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What Is To Be Done ... ? (About the Fascists, I Mean) [1]
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Date: 2025-03-25
Sorry to go all political on this political blog. Usually I just post some history diaries and some travel pics, and I keep my opinions to myself. But for now, allow me please to give my humble opinion on the most pressing question of the day … What is to be done?
(I of course cannot decide what is to be done, nor would I if I could—that is something that needs to be agreed upon by all of us, collectively, so we can all unify and focus our efforts. So, consider this to be just my tiny contribution to the discussion that we all need to have together. People are of course entirely free to agree with my opinion, to disagree with it, or to pay no attention to it at all. But the discussion MUST happen.)
We now live in a country where the rule of law no longer applies and where the Dear Infallible Respected Leader rules unilaterally by Xittered decrees, where people are “disappeared” to overseas prisons without charges or trial or evidence, where people are punished for having opinions that Dear Leader does not like, and where even Federal judges who issue rulings unfavorable to Dear Leader are threatened with impeachment and/or violence from the red-hat brute squad.
The rising tide of fascism is everywhere. And not just in the USA—it is global. No place is safe. Even Germany, which should have learned its lesson the last time, is again flirting with the fascists.
So, what is to be done?
We have three options: the ballot box, the soap box, and the ammunition box. To be used in that order.
First is the ballot box.
Historically, there has been only one way to peaceably beat the fascists—by the formation of a wide opposition electoral front that includes everyone of every stripe who opposes the fascists, from left to right, all uniting behind one specific candidate with the sole and only goal of defeating the fascists and removing them from power. (But of course we, being Democrats, can’t even get along with members of our own party, much less any other parties or organizations. Which is one reason why the fascists keep stomping us into the mud. We are very very good at fighting each other, but we are piss-poor at fighting the Right.)
So, how do we do that?
Let’s first consider previous efforts so we can learn from their mistakes. The last really organized (sort of) mass political movement that we had in the US was the Occupy Wall Street movement back in 2011. It gained some brief life, managed to change the political narrative for a time, and was on everyone’s radar scope for a short while---then it abruptly died without having accomplished anything concrete.
I did a diary here a while ago giving a “post-mortem” on the Occupy movement:
www.dailykos.com/…
My conclusion was:
Certainly, there were many contributing causes of death for the Occupy movement, but one, I think, looms above all the rest: an utter lack of organization. Occupy was a ship without a captain and without even a rudder — and it was intentionally built so. This was, at least partially, a result of the circumstances of its birth. The massive civil rights and anti-war movements of the 60s were, by this time, just a memory for most people. Their organizers were either dead or elderly, and when the “economic justice” movement exploded into being at Zuccotti Park, the younger generation had virtually no experience with large-scale political protest. So, it turned to the only contemporary model that it had: the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East, especially in Egypt. It remained to be seen, however, whether the Egyptian model of a “leaderless revolution” would work in the United States. And, indeed, circumstances would show that ultimately it did not work in Egypt either — when the Mubarak government fell, the unorganized mass of demonstrators were unable to assume political control of the government, and the resulting power vacuum was filled by a military regime which killed Egyptian democracy at birth. The loose anti-authoritarian structure also led to endless faction fights and ideological conflict, as lots of inexperienced people argued endlessly with each other over every possible thing with no “referee” to either keep things civil or to act to end the infighting. Many Occupy branches did nothing more than debate forever over what they were “going to do” without ever actually doing anything. So, what were the lessons that I drew from my experience with Occupy? My strongest conclusion was that the Left in the US has still not found a workable method of organization that effectively balances the need for a decentralized structure with the need for an effective leadership that can set goals, assign people to meet them, and take steps to correct failures and deficiencies. Occupy did a wonderful job of winning the ideological battle, but it failed utterly at the political and organizational battle.
So that model failed spectacularly. Sadly, BLM and Antifa, to the extent that they were even “organizations” at all, used basically the very same model and made the very same mistakes. And now I see “The Resistance” making them again.
Instead, let us look to a successful model: the civil rights movement, and how they effectively used the soap box to organize people …
The structure and strategy of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s were based on those used by every other successful political movement. (And it is best to note at the outset that the civil rights movement, while it sought allies everywhere, was independent from both political parties and had its own power base and structure, which allowed it to set its own goals and methods without being beholden to anyone else’s agenda.)
When organizing politically for anything, whether it is a neighborhood group to have the city install a local stoplight or whether it is a mass movement to remove a fascist regime from power, the basic process is the same, and consists of answering three basic but vital questions:
What do we want? Specific and concrete, not some pie-in-the-sky fantasy dream of puppies and unicorns and rainbows. What, exactly, do we want to be done or undone. If you try to do impossible things, success is impossible—and if you don’t know clearly what you want to accomplish, you will never accomplish it.
Who has it? Who has the ability to do or undo what we want. Specifically. Name some names. Focusing on people or institutions who cannot actually solve the problem you want to solve is a pointless waste of effort. (Torching or spray-painting Tesla cars may give your emotional angries a nice warm fuzzy, but it doesn’t do jack-shit against the fascist power structure, and only gives the cops an excuse to arrest our people for acts that accomplish nothing for us.)
How do we make them do it? Suppose, after we ask them politely, they tell us to “eat shit and die”. How do we force them to do what we want whether they like it or not? Let’s hear some specific concrete actions that we can actually take in the real world to produce the result we want. Whatever your method is, it has to be attainable for you with the resources you have available, and most crucially of all, it has to be capable of gaining what you want. If your method of attack won’t work, for whatever reason, you are just wasting your time and effort.
Every time I have seen a political movement fail, it has been because they were either unclear or unrealistic about one of these three basic steps. (Occupy, for instance, failed all three.)
Once we answer those three questions, we have a goal, we have a target, and we have a strategy. That is our campaign. Anything which falls outside of that, is a waste of energy and effort. The key is to be bluntly hard-nosed: we need real-world concrete practical doable answers to each of those questions, not pie-in-the-sky wishes or ideological babblings about “unite the working class!” or “general strike!” or “fight capitalism!” or “socialist revolution!” None of that fantasy helps us any.
Too many people also seem to have this idea that if we all rush into the streets chanting and waving signs, some sort of magic will happen (perhaps the fascists will all slap themselves on the forehead and declare “lo, I’ve been wrong all this time”), and things will somehow set themselves right again. Protests and demonstrations are a means to a goal—they are not a goal in themselves. Protesting for the sake of protesting, or to “demonstrate our anger”, doesn’t do jack-shit. The fascists don’t give a fuck that you are angry. All they care is that you remain powerless. And raging impotently while you wave a sign on a street corner is powerless, no different than pounding angrily on your laptop keyboard in all caps on some online forum. Impotent rage is the weapon of the powerless. It accomplishes nothing.
Protests and demonstrations only work when they have a specific goal and are aimed at the specific person or institution that can be convinced or coerced into accomplishing that goal. Of course, that target may be “the general public”, and the goal may be “to bring this or that specific thing to their attention”. Such rallies have their place (though they depend heavily upon an open information media to amplify and spread the message—which, it could certainly be argued, we no longer have). But far too many times, the purpose of a demonstration is just “I am pissed off, so there!” That’s nice. But nobody gives a shit that you are pissed off, unless they are pissed off too—in which case both of your energies would be more effective if combined and focused on achieving a particular goal from a particular target. Unfocused anger is just a tantrum.
And if we want to be effective in our current fight, we can have only one goal: “remove the fascists from power”. That is what must be done. At this point, our goal has to be to unite everyone everywhere to restore “democracy” itself. If we don’t accomplish that, then nothing else matters anyway. Everything else on our big long progressive wish list, from “free Palestine!” to “end capitalism!” to whatever else, won’t mean shit when they are packing us off to Buchenwald Del Salvador. That means we ALL have to fight the fascists, together, even those people who disagree with us and who we disagree with about a lot of things. This is no time for purity tests. The fascists don’t give a shit how pure any of us are—they intend to put us ALL into the ovens. All they want to know is whether we are on the fascist side of the battle lines or we are not. And we must do the same. If the CEO and Board of Megaglobal Bastards Incorporated comes out against the fascists, they are now our ally: if a gaggle of goppers defects en masse and condemns the Trumpites, they are our new friends: if Hitler invades Hell, we say good things about the fucking Devil in the House of Commons. The alternative is to be split apart and fed to the ovens one group at a time. “First they came for the gang members ...” Divide and conquer, the oldest play in the playbook. And it still works—because we still allow it to work.
Sadly, we lefties tend to not be very good at any of this, and we seem to prefer waving a big long shopping list of everything we have ever wanted no matter how nebulous and idealistic it is, demanding everything everywhere all at once, yelling “heretic!” at anyone who is “soft” on any one or another of those infinite demands, and then giving up and going home when we don’t get all of it instantly. It is why we keep losing all the time. We can’t keep any specific goal in focus, and we want it all, now.
Keep your eyes on the prize and focus all your energy on it. That’s how we win. Don’t diffuse your energy on a billion scattered things all at once. That’s how we lose.
Elections are, of course, the domain of the political parties, and this is where the Democratic Party could make itself useful and effective—actively forming a broad electoral coalition of anti-fascists of all stripes with the sole and only purpose of defeating the MAGAs in 2026 and 2028 (and it must be a win by an unquestionable and unchallengeable large margin—a clear mandate), forming a “caretaker” government that can kick them out of power from top to bottom, begin to undo all the damage they have caused, and bring them to account for all the illegal shit they have done. Everything else on our big long wish list, whatever it is, can wait. First, we have to stop the fucking fascists.
Alas, though, the Dem Party could not organize its way out of a wet paper bag during a thunderstorm, and they seem to be not only incapable of such a task, but unwilling. So it falls to some other organization to fill that leadership gap. Perhaps one of the anti-MAGA GOP splinter groups like the Lincoln Project, or perhaps someone who would be willing to break with the Dem party hacks and take the leadership role. So far, though, that is not happening either. But one thing is for certain—it must be done. We have zero chance of ousting the fascists electorally if it is not.
All of this of course assumes that there ARE still free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028 for us to win, and that we will still have the ability to organize people from our soap box for political and social action (which is ultimately validated at the ballot box). If there are not, then our entire strategy has to change.
That leaves the ammunition box.
The ultimate power, of course, is that of physical force. Chairman Mao was not right about many things, but one thing he was right about is that, in the final analysis, “political power comes from the barrel of a gun”. The US military has the guns, and also has the duty to protect the country “from all enemies foreign or domestic”.
So in the end, if elections disappear or become Putinesque charades, things will come down to “what will the military do?” If the military supports the Constitution and acts forcibly to defend it and remove those who are dismantling it, then there is no way for MAGA to win. On the other hand, if the military backs the coup and enforces the Orange Shithead’s pronunciomentos, then there is no way for “democracy” to win. And even if the military forcibly deposes the regime and seizes “temporary power until the crisis is over”, that in itself is a huge threat to “democracy”.
If the military fails us and there are no longer free and fair elections, however, then there is only one remaining way to beat the fascists—the way we did back in 1945. I’d prefer it not come to that. But if it happens, we need to look to another successful model of opposition within a fascist society where political/social action was impossible—apartheid South Africa.
Remember back in the 80s when the entire civilized world ostracized apartheid South Africa, condemned it at every opportunity, cut off all of its trade, made its leadership unwelcome everywhere, encouraged everyone to not spend a single dollar to its benefit, kicked it out of every international forum, isolated it from the rest of the world, and turned it into a reviled toxic pariah, letting it stew in its own juices until it collapsed into a giant heap of shit that could no longer support itself?
That’s what needs to happen to the US. And that will demand a level of organization at the global level. That is not non-doable: after all, the world did it before and played a major role in toppling apartheid. On the other hand, the US is not piddly little South Africa, and also, as noted previously, the rising tide of fascism is global and there is a real chance that the fascists may take over everywhere. If that happens, it’ll be “lights out” for western civilization, for who knows how long. And at that point, driving the fascists from power will require … well … methods that we are not allowed to talk about here. Again, I hope it doesn’t come to that.
But above all we must recognize that there is no savior, no knight in shining armor who will come charging in and slay the dragon for us. Every “traditional” institution that we have depended upon so far—the Courts, the Congress, the Democratic Party, even mass popular protests in the streets—has so far either bent their knee to the fascists and kissed orange ass, or proven to be ineffectual and futile, and we have no effective leadership anywhere and no workable strategy. We are on our own, and we can depend only upon our own collective resources. So we had best use them wisely and effectively. And we’d better hurry.
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[1] Url:
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