Chip Berlet, in memoriam; Poland's Perils; Matters of Church and State
Reading, Watching 02.15.26
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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
I will be coming to the United Kingdom to give a talk at King’s College London on March 26th! See the details and reserve a (free) spot here.
Two weeks ago, investigative journalist, scholar, and activist Chip Berlet died at age 76. Chip waged a lifelong crusade against the extreme right. His research, particularly his book Right Wing Populism: Too Close for Comfort, co-authored with Matthew N. Lyons, was an essential source for me while writing my own book. A few years ago, The Progressive offered a retrospective of his career:
Nearly fifty years ago, in the early 1970s, John Foster Berlet—better known as “Chip”—learned a foundational lesson that he carried into his work as a writer, researcher, educator, and activist. He was living in the Chicago neighborhood of Marquette Park and, as Black families began to move into the area, their homes were being firebombed. Worse, the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party were marching through the streets to demand that “Marquette stay white.”
Berlet, like others, opposed this bigotry, organizing counter marches and other pro-integration actions. “We started out saying ‘Smash the Klan,’ ” Berlet tells The Progressive. But after meeting with local Black pastors and hearing them talk about the needs of the new residents, the coalition he was a part of changed course.
“The ministers explained that every night the newly arrived families would designate one parent to stay awake in case of a firebombing so they could quickly get themselves and their children out of harm’s way,” Berlet recalls. “When we understood this point of view, we knew that we needed to work to make it possible for Black people, Black parents, to sleep through the night in their homes. We had to follow their lead so that children would not be immolated in their beds.”
Berlet calls the end result of this struggle a victory: “We pushed the neo-Nazis out of Marquette Park,” he says, “and allowed for a relatively peaceful community transition, from a white population to a predominantly Black and Latino one.”
Looking back, he says the lesson it brought home—that successful community organizing requires listening to those who are directly impacted by what is happening around them—became his calling.
A big question on everyone’s mind is “What comes next?” after Trump. There’s a recent piece by Joy Neumeyer about Polish democracy in The New York Review of Books that I think suggests some instructive ideas. Poland successfully fended off an authoritarian push, a la Hungary, but PiS, the right-wing populist party responsible for it, still hangs around in politics, looking for a way back. The liberal democrats’ attempts at righting the ship and undoing the damage have been partial and frustrated in certain areas:
Tusk had vowed to clean up after PiS with an “iron broom,” and he made some initial progress. He took the public media out of PiS’s control, unlocked billions of euros in EU funds that had been withheld because of the government’s violation of rule-of-law regulations, and withdrew PiS’s challenge to the Istanbul Convention. Other plans, however, stalled. Parliamentary commissions set up to investigate several major PiS scandals (including its use of the spyware program Pegasus to monitor opposition politicians and journalists) have yet to produce any results. Though two top PiS officials were arrested in early 2024 for abuses committed during the party’s earlier years in power, within weeks they were pardoned by Duda and released. Two others facing arrest warrants fled to Hungary.
Tusk’s bloc had promised two major social reforms—relaxing the abortion ban and introducing civil partnerships for gay couples—but didn’t deliver on either. Though Duda would certainly have vetoed an abortion law, Tusk wasn’t even able to pass one. These failures fed disillusionment among the people who’d gotten his party into power. Last winter I had lunch with a friend in Warsaw, an academic in her early thirties who took part in the women’s protests and supported Tusk’s coalition. When I told her that some Americans saw Poland as an inspiration, she burst out laughing.
