People want to elect fighters. They want affordability. They want security. Accountability. Voters want to fight corruption. Voters are starving for somebody who’ll stand up to power on their behalf. Yet, almost every time, that sentiment gets pointed at one target, Donald Trump. Fighting Trump, fighting his administration’s grab at our rights, fighting the handful of people at the top who’ve piled up about as much wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent of the country combined. I’m for the fight. But a fight needs an opponent, and you have to be clear-eyed and correct about who the opponent is, or you can’t defeat them. Right now, too many politicians and too many voters have decided their opponent is one man.

Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, and his administration is a threat to people the world over. But you don’t solve that threat by standing up to him, or legislating around him, or writing some new law that says he can’t do the thing he’s already doing. Because we’ve watched a Supreme Court bless this behavior. We’ve watched laws get ignored. Judgments ignored. Courts ignored. So it isn’t a question of who sits in the chair. It’s a question of power, and a question of accountability, and almost nobody with any standing is asking for accountability.

Our enemy isn’t the man. Our enemy is the system in which he’s operating, and that system runs on one thing, a lack of accountability.

Let’s start with what should be the clearest. We have been funding and arming a genocide of the Palestinian people, carried out by a rogue regime in Israel, in plain sight, and none of us can do a thing to stop it. You might think that has nothing to do with your life in Des Moines or Knoxville or wherever you’re reading this. It has everything to do with it. Because a system that lets war crimes happen in broad daylight with no consequence is the same system you live under, and if genocide can’t be stopped then what can? The powerlessness we feel isn’t just a side effect, it’s the point. An inspiration to quit.

Unlike money powerlessness does trickle down. It’s the Epstein operation, where the names are known, and not one person who mattered has answered for any of it. It’s Ken Paxton in Texas, whose office took over the case of a man who admitted to years-long sexual abuse of a young boy, a first-degree felony that carried up to life in prison, and after a mistrial cut him a deal down to two misdemeanors, thirty days in jail, and no spot on the sex-offender registry, and that same Ken Paxton is now his party’s nominee for the United States Senate. It’s an economy that minted its first trillionaire off the backs of American workers, American innovation, and resources we all paid to build. Different stories, same disease. Nobody pays.

The centrists have a ready answer for all of this. They’ll say, “That’s your problem, you’d rather go after the Democratic Party than fight Trump.” The “centrists” are wrong. Working to transform and restore the Democratic Party is one of the few solutions that might work.

There’s not really a center for them to occupy. There’s no neutral ground when the government is actively working to dismantle democracy and we have an economy failing the overwhelming majority of the people inside it. There is no center on genocide. To stand in the middle is to work with the people who currently hold the power, and the people who hold the power are Trump, and Palantir, and private equity, and the billionaires, the ones doing the extracting and the oppressing, here and across the planet.

So when a Democrat says I’m not willing to take on the system itself, the economic system, the justice system, the whole machine, what that Democrat is saying is that the machine gets to stay. And the machine is what empowers Trump. Going after Trump the man instead of the system isn’t a step toward fixing anything. It’s the false option, the move that lets you feel like a fighter while you don’t solve anything. You cannot be a centrist in this moment, because in this moment the center is just a way of siding with Trump.

I don’t see how a centrist can honestly think of themselves as “a fighter.” You can’t both fight for people and not fight to take power away from the institutions and companies that hold it and use it to harm people. You can’t fight against Trump by attacking socialists.

There’s a poem most of us know, written about what Germany allowed to happen. I won’t paraphrase it. It does its work whole.

First, they came for the CommunistsAnd I did not speak out because I was not a CommunistThen they came for the SocialistsAnd I did not speak out because I was not a SocialistThen they came for the trade unionistsAnd I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionistThen they came for the JewsAnd I did not speak out because I was not a JewThen they came for meAnd by then there was no one left to speak out for me

We are doing it again, right now, in the open.........

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