Under Postfascism, Fractures in the State Will Make Openings for Protest
November 13, 2024
It can be difficult to gauge sentiments in the midst of historical events. But something seems to feel different this time. Compared to Trump’s victory in 2016, this breakthrough for postfascism feels, for many, more demoralizing and the loss more definitive.
Many will know that Hegel “remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.” But in writing this line, Marx forgot to note the significance, for Hegel, of historical repetition. For Hegel, the second appearance of a phenomenon in history can make this phenomenon more real or consequential. The second time Caesar rose, an imperium followed. The second time Napoleon was defeated, his defeat stuck. When something happens a second time, the first time retrospectively can seem less anomalous.
In 2016, Trump’s unexpected breakthrough was met with large-scale mobilization. The Women’s March, timed to interrupt his inauguration, constituted possibly the largest mass protest in the country’s history. This event was followed by occupations of airports. And then came the International Women’s Strike. For as short-lived as this wave of protest would prove to be, it nevertheless helped dislocate Trump’s first one hundred days, making clear that the people did not acquiesce to his project. Protest also marked the close of Trump’s first presidency, with the forceful reemergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020.
Surely it is too soon to gauge the likelihood that mass protest will reemerge over the coming months. Perhaps the Palestine solidarity movement will remake campuses again at the close of the Fall term—typically an auspicious moment for university-based protest movements. Perhaps another set of demonstrations, drawing in millions, will interrupt Trump’s second inauguration. But in building toward mass demonstrations in the coming months, I think it will be important to speak to sentiments of demoralization and to take account of the subjective headwinds that may inhibit people from throwing themselves back into political activity for yet another time and against all too familiar adversaries. For many—at least at the outset —situations might feel too fixed in place, openings too narrow, coalitions too difficult to forge, and repression too imminent.
Indeed, it does seem that repression could be getting more acute. Stop Cop City organizers recently faced RICO charges. Palestine solidarity encampments faced police raids and prosecutions. The encampment at UCLA faced vigilante violence. And students now face more restrictive policies against protest. Trumpist vigilante and state violence will likely be layered onto existing forms of institutional repression, and will likely include both highly spectacularized and less visible elements. Progressive organizers, including those fighting postfascism at home, could face lengthy jail sentences, deportations, and threats to their bodily integrity.
Repression, however, is a double-edged thing. When made visible, repression can provoke outrage—a broadening of people’s circles of concern and the spread of oppositional tactics. The initial raid on the encampment at Columbia University, for example, prompted the establishment of encampments at colleges across the country, as well as the reestablishment of an encampment at Columbia. The Oakland general strike of 2011 was called following a night of police violence against those defending the Occupy Oakland encampment. In these cases, organizers were able to generalize struggles when encampments faced repression, either by layering in a new tactic (the strike) or by replicating the original tactic across wider geographies.
Moments when fissures within the state emerge are moments when mass protest might be made to appear necessary and timely to many.
Not only does repression potentially spur a generalization of protest movements, but efforts to intensify repression also have the potential to bring out fissures within the state. Any effort to mobilize the military to repress domestic protest would provoke legal challenge and, potentially, dissent from within the military itself. Politicians and heads of institutions at state and local levels could be compelled through popular protests to refuse to cooperate with federal policies that aim to defund social goods or that target immigrants and other groups. And given that we’re likely to see an upsurge in reactionary violence over the next few years, the question arises as to whether and how to prosecute such vigilantism in the courts. This is likely to set different layers of the state at odds with each other, opening up spaces for popular intervention. Moments when fissures within the state emerge are moments when mass protest might be made to appear necessary and timely to many.
All of this is to say that there are reasons to believe that the coming months and years will present a more violent and repressive terrain for organizing, but also could feature openings for the reemergence and generalization of protest movements. Even if the transition period or first days of Trump’s presidency are not marked by waves of mass protest this time around (and hopefully they will be), there is reason to think that building capacities and coalitions could help prepare the groundwork for later movement upsurges.
In the shorter term, it will be especially important for those on the left to argue for and help maintain alliances between Palestine solidarity organizing and emergent anti-fascist, community defense, and social goods defense organizing. Trade unionists who have been active in the Palestine solidarity movement are especially well positioned to carry out this work. And it should be possible to articulate principles of solidarity, human dignity, and the common good that link these projects. The greater difficulty, it seems to me, is how the election has exposed disagreements among organizers about how to relate to electoral politics and to the Democratic party when both a postfascist project is being advanced domestically and a Democratic administration is funding a genocidal war. However, moving through these disagreements with an eye to movement building independent of the Democratic party ought to be possible.
For as much as the moment can feel demoralizing, and for as dangerous as this moment is, there is much yet that can be done to ensure that the postfascist right—both in the United States and elsewhere—does not possess the future.