Commentary
The Republican Party seems oblivious to a major threat developing in its Southern stronghold. Pro-China communists from the Liberation Road group are working to flip Republican held states in the South one by one. Virginia has already fallen.
North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee are next on the list. If the communists can flip toss-up states Florida and North Carolina in 2020, President Donald Trump will likely be a one-term president and the Republican Party will be finished as a national force.
While probably numbering fewer than 2,000 members, the ultra-secretive Liberation Road may be able to remove China’s number one enemy from the White House for a measly few million dollars.
Known until April as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Liberation Road is an amalgamation of several Maoist and anarchist factions, some dating back to the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s.
Turn to Electoral Politics
In 2016, FRSO made a strong turn toward electoral politics in response to the electoral dominance of the Republican Party (especially in the South) and the election of President Trump.FRSO/Liberation Road, like most parties of Maoist origin, is heavily focused on racial and sexual minorities. The Black Lives Matter movement is an FRSO front group. Ending “white privilege” is a major part of Liberation Road strategy. The proliferation of gender pronouns we now have to deal with also comes partially from Liberation Road.
According to Liberation Road, socialism will come to the United States by rallying minorities against “white capitalism” and minority voters against what they term “The New Confederacy.”
According to the Liberation Road website:
“The New Confederacy is the white united front that, building up over the past 40 years, has used white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and austerity to rally sectors of the white middle strata and white workers around the leadership of the most reactionary forces of capital. The Republican Party is its political instrument.”Originally based mainly in Massachusetts, New York, and California, FRSO has been moving comrades into Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and other Southern states for some years. Mostly they fought the “New Confederacy” through protest and agitation. Tearing down Confederate statues is a favorite Maoist tactic, for example.
Now, after building considerable strength in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, Liberation Road is strong enough to influence elections and elect members and supporters to public office.
Grand Strategy
Liberation Road’s 2019 Main Political Report lays out the organization’s “line” and plans very clearly. If you can stomach the pseudo-scientific Marxist prose that is.“The waves of protest that spread across the county after the 2016 election showed the force of the people’s rage and resistance. But this resistance has grown, for the most part without a strategy to contend for power. We need to move from protest to power. We need to build independent political organization.”Liberation Road essentially blames the South for all that is wrong with America. They believe that without the South, the United States could soon become a non-racist, gender fluid, climate-change battling, non-patriarchal socialist paradise.
“With the power the New Confederacy has gained through the use of the Republican Party, holding trifectas in 22 states, they destroy unions, deny climate change, push the most homophobic and transphobic propaganda and policy, overrule progressive local movements or laws by state legislative ‘preemption’, and organize to repeal every last trace of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement.”Liberation Road has the solution. The Republican stranglehold on the South must be broken county by county, state by state, by mobilizing the large black and Latino populations in the South in alliance with the existing white “progressive” minorities.
“In response, some new efforts by progressive forces have emerged, state by state, to bring together the multi-racial working class with minority nationalities and others to fight back. These efforts have several things in common.
“They have a broad vision of contending for power. They work in the street and in the election booth. They work inside and outside the Democratic Party. They fight austerity, white supremacy and/or cisheteropatriarchy. And they build on the strategic alliance of the working class – of all nationalities, races and languages – with mass movements based in communities of color.”
The question is, how can Liberation Road comrades use their manpower and influence to unite enough forces on the left and the center to defeat the New Confederacy? In their 2019–2022 draft Strategic Orientation plan, they state:
“We contend that it is only a united front led by an advanced layer of forces in opposition to white supremacy, austerity and cisheteropatriarchy that can defeat this enemy. A politics that both rejects and challenges—that offers a genuine alternative—to white supremacy, austerity, and cisheteropatriarchy is the only durable solution, and a united front must lead with those politics.
“The clearest path to organizing that united front is through engaging in the electoral arena. Why do we place so much emphasis on the electoral arena in this moment? Because we believe this is the arena of struggle in which we are most clearly presented with the opportunity to construct the united front—to bring together social and political forces across and beyond self-interest. …
“Struggles become generalized when they enter into the broadest arena of politics. ... The clearest and most practical way to do this is through elections, which necessarily involve and implicate the entire public.”
Working Through the Democratic Party
Liberation Road has learned from communist mistakes of the past and is committed to a very flexible strategy in its relations with the Democratic Party.“Our approach is distinct from the Popular Front policy of the Communist Party prior to and during WWII, when it was a non-critical junior partner in the broad front of Left and center forces against Nazism and Fascism.
“That is, we are not calling for a political program that is just about electing any Democratic politician. Instead, we are calling for a clear progressive program that we fight for, through primaries, non-partisan races, and outside struggles; and commitment to a fight against our common enemy.
“This will look different depending on conditions: in Blue states, it may be the case that the advanced forces could struggle to a position to play a decisive leading role in a united front against the New Confederacy; in purple and red states, we may play secondary roles as we develop our forces and build organization and strength to ultimately contest for leadership in that front.”
The Power of ‘For All’
As serious revolutionaries, Liberation Road comrades know that the masses can best be unified around clear and meaningful slogans. Liberation Road has chosen two simple words to unify the base it wants to mobilize—“For All.”This is already evident in Liberation Road’s newly created voter mobilization organizations: Richmond For All in Virginia and the more established Durham For All in North Carolina and Memphis For All in Tennessee.
“We believe that the way to build the ‘us’ is the For All. This represents a unity of the advanced and the link between the particular subjects of the united front.
“Here we propose that the For All frame be the generally adopted one for our organization, and that our work engage in the struggle for political power. We suggest that it is on the basis of For All that we can facilitate a broad unity on the foundation of the specific grievances of oppressed peoples that also invites a generalized public support and participation.”
Why We Must Have an Enemy
If any body is wondering about the incessant propaganda from the left against President Trump, the Republican Party, conservatives, and traditional Christians—all components of the New Confederacy—Liberation Road makes its purpose clear.“For there to be an us, there also has to be a them that we can define through relation to us. This is why it’s critically important to have an enemy—the racists-billionaires, the New Confederacy, and their political organization, the Republican Party. The naming of an enemy gives us the narrow target needed to direct the united front forces against. This in turn sets the foundation to define the lines of demarcation between the enemy and the people’s united front.”
Why the Republican Party Should Take Liberation Road Seriously
While they will never admit it, Liberation Road is working in the interests of China and the world revolutionary movement. They fully understand that the United States, and specifically President Trump, must be taken down if the revolution is to succeed.Liberation Road’s many front organizations are richly funded through several major foundations and the Democracy Alliance—a network of more than 150 leftist billionaires and multi-millionaires including presidential candidate Tom Steyer, George Soros, socialist lawyer Steve Phillips, and many others. Liberation Road and their on-the-ground allies do not lack for resources.
Liberation Road has already flipped once reliably Republican Virginia. It took them 10 years, but they have already replicated much of their winning strategy in several other Southern states—some of which could go blue in 2020, or more likely 2022.
Liberation Road already heavily influences the local government in Durham, North Carolina’s most important city, and also has a strong influence in Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
Liberation Road is also influential in Jackson, Mississippi, a town run by radical mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba.
In Florida and Georgia, FRSO was a major part of the coalitions that almost elected Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams to their respective governor’s mansions in 2018. In Florida, FRSO and its allies lifted Democratic voting by around 40 percent, which normally would have guaranteed victory.
Only because President Trump ignored the Republican Party hierarchy and endorsed strong insurgent conservative Ron De Santis were the voters able to narrowly stave off a shock Democratic victory.
While Republicans seem to be focusing on the Midwestern states, the big shock of election night 2020 might come from the South.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
