here we go again
notes on where we are and what comes next
At 5:30am EST on Wednesday morning, my alarm went off. Four minutes later, the Associated Press called the state of Wisconsin—and therefore, the 2024 United States presidential election—for Donald Trump.
A few months ago, this outcome had seemed all but unthinkable. In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in July and the subsequent coronation of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, there was a brief window of time where it appeared that the Democrats had managed to actually get their shit together for once; that they might actually be able to keep Trump out of the White House for a second term. Even for the most principled radicals among my leftist peers, most of whom (like me) had already resolved to vote third-party or not vote at all in protest of the Biden-Harris administration’s shameful complicity in the Gaza genocide, there seemed to be an unspoken collective sigh of relief at the knowledge that a Trump victory was now much less likely than it had been before Biden dropped out.
But three and a half months later, here we are. I have little interest in adding my voice to the already-deafening chorus of armchair analysts on platforms like this one, all clamoring to offer their own postmortems of what happened and what went wrong. We all know what happened; we all know what went wrong. The Democrats simply did what they do best—squandering whatever modest breath of momentum they briefly had by failing to offer anything remotely resembling an alternative to the status quo and steadfastly refusing to listen to the voters’ clearly-stated demands on what is, beyond a doubt, the defining moral litmus test of our time.
After 2016, when I was much younger and far more naive in my political outlook, I had hoped that the shock of that result would serve as a much-needed wake-up call for the Democratic Party. Perhaps, I told myself then, the party establishment would read the writing on the wall, and maybe even take steps towards becoming a true party of the working class. This time around, I harbor no such delusions. The results of Tuesday’s election have laid bare for all to see what so many of us on the left have been saying all along—that the Democratic Party cannot and will be our salvation; that the antidote to fascism will come not only from outside the two-party system, but from outside the rigged game of electoral politics itself. The time for civility and respectability, for playing by the rules and working to ‘change the system from within,’ is long since past. Contrary to what the liberal establishment loves to claim, our present political situation is not one of even-handed ‘polarization’ or ‘division’—it’s an all-out, multi-front war against the very essence of fascism itself. The only question that matters now—the question that each of us needs to seriously ask ourselves—is what we are willing to do to fight it.
• • •
As shocking and horrifying as Trump’s election in 2016 was, there are a number of factors that set our current moment apart from the last time Trump entered the White House—and, I think, that make this moment far more dangerous than 2016 ever was. Chief among these is the fact that the MAGA movement is infinitely better organized and better prepared than ever before to actually take over the reins of power and use them to enact a reactionary, neo-fascist agenda. In many ways, and particularly in its early months, the first Trump Administration was as farcical as it was disastrous. It was both easy and comforting to laugh at the bumbling incompetence and endless succession of minor and major scandals that, to many liberals, only underscored how woefully unfit Trump was to govern. Even as the administration pursued incredibly harmful policies, there was still an overwhelming sense that Trump was an idiot who had no idea what the hell he was doing—and if we couldn’t take comfort in anything else, we could at least take comfort in that.
We have no reason, however, to expect any such dysfunction this time around—the main reason for this being that Trump himself is, in many ways, just a figurehead. From the notorious Project 2025 to the lesser-known but arguably even more insidious America First Policy Institute, there is an entire army of political operatives, think tank staffers, policy advisors, and bureaucrats-in-waiting who have spent the last four years patiently preparing behind the scenes to implement a sweeping reactionary agenda the moment Trump enters office—especially a GOP caucus packed with Trump loyalists.
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Ever since Trump first came onto the political scene in June of 2015, the word ‘fascism’ has been bandied about with increasing frequency and conviction to describe his particular mix of xenophobic, masculinist nationalism and nostalgia for a chimerical golden age when America was still, in his words, “great.” I think it’s important, however, to be specific about what we mean when we call Trump a ‘fascist,’ because his campaign to mainstream fascism in the United States has been a remarkably long game, taking place over the span of nearly a decade. In 2016, Trump began sowing the seeds for a uniquely American brand of fascist politics, stoking a MAGA-fascist faction within the Republican Party—both at the grassroots and in the halls of power—that, as it reached critical mass, was able to engage in a fierce battle for hegemony on the American right. After being unseated in 2020, Trump spent the next four years of the Biden Administration working to cement the total fascist takeover of his party, while simultaneously bringing openly fascist rhetoric squarely into the political mainstream. And now, as he prepares to take power once again in just a few months, the groundwork has been laid for Trump—with the entirety of the American right now standing firmly behind him—to apply the fascist style that he has spent the last eight years cultivating to the actual practice and administration of government.
This feeds into the second key difference at play between our current moment and 2016—the complete and utter collapse of the ‘anti-Trump Republican’ as an extant, let alone salient, political force. In the early days of the first Trump presidency, it was common to see liberals lionizing the John McCains and Jeff Flakes and Mitt Romneys of the world, uplifting them as saviors of democracy and conveniently ignoring their own deeply reactionary track records in the laughably naive hope that these old-school conservatives would ‘put country over party’ and resist the Trump agenda from within the GOP caucus. Eight years later, however, what was then already a dying breed has since all but gone extinct, with most of its leading lights either having been pushed out of politics altogether or else having sold themselves to the MAGA movement in exchange for Trump’s goodwill. The fact that the Democrats in this electiom failed so spectacularly to recognize this basic and glaringly obvious reality, instead trotting out the likes of Liz Cheney in a desperate attempt to appeal to some imagined and entirely spurious notion of ‘bipartisan consensus,’ betrays the astounding ineptitude, utter political vacuity, and incurable existential rot at the heart of the Democratic establishment.
The significance of this political shift cannot be overstated. With an increasingly likely Republican governing trifecta on the horizon, a judiciary that has already been thoroughly captured by the right wing, and the last shreds of opposition within his own party safely relegated to irrelevance, there is virtually nothing left standing in the way of Trump’s ability to ram through as extreme and fascistic of an agenda that he wants—nothing, that is, except for us. As long as there are still people willing to get organized, to escalate, and to resist—to put their comfort and their bodies on the line, and do whatever it takes to defend their communities against fascist violence and repression—there is still hope. After all, until the last light goes out, there is no such thing as total darkness.
• • •
There’s a famous quote by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, from one of the Prison Notebooks that Gramsci wrote during the 11 years that he spent in a Fascist prison cell. “The crisis,” Gramsci observed, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” (The quote is also often written less accurately, but more poetically, as: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”) This quote from Gramsci, particularly in its more evocative formulation, often makes the rounds in moments such as this one. But as I was doomscrolling on Twitter on Wednesday morning, I came across another quote, offering a slightly different perspective on Gramsci’s observation. This quote was from the late Marxist historian Mike Davis, who wrote in a 2022 essay for the New Left Review’s “Sidecar” blog a few months before his passing:
Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.
Insofar as the ruling class is concerned, I agree with Davis on this point. For more or less the entire duration of my conscious life, I have seen the ‘ruling class brain tumour’ that Davis so rightly criticizes steadily continue to grow and metastasize in ever more visible ways—with predictable and increasingly devastating effects.
I was born, after all, in October of 2000, in the waning days of what the ruling class and its intellectual elites had taken, with characteristic arrogance, to calling the ‘end of history.’ 11 months and 8 days later, a Boeing 767 flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center—and with a great deal of heaving and groaning, like a rusted machine that had lain neglected for years only to be suddenly and torturously jolted back to life, history started back up again. Since then, historical events have unfolded as a succession of interlocked and ever-escalating crises—one long and iterative catastrophe, continuously hurling wreckage at the feet of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history.” And to each of the countless crises that make up this ongoing catastrophe, the ruling-class response has been disastrously myopic, characterized by a lack of foresight that would almost be impressive if its consequences weren’t so horrifying.
In his essay, Davis describes this lack of foresight as a form of “pathological presentism,” in which every calculation and decision is made “on the basis of short-term bottom-lines” so that the elite may “consume all the good things of the earth within their lifetimes.” He’s right about this. Where I differ from his analysis, however, is in the skepticism he expresses about the possibility of whether “something new will be or could be born” out of that old world whose long and violent death we currently find ourselves living through. In spite of everything, I remain convinced not only that something new can be born out of this wreckage, but that it must. Davis is right to observe that it will not be born from the ruling class, but it’s worth remembering that the elites are not the only ones with power or agency. My faith lies, as I think everyone’s should, with the masses of people who have expressed time and time again—in the streets and at the ballot box, through union drives and student encampments, in small and spectacular ways alike—that they are no longer content to accept the way things are, that they are willing to struggle and to sacrifice in the hopes of a better future.
Every crisis brings with it an opportunity, and it is incumbent upon the left—the only ones, now as always, with a coherent analysis of the problem and vision for how to solve it—to seize the opportunity that the current crisis presents to us. We would do well to remember the final stanza of the classic union song, “Solidarity Forever”:
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.
We can, in fact, bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. But before that new world can be brought to birth, the old one must have already been reduced to ashes. And while the spark has already been ignited by forces beyond our control, it’s now up to us to fan the flames.
In other words, there’s no time to mourn. We’ve got burning to do.
culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox: