To Fight Fascism You Have To Fucking Fight It

Stop crawling on your bellies you quisling motherfuckers

Image: Job CC

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I’ve written a couple posts about Senate Democrats’ decision to surrender all leverage for the foreseeable future. I promise this will be the last one! But I felt like I had one more important thing to say about this.

That being:

YOU CAN’T FIGHT IF YOU DON’T FIGHT YOU QUISLING MOTHERFUCKERS! FFS!

So.

Let’s see if I can parse that insight in a slightly less shouty manner.

Sheldon Whitehouse’s condescending case for surrender

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) posted a thread on bluesky about the shutdown a couple of days ago. Whitehouse voted against the CR, but he wasn’t writing to castigate Schumer.

Rather, he was writing to defend his colleagues/buddies/collaborators who gave away the keys and also their spines. He argued that the vote on the CR was difficult, and that reasonable people could disagree about the correct approach. Therefore no one should call for Schumer’s head and everyone should go back to opposing Trump and donating to the Democrats.

I voted against the horrible MAGA “continuing resolution” — a fake and partisan CR loaded up with executive power for Trump. I hated it. But respected colleagues voted otherwise, and not just to “cave in” versus “stand up.”

I did a lot of research into how a shutdown might play out, and there was lots to fear; not least that the Trump/Musk/Vought axis of MAGA extremists would love a shutdown, and want a long one, and use it to cruel advantage. What was there to fear?

In shutdown, executive powers are at their apex, including power to close whole departments and agencies and divisions, “Reduction in Force” all their personnel, and make massive cuts of programs and firings of people they deem “non-essential.”

The horrible stuff they’re now doing illegally and sloppily with their DOGE Musk-rats, they could do in shutdown mode under a veneer of legality, directed by Trump’s “Project 2025” OMB, with added executive powers from declaring an “emergency.”…

I was willing to walk into that valley of government death to bring the battle to a head, make a clear break between sides, and (I believe) help brightly spotlight for voters the evil at work. But it’s reasonable to reach the other conclusion, and good people did.

Whitehouse didn’t mention that Democrats might be able to demand concessions in a shutdown fight and force Trump to (for example) abide by court orders. Whitehouse also added some infuriatingly condescending nonsense about how his House colleagues didn’t have to make the tough decisions since theirs was just a “protest vote”—though, of course, it wasn’t clear until the vote was actually taken that the GOP caucus would hold together. House Democrats took a difficult vote because they thought fighting was important.

Whitehouse’s colleagues shirked the vote because…well. Whitehouse says because they weighed costs and benefits. Some of us think that they in fact just decided fighting fascism wasn’t worth potentially getting criticized by the right and the media and risking reelection chances.

In any case. The point is that Whitehouse said the issue was mostly about figuring out which path led to more or less pain. He adds that he thought a shutdown fight might “help brightly spotlight for voters the evil at work”—clarifying issues for the next election.

Surrender leads to surrender

But none of this really gets at the heart of the matter, which is that we need people to fight, and to get people to fight, you have to fight.

The Senate Democrats are locked into a vision of politics which is wholly taken up by electoral calculus. The questions they were asking themselves were, “Who will get blamed for a shutdown? Who will gain an advantage in the midterm elections?” Or, at its most craven, “How do we get Trump’s approval to fall so that Republicans finally come to their sense, vote against him and save us all?” (Schumer actually said this was his brilliant strategy in his New York Times interview. You can go look it up if you can stomach it.)

The problem with this approach is, first of all, that Republicans are not going to save us, you fucking shitheads.

But beyond that, the focus on elections and elections only, while understandable to some extent from elected officials, really misses the extent of our emergency and the fascist dangers we are facing.

I do think there will be midterm elections; I suspect that Democrats will be in a good place to win many of them. But midterm elections are still a year and a half away. In the meantime, Trump is rushing to use coercive federal power to force universities to target students and professors he dislikes and to shutter programs he feels challenge his power or ideology. He’s using ICE to terrorize…well, basically everyone. He’s using lawsuits and threats to silence media voices that oppose him as billionaires like Jeff Bezos rush to turn outlets like the Washington Post into MAGA stenography. He’s defying the courts and threatening judges. He’s targeting health care facilities.

Fascism isn’t just an electoral force. It’s not even primarily an electoral force. Fascism is an anti-electoral ideology which seeks to hollow out opposing institutions and crush any place for dissent—including, but not limited to, universities, media outlets, churches, unions, and civic organizations of all kinds. The goal is to terrorize and silence opposition and to ramp up the price of dissent to such heights that to speak out against the fascists becomes unbearably costly for just about everyone.

In that context, it is especially vital that people who have power and a fair bit of security use that power and security to visibly and emphatically oppose fascism. When Democratic lawmakers show that they are willing to defy Trump—and more importantly, when Democratic lawmakers show that they are willing to stand with, speak for, and try to protect Trump’s victims—they carve out more civic space for dissent. The more people who speak up, the more people who are willing to defy Trump, the more other people can feel like they have space to defy Trump too.

In contrast, when Democrats preemptively surrender any leverage they have, then it feels like there is no space for anyone else to resist either.

When Chuck Schumer goes to the New York Times and won’t categorically defend Columbia University in his own state as Trump targets it for cuts, when he goes to the NYT and won’t categorically defend protestors deported by the state, when Democratic senators like John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego rush to cosponsor unconstitutional legislation targeting immigrants accused of crimes for deportation without due process—what that says is that Trump has already won. It says resistance is futile. It says that if you speak up, if you defy the fascists, no one will have your back. It says Democrats will at best abandon you, and at worst kick you in the head as the fascists hold you down.

If you want people to fight, you need to fight

I understand that in fighting fascists, you want to choose tactics that will work. You don’t want to do things that will hurt people or help the fascists. So, for example, you don’t want to mock Trump’s weight, because fatphobia ultimately hurts fat people, who are often fascist targets because fascists are eugenicist assholes. You don’t want to threaten universities that you’ll withhold funding later if they cave to fascists now, because withholding funding tends to hurt marginalized students most. (I made this mistake on social media and people corrected me, for which I was grateful.)

But. When weighing pluses and minuses and trying to figure out the best path, it’s worth remembering that fighting has a huge strategic advantage over not fighting because fighting lets people know that they are not alone.

Resisting fascism requires solidarity, and solidarity requires resistance. If you’re constantly waiting for someone else to fight, because you’re worried you’ll be criticized, or that you’ll lose an election, or because you are waiting for someone else (like, say, Republicans) to do the dirty work for you, then not only will you never actually fight, but other people also will feel abandoned and will be less likely to fight as well.

We are facing an in many ways unprecedented crisis. It requires imaginative and determined leadership. It also requires a certain amount of willingness to agree to put other priorities aside—to say, for example, “Well, I hate pro Palestinian protestors, but Trump is the main threat, and we can’t let him deport them,” or to say, “I think the FBI is a largely evil institution, but I am not going to support Trump hollowing it out.”

Democrats in the House took a step towards acknowledging that by putting aside electoral calculations in order to stand against Trump. Democrats in the Senate, and Chuck Schumer in particular, instead chose to remove their spines in their usual fashion, hoping to sink into gelatinous sluglike hibernation until election season when they will rise up and demand donations.

This is inadequate. And it’s why Chuck Schumer needs to go. We need someone who understands that you fight fascism by fighting fascism, not by surrendering. We need leadership that understands that the stakes are bigger than the next election, not least because if fascists win, there won’t be any elections at all.