We had five years' worth of time to call bullshit on Trumpian/MAGA efforts to mainstream radical, violent brownshirt-type white supremacists into national party politics. There was a window.
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Antifascists warned people, loudly. Here in Philly, we warned you that the Young Republicans had effectively formed an alliance with the Proud Boys. We warned you that the GOP mayoral candidate was wooing the literal Nazis at Identity Evropa.
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We warned folks that the GOP candidate runner-up for the minority council seat here had literally one employee, and that the employee was a Proud Boys affiliate who ran point on security for their November 2018 rally.
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That's just in famously blue Philadelphia. Far worse was happening across the country, and to the extent that mainstream media picked up on the story at all, it was as local flavor stuff and never as the existential threat that it was.
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Way too many people, very much including Democrats, bought into anti-antifa bullshit and treated the problem as some mildly interesting street war between colorful fringe groups instead of taking it seriously and understanding that the fight was about real, rising fascism.
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We as a country had an opportunity to draw a line in the sand, and we botched it. Antifascists drew that line, and the liberal mainstream walked right up and smudged it to shit with "oh but white economic anxiety" and "civility" excuses.
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It's difficult to watch people be shocked, just shocked, to hear undisguised radical white supremacist talking points coming out of the GOP and Fox these days, because... What the fuck did you think was going to happen?
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Trump was never the sole instigator. Getting rid of him was always going to be harm reduction, not a cure. He shielded these guys while they worked their way into GOP infrastructure, and liberal silence was a complicity that allowed them to complete that process.
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I think back to all the people who told me I was absolutely nuts to make the shift from legislation-focused organizing to a focus on antifascist research, and it makes me mad all over again. A lot of those folks have changed their minds since, but... we needed them. Then.
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This crossover was exactly what antifascists worked so hard to prevent. Nazi whack-a-mole was never easy, but it relied on employers and politicians and communities saying, oh wow, I can't afford to be associated with that shit.
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Normalization of brownshirt fascism means we're less and less able to depend on people in positions of authority balking at the idea of being publicly associated with brownshirts. It makes whacking those moles a harder and harder game, especially when they hit the national stage.
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It's also given cover to fash sympathizers like Greenwald, who are increasingly comfortable co-opting economically left language in ardent defense of the brownshirts, helping deepen the brown-red problem on the left at EXACTLY the time we should be united on fighting fash.
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Basically we're at a really ugly point where 1) not only Trumpian but also brownshirt fascism has been normalized into the GOP; 2) the liberal Dem establishment wants to pretend like voting Trump out means we're 9/10ths back to normal, and
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3) the popular left that should be countering this shit militantly is too caught up in its own confused enabling of brown/red alliance fetishization to launch any meaningful united resistance and put pressure on liberal establishment to act.
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Antifascists are still doing god's work, but contemporary popular antifascism in this country is built to hold the bright line against Nazis by maintaining the stigma and alerting our communities to the presence of fash, driving them out before they can get a foothold.
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That work depends on authority within broader community (very much including politicians and prominent media voices) being like "holy shit we can't afford to be associated with that" and acting appropriately once we've lifted the veil of plausible deniability.
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The fact that liberal Dem establishment doubled down on the preservation of plausible deniability and and practiced obliviousness for so long meant that the line antifascists have worked so tirelessly to maintain became permeable to fash.
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What we're witnessing now are the consequences of that cowardice. Liberal Dem leadership (and to a lesser extent, brown/red "leftists") opened a window for the GOP that allowed them to incorporate overt brownshirt fascism into the party.
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That's an electoral and partisan problem, and electoral/partisan politics are not antifascist specialties. Antifascism is vitally important, now more than ever, but in its contemporary US form it is not equipped to leverage a lot of power in electoral/partisan spheres.
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Electeds and partisans leverage power in those spheres, and it's the electeds and partisans that have overwhelmingly failed to recognize and address the threat of rising fascism so far.
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Watching the followup to the Capitol coup attempt feels like watching a surgical team try and cure cancer by removing a single tumor that's already metastasized. It's certainly gratifying to see fascists suffer consequences, but by itself it's just too little too late.
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We're at a very perilous crossroads, and it is all the more perilous because we seem to think the threat is over. We seem very relieved to be heading back to an old "normal," even though that old normal is exactly what nurtured this new wave of fascism in the first place.
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The solution isn't complicated. We need to be militantly calling out not only GOP and brownshirt fascism, but also all the folks enabling that fascism right now by pretending it's mildly worrisome at worst.
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That very specifically means Dem electeds, very much including Biden, for taking the easy out and trying to ride the good vibes of reopening instead of meaningfully challenging the GOP by 1) calling out their fascism and 2) providing a meaningful & liberatory alternative vision.
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Are they even capable of (2)? Probably not, but it's what they always promise us. It is *certainly* possible to pressure them into (1), and if they can't pull off (2), we hold them and the party accountable and demand better leaders.
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At the same time-- and this is critical-- we need to be supporting direct action antifascist organizing now more than ever. That means amplifying and showing up.
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And finally, we need to be doing our own work of building alternative liberatory vision for the future. Fascism has a very clear vision that it presents vocally and unapologetically. The rest of us, even the liberatory left, mostly fail on that front.
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We need to be listening to liberatory thinking, actively imagining a better future, and learning to articulate that vision. Folks like
@prisonculture and@BreeNewsome are already leading on that work. We need to do a better job of learning from these leaders.Show this thread -
None of this is easy, none of this is simple. But none of this will go away just because we are ignoring it. That practiced ignorance only aids and abets the creep of fascism in this country, and this world.
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We aren't out of the woods. We have to do the work. Trump's defeat didn't end this threat. The danger is still very much present, and we *have* to fight back. That's the writing on the wall, and in the history books.
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