We can’t be afraid to live differently
Fighting fascism requires a profound willingness to change society
Someone finally did something. A politician took tangible, urgent action to help Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Senator Chris Van Hollen not only went down to El Salvador, he agitated and held press conferences and met with the country’s Vice President and got a meeting with Kilmar. His pressure got the kidnapped Maryland man moved out of Bukele’s atrocious detainment camp and into a less nightmarish facility. All of this must be just the start of ending the Trump regime’s mass abduction program, and of returning the people they’re trafficking back to their families. But it’s a powerful start, a break from the weak insistence on norms and mealy-mouthed statements devoid of action that we’ve come to expect from politicians. Van Hollen decided to do something different, and that simple lesson is one we need.
We all know, somewhere in us, that what we think of as normal is gone. Covid, climate change, and this mix of fascism and economic turmoil have combined to put us on a path from which there is no simple return. And clinging to the delusion of return, to the idea that if we just get things right we’ll trot back to simpler times, will fail us. It has already failed us. As the world grows more uncertain, as the democratic and economic pillars this society rested on bend and buckle, fascists have campaigned, both implicitly and explicitly, on a return to the days of bland normalcy. Efforts to go backward, to return to simpler times, have fed the fascist beast because they are a movement of regression. To fight them we cannot just pitch a lighter, less oppressive version of their narrative, we need something different.
In framing our approach, and in making clear the need to do something new and radical and powerful, it’s helpful to clarify just how dramatically the fascists lie. Their promise of a return to simpler times is grand misdirection. Yes, they want to drag us backward, but to more oppressive times rather than an imagined, fictional, peaceful past. And the particular brand of fascists we’re up against want mega-prison camps, endless surveillance online and out in the world, and the destruction of all democracy. They want to rend the social fabric, destroy society as we know it, and move towards a maximally exploitative and violent system, not return to some simple life. So we in turn must be willing to abandon the failed elements of modern life that have led us into the arms of this fascist beast, and do something radically different.
It takes profound courage, a deeper courage than I think we understand, to break free of societal norms. Our psychological attachment to the particular structures of the world we inhabit, the pressures of conformity, and the ways that culture and norms are embedded in our physical world can be so strong as to feel unbreakable. Moving away from the contemporary ideas of how life ought to look, how society ought to be structured, can feel physically difficult, viscerally frightening — it can feel like the floor being yanked out from under us.
This psychic equivalence, where even the idea of society changing feels like a physical attack, explains a substantial percentage of the collective response to the current fascist onslaught. Among people who are not facing immediate risk there's still an understandable panic, and in that panic we can cling to normalcy as the drowning cling to whatever or whoever is closest to them. But no matter how we’re feeling in this moment, we need to pause. We can’t let fascists use our flailing, we can’t try to run back to a normal that doesn’t exist; we have to be deliberate, brave, and visionary.
Crushing fascism must be our number one goal right now, but it’s easy to conflate, as some do, the defeat of Donald Trump with total victory. We need a long-term vision to wash away the ideological underpinnings of the far right in America and across the globe, and although that’s a much taller order it’s also the only way to ensure we don’t get the horrifying new world envisioned by men like JD Vance. So we must confront the fact that comprehensively defeating the ideas that bolster fascism means a structural reorganization of society.
There are more feeders of fascism than are possible to list here, more structural elements and societal trends that interact, sometimes blatantly and sometimes subtly, to make people interested in authoritarianism and oppression. The decimation of community, the societal instability and boundless corporate greed of late capitalism, the stoking of hatred and the prevalence of scapegoating, all of this and more adds up to a society ripe for fascist takeover. In 1941 Erich Fromm wrote about what these sorts of conditions lead to in his book Escape From Freedom: “The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.”
In attempting to escape from the burden of individuality, the burden of confronting a difficult world alone, people sublimate themselves to bigger movements. Fascists exploit this just as they exploit the desire for normalcy; these two desires are in fact intimately intertwined. But the desire for community, the desire to not be alone, also has positive solutions. We need not sublimate ourselves to oppressive movements to feel connection. We can, and must, find healthy alternatives, movements and groups and organizations where the individual becomes part of something bigger than ourselves without the sacrifice of our personhood, and without the demand that we sacrifice the personhood of others.
Modern society is not set up this way. Neoliberalism deliberately killed unions, atomized communities, and lifted up the ethos of total individualism at the expense of community and collective organization. Neoliberalism built a normal where we’re isolated units, each of us meant to conceive of ourselves as separate from the people around us, disconnected from neighbors and friends and even family. We’re each fundamentally meant to see ourselves as an island. And we can’t fight fascism while clinging to this normal.
For one, we can’t build the mass movements we need right now while holding onto such individualism. And, on a much larger scale, we can’t beat the appeal of fascism, of a movement that promises belonging, however falsely, while we have no real belonging to promise people. We need each other, we need places and organizations that people can join and experience profound connection within. We need to have purpose and community that we build and offer openly to those who would join us. All of this is needed for the immediate term, but also for the long-term defeat of all that underlies the far-right.
Connection does not arise easily in a world where we’re forced to work and hustle constantly. But changing the economic structure of society is a daunting prospect. Despite the constant failings of the current system, the uncertainty of radical change can be intimidating. I look to groups who are already building alternatives, like the hundreds of organizations that came together to form the New Economy Coalition. They write, “Global economic transformation is built and led by regional solidarity economy ecosystems. A solidarity economy ecosystem is an environment in which all of the things a community needs — like housing, schools, farms and food production, local governance, art and culture, healthcare, and transportation — are controlled and governed by the people…” And they’re doing this work. Groups around the country are steadily building the practices and infrastructure to hold up a new way of providing what we need, a way where people are empowered instead of exploited.
It’s happening. Radical change, prompted both by the desire for a better world and by the failings of our current arrangements, is being fostered. Groups like Cooperation Jackson are working to “replace the current socio-economic system of exploitation, exclusion and the destruction of the environment with a proven democratic alternative. An alternative built on equity, cooperation, worker democracy, and environmental sustainability to provide meaningful living wage jobs, reduce racial inequities, and build community wealth.” They’re doing this work through worker cooperatives, community assemblies, solidarity economy work and more. And sister organizations have sprung up in Tulsa, Vermont, and beyond.
Every alternative, every organization that begins to practice and demonstrate how we can live differently opens the door a little wider for all of us to step through. Every time a community garden offers its bounty to neighbors for free, every time a mutual aid organization provides clothing or food or medicine, every time we showcase a way of living that isn’t exploitative or oppressive we help others follow us on this new path. We don’t need to, and can’t, successfully respond to fascism by returning to a normal that doesn’t exist.
Whether in Congress or in our neighborhoods we’re learning that business as usual is no more. What this moment requires is casting aside fear, casting aside our limited conceptions of what fighting back looks like and of what society is supposed to look like, and embracing something new. We know deep down that this fight against fascism requires more of us, we know we have to be bold, and we know that our old approaches are insufficient. Times are changing rapidly, and if we don’t change with them we’ll be left in a dark and bitter world. But, if we do adapt, we might just pave the way for a future free of fascism and all it entails. So, the question is, are you willing to live differently?
Thank you for this. It’s perhaps the most hopeful essay I’ve read on here in a while.
yes indeed, we need to be working towards something better.