Host and "Movement Meteorologist" Ejeris Dixon welcomes back strategist Tarso Ramos to gauge where the barometer is this week.
Ejeris welcomes back researcher, strategist, and longtime movement advisor Tarso Ramos for a sobering and clarifying conversation about authoritarian consolidation, democratic renewal, and what it means to stay in the fight. Tarso and Ejeris explore why the barometer reads differently depending on the community you belong to and the dangers you face. Together, they examine the warning signs of rising fascism and an increasingly consolidated authoritarian state, the escalating attacks on targeted communities and social justice organizations, and the urgent need to shift from protest to challenge.
You can find the tools you need to fight fascism at our Resource Hub.
Connect with Ejeris Dixon
Donate to the Fascism Barometer, and help us create more episodes and resources
And when you feel the pressure, share this pod, and visit fascismbarometer.org
Full Transcript is available at fascismbarometer.org.
Podcast production by Phil Surkis
The following is presented to you in “around sound.” It was recorded with whatever was lying around.
Tarso
We're at or nearing an inflection point in which the question is whether we can pivot from protest to challenge.
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 I've deeply desired a way for quite a while for us to understand and measure the threat of fascism and how it impacts us. 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 tend to believe that they should rule society and that their rightful place has been taken from them. So it's a movement based on revenge. It's what folks call ultranationalist, which is motivated by worship of their country or nation at the expense of others.
And fascists see themselves as victims who are being persecuted by actual oppressed communities. And they want to return to a fictional past, a past where they imagine that they had ultimate power. So therefore, they're fighting for their survival.
And they seek to eliminate marginalized communities, their opponents, honestly, anyone who'd get in their way through violent means, through arrest and through imprisonment. And they also seek to eliminate democracy, which they see as a political system that has given power to people that they don't think deserve it. So, there's a lot to unpack here, and we'll keep working on this definition throughout the season.
Now in each episode, we work to learn what fascism is and what we can do about it. And as barometers measure pressure, we unpack the pressure that fascism puts on all of us. So as I'm looking at the fascism barometer today, its reading continues to be very high.
The regime is claiming a huge election conspiracy is underway, and the timing feels curious at best. ICE or Immigration Enforcement has murdered multiple people in the last few days. And there are escalating attacks on organizations and activists challenging the administration.
There's this continued and escalating war on Iran and its people. It's a challenging time. And yet, we're seeing patterns in what the resistance needs to do to win.
So, yes, the Fascism Barometer is rising at an alarming speed. And I know we can navigate the storm. I believe we will come out the other side, but we can't do it without you.
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 listening and joining our movements.
And before we get to today's conversation on the current stage of fascism, here are the latest updates from the news.
In this segment, we talk about current trends in fascism in the United States. There's a lot that is happening, and that has happened recently. So this is just a snapshot.
We've placed everything we didn't get to in the resource hub. So last night, Trump gave a national address where he made some really wild claims. He announced the declassification of intelligence that supposedly revealed that in 2020, China stole 220 million voter files, that government officials covered up election vulnerabilities, such as compromised voting machines, a ballot counting system, as well as more allegations of international interference.
He named Obama, he named Biden in this conspiracy. He even said that NBC and ABC were, and I quote, part of the plot. What's important to note is not only he once again claimed that the 2020 election was stolen, but that these vulnerabilities would get fixed by investigations, prosecutions and targeting of any group that he blames.
And they would be fixed before the midterms. He ended his speech pushing for Congress to pass the SAVE Act, an act that would mandate voter ID, proof of citizenship, it would threaten election workers with prison time, and largely eliminate mail-in voting. Now, this is in addition to Trump recently dismissing the remaining three election commissioners at the Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency tasked with ensuring that state and local elections run smoothly and meet federal guidelines.
Honestly, this screams textbook fascism, and I want to remind you of the Fascist Emergency Playbook. Where a leader creates or uses an emergency to take a huge leap in power and to reduce the rights of the people. We have a lot of elements of the playbook happening right now, from scapegoating communities to promoting a sense of fear to reduce public outcry against their seeking to have federal control over the election process, to reducing access to elections in general, and setting the stage where he can claim election interference or manipulation if MAGA and the Republicans lose congressional seats.
In Hungary, Viktor Orban used a series of tactics to intervene in elections and the public perception of them. He dismantled independent journalism, he passed a new constitution where he forced over 200 judges and prosecutors into early retirement, he redrew district lines to gain electoral power, and he made LGBTQ or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer folks and immigrant communities enemies of the state. So it's clear that Trump's concerned about the organizing work that's occurring in the lead up to the midterms, and he's clearly preparing for a series of interventions and claims that the election was stolen if fascists lose power in November.
Additionally, the Trump administration announced the policy to impose new visa restrictions to attempt to stop people from entering the country that they consider to be members of the far left. This policy builds on the National Security Presidential Memo 7, which we've talked about previously. And it's a directive that Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, championed.
It directs the federal law enforcement, intelligence and financial agencies to jointly identify, defund, remove banking power, and prosecute domestic organizations that they are branding as political terrorists. Now, Miller boasted about these plans to suppress the radical left. So between Trump's speech and Miller's comments, it's clear that they're going to be ramping up repression against all of us that are doing anti-fascist organizing.
Our organizations, our institutions, and our movements. Now, this has happened before. There's a long history of fascists blaming leftists and socialists and communists and persecuting them.
In Nazi Germany, the government suspended civil liberties in the name of fighting what they called communist terror. Under Mussolini's Italy, they banned the Communist Party and targeted communist and socialist leaders and activists with surveillance, raids, imprisonment, and violence. And then here in the US, we have a history of the Red Scare.
When subversion laws were used to raid and deport leftists in mass, we know what this means. And as we continue to organize, we need to continue to support, protect, and defend each other. In other terrible news, ICE or Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently killed two people during traffic stops.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, and Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Maine. The rampant violence of ICE, it's horrifying. And multiple politicians and activists have been declaring their support to abolish ICE.
Following these killings, ICE briefly paused traffic stops, a pause that Trump quickly overturned. That same day, another Florida immigrant was killed on the highway during an ICE chase by a tractor trailer. And it's not just ICE that's been escalating violence against our communities.
At the beginning of July, two Tennessee National Guard members shot and killed Tyron Johnson in Memphis. Now, if you remember, we did an episode with Rachel Herzing on fascism and policing and how fascists use policing, prisons and detention as the foundation of imposing their agenda, violently targeting communities that they seek to eliminate and using these tools to attack their opponents. In the past two years, in fact, billions of additional dollars have been placed into the federal budget to expand ICE and to fund these harmful National Guard deployments.
We must continue to fight this, y'all. And we have some powerful news on Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia graduate student who was recently reunited with his family after being arrested and jailed for his organizing within pro-Palestinian movements. He's currently fighting the Trump administration's final order to deport and remove him.
Though he's not only just fighting the administration on this. He launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration, two pro-Israel groups, Betar and Canary Mission, and the far-right think tank, the Heritage Foundation. The lawsuit names that they were conspiring to suppress his constitutional right to free speech.
In a beautiful quote, he said, “This case is about far more than what was done to me. It's about a coordinated, ongoing campaign to punish, silence, and intimidate anyone who dares to speak out for Palestinian liberation.” And Khalil said this on Tuesday at a press conference announcing the lawsuit.
Fascists seek to scare people into submission. And Mahmoud Khalil has kept fighting. Let's continue to support him and his family as they fight against his final order for removal, and as he brings pressure to protect free speech.
I'm very excited to welcome Tarso Ramos to The Fascism Barometer. Tarso has been studying and challenging the US right wing for decades. He's a sought after speaker and movement advisor on authoritarianism and fascism. Brazilian born, Ramos was raised in the US after his family was exiled by that country's military regime.
For 15 years, Ramos served as the executive director of Political Research Associates, a research and strategy center dedicated to defeating authoritarian and supremacist movements. He's currently a senior fellow with Future Currents. But Tarso and I have been collaborating for years, in a way that I feel we've both grown and shaped each other.
Tarso comes from a family with generations of political activism, and it shows in his deep commitment to justice movements and dedication to ending the violence, inequity and repression that stems from fascism and authoritarianism. Tarso's partnership and presence with the work of the Fascism Barometer, both in front of the mic and behind the scenes, has made us all sharper and more effective. Thank you for joining us, friend.
Tarso
Thank you for having me, Ejeris. That's such a warm welcome. I feel a little embarrassed.
Ejeris
No, it's the perfect welcome for you. So this season, we're really talking about power, we're talking about movement strategy, and we're kind of looking at where we are since we've been talking about fascism with people for, it's our third year now. So I like to start with asking folks at this stage, where do you think we are on the Fascism Barometer and why?
And we've been kind of doing like a one to 10, like 10 as fascist as it gets. One, what's fascism?
Tarso
Oh, numbers, math, goodness. I don't know, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian post-colonial writer, warns us of the danger of a single story.
Ejeris
Mm, okay.
Tarso
And as always, what time it is on the clock of fascism and authoritarianism has a lot to do with what body you're in, what part of the country you live in, your economic circumstances. So on the one hand, we're all of us in the same boat, right? We're 16 months into authoritarian consolidation, following breakthrough of the last presidential election and the immediate aggressive assaults on democracy and the constitutional rights that followed inauguration last January.
On the other hand, on this boat, some of us have private cabins with the Boccanese. While some of us live down in steerage, right? Beneath the water line and the boat is taking on water.
And yet others of us are being thrown overboard. So it might be, I don't know, a seven if we're doing averages, but that doesn't change the reality that it's a nine for some people in some communities, right? If you're a trans person or a trans family member, the campaign of persecution and erasure, including the recent Supreme Court decision around trans participation in sports, among other things, it is and has been here on fire o'clock, right, for some time.
Ejeris
Yeah.
Tarso
The recent SCOTUS decision that gutted the last remaining robust portions of the Voting Rights Act inviting return to pre-1965 levels of African American and other racially marginalized community representation in Congress. All these things mean that the barometer is just really different, right? What rating would you give it?
Ejeris
I do think we're at a seven or an eight on average, but then there is something horrible about this idea of average, because I wanted the barometer so badly because I wanted to make sure that we were speaking to the communities that, for lack of better language, were hit worst and first, you know?
Tarso
Yeah.
Ejeris
And so, recognizing that a nine is logical, and we've been saying for quite a while, the barometer is very high, the barometer is very high. And I still see strides in our movement building, I still see moments in which we are really pushing back, but I see these attacks coming full force. And I have concerns on how we continue to keep all of the different communities who are not only being targeted, but also all the people who need to be in solidarity with all of us who are being targeted.
Like how we keep focusing on building power and building movements, and not separating and thinking about each of our own individual safety, and throwing each other under the bus, or just being too afraid to come to each other's aid because the stakes are getting so high. That's what I think is one of those critical pieces right now. And it's why I wanted to enter the Barometer conversation with people like you and so many other researchers, because I also saw that for some of the researchers, it was community skewing to folks who had more privilege.
Right? And so I was like, so if these are the measurers, right? Then how does that shift what we call strategy, and how does that shift what we call danger, if danger is connected to other people?
But I want to shift gears a little, but in the same vein, your episode last season, we got so much feedback on. People loved it, used it, listened to it in their community groups or with friends. And we had talked about the 12- to 18-month window.
Tarso
Yeah.
Ejeris
But we talked about that 12- to 18-month window, I think, almost a year ago, and we were already six, seven, eight months in it. Now I'm doing complex math.
What I'm trying to say is by my numbers, we are approaching the end of the window, but I want to know, is that accurate? So you had named previously consolidation is where authoritarians and fascists have gained so much power, whether legally or illegally, that they can't easily be removed, and that the system has been so badly rigged, that it could rarely result in fully removing the autocrats or fascists, and this can be referred to as a dictatorship or an electoral autocracy. So, recognizing your knowledge of what's happening in the world and what's happening here, and tracking the rise of fascism and authoritarianism, help us understand this stage a bit.
What are the big markers, and are we already living under consolidation?
Tarso
Well, the first thing I would say to ease into this difficult conversation is that consolidation is a process, right? It's not an on or off switch. I would say we are well into the process of authoritarian consolidation in the United States.
And there are many, many markers of that. I'm just going to talk a little bit about one of those. I mentioned earlier the recent supreme court ruling, gutting the Article II of the Voting Rights Act.
And it's important to put that in the context of the reversal of the second reconstruction. So the United States has really only been something approximating a multicultural democracy since 1965, thanks to a combination of things, including, not limited to, but including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights and the Immigration and Nationality Acts passed in 64 and in 65. So that's, in the Immigration and Nationality Act, helps to also put into context why the current attacks on immigrant communities and the attempts to overthrow birthright citizenship and so forth are so significant, because that act undid the racial quota system for immigration that preferenced white Anglo immigration from Europe and disadvantaged everybody else and tried to engineer a white nation in the United States.
So in combination with things that I think are more commonly understood to be historical legislative achievements of the Civil Rights Act, we've really only been a multiracial democracy or something close to it for the last 60 years. 60 years out of the 250 being celebrated this year, or 60 years out of the maybe 406 years since 1619. And so just like the first reconstruction, this second reconstruction is being swiftly and violently undone and destroyed and that is part and parcel of this process of consolidation.
Many, though not all, democracy monitors and analysts who previously credited the United States as being a liberal democracy - not everybody has considered the United States to be a democracy - Many of these analysts now agree that this is some kind of non-democracy. I think that's right.
What sort of non-democracy is more the question, right? So there's an influential Harvard political scientist named Steven Leibitzky who calls what we are now a state of competitive authoritarianism. That is the idea that it's not fully consolidated and it still has many of the traits, think elections and lawsuits that sometimes successfully constrain some of the unlawful actions of the government and so forth.
These are qualities that maintain the hope and the feel that we are somehow still in a democracy. I don't agree with Leibitzky on everything, but this seems mostly right to me. Perhaps we're in the gray zone.
Another way to think about it is that we're either in the twilight of multiracial democracy or we're in the pre-dawn hours of democratic renewal. In which way that goes depends as much on the actions of the people, the choices that we make is on the actions of the current government, which is moving very quickly to try to consolidate its position, including although not exclusively through the midterm election process.
Ejeris
So what I think would be helpful is to give us a little picture of what does it look like if things get worse? Because sometimes some of the markers of fascism and authoritarianism are quite scary or quite sudden. Like me and you are having an open conversation about whether this is fascism and authoritarianism.
This is not like, we've joked about like, oh, well, one day we'll have to be like the fascism barometer from an undisclosed location, you know, or other such things, right? But also, I still really remember your story of when the Secret Police showed up and I was just really animated like, how do you know it's the day before those types of things happen? So where we are now, it would be useful to just be like, if things get worse, it could look like this, so that we have an understanding of what we're trying to stop.
Tarso
Well, I think we've begun to see some test cases of what looking worse might look like, right? We've seen raids on the offices of social justice organizations and organizers recently in the state of Ohio and some other places. We've seen the full force, the Justice Department, being brought in the form of a slap suit against an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center, both for specific reasons and grievances, but also more in a test case kind of example, is a chilling action to try to achieve compliance and advance from other parts of the social justice movement
And so I think we could expect an escalation of those kinds of behaviors, such that the social costs of speaking out of being a recognized and recognizable critic of the regime of the administration is raised significantly. And people have to wonder whether being a vocal opponent in and of itself could result in cost of litigation or a subpoena or arrest. Or depending on your immigration, other kinds of statuses, other kinds of persecution, threats of deportation, attempts, for instance, to denationalize those of us who might not have been born into American citizenship.
I think it could look like an election so badly rigged, both in the slow steal that's already underway, right? We see the slow steal in all kinds of ways. We see it in the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. We see it in the subpoenas and seizures of documents in Fulton County, Georgia, and similar actions in California. We see it in the Electoral Right Deregistration Act, that they call the SAVE Act right?
Ejeris
That's a perfect definition, yes.
Tarso
Which has had some opposition, but now apparently there's an attempt to attach it to an appropriation spell that would be difficult to defeat, and a decision to replace Lindsey Graham with his sister in the Senate, in part in order to try to push that over the finish line. So the slow steal is in all kinds of ways, but we may see the fast steal come in other ways, right? We see the slow steal in the replacement of non-partisan election officials and commissioners committed to free, fair, safe elections with 2020 denier loyalists.
And so there's a lot of pre-work to what then could be a fast steal involving, who knows, security force deployments, both to intimidate certain populations from getting out to the polls, or to seize ballot boxes, or drop boxes, or to interfere with mail-in ballots, interfering with the ability of veterans and active military to cast votes who are abroad. So there are lots of ways in which the fast steal may come in on the heels of this slow steal that's been underway now for many, many, many months. So I think it could look like that.
I think it could look like the ongoing build up of ICE and other security forces. Now the largest police force, nationalized police force in the country, a force that continues to grow, that is often only called back from its most violent activities, including the most recent killings during traffic stops in Texas and in Maine, out of concern about what the balance of power consequences might be in the Senate. And I say it like Maine, where Susan Collins is vulnerable.
And so the president's party is vulnerable in terms of maintaining its majority. So I think it could look a lot like a lot of those things. I think it will be harder for, it already is harder for people without permanent citizenship to leave the country and imagine that they could ever enter again, to leave to visit family, to leave to just do their business, to go on a work trip, to do other kinds of things.
People are making all kinds of survival calculations about whether they would ever get back in. So I think it could look like a lot of things. I think the notion that we are entering a period of electoral autocracy feels about right for the moment that we're in.
And so whether this administration is successful in so badly rigging the midterm elections that they would have confidence going into 2028, that they could determine and advance the outcome of the presidential and whether their presumably chosen successor would be guaranteed election in that contest, is a really important contest. We're at a key inflection point. That's a degree of consolidation that is not impossible to come back from, but much more difficult to come back from.
So I think that's some of the ways that it would feel. But again, some of this depends on the body that you're in, right? And so I think the midterms feel more decisive as a measure of whether we're in consolidating authoritarianism for communities of relative privilege, for whom the outcome has more of a bearing on a sense of their own civil liberties and freedoms, and a political possibility for communities that are already experiencing accelerations of violence and deportation and erasure as recognized people in our laws, in our practices, in our policies.
The midterms feel like an important but just another measure of this question of consolidation. So I think we have to hold both the particular and the general there. And we have to recognize that even people who agree that we are facing a dire situation in the United States, read the barometer differently, right?
The temperature, in fact, is different. The barometric readings are, in fact, different inside of different people's abodes. And that has to inform the way we think about building with people.
And it's almost always the case that those who are most negatively affected have the clearest sense of the moment we're in and often play some of the most important leadership roles in pushing democracy forward, right? There was no second Reconstruction. There was no racial, multiracial democracy in the United States without the particular sacrifices and leaderships of the African American Freedom Movement is an example.
And so we need all kinds of actors in this moment. And the difference in the way people are experiencing the barometric pressure to continue your metaphor are frustrating and they're real. And we have to develop strategy that is attentive to those differences of understanding.
And not just understanding, but a feeling, the intensity with which people feel the moment that we're in.
Ejeris
Yeah. I first started anxiously reading about fascism in 2016, just because people were saying the word. And I was like, well, that sounds bad.
Let's hope that doesn't happen. And I feel like my tone has changed year after year, and we've been in conversation for many years. And that's my biggest, my understanding of strategy, of anti-fascist strategy and anti-authoritarian strategy, is it does require a level of collaboration and coordination from a whole host of communities that may not agree on a lot of other things.
Tarso
That's right.
Ejeris
And so then you have that intersecting challenge of differing impacts as like the barometer gets higher, right? So it is harder to create a collaborative strategy when some people are like, I'm losing rights and some people are like, I may lose my life.
Tarso
That's right.
Ejeris
So that's the context that we're in. The invitation for fighting fascism and fighting authoritarianism is that we have this ability to build broad coalitions in ways that we may not do under other forms of political work and under other times. Because it is a dire necessity for our survival.
So then recognizing that there's disparate impacts, so much so that some people may not even see how dangerous things are for others, right? What are the most important goals? Because there's part of this that's up to them, right? Like how fast they're moving to consolidate. There's part of this that's up to us.
Tarso
That's right.
Ejeris
And so from your vantage point, knowing history, knowing what's happened in other countries, what are some of our most important current goals?
Tarso
Thank you for that question. I want to come at it first by thinking about what we learn from successful struggles outside the United States. I recently had the honor of co-presenting to some Minneapolis groups that led much of the successful opposition operation to operation Metro Surge, and who ultimately stood down ISIS occupation of their city, right?
Ejeris
Yes.
Tarso
It was an incredible gathering, block by block organizers, unions, faith groups, immigrant justice folks. It was an honor just to go and say thank you. So my co-presenter there traveled from Seoul, South Korea, where she's the leader in the KTCU, which is the militant nationwide labor federation. And just a year and a half ago, the KTCU played a central role in blocking an attempt at martial law.
Ejeris
I remember this.
Tarso
And then forcing the South Korean president, who declared martial law, to resign his office. Among her many powerful comments was this provocative question to the Minneapolis organizers. She said, “What red line are you waiting for? If this was Korea, we would already be on a general strike.”
Now this is a person who in fact is highly knowledgeable about US politics, including the very big differences in the capacities and cultures of the labor movement's there and here, I took her provocation as an assessment of how dire our circumstances have already become in the United States, such that sustained general civil disruption in defense of democracy is entirely justified and necessary. The question is one of readiness.
Are the people ready? Have we built the organizing capacity to choose and act collectively in response to the trespasses of even more red lines that we can all see coming? We are, in fact, at a high water mark of protests in the United States already.
Each no King's mobilization breaks records, and there has been ongoing sustained local protests across the country before and in between these mass mobilizations in response to ICE deployments, attacks on trans communities, construction of data centers, and lots of other things. We're at or nearing an inflection point in which the question is whether we can pivot from protest to challenge. That is the question that leaders of the African Freedom Movement posed in the early 1980s, and it led them to pursue a dual course that I think, even with our very different circumstances in the United States, is still very relevant to the questions before us.
On the one hand, the charterists, by which we mean the anchor movements of the Black Freedom Struggle, the African National Congress, the Coalition of South African Trade Unions and others, they needed to keep disrupting the Apartheid state. They sought to make South Africa ungovernable through sustained non-cooperation, and their clear alternative to Apartheid was non-racial democracy, both social and economic, laid out in their Freedom Charter, which was a widely circulated platform for change and transformation of the country. On the other hand, these same charterists understood that they did not have enough power, even with a large Black majority population, to force the transition that they sought, to force Apartheid to stand down and make way for a multi-racial democracy.
South Africa's military and security forces were very powerful and ruthlessly violent. They surgically arrested, jailed or assassinated democracy leaders, but they also committed community level atrocities that raise the social costs of participating in democracy organizing. So it was a very dangerous thing to show up for a protest.
So the Charterists created an additional vehicle. They created the United Democratic Front. Into it, they invited lots of other leaders and organizations, even their adversaries who had different ideas about what democracy should look like or what democracy means.
Here, there were what their Charterists called minimum plates of unity. You didn't have to agree with the Freedom Charter. You had to agree that Apartheid had to go, that there was going to be one person, one vote, that there had to be a peaceful democratic transition.
And that's about all you had to agree to in order to join this broader front, right? That involved lots of white led organizations, faith organizations, business associations, even ones that the Charterist movement was boycotting in order to try to force some measure of justice in the townships and other places. And so they created this other vehicle where they basically said, we can fight later about the meaning and expression of democracy in all of its dimensions, but anyone with a core commitment to ending racial authoritarianism and creating some semblance of democracy in this country needs to be in a broad front.
And I feel the same way. My definition of democracy is very different from many of the other definitions that circulate in this country. And I'm willing to work with anyone who sees themselves as a believer in a fighter for democracy.
In some ways, we're in a stronger position than the charterists, right? We're not dealing with fully consolidated authoritarianism of the sort that the freedom movement in the mid-80s was facing an apartheid state that had consolidated for decades and had the full loyalty of the security forces, fully ensconced in the international state system, had the full backing of global powers like the United States in that case, and in some ways were weaker. Even though we're fighting under more open conditions, right?
A closing but still somewhat open society in the United States, the strength, the relative strength and militancy of our labor union movement of some of our other sectors is not as clear-eyed and disciplined about the conditions that we're facing. We have not reached a level of sustained mobilization that has been disruptive to the ability of the state to govern and so forth. And so there are lots of differences, but the challenge, I think, is the same.
It's how do we pivot from protest to challenge? And how do we understand that there are multiple lanes in this? And that the task of democracy organizers, including those of us who come from a more radical tradition of that work, isn't to convince everyone of our ultimate vision for social transformation.
It's to do that work alongside this much broader work, that pulls in all kinds of people, including many who consider themselves, and perhaps even have a primary identity as patriots in this country, and yet understand that we are increasingly a non-democracy, and that so much is at risk, that they too are willing to make sacrifices and to take risks in order to safeguard the possibility of a democratic future, to safeguard the opportunity for democratic renewal, are willing to put some skin in the game and put themselves at risk in order to choose that this is the pre-dawn hour before democratic renewal, rather than the twilight of a democratic experiment in the United States. And so there are many more people in communities available to us and to each other for this project of democratic renewal than certainly at any time in organizing life in the United States. And so we have to take that richness of opportunity very seriously, and it requires the discipline to think strategically about multi-prong strategies for moving our work forward.
And that has not been a strength of the left in this country for many years, in part because the left in this country is so small. And so choosing a multi-pronged strategy, including broad front building, and by broad front, I don’t just mean the folks to our immediate left or right, but much further than that is a very challenging thing to do, in part because the left in the progressive movement would have to recognize its own limitations and wrestle with our own weaknesses in order to make those strategic choices. But if we're serious about building power, including governing-level power for transformational democractic possibilities, we can only develop effective strategy if we're really honest about both our potentiality and our limitations in this moment.
But so I'm curious about how that resonates with you, Ejeris. And I'm interested in talking about what some of the implications are then for this immediate next phase of contests we have in the United States, which overlaps with the midterm elections.
Ejeris
I think it makes a lot of sense to me. It makes a lot of sense in some of the pivots I've made, I don't know, personally or politically, where you just start to realize that the fight against fascism, the fight against authoritarianism - I've been asked, why did you pivot towards this from your other work?
And I was like, well, it's because fascism can cancel everything else I was working.
Tarso
That's right.
Ejeris
And that's it, that's why. But that is not a shared strategic assessment. And I don't think it's like an actively not shared strategic assessment.
I don't think it's like people are like, but it's more an unwillingness to change for people who don't have to change, right? Or a short-sightedness where we are working on parts of the strategy. So part of the strategy is defending every community that is attacked, right?
And part of the strategy is also connecting that with building building massive power on multiple lanes. And when you're talking about multiprong, that means electoral power, that means economic power, right? That means community power, and it means that these things should have some connection to each other.
Not like we don't all have to have like Ejeris Dixon, the very type A person would love us to be all in the same work plan, but that's not possible. But at least freedom charters, shared agreements, shared broad strokes, we believe in this thing. And so I think that's been hard.
And sometimes I talk about fascism like it's a video game. But when you lose the level, you don't get to replay the same level.
Tarso
That's right. Game over.
Ejeris
It's either game over or the level comes back much harder. Much harder.
Right? It's much harder.
Tarso
Now building an effective coalition from a gulag.
Ejeris
Yes. No. And so it's like, is this the conflict we want to have now, or is this the conflict we want to have when we're…
Like there are conflicts that we can have when things are more dire. But it still returns to this question around me and you are both positioned in communities that also have higher stakes and then there are also people within our own communities that are targeted far more than we are. But it's still different calculus, right?
There's still a way that I know that... Like I've heard from people and they were like, even if I think you all are right talking about the word fascism, I'm not going to debate it from that point. I'm just not going to say it because now, now it's unsafe to say that word, right?
Because of how there are these different kind of terrorism accusations and investigations. So for us who have higher consequences, and I know that your family has lived high consequences of political activism. Are our goals different?
Are your goals different? Is there a, if things get here, then I will make this shift type of calculation that happens within you, within your family?
Tarso
Oh, interesting. Well, like you, Ejeris, I have made different decisions about where I'm investing my organizing time. So that's the first kind of shift that I could talk about.
And without going on very long about it, I really believe that without a very broad, ideologically broad and socially deep national pro-democracy vehicle rooted in civil society rather than in either one of the main political parties, such as we've seen in other places that have managed, I think will be lost. And so I really believe in the work of working with all sectors of society. And I'm talking about business leaders.
I'm talking about military and veterans. I'm talking about organized faith. I'm talking about social service agencies and arts and entertainment people and local sports teams and knitting clubs.
I'm talking about civil society, like in the richest sense of the organizations that touch people in their everyday lives and make meaning for them and through which they find a community and affirmation that we all need to be part of a project of fighting for democratic possibility that's indexed to, as the South Africans put it, more minimal points of unity, right? Free, fair and safe elections, a free civil society that's not subject to the politicization and the repression of the state, peaceful contestation to resolve major disputes and differences. These are the kinds of things that can animate and do animate tens of millions of people and that it's our job to organize as broadly as possible right now.
On a personal level, the first thing to say is that most of us have nowhere else to go. Most of us have nowhere else to go. And those of us who have the means to go elsewhere, often have the means to make real contributions to the fight here, and still be able to flee later if we had to.
And so I'm all for having contingency plans, right? Have a go back, expand your options, make options for other people, right? It's not just about planning for yourself.
Who else needs some options? And the point about having those other options, in my view, is A, to survive, and B, to stay in this fight from a location that makes sense for you, which doesn't mean it's a safe location. I think that the notions of safety have to be recalibrated.
There is not a safe location to do pro-democracy work in this period of time. But there are less safe, and even less safe than that, situations and contexts from which to do that work. If you have to flee to another location to stay in the fight, do that.
My family had to get out of Brazil because it didn't look like we were likely to survive if we didn't get out of Brazil. And we got out of Brazil and my family fought from another location, fought from the United States, fought the dictatorship from the United States with everything you could think of to muster. And that was hard and it was necessary and that's not unusual.
In fact, that's normative in a fight for democracy in a location. So much of the leadership, the South African Freedom Movement was forced into exile and operated from London and operated from other places. So much of the leadership of various African global South freedom and liberation movements have been forced at various moments to conduct their contributions to the fight from outside the territorial boundaries of the nation state that they were fighting with and for.
And so that's fine. And if folks are deciding to leave early because they're going to be able to contribute more to the fight from some other location abroad, then I support that. What worries me is I see too many people with the means to make meaningful ongoing contributions to the fight here in the United States, choosing for reasons of personal discomfort with the political situation in the United States to find a more comfortable location to go about their business elsewhere.
And a withdrawal from the fight, it's one thing to fight from elsewhere, it's another thing to withdraw from the fight, and that we can't afford. And we can least afford it from the people with the greatest insulation from danger and the greatest economic capacities to contribute to the fight here. And so I get this question all the time, is it time to leave the United States?
And my general answer is no, not if you have a modicum of safety, not if you have options to leave later if you had to, not if you're still in a position to make meaningful contributions to the fight. There's a big difference between keeping your options open and making a choice to leave. It's sort of the opposite of a maxim that I shared in an earlier edition of The Fascism Barometer, in which I said that the most useful anti-fascist is the premature anti-fascist, the person who's committed to fighting fascism, in the place before the consensus is that what we're fighting is fascism, right?
Because the early work, the advanced work before consolidation, it can really get a foothold is the most important preventative work. The foundational alternative infrastructure building work can happen before consolidation is golden. And to flee when you don't have to is exactly the opposite of that, right?
It's making a personal choice around your own civil liberties. In a context where what we're facing is rising global authoritarianism and fascism, where probably all you're doing is buying a little time for yourself personally.
Ejeris
Yes.
Tarso
You're not actually changing the global conditions of rising authoritarianism. So as I told my own kids, we have, my kids have three passports, right? I'm Brazilian born, they have Brazilian citizenship, their mother is a Filipina and has Filipino citizenship as well as US citizenship.
As I said to them, when they asked us after Trump's first election, whether we were leaving the United States, I said, you have passports, but you have passports to repression elsewhere. We can choose to fight authoritarianism and fascism in Brazil, or in the Philippines, or here. There's not an option here to flee and not fight, not have a similar set of fights elsewhere.
And so this is where we are now, this is where our strongest community ties are, this is where we are best positioned at the moment to make contributions to fight against authoritarianism and fascism. So we're into their disbelief. I'll tell you, when they were five and seven, to their incredible disbelief, we said, no, we're staying here and this is our fight.
And I think that has to be our stock answer. Understanding that some people will in fact, already have had to leave. Others will have to leave.
Some will have to go underground in order to continue making contributions in the United States. People will have to change their locations, and that's part of what it means to make a commitment. But that change of location should be indexed to this question of where can I make my best contribution.
Ejeris
So it seems like both our movements and communities should have red lines. People should also be thinking in that sense, but the opt-out that we're saying that no matter where you go, you stay in the fight.
Tarso
There's no opt-out, not really.
Ejeris
Yeah, I've definitely said to people, they're like, well, I don't think you can escape the global fascist movement.
Tarso
I know, but fascism, authoritarianism are not going to leave you alone because you decide to go elsewhere. I guarantee you that.
Ejeris
Yeah, they can find you.
Tarso
And if this authoritarianism or fascism consolidate in this country, anyone that they've considered to be a significant threat to their rise will remain in their gun sights. And so let's not have the illusion that there is a cozy alternative existence. There may be other dimensions.
We may be in a multiverse, but not on this planet are we in a multiverse.
Ejeris
Yes. I mean, what we've talked about has been really powerful, but it's also scary. So the question is, amidst all this, what is bringing you hope?
Tarso
I would say a few things are bringing me hope. One is I see more and more people willing to take risks. I'm in conversation with people who on this broad front building piece, for instance, Ejeris, have said to me, God bless you.
And I represent a kind of centrist community and organization and I could never join an effort like that who after Operation Metro Surge and after the courage they saw exhibited by the people of the Twin Cities of Minnesota, changed their minds, their assessment of the conditions and what it means to take risk in order to put your money where your mouth is in terms of your beliefs in democracy, just shifted. People are making reassessments all the time.
Some of them are going in the direction you were just asking me about. Is it time to go? Should I get out of here?
For many people, it's going the other direction. It's a recognition that this is a time to take risks, for to stand for our neighbors, to stand for our core beliefs, to stand for our own sense of, of self and human dignity, to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, yes, I am willing to take some risks for what I believe in, and not just cower in the fear that we all experience all the time. So part of what gives me hope is seeing the courageous choices that other people are making in this moment.
Part of what gives me hope is that I know from my study of history that there are two ways that autocrats are dislodged, stepped down from power, right? Sometimes it happens through elections, right? Sometimes the opposition authoritarian is so intense that even rigged elections can't save them.
This happened only a few months ago in Hungary where a self-characterized defector from Orban's coalition broke away and successfully became an opposition candidate and defeated Orban in the most recent presidential election in a situation where many people thought the level of consolidation made that impossible, right? A second way that authoritarians are removed from power is through sustained nonviolent civil non-cooperation, right? So if we consider the People's Power Revolution that forced the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Tarcos from power, ultimately, in that case, the military refused orders to fire on its own people.
So I take inspiration from knowing that authoritarians are, can be, and recently have been forced from power, right? Even under the conditions of electoral autocracy that we are racing headlong into, those possibilities are here, and people see them, and people take inspiration from our comrades in South Korea, who averted martial law and forced them to step down. They take courage from the people of Brazil, who managed to hold Bolsonaro accountable for his attempted coup there.
We take inspiration, right, from these and many other examples of the people, the broadest sense of the term, saying no, in organizing themselves into another kind of set of possibilities. I take inspiration from that. I take inspiration from the everyday people, who are taking incredible risks.
For all the people who are frustrated that more people aren't stepping up against, for instance, the ICE deployments and this sort of thing. I take inspiration from the people who may have voted for Trump, but when ICE comes for their neighbor, draw a line and say, over my dead body, are you going to take my neighbor? I will put myself between these armed agents of this state who are killing people somewhat indiscriminately in my neighbor, because that's the kind of connection I feel.
That's the we that is tangible to me, not some abstract concept of democracy. But if you set your dogs on my people, on my neighbors, I will stand up and take real risks in their defense. That inspires me.
And so I think we see all around us the will of the people to fight and to resist, sometimes not with the vocabulary that we bring, sometimes not with the framework that we are discussing here, but in the most important ways and in the moments that count the most, that are the most consequential. And so I believe to paraphrase a song that I've drawn inspiration from much of my life. I believe it in the people and their power to fight.
And I think we see that. Again, we are in this gray zone, right? It may be the twilight and it may be the pre-dawn hours.
And we choose to make these the pre-dawn hours. And seeing other people make that choice is what keeps me going, Ejeris. I don't know.
What about you?
Ejeris
Oh, what gives me hope is, is everyone I know extending with everything they have to continue to keep building power. Similar to what you're saying, we're in an upsurge of activism and of organizing and of people who never thought of themselves as political.
Tarso
That's right.
Ejeris
Getting involved and saying no. And if we harness that right, we have everything we need. And that's the question, right?
If we harness that right, if we inspire people, right? So I want to talk to you forever, but I'll just say if the lesson from this episode with Tarso today, I think is really how are you going to get involved? How are you going to get involved?
And how are you going to be a part of the struggle against fascism and authoritarianism because I think then we can fight this all together. And, friend, I want to talk to you forever. And this has been amazing.
Thank you for joining us three seasons in a row and giving us the roadmap.
Tarso
It's always my pleasure to be here. Ejeris, I appreciate so much this ongoing conversation of ours. You helped to shape my thinking.
And if I could say one last thing before the sands run through our little hourglass here, it's that I think for the likes of you and me, democracy and formal democracy has been one of multiple potential vehicles for advancing freedom. Where freedom is the question and democracy is a mechanism. And I think, back to your question about part of what gives me hope is, I think for more and more people, the fact that freedom is under threat is what's become clear.
The ambivalence about democracy as a vehicle for advancing freedom is deep and real. The commitment in the bones to freedom is not equivocal. And so I think we are in a moment where the fight for the possibility of freedom in the United States is deeply, deeply resonant.
And how it relates to democracy and governance is what we in Brazil will call an abacaxi, a pineapple. It's a very thorny problem. It's very sweet if you can get to the inside, and it's very prickly to get there.
But if we keep our focus on freedom, I think we're in conversation with the masses of people in this country. And so, invite that a touchstone of freedom in moments where the questions of democracy make and found us.
Ejeris
Tarso, this has been amazing. Thank you for joining us, and thank you for everything you have to share, and thanks for all the work you're doing in the world. It's an inspiration.
I appreciate you.
Tarso
Thank you, Ejeris. Pleased to be with you, even with my gravelly digging myself out of a bad case of the flu voice situation here.
Ejeris
We've reached the end of today's episode, and while the pressure continues, I also feel so very committed to keep growing the movement against fascism. I hope you do too. Now this episode has a lot to chew on.
Tarso explained the challenges and opportunities we have within this current stage in fascism and authoritarianism. We discussed what it means when the consolidation that we attempted to prevent is in progress, and what it means to resist when so many of us are experiencing higher threats. I think one of the most important parts to think about is how each of us can still be a part of the resistance, show up for our communities, and take care of ourselves simultaneously.
And I know that's a tall order. We discussed some terms that may be new to you, from SLAP lawsuits to electoral autocracy, and the first and second reconstruction. As this is a learning space, in addition to the listening guide that we're going to be placing in the Resource Hub, we've also created a glossary for you.
Hopefully, it supports your learning and activism, but also feel free to send us any and all questions. Now, if you're a fan of this work, we are still raising money, so please donate at fascismbarometer.org, and it will support us to create resources. We appreciate you joining us, and we're working very hard monitoring The Fascism Barometer for you.
Together, we can keep fascism at bay. Watch the skies, subscribe to this feed, as we have so many more amazing episodes coming up. And please share this show with a friend, get involved, and deepen your activism wherever you can.
We need you, and together, we can fight fascism. Our producer is Phil Surkis. Our theme is by McLeet Hadiro.
This podcast is a project of Ejerie Labs. I'm your movement meteorologist, Ejeris Dixon. See you next time on The Fascism Barometer.