As I write this, bar a miracle, Donald Trump looks set to win the 2024 US election. With this shock victory, many people are despairing at the situation in America, and rightfully fearful for what is to come. However, some observing from other western democracies will seek solace in the idea that America is somehow abnormal among nation states, and that a Trump could not rise in their home country. In the UK, we have recently ejected a grasping, corrupt, and useless Tory government that was leading the country down the same path as America is headed down now, and many British people might feel hopeful that we have managed to avoid our own slide into fascism.
This is a mistake. America is not abnormal. In fact, Trump represents a return to attitudes that have been the norm for the vast majority of the existence of the nation state; exploitation, oppression, racism, sexism, classism, elitism, division and hatred of every flavour, and a boot on the neck of all humanity. These were the principals on which the European empires, the colonial states they birthed, and the capitalist economic system they nurtured, were built, and it is only recently, and only in some areas, that we have have achieved limited relief from their evils. America may be ahead of the curve in their return to this fascist equilibrium state, but they are trailblazers in a direction we are all headed.
The same poison that led to a Trump victory flows through the veins of every modern nation state. The racist anti-migrant rhetoric that may now result in a massive ramp up of state violence in America has been a part of mainstream American politics, British politics, and politics across the globe, both right-wing and left-wing, for as long as I can remember. The hatred of the poor and dispossessed has always been there, and so have patriarchal views on gender and sexuality, even among politicians who claim to be champions of the oppressed. Nationalism has always come before common humanity. Encouraging and pandering to toxic ideas to secure votes has always been good political strategy, even among the most “functional” of democracies. Putting personal profit over any ethical constraint is the basis of our entire economic system. The current wave of fascism is not some alien contagion that has infected the American political system, it is the logical and consistent end result of the ideas that form the very core of the global system of state and capital.
And a problem so embedded in our society can not simply be voted away. Even if Kamala Harris had won, the forces that birthed Trump would still exist, and America very likely would have faced a new Trump-a-like at the next election. After all, the victory of Joe Biden over Trump in the last election did not prevent Trump from regaining the presidency today, and nor should anyone currently living under a more progressive government believe that the current ascendancy of the local liberal, green, or social democratic party will make them safe from their own fascist strongmen come the next election.
Indeed, despite progressive parties often winning elections, the long term trajectory of the democratic nation state seems to drift rightwards; conservatives and fascists pursue their wildest dreams when in power, while liberals and socialists preach caution and restraint. The mainstream left functions only as an enabler and mechanic for the right; they fix the system of state and capital when regressive forces have driven it into a ditch, but they are unwilling or unable to ever truly take the wheel and drive society in a more progressive direction, leaving the right to push society ever further towards fascism once they regain power. The ultimate result of this is the situation we see now, when even many “progressive” politicians are supporting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. When a political system produces a situation where the sensible and moderate position is to accept the mass murder of innocent civilians, how can it lead to anything but fascism?
The cause of this constant rightward drift is not tied to any one party or leader, but is a systemic problem. Part of that problem lies in democracy itself; a system of winner-takes-all majority rule does not protect minorities through its formal power structure, nor does it encourage a culture of understanding and compromise among the majority that, by democratic logic, has the right to impose its rule on the losing minorities. Part of that problem also lies in the concept of the nation state; a system in which the world is divided into arbitrary competing factions with the right to use violence against each other, where a person’s humanity is only fully recognised within a territory if they are a formal citizen, and in which ethical standards do not apply across borders. Part of that problem is capitalism; a system in which profit has to come before honesty, before empathy, before long term sustainability, and even before common sense, and in which we are all encouraged to exploit each other in order to survive. And parts of that problem are older and more ingrained systems of oppression, like patriarchy, which our current social system all too often encourages as useful tools to gain and hold political or economic power, and not as the blight on humanity that they really are. Under these conditions, anyone with progressive ideas must constantly fight, and often fail, against the inherent structural tendencies of the system, while fascist scumbags find that their politics align seamlessly with the way that state and capital function and the world-views they encourage.
With our society structured in such a way, it should be no surprise that people like Trump can gain power. Instead, it should be a surprise that we ever manage to avoid fascism at all. In so far as we have done so, it has often not been through accepting the current system and its choice of picking between the merely bad and the outright evil. Much of what is good and worth preserving in our society has instead come from working outside of, or against, the formal system of state and capital. In so far as we have gained lives outside of wage-slavery, it has been done in the workplace by refusal to work, resistance to management, and sabotage. In so far as we have forced the state to respect our dignity as human beings, it has been done with disruptive protests and riots that made us impossible to ignore. In so far as we been able to plug the holes in our crumbling society, it has been done in our communities by organising mutual aid and supporting each other. In so far as we have been able to protect ourselves from abuse and oppression, it has been done by direct confrontation with police and fascists on the streets.
These movements have not only acted as a spoiler on the fascist tendencies inherent in our political and economic system, but created opposing tendencies within our communities. Instead of competition for votes in which the “other side” is to be demonised, and politically expendable minorities scapegoated and exploited, such bottom up organising encourages those involved to come together across social boundaries in order to support each other against capitalist exploitation or state oppression. Mutual aid works best when cooperation is based on solidarity between those in need instead of arbitrary divisions of race, gender, or nationality, and these principals push in the opposite direction to capitalist competition. Likewise, in being based on the self-directed actions of those at the bottom of society, and operating outside of the dominant system, these movements encouraged initiative, free-thought, and a willingness to take stand on ethical principals, compared to the passivity, ignorance, and cowardice that our current system encourages. Not to say that these movements have been perfect, as they have often suffered from the prejudices of those that built them, but in so far as they remained independent and organised from the bottom up, they developed systematic tendencies that pushed towards overcoming those prejudices and away from fascism. But these traditions of self-organisation and resistance have atrophied and been replaced with the idea that we can improve society simply by voting Labour, Democrat, or for some other local manifestation of the Soulless Technocrat Party. The disastrous results of this attitude are increasingly obvious to all those willing to actually look.
In the coming days the same media commentators who have been pushing misinformation for decades will come up with various suspect explanations for the Trump victory, provide excuses for why no one needs to worry, and continue to normalise America’s descent into fascism. They will studiously avoid the fact that, out of a population of 346 million, Trump only needed 71 million votes to win; around 20% of the American population. Such results are no unusual in “democracies”, and Kier Starmer won his 2024 election “landslide” on the support of less than 15% of the British population. The vast majority of the population that either do not vote, or can not vote, and are simply interchangeable political subjects and wage-slaves within our system, will be ignored, as they always are. Instead the media will likely platform the opinions of the most virulent bigots that supported the Trump campaign, and gormless talking heads will demand that the left further pander to this far right minority in order to win the next election, pushing the entire political culture rightwards once again.
This vast population of the disinterested, the disillusioned, and the disenfranchised is the most likely basis to rebuild the kind of movement that might halt the current rise of fascism. Some of these people simply do not care and probably could never be made to care about politics, but many others do not care because, all their life, politics has never cared about them. Those for whom, regardless of if the ruling party claims to be right wing or left wing, wages will remain stagnant, the cost of living will go up, police violence will never stop, and their neighbours will continued to be abducted in immigration raids. The people who are working twelve hour shifts to feed their families and have neither the time to develop an informed opinion, or the arrogance to assume they know what is going on without putting that time in. The people who look at the behaviour of every party and conclude that they are all some brand of negligent, corrupt, or outright malicious, and that regardless of who is in power at the current moment, the only thing they can do is keep their head down and try to find joy in life where they can. Sometimes these are the people for whom fascist oppression returned decades before the rest of society noticed, or for whom it never really went away.
Another party political promise that will inevitably be broken will likely never being taken seriously by these people. But organisation on the ground that offers their members a real say in how they operate, and which deal with problems they have right now, could offer a path to involving this currently politically dormant majority. Organisations that win them higher wages in the workplace through strike action, that directly solve problems in their community, and that protect them against the grifters and predators that state and capital empower to exploit them. Such organisations can prove themselves with committed action that their members can see, understand, and participate in, and in doing so can empower their supporters not just with material victories, but with the hope, self-confidence, and experience needed to break out of the prison of despair and passivity that characterises much of modern life. Likewise, in enabling participation across the workplace or community in the pursuit of common aims, these organisations can break the isolation and mistrust that fascism often feeds upon. Once widespread, and allied together in networks or federations, such organisations could bring the economy to a standstill and the state to its knees, and even replace both state and capital and run society on a new, bottom up, basis.
But none of that can be achieved, even if America gets to have another real election, by voting for whoever the next Democratic candidate will be, and it will not be achieved in the UK by the likes of Kier Starmer or even Jeremy Corbyn. The technocrats of the liberal and social democratic parties have never trusted the self-organised power of those they claim to represent, as the power of these political parties is based on control of the nation state, and the nation state can only be powerful when its subjects are passive, obedient, and disempowered. But as I have discussed, the nation state, even when democratic, is an institution with an inherent tendency towards fascism. If we want to make ourselves safe from fascism, we must replace the nation state and capitalism with a new system with different tendencies, a bottom up system that is based on inclusion instead of division, on consensus instead of domination, and cooperation instead of competition. And we need to start building that system right now with the people around us instead of waiting for a political party to come and save us.
There is no more business as usual, we must organise towards a revolution, or we will inevitably slip into an abyss of human misery.
(The views expressed in this article are those of a member, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Solidarity Federation as a whole)
