The Hidden Ways Fascism Does Its Most Lasting Damage, and What That Means for Strategy

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“Part of the inaction that we see or this muted response [in Congress], is this notion that this is just a really extreme version of normal politics, an extreme version of polarization. And my very fundamental and vociferous belief is that this isn’t an extreme version, this is a new thing. This is American Authoritarianism. And it is virulent, it is embedded, and it will continue to expand even when we win elections in ‘26.” - Stacey Abrams, Assembly Required podcast

Good strategy is premised on a clear diagnosis. A diagnosis is a choice about how to frame the strategic challenge and make sense of “what’s really going on here?“ In strategy, different people can look at the same situation and make different choices—each perfectly valid—about how to understand what’s going on. The choice is pivotal, because differing diagnoses can lead to very different strategic implications.

For those of us working to build a more just world, the socio-political context in the United States right now looms especially large. I read a few pieces recently that sparked some reflection on this context, which I’ll share below. Thoughts and reactions are welcome.

Getting real about the strategic context: Yes, it’s fascism

In her Assembly Required podcast, Stacey Abrams contests the notion that we’re experiencing an extreme version of political polarization. This is obvious to me, but as Abrams suggests, it is not so obvious to many in Congress.

Hopefully that view among the elite is beginning to change. Jonathan Rauch, the Brookings Institution senior fellow and author who one year ago resisted the idea of characterizing the Trump regime as fascist, has revised his position in light of the cumulative evidence to affirm that “Yes, it’s fascism.”

His clarification helps us better understand what we’re up against. According to Rauch, Trumpian fascism is characterized by: demolition of norms, glorification of violence, “might is right” philosophy, politicized law enforcement, dehumanization, police-state tactics, undermining elections, manipulating the private sector to serve state interests, attacks on news media, territorial and military aggression, transnational reach, blood-and-soil nationalism, white Christian nationalism, mobs and street thugs, leader aggrandizement, alternative facts, politics as war, and governing as revolution. (Note this last part: fascists explicitly attempt to repattern society in revolutionary fashion.)

The article provides abundant evidence of these characteristics, and for those curious about the depth and breadth of the degradation, it could be worth a read. (For those who don’t need more fuel for outrage, go ahead and pass.)

I’m glad Rauch has stated this conclusion emphatically. But his concluding thoughts leave me thinking he has fallen prey to the dominant culture’s tendency to over-attribute societal changes to the impact of individual leaders, and to under-appreciate the dynamics of complex systems. He remains overconfident, in my estimation, about the resilience of our societal institutions and what kind of country will remain when Trump’s presidency ends:

“If, however, Trump is a fascist president, that does not mean that America is a fascist country. The courts, the states, and the media remain independent of him, and his efforts to browbeat them will likely fail. He may lose his grip on Congress in November. He has not succeeded in molding public opinion, except against himself. He has outrun the mandate of his voters, his coalition is fracturing, and he has neglected tools that allow presidents to make enduring change. He and his party may defy the Constitution, but they cannot rewrite it, thank goodness.”

Professor and author Timothy Snyder, in his illuminating and frightening book On Tyranny, cautions against maintaining such blind faith under authoritarian regimes.

The hardest part of fighting fascists

Joel Westheimer, professor of democracy and education at the University of Ottawa, would seem to agree with Snyder. He lived in Argentina through its post-dictatorship days in the mid-eighties. He explains through Argentina’s story of recovery why the hardest part of fighting fascists comes after the fascists have fallen:

“Even if authoritarian leadership is removed through elections or legal action, the damage will persist. Institutions that learned to comply will not automatically relearn courage. Citizens who learned that politics is dangerous, rigged, or pointless will not suddenly reengage. A public culture trained to reward cruelty, spectacle, and domination does not revert on its own to one grounded in deliberation and care.”

Westheimer describes a telling moment during the trials of military junta generals:

“Early in the trials, nearly an entire day was spent hearing the defense counsel’s attempt to prove that the daughter of a prominent human rights lawyer might have been a terrorist, and therefore her murder was justified. The claim was not only false; it inverted the very idea of justice. The spectacle continued until the editor of the English-language newspaper that had illegally published the names of the disappeared was called to testify. When a defense attorney asked him how he knew the woman was not a terrorist, the editor replied simply: “Because everyone knows that a person is innocent until proven guilty.”

That moment was electric. It was also sobering. A foundational democratic principle had to be restated aloud, as if newly rediscovered. Years of authoritarian rule had so corroded civic norms that even the presumption of innocence could no longer be assumed as common sense.”

It’s not hard to see the same threat here in the United States. Our problem is not simply a renegade narcissistic president. Rauch’s long list of fascist beliefs are variously espoused throughout the Trump administration, by state and federal Republican legislators, and by the grassroots Republican base.

Westheimer warns that “If the United States manages to restore democratic governance after this authoritarian moment, it will need far more than new leaders. It will require a massive cultural and educational project — one that re-teaches not only how democracy works, but why it matters. One that confronts institutional complicity rather than glossing over it. And one that restores civility, compassion, and trust.”

And he’s right. It’s not like the MAGA base, Right-wing think tanks, politicians, and billionaires are actually under the spell of a dark wizard. Even when Trump’s reckoning comes, these widespread beliefs will not simply come swirling out of people’s mouths in a cloud of dark particles and dissipate to the wind.

No, this isn’t the Hollywood version of a fantastical government takeover. It’s real. And we had best get our strategic diagnosis right.

Complex systems and power

Here’s what I see. Westheimer describes a “stickiness” of authoritarianism, reflecting a repatterning of belief, behavior, and relational dynamics in Argentina’s society that lasted beyond the authoritarian rule itself. Anti-democratic patterns didn’t simply emanate from autocratic leaders; they came to live within the fabric of the system itself.

This dynamic is why I think Jonathan Rauch’s faith that eliminating Trump will eliminate the threat is too shallow a view of how power really works. A more nuanced view appreciates that power is multi-dimensional and resides within the patterns of coordination within a system. Pieter de Beer offers just such a theory, which explains power as an emergent property of coordination (← highly recommended read).

When viewed through a coordination-as-power lens, what we see in Argentina’s story—when people remained withdrawn from politics, domination remained a normalized relational orientation, and institutions remained in habituated deference to the will of the state—is that the patterns and pathways of coordination in society remained largely unchanged even when the dictatorship was toppled. People did not automatically regain psychological sovereignty, the confidence to act, and the skills for collective struggle. That is why the power of the people did not automatically return. It had to be repatterned into existence. It was this repatterning, according to Westheimer, that was the hardest part about fighting autocracy.

If power itself is much more than dominance and is produced by patterns of coordination, what does this mean for strategy under fascism? Below are a few implications.

What are we resisting?

When we say, “Resist,” what does that actually mean? Viewed through a coordination-as-power lens, effective resistance is not about stating or demonstrating our opposition to the actions of the administration. It’s about not allowing their actions to condition or destabilize us into habits of numbness, overwhelm, or vitriol (I highly recommend this and subsequent articles from Paul T. Shattuck to understand what he calls the Authoritarian Harm Complex). It’s about resisting the urge to centralize control in the face of threat and urgency, which would legitimize the idea that diversity, participation, and self-determination are ineffective. It’s about rejecting the logic that we must fight fire with fire, which essentially agrees the regime’s claim that “We live in a world...that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time,” and that if you can coerce someone to do what you want, you are within your rights to do so, as Stephen Miller insisted in a CNN interview. (In fact, these are not natural laws that have existed since the beginning of time. The myth is a European Enlightenment-era invention.)

That’s why staying human, as Shattuck puts it, is strategic. It’s why mutual aid and alternative systems are strategic. Why narrative and relational infrastructure are strategic. And why tending the field—even when we don’t know for sure if, when, or in what way our efforts will bear fruit—is also strategic.

If our strategies focus only on expressing outrage, or mobilizing people to vote, or running policy campaigns, we are simply not operating where fascism is mounting its most damaging attacks.

What’s our real goal?

As Jonathan Rauch makes clear in “Yes, it’s fascism,” this regime is out for revolution. Our response must also be revolutionary.

But what should our revolution be like? “We are in the midst of a process that is nothing short of reinventing revolution,” wrote movement elder Grace Lee Boggs in The Next American Revolution. Revolution, she said, cannot (for the Left, at least) be about seizing state power and imposing changes from the top down, as it was during 20th-century revolutions around the world. Revolution today should be about a transformation in what it means to be human together. For Boggs, this involves each of us choosing to “become a new beginning in the continuing evolution of human beings toward becoming more creative, conscious, self-critical, and politically and socially responsible,” and undertaking a “two-sided transformational process, of ourselves and of our institutions.” This view is consistent with the theory of coordination-as-power. Changing the patterns of coordination is what restructures power from domination to liberation.

Theory aside, we couldn’t fight for a return to “normal” even if we wanted to. Even when this regime falls, we will necessarily face a period of broad reconstruction in many sectors of our society. For instance, in the domestic health system, Medicaid cuts are decimating health infrastructure, and by the time Trump is gone, so too will many hospitals, health clinics, and other healthcare providers. The same destruction is happening with child care infrastructure and the infrastructure for international development and aid. This is the material, organizational, and human infrastructure underpinning the society we had, and large swaths of it are already or will soon be gone. If this time of upheaval is not the time for Boggs-style revolution, I don’t know what is.

Westheimer’s caution bears repeating: removing fascists is only half (or less) of the job. Strategy right now isn’t just about kicking Trump out. It’s also about what happens next.

What kind of power are we building as we fight?

After fascism, will this be a country reconstructed by elite interests and the establishment Left? Or will the future be built upon the power of the people? The answer lies in the coordination pathways we are practicing even now.

This is where my framing differs from that of Joel Westheimer, who describes a fight that begins after the fall of an authoritarian regime. I think his fight—in which people and institutions must (re)learn the habits of democracy—actually starts now.

Imagine that in the months and years of anti-authoritarian struggle ahead, we treat people as faceless masses, focused on mobilizing them to demonstrate or call their senator, instead of cultivating critical connection among them. Imagine we continue to treat people not as citizens, but as voters, segmenting them by demographic and voter propensity, blanketing them with political ads if they live in an electorally important district, and ignoring them otherwise. Imagine we centralize resources and decision-making, and cajole the movement into following a single plan because it gives us a feeling of control and efficiency. Because it feels like that’s what it means to be strategic. Or because we think it’s the only way to win. What would this do to the power of the people, in Power Within, Power To, and Power With?

Or, imagine we catch the sparks of collectivism and mutual aid we are seeing and fan their flames into a new American ethos, more loving and more conscious of our interdependence. Imagine we embrace participatory decision-making in our institutions and our organizations. Imagine we continue to prove the viability of economic models that serve and support one another’s wellbeing without extraction. Imagine we manage to stay human—or indeed to evolve what it means to be human. What would these coordination architectures mean for the power of the people?

It should be apparent how the world we build would be different when built through the former coordination architecture versus the latter. One constrains and co-opts the power of the people. The other rides its wave.

Thus, as we build our strategies to fight fascism, how we fight is itself a strategic choice. It may be the most important choice of all.