how to start a prairie fire
organizing against fascism and towards revolution
It’s been more than two months since the Palestinian-American student activist and political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil was abducted by plainclothes ICE officers in the lobby of his New York apartment building on the evening of March 8th. So much has happened since then, however, that it feels more like two years have elapsed than two months. It’s become all but impossible to keep track of the constant flood of terrifying headlines that darken our inboxes and social media feeds every morning, each more chilling than the last—another activist disappeared off the streets, another innocent person shipped without due process to a concentration camp in El Salvador, another brazen assault on the basic principles of an independent judiciary.
It would be futile to try and list out every example of this administration’s authoritarian overreach—there are simply too many to name, and by the time this essay is published, the list would already be out of date. Besides, this is one instance where the whole is decidedly greater than the sum of its parts. What really matters, much more than any attempt to provide a full accounting of the Trump Administration’s countless violations of democratic norms since returning to power, is the overall effect that these violations combine to produce—the inescapable sense that America’s descent into fascism, which so many have warned about for so long, is well and truly here. Though warnings that the billionaire demagogue’s political style bore an eerie resemblance to the fascist movements of the past were once dismissed as hyperbolic and alarmist, the acceleration in recent years of Trump’s reactionary conspiracism and shameless disdain for fundamental democratic principles have made the fascist contours of Trumpism increasingly difficult to ignore—and in the 100 days since Trump took office in January, the mask has come off entirely.
For the American left, this current fascist upsurge comes at—and contributes to—a moment of profound demoralization. More than a year and a half ago, the Zionist genocide in Gaza sparked the most significant resurgence of grassroots mobilization and activist energy that the left in this country had seen since the Summer 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. All around the country, millions of people were suddenly awakened (in many cases, for the first time) to a genuine anti-imperialist consciousness as organizers sustained month after month of high-energy protests that employed a staggeringly diverse array of tactics—mass street demonstrations, civil disobedience, student encampments, direct action against arms manufacturers, and more—to mobilize numerous segments of society around the Palestinian cause.
But while these protests succeeded to an extent in shifting public opinion in favor of Palestine, they largely failed to move the needle in terms of materially disrupting the United States’ ongoing and unwavering support for the Zionist settler state and its genocidal project. Instead, we’ve seen the brutal repression of the Palestine solidarity movement on all fronts, from police brutality to campus crackdowns to the expansion of a neo-McCarthyite political climate that harshly punishes even the most anodyne displays of pro-Palestine sentiment. All of this, understandably, has contributed to a widespread sense of exhaustion, demoralization, and burnout among many of us who have spent the last year and a half taking to the streets time and time again with very little to show for it. All around, it’s hard to escape the increasingly pervasive sense that while it is our duty to keep showing up and carrying the struggle forward, the prospect of victory in that struggle seems to be growing more and more distant with each passing day.
We live, in other words, in dire times—and all the more so now, with the Trump regime back in power and wasting no time in gleefully pursuing the most extreme possible version of its fascist agenda. But as is often the case in politics, there is more to our present situation than meets the eye—and as bleak is this moment is, it also offers the left, such as it exists in this country, a crucial opening to put revolutionary politics back on the table. Our present crisis represents an escalation of the dire contradictions that have long festered at the heart of America’s social, political, and economic order—and if a Marxist analysis of history has anything to teach us, it’s that the escalation of contradictions in a given society is precisely what creates the conditions for revolutionary upheaval and rupture. The moment of opportunity is fast approaching—the question is whether we will be prepared to seize that moment when it arrives.
• • •
Since January, many liberals have responded to the Trump Administration’s authoritarian onslaught by insisting, as one Democratic congresswoman did during Trump’s Congressional address, that “this is not normal”—that Trump’s flagrant disregard for democratic values represents a dangerous deviation from a status quo in which the rule of law is honored and the Constitution’s sanctity respected. As many have rightly pointed out, however, such claims are premised upon a shameful ignorance of the brutal realities of American history. After all, to the many marginalized communities in this country for whom the supposed privileges and protections of American citizenship have never been anything more than a fanciful illusion, the Trump Administration’s ongoing escalation of state repression can hardly be described as an aberration.
As it turns out, the only thing that is remotely ‘unprecedented’ about our current fascist moment is Trump’s willingness to say out loud what others before him preferred to keep quiet. In the past, this country’s ruling class typically sought to conceal the ugly machinations of the American state’s repressive apparatus behind a veneer of liberal niceties. Those who hold power today, however, make no bones about their intentions of using the state’s coercive power to harass, intimidate, and threaten their would-be opponents into silence. The wave of repression we’re currently seeing, centered for the time being around weaponized immigration enforcement, must be understood as part of a broader project of expanding the limits of what is considered acceptable for those in power to do and say openly—an envelope-pushing strategy that Trump has championed from the day in 2015 when he first descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to announce his presidential campaign with the shocking claim that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.”
The point of the current crackdown, in other words, is to shift the Overton window in such a way that the President of the United States feels empowered to go on TV—or, perhaps more accurately in Trump’s case, to log on to Truth Social—and smear anyone he sees fit with the label of ‘terrorist’. By doing so, he provides rhetorical and political justification for measures to be taken against them that would otherwise be considered beyond the pale. (As I have written elsewhere, the word ‘terrorist’ is an “inherently loaded term,” intended to “place its subject outside the very bounds of humanity” by invoking the figure of an enemy “against whom any and all violence is warranted and even demanded.” For decades, this smear has been deployed to deadly effect against people in the Global South who dare to stand up against U.S. imperialism, as well as those unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its deployment against those resisting imperialism here on American soil is a textbook example of the imperial boomerang in action.)
The lesson that must be drawn from all this is an uncomfortable one: none of us are safe. It’s true that for the moment, the brunt of the violence and repression we are currently witnessing seems to be falling on those whose immigration status renders them more vulnerable—but we have no reason to believe that the fascists who hold power would stop there. We all remember the 2020 uprisings, when Trump declared himself “the president of law and order” and threatened to deploy the United States military to suppress the tens of millions of Americans who had taken to the streets in protest following George Floyd’s murder. We all saw the horrifying images of a stone-faced Trump holding up a Bible in downtown D.C.’s Lafayette Park, just minutes after police used tear gas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades to clear the park of protesters. It’s reasonable to ask ourselves what might happen if such an uprising, even at a fraction of a scale of what we saw in 2020, were to break out today, in the age of Trump 2.0—especially given Trump’s recent threats to deport U.S. citizens to the Bukele regime’s CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador.
I say all this not to be alarmist or to inspire panic, but rather to offer a sober—if uncomfortable—assessment of the situation we find ourselves in now. Such an assessment is important not only because it allows us to understand the full severity of what we are up against, but because it also allows us to understand what opportunities this moment presents to us. The reality is that as bleak as things seem, Trump’s full-frontal assault on the norms and institutions of America’s so-called ‘democracy’ also serves to heighten the contradictions that lie at the heart of the American constitutional order. In the process, Trump is actively dissolving in real time the veil of liberal constitutionalism and blind faith in ‘the system’ that has lulled far too many people for far too long into complacency, depoliticization, and inaction. The dissolution of this veil, jarring though it may be, also offers an important opportunity for mass radicalization and the articulation of a different path forward—one that is actually capable of making good on the promise of a genuinely democratic system.
• • •
In developing his influential theory of cultural hegemony, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously observed that the ruling class in a given society cements its dominance not only through direct coercion, but also through securing consent from the masses by promoting ideas and ideologies that reinforce the status quo. Within the context of the American political system, this consent is secured by, among other things, the promotion of a national mythology that emphasizes the supposed stability and sanctity of constitutional norms, practices, and institutions. From an early age, we are inundated with the idea that the American order is more resilient than we think, its constitutional safeguards and system of checks and balances having been carefully designed by the genius of its founders to withstand any challenges history might throw in its path. ‘The system,’ liberals love to remind us, has managed to weather every storm from the Civil War to the Cold War and beyond—there is no reason why it can’t weather the Trump storm as well.
This attitude was on full display during the first Trump term. As liberals everywhere floundered in the wake of the stunning rebuke that the 2016 election had posed to the fundamentals of their worldview, they responded by coalescing into a #Resistance that practically deified figures like Robert Mueller and John Roberts, and Jeff Flake—lionizing them as heroic patriots who would swoop in on a white horse, brandishing the scales of justice in one hand and a pocket Constitution in the other, to save American democracy from the dreaded orange menace. They insisted that all we needed was one more damning special counsel report, one more SCOTUS ruling, one more party-defying Senate vote, and this time—this time—there would simply be no way for ol’ Donny Trump to wriggle his way out of THIS jam. (Ah! Well. Nevertheless…)
This same ethos of faith in what Abraham Lincoln famously called the “better angels” of America’s nature underpinned the Biden 2020 campaign, which sought to frame the Trump era as a chaotic aberration and positioned the Biden Administration as a much-needed “return to normalcy.” (For her part, rather than offering any substantive vision for a country in crisis, Kamala Harris’ disastrous 2024 presidential campaign openly spurned the notion of a departure from the historically-unpopular Biden Administration, instead simply presenting Harris as a defender of the ‘normalcy’ to which Biden had supposedly returned us.)
This approach was, of course, doomed to fail from the outset. Like his initial rise to power in 2016, Trump’s return to power in the 2024 election was an inevitable product of the contradictions inherent to the neoliberal status quo that the Democratic Party establishment (as well as their counterparts across the aisle) have long upheld. As Marisa Miale points out in a March 2025 essay for Light and Air, the publication of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Marxist Unity Group, the emergence and resurgence of Trumpian authoritarianism has followed what she calls a “constitutional road to fascism”—playing out not in spite of the American constitutional order, but because of it. “Fascism,” Miale writes, “does not grow from the reactionary sections of capital alone but from the entire liberal constitutional regime.” She explains:
The austerity of the ruling class tills the soil for an autonomous reactionary movement, and the liberal police state, bolstered by the Biden administration’s militarism and border policing, becomes a tool for the realization of fascism . . . Under Trump, the elite of the movement have penetrated the Executive Branch. Trump may usher in a more rapid decay for political freedom, but Harris’s election would not have defeated fascism or defended a democracy we have never had. In other words, while Trump represents a genuine fascist threat, the root of the problem is the system itself.
Consider, for example, the fact that even the most egregious of the administration’s overreaches thus far have been justified on the basis of existing legal institutions, structures, and provisions—creative though their interpretation of those frameworks may be. Remember also that Trump is merely continuing a longstanding and bipartisan tradition of steadily expanding executive power and repression against political dissent that has been a persistent feature of the American state since at least the First Red Scare of the early 20th century. (Nowhere is this clearer than in the ongoing crackdown on pro-Palestine speech and campus protest, for which Trump is merely building on an existing foundation that the liberal establishment—from the White House to university administrations—had spent the last year and a half patiently laying for him.)
With these uncomfortable truths in mind, it’s not difficult to see why the liberal expressions of #Resistance, exemplified by the dominant currents in the ‘50501’ movement and the April 5th ‘Hands Off’ protests, that have gained steam in the aftermath of Trump’s election are woefully inadequate to address the real fascist threat that the Trump regime poses. With all their lofty rhetoric about ‘defending democracy’ and ‘upholding the Constitution’ against Trump’s assaults, what these movements are really demanding is a return to the same status quo that got us to this point in the first place. And though it may appear paradoxical at first glance, it’s important to recognize that the dead-end nature of this liberal response to the Trump onslaught is a feature of the system, not a bug.
There is, after all, nothing that the ruling class fears more than the prospect of revolution (a fear that, in the American context, goes all the way back to the country’s founding by a small group of propertied elites who designed the system to preserve their class interests). The mythology of liberal constitutionalism that is so pervasive in America’s political culture was thus always intended to be a deradicalizing force, intentionally constructed to undermine even the remotest fragments of revolutionary consciousness before they could even have a chance to take root. The logic here is simple—if the masses have already been led to believe in the stability of the existing social order and the sanctity of its institutions, then the already-difficult task of convincing them to overthrow that order only grows more difficult. The result is that even as the internal contradictions of the constitutional order escalate to a crisis point, vast segments of the American public remain ensnared in a liberal political framework that is designed to reinforce, rather than challenge, a failing system—and that, therefore, is structurally incapable of meeting the demands of this moment.
This state of affairs, however, can only go on for so long. And as every day brings with it yet another set of headlines detailing the unraveling of the American system, the illusion is growing harder and harder to sustain. In December 2023, a YouGov survey found that 18 percent of Americans expected the United States to be ruled by a dictator in their lifetime—roughly the same amount as when Gallup asked Americans an identical question in 1938. In February of this year, YouGov conducted the same survey again and found that this time, the share of Americans expecting a dictatorship had risen to 28 percent. Other polls conducted in March have found that 58 percent of Americans believe democracy is working “not too well” or “not at all well,” 55 percent agree that the country is in a constitutional crisis, and nearly a quarter of the population think that American democracy is “on the verge of collapse.” And all of this comes as the share of Americans who trust the federal government has precipitously declined from an average of 77 percent in 1964 to an average of just 22 percent in 2024.
In other words, people are slowly beginning to wake up to the fact that the emperor has no clothes—that the systems, structures, and institutions in which we have been taught for so long to place our unquestioning trust will not, in fact, save us. It’s often said that every crisis is an opportunity, and the present crisis of faith in the American constitutional order is no exception. As the mythology of liberal constitutionalism collapses, it logically follows that the deradicalizing force that this mythology has long exerted over the American public is likely to collapse as well—or at least, to have its foundational assumptions called into serious question. This means that the left—and particularly the socialist left, whose revolutionary project is the only one capable of actually addressing the myriad crises facing us today—now has a crucial opportunity to raise mass consciousness by offering a different path forward, one that does not lead us back to the same moribund status quo that has already failed us time and time again.
• • •
Of course, the mere fact that the conditions are increasingly ripe for the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness is no guarantee that such a consciousness will, in fact, emerge. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but so too is apathy—and there is plenty of reason to believe that, rather than inspiring a newfound commitment to revolutionary change, the withering of public confidence in ‘the system’ will instead simply give way to a defeatist politics of resignation and withdrawal. This is due in no small part to the influence of another deradicalizing force that, in addition to liberal constitutionalism, plays a major role in American life. I am referring here to the sheer abundance and material comfort that the American public enjoys as a result of the United States’ hegemonic position within global imperialism—what scholars and activists alike have increasingly taken to describing as the “imperial mode of living.”
It is well established that the lifestyle of Americans (and inhabitants of the Global North more generally) is premised on levels of consumption that are unsustainable in every sense of the word. As the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel points out in his brilliant 2018 book The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, “if we were all to live like the average citizen of the average high-income country, we would require the ecological capacity equivalent to 3.4 Earths.” Even those Americans who occupy a relatively less privileged class position enjoy a standard of living that would be quite literally unthinkable to the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. Of course, the material abundance that characterizes this standard of living is only possible through the grotesque exploitation of land, labor, and natural resources in the Global South—a process which is itself enabled by the machinations of the imperialist world system. This is why, in their 1974 book Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, the legendary communist organizers Grace Lee and James Boggs argue that:
the revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease, and early death.
It’s not difficult to see why this might complicate the prospects of revolutionary organizing. The idea that the masses should expect to “make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things”—in other words, to accept a reduction in their standard of living as a condition of the revolution—is, to put it lightly, a tough sell. The reality, however, is that forces beyond any of our control have, in many ways, already begun to set this process in motion. In recent years, the idea that America is an empire in decline has become widely accepted in most left circles (and even many mainstream ones). While it’s clear that the United States maintains a dominant position on the world stage, there is a growing sense among many observers that this hegemony cannot last forever, that its foundations are too brittle and corroded to withstand the seismic shifts that are currently underway in the global order.
The unfolding crisis of American empire is a product of contradictions in the capitalist world system that have been steadily heightening for decades. But although it’s been a long time in the making, this process of imperial decay has been greatly accelerated by Donald Trump since his return to power in January. Trump’s escalating trade war, for example, has created an emergent threat to the dollar dominance that has long underpinned America’s imperial hegemony. Similarly, his blustering alienation of America’s European allies has shattered the Atlanticist consensus that has structured the Western-dominated imperialist order ever since the United States took over from Britain as the world’s imperial superpower in the aftermath of World War II. Meanwhile, a rising China has (rightfully) seized this opportunity to fill the vacuum and pursue deeper relations with other countries, from the EU to the nations of Southeast Asia, who stand to lose from America’s hasty withdrawal on the world stage.
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The fragmentation of America’s imperial hegemony is still playing out, and it is too early to know precisely what effects it will have. It’s clear, however, that the impact of this fragmentation on the American economy will be a profoundly destabilizing one, in ways that are too numerous to count. That destabilization will certainly have enormous costs, but it may also be a necessary evil. After all, the destabilization of the American economy, in whatever form it takes, will necessarily entail significant disruptions to the material abundance and rampant consumerism that most Americans have long taken for granted. This will also mean, therefore, the destabilization of the constructed ‘middle-class’ identity—underpinned by the imperial mode of living–that has served for decades to pacify American workers and secure their compliance with the machinations of capitalism and empire.
As with the collapse of the constitutional order, the decline of American empire similarly offers the left an opportunity to articulate a revolutionary vision that not only accurately identifies just how unsustainable the status quo really is, but that also shows American workers who their true enemies are—not minorities or immigrants or workers in the Global South, but the capitalist elites who are responsible for the exploitation and immiseration of the entire international working class. The uncomfortable reality is that for far too long now, the entire system of American capitalism and imperial dominance has been running on borrowed time. The moment, however, is fast approaching when that system will finally be called upon to make good on its debts. When that moment comes, and the rug is finally pulled out from under the feet of a long-placated American public, all bets are off.
• • •
In 1930, three years into the civil war that would eventually culminate in the Chinese Revolution, Mao Zedong—then a commander in the Red Army—penned a short essay intended to counter the pessimistic sentiments that he observed proliferating among his comrades in the Communist Party of China. That essay, whose title “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire” comes from an old Chinese proverb, is among Mao’s most significant revolutionary writings. In it, Mao admonishes those who see “only the superficial appearance and not the essence of what is before them,” warning that the failure of these comrades to undertake a “scientific analysis” of the situation at hand leads them to “unwittingly generalize and exaggerate their momentary, specific and limited situation, as though the situation in China and the world as a whole gave no cause for optimism.” Instead, he argues, “the question whether there will soon be a revolutionary high tide in China can be decided only by making a detailed examination to ascertain whether the contradictions leading to a revolutionary high tide are really developing.”
As with most works of revolutionary theory, Mao’s essay must be understood first and foremost as a product of a particular time and place, but its most salient lessons reverberate far beyond those immediate circumstances. The question of whether there will be a “revolutionary high tide” in the America of today, as in the China of the 1930s, can similarly only be determined by examining whether the necessary contradictions for such a high tide are developing. And when we attempt to follow Mao’s advice to make a “detailed examination” of our present conditions, it quickly becomes clear that those contradictions are, in fact, developing. From the implosion of the domestic constitutional order to the steady disintegration of U.S.-dominated unipolarity on the world stage, the entire edifice of the capitalist-imperialist world system is rapidly approaching a crisis point, spurred on by the persistent heightening of its own internal contradictions.
What form that crisis will take, of course, remains to be seen, and we cannot afford to take for granted that a crisis will inevitably and mechanistically lead to revolution. In a recent article for Jacobin, Meagan Day rightly warns against an excess of left jubilation over the prospect of an impending recession, arguing that “if the last century is any indication, it’s just as likely that capital and its political allies will emerge from a given crisis invigorated while labor and the Left feel the adverse effects for decades to come.” Though crises may “increase workers’ recognition of the necessity of transforming the system,” she writes, “they may also make it harder for workers to overcome fragmentation, which is necessary to take advantage of the moment.”
This is all true, but it’s equally true that regardless of whether or not the left embraces its arrival, a crisis is coming (indeed, it’s arguably already here). The question is, what are we going to do about it? Day is correct in arguing that it would be a mistake for the left to uncritically cheer on this crisis, blinding ourselves to both its human costs and to the ways in which our political and class enemies may stand to benefit from it. It would be an equally grave mistake, however, to simply ignore the inherent revolutionary potential of any moment that calls the stability or desirability of the present order into question. Crisis may not be a sufficient condition for revolution, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a necessary one.
The fact is that when all is said and done, the mere unfolding of history cannot produce a revolution in and of itself. Only the working class, awakened to revolutionary consciousness and an understanding of its own collective power, can do that. All history can do is create conditions that are more or less favorable to the project of building a revolutionary movement. Beyond that, it’s up to us on the revolutionary left to seize the opportunity that the current crisis presents to us—to raise mass consciousness by accurately diagnosing the evils of the existing system and offering the working class an alternative vision for the future. That means resisting the urge towards defeatism and fragmentation, steadfastly refusing the ruling class’ myriad efforts to convince us that our fight is no longer worth fighting. It means deepening our own analysis of the present situation through disciplined study and political education, so that we can be better prepared to raise the consciousness of the people around us. It means recognizing that every place where we interact with our communities—our workplaces, our campuses, our neighborhoods—is both a potential and an actual site of struggle, and developing revolutionary organizations that are capable of engaging in sustained agitation in all of them.
As Chairman Mao reminds us, a single spark can start a prairie fire. In order for that to happen, however, the conditions need to be just right—high enough temperatures, strong enough winds, dry enough vegetation covering the ground. But even though we can’t control how long it takes for that to happen, that doesn’t mean we can’t still work to create sparks. This is our responsibility as revolutionaries—to keep on striking flint against steel, refusing to stop when our arms grow tired or to become demoralized when the sparks fail at first to catch, continuing strike after strike until that moment when the ground is dry enough, the wind blows hard enough, and the entire thing finally goes up in flames.
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: