I have been having a lot of conversations lately about what antifascist organizing should look like in 2024. Some people argue that fighting fascism means stopping Donald Trump, and I agree with those who believe that another Trump presidency would prove catastrophic. Trump’s aspirations are dictatorial, and we have every reason to believe that a second Trump presidency would be even more devastating than the first. However, thwarting Trump’s return to the White House would not be the end of our fascistic problems. The Democratic Party is on its own journey into authoritarianism, given that climate collapse and other compounding effects of capitalism, militarism, and imperialism have thrown liberal democracy and capitalism into divorce proceedings. That doesn’t mean that there’s no distinction between the two parties and no reason to keep Trump at bay, but it does mean that the Democrats are not fascism’s true opposition.
What the Democrats are offering is a somewhat longer road to the outcomes we fear most. I would prefer a longer road because I want us to have more time to cultivate the movements and resistance we’ll need in order to defend ourselves and establish new lifeways in a changing world. However, I am not an electoral organizer, and I find that our hyper-focus on elections often detracts from other necessary work and analysis.
As I said during a recent panel on fascism:
In the minds of neoliberal and conservative world leaders, western civilization is a collapsing box. Inside the box, we have habitable land and intact supply lines. Basically, we have the means of survival divvied up by the norms of capitalism. As habitable land decreases and supply lines break, the capitalist solution is not to help the land or displaced people recover. It’s to push more people out of the box as it collapses. From the neoliberal perspective, this will be framed as a matter of pragmatism and inevitability. From a fascist perspective, it will be framed as a recovery of the natural order.
Borders are one of the primary mechanisms by which people are boxed out of potential realms of survival. But even within those habitable realms, mechanisms of carcerality also subdivide our access to resources and livable conditions through various modes of containment, including house arrest, institutionalization, and the use of jails and prisons. Deprivation and debilitation are imposed externally and internally by leaders whose primary role is the maintenance of capitalist norms. As mass migration leads to increased conservatism, and mass death and mass murder are further normalized, we will need resistance movements grounded in an ethics of care and a refusal to abandon one another. Antifascist and anti-authoritarian politics must exist in opposition to ideas about human disposability that will be adopted as common sense by the majority of the public. The pandemic has already widened the scope of normalized disposability in the US, with those who cannot survive COVID infections being deemed expendable for the sake of capitalist normalcy.
Think about how people are often treated or regarded for being COVID cautious nowadays, and you will have some sense of how a politics that refuses mass death, abandonment, and mass murder will be regarded in the near future, regardless of who wins the 2024 presidential election. People whose politics are grounded in a universal regard for human life, regardless of a person’s location, economic status, or life choices, will be subject to ridicule and held in social contempt. From the US government’s rejection of desperate migrants at the southern border to the forcible........