On October 3, Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD), in partnership with Convergence and a wide range of other organizations, will host a National Teach-in on “MAGA and Project 2025: Historical Precedents and Current Dangers.”
Although it is open to everyone, this teach-in will focus on educating students and youth around the extreme threat MAGA authoritarianism poses to the deeply flawed but hard-won democracy we have. The event will be virtual. We are urging professors to host live-streams or show it later to their classes (and offer “extra credit”); to that purpose it will be widely available via YouTube through November 5.
The teach-in will be moderated by Convergence Advisory Board member Bill Fletcher, Jr. and features three top historians: Carol Anderson, Nancy MacLean and Paul Ortiz.
HPAD members have been thinking through what it will take to mobilize young people at a time of widespread disillusionment with conventional politics, intensified by the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. As it happens, we already had a roundtable scheduled for the January 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City, with the title “The 2024 Presidential Election: Where Do We Go From Here?,” featuring the three historians listed above plus Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton University. As the proposal for that panel states:
The November 5, 2024 election is an inflection point in US history. One candidate denies the prior election’s legitimacy, endorses the January 6, 2021 attack, and proposes to purge the entire federal civil service. He may win. And if he loses again, his supporters may seek to violently disrupt democratic functioning. Our roundtable will respond to all of these dangerous possibilities, examining relevant historical comparisons of anti-democratic mobilizations, and how to resist that trend.
We are excited to be working with distinguished historians whose work has contributed so significantly to our understanding of the present moment. Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Myrna Bernath Book Award and Gustavus Myers Book Award); Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York Times Bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award); One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy (long-listed for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Non-Fiction); and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (New York Times Editor’s Pick).
Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and a past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). She is the author of several award-winning books, most recently, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The Guardian said: “It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century.” A New York Times bestseller, it was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs and the Lillian Smith Book Award for outstanding writing about the U.S. South. The Nation named it the “Most Valuable Book” of the year.
Paul Ortiz is Professor of Labor History at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. A PEN Award-winning author, Paul’s book An African American and Latinx History of the United States was identified in 2020 by Bustle as one of “Ten Books About Race to Read Instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You.” Fortune Magazine listed it as one of the “10 books on American history that actually reflect the United States.”
We urge Convergence supporters not only to tune in next Thursday (at 5 pm Eastern) but to publicize widely, especially on campuses or anywhere that young people gather, and to set up informal viewing with friends and comrades. RSVP here!