The Banality of Good

On the millions of people joining the fight against fascism

Somewhere along the line we became convinced that change, revolution, bending the arc of history are only accomplished by a few, outstanding heroes. In fact, everywhere along the line we were told that a few great men, the occasional exceptional protagonist, or a handful of superheroes are the primary engines of history. Our textbooks, our movies, almost all of our stories teach us again and again that it’s an unusual hero, a rare transformative person who stands head and shoulders above the rest of us who might make a meaningful difference in this world and its trajectory.

Photo by MeSSrro on Unsplash

So what about the masses of ordinary people who are, of course, present during great historical events, seismic shifts, revolutions and the like? The millions of people who have participated in social movements, wars of independence, and political upheavals are treated as background actors, footnotes, statistics. A quarter of a million people attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a dream speech’ in Washington, D.C. but only a handful made the history books. Many of the other 249,900 organized, marched, boycotted, took action to bring the Civil Rights movement to its zenith — but we’re not taught to think about thousands of heroes, we’re taught to just think about the exceptional few.

The truth is that we’ve always needed thousands and millions of heroes. And, at many points in history, the truth is that they’ve been there. No revolution, no transformative change has ever been brought about by just a handful of people. There have certainly been important leaders, visionaries, leaders and thinkers who have had outsized impacts, but each and every one of them were backed by thousands and millions of ordinary heroes, heroes who history typically forgets.

We have those heroes today too. We have hundreds and thousands and even millions of people acting to change the trajectory of our world. Much of what these ordinary heroes do flies under the radar. In nearly every city in America there are now people who have, of their own accord, formed patrols to protect their communities from federal kidnappers. They have done so unprompted, not at the behest of any acclaimed leader, but because they stood up in response to the fascist onslaught and chose to band together with their communities.

These are the same thousands and millions of people choosing to skip out on work in response to the call for a general strike, the same people who are protesting and organizing and increasingly intervening in deportation attempts. Recently, in Minneapolis, a growing number of neighborhoods have seen checkpoints pop up. Not border patrol checkpoints, but checkpoints established by community members that let their neighbors through and turn around ICE agents. These “filter blockades” are yet another move by ordinary heroes working to protect one another from fascist kidnappers.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

We have been rightly consumed for the past decade with the banality of evil. The rapid rise of Trumpism in the United States has led us to reflect on how ordinary people, even some of our boring neighbors, may quietly hold hatred in their hearts, may have spent years thinking of themselves as superior, years filled with resentment that finally found a vessel. Karl Stojka encapsulated the terrifyingly human nature of the masses the compose fascism decades ago:

“And people did this, just like you, you and me. These people did not come from another planet. [...] They were human beings, just like us. And it was not Hitler who arrested me, not Goering, not Goebbels. The grocer, the janitor, the tailor, the shoemaker, the baker, they suddenly got a uniform, a swastika armband, and there they were, the master race”

This is part of the reality we have to face. It’s so easy to just blame a few leaders, blame Trump and Vance and Miller, and ignore the underlying problems. But Trump is possible because of underlying systems and culture, because of white supremacy and massive inequality and the many ways this country falls short of being a full democracy. See-sawing between fascists and moderate democrats won’t cut it. Trump is already trying to steal the 2026 elections, and he’s doing so quite openly. It’s going to take systemic transformation to fully defeat fascism, not just pinning the damage on a few leaders and calling it a day.

The good news is that the millions of ordinary heroes who are already starting to step up in countless ways are the exact legions we need to bring about transformative change. We’re familiar with the ordinary heroes across Minnesota, but they’re not alone. In Chicago thousands of neighbors carry whistles and patrol their communities keeping watch ICE. In LA thousands spent this past summer fighting the federal incursion. In Portland, New York, Memphis, Detroit, St. Louis — the list is too long, and that’s a good thing. Everywhere in this country people are joining the fray, organizing, and protesting by the millions.

We’re unfortunately all too familiar with the banality of evil, but now we get to grow more accustomed to the banality of good. We see Moms in Subarus following border patrol vehicles. We see teenagers walking out of schools en masse to protest ICE. We see millions of people of every stripe marching in solidarity with Minneapolis, in solidarity with Palestine, in opposition to genocide and fascism wherever it rears its ugly head. We see legions of people who once sat on the sideline joining organizations, attending meetings, doing the unsexy work that makes real resistance possible. We see thousands of people show up to picket lines, block roads, and even risk tear gassings and beatings. Then we see them pick themselves up and carry on fighting the next day.

This is the banality of good. We got so used to the scary, mundane evil of this country and this world that we came close to forgetting that millions and millions of people are willing and eager to fight the good fight every single day. Maybe it took the fight coming to our doorsteps, and maybe it shouldn’t have. Some people fought well before fascism entered their town in the guise of masked kidnappers, and some needed that terrifying wake-up call. Some still do. But what millions of people are making clear, right now, is that they know their neighbors are worth fighting for. They’re making it clear that solidarity is a verb, an action, it’s showing up and taking risks and defending one another.

Photo by Rafli Firmansyah on Unsplash

The right believes in a few great men. More accurately, they believe in submission to a few leaders, who are extremely shitty men. They believe in dominance, and even more so they believe in being dominated. The banality of evil is fundamentally the willingness, even eagerness, to submit to the leadership of a sadistic demagogue. And these sadistic men, these fascists, are eager to use their followers. As Erich Fromm says, “The aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life — freedom.” This is the banality of evil.

The banality of good must, necessarily, counter the turning of people in automatons. It must work against the fascistic and sadistic mode of being. And we see that happening all around us. Even as some supposed leaders call for placating fascism, appeasing it, compromising with it, millions of people are rejecting that failed and dangerous approach and instead taking their fates into their own hands.

Masses of people are getting organized — both organizing themselves into new formations and joining existing organizations — and spearheading the fight against fascism. This is vital to fighting and defeating the fascist movement and its state goons, and also vital to reclaiming the agency that we have long been denied. Neoliberalism and fascism both deny the power of the masses. The former primarily seeks to sideline us by turning us into consumers and aggregating power for corporations and the ruling class, while the latter seeks to subordinate us and turn us into its brownshirt foot soldiers, which makes a segment of the working class feel powerful, despite ultimately building power for the ruling class.

Right now people are rejecting both of these modes. Millions are actively rejecting fascist subjugation, and simultaneously rejecting the idea that we should be passive consumers without political agency and power. The truth is breaking through. It comes at a steep cost, it takes great pain for many comfortable, and even less comfortable people to wake up and step off the sidelines, but it’s happening. People are organizing to reclaim society from fascism, but also to reclaim power for the working class more broadly.

There is no solution to fascism that concentrates all power in the hands of a few billionaires and politicians. It takes masses of people, millions of people with real power, real organization, real agency and a say in their lives to defeat the ethos and the power structure of fascism and the systems that enable it. And we’re seeing millions of people move towards that realization and take action to materialize it. We’re seeing the banality of good begin to manifest, seeing neighbors step up and act and organize, seeing people realize that we have to be active agents in society, or be steamrolled by the worst among us. And, once that realization is attained, the choice is clear. - JP

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