Resistance in a year of fear [View all]

... there's the most obvious and widespread expression of people shifting leftward: the Democratic presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, who is polling at over 30 percent as an open (if quite moderate) socialist in party polls. Sanders, it should be noted, is even with or ahead of Trump and other Republicans in polling on head-to-head matchups.

Donald Trump and his fellow Republican monsters may hog the headlines, but their outrages don't represent the full picture of the political climate in the U.S. today.
December 18, 2015

IN CARTOONS, years are usually drawn as Baby January who becomes frail Old Man December. But as this year ends with a disturbing cycle of public violence and racist fear-mongering, maybe the months of late 2015 will be drawn as a gunman screaming racial slurs.

The violence has come in different forms: there were the ISIS terror attacks on the streets of Paris and Beirut and a Russian passenger plane; right-wing terror attacks in the U.S. against a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic and a Minneapolis Black Lives Matter protest; a mass shooting at a San Bernardino social service center that seems to have been a fusion of an ISIS-inspired attack and an American-as-apple-pie workplace massacre--and, not to be forgotten, as the media seem to, the biggest wave of violence against Muslims or those believed to be Muslim since the days after the September 11 attacks.

The racist fear-mongering can be seen in a surge of right-wing demagoguery on both sides of the Atlantic--from the unprecedented election gains made by the far-right National Front party in France to Donald Trump's commanding, though still early, lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

These disturbing developments are themselves products of and reactions to more deep-seated instabilities and injustices that many mainstream political leaders generally refuse to recognize, much less address: An economy where living conditions have stagnated or worse for the vast majority of people during the 2008-09 Great Recession and after; and the global chaos caused by the endless U.S. wars on terror and drugs, which is creating the largest refugee crisis the world has seen since the Second World War ...

Much more here: http://socialistworker.org/2015/12/18/resistance-in-a-year-of-fear