Voting in a Time of Fascism
On May 16, New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein released another (his third? tenth?) podcast episode where he excruciatingly ponders the precise shape and trajectory of the authoritarian regime descending upon the United States. In this episode, he hosted a couple writers (Zach Beauchamp and Andrew Marantz) of recent pieces about Trump, “competitive authoritarianism,” and the present situation. In their discussion, Klein asserted (at 1:02:30): “the Democratic opposition… is still processing, in its own ways, 2024. It has learned, I think, certain lessons that I think are relatively consensus at this moment among its leadership. Democrats had, in fits and starts, gone too far left. They really… really politically screwed up, and substantively, on the border. They got crosswise on the trans edge case issues that they never should have allowed to, to find them… this is a set of things that I think they all believe, but they don’t know what comes next.”
Klein’s logic here is twisted. He directly inverts the reality of what happened in 2024. The left did not run that race, centrists did, and they lost. The Democrats have not run a left-leaning, base-mobilization presidential strategy since 2008 and 2012 (the last times we decisively won). If Ezra Klein is right about Democratic leadership coming to consensus on such a stupid and objectively wrong takeaway from 2024, then the party is in real trouble, and, as we describe in “Milwaukee Collaborationists”, we need to get to work pushing those leaders out.
Our side has to win
Fascists are currently taking over the most apocalyptically powerful country human history has ever known. Don’t want to imagine a fascist leader having their last day in a bunker while sitting on the US nuclear stockpile? Yeah, us neither. So, let’s prevent that!
In such terrifying circumstances, it makes good sense to be afraid, and a natural response to fear is caution. Sometimes though, caution can lead to inaction, and inaction is deadly. The only way Trump leaves office without a massive, potentially civilization-ending civil war is if we beat him, emphatically and thoroughly. We need to win, and centrists don’t win. Centrists lose. They lose, and they blame everyone but themselves, and then they tighten their grip on the party.
During the 2024 election cycle, centrist Democrats used institutional power to systematically avoid involving the voting public and low ranking members in party decisions. First, Joe Biden prevented an open Democratic primary by running as an incumbent despite being too old and too unpopular. Even Ezra Klein knew he’d lose. The party further deterred a primary challenge by advancing a conservative red state, South Carolina, to the top of the primary schedule.
On the campaign trail, team Biden chose a disastrous strategy: reach out to moderate Republicans, fund a genocide, and villanize migrants, rather than mobilizing the Democratic base around economic change, taxing billionaires, and checking corporate power. Then he completely shit the bed on national television. Despite his inability to join words into sentences, centrists helped Joe Biden hold on to the candidacy for weeks, preventing a mini-primary, or any debate where a replacement candidate could be vetted and democratically chosen. Instead, party leaders anointed Kamala Harris his successor, again, dodging input from party members and the public. After an exciting first week of picking a progressive running mate and promising change, while mocking and shaming Republican bigots, Harris returned to the disastrous Biden strategy. She discouraged or dismissed the activist left, while embracing Republican war criminals. Finally, she said she would “do nothing different” from Biden’s exceedingly unpopular policies, and thus, she lost.
The 2024 race was not a fluke. There’s a lot of attention on Biden and his inner circle right now, but centrists up and down the party were responsible for what happened. Last year was just the most recent and most extreme example of a long tradition of centrists squeezing control and fucking up. Biden and his supporters were also ruthless in the 2020 primary to prevent a left populist challenge. After fighting against and demobilizing the most enthusiastic members of the party, that election was so close Trump could easily peddle his big lie about voter fraud and the stolen election. In 2016, notorious centrist Hilary Clinton and her backers adopted the same strategy: ruthless moves against the popular left half of the party, followed by outreach to Republicans.
It is the people with control who are responsible for failures, and the consequence of failure should be removal from control. Instead, centrists have failed upward, maintaining control of the Democrats while losing and watching the United States careen rightward.
Wisconsin’s centrists
During the election, centrists like Chris Siniki, Ann Jacobs, Peter Burgelis, and Karen Kirsch demanded unquestioned loyalty to Biden’s disastrous strategy and his war crimes. There was a brief opportunity to change direction when Biden finally stepped down, but these business friendly centrists, xenophobes, bootlickers, and genocide freaks ramped up pressure to unify behind the status quo, despite the electorate obviously craving change. Even Ryan Clancy, Milwaukee’s most controversial socialist Democrat caved to this pressure. He had been holding back his endorsement until Harris articulated her platform and contrasted herself from Biden. On August 2, he betrayed his activist supporters and endorsed her. Then, Harris revealed her platform: xenophobia, trans-erasure, and more war crimes.
To be clear, most of us at Milwaukee Beagle also held our puppy noses, shielded our tear-filled eyes from the genocide, the border xenophobia, the silence in the face of Trump’s transphobic attacks, the coziness with war criminals, the tone-deaf “I wouldn’t do anything different” of Kamala Harris. We voted for her. We, like Clancy, did what the centrists demanded of us, but that wasn’t good enough for them. They want us to also take the blame for their failure. Centrists are obsessed with blame. But they don’t blame the people with power, the party leadership who made the actual decisions. Even worse, they don’t blame moderate Republicans for whom Trump was not a deal-breaker. No, like Klein above, their fingers only point left. This begs the question: if you bully the base of the Democratic party, but coddle moderate Republicans, what kind of Democrat are you?
Forward!
There is a difference between 2024 and now. Last year, everyone was clouded by fear of political polarization. Election anxiety and the rolly-coaster nightmare the media loves putting society through every four years, led politicians to compromise principle and reach across the aisle. Fear of a looming civil war led many to grasp desperately at the unrealistic dream of bipartisan peace Biden peddled. That fear and caution enabled Trump’s victory, and now we see the consequences of appeasement.
Except Centrists don’t. They respond to fear not with solidarity and community defense, but by withdrawing and protecting what they individually have. So, they will continue to appease, accommodate, and collaborate with fascists if we do not stop them. Every day that the Democrats remain calm, waiting for the rule of law, or reasonable Republicans, or midterm election pressure to stop Trump, his administration spreads its rot and tightens its grip on the reins of power. Trump is floating a third term and has been undermining the credibility of any election he didn’t win since 2018. If we remain calm and wait for the midterms, the midterms may never come.
It is also too late for a third party. Here in the US we have one of the world’s oldest, dumbest constitutions. Our founders didn’t consider the role of political parties, and they inadvertently hardwired the system to always only have two. It will take years and massive momentum for a third party to supplant the Democrats without splitting the vote and guaranteeing huge losses in the next race. Last November, Bernie Sanders mused about leaving the Democrats, but he didn’t. If a Sanders-led breakaway party had started building months ago, they might be rendering the Democratic Party irrelevant right now, setting themselves up for midterm victories in the fall of 2026. But, they didn’t, so that’s not an option.
We are left with taking over the Democratic Party, removing the collaborators, and finally running base-mobilization antifascist campaigns. The embrace of genocide denial, xenophobia, bootlicking, and bigotry by Wisconsin’s Democratic leaders during the 2024 election cycle were not just moral failings, but also clear strategic errors in the face of rising fascism. The people who made those errors, and who want to keep making them, must be removed from their positions as soon as possible. The race for WISDEMS chair is one place to start. Local spring elections are another. If Wisconsin’s left Democrats are in fighting shape by then, we will be poised to win state legislative primaries, and even to heavily influence the congressional and gubernatorial primaries.
We can beat Trump without a civil war and a massive disaster, but we need to get his collaborators within our party out of the way first.
