Host Ejeris Dixon welcomes Tarso Luís Ramos, the Outgoing Executive Director of Political Research Associates.
Ejeris discusses the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Coalition with Tarso Ramos, long-time researcher and activist challenging the right wing. Tarso gives us a breakdown of various members of the coalition and the uneasy alliances that it includes. Ejeris reviews the latest news and political terrain post-election and talks about what it means to continue to monitor the Fascism Barometer after the 2024 US election and what's needed from all of us.
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Podcast production by Phil Surkis
Intro Music by Meklit Hadero
The Fascism Barometer Podcast is an Ejerie Labs Project. Thank you for joining the movement.
Ejeris Dixon: Hi friends. Welcome to the Fascism Barometer. I'm Ejeris Dixon, your movement meteorologist. And the barometer is an educational project where we learn together what fascism is, how to stay safe, and how to create democracy and liberation for us all. Barometers measure pressure, and each episode we work to unpack and understand the pressure that fascism puts on all of us.
As a Black queer feminist, I exist at the intersections of communities that fascists [00:01:00] see as undesirable. And because of that, I have been researching fascism since 2016. I deeply desire a way for us all to understand and measure the threat of fascism and its impact on all of us. So I'm looking at the barometer today, and it's reading continues to be high.
Donald Trump has won the presidential election. And the MAGA led Republican Party will have control of the Senate, and it seems likely that they may gain control of the House as well. Within all the possibilities that people were planning for, these results are dire, frightening, and dangerous. So the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, it's a coalition, and it includes fascists.
It speaks in fascist messaging. And it increases violence against marginalized communities. And in these times, many of us are wondering, what degree of violence is coming? [00:02:00] How will the policies of the incoming administration negatively affect our families and our communities? How will we continue to protect ourselves and each other?
And how will we resist the forms of oppression and repression that they have planned? And how do we continue to build liberatory futures under these conditions? We've got a lot of questions to answer, but I'm known to say that our relationships will keep us alive, and I believe that deeply. I know that we can navigate the storm together, and I believe that we can come out the other side.
And as we say here, fascism is best fought with massive amounts of people power. And that's what we're building. And by listening, you're joining the movement. Thank you for being here. Before we get to today's incredible guest, Tarso Ramos, here are the latest updates in fascism and what to watch out for.[00:03:00]
Welcome to the Fascism Roundup, where I review news and updates on trends in U. S. fascism. The big update is that Donald Trump won the presidency, and the MAGA Republicans have power in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, and possibly the House, leaving us in a precarious state. And as we've said previously, Donald Trump uses fascist slogans like Make America Great Again, espouses fascist policies, where he's planning the mass removal of undocumented immigrants through detention camps, and fascists use violence to increase their power.
And he's already attempted that with a January 6 coup. When fascists increase their power, it can embolden and give people permission to be harmful, oppressive, abusive. And Violet, and we're [00:04:00] already seeing the results of that emboldening. According to CNN Black College students, children and black young people from 30 states have experienced racist texts where they are addressed by name.
and told to be prepared to become slaves and pick cotton at the nearest plantation, with some of these texts allegedly being signed from the Trump administration. Now, the Trump administration has denied sending these, and there's an ongoing investigation, but this is terrifying. Also, at a protest at Texas State University, protesters used signs calling women property.
Stating that homosex is sin, and then they had signs that listed that women and slaves were both types of property. And this is just what we know now. While these developments are depressing, there's some context. There's a long history of a connection between rising fascism and economic [00:05:00] crisis. Scholars speak to inflation in particular as interconnected to the rise of both Hitler and Mussolini.
And in more recent times, the economic crisis of 2010 was connected to the rise of Hungary's far right leader, Viktor Orban. Journalists are speaking of a current global trend of incumbents losing power due to a COVID related global inflation. These election results show us a lot. They show us that many people are deeply concerned about their financial stability, and this is a reality in my family, and I'm sure in many of yours.
And the heartbreaking part is that while some people agree with Trump's politics, there are many other people who are willing to support a fascist, narcissistic, bigoted sexual abuser to improve their financial lot, whether or not they agree with him. But let's not get it twisted. I believe the Democrats were outmaneuvered.
I believe that Donald Trump is a fascist, but I [00:06:00] don't believe that this country is 50 percent fascist. There are people who believe that everyone has a right to safety and dignity. There are people who are against oppression, people who are for democracy, and people who believe in civil liberties, and we are not the minority in this country, but we need to increase our organizing, connection.
and coordination. The right wing has worked for quite a while to set in place what happened in this election. They have worked for years to build a large, expansive, and connected media apparatus. This apparatus, it creates lies. It repeats those lies and it creates alternate realities for so many people in this country.
And that's why what we're doing here is so important. And I'm so grateful for you to be here. Because mass popular education around what is happening in this country is essential to stopping fascism. So we are here with you in grief, in [00:07:00] fear, in anger, and in action. We need to organize and support organizations working to improve the lives of working people.
We're going to need safety planning and community protection strategies, particularly for trans and undocumented communities. We'll continue to need collaborations and coalitions to unite across many different organizations and communities, and we'll need to provide support for each other, whether that's for abortion access, for healthcare access.
or all kinds of other forms of support, as public services could be reduced or restricted. And Trump has promised to go after what he calls the enemy within, and we will need plans to protect targeted activists, organizations, and communities. And I know that we can do this. There's a point in the trajectory of fascist movements where people willingly and safely join them, and then things change, where people no [00:08:00] longer safely join.
Where they are forced to comply, where people stay silent out of fear. And we are not at that point, but we must not let it get there. See, the challenging truth is that the violence of fascism affects everyone. So even the fascists are less safe now. And we have hard work in front of us. All of us who are concerned must take it a step further.
We must join organizations, we must donate to support progressive groups if we can, we must pledge to protect the most vulnerable, we must create safety plans for ourselves, and we must create organizing strategies that secure the well being of working people. of the climate of all marginalized communities for the sake of us all.
In light of all that's happening, I couldn't be more excited to talk with Tarso [00:09:00] Ramos in today's episode as a way to digest and dissect the MAGA Coalition. Tarso's been researching and challenging the U. S. right wing for more than 25 years. He currently serves as the Executive Director of Political Research Associates, a social justice research and strategy center.
But Tarso and I have been in conversation and collaboration around movement strategy, political education, and fascism for a few years now, and I'm grateful for his friendship. Tarso's breadth of knowledge on the right wing is impressive and vast, and his compassion and care for justice movements runs deep.
He's my go to on how to understand the scope and the scale of the right, and how we build democracy and ensure safety for targeted communities. Welcome friend.
Tarso Luís Ramos: I'm so glad to be here. And it's true. We have been on these kinds of conversations for a few years now.
Ejeris Dixon: So I start every episode with this question to my new guests.
So let's say you're speaking to some folks who are [00:10:00] brand new to learning about fascism. How would you define it?
Tarso Luís Ramos: So, uh, definitions are tricky. Because anything I share with you is going to be really imperfect. And one of the reasons is that fascism changes. Yeah. Fascism isn't stuck in time. And so, it's important to understand its origins and some of its characteristics.
Thanks. And also not to get totally hung up on the definitions because it mutates, changes with conditions. But I think we can start here. When we talk about fascism, we're talking about an ultra nationalist, anti democratic far right movement, a movement in which the people and leaders who are in dominant racial, ethnic, and religious groups, we imagine themselves as victims fighting against marginalized eyes.
usually racialized communities for their survival. And they believe that democracy has failed them and allowed for their victimization and that communism is an even larger existential threat. So fascists seek to eliminate both any [00:11:00] democratic processes or governance and they also attack marginalized communities in order to revive a fictitious Glorify past with their power reigned unchecked.
And they have this notion of regeneration and repurification of the real people through, through violence.
Ejeris Dixon: Okay.
Tarso Luís Ramos: And so violence is unnecessary. It's even worshipped. There are kind of cults of violence. Yeah. And the notion that you can repurify yourself, you can recommit yourself, and you can rebuild a nation through violence.
And by nation, I don't, I don't just mean a country. I mean, who are the people, right? Who are the real people of the country? And again, that is usually defined in some kind of racial or ethnic, sometimes religious set of ideas and mythologies about who the real people are or should be.
Ejeris Dixon: It also feels like this mythology piece that you're speaking to, It's a mythological nation and also a mythological past, right?
So this rebirth isn't a place that actually [00:12:00] existed. It's some type of imaginary place that also requires kind of scapegoating. I don't know, here it's like scapegoating people of color, scapegoating immigrants, scapegoating queer and trans people. Um, so yeah, it feels like that the rebirth notion is also connected to this piece that's fictionalized.
Tarso Luís Ramos: No question. Both the past and the future are both works of fiction, 100%. And it's important to recognize that fascism is a cultural movement as well as a political one.
Ejeris Dixon: And it
Tarso Luís Ramos: has certain characteristics. It also imagines the elimination of all rivals. So fascists generally seek, um, a totalitarian state or sense of one ruler, one party, no dissent at the governing level.
So fascism is a movement emerged. in Europe between World Wars I and II, first in Italy, and so the, the word fascism comes from Italian, and it emerged as a reaction. This is [00:13:00] a way that political scientists, historians, and others think about fascism, is reaction against revolutionary socialist movements sweeping the European continent in that period.
And also a reaction in defense, supposed defense, I'll say, of white European civilization from the global South peoples that Europe had dominated and whose lands they had colonized.
Ejeris Dixon: Yeah, it feels like fascism is, I don't know, there's like this bait and switch for people where through the demonization of other folks, they can actually say, Oh, the reason either your economic conditions aren't the way that you want it to be, it's because of these people.
Like, there's this way that. The cultural movement and the propaganda that fascists put out become a way that people will agree to violence because they blame other factors that aren't actually at fault for what's happening. Like I know that there's a lot of times where fascism will emerge connected to economic crises, [00:14:00] right?
And the idea is, Oh no, the reason this is happening. it's because of, I don't know, it's because of immigrants or it's because of Jewish people or it's because of black people or, or, or so on and so forth. So it also feels like it does, it interrupts the types of movement building and organizing that can happen if people who are all navigating issues like poverty or joblessness or all these types of things by actually saying like, no, it's their fault.
And if we eliminate them. Then you will, you will be back on top again, like you once were, and so it almost becomes this way of mythological soothing or something.
Tarso Luís Ramos: Yeah, I couldn't agree more about the scapegoating, but the last thing you said is particularly important because fascists are certainly not the only ones who scapegoat, right?
Lots of folks scapegoat. Yeah. Laborers scapegoat, conservatives scapegoat, authoritarians scapegoat, people are scapegoated all the time for all kinds of problems, certainly [00:15:00] immigrants, certainly in, you know, The Global North, people of color, various national origins are scapegoated for all kinds of things.
Women and queer folks are scapegoated. So that, that happens. But the thing you brought up is that the violent eliminationist instincts of fascism. Yeah. So under fascism, these communities are often identified as existential threats. Not, not mere problems to be controlled or communities to be. dominated, although those things are true, but often existential threats that must be eliminated.
And so this is closely related to a conversation many of us have been having over the last decade or more about a shift in white supremacist movements within the United States. away from old school, you know, our grandparents white supremacy in the United States, which was like, okay, we need to keep black people and Latinx people and indigenous people in their places in order to exploit and dominate them and take it, you know, [00:16:00] exploit their labor and not let them get too comfortable or advance too high.
in society towards a white nationalist, um, white supremacist idea, which is that the real people, the only organic community is a white community, and people of color, Black people, Jews, and others represent an existential threat that we need to expel, we need to get rid of, either through mass expulsion or through other forms of elimination.
Ejeris Dixon: No, it's, it's, it's terrifying. It feels like, you know, You can't have fascism without the glorification of violence. Like that's a key part of the definition. One of our conversations has been about MAGA, the Make America Great Again kind of, I don't know, movement or coalition. And I'm, I always think of them as a group that definitely enables fascism, helps fascism grow in this country, but you've always said to me, but it's not just fascists, you know, so I [00:17:00] would love for you to kind of talk us through who are the different types of groups or ideologies that are within this coalition and, and ideas on how they collaborate.
Tarso Luís Ramos: I appreciate that in the authoritarian coalition of the authoritarian bloc. in the United States today, and I think it's fine to refer to that as the MAGA coalition. There are a lot of different political tendencies, and I would say overall, it's an authoritarian coalition. You know, it's a coalition that wants to eliminate democracy in order to pursue the endgame or the ends of the various coalition partners.
But those partners have different endgames. Some of them are really about reestablishing the roots of the United States as a Christian nation, as Christian nationalists. And they're open to a certain degree of democracy, but they want to constrain democracy in ways that allow for the cultural, economic, and political dominance of white Christian [00:18:00] men.
There are other folks in that coalition, like the tech fascist Peter Thiel and people like that who have been bankrolling JD Vance and are now gotten behind Donald Trump and so forth, who really are this kind of hardcore libertarian, they would see themselves as meritocrats, right? The most powerful should govern.
They're almost neomarticus. They imagine, you know, kings would be fine. Um, we have people in that coalition who are really about deregulating industries so that corporations can concentrate even more power. And they're less interested in sort of the political philosophy of governance and more about interest in maximizing their profit, uh, potential.
And then you have actual ideologically committed fascists who are up in that coalition and are suspicious of the others. And so within this coalition, we, we have both competition and cooperation. Um, and one of the things I would say is that the coalition is held together in [00:19:00] part because these various different factions are aligned in their assessment.
That none of them can actually govern unless we do away with, um, what little democracy there is in the United States and create the conditions for minority rule. None of them have a majority. None of them can govern from a majoritarian position. And so there is a coalition that's really bent on converting the United States.
Into something like an electoral autocracy elections may occur, but that's not what determines who governs and that vision that agenda really holds the MAGA coalition together and Donald Trump came along and really presented himself as an electoral vehicle at the national level. Any number of people have come along.
And presented themselves as useful vehicles for this approach at the state level at DeSantis, Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas, and many other examples of that. So there are fascists in that blog, but [00:20:00] not all of them are fascists.
Ejeris Dixon: Right. So it's like MAGA can enable the fascists or allow the fascists to, because there are times when you will hear, well even just make America great again, you know, like that whole hearkening back to a mythological past.
There are all these pieces where you, you have these trickles of fascism. So as you call it an authoritarian coalition, is it that fascists and authoritarians both agree? That democracy is counter to them being able to get what they want or to have the power that they have. And is that the only point of agreement?
Or what are the kind of similarities and differences you would say between authoritarians and fascists?
Tarso Luís Ramos: So there are hardcore authoritarians who are theocrats who want to do away with the notion of constitutional democracy altogether. and replace it with their version of biblical law, for instance. And there are tech fascists like Peter Thiel who hate [00:21:00] those folks, um, not because they're authoritarians, but because they have a different view of who should govern, who should hold the power.
And so they have a different end game, but they are involved in this loose coalition, recognizing that the only way to really create the conditions under which The possibility of democracy can be permanently put away and eroded and create the conditions for their potential ascension to power is through an alliance around doing away with any prospect of majority rule in the United States.
And once they dispense with Us, they can fight it out amongst themselves in terms of who will be the dominant tendency within that coalition. And the outright fascists are sometimes in and out of the coalition. We saw a lot of criticism of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2024 because there was a sense among white nationalists that he was [00:22:00] abandoning them, that he was abandoning his actual beliefs, that he was saying the things that he perhaps needed to say In order to get elected, he was saying that he wasn't necessarily anti abortion, that he would support a national abortion ban.
He backed away a little bit from the more flagrant race baiting and eliminationist rhetoric. And so there were calls to abandon Trump and abandon the MAGA. And these happened not all that long before we saw a pivot in the Trump campaign's rhetoric towards blaming particularly Haitian immigrants and other immigrants and really ratcheting up, um, the kind of race baiting.
And so Trump has a signal to various parts of his coalition, including to the fascists, that they're still welcome, that they should come back. Into the fold, but you have this kind of dynamic of interest. Um, um, and straying from the coalition, uh, the blog, a block, depending on whether it's seen as a viable vehicle [00:23:00] for the political aspirations of various constituencies in this case, including fascists.
And let me say one more thing. Authoritarians. Yeah. Because authoritarians come from a lot of different political tendencies as well. Yes. The new right coalition as it called itself that came to the forefront in the aftermath of the civil rights period and the second reconstruction in the United States kind of drove out the hardcore overt fascists.
It was no longer. seen as plausible to put together a governing coalition with very direct sort of race baiting or expressions of biological racial superiority and those kinds of things that had been very much in the fore of the fight to preserve Jim Crow, let's say. So that new right coalition put itself together and there are many similar coalition partners.
The Christian right was an early coalition partner, you had these hardcore libertarians, you had segregationists who were willing to be [00:24:00] disciplined in their rhetoric, and most were authoritarians to some degree or other. And if we bring that forward to the present period, lots of folks who, until recently, would have been regarded by the presses traditional conservatives.
I'm thinking about people like Mitch McConnell, right? These are authoritarians, um, to a significant degree. They do believe in some version of democracy, but they believe in democracy for elites. So if we look at the way that Mitch McConnell, for instance, was a core instrument for the seizure of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, right, by the MAGA bloc and by Christian nationalists.
This supposed traditional conservative really showed his true colors, which were quite, quite authoritarian, but probably not fascist. I don't think that Mitch McConnell has given us any reason to think that he's a, A biological supremacist or mm-hmm . That he doesn't believe that there should be some kind of constitutional order [00:25:00] rather than the, the erasure of, of the constitution replaced with, uh, conservative biblical interpretation or, or something like that.
So the, the authoritarian, the range of authoritarians is really quite broad and from a governing perspective, what most distinguishes authoritarians from fascists is, first of all. You can believe a lot of different things ideologically and still believe in super constraints on democratic participation.
Ejeris Dixon: Yeah.
Tarso Luís Ramos: And so, Ortega's in Nicaragua, right, who imagine themselves as leftists, are engaged in authoritarian rule. So authoritarianism doesn't necessarily tell you a whole lot around the, about the ideological perspective. Right. Also, typically under authoritarianism, there's some level of what we would call pluralism.
Certain parties, like other political parties, like some level of dissent, churches, there could be unions, there could be an opposition party. Other parties might be declared illegal, but there's at least a [00:26:00] pretense, right, of democratic participation and contestation. And occasionally, Doesn't happen often, but occasionally authoritarians are unseated from power through elections if there is a big enough uprising.
Ejeris Dixon: There is this, this piece around. So you've got all of these. Um, different folks within the MAGA coalition that can have some even contradictory beliefs, but they still remain in coalition and tolerate the fascism, right? They tolerate, um, the glorification of violence. They tolerate the horrible things that are said about immigrants, right?
And even if we look at what people are thinking about with Project 2025, they, they even tolerate. Either signaling or planning to eliminate. So does this mean that some people have actually shifted to the right and their collaboration or we're seeing their true colors because there is a piece around like if you don't believe it or even if you abhor some of the messaging, but it is politically [00:27:00] beneficial for you.
At what point morally do you say this is this is my line because I'm just really curious about how many of the. Traditional conservatives have kind of, you know, like people who we wouldn't have thought or even the Republican Party that at some point has been what was courting immigrants at different points and and these shifts.
So it's just, um, In the end, whether you outright say, I want to eliminate you people or your close collaborator says, I want to eliminate you people, like in the end, these folks are still dangerous and not to be trusted. So tell me where these delineations matter for you. If, if there's still in some ways.
Enabling violence against a lot of us and the people we love.
Tarso Luís Ramos: Yeah, I really appreciate these questions. I would say that we are, um, experiencing both authoritarian acceleration in the United States, like rising authoritarianism. We're also experiencing rising fascism. Right? And so those both of those things are happening.
So there are those within the MAGA coalition really want the fascists [00:28:00] out. They don't want the fascists in the coalition, but they don't have complete control over whether that happens. In part, that's a Trump dynamic. And so partly there is this constant jockeying for position. And the political calculus in the United States over the last eight or so years has been such that the members of the authoritarian bloc that are uncomfortable with the vicious racism, the elimination list signaling, as you've said, the promises of deporting over 10 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, these kinds of positions have really fallen quiet.
A few of. Defected. But as a whole, those policies, those positions, that rhetoric, that demonization, that welcoming and invitation of violence to be visited upon targeted communities is not a disqualifier for those folks in terms of [00:29:00] breaking ranks. And so there is a very real danger that the character of rising authoritarianism.
in the United States incorporates more and more of a fascist orientation and a fascist agenda. And this is part of why those of us who have been doing anti fascist work for a long time have long been of the opinion that the only meaningful anti fascist is a premature anti fascist which is to say You have to fight fascism, be vigilant and fight fascism before it's an imminent governing threat.
Ejeris Dixon: Yes.
Tarso Luís Ramos: Because by the time it's an imminent governing threat, it's often too late to mount an effective resistance to it. And so while it's important not to characterize All of the folks within the MAGA bloc is fascist. It's also important to recognize that the bloc is taking on an increasingly fascistic set of characteristics.
Ejeris Dixon: Yeah.
Tarso Luís Ramos: In the United States, there's been a long [00:30:00] tendency, especially on the left, to denounce all factions, all parties, all political figures. Who expressed an enacted anti democratic and certainly racist or other bigoted expressions as being fascists. Right. And this has not served us for a number of reasons.
It has not served us in part because there were even conservatives that we could sometimes split off into an anti fascist position for a lot of reasons. The United States had participated in World War II, which was broadly perceived as a fight against fascism in Europe. Certainly was not the only thing happening in that war.
But there were many conservatives who came away from that experience or were the children of people who, for instance, were part of the generation that fought that war, who saw themselves as anti fascists. And so it was possible to drive a wedge between garden variety bigots, right? And committed fascists.
Also, the [00:31:00] political tactics in the street tactics that are used by fascists are often really different from other parts of the right wing coalition. And so strategically, one needs to mount different strategies to contest fascism than contest other kinds of challenges. And so it's not just a, uh, rhetorical or an academic thing.
The splitting here is about whether somebody's a fascist or not. There are strategically significant implications about over whether what you're fighting this is fascism or not. So I think that's part of why this conversation is, is so important. I also think there are some things about the way that fascism has expressed itself in the United States that are really different from how it's expressed itself in mid century Europe.
And so it's important, as I said earlier, when we were talking about definitions, it's important not to get stuck in a particular historical or particular. Like continental expression of fascism. Yeah, it's important to think about how fascism presents [00:32:00] itself Historically in the United States what's the same or what's different about that?
And what what does that tell us about what's happening now and what we do about it
Ejeris Dixon: now? one of the things that I think I was reading in Robert Paxton's anatomy of fascism and and he talks a bit about As opposed to Marxism or capitalism, there's not one text or one book or one theorist that you can name that kind of lays out the tenets of fascism.
But really, like, as you were saying, fascism is a process, fascism is a, we, we watch and name fascism by what people do. And what the results are, and also because it's a process, it's not going to start looking like, like a dictator that eliminates, because fascists actually, like any movement, people have to build power.
They have to build power to govern, to then take away rights, take away civil liberties, and move towards their aims. But I think the other part that I remember, because I was in these conversations in 2016, just debates about is [00:33:00] Trump fascist, blah, blah, blah. Is it helpful? Is it not helpful? But the other piece that makes it really complex is that because of oppression and because of where you are and where you fit in terms of being the quote, unquote, undesirable people under fascism, your experience of it.
can look really differently. So there's, there's like a long kind of anti fascist Black tradition in this country, but it's also because living under Jim Crow or experiencing slavery are all these types of things. It starts to look like, and, and especially that we know That there was inspiration that the Nazis took for the Nuremberg Laws from Jim Crow Laws.
So there's, there's this other piece where who is naming someone or something or a system or a person as fascist really is about the positionality and the power that that person has under the system. And if they are, like, the heart of the fascist target, you know? And so it's so, [00:34:00] um, it becomes really, really complex.
And, and it's this way that, uh, for me, this project, it was so important to speak from the experiences, like a queer black person, right. To speak from the experience, like to speak to people who are Latinx and speak to people who are indigenous, like all of us who are both fighting, fighting to preserve democratic processes.
Because we're fighting. to preserve our rights, but we're also fighting for our lives. And we're really, we have an eye on what the authoritarians seek to do with democracy, but we also have an eye on what the fascists seek to do with our loved ones. And as we, as we balance those, it can become, a really challenging conversation.
So I'm, I'm just curious, you've been in this work for a really long time. Why does fascism matter to you? Like what animated you to get in, into this fight and, and the communities that you're from?
Tarso Luís Ramos: Yeah, I think you should just call me old. I have been, I have been in this fight for a long time. [00:35:00] That's all right.
I'm getting, I'm, I'm getting on in years. Not old, just, just seasoned. I like that. So, you know. I got into this work in a number of ways. In some ways, it has to do with my own family history. I'm Brazilian born, um, Brazilian father, North American mother, and we had to leave Brazil when I was very small. Um, we were experiencing, the globe was experiencing at that point sort of the second global march of authoritarianism, um, often characterized by these post World War II dictatorships propped up by the United States or sometimes the Soviet Union or other, or other folks.
And the United States backed a military coup in Brazil that created conditions that were so dangerous that we just had to leave them. The police were sweeping our home. Our father lived underground for a little while. It got to a point where we were able to get out and, um, in that ironic way that is all too common, we ended up, uh, in the United States, one of the aggressor countries that destabilized [00:36:00] conditions in Brazil that forced us to leave, right?
So just as like. Lots of folks that the United States has colonized or sought to colonize end up in the United States. That was, we were part of that stream that ended up here. And so I grew up being acutely aware of the role of U. S. imperialism in propping up, um, authoritarian and fascist regimes around the world.
I grew up with stories about how even fragile, semi democratic, liberal democratic states are really fragile and can collapse under the right conditions. And so, in a way, my arc, it's not all that surprising that from that background, I ended up being involved in a work and leading an organization whose purpose is to, uh, help to prevent fascism and authoritarianism from consolidating in the United States.
Yes. So there's a lot of other sort of steps along my journey in terms of sort of shifting my consciousness more from an anti imperialist stance of US and the world. Um, I've never been to that certainly, but towards more of an emphasis on, you know, Fighting, [00:37:00] rising, authoritarianism, neo Nazi movements, Christian right, um, misogynist and, uh, anti queer movements and so forth, because that's what I was seeing and experiencing all around me.
And so I got involved in, and was recruited by amazing people to doing, into doing this kind of work. So it's important to me for a variety of reasons. I think that the threats that my community, my communities are experiencing are much more severe under a fascist or authoritarian threat than under, um, garden variety U.
S., you know, white supremacist imperialism. Um, that's about enough. But as the U. S. pivots into a more aggressive and eliminationist stance, as it begins to experiment with ways to fundamentally erode those freedoms we do, in fact, exercise in the United States, based on gender, based on race, ethnicity, [00:38:00] nationality.
Who's got papers, who doesn't, who's queer or not, who expresses their normative sexuality in conformist enough ways. All of those things are really frightening to me, um, are incredibly frightening to me. And so when Folks like Stephen Miller, who was part of the first Trump administration and now runs America First Legal, when they're plotting to create concentration camps for millions of immigrants along the southern land border in places like Texas and other states that have shown willingness to contest it.
the already horrible national immigration policies of this, of this country and try to enact their own. When we see folks like this also advocate for invoking the Insurrection Act in order to deputize police and sheriffs and the military to participate in this kind of activity, um, [00:39:00] we should take them seriously.
We should believe that this is their intent. And so, none of that is to say that the United States isn't already a violently racist, right, and oppressive and homophobic place. It is to say there is a huge difference between the lengths that fascists are willing to go in the lengths that are possible under this kind of so called liberal democracy that we've had in the United States, um, in the post World War II period.
And so, I'm not interested in defending what we have now. I'm interested in fundamentally transforming what we have now. Unfortunately, the trend lines have been in the other direction. The trend lines have been towards growing power for fascists and authoritarians. Just an additional thing to, to share.
Um, in a way, the fascists in the United States and the authoritarians here are taking us into a kind of territorial reality we haven't experienced [00:40:00] since the days of Jim Crow. And so as much as we've been using some federal examples, we've talked a bit about Trump, we've talked about the MAGA coalition, we now have the reality that some 23 states in The United States are governed by kind of a MAGA trifecta, right?
Where the Senate and the House and the governorship are all controlled by folks without a MAGA agenda who are rolling out many of the elements that have been codified in Project 2025, which you mentioned, you mentioned earlier, Jairus. And so they have captured Nearly half of the states in the union. Um, and so we are experiencing this kind of fascist rise and authoritarian acceleration very quickly already and the rise of a fundamentally different social cultural and to some extent de facto constitutional order in such a massive block of the United [00:41:00] States is a reminder Of the ways in which the U.
S. Constitution has allowed for these very contradictory governing regimes to coexist in the United States, where what you said earlier is true that you're one's experience of the level of democracy and the level of state violence at the level of vigilante violence is really different depending on the body.
You're in. It's also really different depending on where in the country you live. Yeah. Right? Yes. And that's increasingly true. And so, you know, the United States Constitution is this amalgam of colonial settler declaration of, of authority in rights. It's the remnants of colonial administration in defense of slavery.
And then it has these provisions that are democratic because they were fought and won. Through blood, sweat and tears [00:42:00] and a lot of, a lot of sacrifice, um, mostly by the black freedom movement, but other freedom movements as well in the United States. And so it's this weird amalgam, but it's an amalgam that has allowed for the existence of Jim Crow and has allowed for an incredible degree of racial and gender based and class based, um, violence and repression, especially when there's been a judiciary that's been flexible enough to justify it.
Those variances and I think we have exactly that kind of judicial order at this point in the United States So it's not hard to imagine a kind of federated authoritarianism whatever happens in the presidential election where we basically have a huge territorial block that is developing a new kind of authoritarian and At least proto fascist if not fully fascist social and cultural and political order in the United States You Um, even if [00:43:00] in some places, for some bodies, there is still a relative degree of autonomy, agency, ability to participate, politics, and, and, and cultural life.
And this is one of the difficulties in diagnosing. Rising authoritarianism and fascism in the United States because it doesn't emerge uniformly at a national level. Yeah. It rises in different pockets in different ways. Some writers in, uh, historians, theorists have referred to this as border fascism, but it's the territorialization of authoritarianism and fascism in profound and very, very deep ways.
Um, and I think that that is part of what's made it hard. for folks in the United States to really wrap our minds around what is the fascist barometer, like how strong is that threat, right? Coming in to use your metaphor. I think there's another challenge which has to do with the ways in which we've typically historically identified [00:44:00] European fascism as the model, as the archetype.
And so if it doesn't look like goosestepping national socialists all over the country at once, maybe it's not fascism, but fascism has looked different. in the United States for a variety of reasons. And in many ways, the fascism that we got in mid century, mid 20th century Europe was adapted from colonial experiences in the United States.
And so we have this weird, the United States produced a lot of the DNA. Uh, European fascism, and then European South fascism also gets exported back into the United States. So we have sort of the homegrown varieties of fascism here, and then we have these sort of European imports of fascism that have also gained tremendous popularity in the United States.
And we have that amalgam, we have that amalgam here.
Ejeris Dixon: Yeah, I'm really struck by kind of your story as an immigrant and as, as having to be in [00:45:00] hiding and in your own family and like how, you know, almost like I would say probably in your bones, what authoritarianism feels like, and, and I come to this as like the first generation outside of Jim Crow in my family, right?
My, my, both of my parents are from Louisiana, and, and their whole lives, everything was segregated until they moved to California. So they didn't even experience desegregation, right? And so it's different to talk about fascism from the lives that we've had from the families that we come from and, and what it means to fight it.
And it's why I've wanted a barometer for so long, like whether or not it's ambitious or even impossible, I've wanted a barometer so that we know how to be safe and how to fight it. And so my kind of final question to you is, for all of us who are in the targeted communities, How do we fight this? What do we do?
Tarso Luís Ramos: Well, first of all, I think that, that metaphor of knowing it in your [00:46:00] bones, the first thing we do is we get with other people who know it in their bones. Right? The worst thing is to feel one has no agency. Um, or to feel like you're seeing something that other people aren't seeing. And so I appreciate the work of the Fascist Barometer, I think that creating containers for conversations where we educate each other and make collective meaning of this moment are really, really important.
And especially so in targeted communities and black and brown communities and queer and trans communities and immigrant communities. and many others. Um, so I think the first thing is we find our people. Yeah. We find our people. The second thing is we fight against U. S. exceptionalism. the level of denialism that still exists in the United States that, oh, you know, that we have a, an inherently centrist system.
Sometimes things swing a little too far to the right or a little too far to the left, but it's a self correcting system is of course a [00:47:00] lie. It's just not, it's just not correct. And that's not what's been happening at all in the United States. And so I think that tearing down that notion that this is a self correcting system.
The only thing that will stop fascism, that will stop authoritarianism in the United States, are the people of the United States. The institutions are not going to save us. Now it's important to leverage what power we can through institutions to block fascists, um, and to transform our collective lives for the better.
But the institutions are not going to save us. American political institutions. Are inherently conservative, um, self protective, and as we've seen, they tend to compromise. They tend to compromise and concede slowly until they do it rapidly to fascism, and we see that happening in the United States. We see it with Democratic Party's policies around immigration, right?
We see it with bipartisan attacks on protest and dissent, um, starting with pro Palestinian, Palestinian [00:48:00] human rights, but extending that to lots of other communities, right? Um, we see it in what Angela Davis referred to as the, the preventive fascist tendency of even the liberal democracy to try to go after black and brown in poor communities before they can develop enough power to, to really challenge the oppressive systems in the United States.
So we see it in all these ways. So the first thing is we build community. The second thing is we fight against this notion of American exceptionalism. And then I think we have to adopt a dual approach. And this is a, this is not a, um, nitty gritty answer. It's a general answer to your question of what we do of both self defense.
On the one hand, we have to protect our people. We have to protect ourselves. We need to blunt and block the ways in which authoritarians and fascists can come on for our communities. We have to protect each other and we have to simultaneously be serious about building a counter power. Our job in this period, it seems to me.
is not all that different [00:49:00] than the job of people like us, our ancestors in this place in the time of slavery. It wasn't just to defeat slavery, it was to do that, but it was to defeat it and build enough power to usher in a transformational cycle. for something entirely new. And for a time that happened, right?
Reconstruction brought the first experiences of multiracial democracy in the United States before they were violently crushed. Yes. But they brought that. It wasn't just a negative thing. Let's get rid of this awful thing. It's like, no, let's transform this place in a, in a, in a vision of freedom. Likewise, the defeat of Jim Crow wasn't just about Defeating Jim Crow, it was about how do we transform, how do we defeat the white racial monopoly on politics, defeat that and open up new possibility in the process which give us a second reconstruction.
And I think we're in a period where our job is to defeat rising fascism and authoritarianism and in the process build enough power [00:50:00] across difference, across racial and gender and other kinds of difference in order to transform this. place into a world where we would want our descendants, um, we can imagine our descendants will be free.
So in broad strokes, I think that's the job. Um, it's not just about being safe. It's not about holing up.
Ejeris Dixon: Yeah. It's
Tarso Luís Ramos: about building enough collective power to block the fascists, to defeat them, and to usher in a new world.
Ejeris Dixon: Well, there we go. Tarso, I am so grateful for this conversation, for all of the information, and also, um, for the way that you bring your heart into this work.
And, um, we will, we will be here. We will be monitoring the barometer, but we'll also be building the movements we need to defeat fascism and authoritarianism. Thanks for joining us today.
Tarso Luís Ramos: Thank you for inviting me and thank you for the work you do. I think it's so important.[00:51:00]
Ejeris Dixon: We've reached the end of today's episode. And while I still feel the pressure, it's always better when we're connected. And did you know that you helped fight fascism just by listening to the barometer? We appreciate you joining us and together we can keep fascism at bay. Watch the skies and like and subscribe to this podcast as more episodes are coming.
If you want to know more about Tarso's work and how to take action, we've placed a lot of resources in the resource hub to deepen your knowledge. And I have a special ask for you all, and that's to donate and ask your folks to donate. to the Fascism Barometer. You can do so at our website, fascismbarometer.
org, and this will help us continue and expand the work. We'll be including some resources where groups are asking for help on making calls to other people, on holding meetings in their communities, and places you can find local protests. And, when you share this show with a friend, [00:52:00] you've got it, you fight fascism.
Our producer is Phil Serkis. Our theme is by Macleet Hedero. This podcast is a project of Ejeri Labs. I am your movement meteorologist Ejeris Dixon. See you next time on the Fascism Barometer.