump hangers-on spun fables for the frothing GOP base, and Trump began a grand campaign of firing his enemies within the Federal Government, stacking it with lickspittles. He took to intimidating political figures outside his direct control (such as the Georgia Secretary of State) to go along with his coup. 

He spent months attempting all this and more, but ultimately failed to secure the support of the congressional Republican establishment, his own Vice President, or the military high command as represented by those like Mark Milley. He had started too late.

The rickety gallows of the nationalist mob.

It all culminated with the rally on January 6th, the event meant to be the final kinetic push to intimidate Congress into overturning the election results and allowing Trump to remain in office. Thousands of provincial business owners and fascist militiamen flew into Washington D.C. with weapons in tow. They built a gallows. They marched to the Capitol, where the esoteric certification ceremony was taking place. They demanded the Vice President's death.

For a few hours, the state’s “special bodies of armed men” were routed by the sheer mathematical reality of a weaponized mob. The government was caught completely flat-footed; Donald Trump neither called off his supporters nor explicitly instructed them to carry out further violence, instead denying Congress protection from the National Guard for hours despite their public and private pleas for help. 

The crowd smashed the police perimeter, climbed the walls, and broke through the windows. They hunted Congresspeople through the halls as the representatives fled, only barely escaping into underground bunkers. The rioters breached the inner sanctum but found only paper and mahogany. 

The state was momentarily paralyzed, but the mob was a headless chicken. Despite multiple “trained” militias being present in the building, they lacked sufficiently robust tactical plans to hold Congress and capture its members. Further, Trump lacked the strategic understanding to ensure the success of his putsch, and found himself unable to crudely bully Congress and the military into bending to his will in the aftermath of his too-late purges.

But most importantly, the public was not behind him. Indeed, those infuriated by Trump’s machinations far outnumbered his remaining supporters. He lacked a democratic mandate or any legal standing. He relied wholly on the subset of Americans fully subsumed in the propaganda mills of the nationalist coalition. He simply lacked the support of the people. They would not stand with him.

No mass strikes or protracted guerrilla campaigns would break out to reinstate the President. He was outmaneuvered by his opponents, and he proved incapable of providing the battlefield vision his followers’ cultish devotion demanded. This was a mob dependent on an oligarch’s marching orders, and so they could only aimlessly loiter about before eventually going home once the Caudillo silently, then openly, surrendered.

The remaining period between the 6th and Biden’s inauguration on the 20th was marked by an extra-constitutional, unofficial triumvirate of Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence, and Mark Milley managing the country. The coup had failed.

The Next Coup is Coming

We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.

— Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025 (July 2024) 

The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer (1899)

The obvious, fundamental error of the liberal establishment is believing that, because the system held in 2021, it must hold forever. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. The underlying, unresolved material contradictions of the American political economy guarantee that the nationalist regime is structurally destined to attempt to break the system again—and perhaps even, this time, succeed.

What has changed since 2020, except that the nationalist coalition is more radical, more exposed to criminal prosecution, and more institutionally entrenched? The engine of January 6th was never dismantled; it has been retooled and is ominously chugging along. 

For decades, the Republican coalition has been methodically stacking the deck, accumulating structural advantages until the sheer quantity of bias forces a qualitative rupture in the constitutional order. They have captured the judiciary, relentlessly gerrymandered state and federal maps, and systematically broken the back of Black voting power in the South. Backed by bottomless funding from reactionary capitalists, they have instituted draconian restrictions on ballot access and laid the groundwork for coordinated paramilitary intimidation at the polls.

This is not mere partisan gamesmanship. It is a creeping, institutional coup. Once this quantitative capture reaches critical mass, the final tip-over—the actual, physical theft of the executive branch—becomes little more than a necessary leap of faith.

Standing in the way of this machinery is the Democratic Party. But the Democrats yet remain within the iron grip of a neoliberal center entirely unequipped for the moment. The Biden administration was tragically committed to playing by the rules of a game the Right abandoned years ago. The broader Democratic establishment offers the public little more than managed decline, hoping that institutional norms will somehow check a movement explicitly designed to destroy them.

While the national-capitalist bloc grows increasingly desperate to permanently seize the state apparatus and insulate its profits from demographic and economic shifts, the center clings to the delusion that "the adults in the room" will ultimately, somehow, prevail. That the short arc of history will inevitably bend toward “nothing ever happens.”

But the guardrails barely held in 2021. The regime was fractured—figures like Mike Pence and Mark Milley refused to cross the Rubicon. By the time the 2028 election cycle concludes, that fractured reality will no longer exist. The regime has spent this term systematically purging the hesitation from the executive branch. Russ Vought, Steven Miller, Pete Hegseth, and other Trumpists in the National Security State are scrubbing their staffs of traditional institutionalists and restocking them with vetted loyalists.

Mike Pence balked. Will J.D. Vance?

This institutional capture is accelerated by a deeply personal, megalomaniacal trap. Donald Trump faces the immovable wall of the 22nd Amendment. He cannot legally run for a third term—but relinquishing the presidency means stepping back into a crossfire of potential legal retribution and asset seizure.

Consider the sheer audacity of his most recent grift: establishing a 1.7 billion taxpayer slush fund pried from the public coffers by literally suing his own government. This is to say nothing of the staggering billions in raw estimates of public wealth he has extracted over his tenure. If a Democratic candidate, propelled by an infuriated base, promises to claw back that stolen money, are we expected to believe he would ever allow himself to be forced into a position of vulnerability? To be dragged into court yet again, made to suffer all manner of indignities in his dying senility? Cornered by these material realities, the incentive structure drives him to lash out like a dying animal.

Indeed, the danger is not merely his temperament but his structural position: shattering the republic is simply the most reliable means to keep himself out of a cell, secure his legacy, and get the last laugh on the suckers and losers who always dismissed him as a joke. The Republican base hates the Left no less than they did in 2021, and they remain eager to see our permanent destruction. Under these conditions, a willingness to break the constitutional order becomes a matter of political survival.

Consequently, the crisis of 2029 will not look like the farce of 2021. There will be no headless mob aimlessly wandering the halls. The next coup will only be viable because the far-right has spent the time since learning from the errors of its first attempt, sinking its teeth deeper into the state and civil society, and, worst of all, has been encouraged for all this by its voters, donors, and pundits. The preparation for this coup has been long, bureaucratic, and terrifyingly concrete. The regime will cast doubt over election results, maximally rig the electoral districts, and intimidate the Democratic base.

If the Democrats undeniably win, they will manufacture a crisis within the Electoral College, using loyalist state legislatures to submit competing slates of electors or refusing to certify hostile results entirely. When the inevitable legal chaos ensues, the captured Supreme Court will step in, halting the certification process under the guise of investigating "irregularities."

Should this trigger the expected mass unrest in the streets, the trap will spring shut. The regime will deploy a weaponized and radicalized ICE, the newly cleansed military, and a federalized National Guard to freeze the transition of power indefinitely under the unassailable banner of "national security." Trump will remain, or he will ensure a hand-picked loyalist secures his office.

What is to be Done?

Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace, et la France est sauvée! (We need audacity, and yet more audacity, and always audacity, and France is saved!)

— Georges Danton

The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, Jacques-Louis David (1789)

If the state is much more captured by the Right than it was on January 6th, the Left can no longer play defense and expect the structure to hold. For a decade, the broader Democratic coalition has mobilized under the banner of protecting the institutions. By 2029, there will be nothing left to protect. The institutions are the very weapons the enemy will use to execute the steal.

The liberal establishment will predictably hold vigils outside the Supreme Court, begging a captured judiciary for a legal remedy. They will fail. The Left must reorient its psychological posture entirely. We must become an offensive insurgency. We are besieging a captured state to physically evict the regime. 

To execute this siege, the movement requires an unassailable popular mandate. A neoliberal campaign is structurally incapable of providing this. The centrists, if they are the ones left to respond to the coup, will lack the vision to inspire the masses to throw themselves into the struggle. They possess zero willingness to marshal popular forces to displace the regime. Not only this, they have demonstrated an incapability of even marshaling sufficient voters to defeat Republicans in the first place. It may seem as if a centrist or even right-wing Democrat will be uncontroversial enough to avoid triggering the coup. This is delusion. Whether it is Gavin Newsom or AOC, they will not allow the election results to go a different way. Let’s not forget that to these forces someone as conservative as Joe Biden was perceived as an existential threat.

When push comes to shove, the do-nothing faction of the Democrats simply do not have the courage, organization, or will to stop Trump’s coup. They barely have the inclination. They will roll over like the useless dogs they’ve always been as the Republic is murdered in front of the whole world. It falls on the Left, and the Left alone, to save the country.

The prerequisite for success is a total political victory for the insurgent left against the centrist political leadership of the Democratic Party, culminating in an undeniable victory at the ballot box. When this is achieved, and the regime subsequently halts the transition of power, this left-populist ticket instantly becomes the legitimate government-in-exile.

To rally the masses and cohere the fractured radical Left, the movement requires its own "Project 2029." We must shift the political horizon from the limited, liberal fight for "affordability" to a maximalist demand for raw institutional power. The masses will not risk state violence merely to restore a neoliberal consensus; they must be fighting for a tangible seizure of the state. This, again, is not an empty wish. The masses are already struggling for a Democratic Revolution—turning their ire against the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and the other reactionary institutions of the state.

As a staggering debt crisis buckles the economy, as energy and climate crises shatter the basic infrastructure of daily life, and as the empire spirals deeper into unmanageable overseas wars, the apathy of the public will curdle into pure rage. Every new horror unleashed by a weaponized ICE will only radicalize the people. An insurgent Left must seize the reins—demand a total economic, social, and political overhaul, the ruthless criminalization of the Trump faction, and the systematic stripping of their power, their liberty, and their loot. Nothing less than a rebirth of the state.

The regime will break the glass and execute the final coup when they are backed into a corner by this furious popular front—when they realize that losing the election means facing absolute ruin and being held accountable for their crimes. The leftmost candidate capable of winning must channel this raw political energy until they have conquered the party and the state.

The crowds descending on the capital will be shielded by the ideological ammunition of a genuinely stolen election, and a clear roadmap for what must be done in the immediate term: Trump and his government must go, the Left and their government must come in. We will be, must be, defending the indisputable, democratic will of the people.

We must remain clear-eyed about the terror this confrontation will provoke. The regime will not surrender power voluntarily. They will deploy a weaponized bureaucracy, local police, and the military, equipped with live ammunition. Fascist militias will harangue us with increasing ferocity the closer we come to success.

Let me make one thing clear: we cannot outshoot the United States military in a pitched battle. Meeting the state on the terms of armed conflict guarantees the movement will be crushed.

We win through mass intimidation. History provides the roadmap, tracing a line of successful popular sieges from France in 1789 to Russia in 1917. More recently the “Gen-Z” Revolutions of the 2020s in places like Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka serve as stark examples. As does Ukraine in 2014. As will, hopefully, at the time of writing, Bolivia in 2026.

The strategy requires two concurrent fronts. The first is the Square: the decentralized, nationwide physical occupation of federal buildings, public plazas, and logistical chokepoints. Hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of bodies must flood the streets to make the physical continuation of the regime impossible. The enemy must worry that they will be quite literally overwhelmed not by force of arms, but by the sheer, paralyzing gravity of a populace that simply refuses to be ruled.

Protesters facing tear gas during a clash with riot police in La Paz, Bolivia, on May 18, to demand the resignation of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz.

The socialist Left, having participated in or organized many of the protests of the past decades, is uniquely positioned to coordinate the crowd. We have an opportunity to provide the people with much needed leadership, if we can prove ourselves to be as useful as we are capable of being. We have spent much of the past decades surviving police brutality and media harassment while others have sat out of harms way. We have experience. Now is the time to put it to use.

Yet bodies in the Square remain vulnerable to kettling, tear gas, and bullets. The Square only succeeds when backed by the absolute economic leverage of the working class. This requires the second front: the Strike. The labor movement is already laying the groundwork for this exact moment. By intentionally aligning union contract expirations for May Day 2028, leaders like Shawn Fain of the UAW are providing the working class with the structural runway to execute a political general strike.

Again, any such labor action must be fundamentally political. The lesson of recent years is that the political strike will emerge from the democratic revolution. The democratic revolution cannot emerge from the strike.

We have already seen the embryonic, localized flashpoint of this necessity during the 2026 federal siege of Minneapolis. When the regime unleashed Operation Metro Surge, illegally occupying the Twin Cities with DHS thugs and murdering protesting citizens in the streets, the sheer terror of state violence catalyzed an organic resistance. It forced a convergence of working class fury and progressive panic, culminating in a coordinated labor and consumer strike in solidarity with the mass protest movement. This is the concrete form of the left-labor pole.

The full city of Minneapolis standing against ICE.

But the Minnesota struggle also provided a stark warning: a one-day boycott, policed by timid business unionists too afraid of no-strike clauses to risk their own salaries, is vastly insufficient. 

The transit workers, the dockworkers, and the logistics unions must leverage their diminished strength to paralyze the American economy. Public sector unions and service worker unions must join them to render the crisis unmanageable. Government workers, teachers, and students. Everyone who can be persuaded, made, or pressured to join. This is not an empty prescription, but a logical extension of the orientation progressive unions are already taking towards 2028.

Crucially, this cannot rely on organized labor alone. They simply do not possess the unilateral strength necessary. The vast non-unionized majority of Americans must be roused by any means available into joining the picket line. This must be a ruthlessly enforced popular front. When the masses are brought into the struggle, so too will key sectors of leverage.

We must clog the roads, highways, airports, and government buildings. We must make it impossible to go to work, to travel, or for capital to flow as it had before. We must overwhelm the infrastructure such that even the hopelessly apathetic or deeply skeptical are compelled into compliance with our movement. We must make the continuation of the capitalist day-to-day impossible long enough to break their will, or we will fail. 

This is the only weapon capable of bypassing the military. The Pentagon and the Fascist militias cannot force the supply chains of the American economy into moving against the people’s will without mass slaughter, whatever their logistical prowess or supposed ideological commitments. By freezing production, the Left forces the loyalist elites to realize the dictator's grip on power is actively destroying stability, and more directly, their own wealth. 

America is a massive nation, and so our Democratic Revolution must be fit for the task. Washington, D.C. is the primary nexus of raw political power and is thus the most crucial terrain. As such, it must be our main focus. But it is not the whole country. Cities across the nation, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, must each be occupied by the people.

The protests and strikes must be truly nationwide so as to grind the whole country to a halt. The progressive masses have already proven that they are ready and able to do this. The width and breadth of the 2020 BLM protests (as well as the No Kings movement) are only glimpses of a much grander and inevitable future. We must hold out everywhere, as long as it takes, until the bastards finally resign, and surrender to the will of the democratic masses.

To break the strikes and the protests, the regime is forced into a terrifying corner. They must ask the military to slaughter its own citizens en masse simply to keep the economy running.

Historically, this is the exact moment when a regime's internal alliances shatter. These are National Guardsmen who have spent months casually occupying the capital, taking selfies with civilians and getting to know local Washingtonians. The National Guard or the MPD, whatever their faults, are not particularly loyal to the notion of going down as the hired goons who killed tens of thousands for the sake of an openly corrupt pedophile. When the order suddenly shifts to live ammunition against those same civilians, the moral fracture begins. But more importantly, the logistical fracture begins.

A paralyzed economy means supply lines fail. Will the U.S. military defend an illegal, illegitimate regime that is already collapsing? Will the highly educated officer corps? The sheer mass of the occupation makes the regime look weak and terminal. Confronted with a failing state, the military will inevitably split over the question of lethal force. There will be many soldiers who will question whether order might be better served by hitching their wagon to the country at large (and to the leadership of our Democratic Revolution in particular), rather than to the incumbent President. Their will to rule, if challenged by the undeniable power of the people and a breakdown in the chain of command, shall collapse.

In our hands lies the task of our days. Perhaps it is not the task you personally wanted, imagined, or predicted. There are many brilliant comrades across the Left with vital ideas for how to organize and build power. But I urge every faction and every organizer to recognize the absolute primacy of this specific crisis.

This is a unique confluence of material forces in recent American history. Not for fifty years has such a fleeting opportunity been presented to the people to seize their own destiny.

The regime is trying to steal it from you—not over some unspecified timeline, but right now at this very moment. This is what we have been organizing for. The importance of the remaining period leading up to the 2029 transition of power cannot be overstated.

If we win, we stand to gain an opportunity to position Communism as a true political pole in American political life. By leading, and drawing a clear line between the people and their enemies, we strengthen the proletariat and show the masses who the genuine vanguard for democracy is. To prove that, when we say that the socialists believe that democracy is the “light and air” of the working class, we really mean it.

Once the regime is defeated and the immediate threat has receded, the entropy of victory, as Mike Duncan calls it, will set in, and the popular front will fracture on the basis of a progressive victory, leaving an opportunity for the articulation of a truly Communist politics.

If we lose, we stand to sink into a generation-long national-capitalist dictatorship. We doom the world to American imperial violence, the American public to despotic, corrupt, and exploitative governance, and the planet to catastrophic environmental degradation.

These are the times. These are the stakes. Act accordingly.