Anarchists have some lessons for Trump’s America
From Boston Globe by By Cara Hoffman, November 15, 2024
The specter of authoritarian rule stalks the United States. How its citizens respond will determine their future and the future of the world. But what should that response be?
Donald Trump has promised to arrest his opponents, turn the military against the “enemy from within,” and launch mass deportations. He praised Adolf Hitler’s generals, mused about how a former member of Congress might feel when guns are “trained on her face,” and said he wouldn’t mind if journalists were shot. These statements have prompted historians as well as some of Trump’s former advisers to call him a fascist. As he prepares to take office, the specter of authoritarian rule stalks the nation.
How Americans respond will determine their future and the future of the world. But what should that response be?
One answer lies in a small enclave of Athens called Exarchia, where I’ve lived for seven years researching peoples’ uprisings. Roughly the size of New York’s East Village, Exarchia has been an antifascist bastion since the 1970s and an exemplar of how fighting authoritarianism can animate a community.
Generations of antifascists built Exarchia, including fighters who resisted the Nazis during World War II and self-organized brigades who fought home-grown and foreign fascists during the Greek Civil War. Decades later, people enraged by the government killing of dozens of protesters and bystanders at Polytechnic University in Athens in 1973 helped topple the US-backed dictatorship. In 2008, anarchists took to the streets again after a police officer murdered a 15-year-old, sparking protests throughout the nation, evicting the police from Exarchia and establishing a new measure of autonomy.
If you’re imagining a neighborhood filled with thugs wearing black balaclavas, think again. From Exarchia’s Strefi Hill, a park maintained by residents, one can watch children playing basketball and people walking dogs and having rap battles, the Acropolis and gleaming sea visible in the distance. Balconies are filled with climbing jasmine and gardens. The buildings themselves form an enormous interconnected mural of graffiti tags and abstract and figurative paintings. Bitter orange trees line the streets, blooming white in spring.
It’s hard to tell a friend from the community choir, your dentist, your mechanic, or your neighbor’s grandmother from an antifascist. Each week, Exarchia’s residents hold open assemblies in community centers and in squatted spaces — vacant buildings that have been occupied and repaired; their agendas determined by whatever is most pressing in the community.
Decisions are acted upon by those who are most enthusiastic and have the relevant skills. An agronomist, for example, would volunteer to look into environmental reports on the neighborhood. People who have served in the military or studied law might have ideas about security. Exarchians have created their own migrant shelters and community centers, free food kitchens, and parks and libraries in squatted spaces. Antiauthoritarian groups deliver food and medicine to those in need. They do all this having accepted that the government, churches, and nonprofits can’t be depended upon to provide these services.
There are of course downsides to living in Exarchia. It’s good to have a reliable gas mask for when police use tear gas to break up protests. Vandalism of Airbnb rentals is common — despite residents’ efforts, gentrification has made inroads.
In recent years Exarchia has come under threat by the conservative government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The government has evicted squatters and sent migrants from the community to refugee camps. It has clear cut trees in the central square and stationed squads of militarized police on the streets to guard the highly contested site of a new metro station, which residents see as a move toward gentrification. Actions like these destroy communities.
Here’s how Exarchia has fought back.
Maintaining the spirit of the neighborhood is key. Exarchia is known for festivals featuring the community choir and local orchestras, carnivals, and all-night dance parties, some commemorating past victories or memorials to antiauthoritarian fighters. The history of the movement is kept alive, especially for children. When a statue of angels in the square was destroyed by government order, puppeteers created replicas of the angels, bringing them out at festivals and protests. At Carnival, costumed protesters danced the Sirtaki around a giant burning effigy of Mitsotakis in front of military police. Last spring they created an enormous paper-mache tiger that prowled the streets. Thrilled children skipped around it, putting their heads in its mouth.
A diversity of tactics is most essential to protect the neighborhood. This ranges from sabotage of construction machinery to boycotts of gentrifying businesses to protests that fill the streets and lawsuits that fill court dockets. What makes all of these methods so successful is the variety of people involved; young and old, rich and poor, lawyers operating inside the system, and militants fighting on the street. Each act of resistance reinforces the other, and they have been collectively effective at stopping the usurpation of public space, arrests, and evictions — the violent kind by police and the quiet kind by landlords who raise rents or foreign investors who buy up buildings.
Exarchia’s tactics should feel familiar to Americans because many were inspired by American history, which has a startling number of autonomous peoples’ movements — agrarian collectives, networks of enslaved people working as cells to transport themselves and others to freedom, the abolitionists who helped them, the Industrial Workers of the World and Indigenous resistance, underground abortion networks, the anti-AIDS taskforce ACT UP, anti-pipeline activists, and the Earth Liberation Front, whose once radical ideology about protecting the earth has become largely mainstream.
For Americans who feel caught in the snare of an openly hostile government, it’s essential to understand how to organize without a leader. Exarchia’s greatest lesson may well be that when the state fails or turns against us, penalizing us, denying us resources, restricting our speech and freedom of movement, and attacking the weakest among us, all we have is each other: our bravery, our competence, our delight, our anger, our refusal to back down or see another harmed. People have the power to topple dictators.
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Cara Hoffman is a novelist and a founding editor of “The Anarchist Review of Books.“ She teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
After the U.S. Election of a Semi-Fascist
by Wayne Price
Since the November 2024 national election there has been a mountain of reevaluations, recriminations, reconsiderations, and desperations—by liberals and radicals. Some blame popular racism and sexism for the defeat of a Black woman candidate. Others note that a racist nativism led to an hysterical fear of Mexican and other immigrants. This was a fear which the Republicans played up but which the Democrats also played to. The arrogance and elitism of the Democrats has been referred to. Others focus on the economic suffering of working class people, their stalled wages, the effects of inflation, the housing shortage, and so on. All of these were undoubted factors—especially the economic problems of working people, which Harris did not really address, Yet these, and similar influences, seem to leave something out. How could a person such as Donald Trump win a majority of the population—a slight (1.6%) majority, but consistently in most “demographics?” Were the price of eggs that high?
(Usually I do not understand why people vote for the Democrats either. They are the other party of capitalism, environmental catastrophe, and genocidal war. Yet in the 2024 election, the Republican candidate was so extremely vile that I understand why many voted for Harris just in order to defeat Trump. Believing in Kamala as a good, progressive, lover of democracy and the working class is another matter.)
Personally Trump is freakish, mean, not too bright, a bully, a pathological liar, a rapist, a crook, completely amoral, lacking in empathy, and having other bad traits. Politically he serves the biggest of big business, expresses admiration for dictators abroad and a desire to be an authoritarian at home. He proposes crackpot economic policies, such as tariffs on everything imported. He insists that he will carry out round-ups of millions of “illegal immigrants,” put them in concentration camps, and forcibly deport them. Similarly, he threatens to arrest and try his political enemies and press critics.
Where the Democrats were inadequate in dealing with climate change, Trump and his minions promise to wage war on the world’s biosphere, threatening the survival of industrial civilization at least. He will continue the U.S.-backed Israeli war in Gaza but betray the Ukrainians in their war for national self-determination. He vaguely promises to improve everyone’s health, wealth, and happiness—somehow. His slogan was, “Only I Can Fix It!”
In spite of these and other failings, Trump has a hard core of MAGA followers, who live in a delusional bubble of disinformation. Their politics are semi-fascist. There is a larger group of voters which doesn’t necessarily buy into the craziness or like him personally, but voted for him anyway. They put him over the top.
This group saw Kamala Harris as just another conventional Democratic politician (as she was). They also saw Trump as another conventional Republican candidate. They compared the two and estimated which would be better for their wallets and in other matters. This might have been a reasonable approach if Mitt Romney ran again, or if John McCain was around, or even if Nikki Haley ran. A “Never Trump” conservative wrote, “One of the most maddening aspects of the 2024 election is the extent to which so many voters viewed Trump as a mostly normal political candidate….” (French 2024; p. A19) Such voters did not realize what Trump was, how different from an ordinary bourgeois politician, and what he really stood for.
I call Trump (and his MAGA movement) “semi-fascist.” Trump is not likely to quickly install a regime on the model of classical European fascism. That would require declaring Trump president-for-life, cancelling all further elections, outlawing all other parties including the Democrats, and suspending the Constitution, among other things. The business elite does not want this; after all they are making a lot of money under the current arrangement. The rest of the establishment, does not want overt fascism. At least half of the population does not want this. More likely is a creeping fascism, keeping the forms of political democracy while emptying them of content. It will tend toward Viktor Orban’s Hungary rather than Hitler’s Third Reich. Orban is greatly admired by Trump and the Republicans. He calls his program “illiberal democracy.”
“What we are likely to see is a lingering fascism of less murderous intensity, which, when in power, does not necessarily do away with all the forms of bourgeois democracy, does not necessarily physically annihilate the opposition, and may even allow itself to get voted out of power occasionally. But since its successor government…will also be incapable of alleviating the crisis, the fascist elements are likely to return to power as well.” (Patnaik & Patnaik 2019; p. 29)
I am not going to give “the” answer to Why Trump Won. I will raise two other factors worth considering, from the viewpoint of anarchist-socialism. These are factors which are rarely considered in the discussions of liberal pundits or “democratic socialist” essayists.
Sex!
A major motivation for many voters was an underlying sexual hysteria, bubbling just below the surface. From the beginning of his campaign, Trump raised the image of immigrants raping (white) women. This continued to be an important theme of his campaign.
Republicans have won the end of Roe, and the right to chose an abortion. Trump downplayed the issue (having won on the main point) but other Republicans made clear their desire to expand the laws against choice. The anti-choice movement claims to have a concern over the “life” of the fetus. Really it is rooted in fear of women’s sexual freedom.
Anti-LGBTQ sentiment has mobilized fascist thugs to threaten libraries and schools. Hysteria around trans people was a major theme of Republican propaganda, even though they make up less than one percent of the adult population. The Republicans provoked fears that men would take over girls’ sports as well as women’s bathrooms and that boys would be castrated in schools. Being “really” masculine was a theme of Trump’s oratory.
Harris made reproductive rights a main issue of her campaign, but did not link it up with other concerns. The years in which the Democrats had majorities in Congress but did not pass national pro-choice legislation were not discussed. While defending Gay and Lesbian rights, the Democrats were mostly silent on trans rights, trying to ignore the issue.
It is widely believed that the “sexual revolution” is over. There is supposedly no more sexual repression. The insights of Wilhelm Reich or Alex Comfort about the sexual distortions of capitalist society are supposedly no longer of value. It is true that the severe repression of Victorian times no longer exists. But rather than being carried through, sexual freedom has been what the anarchist Paul Goodman called one of those “missed and compromised revolutions of modern times, with their compromised ambiguities and social imbalances….” (Goodman 1960; p. 217)
Goodman writes of “sexual revolution” that “The movement has not so much failed as that it is still in process, strongly resisted by inherited prejudices, fears, and jealousies….Adolescents…are trapped by inconsistent rules, suffer because of excessive stimulation and inadequate discharge….” (p. 225) And not just adolescents.
A capitalist society of relatively high consumption (for the white middle class at least) has broken through many sexual repressions. But patriarchal capitalism remains an authoritarian and exploitative system and therefore cannot break through to comprehensive freedom in any area. Instead there are deep ambiguities, compromises, hysterical fears, and sexual conflicts which cannot be openly faced. These feed into fear of the “other” (immigrants, trans people, leftists, etc.), crazed religious views, and desires for a “strong” father-figure to protect and take care of everyone.
Too Big
There is something absurd about a presidential election. The U.S.A. includes about 345 million people. It includes a large part of a continent, “from sea to shining sea.” Yet one person is supposed to manage the central, executive, part of the national government. One person is in charge of running the country as an elected monarch. Of course he (and it has always been a “he”) has a staff to provide input and then to carry out his orders—but he remains the final boss.
There are other parts of the national state, such as the legislative branch, the regulatory agencies, and the judiciary. They are also isolated in Washington, D.C., and out of touch with the reality of the country. Also, the government does not manage the economy, which is composed of independent firms. Yet the government (especially the “Fed”) has an important impact on all aspects of the marketplace, even if it does not run it. (The ideological rationalization for the capitalist economy is not “democracy” but “freedom.”)
No one person can access enough information, or make good enough decisions, to really do the job. Even a genius, such as Lincoln, would have difficulty, while a fool, such as Trump, is not even self-aware enough to know that he is in over his head.
In theory this is modified by all the states (what in other countries are “provinces”). Also the counties, townships, and cities. Supposedly the U.S. has a “federal” system. However, the state governments are also centralized, bureaucratized, and alienated from the actual voters. This is besides the ways in which one party (usually the Republicans, but also the Democrats) gerrymanders voting districts—so the “representatives” pick their voters, rather than the voters pick their representatives. There are other dirty tricks to distort what little democracy exists. The fundamental role of big money in elections, on the state and national levels, is well-known. (In elections, the capitalist class is re-named the “donor class.”)
Local governments are legally creatures of the state government and can be officially overridden if they get unruly. The general rule is that the more local the government is, the more democratic it is and the less power it has. So the PTA has the most participation but the least power, even over the school.
The main issue is not the inevitable inefficiency (and corruption) of the centralized, bureaucratic, monstrous national state—but that the people are alienated from real decision-making and lacking in the experience of self-governing. How then are they supposed to make decisions about national and international politics when they do not participate in day-to-day collective decisions about their own lives?
To quote the conservative French, “Most Americans…don’t follow the news closely…. While vast numbers of Americans participate in presidential elections, only small numbers actually stay engaged….The majority is focused on the things that directly affect their lives—prices, crime, peace.” (French 2024; p. A19)
This is the inevitable political life of industrial capitalism. Almost all adults spend most of their waking lives working for a boss. They take orders and carry out tasks assigned to them. They live and work under dictatorships, big and little. A few have some limited union or civil service protections. Then once every few years they get to vote for “representatives” to go to the state capitol or to Washington and be political for them. Then they go home and back to work. Is it surprising that they do not have the habits of a self-governing people?
Paul Goodman liked to cite Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a decentralized federalist democracy. Jefferson had been greatly impressed by the New England town meetings. He urged such a radical democracy on the rest of the states. The counties should be broken down into localized “wards.” These would manage the schools, policing, the mustering of the militia, local roads, carrying out elections, etc. Jefferson declared,
“Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of the councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner then let his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.” (Dewey 1957; p. 54) (Or a Trump?)
The slaveholder Jefferson meant his participatory democracy only for white men, and not for slaves, free Black people, Native Americans, or women. He accepted the class division between rich plantation owners and poor whites. The participatory-democratic principle was excellent but impossible to carry out under these conditions.
Jefferson based his decentralized democracy on a society in which most worked their own farms (with or without slaves).
As capitalist industrialism was to grow, participatory democracy became impossible unless it included industrial democracy. This meant worker management of production or co-operative communalism, as in the programs of anarcho-syndicalism, council socialism, and other versions of libertarian socialism.
It is widely believed, by liberals and Marxists alike, that productive technology requires super-centralized, autocratic, and bureaucratic, large-scale enterprises. Therefore democracy on the job is not possible. This is a modern superstition. The Marxists forget that capitalism develops production in the most effective way to create surplus value (profits), not necessarily in the most efficient way to produce useful goods and healthy workers. A society with different goals for production would develop technology in different ways. (For one exploration of decentralized uses of modern technology, see Carson 2010.) Human scale production can be organized in federations and networks, to cover regions, continents, and the globe. But it must be rooted in local, face-to-face, direct democracy.
As it is, society is too big, too out of ordinary people’s control or even understanding. It is too much beyond the experience of most people in terms of making democratic decisions. That voters make poor decisions is not due to lack of intelligence or capacity. It is due to living in a society which discourages democratic thinking. As the saying goes, “If voting could change society, it would be illegal.” If the majority really began to organize themselves in their own interests (which is what anarchists want), then “democracy” would be suddenly be attacked by the rulers.
Conclusion
This has not been a discussion of what Kamala Harris might have done differently in order to beat Trump, nor of what the Democrats should do next time to beat the Republicans. A program of more decentralization and workers’ management of the economy, plus more sexual freedom, is not a winning program for elections. Not for the Democrats or even for a new, progressive, party. (Although the Green Party does have a program of increased decentralization and a democratic, ecosocialist, economy—but, to repeat, this is not a “winning program” at this time.)
However I am not considering how best to win in a capitalist election. My concern is what is necessary to create a new and better society—not a perfect one, but merely one without wars and the threat of nuclear war, without the developing ecological catastrophe which threatens us all, without capitalist economic crises, and without various forms of oppression (racial, sexual, gender, etc.). These would require the overturn of the government at national and local levels, and of all capitalist rule.
To think about how to achieve this goal, it is necessary to face the problems directly and fearlessly.
References
Carson, Kevin (2010). The Homebrew Industrial Revolution; A Low-Overhead Manifesto. Booksurge.
Dewey, John (1957). The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson; Presented by John Dewey. Greenwich CT: Fawcett Publications.
French, David (Nov. 18, 2024). “Trump is Already Starting to Fail.” New York Times. P. A19.
Goodman, Paul (1960). Growing Up Absurd. NY: Vintage Books/Random House.
Patnaik, Utsa, & Patnaik, Prabhat (2019). “Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End.” Monthly Review (July-August 2019) Vol. 71; No. 3. Pp. 20—31.
