“A Generational Fight”: Political Organizers on Kamala Harris, Defeating Authoritarianism & More

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” We’re “Breaking with Convention.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, here in Chicago.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Vice President Kamala Harris formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday night here in Chicago. This comes just over a month after President Biden dropped his reelection bid, upending the 2024 race. This is part of what she said.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth, I accept your nomination to be president of the United States of America.

And with this election — and — and with this election, our nation — our nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward, not — not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.

And let me say, I know there are people of various political views watching tonight. And I want you to know, I promise to be a president for all Americans. You can always trust me to put country above party and self, to hold sacred America’s fundamental principles, from the rule of law to free and fair elections to the peaceful transfer of power.

AMY GOODMAN: Kamala Harris, giving her acceptance speech here in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.

We’re joined by three guests. Barbara Ransby is a historian, author and activist, professor of Black studies, gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her latest book, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century. We’re also joined by Mohammed Khader, manager of policy and advocacy campaigns at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. He previously served as a staffer in the U.S. Senate. He’s also a Black Mississippian and a Palestinian. And we’re joined by Maurice — well, Moe — Mitchell, national director for the Working Families Party.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Moe Mitchell, your party, the Working Families Party, has endorsed Kamala Harris. Can you talk about the significance of last night and why the party has decided to endorse her?

MAURICE MITCHELL: Absolutely. And it’s great to be here.

So, the Working Families Party rendered an endorsement for Vice President Harris, now-Vice President Harris, and Tim Walz. And we did it because we understand the stakes, the global stakes, the fact that there’s authoritarians from Israel and Palestine and Hungary and France and the United States attempting to not just move our country, but our world, towards authoritarianism, towards nationalism. And it’s up to us — again, not any politician, but the millions of people that I talk to in North Philadelphia, here in Chicago, who are trying to figure out how to make ends meet. It’s up to us to build a mass movement in order to defeat them. And electorally, the way that we do it is by uniting with the Democrats in this election to defeat MAGA.

What I heard — what I heard is a presidential candidate call for Palestinian rights and Palestinian self-determination. We need to ensure that that rhetoric turns into a ceasefire and an arms embargo. What I heard from Tim Walz was calling for housing as a human right and also for — I think, housing as a human right and other fundamental human rights. We need to translate that into fundamental policy. That’s on us.

I mean, last time, we endorsed Joe Biden. He wasn’t our first, second or third pick. And under Biden, a candidate that is no progressive, we were able to — our grassroots movements were able to secure transformative investments in people, in climate, Justice40 provisions, which came from the grassroots. Those are our victories.

So, again, our strategy is a block-and-build strategy: We need to block the authoritarians, and then we need to build movements outside of the Democratic Party in order to demand that these pieces of rhetoric turn into concrete action. And that’s not just one election. That’s going to happen over, again, decades. We must defeat Trump, but Trump is Trumpism. The defeat of Trumpism and the far right is a movement prerogative that will take, I think, the next decade or more. This is a generational fight. And I believe that job number one is to ensure that MAGA and Trump is defeated. Job number two is, once we do a victory lap against MAGA, that we do the organizing in order to make sure that our movements’ demands become the agenda of the Walz and the Harris administration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But I wanted to ask you — inevitably, once the Democratic presidential candidate is established, there are those sectors of society, the private equity folks, the wealthiest of Americans, who then try to really grab control and influence over the candidate. How are you going to be able to counter that?

MAURICE MITCHELL: This is why we build the Working Families Party, because we believe that, fundamentally, the forces, the two-party system, the forces of capital, are very powerful. They organize. They understand the stakes, which is why that they make endorsements, which is why that they lobby. And we believe that a organized grassroots movement can defeat capital. We’ve seen it happen. I was with Shawn Fain the other day. I was with some of our leaders, independent leaders, like Ilhan Omar, who were protesting and standing up against the fact that there were no Palestinians platformed, which I thought was a missed opportunity for the Democratic Party.

Again, it’s our job. I want to put the center — I want to center our people. Our democracy is our people. We can’t be spectators, we can’t be pundits, and simply hope maybe that we get people elected and then they translate that into victories for us. We need to get the people that we think that we could organize the best elected, and then push and organize them. We’ve actually seen that work. And again, corporate America, they’re thinking the same thing.

And so, it’s important for us to build independent political projects. It’s important for us to work with grassroots organizations, labor organizations and movement organizations, like uncommitted, in order to demand the freedom that we deserve. Electoral politics is just one piece of the fight. That allows us to reset the balance of power and decide who we’re going to be organizing with, and also organizing against, in order to demonstrate over four years what we can win. And then we do it all over again. Elections aren’t the prize. Governing is the prize. And governing happens every single day.

AMY GOODMAN: And just one thing to clarify, for people who aren’t aware, Moe Mitchell, of the Working Families Party, because they’re not all over the country. But in New York, for example, you have a line in the ballot. I mean, you can vote — for example, we’ll be able to vote for Kamala Harris either in the Working Families line or the Democratic Party line.

MAURICE MITCHELL: Yes. And if I can add, the Working Families Party is a 25-year-old independent third-party project. We’re building a third party from the ground up, not from the top down. Some people build third parties from the top down. Every four years there will be a charismatic person who runs at the top of the ticket. We have a ballot line in New York. We have a ballot line in Connecticut. And we’re building, state by state by state, over the next decade in order to create the grassroots infrastructure, county by county, in order for this project — unions, grassroots movements, independents — in order to surface the ground up. Kendra Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke in Philadelphia is a perfect example of independent Working Families Party candidates who are delivering for people in concrete ways. We believe that that formula, over time, can be able to unlock this expression, that’s being tied up with organized capital in the two-party system, in a real way to be able to get those concessions for people.

And then, yes, there are voters in New York who could vote proudly on the Working Families Party line to say that, yes, we recognize the binary fight between MAGA and the Democrats, and we’re clear about that, but also we have our own interests, labor and community interests, that we want expressed here on the ballot.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring in Mohammed Khader to the conversation. You’re an African American from Mississippi and also Palestinian. Your response to how the Democratic Party handled the issue of the genocide in Palestine? And if you could talk to us a little bit about your background?

MOHAMMED KHADER: Thank you. Yes, the Democratic Party and officials or party members have really failed to meet the moment. You know, right now we’re seeing a genocide unlike any other in the 21st century, mass atrocities and war crimes that are happening right now, with U.S. weapons, paid by U.S. taxpayer dollars. We know that a majority of the Democratic Party base actually supports what we’re calling for: an arms embargo and a permanent ceasefire.

Right now, obviously, throughout the week, party officials really dropped the ball. We expected a Palestinian to address the floor. Every mention — nearly every mention of Gaza, as you saw, from Kamala Harris to Keith Ellison to others on the floor, whenever that was mentioned, the party, the members were ecstatic. And it was just a missed opportunity. You know, for me, I saw clear examples and clear connection to the 1964 DNC, where Black Mississippians, like my family and others who were organizing throughout the decade, you know, were sidelined, but also missed opportunity there, too.

AMY GOODMAN: So, your father is from Nablus, in the occupied West Bank, your mom from McComb, Mississippi.

MOHAMMED KHADER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Your great-uncle worked with Bob Moses, the great civil rights activist — 

MOHAMMED KHADER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — in Mississippi. Talk more about how you put these issues together. And also your response to Kamala Harris?

MOHAMMED KHADER: Yes. You know, I come from a very historic family. My grandfather’s brother and his siblings were sharecroppers, born as sharecroppers. As children, they saw the murder of Emmett Till. They saw the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and the civil rights workers who came down from the North to help Mississippians register to vote during Freedom Summer. And in 1961, actually, my grandfather’s brother, with the help of Bob Moses, registered to vote, along with eight other Black Mississippians. The next year, Bob Moses invited Fannie Lou Hamer to a conference in Nashville, Tennessee. From there, she became a community organizer. And what we saw in 1964 was the direct result of people that brought Bob Moses and brought him from around the state, people like my grandfather’s brother, people like Fannie, people like others, as well.

And for me, you know, Kamala Harris is a very important person right now. She said that we’ll chart a new path. Well, it’s difficult to chart a new path when you’re not turning the page on antiquated foreign policy, continuing to double down on sending bombs and weapons to kill Palestinians in Gaza. Not turning the page is not charting a new path. And frankly, if Kamala Harris wants to meet the moment, she must include a new foreign policy that centers Palestinians and not centers weapons and war overseas, in Palestine and Israel.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Barbara Ransby, I’m wondering, as you hear Maurice Mitchell and Mohammed Khader talk, your reaction to the continued activism of young Americans seeking a new path —

BARBARA RANSBY: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — for American diplomacy and actions around the world?

BARBARA RANSBY: Yeah. Well, you know, I hear — the historian in me is very interested in the story about Mississippi. And the activist in me, you know, talks to Moe Mitchell all the time, when I want to get insights about electoral politics.

You know, I think the thing that Moe Mitchell said that’s very important is, one, the importance of defeating fascism at the polls, right? And that’s important not only because there are array of issues that there’s a great divergence between the Democrats and Republicans on, but also in order to have the oxygen in order to continue the protests in solidarity with Palestine. If we have an authoritarian regime in power, we’re going to have very much difficulty doing that. And the young people who have been so heroic on college campuses around the country with encampments and so forth, young people also like Moe, who I met at the political conference not long ago, you know, would meet with, I’m afraid, military and live ammunition as opposed to rubber bullets. You know, the liberal leaders of academia certainly have shamed themselves in the way that they’ve treated these protests, and, you know, I just can’t say enough critical about that. But I can imagine worse scenarios, and I think we have to keep that in mind.

The other thing that Moe Mitchell said is talking about the Working Families Party. For me, because of the real difficulty supporting what the Democrats are doing in Gaza, in supporting them while we watch what they’re doing in Gaza, which is nothing less than a genocide, suggests to me the need to break out of the two-party system and to have real choices, where an Ilhan Omar, a Summer Lee, a Rashida Tlaib would feel politically much more at home than they do in the Democratic Party.

And the other thing I just think is — you know, it is a sobering moment, and I cannot be, you know, enthusiastically supportive of anybody on the ballot. Nobody represents my values. And so, in some ways, it’s voting and organizing, which I think is also the Working Families Party’s position. We need a movement, and that is really what’s going to advance the issues that we, all of us around this table, believe in so deeply, much more than who we pick at the head of a party ticket.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed Khader, what happened to you when you went home to — when you visited family in near Nablus in 2022?

MOHAMMED KHADER: Yes. You know, I, like any other person who visits from the United States, endured the same experience as I think everybody knows. You land in Tel Aviv at the airport, and you’re either interrogated, detained, or you have no problem. For me, I was interrogated. And for me, that moment when I was on the ground, it was no different between what my family endured under Jim Crow here in the United States: clear-as-day apartheid — apartheid walls, different set of laws, different set of standards that people are allowed to go through, Palestinian-only buses that you’re allowed to take. For me, the lack of water, lack of clean water was very clear. Mississippi right now actually has the same issue: no clean water in the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi. For me, seeing my family there under those conditions was, very clear, the conditions that my grandparents endured in Mississippi in the early 20th century.

BARBARA RANSBY: Could I just add something to Moe’s comment? I went on a feminists of color delegation in 2011 to Palestine, and there was someone who had grown up on an Indian reservation in the United States and someone who had grown up in the Jim Crow South. And they talked about how similar the experiences were, how much, when seeing the way that the IDF were treating Palestinians in the streets and the extreme segregation, the apartheid there — and a third person grew up in South Africa. So, we had this representation of the global nature of settler colonialism and various forms of apartheid.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask Maurice Mitchell — a lot of focus has been on Election Day, but I’m even more concerned about the day after Election Day. And I think, ironically, it was Bill Clinton who actually raised the question in his presentation, not to take anything for granted, because Trump and his people have made it clear that they’re not going to accept a result where he is not the winner. And I’m wondering what your party is doing to prepare for the battles that will come from a sector of American society that, unfortunately, Trump’s supporters are well armed, and they’re zealots in terms of their beliefs. How you’re looking at the day after Election Day?

MAURICE MITCHELL: Absolutely. We don’t want to be flat-footed. And I want to go back to two elections, so 2016 and 2008, two very different elections, but I think there’s lessons for both of them about what happens after Election Day.

So, let’s talk about 2016. We understand that whatever the outcome, that this movement, this MAGA movement, is anti-democratic and authoritarian, and they will not accept defeat, right? Which means that we have a lot of work to do in order to make sure that this really big pro-democracy coalition stays united and stays vigilant and does the work that we did actually in 2020 in order to ensure that there’s a transfer of power. It wasn’t a nonviolent transfer of power, but there was a transfer of power. That’s going to require everybody to stay in the fight when Trump and MAGA inevitably attempt to question the legitimacy of the election, to continue to engage in advocacy, continue to have these conversations publicly, because there’s a long sort of contested election period between whenever Election Day is and inauguration, where the Trump movement will be animated.

Again, but 2008 is also another moment, because that was the Obama hope-and-change moment. And there’s lessons there. It was a historic election, and people were super excited about somebody that actually came from grassroots organizing, the first Black president, right? We have another first. That mass movement got demobilized. Again, we need mass movements, independent of the two parties, that are mobilized, that are ready the day after Election Day, calling for our agenda to be realized. We’re organizing for a trifecta. We want the presidency. We want to flip the House so that MAGA no longer controls the House. We want the Democrats to retain the Senate, so that we could pass a bold Working Families agenda day one. That’s not going to happen if the forces that are currently engaged and feeling the momentum are demobilized or feel like it was simply their job to get a candidate elected. We have to stay engaged.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank all of you for being with us. We are going to move into a very interesting segment right now. I want to thank Moe Mitchell, who is the national director for the Working Families Party, here in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention; Barbara Ransby, historian, author and activist, professor of Black studies, gender and women’s studies and the history at the University of Illinois Chicago, her latest book, _Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century; and Mohammed Khader, manager of policy and advocacy campaigns at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, previously served as a staffer in the Senate. He is a Black Mississippian and a Palestinian.