Like many others in the US, I gathered with friends last weekend to try to come to terms with the re-election of Donald Trump as president. None of us were surprised by his victory but, with his winning every swing state, the Senate, and, as seemed likely, the House, we were all depressed at the scale of it. For a while, all we could do was share our outrage and fear. But after a while we began to try to think more systematically about what had happened.
None of us had any time for the blame game in which different demographic groups – whether white women, Black men, Latinos, or Muslims – are slammed for voting for Trump more than they should have done. Each demographic voted in higher numbers for Trump than they had before, so any explanation that pins the blame on one constituency is mistaken.
Everyone agreed that Kamala Harris had run a terrible campaign. The greatest disappointment was her position on Gaza. Rather than taking the opportunity to break with Biden’s policy, Harris committed to continuing the financial, diplomatic, and military support for Israel’s ongoing genocide.
It’s not clear how much of an effect that had on the outcome. But this much is certain: you can’t plausibly run as the anti-fascist candidate at home if you’re gunning for fascists abroad. In 2020, Biden benefited from the Black Lives Matter mobilization by embracing, if only in rhetoric, its energy. Four years later, the Democratic Party did not offer even the most minimal concessions to the pro-Palestinian movement.
Beyond that, though, it seemed to us that the Harris campaign made an obvious mistake in choosing the defense of democracy as her main message. It meant the campaign was based on an abstraction. If you really want to save democracy, better to do it with a powerful program that tries to prove democracy can bring substantial improvements to people’s lives. But Harris chose to run on Biden’s record and, with an array of benefits reduced, including Child Tax Credits, the Biden period was, for most people, an era of austerity.
For these reasons, many of my friends concluded that the best way to have defeated Trump would have been with a Bernie Sanders-style candidate who could speak to the anger about economic issues that many feel, especially with rising inflation unmatched by rising wages. This is the analysis that most Lefties in the US have settled upon, even as there are disagreements on whether the Democratic Party can ever again be the vehicle for a program aimed at improving working-class lives.
I am sympathetic to this. But I think there are some other elements that need to be added to our thinking if we are going to be effective over the coming years. First, what happened last week in the US is part of a global phenomenon. A few weeks before the election, I wrote in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies:
Fascism is the politics of the hour; almost everywhere its forces are steadily breaking new ground. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party won the popular vote in the snap National Assembly elections held in June and July 2024. In Germany, the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) was the largest party in the Thuringia regional election. In the Netherlands, the racist party led by Geert Wilders won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the November 2023 general election. In India, the loss of a parliamentary majority for Narendra Modi’s BJP in the June 2024 general election is the one exception to the general pattern; but he remains prime minister. (This article was part of a symposium on my book What is Antiracism?)
While there are specifics to the US, the basic explanation for Trump’s victory must involve trends that are taking place across the world. It is true that inflation has been global but neo-fascism’s electoral successes have been occurring since before the recent steep rises in prices. Moreover, frustration over economic issues never leads mechanically to particular outcomes in elections; it can express itself in voting Left or Right or neither. So economic data by itself is insufficient explanation.
I think what we really need to get at is how it has felt to be in the world over the last decade or so. And to understand that, I think it’s useful to go back to the 1990s. That was when the neoliberal order reached the peak of its domination. We were all invited to think of ourselves as individual entrepreneurs. Get into debt at college to invest in yourself as a product to be sold to employers. With your return on that investment, in the form of your paycheck, you will be able to live as a sovereign consumer, commanding whatever personal pleasures you desire in the globalized marketplace.
On that neoliberal worldview, outside of your circle of friends and family, relationships with other people are reduced to market transactions. In his play No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre had a character say “Hell is other people.” And that sums up the neoliberal attitude to society. It was always an ugly, oppressive, and unsustainable vision of how to organize human life and it produced a world of profound inequalities. But enough people in Europe and the US found neoliberalism plausible for it to take hold of the culture. Soon we were living in an AirBnB world, in which every social friction – even the awkwardness of having to make small talk with a hotel receptionist – seemed removable.
Structurally we still live under neoliberal capitalism. The market order remains the prevailing way that societies organize the distribution of their resources. And neoliberal ideology continues to have its official authority. But since the 2008 financial crisis, and especially since Covid, to try to live as a neoliberal sovereign individual has involved deep contradictions. In an age of unpayable debt, cutbacks to public services, and precarious work, only a wealthy minority can feel like sovereign individuals enjoying the choices the free market offers. And Covid – an underestimated factor in understanding the current rise of fascism – made palpable how we are all embedded in webs of social and biological dependencies.
All these events of the last two decades – financial collapse, blocked economic development, the millions of lives lost to the pandemic – signalled that we are not sovereign, independent individuals but highly dependent on the state and society. It became startingly apparent that we are unavoidably and deeply lodged in social and political relationships that neoliberalism, with decreasing credibility, pretends can be entirely transformed into market transactions. To the neoliberal mindset, this return of the social was deeply shocking.
The liberal wing of the ruling classes still hopes that a few little technocratic nudges here and there can take us back to the more comfortable neoliberal world of the 1990s. That continues to be the prevailing delusion among those who control the Democratic Party. They have been unable to grasp the fundamentally changed world we are now in. Meanwhile, the Left has been too weak to exploit the return of society and politicize it in a socialist direction.
But the Right has responded to the return of the social far more effectively. It offers a kind of fantasy of renewed individual sovereignty, not through rebuilding a neoliberal economy but through the nihilistic pleasures of racial and gender domination – embodied in the global anti-woke crusade. It presents the return of the social as an unwelcome claim on your willingness to care about other groups. Obligations to those needier than you (symbolized above all in the refugee) are castigated as tricks deployed by those who have failed through their own lack of effort or ability, and enabled by the globalist elites whose purpose is to weaken the strength of the nation’s “proper” people. In these ways, today’s fascism draws its sustenance from neoliberalism’s rejection of social obligations even as it rises from the debris of a neoliberal culture.
A century ago, European fascism was a response to the strength of Communist Parties and the real possibility of social revolution. But when the MAGA movement warns of the danger of Marxists and communists, it is not because there is an actual Left that threatens anything at all; rather the label “communist” stands in for any obligation for society to protect the vulnerable.
This is not only about disinformation or irrational beliefs. Again, look at how it feels. There is a euphoria in embracing conspiracy theories about globalist elites. It is to feel smart enough to see through the establishment’s propaganda. A world that felt confusing and nonsensical suddenly feels like it can be decoded and understood. Discovering that powerful people are out to get you is thrilling. After feeling ignored by politicians for so many years, how exciting to discover that you have been the object of elite manipulation! And now you have people on your side with whom you can join in a global battle for the future of the world
The standard liberal response to this is to denounce MAGA intolerance, irrationality, and hatred. But as I argued in my book What is Antiracism?, the racist elements of neo-fascist ideology derive a kind of plausibility from the structural racisms of neoliberalism itself. The neoliberal project involved both a celebration of cultural diversity and a reworking of racist domination through the colossal expansion of border infrastructure, ever greater military spending, rising police budgets, and the building of more and more prisons, all justified by presenting Black, Muslim, and migrant cultures as by nature deficient.
These infrastructures of racist policing, military, border and carceral violence then acted as charging stations for fascist movements, a constant source of political energy they could absorb. The War on Terror, for example, which was enthusiastically supported by liberals, seeded a new crop of fascist movements in Europe claiming to oppose “Islamization”, cultivated US support for Netanyahu, and supplied the building blocks for Trump’s first presidential campaign.
Now, Trump’s program of mass deportations will be carried out using the very Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which has been built up and defended by both parties during the neoliberal age. My most recent book Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters is a comic that I worked on with illustrator Anuj Shrestha and co-authored with Mizue Aizeki. It looks at why the DHS was created in 2002 and how it has grown into a sprawling, costly monster that fails to secure us from the greatest dangers we face.
If all that is close to the truth of what has been happening, what can we do? If the Democrats fight future elections with a stronger set of policies to relieve economic suffering, would that be enough to defeat neo-fascism? My friends had different views. But I think we probably can’t count on that. Neo-fascism’s electoral successes are grounded organically in both the recent domination and failure of neoliberal culture.
The Left, on the other hand, has to start from scratch. Decades of neoliberalism have buried the collective values that animated the mass movements of a century ago. In the age of climate crisis, the sense of our shared fate as human beings has never been more needed and less keenly felt. In any case, elections are by default statistical exercises that agglomerate the preferences of isolated individuals, rather than sites of truly collective action.
In my view, now is the time to build our power outside of elections. We urgently need to demonstrate in practice a simple truth that both technocrats and neo-fascists deny: that it is possible for human beings to come together as equal participants in social and political institutions to jointly shape our destiny. Be involved in an organization. Work with other people. Make those relationships meaningful. Seek to change institutions at whatever level you can.
Through doing that, we also rebuild the culture we will need for our future struggles. In What is Antiracism? I quoted from the Sri Lankan writer A. Sivanandan’s description of the values we need to restore: “loyalty, comradeship, generosity, a sense of community and a feel for internationalism, an understanding that unity has to be forged and reforged again and again and, above all, a capacity for making other people’s fights one’s own – all the great and simple things that make us human.”
Of course, this requires us to think over a longer time frame than the four-year election cycle. But there’s no quick way out of the hole we’re in. As the Grenadian revolutionary Maurice Bishop said, “Revolution is not instant coffee.” In the meantime, I find faith, even in these darkest of times, in what I know to be true of human beings: that to only pursue competition and domination is unrewarding; they do not satisfy the soul in the way that genuine human connection does. Socialism is nothing if it is not the organization of society to reflect our human need for being together.
Books and articles cited:
- Antiracism in dark times
- What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism
- Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters
This article appeared in the November edition of Arun Kundnani’s monthly newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
