American democracy is under attack with a speed and scope we’ve not seen before in our lifetime. What we do next will determine the course of history.
Even an abbreviated catalogue of what we’re up against shocks the conscience: voter suppression, election interference, the courts removing longstanding precedents and overturning our rights, dark money flooding our elections, book banning, the whitewashing of history, the takeover of educational institutions, hateful rhetoric and policies by reactionary rightwing leaders targeting immigrants, women, LGBTQI+ persons, Jews and Muslims, a terrifying insurrection that attempted to accomplish by violence what could not be won at the ballot box. What we are seeing now is the result of a decades-long campaign to entrench “minority rule” and impose a regressive agenda upon the American people.
Journalist Ari Berman explains that as America’s population and its voters have grown less white and more multiracial over the last several decades, white, reactionary conservatives have leveraged anti-democratic features within American democracy, like the filibuster and the Electoral College, to secure their power.[1] Their progress thus far is indisputable, but their victory is not inevitable.
Against this rising movement to take back America, “we, the people” must become both the bulwark and catalyst of democracy. We must protect the democracy we have, while we demand the democracy we need; a democracy where, finally, all people — no matter their race, heritage, language, income, age, gender, physical ability, or ZIP code — can fully participate and realize their constitutional rights and freedoms.
This is a mir zaynen do moment.[2]
The Workers Circle is a national, secular, Jewish social justice organization founded by Eastern European immigrants who came to the United States fleeing autocracy and persecution, and seeking democratic freedoms at the turn of the 20th century. That history drives our work for an inclusive democracy and human equality today.
We have been working in partnership with Reconstructing Judaism to offer an ongoing model for sustained discussion and strategic action for our democracy called Democracy Circles. You gather the people you know, and we’ll provide guidance, evidence-based resources and impactful action opportunities. Democracy Circles gather and act at a pace and in a way that works for them. Importantly, Democracy Circles think together, deepening engagement with one another and our values.
At this decisive hour for our nation and its people, all of us at the Workers Circle are grateful to be responding with you to that great Jewish moral imperative, “Do not stand idly by” (Leviticus 19:16).
Voters in almost half the country will face new voting restrictions in the upcoming general election.[3] These voter suppression laws have disproportionately impacted voters of color.[4] Why have these new laws impeded voters of color by design?
It’s because the state lawmakers who passed them know that if voters of color turn out at the polls, by and large, they will reliably vote for candidates and ballot initiatives that distribute economic power, support affordable housing and health care (including abortion), and expand democratic freedoms. Congressman John Lewis put it this way in 2018: If your vote wasn’t powerful, why would they be trying to take it away?
That’s why the Workers Circle is mobilizing to reach 1,000,000 voters of color in vote-suppressed states before the November election with the nonpartisan information they need to navigate the barriers that are placed between them and the ballot box. We’re working together with the Center for Common Ground, Black Voters Matter and Vote Riders sending postcards, texts and making calls to Black voters on behalf of these trusted organizations. Then, later this fall, Jewish seniors across the country will be calling 10,000 Jewish seniors in Orlando to invite them to join forces with Black Voters Matter as we door-knock in Florida. You are most welcome to join us for all of it!
With November fast approaching, there can be a desperation to quickly agree and “get on with it” because disaster is upon us. However, if we are to not only protect the democracy we have, but demand the democracy we need, we can’t just follow the leader or get trapped in echo chambers of groupthink.
We have to do two things that are very hard in a climate of fear and uncertainty: think critically and act collectively, both before the election and beyond.
The good news is that it’s possible to do both, and Democracy Circles’ action/reflection/action model imbeds this in its design. Some Democracy Circles are happening at senior centers; others are forming circles within their congregation. Some Democracy Circles look like a few friends gathering around the kitchen table while writing postcards. Art, a Democracy Circle convener in Northern California, puts it this way:
“Democracy Circles allow us to share our ideas and feelings with other activists; be heard and hear others; get and give support; and have agency — not feel as helpless as we might in the face of rising fascism in this country.”
In 2022, the Workers Circle made the decision to name what we were seeing: a rise in fascist politics. As a 124-year-old Jewish social justice organization whose members had experienced the rise of fascism in the 20th century, fought against it and had too many loved ones perish because of it, you can imagine we did not take this step lightly. But to fight a problem, you first have to name it properly. Philosopher Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, explains that the elements of fascism do not occur in isolation; they come as a bundle.[5] Fighting fascism is like beating back a vicious, multiheaded hydra; you don’t win against it if you only lop off one head.
Former President Donald Trump is seeking to return to office despite his felony convictions and while facing multiple federal indictments for mishandling classified documents, inciting insurrection and more. He has already announced he will be a dictator on Day One of his presidency. Speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Fla., he was crystal-clear: “Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”[6]
He said this just weeks after the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, broke with more than 200 years of our nation’s history of jurisprudence and placed the president above the law; immune from prosecution for criminal acts committed in an official capacity.
That decision by the Workers Circle to name what we have been seeing as rising fascism has helped us orient ourselves as hateful rhetoric and mis and disinformation have chillingly become normalized on media and social media, stoking fear and projecting inevitability. Information war is exactly how fascist politics work — inundate the public with a torrent of information from every side. Overwhelm until it’s hard to tell what’s true anymore. Troublingly, it can work; make us give up and start accommodating. Historian Timothy Snyder’s first lesson in his 2017 handbook On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is: “Don’t obey in advance.” Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen, reminds us that projecting invincibility and inevitability is part of the strongman’s schtick. In a surprise reversal, she writes that the dictator “needs the crowds more than the crowds need him.”[7] We pause, we wryly smile, we shake out the craziness from our head and we live to fight another day.
The moral awakening and national reckoning following the excruciating murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis in the spring of 2020 caused the Workers Circle, like so many organizations, to re-examine how we were working to undo systemic racism. We realized that instead of simply talking about how policies “particularly impact Black and brown communities” as if that just “happened,” we needed to understand how what historian and Carol Anderson has named “white rage” was producing these inequities and prevent them from happening.[8] This process of recommitting to racial justice shifted our social justice priorities to voting rights and democracy reform.
The Workers Circle’s 21st century reorientation to voting rights put us squarely in line with some of our earliest activists and efforts. Our members marched straight from The Uprising of the 20,000 into agitating for women’s suffrage. In 1919, Dr. Esther Luria, a regular contributor to Der Fraynd, the Workers Circle’s journal, wrote about women’s suffrage and lambasted the segregated south; “full ‘of accursed states’ that continue to deny rights to blacks as well as women.”[9] We just discovered a 1963 letter from Atlanta leader Irving Gordon. He represented the Workers Circle at Medgar Evers’s funeral. He traveled to and from the funeral with Dr. Martin Luther King “amidst a cavalcade of police for our protection.” These are some of our democracy stories; what are yours? Maybe they are still waiting to be discovered, hoping to remind us of what we stood for, and can stand for again, together.
The authors of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 also believed in the power of prevention. It’s why they put the preventative mechanism called “preclearance” in the legislation. Under the Voting Rights Act, states with long histories of voter suppression had to “preclear” or submit their proposed changes to voting laws for federal review. Preclearance blocked thousands of state voter suppression laws until 2013, when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision on Shelby County v. Holder, struck down the preclearance formula. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her scathing dissent said it was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”[10] Lewis, who endured beatings and jail and nearly gave his life for this law, said the court had “stuck a dagger into the heart of the Voting Rights Act.”[11] Within 24 hours of the Shelby decision, Texas immediately implemented the same voter ID law the Justice Department had earlier declared illegal.[12] Ten years after Shelby, nearly 100 laws state voter suppression laws had been passed.[13] Today, there are even more.
It was the devastating legacy of the Shelby decision that propelled the Workers Circle to Senator Schumer’s office (virtually) in August of 2021. We urged him to champion laying aside the filibuster to pass federal voting rights and democracy reform legislation. Our multigenerational delegation spanned four generations. Barbara Schmutzler spoke last.
I was born in the States to German parents and raised in Germany in the 1970s and 80s. From the moment I learned of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, I wondered what I would have done if I had witnessed democracy being used for the sake of its own undoing, and once democracy had been undone, seen people excluded and persecuted both for their opinions and for aspects of their identity that they had no control over, such as their ethnic or religious background or, as the Nazis would have it, their race.
One very clear conclusion I came away with is that when democracy is under attack, we have to do everything in our power to fight back and make our democracy better and stronger, because once it’s gone, it cannot be restored by democratic means. I’m here to say, that time is now. That time is right now for America.
When she finished, you could have heard a pin drop.
Sen. Chuck Schumer came through, but despite waves of civil disobedience, emails, sign-on letters, legislative visits and marches which the Workers Circle helped organize with civil rights and democracy partners, and in which dozens of our leaders, board, members and college students participated, Congress did not pass the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act in January 2022. It failed on the filibuster. The day after, 15 Workers Circle members of all ages joined 30 other democracy activists in blocking the outside entrance to the Senate in protest while singing, “John Lewis was a freedom fighter, and he taught us how to fight.” We were arrested and processed.
The next day, after paying our fine, I was on the Amtrak home to New York with three college students. “How are you feeling?” I asked them, the clackity clack of the train chugging over the tracks. “I’m fired up,” said Merly. “We came really close. We changed the position of a sitting president. We were within two votes of winning in the Senate.” This was not the answer I had expected. Others chimed in about what it felt like to sense their own power and to be part of a larger movement. Then Merly said, “Everyone is heading back to different places. It’s hard to sustain the kind of intensity we need on our own. This showed us we can’t give up. But how do we keep this going?” I knew better than to answer the question she posed. “What do you think we should do?” I asked. There was a pause as the rhythm of the train marked the beat. Then Merly wondered aloud, “What if we asked people to gather the people they knew into small groups? They’d be places we could talk about these important matters and groups we could protest with, too. Then we could connect those groups with other groups nearby and across the country.” And right there, as the train crossed the bridge at Havre de Grace, Md., the idea for Democracy Circles was born.
[1] Minority Rule: A Conversation with Ari Berman, The Workers Circle, April 27, 2024 (accessed July 29, 2024).
[2] The Yiddish phrase, Mir zaynen do, means “We are here!” The phrase was written in a poem composed by a young Jewish man during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, shouted during the resistance and memorialized in the Partisan Hymn.
[3] Voting Laws Roundup: May 2024, Brennan Center for Justice, May 17, 2024 (accessed July 29, 2024).
[4] The Impact of Voter Suppression on Communities of Color, Brennan Center for Justice, Jan. 20, 2022 (accessed July 28, 2024).
[5] The Ten Tactics of Fascism, Jason Stanley, Big Think, Oct. 24, 2021 (accessed July 29, 2024).
[6] Trump tells Christians they won’t have to vote after this election, Tim Reid, Reuters, July 28, 2024 (accessed July 29, 2024).
[7] Crowds and Power, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Lucid, March 30, 2024 (accessed July 29, 2024).
[8] Anderson explores country’s racial past, present in ‘White Rage,’ Elaine Justice, Emory News Center, May 31, 2016.
[9] Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940, Melissa R. Klapper, NYU Press: 2014, p. 61. The Yiddish language journal Der Fraynd is translated The Friend.
[10] Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), Ginsberg Dissent, June 25, 2013 (accessed June 29, 2024).
[11] John Lewis and Others React to the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act Ruling, The Washington Post, June 25, 2013 (accessed July 29, 2024).
[12] Texas rushes ahead with voter ID law after supreme court decision, Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, June 25, 2013 (accessed July 29, 2024).
[13] States Have Added Nearly 100 Restrictive Laws Since SCOTUS Gutted the Voting Rights Act 10 Years Ago, Jasleen Singh and Sara Carter, Brennan Center for Justice, June 23, 2023 (accessed July 29, 2024).
