An Abolitionist Vision for the World We Want

Ahead of the US midterm elections, voters need to clearly articulate a radical framework for spending our collective wealth.

Police officers applauding Trump, August 2026 -- public domain image

By Sonali Kolhatkar

A recent New York Times editorial by Tim Wu, a former antitrust adviser for the Biden administration, caught my eye for the criticism it leveled at Democrats for making affordability a central issue ahead of the midterm elections. Wu contends that the party needs to go further and focus not merely on the high price tags of necessities, but on the unfairness of the entire economic system.

While this is a refreshing shift in the right direction, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s true that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum believe our economy is rigged in favor of the rich. But merely pointing out the obvious is unlikely to attract a huge shift in voting toward the Democratic Party.

Moreover, Wu says nothing about the racist rage that has defined President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s decimation of our democracy, about the devastation to communities of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized members of our society. Nor does he acknowledge the corporate harms that Democrats failed to tackle when they were in power and are now being accelerated under Republicans: fossil fuel emissions, tech domination, and AI, harms that disproportionately impact poor people and people of color.

To Wu and most Democratic Party consultants, these issues are distinct and, depending on the cultural tides, are either worth tackling or anathema.

In fact, they are intimately linked. White supremacy feeds capitalism by distracting poor whites from billionaire-fueled inequality and climate devastation using immigrants and people of color as scapegoats. To take on an unfair economy without addressing the systematically racist impacts of policing, immigration, corporate oligarchy, and the climate crisis does us all a disservice. Moreover, there is an absence of a radical vision for tackling economic and racial justice risks to prevent repeating the same crises in the future.

Democratic Party leaders are falling deeply short by offering little more than undoing Trump’s worst excesses. It is a conservative position to seek a return to the “good old days,” when a predatory capitalist system was overseen by articulate, sensible-sounding statesmen who didn’t embarrass the nation on the global stage, who championed police and prisons as tools of safety, who echoed Trump’s rhetoric on “border security,” who preserved corporate profiteering in healthcare, who embraced endless war as long as it was their party’s doing, and so on.

The Democratic Party is essentially a modern-day conservative party, while Republicans are the extremist, fascist party.

No wonder Americans in general dislike both major parties at roughly the same rate. And while the Democrats’ chances of taking control of Congress appear to be surging ahead of the midterm elections, it is likely because the pendulum is swinging away from Republicans, rather than toward Democrats and their milquetoast agenda.

So, what can Democrats do to ensure victory?

Frankly, it is not our job as voters—or for that matter, the job of newspaper editorialists—to offer advice to political parties.

Our job as voters, especially in this moment, is to seize power in a system that has rendered us powerless and articulate our demands loudly and clearly. Politicians win our votes by acceding to our agenda. Not the other way around.

Therefore, the far more important question is, what do we, the voters, want?

If we agree that the economic system is rigged against the majority of Americans, then how do we unrig it? Is it as basic as “a promise to level out a lopsided economy,” as Wu advises, while ignoring other issues? Is it as simple as a rallying cry to “tax the rich,” as some Democratic-leaning states are doing?

If we want to end the wild pendulum swings of American politics, which are veering us further into the abyss of authoritarianism with each election, we need a complete reset on all fronts, not merely a return to a more balanced economy.

We require, I would argue, an “abolitionist mindset.”

Black abolitionists, who are better versed than the rest of us on what it’s like to be on the receiving end of systemic harms, have long articulated a vision for a better world where we all can thrive: a world where we reverse the equations of how our collective wealth is spent and where we refuse to let our needs be continually defunded.

Black abolitionists like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and Andrea J. Ritchie have already shown us the way to a better world. We only have to listen and apply their vision to all of society.

The foundations laid by these thinkers have helped countless racial justice organizations, big and small to articulate visions for a more just society. Take the Movement for Black Lives, which released a detailed plan in 2020 for a nation where Black people can thrive. Central to this vision is an invest-divest strategy: invest our tax dollars in what actually keeps all human beings safe, while divesting from things that actively cause harm.

The trouble is, we likely disagree on what keeps us safe. White Americans may have forgotten the lessons of the historic 2020 racial justice uprisings in response to George Floyd’s murder. But studies continue to show how the police have always kept whites safe at the expense of Black people. Meanwhile, local police eat up a whopping $135 billion in taxes each year to do so.

Immigration enforcement is similar. A system that disproportionately commits violence against people of color while lulling MAGA supporters into a false sense of safety currently swallows up more than $200 billion of our tax dollars.

Trump’s war on Iran has similarly vaporized $113 billion of our collective wealth. And, since October 2023, we taxpayers have financed Israel’s genocide in Gaza to the tune of nearly $18 billion. Both wars have been deadlier for Iranians and Palestinians thanks to AI-powered weapons and offered us no benefit in return.

To pay for all of this brutalization of Black, Asian, and Latino people at home and abroad, we have defunded public health, housing, food stamps, and Medicaid. We have refused to fund healthcare for all and universal childcare, and have backslid on free higher education, all while continually gifting the wealthy and corporations lower tax rates.

The cost of such violence against nonwhite people is one we all bear. We have all lost out on fully funded healthcare, childcare, education, housing, and the things that keep us safe and thriving. This has not been worth it, even for the most racist whites among us. What good is it to cheer on the barbarity against immigrants if it means you still don’t have a job or can’t afford healthcare? (In fact, the economy is worse because of deportations).

And, unless we stop this trend and reverse it, it will only get worse. The dystopian vision that billionaires—the greatest beneficiaries of our rigged system—are offering is a society that is violently policed by ICE agents and cops, where we are forced to live amid detention centers and data centers, in serfdom and in debt, while bracing ourselves for one climate disaster after another, all while our taxes pay for wars and corporate subsidies.

As we approach the midterm elections, the 2028 presidential race, and every election hereafter, we need to define a vision of the world we want, one that is more radical than merely rebalancing the economy, and one that does not rely on throwing some of us—specifically people of color—under the bus as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done.

For us all to feel safe and to thrive, we need to flip the line items on our budgets all the way from local to state to national levels. This abolitionist mindset offers a grand unifying vision of a world where we all can thrive. It can apply to local budgetary line items all the way to Congressional appropriations for immigration and war. We need to, as abolitionists have long argued, divest from death-making institutions such as the police, ICE, and military, fossil fuels, and AI, and invest in life-giving systems such as healthcare for all, housing, food, and education. And, if we run out of money, there’s plenty more at the top echelons of our economy.

Undoing the horror show that our society is becoming requires so much more than politely asking Democrats to make the economy better. It requires ending systems of harm and adopting a care-based economy. It requires imagining a better world where the entire equation of our social contract is reversed and demanding that politicians adopt this agenda in order to win our votes.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly subscriber-funded television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press, 2026), Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025), and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and was a senior editor at Yes! Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.