This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 29 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic’s Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by one of the smartest people, I think, writing about politics and government philosophy. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown. He’s written these brilliant books about reparations and also about a concept he refers to as Elite Capture, but I have in mind to talk about something much less intellectual—which is a lot of his posts on social media these days.
He uses the phrase, “I regret to inform you that we’re going to win.” We are going to win. I’m not getting the words exactly right, but he’s emphatically been saying this over this last year as Trump has done radical thing after radical thing.
You’ve been one of the voices saying that everything’s not—go, the—things are—things that are bad are happening, but also that some resistance is working. Welcome, first of all.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Bacon: And so what phrase are you using most when on social media?
Táíwò: I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win. That’s what I’ve been saying over and over.
Bacon: And why do you use that phrase?
Táíwò: Honestly, the first time I used it was just playful in the moment—poking fun at the blenders on the right, of which there are plenty. And I think this is an important time to remember that’s the case. But people really seemed to respond to it.
So I just kept saying it. And more or less what I’ve had in mind is, I think we are appropriately responsive to the death and devastation. I think sending people to torture centers, breaking up families, killing people in the streets—that is absolutely the right response on a human level human.
But a thing that’s hard to keep in mind is that tactically, strategically, the point of that hyper-violence is to keep us there emotionally and to keep us from realizing how much power we have to resist them and how successful we cana, and in the case of recent weeks, are being resisting them. That’s the kind of thought behind why it’s important to say stuff like that.
Bacon: So talk about the last few weeks. Are we at an inflection point? And I guess maybe since the election—or really in Minneapolis—it does feel like something has changed. But it feels like Trump is on the defensive a little bit. It feels like there’s a—it’s not—we’re not quite at 2020 levels, and it feels like people are outraged in a certain way. What are you seeing when you look at where we are right now?
Táíwò: People are outraged. And I think it’s too early to tell for sure whether we’re at an inflection point. Only historians have the benefit of being sure about those sorts of things. But it does seem like that—and it seems like that because we’re seeing things on both the left and the right that we saw maybe inklings of before, but I think we’re seeing more dramatic versions of those updates.
On the right, there’s been this kind of shamelessness: We’re not going to fire people for having Nazi ties—a kind of attempt to institute a culture of impunity. And it’s never been total or absolute, right? They—just to give one example—Paul Garcia ended up suspending his potential nomination to a federal position because of what was leaked in Republican group chats. So they’ve never actually been able to project a total culture of impunity throughout the right.
But nevertheless, they themselves called attention to Minnesota with this extreme mobilization of a disproportionate amount of federal [law enforcement] leadership. That’s not a minor position. A position they themselves called attention to does show a level of vulnerability that they haven’t shown before in such a grandiose, charged way.
And they can probably read the polls. There was a YouGov poll that came out that showed them underwater with white people, with men, with demographics that are typically strong for the right wing. So those updates probably correspond with whatever internal polling they’re doing. Something is scaring them. And on the subject of something that’s scaring them, here’s the update on—let’s call it—the left.
We’re seeing an unprecedented amount of mobilization—mobilization not just from ragtag groups of activists, but being joined by people who didn’t previously have organizing experience, being joined by unions that were throwing their weight around. Minnesota had a general strike—in all but name, essentially—on one day. And the most recent murder of Alex Pretti is likely a response to the frustration that the federal agents felt from that incredible mobilization, right?
So we’re seeing levels of organized resistance that don’t really have much of a parallel in recent history. The last general strike was announced in the 1940s—maybe in the 1990s, depending on what you count as the general strike. So we’re seeing big changes.
Bacon: So you mentioned polls—why do you think polls matter? Because you’re a philosopher, I assume you don’t sit around and your actual work does not involve polls. I think there’s a couple indications that the resistance to Trump is working, but I think the one that is the most—I want to say “objective”—is polls. What do the polls tell you?
Táíwò: Me? I don’t think they say much except the short-term horizon of political messaging. Who’s winning the messaging battle the last couple of weeks? But we have to understand for political elites—people that run for office or whose parties get reshaped every two years—they have more of a tangible reason to pay attention to polls than the rest of us do, right?
Their political fortunes, their ability to throw their political weight around, depend on these short-term changes of opinion. While it’s important not to get lost there because things like institutional developments—say, the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, right?—are not short-term problems. And we’re right now seeing why we have to be willing to think in a more long-term manner than the next election.
But it does tangibly seem to change the behavior of these people in office who are scrambling to get allies every couple of years in these elections.
Bacon: And you said, like the general strike, something has happened in Minneapolis that is unique, and I think that’s a good sign. What do you attribute that to? Like, just how heinously they’ve behaved, or is Minneapolis a particularly unique place? What do you attribute that to?
Táíwò: It’s a combination of things. One: They’re finding out the hard way that you don’t invade a strong winter people in the winter—Napoleon and countless others found out.
On a more serious note, there’s been a large undercurrent of organizing since the murder of George Floyd, which was not far from where these recent murders happened. And those connections, I’m hearing, are being reactivated in the wake of this recent invasion by federal agents of a U.S. city. All of that, combined with the heinous behavior of these federal agents, I think has had the effect of political—it’s the worst version of political education.
It would be much better to explain history to people, but people living in Minnesota can just go outside and see that, in fact, what the left has been saying about DHS in particular, about ICE in particular, or about Border Patrol—what all these seemingly radical activists have been saying that might have sounded alarmist six months ago—is just a plain, unvarnished description of empirical reality that you can see in front of you.
And that has, I think, demonstrably radicalized a lot of people in Minneapolis, in Minnesota, and people outside of that state and city who are reasonably plugged into credible information about what’s happening over there.
Bacon: When you say “we,” how do you think about that term in this context? And I assume you don’t necessarily mean Democrats, but I’m just curious what you mean by that.
Táíwò: Yeah. Honestly, I mean, at this point, anti-fascists, right? I think we’re entering a stage of politics where—for whatever misgivings people have—something like a “popular front” is needed, where people who identify as Democrats and people like myself, who would consider themselves to be to the left of that, all need to find common cause. And even people on the right who have principles—as many of them as there are—need to find common cause in fighting this particular fight against authoritarianism and seem to be doing so.
Bacon: “We are going to win” is different than “we are winning.” So, why are we going to win?
Táíwò: Yeah, I think that phrasing is important because one of the things that I alluded to when I first explained why I use that phrase is: what I’m not trying to do is look at these heinous murders, look at this mass campaign of ethnic cleansing, and say nothing bad is happening or “this is what victory looks like.”
That is absolutely not the impression that I’m trying to give. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Why I’m saying this is because things look so dire. And the ability of federal forces to concentrate on slivers of the country and generate these spectacles of hyper-violence is part and parcel of their political strategy to make it look like they have power that they don’t, in fact, have.
This is a massive country. They’re facing massive resistance even in the large cities that they target—and that resistance is effective, by the way. They can’t deploy this strategy everywhere, right? So they depend on generating these spectacles, generating a social media environment of fear and capitulation as a force multiplier.
If they can just harass and attack this many children, they think they can convince people that their victory is inevitable. And it is important now, more than ever, to remind people that’s not, in fact, true. The brave people risking their lives on the streets of Minnesota are in fact doing something that is effective; they are in fact doing something that we can and must learn from and are in fact doing something that can work at scale.
The more we pay attention to how they’re resisting, rather than just the evil they’re resisting, the likelier we are to realize that we can win, we must win—and we will.
Bacon: Let me frame it differently because I try to make sure some of my coverage is about victories over Trump instead of all “Trump did something evil.” And that’s what you’re doing too, is like in, it’s in, it’s important to highlight the wins, both because that’s a reality, but also to mo—keep people aware of that victory is possible.
Táíwò: Absolutely. I might just bring up in this kind of valence: there was a really good interview that Eric Blanc at laborpolitics.com did with a Minneapolis organizer who works with the Twin Cities Sunrise Movement, sunrise, and it’s just detailing how effectively they’ve been able to target specific businesses and target ICE through targeting those businesses—doing things like holding up the counters at Target and campaigns targeting the hotels that they were staying at to complicate the logistics.
And some of these events ended up in the national news. Not all the news coverage highlighted the role of activism in getting hotels to say they’re going to stop hosting ICE agents, but the results of what they did ended up in the national news because the results of what they did were demonstrably effective.
And paying attention to interviews like that, learning the tactics that they used, understanding that we were not helpless. There’s a lot of us and a lot of us are in fact doing things that are effective in protecting their neighbors. I think that’s important for all of us to pay attention to.
Bacon: Is there a way you see this as a philosopher, the rest of us don’t see resistance that is, might be worth thinking about? How do you see this because of you, the way you think, the way you studied? Is there anything about this that the philosophers see that the journalists don’t see that I should think about?
Táíwò: I’m not sure. I’ll tell you how I think of it as a philosopher and, you can tell me if it matches how you, or how your view is. But really for me as a political philosopher, some philosophers have “science envy”—they try to be like scientists. As a political philosopher, I feel like the kind of envy that I do have and should have is “historian end,” right? I want to think about politics like historians.
Think about it as these long-term, pitched, protracted struggles that pop up in waves and recede in waves but that nevertheless push in certain directions, right? And it’s hard in the mud and muck of day-to-day life to tell these long-term, decades-long, centuries-long stories of political struggle. It’s hard to realize that’s what you’re in fact doing when—what is what’s happening day to day.
And if there’s any market difference between how a philosopher or political philosopher might think about these things and a journalist, it might just be that, right? Just because [of] the nature of our jobs, right? One of us has to pay attention to the short-term, right, to do their job effectively. I have to pay attention to [the] long-term [to] do my job effectively. By talking to each other, we can, both learn something, right?
Bacon: But you’re watching the short-term view now?
Táíwò: Yeah. I am, exactly. But exactly that: I’m watching the short term and watching journalists explain the short term to me so that I can figure out what’s going on. The way that I’m thinking about this from that perspective is—the right in this country has been losing for decades.
That’s what the civil rights movement was. It was a world-historical defeat of the politics of segregationism and apartheid that this administration and its allies palpably want to bring back, right? And this hysterical, comic-book villainy is their attempt to spectacle and meme and “earned media” their way out of the reality that no one likes what they stand for.
And that is a victory that has been won culturally through, literally, generations-long struggles. Before the abolitionism of the nineteenth century, people were fighting this fight over what the terms of basic moral decency were going to be. And those terms eventually came to exclude the outward misogyny and the valorization of ethnic cleansing and segregationism that this administration represents and everything that they’re doing.
Those losses—by way of terrorism, essentially. And if there’s a place that my confidence comes from, it’s by looking at the long arc of history and seeing how decisively it’s swung against them. And just thinking that we are capable of winning the battles that were won in the sixties. We’re capable of winning the battles that were won in the fifties and seventies. We’re not any less capable of doing that than the people who preceded us.
Bacon: It’s interesting you said that, ’cause I think a lot of people—you can read history, particularly the history of Black Americans in the U.S., and you can read that in two ways. One: that there’s been a lot of resistance that has succeeded. The other: that a lot of the structure of the country has not changed in a lot of ways.
The inequality has remained; the civil rights movement did not produce economic gains it hoped to. So you are reading it—there’s a couple different ways to read this, and I think these stories are connected—but you are reading it [in a way that says] maybe the history says we can resist, but also you acknowledge history also says we may not overcome, so to speak.
Táíwò: Yeah, absolutely. And just both of those things are true. We didn’t achieve the world we deserve. But they used to buy and sell people on the street in many of the places that we’re protesting. And we don’t have to pretend that—for whatever distance there is between the egalitarian utopia and where we are now—we don’t have to pretend that things are the same.
There were battles that were won. The limitations and constraints on those victories represent the continued investments of the structures of this country, and all the others, in various forms of inequality, various forms of injustice. Both of those things are true. But what this administration and the current authoritarian opposition represents is an attempt to bring back a form of inequality—a specific set of forms of injustice that were decisively defeated and can be defeated again.
Bacon: Let me go through a sort of a—not a rapid-fire—but I want to finish with a couple [of] things that are a little bit away from what we were talking about. The first is, Zohran, you said the Democrats and people to the left are the Democrats. So you put yourself in a group of people left [of] the Democrats. Let [me] ask this.
So on the one hand, Zohran Mamdani wins this great election; it seems to be reforming New York in a more left-progressive way. On the other hand, today I read about the Center for American Progress—maybe the leading think tank among Democrats—is calling for more policing and an embrace of more “tough on crime” policies. And so my question might be: I agree with more Zohran and less with the Center for American Progress, but I guess my question is, are these conflicts related at all? The sort of fight with the right and the fight between the left and the center-left.
Táíwò: I think so. I think the most charitable way to put it would be to think of it as a kind of ideological fight or a tactical fight over how it is that we’re going to resist authoritarianism. And the center-left believes that the kind of policing that has evolved in this country is, at least in principle, professionalizable—in principle, an engine of the democratic will.
And what we’re seeing in ICE, with the Border Patrol, this policing that the president is pushing is something other than what’s developed in local police departments. So it’s an attempt to wall off the protests of 2026 from the protests of 2020. That’s the charitable view; it’s not my view.
I happen to think, as a matter of fact, that ideologically an embrace of policing and the kind of authoritarian politics behind that is just an element of convergence between the center-left and the far right. They just both believe in the project of handing people guns and handing money to the people with guns—whatever fraction of social resources, public resources, that they demand this year—and being willfully ignorant of the abuses of those people, whether it’s Cop City in Atlanta or the feds in Minneapolis.
And I think what we have to gear up for is a struggle with those people, right? It’s [not] different in principle from political struggle writ large. There’s the compromised position that makes sense. One side is going to have to lose and the other side is going to have to win. And the best version, let’s say in a liberal democracy, would be an electoral process. There are more “activisty” versions where people have to do direct actions of some sort. And then there’s open conflict—and you hope that it’ll take one of the first two forms—but those questions aren’t for us today.
Bacon: Let me end with talk about Hammer & Hope. You’re involved in this journalism project—let’s talk about that a little bit, if you can. Hammer & Hope is a website; it’s about three years old now. A very important one, I think. So talk about what you guys are doing there.
Táíwò: At Hammer & Hope, it’s a Black Left magazine that really tries to be both, to varying extents, a center for real open thinking and conversation around core ideas. What kinds of appeals to people make sense? What are the obstacles in Black politics and Left politics writ large? What’s the best way to understand them? But also reporting as well.
What happens with the federal agents who attacked a Chicago apartment building, right? What’s going on in Cancer Alley? What’s going on, for that matter, in Minneapolis right now—especially with Black union members? So really trying to—
Bacon: Great piece on how Zohran won the Black working class, which I hadn’t really read anywhere else.
Táíwò: Yeah, absolutely. So trying to be a place where especially, you know, people adjacent to the Black Left can have conversations and find information that maybe one wouldn’t find elsewhere.
Bacon: Tell people what the Black Left means—what you mean when you say that.
Táíwò: Yeah. So you have Black people involved in the labor movement. You have Black nationalists; you have Black people who are members of, I guess what you could call traditional Left formations: Democratic Socialists, anarchists, et cetera.
All of those people for, very different reasons maybe might have a range of political perspectives, a range of things that they think are central political questions that maybe other people in those kinds of organizations or different kinds of organizations wouldn’t think of as central political questions. We at Hammer & Hope just wanted to facilitate a space where conversations can happen within and across those different groups of people.
Bacon: Okay. Thanks for joining me. This was a great conversation. Good to see you. And thanks for giving us all a little bit of hope this last year. It’s been helpful how you’ve flagged things I hadn’t seen. And I do feel like you’re helping me see that we maybe can get past this moment we’re in now.
Táíwò: I’m glad to hear that. Thanks for having me.
