For months before the election, my friends and I had about a hundred conversations about what would happen in Florida. In these conversations, I kept positing that the majority of Floridians would vote to reverse Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban and legalize recreational use of weed in the state but they’d also re-elect Republican Senator Rick Scott and the state would undoubtedly go to Donald Trump in the presidential election. I had a feeling, too, that this imbalance would be the subject of a lot of online and mainstream media conversation as the election concluded. Although that last part didn’t exactly happen because people misunderstood the data from Florida entirely, people have been discussing these voting incongruences in other states — Missouri, Arizona, and Montana, especially — and hypothesizing on why they came to be. In these states where Trump was elected by a large margin, many people also voted to ensure abortion rights and access and raise the state’s minimum wage.
For me, this is nothing new. Growing up and living in Florida for my whole life as well as doing community organizing work here for the last 20 years, I have seen these incongruencies time and time again. By and large, people seem much more open to “progressive” policies than they do to Democratic lawmakers, and although that is something we should be thinking about and using to help us strategize as we organize in our current moment, this election had a few other, much more surprising results that I think we need to hone our attention, as well.
In traditionally “blue states” on both the East and West Coasts, a number of “progressive” ballot initiatives were also on this year’s ballots. Voters in Massachusetts voted no on a ballot measure that would require employers to pay tipped employees the full state minimum wage. And voters in California voted in favor of the extremely “tough on crime” Proposition 36 — which will create harsher punishments for retail theft, drug offenses, and property crimes in ways that seem to be directly targeting poor and unhoused people — while also voting no on a number of more “progressive” ballot measures like banning prison slavery, increasing the minimum wage, and instituting rent control to combat the high cost of living in the state.
The fact that fascism has always been part of the fabric of the institutions in the U.S. is well-established. We know fascism has always been here and has always been part of the way our systems operate. People were violently subjugated (to say the least) in the creation of this nation, and despite some steps toward what people perceive as progress, people continue to be violently subjugated by the ruling class, their systems, and everyone who willingly participates in the operations of our institutions without question or defiance. Fascism, technically, cannot be untangled from the formation and perpetuation of “democratic” nation states like the U.S. Liberals and Democrats are as culpable for the violent oppression of marginalized people as anyone else, and we can prove that by simply mentioning the amount of people deported during the Obama administration or by pointing out how the Democrats have continued to abandon the working class by protecting corporate interests above all else.
Regardless, the incongruencies in the Massachusetts and California votes stood out to me, not because they don’t make sense but because they seem in line with a lot of what we’ve seen brewing on and off the internet over the last decade. It’s not controversial to say that American society has always been incredibly individualistic in its values. Since the turn of the 20th century, the idea that you can simply “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and work as hard as you can to become “something” in the U.S. has pervaded every facet of how Americans live. Coupled with the anti-communist crusades, the rise of suburbanization and private property, and the increased persecution of the poor and working class that governed much of the last century, building large-scale solidarity against the ruling class is a feat we have yet to master in any way in this country. In the new millennium, this task has been made ever more difficult with the rise of social media peddling lifestyles many of us cannot attain, the destruction of third places all across the country, the celebritization of the ultra-rich, and the increasing amount of manufactured distractions put in our path every second of every day.
People’s connections to each other have dwindled significantly, making them more isolated from meaningful relationships and more apt to think mostly about themselves and their needs. People are constantly buying more shit they don’t need because our society has taught people to combat loneliness with consumerism and social media influencers tell them buying more shit they don’t need is “self-care,” actually. The birth and ascent of the “man-o-sphere” is turning both young and adult men into a small army of self-righteous, indignant losers whose only unified politic is one that is dependent on misogyny, hatred, and the constant excusing of their most vitriolic tendencies. At the same time, the surveillance that was thrust on us during the so-called “War on Terror” has trickled down so far people are constantly surveilling each other through the use of various technological tools to make sure we each fall in line in some way or another.
Disaster capitalism and the horrific consequences of climate change have bred a fear and uncertainty about the future that is largely making people more nihilistic, selfish, and more concerned with creating a comfortable life free of conflict and struggle of any kind. Add to that the complete halt in wage increases and ever-increasing price gouging (what some might call “inflation”) that most people can feel is exploitation but are too afraid to voice the feeling because that would mean they’re not completely in control of the trajectory of their lives. In my last four years of teaching, a noticeable shift happened with my students. In the years prior, many of them had plans to become doctors and lawyers because they viewed that as a viable way to survive comfortably in our world, but since the pandemic, something switched. They no longer wanted careers that would require them to put in some work to ensure their financial freedom — they wanted to “go into business” and become “entrepreneurs,” take advantage of our deeply sad and self-obsessed culture by means of low-effort predatory capitalism instead.
Considering all of this, I’m going to call it like it is and say that on both sides of the aisle, on both sides of our two-party system, in our communities and within both our regressive and “progressive” ideals, many people have completely abandoned the necessity, impulse, and notion that caring for one another is what will help us all collectively and individually thrive. And although political education in the U.S. has never been great historically, the elimination of humanities programs and the insistence on STEM education being of the utmost importance has left many people without even a semblance of the political education necessary to respond to this moment or see through the bullshit. These results from Massachusetts and California are a perfect example of what I mean: Voters believed the only fascism on their ballots would be a vote for Donald Trump, not recognizing that their approval and disapproval of ballot measures that can and will impact the material realities of their communities were also fascistic means of controlling their communities. These ballot measures were created to keep the poor, working, and middle classes from getting ahead in ways that are threatening to the ruling class, and the majority of voters took the bait, choosing as the Democrats do to keep protecting our oppressors instead of doing something materially beneficial for the people around them.
They confirm, once again, that class consciousness and class solidarity on the supposed “American Left” (if we can even claim to have one) is virtually nonexistent, now more so than ever. And we need to discuss this just as much as we need to discuss the incongruencies we see happening in “red states.” In response to Trump’s re-election, many people’s responses have been to join organizations and aid in the fight of organizing the communities around us. I agree with this, and I do think people need to be attending radical community organizing meetings and finding ways to leverage what they have and what they know to help improve the material conditions of the people around them. But I also think an essential part of the equation is missing.
In the face of racial capitalism and fascism, liberalism and the liberal brand of capitalism has never been an answer to solving these problems or defeating fascism in this country despite what liberals and Democrats would try to make us believe. Organizing should not lie in trying to strengthen the Democratic party so they have a chance to win when the next election comes around. They will not save us, and they never intended to. They will just keep packaging the oppression differently, ensuring we are forever clawing, forever scraping for the scraps they throw to us while they keep brainwashing us into believing the scraps are enough. Fascism cannot be defeated by the thing that helps fuel its perpetuation and its intensification, which means that heightened authoritarian and nationalistic rule needs to be countered with steadfast anti-capitalist organization. True anti-fascist organizing cannot and will not rely on leveraging the systems already in place, people “working from the inside,” and the tools that are viewed as palatable by those who lead us. We will have to break free of the present condition of things, discomfort ourselves and those around us, and bring people together in ways that will be seen as an actual threat to the current social order. That means finding new ways forward that ensure the destruction of the two-party system and a new level of consciousness and solidarity across the differences our leaders use to divide us.
