 His history teaches us to be critical, but not to be cynical. So tonight, we're going to be courageously critical, and we're going to be critical in our courage in asking what is at risk and what is at stake when we claim another world is possible. At the same time, we will be careful to avoid conflating what are very different historical cases. And instead, we seek to drill down into these cases. And in the process, we may uncover some disturbing resonances, but we will also be working to put our finger on what is similar, what is different, and why. So I'm going to conclude this little introduction by offering a few questions to launch us in our exploration of the seven cases we'll be considering tonight. What makes one effort to transform the world liberatory and another oppressive? How and why have fundamentally oppressive visions appeared liberatory to some people? How and why have many movements for liberation resulted in maintaining or creating new forms of oppression? And most important, how can we learn from these examples to engage more effectively and in more liberatory ways in our own movement building? So the format tonight, there's seven of us, and we're each going to discipline ourselves, and we're going to rely on Jess Johnson, our committee member, to keep us on track, five minutes each. And then we are going to ask you to reflect and have you do a kind of pair and share, talk to the person next to you for a couple minutes, just to reflect on what you've heard. And then we're going to have quite a lot of time for audience comments and questions. We're going to collect a bunch of them before we respond, really trying to get as many voices in the room as possible. So to start off, I'm going to invite Professor Alon Confino, who is Pen Tishkak, Chair of Holocaust Studies and Professor of History and Jewish Studies at UMass Amherst, where he is the director of the Institute for Holocaust Genocide and Memory Studies. Thank you, Zickery. Thank you, Jess, for organizing it. I'm going to start it easier for me. Good evening. Thanks for coming. So not all revolutionary dreams are born equal. This was my first sentence, so it's a bit of what Zickery said. Some want to change the world for the better, for humanity. And some, not less powerful, not less convincing for millions, not less popular, are based on discriminatory ideas, even genocidal ideas. I'm a scholar of Germany. In 1933, the Nazi revolution swept Germany. It was an awesome popular revolution, awesome, by the way, of its political power, of course. It was based on the idea of race, on the idea that human beings are inherently and essentially unequal, and it ended up with a war of unparalleled destruction and genocides against the Jews, the Holocaust, but also against Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, disabled Germans, and others. In 20th of 1934, Father Spelter, a father of the Catholic Church, wrote to Adolf Hitler, my theory, after I was ordained a priest of April 15, 1934, it was my sincere desire to offer my first mass to God with a prayer. This is for you, my funeral, on your birthday today. And we learn from this letter of a serious person, a sincere person, who wrote this to Hitler on his birthday. I'd like to offer three reflections. First of all, the Nazi revolution and the Nazi regime came to power democratically. The Nazi party was the biggest party in Germany. It won elections. And people from all walks of life supported it. So we have to listen very carefully to why Father Spelter decided to vote for Hitler. Without recrimination and without blaming, we want to avoid these kind of things. We have to understand why people find that it gives meaning to their life to vote for this, to support this kind of revolutions. Otherwise, we are not going to understand why they happened. The second thing is Father Spelter was what we call today a community activist. He had a church that was very active. He talked to people. He convinced them. He had all sorts of things organized for the Nazi party and then the Nazi regime in his church. Revolutions, also like marriage ones, start on the local level. Of course, they need a regime. They need a security apparatus. They need all sorts of things. But they also need supporters, people on the ground, who have failed belief. And we should take their beliefs seriously. And we do things. So, if you want to avoid these kind of revolutions, we have to do our share of the local in this way. And finally, Father Spelter voted for Hitler. But he did that vote for Auschwitz. No one knew in 1933 and 1944 that the World War is going to happen, that Auschwitz is going to happen. We know how revolutions start. We never know how they're going to end. It's true about revolutions from the right and from the left. Which means that Father Spelter thought, you know, it's just going to be really nice if I have my town and the schools and my little world without Jews. If only this, this is going to be great. But this is not so. Things don't happen like this. We know how things start. We don't know where our prejudice is going to lead us. So is there a lesson? We'll be surprised. I'm a historian, but I don't believe in lessons from history because everyone takes his or her own lesson. But I can't say this. History continues to be predictably unpredictable. And it will turn our predictions inside out and upside down and upside down. So it's better not to predict that it cannot happen here. You just don't know it. Instead of predicting, we have to work that it will not happen here. And so if you want to avoid nightmarish dreams, I think we should do two things. First, to listen to Father Spelter. And second, to oppose him as much as we can. Thank you. Now to the case of Mao Erichina. Mao Erichina is once a darling of leftist scholars and activists. Now is something most of them find much harder to celebrate. But the fact that this history is complicated or even embarrassing to former supporters should not lead us to ignore it. Rather, we should tackle it head on and learn from its contradictions. And so I'm going to use this history, Mao Erichina, to raise two questions that I see as deeply important and very hard to resolve for social and political movements around the world today. First is the question of traditional culture. When do we treat traditional culture as a source of oppression? And when as a source of resistance? So following their great disillusionment with the Chinese socialist revolution, many China scholars internationally began honoring Chinese rural culture as something beautiful that had been violated by the socialist state in the name of revolution. What had once been more or less accepted as a liberation of rural Chinese people became seen as a modernist and authoritarian attack on local culture and society. To take, for example, the Communist Party led disruptions of traditional marriage practices. There was a time when leftist observers felt pretty unambivalent in supporting such interventions as necessary components of the movement to liberate rural Chinese women from centuries of feudal oppression. The more remote or inaccessible the village, the more likely that village was to be mired in such traditions. Traditions that not only sold women into marriage but often broke young girls' feet to make them more marriageable. This is the practice of flip-finding, very hard to defend, right? But today, leftists are more likely to celebrate traditional Chinese communities for the ecological wisdom and social values they are seen to possess. Many feel protective of such village communities and the knowledge that they preserve, which many of us see as embedded in deep cultural systems and social networks. And we mourn the destruction of such communities by the combined forces of an authoritarian state and a neoliberal market economy. We celebrate local efforts to resist in the face of transformations composed from the outside as a very different way of understanding what traditional culture is, right? So in sum, we face this problem that oppressive ideologies, for example, patriarchy, are embedded within broader cultural systems that we have important reasons to respect or even to defend. So this then brings me to the second question I wanna highlight, which is how do we propose to get rid of oppressive ideologies? So in Mao Erachina, patriarchy, along with many other oppressive or otherwise undesirable elements of traditional culture was defined as a feudal remnant, like a remnant from feudal times. The state sought to sweep away such old ideologies and cleanse foul old thoughts using a wide variety of methods, including the destruction of religious objects in certain times, the banning of certain customs, also including a practice known as criticism, self-criticism in which people publicly identified what was oppressive in their society and what was oppressive in their own thoughts and behaviors. So this method of criticism, self-criticism was then, and I would say has continued, to have a very big impact on political movements around the world, including here and now, that we rarely call it by that name anymore. It has been extraordinarily empowering and liberating for people who learn to name oppressions and reflect critically on the way their own actions have helped perpetuate those oppressions. At the same time, criticism, self-criticism emerged from this larger sweeping, cleansing, purging mission of the Chinese socialist revolution. And in that historical context, criticism, self-criticism often went itself to reinforcing authoritarian and oppressive political power relations. So it did both, right? It inspired and liberated and it also oppressed. It resulted often in the purging of not just ideas, but also individuals associated with those ideas. It was both physically violent and psychologically violent as people throughout society were required to lay there their deepest levels of consciousness to scrutiny, criticism, and scouring by agents of the party state. And also, they were required in many cases to become agents of the party state to scour their own consciousness and those of their families and friends. So again, just to circle back, what I'm urging us to do is to face the contradictions presented by hard historical cases like Mao Erichina and ask ourselves big questions like how do we grapple with the fact that cultures simultaneously preserve oppressive structures and offer sites of resistance to state and global forms of oppression? And how can political education be practiced and liberating rather than oppressive ways? How can we avoid treating people as disposable or inflicting violence on them in, for example, our efforts to purge society of evils that I think we wanna purge society of like white supremacy and misogyny? I know. And there. So our next speaker is Professor Tiana Sierra-Vicera who's a historian, popular educator, and organizer. So today I'm gonna talk about sexism and homophobia within the 20th century left. The Cuban Revolution and the Black Panther Movement will be my two examples, but I want to make it very clear that sexism and homophobia are not unique to Latin American and African American communities. They've been a historic problem of the white left as well and white supremacy, patriarchy, these are global structures impacting all communities. So in the 20th century left, there was a sexist current that defined militancy as the recuperation of manhood and patriarchal power. And within that logic, some leftists identified feminism and homosexuality and other deviant behavior as counter-revolutionary for us foreign concepts. But why did they think this? Let's turn to the example of Cuba. In the mid-1950s, Cuba served as a playground for U.S. tourists who gambled and bought sex from men and women, including youth and children. And some Cubans were outraged of these inequalities and understood those inequalities through a sexist lens, viewing Cuba as a feminized, vile, sexually violated nation that was being violated by the United States. So let's fast forward to 1959, the Revolutionary Triumph. The top revolutionary leaders saw sex work and homosexuality as bourgeois and imperialist in physicians. Homosexuality was seen as being antithetical to the new socialist man who was responsible for his community and his family. In 1965, Fidel Castro described homosexuality as a deviation, which, quote, clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be, unquote. That same year, the government established work camps to rehabilitate gay men. And due to international and national protests, including bi-revolutionary supporters, the government just shut down those camps between 1967 and 1969. And to give some context, those views were not unique to Cuba at the time. Many people in the United States also believed that homosexuality could be cured and anti-Saharan laws in the 1960s were still very common. People still believe this to this day that homosexuality could be cured. And Castro was not alone in this position. In the United States, the L. Richard Cleaver, Minister of Information for the Black Panthers, framed white supremacy as a struggle to redeem black men as the patriarchs. And in 1968, Cleaver stated that, quote, homosexuality is a sickness. Castro and Cleaver are two examples and women of color and queer folks, especially queer folks of color, stood to lose from these heterosexist definitions of revolution. They were pitted against their own communities and forced to choose false binaries, forced to choose between their liberation as workers or their liberation as women, their liberation as people of color or their liberation as queer people. But what's inspiring is that throughout the Americas, revolutionary women and LGBT people directly confronted those sexist and homophobic tendencies within the left. They redefined revolution as a broad struggle to dismantle various oppressions from the workplace to the bedroom. And in many cases, queer folks and women changed the trajectory of entire movements and aberrations. In Cuba, revolutionary women pushed the government to adopt a radical pro-women's rights agenda, including providing abortion, child care and expanded educational access. Queer Cubans have also been in this fight since 2008, gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy has been made available through the national free healthcare system. The island also provides a comprehensive sex education program. Condoms are distributed. There's medicine and support for people living with HIV. And in 2013, LGBT Cubans successfully won a legal victory to end workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. And now there's an ongoing fight on the island to legalize same sex marriage. There's also a similar tradition in the United States of black feminists and particularly black lesbian feminists who developed a theory and practice to confront multiple forms of oppression, waging the fight against white supremacy as being very intimately connected to the fight against patriarchy. So what's the big takeaway? What are the lessons? When we're studying revolutions, we can't reduce these revolutions to their sexist and homophobic elements. The revolutionary interventions of women and queer folks points to the importance of studying revolution from below. In other words, what the top leaders think that's not the whole revolution. We have to look elsewhere among the right confile. And to answer Sigrid's question of how do we find a way to move forward? I think that when we follow the lead of right confile, we follow the lead of those who are most oppressed. We can develop a theory and a practice to combat multiple forms of oppression and not see the struggle against capitalist oppression as being separated from that of gender and sexual liberation. There is actually just to introduce each speaker now. Professor Agustin Lamontis has a PhD in sociology from the State University of New York, Binghamton and is a professor here at UMass in sociology and Afro-Hamb. The Cuban revolution tends to be not much engaged in conversation about radical politics and revolutionary transformations because it's iterative to be a passe as a tropical embodiment of Soviet authoritarian socialism or embrace unconditionally with that critical reflection. Nonetheless, I will argue that after almost 60 years, after the 1959 revolutionary throne, Cuba offers important lessons for the past, present and future of revolutionary change. Enlightedly increased velocity of historical time and late modernity. The Cuban revolution lived through three videos of world crisis, anti-systemic turmoil and restructuring. The long 60s when Cuba championed struggles for national liberation and their world were this socialism. The fight against the neoliberalism from the 1980 to the rise of the so-called big time that liberal credit characterized as divided in two levels, a bad Castro-Chavista and a good social democratic one. And the current moment of multi-paceted, generalized crisis and the rise of new rights, new rightly good ones. The promises and pedigts of radical change in the Cuban revolution should be analyzed through these three moments. But in the short time that I have here, I'll be briefly address a couple of questions, namely racial politics and democracy focusing in the present. As the late Fernando Martinez Heredia used to argue, an important difference between the Cuban revolution and the so-called socialism of the 21st century in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela is that in Cuba there was a socialization of means of production, partially meaning expropriation of virtual property into the state. This allowed the formation of a nation, national social state that promoted universal policies of redistribution in key areas such as education, healthcare, housing and employment that's authentically leveled the social field. But not to the extent of eliminating racial and gender hierarchies as showed in recent studies on intersectional inequalities in Cuba. The official declaration in the early 1960s of racism as a problem solved along with the prohibition of any associations established on the basis of race disabled the efficacy of racial politics as a positive source of change in the revolutionary process. But the persistence of racism and patriarchy across the social edifice from high government and the media to everyday practices frame the persistence of the black public sphere expressed mostly in the realm of culture and spirituality. I mean racial politics did not disappear from Cuba. As of the fall of the Soviet blood during the so-called special period when racial inequalities deepened in Cuba and some of the gains in redistribution and equity were reversed. Emerged a politicized hip-hop movement that it protested against racism and sexism while dedicating black identities and spirituality. The young hip-hop that is now an anti-racist movement and reconstituted black public sphere in Cuba that includes grassroots neighborhood organizations, women networks, intellectual spaces, cultural groupings and even state representative. There to be an image of a three black vice president just elected in Cuba in the recent elections. This movement part of what has been labeled as a cultural public sphere that dynamized Cuban politics from below as the sister just said. It's part of a culture war that aimed to politicize the only race but also aesthetic practices, gender and sexual relations. Getting to a key challenge to Cuban socialism which is the question of decentralization and democracy and which it was in the three presentations before. Another main critique of the 20th century socialism has been its statism which implies a whole array of problems from the inefficiencies of central planning and lack of democratic rule. Arguably one of the principal prairies of the Cuban revolution has been its authoritarian tendencies which should not be confused with simplistic characterization of its polity as totalitarian and dictatorial. In Cuba there is a political system with elections and legislature and the decision making processes check and balances. This was not denied that it is founded in a unique political party that power has been over concentrated in the executive and that the mechanism of the rule of law are not entirely clear and consistent. These status quo allow for an ongoing practice of exclusion of whoever was considered different and more disliked from hegemonic ways of defining the norm which include the variety of internal orders of this definition of the revolutionary nation from gays and lesbians, the revolutionary man, to divergent intellectual and ideological postures. This provoked debates and demands creating a contested trade for these social identities and spaces bringing questions of citizenship and of empowering civil society. The present process of constitutional change in Cuba is allowing these fundamental questions of democracy to be raised in Cuban society. Interestingly, at the very moment when there is a rise of the right wing in Argentina and Brazil along with crises of so-called progressive governments in Ecuador and Venezuela, in Cuba there is a move toward constitutional reform that has been widely praised as the most participatory process in Cuban political society since the revolution. The critics clearly argue that the proposed constitution might maintain the unique party and do not deeply challenge the highly centralized state power, but both the consultation and several proposals in the constitution point toward democratization. The consultation goes to the neighborhood, to the factories, it's really a wide process of consultation. In what remains of my presentation, which I'm finishing, I can only mention three issues in that direction. The first is the proposal for same-sex marriage that has been very controversial. In my view, serving as a way of promoting public debate and educating citizens on the state of sexual politics. Actually, the image that you see is of a manifesto of a black activist in Cuba who are supporting LGBTQ advocate for same-sex marriage, which is under a big debate in Cuba today because that is actually an initiative from the fundamentalist Christian right there in Cuba as in the rest of the continent. Second, the question of racism and racial discrimination for which there is a discussion about how to move beyond a simple declaration into actual policies such as affirmative action. And third, the recognition of the right to free association that could nurture the proposals of moving toward a republican form of democratic socialism as advocated by proponents of radical democracy in Cuba as a way of ordering a sort of socialism with 21st century in the island. In any case, constitutional change catalyzed an important process of political participation and social debate. Contemporary Cuban society is in a deep plot that are many contending societal logic to the kid, including dynamics of capitalist restoration, not only in the economy, but also in values of competition and conspicuous consumption. And there are many possibilities in Cuban society today. At the same time, there are proposals for revitalizing material life through cooperative and popular economies of solidarity, through a combination of market and plan, as well as the politics of liberation against all forms of oppression including racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity. It is indeed the historical juncture in which agency will determine the future. Who is faculty member in the history department here at UMass Amherst for his research and teaching. Specialties include political economy, social movements, revolution and imperialism in Latin America and the United States. So I'm gonna swing the conversation back toward the right and say a few words about the far right in Latin America in the glider half of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this is a very timely topic. I'm sure many of you have seen the news out of Brazil on October 28th. Brazilian voters elected Jair Bolsonaro, a man who openly praises the Brazilian right wing military dictatorship of the 60s, 70s, 80s. Someone who is openly racist, misogynistic. And of course to say nothing of events, recent events in the United States that make this topic all the more relevant to us today. But I wanna focus on one particular example in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. During this period, Argentina was ruled by a junta of military generals who killed around 30,000 Argentines. And they came to power, lest we forget with the resolute support of the United States government. Henry Kissinger, who today is often revered as a kind of elder statesman by both Democrats and Republicans, was a vocal supporter of the regime. He took great pains to reassure the generals that they had US support. So I'm gonna say a few words about what their ideological vision was, they being the generals and the broader movement that they represented. And how they went about implementing what they call the process of national reorganization or the process for short. Of course, there were many dictatorial regimes on the right in Latin America in the 20th century, but this is the one that is most commonly identified with the concept of fascism. So why do many people label this particular regime fascist in addition to just being dictatorial and authoritarian? Well, it was intensely nationalistic. It promoted a form of nationalism which was highly exclusionary based on notions of racial, cultural, and political purity. It was highly anti-Semitic, it glorified whiteness, and the military cast itself as the air and tour of national purity. It was intensely misogynistic and homophobic. It explicitly attempted to preserve and deepen gender and sexual hierarchies. And again, the military commanders presented themselves as the ultramasculine redeemers and defenders of the traditional order. This commitment to restoring and deepening traditional hierarchies applied in many other realms as well, notably in the realm of the economy or of the class structure. Argentine fascists were generally not anti-capitalist. Fascism in this context was not antithetical to capitalism by any means. In fact, it was capitalism's fiercest defender. And that's part of the reason why corporations like Ford and Citibank and the US government looked favorably upon the regime. Another interesting aspect of Argentine fascism was religion. The Argentine junta had a very close relationship with the Argentine Catholic Church and extraordinarily tight relationship between the generals who portrayed themselves as emissaries of God and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. To go back to the 20s and 30s, with the beginnings of the Argentine fascist movement, there was a fascist leader, Cesar Pico, who used the term Christianized fascism to refer to what he wanted to create. In terms of its methods, the junta embarked on what they called days of cleansing when they came into power, a period of extreme violence that would purify the country. So they were characterized by an extreme version of militarism. Violence was both part of their ideology and part of their strategy, their main strategy, strategy to extirpate dissent in their terms. They glorified war and violence as purifying, sacred, regenerative forces that would remake the nation, much in the same way that Mussolini did when he articulated the doctrine of fascism. The regime's primary war, of course, was against dissidents within Argentina. It was also fascist in the groups that it targeted. First and foremost, the left, the arm left by mid-1976 had ceased to be a major player in the country. So the junta expanded its focus in who it was target, trade unionists, members of the leftist parties, students and professors with suspect politics, human rights advocates, and so on. And I wanna read one quote that elaborates on the strategy. This is from one of the generals in the government. 1977, first we will kill all subversives, then we will kill all of their collaborators, then those who sympathize with subversives, then we will kill those who remain indifferent, and finally, we will kill the timid. So I include this quote because I think it's vital to understand in how far-right regimes operate, even those who think they might be safe often are not. And I wanna just make one other point that I think has particular relevance to the present. Argentine fascism was, for the most part, a homegrown phenomenon. It was not mainly a foreign import, and I think too often we think of fascism as an exclusively European phenomenon. All of the characteristics that I mentioned, nationalism, misogyny, and so on, are not unique to fascism. Argentine fascism gained popularity by building on long-standing elements of the country's political culture. So one of the upshots of this is that if we are serious about confronting fascism and other extreme-right visions, we need to have a broader focus that frontally attacks not only its most extreme manifestations, but also all of those destructive elements wherever we see them. So I'll end it. So I'm gonna talk about neoliberalism in the United States, which we tend to call libertarianism because liberal has these confusing meanings. It is a movement led by business to increase profits by reducing taxes and eliminating services and lowering wages. 1970 saw the beginnings of a massive upward redistribution of wealth that's reconstructed class relations in the United States, reducing mobility from the working class to the middle class. However, it's also made some people very rich, as you can see at the end there. And this is the essence of its vision, is that it imagines itself as a vision that enables us to all get rich. So in order to accomplish this politically in the U.S., it had to begin by confronting the labor movement. So in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, one of his first acts was firing striking workers from the Pat Cove. Neoliberalism also had to crush the so-called identity politics groups, which talked about the well-being of households from the Black Githers to feminists to gay liberation. And two parties from 1968, for 16 years, engaged in the racist attack on welfare. And even though the majority of recipients were white and the largest number were white children, it painted welfare as something that only Black women got. So the reason it had to do this is that in constant dollars, minimum wage had shrunk dramatically. It's worth 40% less than it was in 1968. And so in order to send all of us into Mac Jobs, it had to eliminate welfare, eliminate the alternative. In 1993, there was the emergence of a crisis of white nationalism or anti-immigrant fervor. As Zoe Baird, who was gonna be part of the Clinton administration, admitted that she had been part of, I'm gonna, it's gonna stop. I'm gonna stop this. Because while it's gonna get me, it's gonna keep me on time, I lose my time. So in addition, immigrant care workers themselves often felt compelled to globalize their reproduction, leaving children or other dependents in home countries where their very low US wages could provide for their children. So one way to describe what neoliberalism did was to say it's about privatization. Privatization of care work and reproductive labor, whether that's for women and usually it's people understood to be women caring for children and other people. The other thing, so there were, if I've talked about two historical crises that persuaded us to, let me see if I can get that, yeah. Persuaded us to vote for neoliberalism, which is to say, even the Koch brothers who were understood to be the folks who were most supportive of neoliberalism or libertarianism in the United States, said, hey, it's only about 2% of the population is ever gonna support this. So how did we become persuaded to vote against subsidies for things we all need, like education and healthcare? And it was in large part through crises around race, race and racism. By painting entitlements like welfare as something that only black women got. And even though the majority of there were subpoenas for white children, it persuaded folks to vote against what might have been understood to be their own best interests. The second crisis that I wanted to talk about was the crisis of immigration. Which after Reagan, the Clinton administration were the ones to militarize the border. And they were pushed by the right and they moved very fast to in fact do it. And what that accomplished was actually lower in wage rates in the United States. The third crisis was around foreclosure. And in the 1970s, or in the 1990s, US banks found themselves with too much cash flying around as the economy superheated in the 90s. And so what they did was they made more and more aggressive loans to what they ultimately began to describe as a demographic category, the subprime. And the idea was that these were people who had less than perfect credit. But the reality was that women have better credit scores than men at the same wage rates and they got worse loans. People of color got really bad loans. The people who were particularly targeted for subprime mortgages were mothers of color, women of color with kids. Rick Santelli on CNBC in the rant that launched the Tea Party, which brought Trump to power, was particularly critical of immigrants and people of color and the question of whether subprime mortgages were gonna be subsidized by the government. And so this got us to the current moment, which it's actually hard to say whether neoliberalism, which has a ton of opposition from the left, is also developing opposition from the far right. Trump came to power on a platform that was anti-globalist, which on the one hand is a sort of hand wave to white nationalists, but it's also a critique of free trade and of the very policies that libertarians have embraced since the Cold War. And so the question of whether the Republican Party is now gonna move from endorsing a minority position, libertarianism, to endorsing, to spying over libertarianism versus a racist white nationalism. The through line is racism and misogyny, which were what enabled neoliberalism to have its power over people, and it's also what may ultimately destroy it. And I'll just leave with one thought, which is that the rise of racial nationalism under Trump is the most anti-neoliberal platform we can think of. Rising militarism and hyper-policing is a massive expansion of the US federal budget. And if what business wanted was lower taxes, it's not clear how it can continue in this direction of lower taxes and massive spending on the police and the military. Tax cuts in the last year were designed to, as a guarantee for the very wealthy, that they wouldn't be affected by the budget cuts or by the deficit, but it's not clear how long this can go on. Thank you.