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The Movement Against Fascism – This Moment of Political Possibility
Amy Elizabeth Robinson This article is published in partnership with the Peace Press Collective as a preview of an upcoming edition.* In 2019, I attended the World History Association annual conference to present a paper, and also to record a short educational video that I had scripted for the OER World History Project. I wrote several pieces for this free online high school curriculum resource, but this was the one that felt most urgent. It was called “What is Fascism?” It was my hope that it could play a small role over the following year as US voters returned to the polls to try to return sanity and humanity to the White House. I believed at the time that fascism was looming under Trump, and his shadow master Stephen Miller, and wanted to share some of the signs.
We did return sanity and humanity – and also frustrating, at times enraging, imperfection – to the White House. The failure of the Biden administration to take a position of moral clarity on the atrocities in Gaza, or to adequately communicate that they were indeed rolling out the closest thing to a Green New Deal we have ever seen, are just two of the reasons that sanity and humanity got steamrolled, again, in 2024. Now where are we? And what is fascism, now? On Monday evening, November 14, labor historian and union organizer Fred Glass visited Santa Rosa to present a lecture and lead a Q&A on “American Fascism: What It Is and What To Do About It.” Glass is the former communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, a documentary filmmaker, and the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016). Currently he edits California Red, the CA Democratic Socialists of America newsletter. The event was sponsored by my organization, North Bay Working Families Party, as well as Sonoma County DSA, Sonoma County Green Party, the Peace & Justice Center, and Community United to Resist Fascism (CURF). Around 90 people attended. The multigenerational nature of the crowd was notable, from veterans of Sonoma County’s struggles for progressive change, to Sonoma State students and young worker members of DSA. I was pleased to see that Glass and I both used the work of the same scholar, Robert Paxton, to frame the definition of fascism, as: “…a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, the goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004) But Glass went beyond Paxton in a way that was extremely helpful. In order to explain the form of fascism emerging here and now in the US, he set the historical and economic background. We are emerging from a stage of “punitive neoliberalism” (a phrase coined by scholar William Davies), in which state policies from austerity to deportation are portrayed as “common sense,” but are in reality punitive and nonsensical, spurring important protest (Occupy, BLM) that yet cannot morph into concretely organized, transformative resistance. But this form of neoliberalism, still vaguely if painfully recognizable as the economy most of us grew up with, has given way to what scholar Richard Seymour calls “disaster nationalism.” Seymour’s work is startling. “Now is a time of monsters,” says the text on his publisher’s website. And in a New Statesman article, Davies writes that “disaster nationalism offers…a politics of revenge…. It offers an addictive cycle of threat and release, in which self-respect is transiently secured by the destruction of a neighbor.” Perhaps each person reading is at this moment picturing a neighbor under threat: a trans kid, a newly pregnant young woman in a Republican-controlled state, a farmworker or tradesman friend, a teacher being dragged away from her students, an asylum seeker terrified of being sent to a place that no longer feels like home. It is tragic and terrifying. And Glass helped us cut through the fear to an understanding of this exact moment, in which both Zohran Mamdani in NYC and Adelita Grijalva in Arizona (both Working Families Party candidates) can still win elections, step into governing power, and speak up for working people, immigrants, and a politics based on care. In his talk, Glass asked us to consider whether MAGA fascists have fully achieved power. We largely responded that, given his presentation, and despite the terror, it feels more like American fascism is “still installing itself,” in Glass’s words. This matters. “It matters in terms of how we think about and develop our tactics and strategies to prevent fascism from fully establishing itself,” Glass said. “While we still possess substantial remnants of American democratic institutions, there are important and usable tools at our disposal to help us organize an anti-fascist movement to counter the temporarily dominant fascist one.” The emphasis on movements also matters. Glass pointed out that authoritarianism can present as a brutal top-down formation, like Franco’s Spain, which relied not on any mass appeal but on sheer military power. Fascism, in contrast, relies on the support of an inchoate and contradictory socio-political movement that “emerges from and feeds on disruption.” While we are still in this “movement moment,” there are yet fissures and openings that we can slip into, crawl into, fight our way into, and expand. Glass’s framing of this fascist moment was helpful because of the way he placed us in the stream of historical change, as actors who can make strategic and creative choices, as humans who still have the chance to speak to, connect with, and persuade our fellows. We need to bear witness to the terrible reality unfurling and unraveling around us, but we do not have to be paralyzed. We can all, like Mamdani and the countless other new voices emerging in this moment, step in and do the work to move people from fear, resentment, anger, and despair to courage, vision, joy, and possibility. We can restore the many caring functions of governance that have been crippled by the Trump regime, and we can make them better, if we are willing to use all the tools at our disposal: protest, art, legal enforcement, direct action, and visionary electoral work. Find your vibrant site of resistance, and I’ll cross paths with you there. Related links:
About the Author
Amy Elizabeth Robinson is a historian, writer, and library worker on the Steering Committee of North Bay Working Families Party. * Minor formatting and typographic adjustments have been made for web presentation; the content and meaning have not been altered.
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