Losing to Fascism Will Make Everything Worse

The left, and Gaza, will not benefit if Trump wins.

A certain segment of the left on social media insists that a Trump win next week will force Democrats to change direction on Gaza.

Biden, in refusing to end military aid to Israel, is complicit in genocide. He has refused to listen to the left or to Palestinian voices; he has refused to be swayed by images of horrific atrocities in Gaza and now in Lebanon. Kamala Harris in her presidential run has refused to even contemplate ending military aid under any circumstances.  

The only way to force them to reconsider, the argument goes, is to hand them a defeat in November. Once they realize that support for Israel is bad politics they will supposedly change direction. A Trump win will shift Israel policy to the left, and finally end the genocide at some point in the future, when (or if) Democrats get back into power.

Many people have pointed out that this logic is not compelling in the short term. I think it’s worth pointing out, though, that it’s also incredibly dangerous on a longer time horizon. Fascist victories resonate for a very long time. In many respects, the current horror in Israel is the result of fascist victories past, which buttressed the ideology of ethnonationalism and undermined belief in the validity of diversity and peace.

Fascism creates cycles of despair and hate, which then set the stage for more fascist victories, more despair, and more hate. Surrendering to fascism in the hope that fascism will somehow undermine itself is a poor strategy, to put it mildly.

Trump will be terrible on Gaza, and won’t make Democrats better

Again, other, smarter people than me have explained the problems with this logic in the immediate future. Journalist Mehdi Hassan has a devastating video reminder of Trump’s record on Palestine. Trump regularly uses the term “Palestinian” as a slur, his major donors are people like Miriam Adelson who wants Israel to annex the entire West Bank, he’s reprimanded Biden for not letting Netanyahu “finish the job” in Gaza (ie, kill everyone). He’s also promised to ban Palestinian immigration and deport pro-Palestinian supporters (including, quite possibly, I fear, ones who are US citizens.)

Some voters may feel that even if Trump accelerates war crimes in Gaza, it still might be worth defeating the Democrats to teach them a lesson. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein explains why that won’t, and can’t, work.

The idea here is that it’s important to send a message that you’re unhappy with how they handled some important question, or perhaps that they haven’t sufficiently respected you or your group, or just that you find them unlikable. Sure, people with this reasoning will admit, Trump would be a worse president from their perspective, but it’s even more important to send a message.

Sorry. Voting just doesn’t work like that. You can’t actually send messages that way. The vote totals will put either Harris or Trump in office, and that’s what actually matters. Meanwhile how the winner and others in the political system will interpret the vote is important…but they won’t be constrained at all by any message you intended. 

In fact, when fascists win, the message people tend to get is that fascism is popular and powerful and that therefore you should cater to fascists. Trump’s victory in 2016, and his continued prominence in Republican politics, is a big part of why Democrats have shifted right on immigration.

More, it’s worth remembering that Biden is president in no small part because Trump’s victory in 2016 made the Democratic party afraid of choosing a progressive leader. The party was desperate to win in 2020, and coalesced around Biden because, as a white male centrist, he seemed to present a moderate, unthreatening face for white male reactionaries in diners who, post Trump, were seen (even more) as the true, authentic voice of America.  

Biden ended up governing significantly to the left of his previous record on many issues, including stimulus spending, labor, green energy, and antitrust.

On Israel, however, Biden, a long time Zionist, has fulfilled the (ugly) tenets of his implicit 2020 promise to defeat Trump by not being too, too unTrump. In the first years of Biden’s presidency, he largely adopted Trump’s Middle East framework, pushing Arab states to normalize relations with Israel while ignoring equal rights and human rights for Palestinians. And when that Trumpy pathway led to predictable disaster on 10/7, Biden simply doubled down, providing Israel with all the weapons it needed for genocide.

The first loss to Trump helped create the conditions for the current nightmare in Gaza in part by pushing Democrats to the right. Another loss to Trump is likely to stifle the hesitant moves towards a more pro-Palestinian stance within the Democratic party.

Fascist victories helped destroy the diaspora as an ideological possibility

More broadly, Hitler’s triumph, and Hitler’s example, have had an underdiscussed but powerful effect on the establishment of a Jewish ethnonationalist state, and on the ensuing misery and violence.

The usual story connecting the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel is one of healing and reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates–who himself cited Israel as an example of reparations and justice in his famous essay, “The Case for Reparations”— summarizes the traditional narrative of uplift in his new book The Message.

This arc—from Holocaust to nation-state—has been traced in film, literature, and global memory. The relentless grimness of Schindler’s List finds its relief in the unwanted, wandering Jews, saved by Schindler, finding a home in their Promised Land while “Jerusalem of Gold” plays in the background. In this way the want of relief can be permanently sated: Two thousand years of wrong has at last been righted, and a people, persecuted, hunted, and subjected to industrialized genocide, has not only survived but found its way back to a God-given home.

Israel, we’re often told, is the good thing that came out of unimaginable evil; it’s the real world analog of all those Holocaust movies in which the genocide allows gentiles to demonstrate their virtue.

The Holocaust is not actually a feel good story for the movies, though. Hitler did make Israel possible, but not in a good way.

Prior to World War II, Zionism was strongly contested within the Jewish community. The socialist Bund movement, for example, saw diaspora as a potential metaphor for and a potential spur to an international politics built on equality and acceptance of difference. Some religious Jews saw Zionism as elevating the state above God; Zionists, in this view, abandoned an individual ethical life for a genuflection before nationalist violence.  Shaul Magid in his book The Necessity of Exile notes that Isaac Bashevitz Singer “thought exile was necessary to perpetuate a longing that produces Jewish genius.”

You can agree with these various stances or not (I rolled my eyes at Singer’s formulation). But the point is that diaspora, before the Holocaust, was seen as a possibility which could carry ideological weight within Jewish life. Jewish people could and did argue that exile, diaspora, living in many place among many people, had a value in politics, in religion, in art. Zionists insisted that Jews in the diaspora were weak, assimilated, and a betrayal of ethnonationalist destiny. But their insistence did not sway all, or even most Jews.

The genocide changed that. Hitler did not completely wipe out European Jewry, but he came close. He didn’t wipe out the idea of diaspora’s value either. But again, he went a long way towards it.

Israel was buoyed after the war by Jewish exiles and immigrants from Europe, who were (still) barred admittance to the US and other Western countries. But Zionism was also empowered by the widespread feeling, among Jews and non-Jews alike, that Jewish people could not be safe in the diaspora. Neighbors could not be trusted to join in the work of equality; religion could not survive the antipathy of those neighbors.

Though the Nazis were defeated, they largely won the argument about Jewish life. Hitler had insisted that Jewish people could not and should not live in the diaspora. And after the death camps, a preponderance of Jews and non-Jews reluctantly (or sometimes enthusiastically) agreed with him.

Israel as failure

Israel from this perspective is not a validation of justice and repair. It’s a monument to the failure of the dream of diaspora.

For centuries, Jewish life was an iconic, if not unique, example of shared values and identity across great distance and great difference. Jews faced great adversity and violence, but they also found neighbors, allies, and achievements. The diaspora provided a vision of peoplehood that was not chained to either ethnicity or land, but to beliefs, learning, dispersion, intermingling. Jewish life was antifascist.

And then the fascists won, and the idea of an antifascist people became untenable. Ethnonationalism became the core of Jewish identity in Israel, and to a large extent in the American diaspora as well. That ethnonationalism was violent and intolerant, as all ethnonationalism is, and could not exist without displacement and violence directed at the Palestinians. Fascism reduced the possibilities for Jewish life, and that in turn led to a Zionism inseparable from fear, violent assertion, and colonial atrocities.

I’m not arguing (as some discussions of Israel do) that abused people are doomed to become abusers. Nor (I hope it’s clear) am I excusing the Zionist project. What I’m saying is that fascist victories have long term consequences. They shut down possibilities for equality, for freedom, and for hope in unexpected ways, with unexpected casualties.

There have been many fascist victories in the US, starting with its founding as a slave state, running through its genocides of native peoples and the loss of Reconstruction to the neoConfederates, and on to Trump’s election victory. Those losses created the groundwork for a bipartisan consensus on funding Israel’s genocide.

But every defeat of fascism matters too—no matter how compromised or ambivalent that defeat might be. We can stand against the worst, and thereby open possibilities for better futures. Or we can abdicate, and open a way for nightmares we haven’t dreamed yet. The US has often made the wrong choice in the past. I hope it does better this time.