Host Ejeris Dixon and movement strategist Tarso Ramos return for part 2 two of this special episode, "What Time Is It on the Clock of Fascism?"
In the second half of this vital conversation, host Ejeris Dixon and movement strategist Tarso Ramos go beyond diagnosing the rise of fascism—they map out what we must do to resist it. From learning lessons of South Africa’s Freedom Charter and United Democratic Front to organizing a “bigger we” capable of defeating fascism and authoritarianism, Ramos shares both cautionary tales and hopeful strategies. This episode insists that there is no going back, and that the only path forward is through collective creativity, broad coalitions, and a relentless commitment to building power.
The following is presented to you in “around sound.” It was recorded with whatever was lying around.
Tarso
If we think that we are going to defeat fascism and authoritarianism, we need a bigger we. And so this definitely involves organizing people who are not part of our beloved community, but must be and will be, because we will win. The alternative is unimaginable.
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. In each episode, we work to learn what fascism is and what we can do about it from the perspectives of each of our guests.
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. From the regime's efforts to ensure that the Smithsonian erased the histories of people of color and calling these histories anti-American, we also have the administration's plans to expand immigration raids and kidnappings in Chicago, Portland, Seattle and NYC.
There's threats of additional National Guard city takeovers, particularly in Chicago, and there's continued devastation in Gaza and the repression of pro-Palestinian movements. So yes, fascism is indeed rising. And yet, the people are responding.
There are so many actions to take to defend our communities, and to continue to push back their power and build ours. We are not powerless. In fact, our resistance is growing.
So as the fascism barometer keeps rising, so do we. I know we can navigate the storm, and I believe that we will come out the other side. But we're going to need all of us.
And as we've said before, fascism is best fought with massive amounts of people power. And that's what we're building here. Thank you for listening and for joining our movements.
Today we have a shorter episode, really focusing on part two of our conversation with Tarso Ramos and what time it is on the clock of fascism. Ramos is a long time researcher and movement advisor on fascism and authoritarianism. Brazilian born, Ramos was raised in the US after his family was exiled by that country's military regime.
Our last episode featured part one of this conversation, and we were talking about the stages in autocracy. Autocracy is a type of dictatorship or strongman rule that fascists often lean into once they've amassed a certain amount of power. Now, within these stages, we talked about attempt, breakthrough and consolidation.
And that according to researchers, there is about 12 to 18 months to prevent an autocracy from moving from breakthrough, which is where we currently are, to consolidation, which allows for one person to dominate the government with unchecked power. In today's episode, we focus on what it means to resist consolidation and a deeper dive into some resources for our movements. And I hope you get as much from it as I do.
So, under this historically fast, fascist and authoritarian advance, what are the key goals that all of us who want to resist what's happening - What is our job? It sounds like you've talked about how protest is important, how the elections are still important, but kind of what are our marching orders?
Tarso
Oh, goodness. There are so many things that we need to do. There are so many ways to fight fascism, Ejeris.
We won't be able to talk about them all. But I do want to note a few general categories that I think are really important. They can inform our thinking.
And the thing is to be as creative as possible about what we individually and collectively, especially how we collectively bring our creativity to advancing in these ways. We certainly are responsible for defending and protecting the most vulnerable and the most targeted, right? Yeah.
So that is our responsibility. It is also our responsibility to develop significant counter power. Part of what makes fascism and authoritarianism possible is when there is a general crisis of legitimacy of the political and economic order.
There is a general crisis of the legitimacy of the US economic and political and social orders on top of other crises, climatic crises and other crises. And so unfortunately, there is not a powerful opposition party in this country.
Ejeris
No.
Tarso
There is another major party. It does not behave as an opposition party, and it is not attempting to restructure the society into advanced ideas and proposals at the scale of the crises that we're experiencing. And so there is a vacuum there into which the fascists and authoritarians have marched.
It is our responsibility to develop, counter, power, a set of proposals. By this, I don't mean a long laundry list of policies, as some wants are inclined to do. It's an alternative vision of the society, right?
Yeah, I think about the Black Freedom Struggle in South Africa, where the Freedom Charter was an expression of this. The Freedom Charter wasn't cooked up by three national policy people, the Black Freedom Movement, and behind closed doors - 50,000 people, organizers, went out into communities and had conversations about, what would be the characteristics of a free society? What should replace apartheid?
How would you know that you are free? And to document, right, to give a sense of what is that platform? What's the platform for where we're trying to go?
There has to be an alternative pull of attraction. There has to be an alternative project. It can't just be, we're against this because we're not trying to defend what preceded it.
We're not trying to go back to Biden or Obama or Clinton or any of that stuff.
Ejeris
Because all the problems that, for some people, made them think that MAGA or Trump was the answer, all those problems will still be there.
Tarso
That's right, that's right.
Ejeris
All of people's economic needs will still be there. All of the issues with policing, all of the issues with the climate, all of these issues will still be there. So yeah, going back to before is not a viable…
Tarso
There's no going back to before. And I think that's the most important lesson here. People say that the MAGA folks are captured by nostalgia.
They want to go back to the 1950s. We can't have a thing where people who are fighting, who are fighting fascism and authoritarianism, think that the answer is going back to some kind of previous thing. We're not doing that.
So I do think that's important. And I take inspiration from Mamdani’s campaign in New York, which very directly is competing for base, for MAGA base. By redefining, we are tickling, what are the crises people are actually experiencing, right?
Is the crisis that people are taking your jobs, or is the problem that nobody can afford to live in New York City? That we have a totally affordable system because we're all being exploited for the benefit of a really pretty small class of millionaires and billionaires, which is definitely the case. Now, we're being exploited unevenly, we're being oppressed unevenly, but we all have that problem.
Let's deal with that. And finding a new way to define the we that is not about race, it's not about nation, it's not about gender identity, it's not about being a man and providing, it's about we're on the same boat together. So I do think that we have to compete with base.
And this is one of the most important things. If we think that we are going to defeat fascism and authoritarianism with the same coalition that hasn't been able to defeat neoliberals with its less aggressive use of militarized violence and so forth, we will not. We will not.
We need a bigger we. And so this definitely involves organizing people who are not part of our communities now, who are not part of our beloved community, but must be and will be, because we will win. The alternative is unimaginable.
So that's a big part of the project there. There's another part of the project that is related to this moving beyond our immediate communities and moving into the community of forward advancement. And that is, if I can also draw an analogy to the Black Freedom Movement in South Africa, the ANC, the South African Communist Party, a number of other folks, radical trade unionists came to the conclusion that they did not have sufficient power to defeat apartheid.
And so in addition to advancing this alternative organizing project, which was the Freedom Charter, they also built something called the United Democratic Front. And the United Democratic Front included lots of folks who benefited from apartheid, but who come to the conclusion for their own reasons that apartheid had to go. It had to go because it was a global embarrassment.
It had to go because the freedom movement had made it bad for business for a lot of those folks. A lot of reasons that were not about the freedom of black people. Let's be clear.
But it was a strategic move by the part of the black freedom movement to say, we need a broader front, and the points of unity are going to be really basic. So the United Democratic Front in South Africa had really minimal points of unity, basic stuff. Universal franchise.
Everyone gets to vote. Non-racial democracy is how they phrase what we might call multi-racial democracy here in this time. Equality before the law.
Quick transition to elections. The unbanning of political parties. Minimal points of unity, right?
Not agreement about what the economic structure of the country would be. Not agreement about how we were going to deal with the chronic multi-generational inequality of resources, the generational trauma of state violence. All those things were going to get sorted after the elections.
Based on who? Who prevailed, right?
Ejeris
Yeah.
Tarso
So, building the widest possible anti-fascist coalition is critical. And this is a very uncomfortable territory for progressives, for electists, for freedom-loving people.
Ejeris
Yes.
Tarso
In the case of the UDF, which was a very complicated space, I'm not going to romanticize it. It was, I think, necessary, but very complicated. People were sitting down with folks who were, they were also in on-going struggle with.
This wasn't, let's set aside our differences, and we're all going to pretend that we're on the same page. This was, no, we're going to continue fighting you at the mines. We're going to continue fighting you in the streets.
We're going to continue fighting you with our boycotts. And for this piece, we're going to struggle to defeat apartheid because that's our point of unity. And to be able to both build the strongest possible counterforce and then to build the broadest possible coalition to tear down the thing that you're trying to replace so that you can then compete for what comes next – Those are lessons that I think we need to apply to our context in the United States.
We're going to need all kinds of folks to defect at a personal level, at an institutional level, at the level of whole geographic communities. We are going to need to be as welcoming and humble about the need for folks who have their epiphanies whenever they have them who are ready to defect.
Whenever they are ready to do that, not when we wanted them to, not when we needed them to in many cases, because we need to be clear that we need the most power possible in order to unseat the authoritarian and fascist from power. And that's going to take a lot more than we currently have organized. So I think defend and protect the most vulnerable, build the most powerful and visionary alternative, both to fascism and to the neoliberalism, into whose crisis it is flourishing, right?
And build the broadest possible coalition of people who won't all come along with us on the journey for what replaces this, but many and most of them will come along for taking this down so that there's the possibility of a better future for everyone. I think if we find ways to articulate across those three challenges, those three areas of contest, we'll be on the right track. And there's many, there's lots of specific permutations, right, and examples of what that can look like.
It's going to take all of us. It's going to take the artists. It's going to take the nurses.
It's going to take the midwives. It's going to take the accountants. It's going to take the lawyers.
It's going to take the former CIA people who know how to get the intel and they were not going to be part of this. It's going to take all kinds of people. You know what?
It already is involving many of those people. We already have defectors from an incredible range, from military to intelligence to cops to teachers to nurses, everyday people to workers exploited in factories, to those who are exploited ways we can't even see because it's all kinds of people are going to be part of this movement and are already becoming part of it.
And that gives me hope and that gives me confidence that if we step out our game and we're honest about our conditions and we're honest about the time frame in which we're working, it doesn't mean we give up after 12 or 18 months. It means we keep on fighting, but we understand and we put into motion the things that we can put into motion now before it becomes increasingly difficult. That with time and with commitment and with a lot of love and a lot of sacrifice, we prevail.
Ejeris
Tarso, I think this was incredible. And you've given all of us a lot to think about, both how we defend and protect targeted communities, but also how we build the broadest, most powerful anti-fascist movement possible. Thank you so much for being on The Barometer with us today.
Tarso
It's not only my pleasure, Ejeris Dixon, it's my privilege. And if I could just love up on you for a minute, I think the work of the fascism barometer is so important. It is so important that we find ways of talking about the everyday lived experience of authoritarian and fascist advance, that we do not cede the what time it is question to the political pundits, to the people with advanced degrees in universities who are mostly not talking to our people.
Ejeris
No.
Tarso
Right? And so this has been a really important platform. I learn a lot from you.
I learned a lot from you and my sister, from your other guests. I'm a supporter, not only a political supporter, I'm a financial supporter when I can of this broadcast. I encourage all your listeners also who are able to do that, to support this.
You know, your labor, your good intentions, your commitment to the movement does not pay for this broadcast. I'm quite sure. And so it's a treasure.
And thank you for making this really important contribution to making us all smarter and more committed. And more ready for the fight that we're in the fight that's coming.
Ejeris
Thank you. I'm so grateful to be in the fight with you.
Tarso
So I just wanted to share that to help me better understand the far right tech billionaires behind Doge and the Surveillance State, folks who might rightly think of as tech fascists. I'm currently reading The Contrarian, which is Max Chafkin's excellent biography of Peter Thiel, who was one of the principal financiers of JD Vance's campaign, was on the transition team for both Trump both in 2016 and again more recently, whose companies including Palantir not only profiting from but are really driving this surveillance capital in ways that affect all our communities in really scary ways. So I highly recommend that.
I also want to recommend the recent Brazilian film, I'm Still Here, Ainda Estouarqui is what it's called in Portuguese. It won the 2025 Oscar for best foreign film. It's streaming right now on Netflix if you've got Netflix or know somebody with Netflix and it looks at the political violence of Brazil's military dictatorship through the lens of its impact on one formerly comfortable middle class family.
The film opened just as Brazil's Trump-like former president Jair Bolsonaro was indicted for his own coup attempt which was modeled on Trump's stop the steal attempts in the January 6th attack on Congress. And it landed right on time and it's created a nationwide conversation about what it would mean to go back to military dictatorship in Brazil, something that most people alive in Brazil today never experienced, right? So this has ended up being a real indication for them.
It's also a cautionary tale. This is also the example of what happens when you don't have the spidey sense to understand that when the secret police show up at your door, you do not go with them. You have any way of not going with them.
So it's a cautionary tale in that way about the importance of these kinds of conversations, Ejeris, that you're bringing to the community, these conversations about what time it is. So we could all take the proper precautions. We can all understand what it means to be brave and what it means to be cautious in a sensible way so we can live to find another day.
So thank you for this. And check out those resources.
Ejeris
Thank you so much, Tarso. We're so grateful to have you.
We've reached the end of today's episode, and while the pressure continues, I also feel more equipped and resourced to keep fighting fascism. I hope you do too. In this two-part series, we talked about the specific advances that fascists are making in these times, and how we resist them.
And while we all can feel the pressure that this 12 to 18-month window brings, it can also push us to ensure that our resistance is as effective as we can possibly make it over the next year. And if you're still looking to find your role, please check out the resources on our website at fascismbarometer.org. We also talked through some concepts that may be uncomfortable, from this incredibly broad front that's needed to defeat fascism, and this idea of being in coordination with people that you may have deep disagreements with.
And I admit, this work is also uncomfortable for me. But when I look at the historical defeats of fascists and authoritarians, these broad collaborations are pretty essential. We'll keep discussing these concepts around how we build the power needed to defeat fascism, and we'll also place some resources on this, in the resource hub on the website to supplement.
We appreciate you joining us, and we're working hard monitoring the Fascism Barometer for you, and together, we can keep fascism at bay. Watch the skies and subscribe to this feed, as we only have a few more episodes left this season, and we can't wait to share them with you. And when you share this show with a friend – you've got it. You 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.