Dissent: The Historical Task of the Left in the Present Period. January 02, 2017 by Garret Vreeland in Politics, Human Rights, History The people we need to reach are a radically mixed group. They are economically mixed: they include unemployed men and women, old people without adequate pensions, part-time workers, rust belt workers with new jobs that pay much less than they once earned, workers without union protection and with few benefits, and the rural poor—all of them frighteningly vulnerable, watching anxiously for the next downturn. And they are mixed in their identities: black and white, Hispanic and Asian, men and women, gay and straight. These people could form what Charles Mills (in the Fall 2015 issue of Dissent) called “a transracial coalition of the disadvantaged.”