Hope Not Hate: A Roadmap for Navigating the Racist Backlash Against Neoliberalism
“Hope Not Hate”: A Roadmap for Navigating the Racist Backlash Against Neoliberalism
Kate Aronoff
In These Times
Started in 2004 with the aim of taking on the far-right British National Party (BNP), Hope Not Hate has in recent years embraced a community organizing approach to anti-fascism to start to answer some of those questions, with an even more dire sense of urgency since Brexit. As organizers in the United States navigate their next four years in Trump’s America, its example might point a way forward.
“We judge our success on the basis of whether or not we have brought a community together when the far-right are seeking to divide it, rather than whether we have physically confronted the far-right,” says Hope Not Hate organizer John Page.
One Hope Not Hate effort—part of what Page calls a “jigsaw of interventions”—is aimed at organizing and building a sense of solidarity in towns throughout “Leave” Britain, particularly those hard-hit by deindustrialization and too-often forgotten by the UK's left and progressive circles.
“There’s a degree to which the neoliberal project is running out of steam,” Page reasons, reflecting on voters’ thirst for anti-establishment politics. “People are looking for an alternative. The right wing is happy to use racism to build an electoral base to progress their brand of politics.”
Democrats in the United States may now be facing their own Corbyn moment—complete with the challenge of building a winning and diverse coalition. Progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison—now in the running for DNC chair—seem poised for a takeover, albeit on a smaller scale. Still, part of the challenge of the next several years will be correcting for the serious blind spots around race that hobbled Sanders’s primary campaign, peeling Trump protest voters away from his base while creating a forward-facing vision for what an egalitarian and multi-racial democracy can look like in the United States.
Whatever the prospects for taking back Congress in 2018, one task in the short-term seems bracingly clear: defend the communities most vulnerable to a Trump regime and demonstrate a hopeful alternative to the right’s fear-mongering and division—town by town.
2016 was the year, in more than just the USA, the left failed to offer a populist vision, so we got a right-wing racist populism. We need to do better.