Milwaukee Collaborationists
In Milwaukee Beagle’s first article, published almost a year ago, we identified Republicans as a fascist party. At that time, we needed to put out a follow-up explaining our position. A few months later, even the most establishment Democrats, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, many prominent Republicans, and 49% of registered voters, had joined us in recognizing Trump’s fascism. Unfortunately, after losing, Democrats started telling us bedtime stories about appropriate ways to confront fascism: mainly donating to Democrats, even though they had spent four years neglecting, and even enabling, the fascists’ rise.
In office, Donald Trump has gone beyond the worst fears of centrists. He is running the country via illegal executive orders, and Truth Social posts. His administration is stealing congressional powers, ignoring court orders, renditioning or disappearing targeted ethnic groups, celebrating when they flee the country, and openly pursuing ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
He’s cutting social programs to deliver tax breaks to the rich, threatening the civil liberties of everyone, and expanding police powers. He’s blowing through democratic checks and balances and retaliating against those who oppose him, or who oppose bigotry in general. Trump continues his pattern of floating extremely outrageous ideas to get away with implementing merely extreme ones, and then coming back around to pursue the outrageous plans later.
Donald Trump is a fascist.
What Trump is doing is a fascist takeover. So, what does that make those who, despite expressing concern about him, nevertheless host him, work with him, and enable his projects? They are fascist collaborationists. Every fascist regime in history has had a loyal opposition, junior partners who legitimize fascist power by pantomiming outrage at what’s happening, while standing in the way of the more robust or extraparlaimentary resistance efforts that actually stop it. If we are going to fight effectively, antifascists need to recognize, delegitimize, and defeat these collaborators, as well as the fascists they shelter and enable.
National politics is not the focus of Milwaukee Beagle’s work, but national events shape local events, and there are clearly fascist collaborators in Wisconsin. Most Wisconsin Republicans are overt fascists. They march in lock-step with Trump, or create local knock-offs of national fascist programs. Rare dissenters in the Wisconsin Republican Party are self-motivated and ridiculous. For example, Dale Kooyenga, a former Republican legislator and leader of the local business community, criticized Trump in a Journal Sentinel interview. His concerns were not about immigrants or other human beings who Trump harms and targets, but about tariffs hurting profits, and the business leaders who find themselves afraid to criticize the regime they supported and helped install. Good job Dale, way to stay selfish, inhumane, and cowardly even while speaking up.
Unfortunately, many members of the Democratic Party here in Wisconsin and Milwaukee aren’t much better. We have long written about Wisconsin’s centrists bending over backward to find or facilitate bad bipartisan compromises with Wisconsin’s undemocratic, fascist-backed Republican Party.
Collaborationism must end.
Back in 2021, Joe Biden could have held Trump accountable for January Sixth and other crimes. It worked for Lula against Bolsanaro in Brazil. Biden chose to “move forward” instead. Even worse, during his presidency, Biden refused to undo many harmful Trump policies, or even shift the narrative off of far-right talking points, especially around immigration. His aggressive deportation policy and refusal to acknowledge the humanity of migrants on the campaign trail laid the groundwork for Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele to giddily bypass due process and put hundreds of people in a foreign gulag. When Biden/Harris funded Israeli genocide, blocked Palestinian delegates from the DNC, and ignored police crackdowns at campus occupations, they laid the groundwork for Trump’s ICE agents to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and others. Every time fascists label a group subhuman, they are starting a process that ends with dehumanizing everyone. Blocking that process by actively standing in solidarity with the targeted group is a foundational civic duty in a free society.
The Democratic Party has been controlled by people who fail that duty, both nationally and locally. We go in-depth on how that failure plays out during elections in “Voting in a Time of Facism,” released concurrently with this article. Here are a few examples of how it plays out in policy:
Collaborationists are the people who continue to expand police funding and powers even as Trump proceeds with a plan to turn police into a nationalized force that answers only to the President. Here in Milwaukee, that means Mayor Cavalier Johnson and County Executive David Crowley. Also, no one on the County Board or Common Council will even try to stop them anymore. They are all doing collaborationism.
Collaborationists also refuse to galvanize populist support around inequality, the climate crisis, universal healthcare, and decarceration because they are just as indebted to their elite donors as conservatives are to the fascist ultrarich. Tony Evers and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin break fundraising records relying on big money donors. This deepens Democratic dependency on rich elites who often don’t mind rising fascism and require a bland do-nothing political platform, making the party perennially unpopular, and ultimately, losers.
Collaborationists like local lawyer and Democratic Party influence-peddler Ann Jacobs befoul our party with genocide denial as Israel practices forced starvation and pursues full extermination of the Palestinian people.
Wisconsin collaborationists are ignoring climate change by wasting water and energy, and even risking nuclear meltdown to create data centers that aim to replace human purpose with idiotic artificial intelligence. They are destroying the planet to rush towards a future hell born out of dystopian fiction, but no one in the establishment of either party dares object.
Collaborationists get out of the way when ICE comes to capture people. They marginalize migrants, focusing on narratives of innocence and legalistic intricacy rather than broadly defending all humans from torture and inhumane confinement. The liberal elites and conservative elites both recognize that they are running our world toward a mass extinction event, and seem to have convinced politicians of both parties that shuffling the consequences onto people on the other side of a border is an adequate response.
Anyone who votes or leans Democrat and does not want to shuffle quietly into a Trumpist police state needs to recognize these and other signs of collaborationism. We need to identify and resist the politicians ushering us toward fascism and dystopia. We need to demand more of Democrats, and ideally build an antifascist core within the party that welcomes activists, supports those who are already present, and when necessary, pushes the collaborationists out.
A friend recently told a story about a cowardly advisor shooting down her research proposal about people seeking abortion access because it would be too hard to fund or pursue in “the current environment”. This is so maddening. The actual “current environment” is: most people are pissed off at a small group of fringy forced-birth assholes who wriggled their way into power so they could impose incredibly unpopular misogynist policies on everyone. The cowardly advisor is not afraid of the abortion-rights supporting majority, even though we are more numerous, and more powerful. We just aren’t asserting our power. If we did, we could define the “current environment” instead of the marginal forced-birth fringe. We need to make antifascism scary again. Part of doing so is publicly exposing collaborationists, fighting them, and replacing them.