(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Protests in support of and against fascism in America: a comparison [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-11
When thinking about protest in America, I can’t help but see a basic problem in terms of generating the outcomes that liberals like myself want to see. There is some reasonably reliable evidence that protests can work to increase voter turnout among the constituencies in alignment with the protesters’ message, although protests that turn violent can have the opposite effect.
The problem that I see is in the imbalance in how protests are handled by Republican and Democratic leaders. Under Republican (fascist aligning) leaders, peaceful anti-fascist protests are typically treated like criminal activities and police are routinely used to shut them down, which often leads to a violent reaction from those who are having their constitutional rights taken away from them. When Democrats are in power, they seem to normally treat rightwing (fascist aligning) protests with a soft touch. Even when Tea Party protesters were shutting down Democratic town hall meetings with violent behavior, nothing was done to stop them or remove them from the scene. When Tea Party protests turned violent, there was no move by the Obama administration or Democratic governors to use heavy handed police mobilization to terrorize Tea Party protestors or shut down dissent.
So the problem we seem to have is this:
1. Some Americans of all political stripes will act violently at protests once a certain critical numerical mass is reached. It’s just a demographic reality and particularly inescapable in a relatively violent country like ours. And the violence will only get worse as police and other government forces are used to try to suppress dissent.
2. These violent protests will be treated differently by Republican and Democratic leaders. Fascist-aligned protests will be coddled and allowed to proceed and grow without any pushback by government or police. On the other hand, anti-fascist protests will be quickly criminalized by Republican leaders and police forces.
3. Therefore, the public perception of these protests will be radically different, with most people coming to believe that fascist-aligned protests were peaceful merely because there was no police intervention. This perception will create a radical imbalance in how effective pro-fascist protests are compared to anti-fascist protests, since protests that are perceived as violent are often counter-effective in terms of voter turnout.
Furthermore, there’s the problem of where voter turnout happens wrt protest activity. Voter turnout tends to be affected by protests in a geographically limited area, ie protests that do have a positive affect on voter turnout tend to affect the areas where the protests occurred, but no so much in areas beyond them. The problem that anti-fascist protestors will have therefore is that they tend to protest where they live, ie in the cities where voter turnout doesn’t have the political impact we need to generate the changes we need or correct the imbalances that have been created by fascist-aligned politicians. On the other hand, Tea Party protesters were protesting both where they lived and in the cities, which gave their movement a radically outsized “positive” impact in terms of fascist-aligned GOTV efforts.
So, how should we deal with these fundamental problems?
Should Democratic leaders criminalize fascist-aligned protests to match Republicans until such time that Constitutional rights are safeguarded by everyone? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not sure that there’s much evidence that “leading by example” is working out very well for Democrats or our democracy. But lowering ourselves to their level in order to prove how essential these rights are may not work either — it’s an untested strategy.
Should anti-fascists take their protests on the road and begin protesting in more red/rural areas where they’ll surely be met with extremely biased police resistance? Possibly, but I don’t really see that happening. How could thousands of immigrants and young liberals afford to do that? And would it simply alienate undecided voters in these areas when their communities are inevitably shut down?
What we may be witnessing is the impossible problem that occurs in a democracy when fascists finally have total control of government. There may be no good solution to it, which may be why this is how so many democracies have died.
All I can say is in my opinion, any future Democratic president needs to go far beyond our past intuitions of “returning to normality,” ie the Biden model. We need any future president of common sense to create a new aggressive model for Democratic leadership, one where safeguards for the people are reinstated. They need to ensure that police, the military, billionaires, and fascists are put under serious scrutiny and their power and influence over our lives is radically downsized. They need to ensure that our democratic and civic institutions are rebuilt stronger and more independent than ever in order to resist the destructive carnage of future fascist administrations. And in my view, they shouldn’t be afraid of using some of the governing tactics of the right to get it done quickly, if/where they can. Our democratic system wasn’t designed nearly well enough by the framers do deal with modern global fascism in the digital age. Lastly, I would say future Democrats who would purport to be leaders need to evolve because the current Democratic party model isn’t getting the job done in terms of safeguarding our rights and creating a robust fascist-proof democracy. Because sadly, after the last election and looking at the support Trump has among immigrants for his anti-immigration policies, I think there’s evidence that we won’t be able to rely on the citizens of this country to save themselves from fascism.
This may be the fascism many of us in America deserve. But it’s not something the rest of us should tolerate, nor is it acceptable for leaders of the Democratic party to be as ineffectual as they have been any longer. The question of how to cleverly get from A to B, however… well that’s a lot more tricky.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/11/2327332/-Protests-in-support-of-and-against-fascism-in-America-a-comparison?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
