Host and "Movement Meteorologist" Ejeris Dixon welcomes scholar and researcher, Daniel HoSang,
Scholar, researcher, and former organizer Daniel HoSang joins Ejeris for a deeply clarifying conversation about how people can be drawn to movements that also target their communities. Daniel challenges the idea that shifts toward MAGA among communities of color are simply about misinformation or a political conversion. Instead, he points to a breakdown in civic life where people have lost connection to the institutions and communities that once helped them make sense of the world.
This conversation explores how we talk to the people in our lives being pulled toward MAGA, why shame does not work, and how rebuilding trust, connection, and collective life may be one of the most important strategies we have in the fight against rising fascism.
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Daniel
And so I go into this convention center, it's like, you know, what's stunning is, it was much more like just a Saturday at the mall. People from many different walks of life, and once people take off the red hats and those signifiers, they would just blend in. So what you're really struck by in these places, I'm talking thousands and thousands of people of color in these places.
And so it immediately disturbs that even like MAGA itself is just bitter, white, resentful folks. The mix of energy and experience is much more complex.
Ejeris
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.
As a black queer feminist, I exist at the intersections of communities that fascists see as the enemy. And for a really long time, I have desired a way for us to understand and measure the threat of fascism and how it impacts all of us. We're so grateful to all of you that listen, and we're continuing our fundraising.
The fundraising supports us to produce educational resources, the episodes, and everything that keeps The Barometer going. So please donate at our website, if you're able to, at fascismbarometer.org. Now, when we talk about fascism here, we often talk about a far-right, radically conservative, mass movement of people who've taken over the Republican Party.
Fascists work to build power, recruiting people into their ranks, they take over political parties, they run for office, they instill themselves in leadership positions, ultimately to dismantle and manipulate the government and society to reflect their beliefs. Now, fascists tend to believe that they should rule society, that their rightful place has been taken from them. So they see themselves as victims who are being persecuted.
Fascist movements often use and manipulate people's fear, their anxieties, and their distrust as a way to gain power. And it's in these circumstances where people who only support some of their goals, some of their aims and beliefs, can actually support fascist dictators in their rise to power. And the Make America Great Again movement, also known as MAGA, has many similarities to fascist movements according to scholars.
Now, fascist movements can exist everywhere, and they are often led by people who are in the majority. But they see themselves as a soon to be minority, and they believe that they are fighting for their survival. And so it's in this fight that they seek to eliminate marginalized communities, their opponents, and democratic systems and practices to return to a past that never existed, a fictional past, where they had ultimate power.
Now we've been working on this definition all season, and we'll continue to work on it as there is a lot to review and understand and unpack here. So now in each episode of The Fascism Barometer, we work to learn what fascism is and what we can do about it. And as barometers measure pressure, we work to understand the pressure that fascism puts on all of us.
In this episode, we're continuing our focus on a couple of key things. How fascist movements are operating in the United States? Who are the people who are being recruited to support fascist leaders and movements? And what are the strategies we need to stop fascism?
So as I'm looking at the barometer today, its reading continues to be very high. There are these escalating attacks on organizations and activists and our entire voting system.
The violence of immigration enforcement or ICE keeps increasing. There is this continued war on Iran, and there are attacks on trans communities that continue as well. So yes, the fascism barometer is rising, but we also continue to have power.
As we've said before, fascism is best fought with massive amounts of people power, and that's what we're building together. Thank you for your work of educating yourself on fascism and actively pushing back against it. Before we get to today's conversation on a loss of belonging and a loss of community and how that's fueling the rise of support for fascist movements, we have some updates from the news.
Fascism News Roundup
Welcome to the Fascism Roundup. In this segment, we talk about current trends in fascism in the United States. Again, there's so much happening. This is just a piece of everything. And we've placed all of the stories that we didn't get to in the Resource Hub.
So a new Gallup poll finds that 89 percent of Americans believe that corruption in the US is widespread. And this is the highest level in more than 20 years. And that perception is shared across communities, and it's shared across Democrats and Independents and Republicans. And this makes sense, but it also has troubling implications.
When almost everyone believes that corruption is widespread, it can really reduce your ability to address it. It reduces voting rates. It reduces political activism.
It makes people feel that not only is corruption widespread, but what can I do about it? Additionally, often, authoritarian and fascist regimes claim that government corruption is an issue and then utilize that, right? So in Peru, under Fujimori's regime, he exploited people's belief that Congress and the court system, right?
He exploited this belief that they were so corrupt, so then he dissolved both institutions. He arrested officials and he took them over. We need to acknowledge that corruption is an issue.
The solution is not to deny corruption, but instead, we need to develop trustworthy and accountable organizations and institutions. Now, speaking of corruption, at the time of this recording, this strange Republican midterm national convention is happening in Dallas, Texas, and Trump recently gave a speech to what reporters are saying was a room that was only half full, where he said that if Republicans won both the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, the government will pay every adult $5,000. So now he's bribing Americans to vote Republican.
Reporters are estimating that if he delivers on this promise, it could cost about $1.35 trillion. He did this while also continuing to talk about his belief that we need to pass the Save America Act, which would mandate nationwide voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements. He also called Democratic candidates communists and said that they must be defeated for all or else, and I quote, “a small and dangerous group of extremists will hold our Congress and country hostage”.
Now, calling opponents of the regime communist is pretty classic in fascist governments. Whether we're talking about Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, or even Orbán's Hungary or Bolsonaro's Brazil. It's a classic move that is used as a way to de-legitimize people and then target them.
Additionally, we're seven months into the war on Iran with no clear end in sight. The US and Israel have carried out extensive strikes against Iran while Iran has largely restricted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and fired missiles recently at a US base in Jordan. Trump recently posted on Truth Social about renaming the waterway the Trump Strait, claiming it's now under US control even as fighting continues.
Days later, Trump secured a 35 percent stake for the US government in a new Venezuelan oil company, controlling access to billions of barrels of oil reserves just months after abducting Venezuelan President Maduro and bringing him to the US to face criminal charges. Now Reuters is also reporting that the Trump administration is looking to open up Venezuela's mining sector to US investment, giving US companies access to critical minerals, including gold. Y'all, this is also classic.
Authoritarians and fascists often use military force to remove foreign leaders. They then extract a country's wealth under the new leaders control, and they rename the contested territory after themselves. In Uganda, when it was under authoritarian control, under Idi Amin, he renamed streets and buildings and lakes after himself, while consolidating personal control over the country's institutions and economy to reinforce his power.
So we must continue to resist the way that fascism is fueling continued military expansion. These wars, these military takeovers, the killing of innocent people, the exploiting of other countries and their resources.
And in more corruption, just days before the first mail-in ballots were sent out for the midterm elections, Democracy Now is reporting that a whistle-blower inside of the US Postal Service has warned that the Trump administration's new system for processing mail-in ballots is, and I quote, “Untested, fatally flawed and likely to lead to a catastrophic failure if it's implemented ahead of November's midterm elections”. This is terrifying. At the same time, the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow new rules requiring states to share voting lists with the Postal Service and federally approved envelopes and barcodes which was thankfully blocked by a federal judge.
Over one-third of votes in the last election were sent in via mail-in ballots. I've used mail-in ballots. Trump has used mail-in ballots. You've probably used mail-in ballots. All of this is happening alongside the Department of Homeland Security launching an investigation on voter fraud across nine states, and assigning an increasing amount of immigration agents on voter fraud cases. Fascists and authoritarians often create barriers to voting, while simultaneously casting doubt about who is allowed to vote.
This is to increase their power and to extend their rule. Now, we know that elections aren't the only tool in the toolbox. But between bribes and voter suppression, these fascists are clearly scared about the upcoming midterm results.
And what's our move? Well, we must continue to defend everyone's ability to participate in elections safely and without intimidation, while continuing to also build a movement against fascism here.
Guest Introduction
I'm incredibly excited to welcome Professor Daniel HoSang to The Fascism Barometer. Daniel Martinez HoSang is a Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and the founding director of the Center for Applied Research on Democracy. His research examines race, democracy, the multiracial right, and the ways that political movements build community and belonging amid declining institutional trust.
His forthcoming book, What the Left Gets Wrong About the Right, which is coming out on Haymarket Books in 2027, draws on more than a decade of field research to challenge conventional explanations for the right's expansion and considers how the left might rebuild collective political life. He's also the co-editor with Joseph Lowndes of The Politics of the Multiracial Right. He's collaborated with labor unions, educators, and community organizations for more than three decades.
Now, I first learned about Daniel's work through Linda Burnham when we were co-organizing a community education project called Fascism 101. I deeply appreciate how Daniel makes things that don't make sense, make sense. Dan's work helps us to understand how people align themselves with communities and leaders that also advocate against their humanity.
A former organizer turned scholar and researcher, he's dedicated himself to ensure that all of us understand these times and have the tools that we need to confront rising fascism and authoritarianism and how we can build something better beyond this moment. Thank you so much for joining us, Dan.
Daniel
Thanks for the invitation and just also thanks for this incredible work, which is inviting people to think together, think collectively, drawing on so many different kind of vantage points to help unpack so many of these thorny questions. I'm really happy to be here.
Ejeris
We're so excited to have you. So, softball question. We often start with asking people, if we had a fascism barometer on a scale of 1-10, where do you think we are at and why?
Daniel
I've been preparing for this question and I was thinking also about the analogy of a barometer which is measuring something like in our environment and our atmosphere, but what the barometer says or this is like what a thermometer says or what a wind vane says correlates to the real world. Whereas when we're trying to map where fascism is, we can't just do that. There's studies that say indices of democracy or stability of institutions, but those are not precise measures of what I think what we mean by fascism.
Here's where I'm at then, just to answer the question. The pressures, and I think about atmospheric pressure, the pressures on it, on any hope of collective life and democratic possibility and people governing their own lives in some way, in some ways have never been stronger. But that's distinct for me from what the actual climate is, which is because if we just say, well, that's the climate, I think we make the mistake of presuming that there's large majorities of people that want life to be led like that.
Not just people that might identify with progressive and left-facing projects, but even people drawn into right-wing projects who I actually think are not just, that doesn't just exhaust how they think about the political world. So the pressures for fascism have never been greater. But I don't think the atmosphere of fascism is what we should be naming now because I think that seeds too much.
Ejeris
I love that, especially as the self-proclaimed movement meteorologist. Yeah, and it also gives us some hope about where we can go from here and what we need. So you're a go-to for how the right-wing or how, I don't know, conservative movements, fascist movements are recruiting communities of color.
And where I get really curious around is like, what does this recruitment look like? I think there's a push and pull and a lot of your work talks about this. There's a piece that people are also searching for in this moment that makes them more ripe to be recruited.
So if you can break that down for us.
Daniel
Yeah, let me maybe start with a story. So to do this work with colleagues, my colleague Joe Lowndes, with a whole group of wonderful student scholar activists, have been going to right-wing spaces. And these are not like secret in the wood spaces where one has to like conceal their identity.
So one example is Turning Point USA, a group many people are familiar with Charlie Kirk, who co-founded the group and who was killed about a year ago. They sponsored these huge kind of spectacle events called AmericaFest, 20,000 people.
The last one was 30,000 people in the Arizona Convention Center in Phoenix. We've also been to Moms for Liberty, the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump rallies. So, the first time I went to Turning Point, the image I had in my head was this is a bunch of young conservatives. So I should put on a jacket and young Republicans, right? And that's how I kind of-
Ejeris
Yeah, like button up.
Daniel
Yeah. Older listeners will remember this character, Alex P. Keaton from the show. It was like someone whose idol is like Reagan or Nixon, right? And like reads Milton Friedman or something. So I go into this convention center, it's like it's my jacket on which I wouldn't otherwise wear.What's stunning is it was much more like just a Saturday at the mall.
People from many different walks of life and at different points I've thought, if all these people just went out into the street, there's no way in downtown Phoenix, I would be able to distinguish most of them from just people. I would say the same thing is true from several Trump rallies I've been to.Once people take off the red hats and those signifiers, they would just blend in.
So I say that to just say that it's not like there's a right that's external to all this, that is trying to figure out how to bring people in.
Ejeris
Yes.
Daniel
What you're really struck by in these places, and I'm talking thousands and thousands of people of color in these places. So it immediately disturbs that even MAGA itself is just the kind of bitter, white, resentful folks who are in these other places. The mix of energy and experience is much more complex.
When we sit and talk to people, what brought you here? How did you get connected? What's really striking is that many of the stories you hear would not be different from a DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, organizing conversation on a door somewhere, which is people talking about housing, young people talking about their dim, dim hopes for the future.
People even a few years ago talking about health. Why can't I understand any of the ingredients in my cereal box? Why do I have to work so hard to figure out?
Why am I in charge of my own health? And then listening to the speakers talk to them, not about the free market or like a white pure country, but about those pain points. Why is housing so expensive for young people?
Why have liberals and liberalism seem to have left so many people behind? From working class communities of color, immigrants, et cetera. So I just say that to say that it's not an ideology, one ideology that everyone has brought in on. It's a whole range of experiences.
And just as a last thing, I think at least some of these groups have recognized the deepening sense of cynicism, mistrust, people feeling abandoned by expertise, by institutions that I don't argue with. I'm like, that is true. That has happened.
Ejeris
Yeah.
Daniel
And they know that in that context, just lecturing people about, I don't know, tax policy or even border walls is only going to get you so far. They are trying to navigate these currents of mistrust and fear for the future, et cetera. So it's all just to say that the way they're pulling people in, I think, is often on the same grounds that even progressive politics are trying to build new collectives and possibilities.
Ejeris
No, and that makes sense because I live in New York City, and one of the things that people were talking about was the Mamdani Trump voter, right? People who were upset with the status quo, who were also upset about affordability. So there is a way that the way we think of the left or the right as fixed is that those concepts are breaking down and moving into more of an us versus them or like different types of moments.
And as we've been doing this project, it's our third season, so three years of this project, because I came to this project recognizing that I had family members who said things like, yeah, at least we know where Trump stands. And when you feel like people are making those decisions, you expect to see a values change. But it wasn't a values change.
It was something else that was happening with people. And so I read your report, A Democracy Without Anchors, and you were talking about de-alignment. And I would love for you to get into that more.
The way I understand it is that there were a bunch of different organizations and institutions that people used to join. People used to join things. And there are fewer things for people to join, whether it's unions or community organizations, or people have less connection to all these different organizations, and those organizations help them make sense of the world.
And without that, people can be lost a bit in space politically. And so I would love for you to connect this with how this kind of right-wing recruitment is at work particularly in communities of color.
Daniel
So this idea of de-alignment, and it's a political science term, we can think about it, so there's another term called realignment. And realignment is the idea of people moving from one party to the other, or maybe from left to right or right to left. So in the 1930s, the movement of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic Party, or white voters in the 50s, 60s and 70s from the Democrats or the Republicans.
Some people try to read the last, let's say, four years in which growing numbers of voters of color cast their ballots for Trump and other Republicans as realignment. This is actually those voters ideologically identifying with a conservative party. I don't think that's what's happening in many cases.
It's much more about de-alignment, pulling back. Sometimes I use this like many people used to have a landline, they used to have a cable subscription, they used to have maybe a newspaper subscription, or a paper was delivered to their house. At different points, people severed those connections, not out of ideology for lots of different reasons.
They felt it wasn't useful. They had other ways of getting information that they had more control over. The same thing has happened in civic life.
A generation ago, the network of faith-based organizations, including churches, labor unions, political parties, local media, think about black radio in a place like New York, the black press, robust places where people who held different ideas could come together, ask questions, learn things, get some shape to how they understood the world. There's been just lots of documentation about that's not true today, right? People are not turning to the same places.
And among the dozens and dozens of interviews we've conducted with folks, they would often just name those dynamics. Yes, my mom was active in our local party in the church, in a business association. That's not my life, that's not where I'm going.Those places aren't relevant to me in the same way.
So think of them as kind of like atomized and now almost like free agents in some ways, right? They're not going, very few people, if they're gonna vote, will say like, well, let me figure out what my local paper said before I vote or a local politician or even my pastor.
So this creates then all these openings where people are now, they have questions about the world. Why are things this way? What does make sense for me? And they need to have some places where those questions get mapped and worked out. And I think the right has been attentive to that.
I've sat in Turning Point, organizing voter workshops where they will say the same thing. 10 years ago, if we walked into these neighborhoods and knocked on the door and said, I'm here with the local Republican Party, people would say, I have no idea what you're doing here, but we have no business. They're saying now they will talk to us. Not because they have some big conversion, but because they don't feel a connection to the local Democratic Party, they wouldn't even know who that is.
So once I went to, as another example, the Trump campaign rally in the South Bronx in Crotona Park in May 2024, you just saw a cross-section of multiracial working class in New York there, women in hijab, women wearing like Dominican pride shirts. And not because everyone was there around a set of issues around immigration, gender, et cetera, but because people were angry about the world, trying to figure out a place for themselves. And at least at that moment, I'm not saying permanently, the Trump campaign and different forces on the right felt like they were being responsive to that.
And so many people said, I mean, one person said to me, like, I am not MAGA. I want to be that clear. But I want to talk to you about what is happening in my neighborhood, a neighborhood that I identify with being run by Democrats and kind of like liberals for two generations. And our school, the roof still isn't fixed. The jobs that were promised, the police are still killing people.
So in that sense, it was these are the issues I'm contending with. There's not a place for me to go. I'm open to these appeals.
Ejeris
No, that makes sense. So then let's dig into the part that is harder to make sense, which means there's a piece of this that is about belonging, where people need a space to belong. People feel things that I think many of us feel like that they're not listened to, they're not heard or that government is not responsive to their needs.
And then you also have a world view coming out of the Make America Great Again movement around who does and who doesn't belong, around superiority, right? Around immigrants are less than and trans folks are less than and communities of color are less than. So then the thing that people are joining to belong also is putting out politics that say, you don't belong here.
Daniel
Sure.
Ejeris
Like how does this happen together? Do people join and then leave? Do people ignore that part? What happens when people encounter the violent and harmful and supremacist part of the politic?
Daniel
I think that's such an important question. It's often like, why would you be drawn to a space that-
Ejeris
Like they hate you there.
Daniel
Yeah. That must be about a lack of consciousness, a lack of knowledge, a lack of information, etc. Maybe just to offer a little historic context. I think it's absolutely true that the reemergence of modern conservatism that accompanies the civil rights movement in which Republican politicians from the early 60s, at that point, the party was actually quite multiracial and had many black voters, especially in the North, really remade itself as a white party and very consciously said, we want the Democratic Party to be identified with black interests, black voters, that's their party, because the ideas a white racist imaginary would understand, well, if they're for black interests, that means they're automatically against my interests. And you could see in campaign ads, you could see it in outreach strategies, et cetera.It was an explicit part.
I think something, and I'm not suggesting it, and I don't want to frame this as a moral shift, but by the late 90s and early 2000s, there is some awareness of at least some parts of the party to have enduring governing power for the right. You can't just be perceived as just ejecting people and the party of white purity. Even white conservatives find that a little by this time, many, not all, but many find that beyond the pale.
The question is, how do you keep a right-wing vision, which is rooted in exclusion, sometimes in demonization, sometimes in the figure of the parasite, the dependent, but not just have it applied to strict racial lines? I think part of what they've done is to say that those distinctions are not just white, non-white, or in white communities of color, they are within communities of color.
Ejeris
So, the good and bad.
Daniel
Exactly. Those are things that are not just something imposed externally, those are long-standing dynamics. Who works hard, who's perceived as working hard, who doesn't? Who's perceived as gender and sexually normative, who's not? Who's perceived as having service and patriotism? That appeals to many, many folks.
If your reading is, well, there's two categories. There's the damned, like the stigmatized or the protected. Which one do you want to be in?
It's not surprising that people will say, well, if that's the line, I want to figure out how to be protected, and I'm going to narrate and understand myself as being worthy of that protection, and I'm not opposed to then drawing those other lines. So I think that's where, when you, I talked to many, many folks, they will say, I have lots of consciousness about my culture, about race, and about racism. But they'll say, but we're not all alike.
I'm talking about a very specific set of issues, and that's how I distinguish myself from the people who are being targeted. The very last thing I'll say is, there's a long, the ideas about linked fate in different communities of color, especially among like black communities and black voters. So even if you're not directly impacted by an issue, you will think of yourself as part of the collective because you know that what happens to one person can happen to anyone.
There's been lots of examples of that in immigrant communities. Even if you're not like a citizen or you have status, you don't want people policing that because it could happen to you. There's so much data now that's suggesting that, you know, the majority of Latino voters in 2024 responded to a survey when Trump is talking about Latinos and immigrants, is he talking about you?
And the majority said, no, he's not talking about me. So that's how I think people are navigating, both keeping a sense of their identity, their own anti-racist sensibilities, and can be fully complicit with often kind of violent projects.
Ejeris
And that, I remember it was happening, you know, I'll listen to a whole host of different types of like podcasts, radio and pieces just to have a sense of what people are talking about. And after the 2024 election, people were talking about, we need to get to low information voters, low information voters. And I was like, well, it sounds like what you're talking about actually is exploding the notion of it's not educating people that will actually address this issue.
This is a sense of people are hearing things that are explicitly racist or anti-immigrant or anti-trans or fascism being like, well, that's not me. They're not talking to me. They won't target me.
And it kind of gets to a challenge. And one of the core pieces of, as I understand it, of the project of opposing fascism and authoritarianism is this thing you're talking about around linked fate. It's this idea that, sure, they may not be targeting you directly right now, but they will create the infrastructure, the apparatus, the form of policing, the form of harm, the form of violence, that will eventually target you.
And so you need to see that what is happening to this person or this community as also something that you need to be against. So if that concept of linked fate is breaking away, what is the new way out as you see it?
Daniel
I think, so let me just give you an example of like, you know, and people have seen this across the last, let's say, 10 years, Latinos in especially like places like South Texas, who had long presumed like Democrats are their national political home and Republicans are anti-immigrant, they're anti-Latino, they're racist. And there's been the shift. And when I talk to people in those areas, they said, it's not in abstraction.
Those of us who have lived here for a long time, we distinguish all the time from their perspective, between people who earned, belong, etc. and people who don't. So their sense was, it's not just like it mapped onto something real in their lives.
And so I think the problem is you can't presume it, that the linked fate always extends. You know, and people say, right, like skinfolk be kinfolk. That it's just automatic.And I think what that misses is all the work through different social movements that went into producing linked fate. That actually went into overcoming those many divisions, that saw identity as a project to make, not just something you could draw on. And as, I don't mean to say the left, but liberals have just assumed that there's a direct correspondence between some part of your identity and some part of your politics that is just permanent.
That's why they've troubled and said that's actually not true, and we can exploit some of those divisions. So what does it mean then to collectively commit to remake political identity? It means to engage people in projects where they can see their interests together, they can understand how power works, and that's where identity gets produced.
The very last thing I'll say is, I was so struck in all the people we interviewed about how clear they were about the violence of liberalism. And these are things that many kind of left organizers talk about. Police violence, forms of abandonment.
And so the idea that, well, how could you be in a party or a place or a political formation that despises you? What has the Democratic Party been to many working class people of color in the last 30 years? And that analysis is not coming from the right, that analysis is coming from those communities, right?
That says, like, you routinely ignore us, you only want us for our vote, you're willing to line up right behind all the authoritarians when they want to do mass incarceration.
Ejeris
You pick, like, corporations over a community or?
Daniel
Exactly. Like, you have you, kind of liberalism collectively, have no credibility because you saying, well, how could you go with them? Don't you know they hate you?
What is the experience of the last 30 years being left in abandoned economically segregated communities taught people? So I think that in that sense, I don't know, to your point about are people rational analysts of their own experience, it felt very rational to me. I could say, look, I don't think there's a project there coming from the right that's really interested in redistributing power or redistributing dignity in any way.
But the point that in a two-party system, the center liberals haven't offered them anything is not something we can just dismiss as misinformation.
Ejeris
No, it's actually a correct assessment of what's happening, right? It's a correct assessment of the problem. But there's a piece around the manipulation is in the answer, right?
So we've now had two years of this latest iteration of the Trump administration that has increased the violence of policing and the violence against immigrants and trans communities. So my question is, for people who said, this is where I belong, or at least now, is that starting to fade away? Are people like, wait, this isn't what I signed up for either? Or is it just manifesting into even more distrust?
Daniel
Yeah. No, I think it's more, it's actually a combination of both. So I think there's a soberness people have about what's happening. There's a gap between what they were promised and what they can imagine and the material reality of their lives. I think there's an assumption among especially liberals that something like buyer's remorse will happen, right? Where people will say, well, I think you now saw what I was warning you about. Come back over here.
Ejeris
Finger wagging.
Daniel
Yeah, it's finger wagging and it's like, maybe you'll learn your lesson next time. And I think what it does is it deepens the cynicism that people already had, right? That actually all of this is BS. Any time someone is saying that they have a solution for you, a policy and expertise, it's another scam. And here's the thing. The right, for the most part, is comfortable just deepening that cynicism.
Because what it does is it forces people into a more individualistic, withdrawn framework. I only have myself. Broader social democratic movements, collective movements, we need people to trust one another. We need some faith in institutions. We need some faith and expertise in policy. So it's, you know, you could say like asymmetrical. It's not the same for both sides. And they don't actually really need people power because they have other levers to influence decisions. So this is why even if people do feel misled, frustrated, etc., it doesn't necessarily mean that more collective projects will automatically benefit from it.
I think we've seen in places, New York, other places, where it's still possible to harness that and move it in other direction. I'm just saying it's not automatic. And I think about it in like any kind of personal relationship. If someone is like doesn't want to be with you anymore because you did something wrong to them, and they go somewhere else and someone did something wrong to them, you're not going to say, well, now come back to me because we can resume our relationship.
So they're now just deeply skeptical and cynical of more and more things.
Ejeris
So it's almost like then fascist movements or authoritarian movements they can benefit from increasing this cynicism. So they don't permanently need people power. They need people power at certain points.
Daniel
That's right.
Ejeris
They need people power to win an election. They need people to do certain things, but it doesn't matter if those people don't believe anymore and never want to participate anymore because that actually still serves their project. Because they then can thrive in this context of distrust and cynicism.
And there's even, I don't know, there was something I read that was talking about dictators and fascist and authoritarians can thrive when people don't believe in systems or their own power anymore. Because then you have this like, only I can fix it mentality where people actually are anti-democracy and pro-dictatorship. What makes me sad in all of this is a lot of what I understood as movement building is what you are talking about is happening in these spaces, right?
You ask people what they need.
Daniel
Yeah.
Ejeris
You bring people together, you help them co-create a future that feels good to them. And so it feels like this is like fascist movements capturing off of a failure of social movements in some ways.
Daniel
I think that's exactly right. There's a political scientist, Hahrie Han, who's written this wonderful book about the culture of evangelical churches and how they're able to build relationships. And she points out, people might think, well, it's theology.
First year, accept you're converted and that's what attaches you. She says, actually, the frame is belonging before belief. The first thing you do is make connections.
And there's all this really interesting writing about how these churches think so carefully about what is a person's experience in the first 10 minutes of coming into the space from where they park, to where people greet them. They know that what's going through people's minds is, am I going to be judged? Am I about, you know, I'm not going to know what to do.
And then some of the larger churches, how they've proliferated all kinds of groups, a biking group, a card group, for people in recovery and dozens and dozens more. Not all of which are just kind of sneaky, like we're going to get you in and then hit you with some, some doctrinaire. They recognize that what people are holding in their hearts is often loneliness, isolation, and a longing for community.
They try to give it shape for sure, but that's the premise. And I think too often, our groups reverse that belief before belonging. Show me first that you can mirror back to me some set of beliefs, and then we'll, there'll be an attachment.
Ejeris
Yeah, a set of beliefs or like you can pair it back, a sense of norms. And the part I want to add to that, I started in social movements, organizing movement building in the late nineties. And so I was taught something very similar, like the first three to four interactions with a person are really critical, right?
How they're treated and how they feel and them understanding that their experience is connected to your group. But one thing that many of us have tracked is that training, that information has not been passed on. So then we came up in a time of social media where people are, as opposed to talking and engaging with each other, like yelling and debating at each other in a particular way, where belonging started to fall away as what was critical.
And so, because now there's all these layers of cynicism and distrust, right? Where there's just this piece where people now may have joined things and said, actually, I'm not about this either. Is there a way forward from here or is the damage too deep?
Daniel
No, there's absolutely a way forward and this is the part of doing this work that's actually given me both learning from the groups that are doing it and seeing, again, people's hunger for that connection, reciprocity, recognition. And so, just to example, there's this wonderful group in Indiana, Hoosier Action, that has really great campaigns around like care for people's addictions over law enforcement, like all these kinds of things about resources, etc. But they also have all these kinds of groups to connect people with one another, especially in rural areas, where the presence of the state and what you can rely on is much thinner, and neighbors have to rely on each other much more.
That's the site they use to build that connection and to create spaces where everyone doesn't have to think the same thing. As one organizer put it to me, there has to be a floor of shared dignity. In other words, you can't just have people come in, who can feel like it's a space where you can humiliate people.
But you can accommodate some and that we often dismiss people and say like, well, that word that you just said shows me you're incapable of thinking in dignified terms about ourselves collectively and that that then forecloses lots of different chances for people to enter into one another's lives. Even from the marquee social movements of the 60s, people often talked about that. It was on the bus ride, it was on the planning meeting and the church pew where those connections were made.
When the veterans of those movements talk, that's what they talk about. So we have to think about those connections in many spaces and labor unions that is not just about enforcing a contract and winning a good contract. It's also about the kinds of people we want to be in relationship to one another.
I do a lot of work with public school teachers where I live in New Haven. They are so demoralized every day, not just by what the right is doing, but what's happening to these kids they care about so deeply, what's happening to them as workers. If our projects are not attending that, the sorrow, the loss, people's longings, just a kind of contract alone, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient.
I think that's where the possibilities are.
Ejeris
Now, I don't want to just pat us on the back here, but it feels like then we're also on to something here because I wanted this project also because I would try to explain the meetings that I was going to, to my family members, and I even invite them to things and they'd be like, I don't understand. Or they'd be like, I went to it with you, I was terrified to say words. I was terrified to say words because I did not want to say the wrong words.
I was like, honestly, most of us at the meeting are terrified to say words because we don't want to say the wrong words and the words keep changing.
Daniel
Absolutely.
Ejeris
There is this piece around rebuilding belonging and mutual connection “, and so I think the midterms are going to be very important.
But I think there's also this way that people almost are emotionally holding on to the midterms as what gets us out of this. It sounds like you have a reframe of that proposal.
Daniel
No, absolutely, because the underlying conditions, the deteriorating connections to these civic anchors, to one another, to social movements, to belief in policy. From my perspective, that was the preconditions of what Trump-ism capitalized on, and the liberal notion of our best days are ahead, and it's just about hope and not finding a language to name some of that loss and sorrow and sadness, but not in ways that just turn it against one another, or that just offer, it's the billionaires, which we can agree on the one hand, and on the other hand, in people's day-to-day lives, that's not often how they experience it. They don't just experience it as protect democracy.
Ejeris
Yeah.
Daniel
Those are abstractions. Those are all going to be there no matter who wins. And there is still this, I think, especially among kind of, I'd say like liberal elites, this hope that you can reset the world to 2009, where there's some sense of like a multicultural inclusive future that doesn't take seriously not just the structural inequalities and violences, but again, what people are holding inside them.
I think what we're going to see is the candidates in both parties who were able to connect to that, are the ones who are going to do best, who don't feel to voters especially, like they're just talking the same old BS.
Ejeris
Yeah, the same old BS are like, because there was a way that even I would be like, this is how you're supposed to vote, this is what you're supposed to feel, but things haven't felt real and connected in so many different elections. So then on a much smaller level, as we've been doing this project, more and more people are naming, yeah, I have a brother who is now aligned with MAGA, I have a family member. When people, as you know and as we've been saying, their values haven't seemed to change, but their lack of trust, their disaffection with what's happening has led them to another place.
How do we talk to the people in our lives who are being caught up in MAGA, in fascist-aligned projects and politics?
Daniel
I mean, I think it's such an important question. One thing is we know what doesn't work. What doesn't work is threatening also emotional withdrawal, like you're not going to have my love, my regard, my care should you do this.
Telling people about the harm they're implicated in also doesn't work. Weaponizing relationship or even just providing information. I talked to several pastors who were involved in congregations of people of lots of different views, let's say around immigration.
They completely said, the first thing, you have to be in relationship with people. Nobody is going to think towards new horizons if they don't feel a sense of trust and connection. I think there is something about curiosity, about what gets people there, what makes them think that.
I think there's something about reframing that reminds, because often in your description of a family member, a cousin, all these parts about them and their engagement in the world that are actually oriented towards wanting people to live decent lives and that you know that about them as well and that it's a process that has to happen over time. The loss of these institutions and formations means that we don't have places to regularly go and be kind of socialized in these kinds of possibilities. So imagining that at one dinner table, discussion or text thread, you're going to just undo all of this is just not right.
I think people are seeing very clearly a world in which people are being abandoned left and right, left and right, quite literally watching their houses go away.
Ejeris
Yeah.
Daniel
It's a terrifying world to be in. If we don't have some account of the terror people are experiencing, what it means to be left on your own, to have to figure out the world, there's no policy that we can talk about.
So I think we first have to start there, about what it is that they're holding in their hearts, what is they want for themselves and their loved ones, and that that's the basis of it. It's not about telling them how awful some part of their decisions are.
Ejeris
Yeah. No, this feels clear. It's not about you have to vote this way, or you should feel this, but building with people, right?
It's about building with people, and it seems like all the ways that whether it's a political party, or a politician, or organizations that have done shortcuts to belonging, it's like the addition of shortcut plus shortcut plus shortcut that kind of created the pathway here, and undoing it seems to be the pathway out.
Daniel
Absolutely. And any, I'm sure, of the most like fully robust, fully realized collective projects, it's not just like, well, what influenced me most was the manifesto, or the mission statement. That's not what it is, right?
It's not, I mean, ideology doesn't work like that. It's the relationships people enter into. And that's not just one thing. You're not trying to create cults, right? Around like one person, like this one person showed me the way, or this one book. It's lots of people that you learn from, that you take seriously, that you admire, that you wanna be a better person for.
And you have to create those as containers that then support and facilitate everyone's development. And that includes all of our development too. This sense that like any of us are the cadre.
Someone made this comment at a meeting I was at last year that really stuck with me, which is that people on the left have main player character syndrome from video games. Meaning it's like, and I think of these organizational charts. We do this, we do this, we do this.
And then everyone else becomes this like bystander. And with no curiosity about their lives, what motivates them, what their pain is. And so we have to have less like strategy and big there and more like the relationships.
And then a faith that if people are in those spaces, the best parts of themselves will be allowed to flourish. Whereas when people are isolated, alone and fearful, that's when other parts of themselves kind of come to the fore.
Ejeris
So it sounds like that this is all in our hands, and it's actually very possible. And it kind of breaks down to how we build trusting relationships with people and rebuild almost like the social fabric of communities.
Daniel
And I'll just, I'm going to try to just offer something that's I think even like a little more provocative. I was in, part of this research, I was in Madrid for this kind of conference of like far-right parties. And I was in this arena of 9,000 people who are members of the Spanish far-right party and these politicians would come up and they would say the most demonizing hateful things about expulsions, closing mosques.
I saw there thousands of people rise up waving flags, cheering. It was like chilling. When I’m st these right-wing spaces, even like the turning points, I'm just surprised that we are not there yet.
And I don't mean to say that everyone is just wants to connect with their humans.
Ejeris
Yeah.
Daniel
But look, people like Stephen Miller, they would have loved nothing more than when these ICE cameras happened to have their hardcore folks flood those cities, stand with those officers and cheer it on. That didn't happen anywhere.
Ejeris
No.
Daniel
And again, I don't want to over, I just, I don't want your listeners to think like, oh, it's there. But there is something there about when people could have been drawn in to the most fascist behavior, which is just about blanket there. In Europe, you see people burning down hotels that are holding asylum seekers.
Even at our most difficult, violent moments, we have not seen that on a scale with all the caveats. When I went and touched those, we have those seen even liberal elites be willing at this moment to sell lots of people out, heads of universities and law firms and media organizations. There is something about the decency of everyday people, even across many different political points, against people who run institutions, who have status, who in the last two years have shown us mostly, they mostly want to protect that and they will sacrifice people.
I think that also gives us a map that the new political configurations aren't just in left-right terms. They're about something about everyday people's decency and the belief that that's still possible.
Ejeris
Dan, I don't think there is more to say. I don't think there's more to say because I think you've given us a map that people can actually touch and hold on to and move forward. I just want to say thank you so much for all of your research.
Thank you for sharing it with our folks. Thank you for your work on this and for helping us illuminate this pathway from what can feel like devastatingly hard times to actually know there is a way out of this that involves work that each of us can do individually and collectively, and there is still a tremendous amount to be hopeful for. So thank you for joining us.
Daniel
Thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation.
Ejeris
Now, we've reached the end of today's episode, and while the pressure continues, I feel hopeful to keep growing the movement against fascism, and I hope you do too. I also have to say I hope you're learning as much as we are about who the Make America Great Again movement is, how they operate, and where we have power to push back against rising fascism. We've continued to talk about what happens when whole communities feel like the system has ignored them, and how fascist movements are using those very honest and very real emotions to some incredibly dangerous and violent means.
We've also discussed some terms that may be new to you, and we're including a glossary in the Resource Hub for this episode to discuss realignment and de-alignment and concepts of shared fate more in depth. This is a learning space. So if there's anything else that we think will help you both share this episode and digest this episode, we've dropped it in the Resource Hub at fascismbarometer.org.
We appreciate you joining us, and we're working so hard monitoring the Fascism Barometer for you. I'd really just like to name that ending fascism is squarely in our hands, y'all. So when you share the show with a friend, you help fight fascism.
And when you listen with a group, you help fight fascism. And when you use our learning guides to take action on fascism with your friends, your family, and the organizations you're a part of, you also help push back on fascism. We can do this.
Dan taught us in this episode that the answer to rising fascism is in part increasing trusting relationships, recreating a sense of belonging, and making and ensuring that our organizations and institutions are trustworthy. So my ask for you to think about is what actions have you not taken to stop rising fascism? And how can we help you increase the power of your efforts?
Feel free to check out the list of actions on our website, and continue to watch the skies and subscribe to this feed, as we have so many more episodes coming up. Our producer is Phil Surkis. Our theme is by McLeet Hediro.
This podcast is a project of Ejerie Labs. I'm your movement meteorologist, Ejeris Dixon, and we'll see you next time on The Fascism Barometer.