Policy Statement by the Equal Opportunity Now/By Any Means Necessary Caucus (EON/BAMN) for the members of the National Education Association (NEA) 2025 Representative Assembly (RA) (July 1, 2025)
Teachers and Students – The Natural Leaders in the Fight to Save Democracy and Human Rights from the Trump Government’s Fascist Attacks
I. The Inevitable Historic Confrontation
The fundamental role of the National Education Association (NEA) in American history guarantees that the NEA and the Trump administration will confront each other now in an historic struggle over the principles that our nation is founded on.
The NEA has, from its origins, existed to defend the ability of teachers to lay the basis for democracy and equal rights in the day-to-day education of America’s young people. Teachers, together with education support staff, are the great inspirers and builders of the body of knowledge, the basic skills of learning and understanding, and the individual self-confidence and capability for critical thinking that create a democratic citizenry. What we do as teachers is essential to the possibility of the American people making real the promise of democracy and equal rights for all declared with our nation’s birth. We and our students need to stand together to defend the right to education against the growing wave of attacks on this fundamental condition of democracy in American history.
In stark conflict with the role of education in a democratic society, the government and political movement of Donald Trump exist to undermine the conditions of democracy and to dismantle the gains of two centuries of struggle for human rights. The Trump government and movement have, since Trump’s reelection as president, displayed an ever-deepening commitment to the historic aims of fascism and a constantly growing use of the methods of fascism.
Inevitably, NEA teachers and support staff members stand for everything Trump and Trumpism – 21st-century American fascism – are driven to destroy. Inevitably, NEA teachers and our students must oppose the Trump program of authoritarianism, hate-mongering, bigotry, ignorance, and violence.
II. Joining the Movement
NEA teachers must therefore join with thousands of students, their parents, and their communities in supporting and participating in the mass democratic movement against Trump’s authoritarianism and violations of human rights. We support the “No Kings” movement and the Los Angeles-based movement to defeat Trump’s attempts to use federal forces against the state of California and other states and communities – as if these American governments and communities are foreign invaders.
We stand with millions of activists and protesters of this movement in their defense of democracy, the unity of the country, free speech, civil rights, labor and independent trade union rights, due process, and the popular-democratic norms of a Constitution securing the sovereignty of “we the people.”
With this democratic movement, the NEA must oppose the racism, immigrant-bashing, sexism, anti-LGBT+ rights, and general spreading of bigoted demagogy, ignorance, lies and real cruelty by Trump, his party, and his administration.
III. FASCISM – the Reality in History and Speaking the Plain Ugly Truth About Fascism Now
At this moment in history, fascism is not some demagogic word to be thrown around because we are frustrated and angry. It identifies and delineates with empirical historical accuracy the all too real concrete processes rising up around us. Calling it what it is, is a first step in an absolutely essential, overwhelmingly urgent struggle to stop the fascist rise to power in the United States and around the world. Not calling fascism what it is, is “normalizing” it – accepting fascism as a normal, everyday problem – “nothing to get all that bothered about” – which is exactly the attitude that enabled Mussolini and Hitler to come to power without real opposition.
Along with the recognition of fascism for what it is, it is essential to identify and commit ourselves to the conditions of democracy and the rule of reason we require as teachers, trade unionists, citizens, and sisters and brothers in the global human community.
The members and material resources of the NEA must be committed to the defense of the democratic and educational conditions required by our hopes for a just society and the survival of civilization itself.
IV. Fascism – Its Origins and Roots in History – Disillusion, Defeat, Despair, and Delusion
In the last century, fascism became an ugly and dangerous reality in the form of the governments of the fascist movement and party of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler’s Nazis in Germany. From the 1920s through the cataclysm of WWII and the Holocaust, the influence, power, and methods of fascism spread through Europe, to be ended only by the horrors of one of history’s most terrible wars and the opening of the Epoch of Nuclear Terror.
Both Mussolini and Hitler’s versions of fascism were rooted in the incomplete character and the reactionary distortion of the two people’s national-democratic revolutions. Both Italy and Germany came late to the Western European process of consolidation of national unity, independence, and sovereignty. In both countries, the achievement of national unification through the leadership and methods of progressive plebeian or mass democratic movements (Garibaldi in Italy, Germany: labor and socialist struggle) was thwarted by various problems of political development, divisions, and confusion of the progressive mass movements and the timely opportunism and determination of conservative political leaderships and governments. These conservative forces were able to commit Italy and Germany to the emergence of bourgeois and bureaucratic rule on the basis of minimum reform and an excess of elitist corruption, careerism, and cynicism.
These two Western European nation states, with their acutely uncompleted national and democratic revolutions, entered WWI desperate to prove their great-power status and ended WWI humiliated and demoralized. In both these countries, the end of WWI saw large-scale mass working-class struggle and the possibility of the resolution of fundamental economic and political crises by workers’ power. But the combination of the betrayals and confusion and underdevelopment of political leadership in the given balance of class forces meant a failure to rise to the historic opportunities presented. In both countries, a sort of “almost-worker-revolution” had occurred – leaving a gaping vacuum of historically progressive, bold mass leadership. Instead, weak conservative “institutionalist” timid liberals, and so-called “socialists” (in words alone), treated the impasse of their national societies as the occasion for opportunist electoral maneuvers and cynical parliamentary and petty business dealmaking.
The common thread for supposedly progressive trade union and social-democratic leadership was evasion of the real issues of international imperialist rivalry, intensified income-inequality, ever-worsening concentration and centralization of wealth in few hands, and the boundless drive to resolve imperialist crisis through super-exploitation of the colonial world.
The absence of bold progressive leadership and the fear of the real solutions that were needed in both Italy and Germany, left the road wide open for right-wing, reactionary, ultranationalist delusions, divide-and-rule hate-mongering demagogy, and infantile leadership cultism.
Mussolini declared Italy would only recover national honor through destroying democracy and converting the Italian Constitution into a personal dictatorship headed by “Il Duce” to turn the fantasy of a New Roman Empire into a national mass delusion. Mussolini then tied his national illusion to Hitler’s even more grotesque and grandiose ultranationalist paranoia.
To Hitler’s Nazis, German nationhood could only be realized in the German subjugation of all of Europe as enslaved colonies in a German Empire. Hitler’s “New Empire” (the Third Reich) would naturally have to be headed by a German emperor – the one-man absolutist leadership cult (Der Führer) – Adolf Hitler himself.
To the people of their respective countries, Mussolini and Hitler offered a perverse tradeoff. The Italian and German people were to carry out a mass suicide of democracy and individual rights. They should receive – in return for the very real death of freedom – two mass delusions.
First would be the delusion of suprahistorical National Glory. This would be combined with the second delusion: the undefined vagueness of mystifying promises of the imaginary benefits of fictitious national and ethnic superiority. The European “Aryans’” subjugation by the Nazi/fascist powers might be mitigated by treating them as semi-beneficiaries of the two mass delusions – as long as they were subservient enough to their conquerors.
In exchange for the mass spread of belief in a new “Roman Empire” and white European (“Aryan”) supremacy, what German, Italian, and millions of other white Europeans actually received was the catastrophe of WWII, the Holocaust, the effective destruction of the German and Italian nation states, the deaths of tens of millions of soldiers and civilians, and the launching of the Nuclear Age.
V. The New Fascism – No Normalizing Fascism
Trump’s version of fascist mass hysteria and destruction has not yet had sufficient time to reveal its full potential cataclysm. But the essential character of the cataclysm threatened by Trump’s fascism becomes clearer by the day.
Fascism is not “normal” in American history and should NEVER be normalized. Trump is not just a more-right-wing-than-usual conservative. He is a fascist. His aim is not just to defeat certain liberal reforms. It is to destroy American democracy so there will be no more proposals for reform and no more mass movements for reform.
Trump is not just pushing for a more conservative US Supreme Court to limit or reverse certain gains in human rights and welfare legislation. Trump wants – and is getting – a Supreme Court that will cripple Congress’ ability to advance future relatively progressive measures or even enforce relatively progressive legislation that is already a matter of law.
TRUMP HAS A SUPREME COURT THAT HAS ALREADY GIVEN HIM THE POWER TO RULE BY DECREE IN SUBSTANTIAL AREAS AND ALREADY PROTECTED HIS ABILITY TO BREAK THE LAW WITH IMPUNITY. HE CAN IGNORE DUE PROCESS, ACT IN DEFIANCE OF THE FACTS, AND TREAT THE PRESIDENCY AS HIS OWN PERSONAL DICTATORSHIP.
These are not just threats. These are already facts – already “law-of-the-land” US Supreme Court decisions – albeit by 6-3 majority votes.
THE US SUPREME COURT HAS ALREADY GUTTED THE ABILITY OF FEDERAL COURTS TO CONSTRAIN – LET ALONE PREVENT – AN AUTHORITARIAN PRESIDENCY – THE CENTRAL POLICY AIM OF THE FASCIST HISTORICAL PROGRAM.
In his first six months since being reelected, Trump has accomplished a higher degree of unrestrained self-empowerment with a few 6-3 votes, than Mussolini and Hitler were able to accomplish with years of careful maneuvering to establish their dictatorship.
CONGRESS HAS LARGELY STOOD BY, IMPOTENTLY WATCHING THIS DESTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY, UTTERING A FEW WORDS ABOUT HOW “CONCERNING” THESE DEATH BLOWS TO BASIC RIGHTS ARE.
ONLY THE MOVEMENT IN THE STREETS HAS ACTUALLY CONSTRAINED TRUMP. IT HAS BECOME OBVIOUS THAT THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES MUST DEFEND THE DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS WHICH THE COURTS, THE POLITICIANS, AND THE JOURNALISTS – WITH A FEW BRAVE EXCEPTIONS – HAVE FAILED TO CHAMPION.
HOWEVER, THERE IS A MOVEMENT IN THE STREETS REFUSING TO “NORMALIZE” TRUMP’S FASCISM, SPEAKING THE PLAIN TRUTH ABOUT THE ATTACKS ON THE PRECIOUS ELEMENTS OF LIBERTY AND EQUALITY THAT HEROIC FIGHTERS LIKE TOM PAINE AND THOMAS JEFFERSON, FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND JOHN BROWN, SOJOURNER TRUTH AND HARRIET TUBMAN, ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND CHARLES SUMNER, IDA B. WELLS, THE MILITANT LABOR MOVEMENT AND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., AND MALCOLM X – ALL THESE AND OTHER FIGHTERS TRIED TO TEACH US THROUGH WORDS OF TRUTHFUL FIRE AND THE BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS OF THEIR OWN LIFE.
During Trump’s first term, the George Floyd movement massively mobilized throughout America to put a stop to Trump’s excesses and abuses – to fight to reunite families and defend immigrant rights, and to bring an end to the racist police war against our minority communities.
Now, BAMN activists and activists from thousands of community, trade union, and other anti-war organizations are mobilizing again – and on a larger scale and with an even deeper commitment.
On Thursday 12 June in Los Angeles, California’s US Senator Alex Padilla was physically assaulted by federal forces for merely asking a question of Trump’s Homeland Security czar Kristi Noem. On 17 June, Senator Padilla summed up Trump’s rendition of the program of Mussolini and Hitler by stating, “Trump is using immigrants in the country without legal status as scapegoats to send in troops.” As he addressed the Senate, Padilla choked up as he described how he had been physically attacked, thrown to the ground, and dragged off to be silenced – all without cause and with no charges filed. Padilla declared: “I refuse to let immigrants be political pawns on [Trump’s] path toward fascism.”
The NEA and all Americans concerned about our democracy should recognize the truth of Senator Padilla’s characterization of Trump’s road to fascism. NEA teachers should join with our students in condemning Trump’s fascist movement, refusing to normalize it, and joining the new American movement in defense of democracy and its struggle to expose and shut down the authoritarianism and bigotry of Trump’s fascist road. We must do everything in our power to defeat American-style fascism and save what we still believe is history’s “last best hope” for freedom, equal rights, and justice for all.
VI. IF WE FIGHT, WE CAN WIN
We call on the teachers of the NEA to declare that, despite the massive abuse of power of these tyrants, despite their arrogance, their contempt for democracy and their cruelty and rejection of humane values – THESE WOULD-BE CALIGULAS AND HITLERS HAVE NOT WON.
The NEA must declare its commitment to join with the millions of defenders of democracy, equality, and humane values, marching and mobilizing across America and around the world against the rise of fascism and barbarism. As teachers who have devoted ourselves to satisfying the curiosity and nurturing the idealism of the young people we seek to educate, we assert our conviction that the international global forces mobilizing now to defend democracy can win, if we fight together, with our students and their communities, combining all our strengths, relentlessly committed to the truth, to scientific integrity, to the highest and most humane achievements of human civilization, to the unity of the human species.
It is true that these 21st-century tyrants have on their side unprecedented wealth, power, weaponry, and sheer cynicism. But they also have the tyrants’ inevitably overreaching overconfidence. Our democratic side has far greater numbers and the fact that the motive force of our history is the truth. The force of their side of history is always the chain of lies and the endless cycle of mutual thefts that has brought every “Ozymandias, King of Kings” (Shelley), every system of boundless greed and power-hungry “cold command” to “the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare” – “‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’”
We, the teachers of America, take our stand now at this great and dangerous turning point – with our students’ hopes and the new movement for democracy and the truth.
