Fascism Cannot Be Voted Away at the Ballot Box

“Of all the modern delusions, the ballot has certainly been the greatest.” —Lucy Parsons

You do not vote fascism away. Even though this feels obvious, the right-wing political establishment in the U.S. has accomplished something remarkable with the help of the Democratic Party. They managed to shift the discourse so far right that they normalized positions that were possibly once inconceivable for many liberal voters.

Democrat politicians have long tried to appeal to increasingly fascistic rhetoric by boasting about compromises and their conservative shifts on issues like immigration and foreign policy. Yet, Democrats are not in opposition in this regard, so they made this continual movement right some sort of deluded progress. This isn’t a theory; we have one giant right wing in the U.S. with different components. The party switches of the past that took place because of conflicts over slavery and the civil rights movement may pale in comparison to this event. Unpacking what just happened, what happened in that not-so-distant past, and what seems inevitable now will help us face a new, unsettling reality.

A nice mixture of fear, the disempowering electoral system, and representation politics have helped the Republican Party amalgamate the liberal base into their policy positions. Old Guard Republicans helped achieve this under the guise of “defeating” the fascism they paved the way for. Simultaneously, the Democrats have been inching closer and closer to what feels like a gradual merger with the GOP for several terms now. They’ve been announcing it, too. Former Rep. Liz Cheney, the past chair of the House Republican Conference, directed fellow Republicans to put “country over party” and campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris. President-elect Donald Trump, she said, “has abandoned the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan.” In this light, Reaganomics signaled a “united” past that needed restoration through a Harris presidency. This bipartisanship to strengthen the right-wing establishment didn’t start here.

Kamala’s “country over party” followed former President Barack Obama’s saying, “I want an effective Republican Party,” and Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s saying the U.S. needs “a strong Republican Party.” Pelosi’s comment came as the Democrats worked to boost far-right candidates in the GOP primaries. U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg said, leading up to the 2024 election, “A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote to get politics out of everyone’s face—and maybe even start to see a normal Republican Party reemerge.” It’s not the Republicans reaching for liberal politics; it’s liberals reaching out to neoconservatism. Harris’s endorsements from those like former Reagan administration officials and Dick Cheney have been celebrated by liberals, but there’s an issue. Something is more profound and insidious about war criminals rallying support to “save democracy.” However, the fog of trepidation led liberal supporters to virtually ignore a lack of a transparent policy platform, the sponsorship of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and anything else to beat Trump at the polls.

While it’s undoubtedly true that Trump is a white nationalist despot who is a dreadful threat, that doesn’t explain a lot of what we’re witnessing. It would be one thing if people hadn’t been gleeful about this situation, but delusion, celebrity, representation politics, and political theater made the public believe they were accomplishing something they weren’t. Now, liberals will surely blame one another instead of the ruling class, corporations, and politicians that duped them. We need to think critically. The Democratic Party consistently tried to appeal to Trump’s base, not just with rhetoric, but with promises and past actions that highlight their gradual march in the same direction he’s going. Confused and dizzy liberals drunk off of the spectacle tumbled into historical amnesia. They acted as if conspiring with those from the very forces that paved the way for Trump was subversive. “Trumpism,” so-called, is merely a byproduct of a much more pervasive problem: white supremacy. And let it be known that white supremacy is not going anywhere any time soon despite ongoing attempts to diversify its institutions through inclusion. The past should warn us because the Democrats and Republicans were once very different parties that flipped ideologically as times changed.

Before Biden failed to reverse all of Trump’s policies and Obama extended Bush’s policies, parties once switched. Frustrations of civil rights policy within the ranks of the old Democratic Party led Southern defectors, known as “Dixiecrats,” to flee. After President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he said, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.” The Republican Party was no longer Lincoln’s party after that. Republicans still exploit public ignorance of this change by claiming to be the party that opposed slavery. However, this shows us how things can change subtly and blatantly, whether people notice or not. What’s happening now is different. It’s not that Democrats are defecting toward the Republican Party yet again; it’s that Republicans are absorbing everything by setting the tone through sheer dominance. The so-called Party of Lincoln is dead as an idea because we have one giant right-wing apparatus devoid of progressive values or principles. That’s unless it’s election time, and even then, that’s not guaranteed. The 2024 election highlighted this since not being Trump was the primary selling point.

Since the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election, we’ve been watching elections grow increasingly volatile and contested, and with each one following that, the Democrats shifted right. Liberal voters joined the chorus of their representatives appealing to the right-wing constituents and still lost. The anarchist-communist Peter Kropotkin said it well, “An intelligent people always seems to demean itself in its choice of representatives and betrays itself by choosing nobody better than the boobies who are supposed to act on its behalf.” Instead of trying to gain support based on resourceful changes for the good of everyone, they colluded with the right wing as an alternative reactionary politic. Now, what will most likely happen is resentful and disillusioned voters will continue to scapegoat one another as the U.S. plunges deeper, while corporations, a racist white majority, and the ruling establishment laugh at the petty bickering. Divisions based on class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, and citizenship status will deepen. I believe those of us who are not clowns are supposed to resist this, in part, through collective-mindedness and survival work. We’re going to be forced to.

I don’t write any of this as some detached or overly idealistic “leftist” with nothing to offer except theory, debates over historical events, and condescension. Furthermore, I’m working to transcend the binarism and conceits that trap factions of leftists in illusions, just like electoral politics. After all, if more factions of the left had an alternative to offer outside of electoral politics, we’d be in a different situation. Endless left rhetoric and dogma are not life-sustaining.

There was even a time in my life, albeit long ago, when I worked with and among Democratic Party ranks. I’ve done Get Out the Vote, managed swing district campaigns, and sat in countless meetings leading up to past elections. That’s why I have to be honest at this point in my life. When it’s all said and done, fascism has not been overcome, and when that reality slowly bubbles up again, the punishment for what the election represents in terms of depravity will fall upon every head. Those of us, both deserving and undeserving of the coming punishment, will now learn the difference between beating them and joining them. We now have to see the difference between representative democracy and direct democracy. What kind of fight we choose to have as this all unfolds matters, lest we circle back to this moment (worse off) in another four years.

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