A few months ago, I was working on a “point-counterpoint” article for an upcoming journal issue on the future of the child welfare system. The purpose of my piece was to present an argument for abolishing the system and then provide a “counterpoint” to an article advocating for reform. As I was prepping to write the counterpoint, I reread two of George Jackson’s most prominent works, Blood In My Eye and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, because I wanted to include some of his ideas about the dangers of reform. It had been several years since I first read these and upon rereading them, I was reminded of his many thoughts about not only the dangers of reform, but also the dangers of fascism, which he described in the early 1970s as the de facto political reality of the United States. This specifically stuck out to me because of the time in which I was reading this – just a few months before the 2024 presidential elections – when there were near daily conversations about the dangers of Donald Trump ushering in a fascist government should he be elected president. Yet over 50 years ago, in 1971, George Jackson reminded us in Blood In My Eye:
Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act.
I’ve thought about this more and more over the past few weeks since the start of the Trump presidency as many of us have watched in horror at both the speed and volume of Executive Orders threatening the most fundamental of human rights, which of course is the realization of what many warned of. But what I’ve thought about most these past few weeks, and why I’ve continued to come back to George Jackson’s ideas, is why this level of concern seems to be newly present for so many and why we have consistently failed to recognize the danger of a fascist state in our government for decades.
Recent actions related to immigration policy provide perhaps some of the best examples of this. Undoubtedly, what the Trump administration is enacting is inhumane, cruel, and should be condemned on every front. But as some have pointed out in recent weeks,deportations were higher during the terms of Barack Obama and Joe Biden than they were during the entire first Trump presidency. Over the last two weeks as the media has been dominated by stories of Trump’s actions against immigrants, records on deportations and removals clearly show that hundreds of people were being deported DAILY under the Biden administration. If this seems surprising, consider this post from Democratic senator Chris Murphy, who took to X last week to brag about the fact that Joe Biden deported thousands more people EVERY WEEK than Donald Trump is doing now:
Where was the outrage while this was happening? Why are so many who identify as progressive shocked and infuriated now when this has been happening for years under Democratic presidencies?
George Jackson was hesitant to provide a specific definition of fascism as he recognized that it is always evolving and taking new forms, but in Soledad Brother, he described characteristics of fascism as “a police state wherein the political ascendancy is tied into and protects the interests of the upper class — characterized by militarism, racism, and imperialism.” I know we can all point to examples of the prior and current Trump administration as examples of this, but why did we not point to examples of this during the Biden administration?
Continuing with immigration policy, much has been made of Trump’s executive order to expand a migrant detention center in Guantanamo Bay after announcing that the facility would be used to detain up to 30,000 migrants. Although there has been some speculation on whether this can actually occur given the capacity of the facility, if any portion of this does occur it will be because just months before leaving office, Joe Biden granted a $163.4 million contract to a private prison company to continue operating Guantanamo Bay as a migrant detention center. This was despite his campaign promises to close the facility and despite multiple accounts of the inhumane treatment of migrants at the facility.
Of course, there were some who tried to point out the fascism that was present under the Biden administration, particularly regarding his actions supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine and his condemnations against students and others who protested the genocide. Yet these charges were largely ignored or discounted in many circles, where we were consistently warned of the fascism that would be ushered in under Donald Trump if we failed to vote for Democrats.
As a more recent example of this, Donald Trump has been strongly (and rightfully) criticized for his recent executive order to “combat antisemitism” that would identify potential ways to deport pro-Palestinian activists. Yet it was the Biden administration that provided the blueprint for this by confirming that it potentially had the ability to revoke the visas of those “who have endorsed or espoused Hamas’ terrorist activity on U.S. soil” following questioning by Republican senators during a congressional hearing in November 2023.
How do all of these actions of the Biden administration not equate to a “police state…characterized by militarism, racism, and imperialism” as described by George Jackson?
When I initially began writing this post, it was intended as a way of sharing some thoughts on our February selection, Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” and why I thought this book was the perfect choice for this moment. As I’m sure you know, references to Parable of the Sower have been continuous in recent months, as many have pointed out the unmistakable prescience of this work in describing our current reality. In particular, this was a widely shared post:
For years, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has been correctly described as everything from a dog whistle to overtly racist. However, this was also the exact slogan that Bill Clinton used to announce his presidency in 1991, just two years before Parable of the Sower was published in 1993. In hindsight, it is clear that the Clinton presidency was marked by both racist and anti-LGBTQ policies; however, this record is rarely, if ever, connected to his campaign pledge to “make America great again.” What accounts for our different thoughts about the use of this phrase?
To be clear, this post is in no way meant to excuse or defend the actions of the Trump administration. These actions are wholly inexcusable and should be met with the horror that so many are feeling today. Nor is this meant to suggest that Donald Trump’s actions do not amount to fascism.
Rather, this is meant to question why this same outrage, horror, and labeling of fascism were not applied to Joe Biden throughout his presidency — and to the presidencies before him. Why do our political systems so readily accommodate or enable fascist policies in the first place? And what are we willing to do about that? More importantly, given all the evidence before us, why aren’t we doing everything possible to dismantle the political duopoly maintained by Democrats and Republicans?
In addition to my concerns about all the harm that will result from the Trump presidency, my primary concern for the next few years, is that as we get closer to the next election cycle, the concept of “resistance” will simply come to mean “vote for Democrats.” For those of us who truly seek change, this cannot be our strategy.
I’ve written previously about my thoughts on the 2024 election and what I believe resistance should look like moving forward, and I remain convinced that the solutions we seek will not only never come from Democrats, but more importantly, they will never come from the state. When we vote for either a Democrat or a Republican, we are using our power to maintain the very entity that has been designed to oppress us – a state founded on genocide, theft, slavery, racism, xenophobia, and militarism. This cannot be our path forward.
As we read Parable of the Sower this month, and seek inspiration for strategies to help us move forward in community, I hope we will also begin to explore how we can use our individual power and our everyday interactions to create the conditions that can reshape our future. We cannot continue to rely on the strategies we have used in the past. And we cannot continue to rely on the state to move us any closer to liberation, when the state wholly depends on our oppression to continue existing.
The power to change our reality through our everyday practice is at the heart of the Emergent Strategy series that was inspired by Octavia Butler. I look forward to exploring all this can mean as we continue to read and learn.
In solidarity,
Alan
I think Antiblackness undergirds neoliberalism and its willful “blindness” to the ills of democratic policies. it’s a bit like northern whites who didn’t want to see the lynching but who invested in the slave trade until it began to encroach on their livelihood. Fascism is the baseline experience of poor Black folks regardless of who’s in office the party line is little more than window dressing.