1984 ends not with a bang, but with a grammar lesson. Readers of George Orwell’s novel—still reeling, likely, from the brutal dystopia they’ve spent the previous 300-odd pages living in—are subjected to a lengthy explanation of Newspeak, the novel’s uncanny form of English. The appendix explains the language that has been created to curtail independent thought: the culled vocabulary; the sterilized syntax; the regime’s hope that, before long, all the vestiges of Oldspeak—English in its familiar form, the English of Shakespeare and Milton and many of Orwell’s readers—will be translated into the new vernacular. The old language, and all it carried with it, will die away.

With its dizzying details and technical prose, “The Principles of Newspeak” makes for a supremely strange ending. It is, in today’s parlance, a choice. But it is a fitting one. Language, in 1984, is violence by another means, an adjunct of the totalitarian strategies inflicted by the regime. Orwell’s most famous novel, in that sense, is the fictionalized version of his most famous essay. “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is a writing manual, primarily—a guide to making language that says what it means, and means what it says. It is also an argument. Clear language, Orwell suggests, is a semantic necessity as well as a moral one. Newspeak, in 1984, destroys with the same ferocious efficiency that tanks and bombs do. It is born of the essay’s most elemental insight: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

The essay, over the years, has enjoyed the same backhanded success that Orwell himself has. Its barbs have softened into conventional wisdom. Its enduring relevance has consigned it, in some degree, to cliché. Who would argue against clarity?

But the essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. “Use clear language” cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion—on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity—but they fail, all too often, in the same ways Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them. Language, the connective tissue of the body politic—that space where the collective “we” matters so much—is losing its ability to fulfill its most basic duty: to communicate. To correlate. To connect us to the world, and to one another.

And semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump mused aloud about the violence Americans might anticipate on November 5. If Election Day brings havoc, he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, the crisis would come not from outside actors but instead from “the enemy from within”: “some very bad people,” he clarified, “some sick people”—the “radical-left lunatics.”

The former president further mused about a solution to the problem. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard,” he said, “or, if really necessary, by the military.”

A presidential candidate who may well retake the White House is threatening to use the military against American citizens: The news here is straightforward. The language that makes the news, though, is not. The words twist and tease, issuing their threats in the conditional tense: It should be. If necessary. Trump’s words often do this; they imply very much while saying very little. They are schooled, like the man himself, in the dark art of plausible deniability. In them, Orwell’s doublespeak—that jargon of purposeful obscurity—gets one more layer of insulating irony: The former president says whatever he wants, and reserves the right not to mean it.

Do we take him at his word? The answer to this question, on which so much else depends, can only ever be “maybe.” When he describes “the enemy from within”—or when he muses about police forces fighting back against criminals for “one real rough, nasty day,” or when he announces his intention to spend the first day of a second term acting as “a dictator”—you could read each as a direct threat. You could assume that he’s lying, embellishing, teasing, trolling. You could say that the line, like Trump’s others, should be taken seriously, but not literally. You could try your best, knowing all that is at stake, to parse the grammar of his delusion.

But the fact that you need to translate him at all is already a concession. The constant uncertainty—about the gravest of matters—is one of the ways that Trump keeps people in his thrall. Clear language is a basic form of kindness: It considers the other person. It wants to be understood. Trump’s argot, though, is self-centered. It treats shared reality as an endless negotiation.

The words cannot bear the weight of all this irony. Democracy is, at its core, a task of information management. To do its work, people need to be able to trust that the information they’re processing is, in the most fundamental way, accurate. Trump’s illegibility makes everything else less legible, too.

[Read: Do you speak Fox?]

Orwell published “Politics” at the end of a conflict that had, in its widespread use of propaganda, also been a war of words. In the essay, he wrestles with the fact that language—as a bomb with a near-limitless blast radius—could double as a weapon of mass destruction. This is why clarity matters. This is why words are ethical tools as well as semantic ones. The defense of language that Orwell offered in “Politics” was derived from his love of hard facts. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” he confessed in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.” His was an elegant dogma. Words matter because facts matter—because truth matters. Freedom, in 1984, is many things, but they all spring from the same source: the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 4.

One October surprise of 2024 took an aptly Orwellian turn: The scandal, this time around, was a matter of language. Earlier this month, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, escalated his warnings that his former boss is unfit for office. Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump had expressed a desire for generals like the ones “that Hitler had.” Then, in an interview published by The New York Times, Kelly described Trump’s dictatorial approach to leadership, his drive to suppress opposition, his insatiable appetite for power. He concluded that Trump fits the definition of fascist.

Kelly’s claim was echoed, more mildly, by Trump’s former secretary of defense—he “certainly has those inclinations,” Mark Esper said—and, less mildly, by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley warned in Bob Woodward’s latest book, its publication timed to coincide with the election. He is also, Milley added, “fascist to the core.” (Trump denied the men’s claims: “I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he said.) Late last week, 13 others who had served in high-level positions in the Trump administration signed an open letter: “Everyone,” they wrote, “should heed General Kelly’s warning.”

The comments made headlines because of the people who expressed them: Each had worked directly with Trump. The former officials made history, though, because of the word they deployed in their warnings. Fascist is a claim of last resort. It is a term of emergency. Because of that, its validity, as a description for Trump’s seething strain of populism, has been the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars, journalists, and members of the public—one made even more complicated by the fact that, as the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

But one need not be a scholar of fascism to see the plain reality. Trump lost an election. He refused to accept the result. In a second term, he has suggested, he will “terminate” the Constitution; use the American judicial system to take revenge on those who have angered him; and perform sweeping immigration raids, expelling millions of people from the country. Trump, in addition to praising Hitler’s generals, regularly uses language that echoes Hitler’s hatreds. He has described immigrants, whatever their legal status, as a formless “invasion,” and the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has dismissed those who are insufficiently loyal to him as “human scum” and “vermin.”

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

Fascism—that call to history, that careful description, that five-alarm piece of language—is the right word. But it may turn out, at the same time, to be the wrong one. It might, in our cynical moment, provoke exhaustion rather than alarm.

In “Politics,” Orwell reserves particular vitriol for political language that hides its intentions in euphemism and wan metaphor. Wording that resorts to ambiguity can disguise atrocities (as when, in one of the examples Orwell offers, the bombing of villages and their defenseless people is referred to merely as “pacification”). Orwell’s problem was language that gives writers permission not to think. Ours, however, is language that gives readers permission not to care. Even the clearest, most precise language can come to read, in our restless age, as cliché. “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet,” the old line goes; “the second, an imbecile.” On the internet, anyone can become that imbecile. For language in general, this is not an issue: When on fleek goes off in an instant or cheugy plummets from coinage to cringe, more words will arrive in their place.

When the restlessness comes for political language, though—for the words we rely on to do the shared work of self-government—the impatience itself becomes Orwellian. Urgent words can feel tired. Crises can come, but no words suffice to rouse us. Americans face an election that our democracy—hard-fought, hard-won, ever fragile—may not survive; “defend democracy,” though, can read less as a call to arms than as a call to yawn. Trump himself is insulated by all the ennui. Nearly every word you might apply to him fits the picture that was already there. His depravity has become tautological: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s shocking, not surprising.

The word fascism can fail that way, too. And it can be further defanged by the biggest cliché of all: thoughtlessly partisan politics. Some audiences, seeing the word deployed as a description, will dismiss it as simply more evidence of the media’s (or John Kelly’s) alleged bias against Trump. Others, assuming that fascism and Nazism are the same thing—assuming that fascism cannot be present until troops are goose-stepping in the streets—will see the term as evidence of hysteria.

But fascism can come whether the language acknowledges it or not. It marches toward us, restricted right by restricted right, book ban by book ban. It can happen here. The question is whether we’ll be able to talk about it—and whether people will care. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week asked registered voters across the country whether Trump was a “fascist” (defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”). Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said he was—roughly the same percentage of people who, in recent national polls, say that they plan to vote for him.

The philosopher Emilio Uranga observed, in Mexican political life of the mid-20th century, a gnawing sense of uncertainty—a “mode of being,” he wrote, “that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on.” The unsteadiness, he suggested, amounts to pain. In it, “the soul suffers.” It “feels torn and wounded.” Uranga gave the condition a name: zozobra.

The wound he describes, that plague of doubleness, has settled into American political language. In her 2023 book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” in right-wing politics—a place where every reality has a rhetorical double. She focuses on the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the former Trump-administration strategist. As Democrats and journalists discussed the Big Lie—Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election—Bannon began discussing the Big Steal: the idea that Joe Biden, against all evidence, stole the presidency.

The tactic is common. Trump regularly fantasizes before his cheering crowds about the violence that might befall his opponents. Journalists describe him as engaging in “extreme” and “inflammatory” rhetoric. Republicans in Trump’s camp, soon enough, began accusing Democrats of, as one of his surrogates put it, “irresponsible rhetoric” that “is causing people to get hurt.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s response to the former military leaders’ warnings about Trump took a similar tack: Their rhetoric is “dangerous,” he said this weekend. On Monday, Trump gave John Kelly’s comments about him a predictably zozobric twist. Kamala Harris, he said, is a fascist.

“In the mirror world,” Klein writes, “there is a copycat story, and an answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has commonly been described as an insurrection; Republican power brokers have begun describing peaceful political protests as “insurrections.” We must save American democracy, the stark slogan that gained new currency in response to the Big Lie, is now a common refrain on the right. (Elon Musk, at a recent Trump rally, argued that the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”)

Mirroring, as propaganda, is extremely effective. It addles the mind. It applies a choose-your-own-adventure approach to meaning itself. Mirroring does, in that way, precisely what Orwell feared: It gives up on the very possibility of common language. It robs political terms of their ability to clarify, to unite, to warn. In a world that is endlessly doubling itself, 2 + 2 = 4 may be a liberating truth. Or it may be a narrative imposed on you by a smug and elitist regime. Freedom, soon enough, becomes the ability to say that the sum of 2 + 2 is whatever you want it to be.

[Read: Why are we humoring them?]

The words fly, flagrant and fast; the definitions that might ground them trail, meekly, in their wake. But when the words are mere slogans—shibboleths and signifiers, narrowcast to one’s tribe—dictionary definitions miss the point. Slogans are rhetoric. They are advertising. They are vibes. They can function, in that way, as what the author Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”: words or phrases that effectively curtail debate—and, with it, critical thought itself. Last year, an author who wrote a book decrying the “woke indoctrination” of children struggled to define what woke actually means. In 2022, the New York Times editorial board effectively declared lexicographic defeat: “However you define cancel culture,” it wrote, “Americans know it exists and feel its burden.” On Tuesday, Musk—who has been spreading his Trump-friendly brand of groupthink on his social-media platform, X—shared an image: a man, his face obscured, wearing a green cap. Stitched onto the hat, in large, all-caps letters, was MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN.

In 1990, a conservative Republican group headed by Newt Gingrich sent a pamphlet to Republican candidates running in state elections across the country. The document amounted to a dictionary: 133 words that operatives might use to elevate themselves (family, freedom, pride) and vilify their competitors (decay, corruption, pathetic, traitors). The pamphlet was titled, unironically, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Many in the media, nodding to the Orwell of it all, came to know it as “Newtspeak.”

The 1990s were years when politicians were translating the insights of postmodern discourse (the power of “framing” and the like) into the everyday practice of politics. But Gingrich’s memo turned spin into a plot twist. Every word of its grim new language represented an argument: that Democrats were not merely opponents, but enemies; that the differences between the two sides were not merely political, but moral. It recast American politics not as an ongoing debate among equals, but as an epic battle between good and evil. The core aim of propaganda, Aldous Huxley observed, is to make one group of people forget that another group is human; the pamphlet, cheerfully promising aspiring politicians that they could learn to speak like Newt, wove that logic, word by word, into Americans’ political habits.

The language in the pamphlet is stark. It is evocative. It is so very, very clear. It also takes the advice Orwell gave to preserve the thing he most loved and puts it in service of the thing he most feared.

Orwell watched the rise of communism. He fought the rise of fascism. He observed, from a distance and, at times, from intimately close range, the blunt-force power of words. He saw how quickly a common language could be transformed into a divisive one—and how readily, in the tumult, new hatreds and fears could settle into the syntax of everyday life. And he knew that history, so rarely consigned to the past, would repeat—that the battles of the 20th century would very likely be refought, in some form, in the future.

He knew all that, but he could not know it all. And there are moments in “Politics and the English Language” that can read, today, as nearly naive, with its faith in facts and its hope that clarity could be our salvation. Orwell was a satirist, too—1984, he believed, was an example of the genre—but he did not account for the ways that irony could come for language itself. He did not imagine propaganda that does its work through winks and shrugs rather than shouts. He did not sense how possible it would become for people in the future, seeking his wisdom, to wonder whether use clear language offers any counsel at all.

This is not Orwell’s failing, necessarily. And it need not be our own. If we look to him for refuge and find none, that means simply that we will have to use the words we have to create new advice, new axioms, new ways forward. We can take the insight that drove him—that words can expand the world, or limit it; that they can connect us to one another, or cleave us—and seek new means of clarity. We can treat language not just as a tool, but as a duty. We can keep remembering, and reminding one another, that 2 + 2 = 4.

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In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him.

“I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion by the Polish Jews being held captive there. When Du Bois got there, in 1949, the city was still being rebuilt. Speaking at the behest of Jewish Life magazine—now Jewish Currents—Du Bois said the visit had helped him reconceive the “Negro problem” as part of a larger constellation of global struggles against oppression. He had been cured of a “certain social provincialism” and sought a way for “both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group.” For Du Bois, the path forward was simple: solidarity.

Du Bois’s vision has been deeply influential in the decades since he delivered his “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” speech. Similar sentiments moved Jewish students to take buses to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964, and brought both Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali to oppose the Vietnam War. Solidarity spurred students and people of color to call for American divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and has more recently brought Black activists to Standing Rock. The notion of global minorities and underclasses sharing common cause was provocative in 1952, but is now a constant in progressive circles, and has a special force among mainstream Black American institutions and politics, regardless of ideology.

But the past year has thrown Du Bois’s prescription into crisis. Most Americans expressed horror and sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s counterassault against Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians and caused a dire humanitarian crisis, all with the backing of the United States. As about 100 hostages still languish in captivity, the horror and sympathy remain. But the continued violence in Gaza has strengthened, among many, and especially among many Black observers, another feeling: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the resulting protests against Israel’s conduct, and statements of empathy for Palestinians, have been met with censorship by universities and state governments, and with derision and dismissal by the media. This has been particularly true for expressions of solidarity that are based on the Black experience in America, which have often been disparaged as unsophisticated and inauthentic. “The identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America’s race problem was hardly made in America,” the historian Gil Troy argued in Tablet magazine. “It is a recent foreign import,” air-dropped onto a gullible populace.

Of course, the American South is not the Middle East, and there are limits to every comparison. But it is not simplistic or facile to, while acknowledging differences, also see structural similarities over time and space, or to believe that, in a world connected by language, finance, and technology, our systems and ways of being are related. The Black experience has been usefully analogized to the Jewish struggle over the years, and we have clear documentary evidence of the ways that systems of anti-Black and anti-Semitic oppression have been borrowed and translated from one to the other. To claim kinship between Black and Palestinian peoples is merely to apply the same logic. Solidarity means recognizing the parallels and shared humanity among the three groups, and working to create a world that does so as well.

But efforts to create that world are now in danger of being snuffed out. The dehumanization and marginalization of Palestinians in American discourse and media, as well as denunciations of the use of concepts such as “intersectionality” and “decolonization” in relation to Israel, among even liberal commentators, have dovetailed neatly with the ongoing conservative backlash against “wokeness” and Black history. All the while, anti-Semitism is worsening in America and beyond. The fate of multiracial organizing and democracy in America is inextricably bound up with the fates of people halfway around the world.

Can solidarity survive the onslaught in Gaza?

Left: A draft of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” from April 1952. Right: Du Bois (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture).

First, some words about that onslaught. Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal incursion, in which assailants killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages, with an offensive that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, an estimate from the Gaza Health Ministry. (Hamas runs the ministry, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations consider its numbers generally reliable.) As of April, nearly 23,000 of those fatalities were identifiable by names and identification numbers issued by Israel. According to some experts, if people who die from disease or injury, as well as those found buried in rubble, are included, the true toll could be much higher. War is war, and the great, unavoidable tragedy of war is civilian death. But unavoidable is not synonymous with purposeful.

The Israeli campaign has, as a matter of strategy, regularly and knowingly subjected Palestinian civilians to violence. The Israel Defense Forces have targeted Gazan health-care facilities as civilians were being treated and sheltering there, claiming that militants use the facilities and that hostages were held in them (an explanation that the U.S. State Department has backed up as credible). Israeli air strikes have devastated Palestinian refugee camps, including a strike in Rafah in May that killed dozens of civilians along with two top Hamas commanders.

The UN and the U.S. Agency for International Development have both concluded that Israel blocked shipments of food aid to Gaza, a finding that under both U.S. and international law should make continued weapons shipments to Israel illegal. (The Biden administration rejected the finding, but has since written a letter demanding that Israeli officials improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.) The IDF has struck the same UN-backed school building five times, saying it was targeting militants. According to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 129 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed, making this the deadliest period for journalists since the group began keeping records in 1992. Last month, Israel shipped 88 unidentified Palestinian bodies back to Gaza in the back of a truck. And earlier this month, the United States launched an investigation of allegations of widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, months after video depicting an alleged sexual assault at the Sde Teiman detention camp leaked on social media.

Those who survive are facing the depths of deprivation. Almost 2 million people in Gaza are hungry or starving. For pregnant women, stress and terror are contributing to a spike in preterm births, and doctors describe seeing stillbirths, newborn deaths, and malnourished infants. Deteriorating public-health conditions have resulted in a wave of contagious skin diseases among children, and what the UN calls a “frightening increase” in Hepatitis A infections. The WHO is rushing to vaccinate Palestinians against polio after Gaza’s first confirmed case in a quarter century. This is a human catastrophe, documented and verified over the past year by the United States and other countries, the international diplomatic and legal community, nongovernmental organizations, reputable news outlets, and, not least, Palestinians themselves.

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov shows a steady drop in American sympathy toward Israel, and a corresponding rise in sympathy toward Palestinians; earlier polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and want America to send humanitarian aid to Gaza in lieu of more weapons to Israel. Yet one demographic group that broke early in this direction was Black Americans. In a New York Times/Siena College poll taken in December 2023, Black respondents already overwhelmingly supported an immediate cease-fire, and were much less likely than white respondents to endorse any action that endangered more civilians. Altogether, Black respondents were more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, and more likely than not to believe that Israel was not “seriously interested in a peaceful solution.” In a June CBS News poll, nearly half of Black respondents said they wanted the U.S. to encourage Israel to completely stop its military actions in Gaza, while only 34 percent of white respondents did.

These sentiments aren’t limited to young activists and leftists. Even moderate and legacy Black institutions have expressed them. In June, the NAACP called on the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel, arguing that the president “must be willing to pull the levers of power when appropriate to advance liberation for all.” In February, the Council of Bishops, the leadership branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for an end to American support for Israel and an immediate cease-fire. Noting both the connection of Black folks to Palestinians and the historical linkages between the Black and Jewish plights—and the deep theological affinity of Black-liberation thought with the story of the ancient Jews—the AME statement said that “the cycle of violence between historically wounded peoples will not be dissolved by the creation of more wounds or through weapons of war.” The statement also accused the United States of “supporting this mass genocide.”

In January, more than a thousand Black pastors—representing congregations totaling hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class Black people—urged President Joe Biden to push for a cease-fire. The leaders made a pragmatic case: They feared that Black voters, typically reliable backers of the Democratic Party (and Biden in particular), might not show up to the polls in November if the deaths in Gaza continued. But they also made a moral argument based in solidarity: “We see them as a part of us,” the Reverend Cynthia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

This sympathy toward Palestinians is shared widely across Black communities—by Black activists, commentators, clergy, and white- and blue-collar professionals of all age groups. Identification with the Palestinian cause stretches back well before the current conflict, showing up in polls as early as the 1970s. This solidarity is based on a number of factors, but the main one is obvious: Black people see what is happening to Palestinians, and many feel the tug of the familiar in their heart.

Attempts like Hale’s to analogize the experiences of Black people with those of Palestinians have often been met with a simple insistence that they are wrong; that they have confused things; that relations between Palestinians and Israelis are too complex to allow any comparison. In 1979, at the United Nations, the chief Israeli delegate, Yehuda Blum, chided leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, for calling for a Palestinian homeland. “Understandably, they are less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties,” Blum said.

In 2020, during the height of America’s purported “racial reckoning,” the Haaretz commentator Nave Dromi wrote that there were simply no commonalities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, claiming that Palestinians “don’t want genuine peace, in contrast to blacks in the United States, who do seek to live in peace with their American compatriots.” In 2021, in the pages of this magazine, the writer Susie Linfield said that the concept of “intersectionality” had been improperly applied to analogizing the Black and Palestinian struggles, in a way that can “occlude complex realities, negate history, prevent critical thinking, and foster juvenile simplifications.”

It is true that analogy has its limits for any political situation, and that, especially among journalists, nuance and context are crucial components of the arsenal of understanding. But often, regard for “complexity” in this particular conflict means treating its history as one hermetically sealed off from the rest of human experience, which in turn short-circuits any attempt to make common cause with Palestinians.

The short-circuiting has only accelerated since October 7. Shortly after Hamas’s attack, Rabbi Mark H. Levin wrote in The Kansas City Star that the argument that Black Americans and Palestinians have parallel experiences is “a popular but false analogy.” According to Alexis Grenell in The Nation, “When outsiders collapse the Palestinian cause into, say, the struggle for Black Lives or LGBTQ rights—while framing that position as virtuous because it’s ‘simple’—it’s not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Behind these objections is, perhaps, the very real fear of anti-Semitism—of Jews facing a unique scrutiny born not of compassion, but of hate. And it is indisputably the case that such singling-out does animate odious worldviews, that Hamas has justified its actions with anti-Semitism, and that the group has committed brutal and unspeakable acts. But instead of isolating Jews, solidarity actually situates the state of Israel within a much larger story, one in which brutality is all too common. And standing with oppressed people—including Palestinians, many of whom dream of a future without Hamas—does not require them to be universally righteous; this would in itself be a unique scrutiny.

Still, the fear of anti-Semitism has empowered those who would quell expressions of solidarity, and who were hostile to the idea long before October 7. In the past year, the insistence on Palestinian-Israeli relations as an inscrutable cipher, and the rejection of attempts to analogize the Black and Palestinian situations, have contributed to a broader aversion to multiracial organizing. In November 2023, the Free Press’s Bari Weiss made this argument explicit in an essay about college campuses: DEI efforts, she argued, were tantamount to “arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Since the 1960s, student protesters have often borrowed from the logic and language of Black protest, and many left-wing organizers on campuses have compared the Black and Palestinian experiences. During the invasion of Gaza, as universities became the locus of pro-Palestinian protest, many on both the left and the right saw the activism as proof that students’ minds had been warped by left-wing orthodoxy. Universities targeted their own protesting students with police crackdowns, canceled commencement addresses, and conspicuously revised speech and conduct codes, while politicians sought to pass laws that would ban forms of free expression, including an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires universities to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could reasonably see students expelled for criticizing Israel. Many ostensibly stalwart defenders of the First Amendment have found themselves tongue-tied.

This environment has invigorated people who were already calling for crackdowns on “wokeness.” The right-wing activist Chris Rufo used the backlash against student protests to try to oust administrators at elite universities who were too friendly toward diversity and other presumably leftist causes. Many other commentators have assailed DEI, decolonization, and critical race theory, often without taking care to define or assess how much currency in our discourse these terms actually have. The Black intellectuals who helped spin solidarity into real practice are often summoned, solely for the purpose of exorcism. All of these names and theories have been stripped of meaning and context and stewed down to a mush. The objective is not understanding or coherence, but convenience, turning solidarity into a Black bogeyman to destroy.

It should be noted that W. E. B. Du Bois was an early contributor to The Atlantic, and in 1901 risked his fledgling academic credibility to write a story for the magazine defending Reconstruction—when the magazine’s editorial leadership decried the era as a mistake. That essay became the cornerstone of Du Bois’s most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first elucidated the concept of the “color line,” which animated his 1952 address in the Hotel Diplomat. It should also be noted that, like many other Black scholars, he saw a mirror of the Black experience under that color line in the historical plight of Europe’s Jews, and explicit links between Nazi policies and Jim Crow. As Hitler began to build the machinery of industrialized genocide, and much of Europe and white America refused Jewish refugees from Germany, historically Black colleges and universities continued to sponsor visa applications. The Black press, early and without equivocation, saw the brewing catastrophe for what it was.

In the years leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto speech, Du Bois had been an ardent Zionist who believed that the creation of a Jewish state would lend legitimacy to Pan-African projects like Liberia, which had been founded as a colonial “promised land” for formerly enslaved Black Americans. But the Liberian project did not provide the promised liberation—indeed, it subjected local people to enslavement, subjugation, and war instead, all at the hands of a colonial elite and foreign companies—and Du Bois’s reluctance to acknowledge that failure was one of his great hypocrisies.

But in his later years, Du Bois followed his own logic to a more ecumenical approach, one that viewed all subjugated peoples as part of a connected global movement. This expansive view of solidarity, as embraced by many in the Black diaspora, did not require that groups have identical struggles or historical contexts in order to create common cause. Rather, it was based on the shared experiences of oppression, dehumanization, and lack of self-determination, especially at the hands of the American empire.

In this context, many Black observers witnessed years of Palestinian suffering, subsidized by American tax dollars and arms shipments—even as Black neighborhoods and schools were deprived of investment—and concluded that something familiar was going on. Many Black intellectuals criticized Israel for its role in conflicts with its Arab neighbors in the 1950s and ’60s, and for allying with apartheid South Africa. For those who were not scholars in foreign policy, there was a constant stream of news images showing meager conditions in Palestinian refugee camps, and forced or restricted movement. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of his own trip to the region in 2002: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Arguments that the conflict is too complex to compare with other global systems—to the Black experience in particular—have always rung hollow, especially given that both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were often characterized by their defenders as too singular for outsiders to comprehend. In the 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency devoted to maintaining white supremacy, sent speakers across the country to deliver a set of talking points called “The Message From Mississippi.” In those remarks, the speaker would complain that “the North seemed to know all the answers to our problems without having and knowing the problem,” before explaining patiently that Jim Crow was necessary and right. But this kind of time-wasting and complexification did not stop the northerners who heeded the call to participate in Freedom Summer. They did not need advanced degrees in segregation to know that what they saw on the news was wrong.

One effect of the prominence of the war in Gaza in American media over the past year has been a belated demystification. The deluge of images of flattened buildings, dismembered bodies, and grieving families does not present a conflict that is singular or arcane, but one that is frustratingly, appallingly familiar. After the May air strike on Rafah, the videos and photos that emerged were horrific—and not the least bit “complicated.” The victims were not “human beasts,” as the Israeli general responsible for overseeing Gazan aid described Hamas militants and the Palestinian civilians who celebrated on October 7, but mothers and children, dazed and broken. They deserve the same empathy and protection as any other people, and have been denied it by a constant stream of dehumanization, including decades of rhetoric painting Palestinians as backwards, uncivilized, and incompatible with “Western” values. This is a tactic Black folks know all too well.

In November 2023, Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, a member of the governing Likud party, shared on social media his belief that the campaign had been “too humane,” and demanded that Israel “burn Gaza now no less!” Last winter, two members of far-fight ultranationalist parties—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a vocal proponent of illegal settlement and annexation in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the Jewish-supremacist movement—called for the expulsion of all of the residents of Gaza. Shortly after the Rafah strike, Nikki Haley, the former Republican candidate for president, visited an artillery post in Israel and wrote Finish Them on an artillery shell. Instigated by extremist leaders and unfettered by the law, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have engaged in a campaign of ruthless violence and dispossession against Palestinian residents, even as the Israeli military has ramped up operations there that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Given all this, when Black folks who were raised on stories of lynchings and the threat of obliteration—stories of the Tulsa Massacre, of the quelling of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, of the Red Summer—look at Gaza, how could they not see something they recognize?

Rafah, May 5, 2024 (Hatem Khaled / Reuters)

When Du Bois gave his 1952 speech, Israel was a new state with an uncertain future. The Holocaust was not yet a matter of memory but a matter of present urgency, and across Europe, Jewish refugees still made temporary homes in displaced-persons camps. Du Bois had wept for victims of lynchings in the United States, and his grief was naturally extended to Jews who had lost family members, and who feared mightily about their ability to exist on this Earth as a people.

The Holocaust is more distant in time now, but not much more distant than Jim Crow, which is to say that it is living history, and that the staggering pain of genocide—and the attendant anxiety about future erasure—remains an essential part of how those of us seeking to build a global moral community should understand the world. That requires understanding the shock and profound loss of the global Jewish community on October 7. Solidarity demands that right-minded global citizens reckon with the stubborn persistence of anti-Semitism in the world, and its resurgence in the past few decades.

Solidarity does not demand, however, that they endorse another massacre, or the continued subjugation of another people. In fact, it demands the opposite. “A truly intersectional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Susie Linfield wrote, “would, of necessity, incorporate the Jewish people’s torturous history of expulsion, pariahdom, statelessness, and genocide.” This is undeniably true, and would then logically make an imperative of standing in solidarity with any group facing such circumstances.

The widespread backlash against that imperative is perhaps the chill in the air preceding the storm of the next four years, auguring a world of warring tribes, of us versus them. Trumpism, the ideology that backs the most authoritarian crackdowns on student protests and free speech, is hostile to Jews and Palestinians, and positions solidarity as the main enemy to a state built purely on the pursuit of self-interest. Already, this is a world where Palestinians are marginalized in the media and in policy, and one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and anti-Semitism continues to rise. Americans have always believed themselves to be at the moral center of the world, and here they have a case. The militarism and dehumanization endorsed by so many Americans are important exports, as are the American armaments that have killed thousands of Palestinian children before they could experience the wonder of learning to ride a bicycle.

This may all sound like an anti-war argument in general, and it is. Reeling from the horrors of the World Wars and the atomic age, Du Bois grew preoccupied with finding a solution to war itself. He came to understand that domestic systems of oppression and global wars shared a common root of systematized dehumanization, manufactured by the global color line. For Du Bois, true peace was the only way forward, and it required “extend[ing] the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples” across the world.

Several other Black leaders reached similar conclusions in their intellectual lives, ultimately linking global pacifism to the project of racial egalitarianism. In the years before his death, King, operating from his framework of the “three evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism, came out to oppose the Vietnam War. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in his best-known denunciation of the war. He spoke specifically of Black empathy with the Vietnamese. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met,” he said. “They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.”

What would Du Bois have said about the tragedy in Gaza? Over his long career, he worked to build a coherent philosophy on the basic principle of seeing all humanity as worth saving. He contradicted himself, made grievous errors, and often fell short of his own ethics in this quest. By the time he found himself speaking in the Hotel Diplomat, he’d amassed enough conflicting views to be his own best interlocutor. But he always professed, as found in his “Credo,” a belief “in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Du Bois’s guiding principle was not so different from the founding ethos of the abolitionist magazine that had helped catapult him to fame. In 1892, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of The Atlantic, gave an unambiguous definition of the American idea that his magazine contemplated: “emancipation.”

Emerson’s view was forged at a time when abolitionist arguments were censored in some institutions, abolitionists could be lynched if they journeyed to the wrong corner of America, and the supposed savagery and bloodthirst of the American Negro was the predominant moral argument for keeping him in chains. Emerson made a choice that was then bold and unusual among the white literati: to view Black people as humans, and to rebuild his philosophy around that conclusion. Emerson chose solidarity, and wrote against the scourge of slavery. He did so because emancipation, that American idea, demanded it.

Today, emancipation still demands much of us. It requires that we create a world in which the Holocaust could never happen again, which by definition means a world in which a holocaust could never happen again. It would also necessarily be one in which there would be no mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no famine in Sudan, no children held in cages at the American border, no steady procession of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, no killing of thousands of children in Gaza.

America is clearly failing miserably in that work. The ascendant political ideology gripping both parties views solidarity with suspicion, a suspicion that colors our global realpolitik. The United States remains committed to providing the bombs that kill children, even while—somehow—calling for a cease-fire.

“Where are we going—whither are we drifting?” asked Du Bois in 1952. On the one hand, we have solidarity. On the other, ruin.

We might as well start with the lowlight of last night’s Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. That would be Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster who’s part of Joe Rogan’s circle, and who was the evening’s first speaker.

“These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside,” he joked. “Just like they did to our country.” A minute later: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” It took a few more minutes before he got to the joke about Black people loving watermelons. Novel, edgy stuff—for a minstrel show in 1874.

Other speakers were only somewhat better. A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ” and “the devil.” The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised “to restore America to the true Americans.”) Melania Trump delivered a rare public speech that served mostly as a reminder of why her speeches are rare.

[Read: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks.

Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror—presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally. (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.)

“Stay on message,” pleaded Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican in a tight reelection race. That’s ridiculous. This—all of this—is the message of Trump’s campaign. Other Republicans may cringe at the coarseness of these comments, or worry that they will cost votes, but they made their choice long ago, and have stuck with them despite years of bigotry and other ugliness

[Adam Serwer: J. D. Vance’s empty nationalism]

Trump is running on nativism, crude stereotypes, and lies about immigrants. He has demeaned Harris in offensive and personal terms. He’s attacked American Jews for not supporting him. His disdain for Puerto Rico is long-standing, and his callousness after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was one of the most appalling moments of an appalling presidency. He feuded with the island’s elected officials, his administration tried to block aid, and he tried to swap the American territory for Greenland. (The Trump campaign said that Hinchcliffe’s routine “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” which is also absurd. He was invited by Trump to appear at a rally for Trump’s campaign, and made the joke standing at a lectern emblazoned with Trump’s name.)

The Trump campaign itself may be perfectly happy with how it all went down. Madison Square Garden, the most famous venue in Manhattan, a place that still enthralls him, was packed to the rafters for him. Counterprotests were muted, even as speakers at the rally boasted about entering the beating heart of liberalism. (As The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes, New York City has moved somewhat toward him, though any hopes of his winning the city or the state remain far-fetched.)

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump’s dog whistles are unmistakable]

The whole point of the rally was provocation. Trump has long demonstrated a view that it’s better when people are talking about him—even if they’re outraged—than talking about anyone else. The record is murky: Trump won in 2016 but lost the popular vote, lost in 2020, and led his party to poor performances in 2018 and 2022. But he appears to believe that this year could be different. Trump calculates that if people are thinking about immigration and race, they will move toward him, even if they disapprove of the policy solutions he’s offering (or just don’t believe he’ll implement them).

Some Democrats agree, and fret that the Harris campaign’s recent turn toward attacking Trump is a missed opportunity for the Democrat to make a positive case for herself or refocus on economic issues. The pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward warns in an email that “attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” while Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a Harris surrogate, warned that the rally was “bait.”

As a matter of electoral calculation, focusing on the offensive remarks last night may be unhelpful for Harris. But as an encapsulation of what Trump stands for as a candidate, and what he would bring to office, the rally was an effective medium for his closing message.

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Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

[Peter Wehner: Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying?]

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”

This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots, so that Cambodia would be “purified.”

In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.

[Read: Trump isn’t bluffing]

In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”

His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.

These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.

These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.

But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.

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