Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic’s Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by one of the smartest people, I think, writing about politics and government philosophy. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown. He’s written these brilliant books about reparations and also about a concept he refers to as Elite Capture, but I have in mind to talk about something much less intellectual—which is a lot of his posts on social media these days.
You’ve been one of the voices saying that everything’s not—go, the—things are—things that are bad are happening, but also that some resistance is working. Welcome, first of all.
Bacon: And so what phrase are you using most when on social media?
Bacon: And why do you use that phrase?
So I just kept saying it. And more or less what I’ve had in mind is, I think we are appropriately responsive to the death and devastation. I think sending people to torture centers, breaking up families, killing people in the streets—that is absolutely the right response on a human level human.
Bacon: So talk about the last few weeks. Are we at an inflection point? And I guess maybe since the election—or really in Minneapolis—it does feel like something has changed. But it feels like Trump is on the defensive a little bit. It feels like there’s a—it’s not—we’re not quite at 2020 levels, and it feels like people are outraged in a certain way. What are you seeing when you look at where we are right now?
On the right, there’s been this kind of shamelessness: We’re not going to fire people for having Nazi ties—a kind of attempt to institute a culture of impunity. And it’s never been total or absolute, right? They—just to give one example—Paul Garcia ended up suspending his potential nomination to a federal position because of what was leaked in Republican group chats. So they’ve never actually been able to project a total culture of impunity throughout the right.
And they can probably read the polls. There was a YouGov poll that came out that showed them underwater with white people, with men, with demographics that are typically strong for the right wing. So those updates probably correspond with whatever internal polling they’re doing. Something is scaring them. And on the subject of something that’s scaring them, here’s the update on—let’s call it—the left.
So we’re seeing levels of organized resistance that don’t really have much of a parallel in recent history. The last general strike was announced in the 1940s—maybe in the 1990s, depending on what you count as the general strike. So we’re seeing big changes.
Táíwò: Me? I don’t think they say much except the short-term horizon of political messaging. Who’s winning the messaging battle the last couple of weeks? But we have to understand for political elites—people that run for office or whose parties get reshaped every two years—they have more of a tangible reason to pay attention to polls than the rest of us do, right?
But it does tangibly seem to change the behavior of these people in office who are scrambling to get allies every couple of years in these elections.
Táíwò: It’s a combination of things. One: They’re finding out the hard way that you don’t invade a strong winter people in the winter—Napoleon and countless others found out.
It would be much better to explain history to people, but people living in Minnesota can just go outside and see that, in fact, what the left has been saying about DHS in particular, about ICE in particular, or about Border Patrol—what all these seemingly radical activists have been saying that might have sounded alarmist six months ago—is just a plain, unvarnished description of empirical reality that you can see in front of you.
Bacon: When you say “we,” how do you think about that term in this context? And I assume you don’t necessarily mean Democrats, but I’m just curious what you mean by that.
Bacon: “We are going to win” is different than “we are winning.” So, why are we going to win?
That is absolutely not the impression that I’m trying to give. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Why I’m saying this is because things look so dire. And the ability of federal forces to concentrate on slivers of the country and generate these spectacles of hyper-violence is part and parcel of their political strategy to make it look like they have power that they don’t, in fact, have.
If they can just harass and attack this many children, they think they can convince people that their victory is inevitable. And it is important now, more than ever, to remind people that’s not, in fact, true. The brave people risking their lives on the streets of Minnesota are in fact doing something that is effective; they are in fact doing something that we can and must learn from and are in fact doing something that can work at scale.
Bacon: Let me frame it differently because I try to make sure some of my coverage is about victories over Trump instead of all “Trump did something evil.” And that’s what you’re doing too, is like in, it’s in, it’s important to highlight the wins, both because that’s a reality, but also to mo—keep people aware of that victory is possible.
And some of these events ended up in the national news. Not all the news coverage highlighted the role of activism in getting hotels to say they’re going to stop hosting ICE agents, but the results of what they did ended up in the national news because the results of what they did were demonstrably effective.
Bacon: Is there a way you see this as a philosopher, the rest of us don’t see resistance that is, might be worth thinking about? How do you see this because of you, the way you think, the way you studied? Is there anything about this that the philosophers see that the journalists don’t see that I should think about?
Think about it as these long-term, pitched, protracted struggles that pop up in waves and recede in waves but that nevertheless push in certain directions, right? And it’s hard in the mud and muck of day-to-day life to tell these long-term, decades-long, centuries-long stories of political struggle. It’s hard to realize that’s what you’re in fact doing when—what is what’s happening day to day.
Bacon: But you’re watching the short-term view now?
That’s what the civil rights movement was. It was a world-historical defeat of the politics of segregationism and apartheid that this administration and its allies palpably want to bring back, right? And this hysterical, comic-book villainy is their attempt to spectacle and meme and “earned media” their way out of the reality that no one likes what they stand for.
Those losses—by way of terrorism, essentially. And if there’s a place that my confidence comes from, it’s by looking at the long arc of history and seeing how decisively it’s swung against them. And just thinking that we are capable of winning the battles that were won in the sixties. We’re capable of winning the battles that were won in the fifties and seventies. We’re not any less capable of doing that than the people who preceded us.
The inequality has remained; the civil rights movement did not produce economic gains it hoped to. So you are reading it—there’s a couple different ways to read this, and I think these stories are connected—but you are reading it [in a way that says] maybe the history says we can resist, but also you acknowledge history also says we may not overcome, so to speak.
There were battles that were won. The limitations and constraints on those victories represent the continued investments of the structures of this country, and all the others, in various forms of inequality, various forms of injustice. Both of those things are true. But what this administration and the current authoritarian opposition represents is an attempt to bring back a form of inequality—a specific set of forms of injustice that were decisively defeated and can be defeated again.
So on the one hand, Zohran Mamdani wins this great election; it seems to be reforming New York in a more left-progressive way. On the other hand, today I read about the Center for American Progress—maybe the leading think tank among Democrats—is calling for more policing and an embrace of more “tough on crime” policies. And so my question might be: I agree with more Zohran and less with the Center for American Progress, but I guess my question is, are these conflicts related at all? The sort of fight with the right and the fight between the left and the center-left.
And what we’re seeing in ICE, with the Border Patrol, this policing that the president is pushing is something other than what’s developed in local police departments. So it’s an attempt to wall off the protests of 2026 from the protests of 2020. That’s the charitable view; it’s not my view.
And I think what we have to gear up for is a struggle with those people, right? It’s [not] different in principle from political struggle writ large. There’s the compromised position that makes sense. One side is going to have to lose and the other side is going to have to win. And the best version, let’s say in a liberal democracy, would be an electoral process. There are more “activisty” versions where people have to do direct actions of some sort. And then there’s open conflict—and you hope that it’ll take one of the first two forms—but those questions aren’t for us today.
Táíwò: At Hammer & Hope, it’s a Black Left magazine that really tries to be both, to varying extents, a center for real open thinking and conversation around core ideas. What kinds of appeals to people make sense? What are the obstacles in Black politics and Left politics writ large? What’s the best way to understand them? But also reporting as well.
Bacon: Great piece on how Zohran won the Black working class, which I hadn’t really read anywhere else.
Bacon: Tell people what the Black Left means—what you mean when you say that.
All of those people for, very different reasons maybe might have a range of political perspectives, a range of things that they think are central political questions that maybe other people in those kinds of organizations or different kinds of organizations wouldn’t think of as central political questions. We at Hammer & Hope just wanted to facilitate a space where conversations can happen within and across those different groups of people.
Táíwò: I’m glad to hear that. Thanks for having me.
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