Against the New Nationalism: May Day in a Fractured Left
As May Day arrives, the left marches without its compass — and those rooted in global struggle are being left behind.
Field Notes — Chicago, April 30, 2025
May Day is tomorrow.
International Workers’ Day — born in Chicago’s streets and baptized in blood at Haymarket Square — has always been more than a commemoration. It is the left’s global ritual. A day when workers, organizers, artists, and radicals declare, if only for a moment, that the world belongs to those who build it — not those who exploit it.
And yet, here in the very city where May Day began, something feels fractured.
There will be marches, yes. Rallies in Union Park. Chants downtown. Community cookouts and student-led walkouts. But the message is unfocused. Dispersed. Pulled in too many directions.
Some are organizing around Gaza. Others are demanding reproductive justice, housing reform, trans visibility, immigration reform, workers' rights, and ‘defeating Trump's agenda.’ Each struggle is righteous. Each voice urgent. But together, the movement sounds like overlapping frequencies — intense, beautiful, dissonant.
One veteran organizer told me, “I love the energy. But we used to know what we were fighting. Now I think we’re still figuring that out.”
A Movement Still Marching, But Losing Coherence
In the spring of 2025, the American left is not dead. It’s not silent. It’s not even passive. It’s visible. Loud. In motion.
March 2025 brought the largest protests since the George Floyd protests — fueled in part by Trump’s return to power, but more deeply by the eruption of violence in Gaza and America’s role in enabling it.
I watched thousands take to the streets. Palestinian flags waving. Chants echoed through the Loop, calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza.
But as months passed, I began noticing an evolution. Not in commitment but in coherence. Specifically, the night of Trump’s election as the 47th President of the United States.
The focus turned inward — toward domestic issues, electoral cycles, and the specter of Trump. Palestine slipped from the center to the margins. Not intentionally. But quietly. The movement expanded its list of demands but lost its thread.
And in this drift, something dangerous emerged: the resurgence of progressive nationalism — a rhetoric and strategy that centers on saving the United States rather than ‘dismantling’ the structures that created this crisis in the first place. Think of progressive nationalism as something the center can co-opt: moderate liberalism with moral branding, the suppression of internationalism, and a lack of connectivity to transnational or borderless solidarity.
Who Gets Left Behind?
For many Muslim American organizers, especially those fighting for Palestinian liberation, the shift has been alienating — and, at times, devastating.
They are not only targeted by the state — by federal surveillance, university crackdowns, doxxing, and lawfare — but also sidelined within the movement itself. Increasingly, solidarity comes with conditions: keep your language focused on Trump, appeal to the domestic consensus, and be more American.
As one young Palestinian American activist told me, “We support healthcare and queer rights, but our focus is Palestine. We’re being told to wait our turn. To frame Palestine in ways that don’t offend liberal America. That’s not solidarity — that’s a muzzle.”
Their voice wasn’t bitter. Just tired. Tired of being told that the movement must speak “with one voice” when that voice erases the people who made it possible. And tired of being excluded from the main stage, from the Democratic National Convention to the many various broader movements around the United States increasingly focused on domestic politics and not global justice or liberation.
The Nation as an Imagined Community
Benedict Anderson, in his seminal work Imagined Communities, describes the nation as:
“An imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”
Even in its most progressive forms, nationalism creates borders — psychic, rhetorical, and strategic.
It defines who belongs, whose pain is prioritized, and what stories are “relevant.”
Anderson reminds us that the power of nationalism lies not in its truth but in its emotional pull — in the sense of shared destiny that makes people fight and die for what is ultimately a limited imagining.
“It is this fraternity that makes it possible… not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”
Today’s left is not dying for the nation. But it is shrinking its vision to fit within one.
What began as a call for global justice became a campaign to “save democracy.” Just look at the signs indicating Donald Trump is a fascist and Elon Musk is a nazi.
The language has softened. The targets have shifted. The international has been replaced with the domestic.
Even within liberation spaces, the old logic persists: contain, moderate, consolidate, and control, especially with how intense the power vacuum is within the movements, all of the grappling and shuffling, with the loudest voices coming to the front.
Fanon, Davis, and the Illusion of Progressive Order
Frantz Fanon saw this coming. In The Wretched of the Earth, he warned that post-colonial elites — or revolutionary movements turned inward — often replicate the very structures they claim to oppose.
“The national bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former European settlement… and hastens to legitimize its authority.”
In today’s movement, the elite is symbolic — but the behavior is real.
A new hierarchy emerges: those whose causes are palatable and those who must wait.
Palestinian voices — and Muslim American organizers more broadly — are being asked to self-police.
To make their resistance “fit.”
To sacrifice urgency for optics.
Angela Davis, in Are Prisons Obsolete?, reminds us that the logic of exclusion — of caging what doesn’t conform — doesn’t stop at prisons.
It lives in policy. In narrative. In political culture.
It punishes dissent. It isolates discomfort.
Even in movements that claim liberation as their mission.
What May Day Teaches Us
At its best, May Day is a refusal to be divided by nation, language, religion, or status.
It reminds us that the working class—in Gaza, Chicago, Manila, Caracas, and Detroit—has more in common with each other than with their bosses, politicians, or generals.
But this year, that spirit feels harder to hold.
The movement is still marching — but without a compass.
The older generation is confused. The younger generation is courageous but overwhelmed.
The Muslim American left is under siege — from the state and from a movement increasingly seduced by national language and national strategy.
What Kind of Community Are We Building?
If the left is to survive this broken time, it must ask itself:
What kind of community are we building?
Is it imagined as a nation — limited, sovereign, bordered by ballot boxes and nonprofit funding cycles?
Or is it imagined as a global movement — rooted in rupture, solidarity, class struggle, and real risk?
Because if we get that wrong — if we mirror the structures we claim to oppose — we won’t build power.
We’ll build another hierarchy, another party, another echo chamber.
And the people we leave behind will remember.
Christopher Sweat is a political analyst, researcher, and movement strategist based in Chicago. He works at the intersection of technology, resistance, and liberation. With a background in political fieldwork, security studies, and AI systems, he documents how communities respond to repression, organize under pressure, and build opposition from the margins. His work centers on the voices too often pushed aside—from Muslim American organizers to global solidarity movements—and aims to equip the next generation of political actors with tools for transformation.
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well-written, man -- great analysis and a great reminder. thank you