strata

we’re a mere ten months into the most recent trump regime, and everywhere we look, signs of it are oozing through the newly cracked structures of the administrative state. but the totality of totalitarianism remains in question. it’s clear that even for the regime there are different levels and priorities at work: obvious “blue” states are a first target: those cities within range of border patrol, with democratic mayors or governors. at a more insidious and granular level, police and legislative actions against scapegoated identities (trans people, immigrants) are both the lever and the aim: ginned up threats attributed to each group justify the intense ramp up of surveillance and ICE brutality; and once you have a rabid police force, you have to have someone for them to police. 

the things, they are bad, in other words. but they’re not universally bad, or at least, we can say that the tendrils of fascist power have not crept their way into every facet of everyday life just yet. it’s important to me to spend time noticing this gap between the political totality presented by the trump regime’s insistence on its own reality, and the actual reality which is much more reliant on and responsive to local conditions and materialities. 

it’s also important to me to insist on the anti-pollyanna intent here: this isn’t an exercise in silver linings or sticking our heads in the sand. it is an exercise in assessing the terrain and laying claim to what fragments of livable reality remain, and determining where to dig in, where to cede, and where to expand territories of revolution. 

after the first trump regime, and for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to locate various levels of politics and prioritize their impact was foregrounded. in the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic months, the friction between national and local contexts gave energy to the reactionary positions that sought to minimize the dangers, and therefore the “restrictive” public health measures that were implemented. at the same time, actors on both the right and left leveraged the crisis to increase surveillance and police capacities. 

the apparent contradiction of strata–the clearly visible and terrifying global impact of the virus compared against the understated, often invisible, presentation in many local (and especially rural) communities–provides a good framework for thinking about the movements of fascism through our society. the dominant themes of our world–inequality, hyperindividuation, omni-marketization–got a critical infusion of momentum during the pandemic, right at the precise moment they came into question. we shouldn’t ever forget the early days of the global shutdown, the sudden stalling of capitalism, the lurch of daily life into slower and more meandering rhythms. 

those first few weeks, while also filled with more than enough fear, dread and death, also found room for imagination and hope. a brief opening of the gates to let the outside in. nature was healing, dolphins were returning to once polluted and abandoned rivers in china, air quality was at record levels absent the choking smog from our (apparently useless!) daily commutes. 

the unevenness of that time is what stands out for me. at the level of the zip code, which is as big as most of us live, i think, the situation becomes murkier, more varied and contingent. i was laid off. M, who worked in senior healthcare, was struggling to keep her communities safe and alive. we ate at home, took walks after dinner. i read capital on the porch with morning coffee. we went to protests and organized with comrades, supported mutual aid funds and actions. 

trump was the president during the first year of the pandemic, when there was no vaccine, when the threat was predominantly experienced as both existential and external. the response from power may have always ended up ossifying into the extortionist “return to work” model that emerged during the biden administration a year later, and in no way am i making a claim that a trump regime is ever preferable to a non-trump regime. 

what i’m trying to notice are the ways that even during an incompetent, authoritarian regime, new ideas, politics, movements and solidarities can emerge from local conditions, precisely because the global can never fully saturate the local, even as it shapes it. 

where the pandemic was “external/existential”, the second trump regime is clearly “internal/existential”, but still very much subject to the same ineffective and incomplete totalizing capacities. they simply cannot physically exert power everywhere all at once–no one can. there are a couple of important implications to this idea of unevenness. 

first, in order to legitimize its authoritarian power, the regime must also make that power visible—the implementation of trump’s totalitarianism is also a live map of its territory, where it is expanding, where it’s contracting, the frontiers of its contestation. similar to the way dyes illuminate a person’s vascular system in an MRI, trump’s fascist acquisition of our democratic institutions draw out the structures, pathways and vulnerabilities of our government. one benefit of having a bloviating authoritarian at the helm who is fascinated by his own celebrity is that he is never not announcing his presence or intentions. the spectacle is the milieu for all communication and action. one can, to a certain extent, still be where they are not. 

the second quality of unevenness is a mirror of the first: through the daily practice of our small lives, we reproduce the conditions of anti-fascist communality, refusing the political and cultural invasions of trump’s shock troops and expanding our own claims to an existence built from solidarity, art, music, mutual aid, education and so on. fascism attacks democratic institutions at the level of the verb: these are machines that produce our society. when they no longer work due to hostile capture or destruction, it’s up to us to become the engines. for me, this work is inherently and inescapably non-violent, and has a lot to do with the corny work of community building, conflict resolution, solidarity and militant insistence on universal inclusion. the critical difference between this anti-fascist cultural reproduction and trump’s fascist project is something like directionality: in the latter, the move is to stabilize and crush, to overdetermine the meaning and function of our institutions in order to reduce their capacity to a single vector of compliance. 

to build and defend an anti-fascist world is a project of nurturing movement and multi-vocality; a blasting open of the gates into a billion possible futures. an attention to these spaces that are yet free from fascist capture and the movements that seed their existence is at least the foundation of a true resistance in the face of the oncoming crest of the wave.