Keep Your Friends Close
In which I offer a rebuttal to a "strategic" critique of the Prairieland defendants
The “is it fascism?” debate has been reignited by Anton Jager’s Hyperpolitics. (My own ambivalence on this question has been a theme in this blog.) I have not read Hyperpolitics.1 But I have read a bit of the short-form debate about Jager’s controversial claim that Trumpism is not, in fact, fascism. In particular, the Guardian’s recapitulation of the book’s thesis, which prompted Bluesky Discourse: “The more immediately controversial proposition of the book, though, is that what we are watching in Trump’s US is not fascism, because the right only travels to that extreme in the face of a direct threat of organised socialism.”
As a historical claim about the conditions that gave rise to Italian and German fascism, well, the divergence between the role of an organized left in either country then and in the U.S. now strikes me as a fairly obvious historical fact. Mussolini came out of the organized left; you can draw a line from Sorel’s general strike to the Italian Futurists to Italian Fascism. Among the first things the Nazis did once in power was withdraw state protection from socialist and labor organizers to allow a brutal intimidation campaign by party thugs. Socialists and communists were the first detainees in what would come to be mass concentration camps. Phrased as the Guardian did, Jager’s position seems an awful lot like victim-blaming, but no one is really making the case, in response, that there are close parallels between economic, social, or political conditions in 1930s Europe and those of the 2010s U.S.
Instead, if you suggest Jager might have a point, you are directed to Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism, which sets forth the persistent substantive political principles held by fascist movements across time and place. And yes, MAGA is defined by a rejection of modernism and fear of difference, etc. etc. But reading Eco is clarifying not just as a succinct and convincing articulation of the core elements of “fascist” ideology (it is), but because the recourse to Eco makes clear that the sides in this debate are to an extent talking past each other. Jager (and Moyn) are asking whether our current conditions resemble those under which fascist governments were successful in consolidating state power and their opponents are asking whether the content of MAGA resembles that of 20th-century fascist movements. Which leads me to the somehow deeply unpopular position of insisting both sides are right. And that in turn leads me to ask: What goals does it serve to call MAGA facism? What does that labeling do?
If the point is to solely draw substantive overlap between Hitler’s and Trump’s respective ideologies that strikes me as analytically correct but politically pretty useless. Maybe there are some folks out there on the fence about voting Republican who might, upon being confronted with the similarities between the Republican platform and the canonical Bad Guy of U.S. history and post-1950s popular media, rethink their vote. But I’m skeptical of this strategy, both because of media siloing (who are these claims about fascism reaching?) and because the depressing reality is that, at least for 20-something Republican staffers, the response to learning of these similarities is to lean into Nazism.
Rather, I think there are two reasons why people are so attached to calling Trump a fascist. First, the term is necessary to adequately characterize the extent of his and his colleagues’ aspirations and thus the threat we face if they succeed in consolidating power. Kevin J. Elliot’s piece articulates this position clearly (even if partially disagree with it as an empirical assessment): We are faced with a stripping away of public life beyond what even those under authoritarian regimes experience. The second, related purpose is to express the moral seriousness of the struggle we are currently in. If Trump is a fascist, then we are not merely in the realm of “you should probably sign up for GOTV for Obama so he can hold off Romney and Republican tax breaks,” we have left the terrain of mere partisan difference and entered into morally mandatory action in the face of an existential threat to a republican form of government as such.
But that just raises another question: If the point of using the F-word is to challenge Congressional Democrats or voters or people not currently in the street to responses either commensurate with the threat or consistent with the moral imperative of defeating fascism (as opposed to, say, 1990s-style Republicans), what should that response consist of? If the point of calling it fascism is to say this is serious, the prior norms don’t hold, what norms should we be discarding and how? Should we stop paying taxes? Should Rebecca Slaughter have barricaded herself in her office? Should Democratic Representatives get into fistfights on the House floor to stop legislation? How does calling Trump fascist help us decide what to do next?
I do not know the answer to that question, but I do feel, with some moral and intellectual clarity, that if we are going to use the term “fascist” to describe the Trump administration, it applies most forcefully to that administration’s treatment of immigrants. The Trump administration’s invocation of disease and contamination in discussing immigrants, demonization of racialized immigrant groups in ways quite obviously designed to provoke a pogrom, use of literal Nazi iconography on its DHS social media account, and in its mass arrests of hundreds of thousands of individuals using internal armed forces and literal concentration of those individuals in a network of detention centers, resemble in both their content and material formation the work of 20th century European fascists to cleanse their respective volks of undesirables.
The other obvious metaphorical site where “fascism” as a descriptor seems particularly apt is in Trump’s own positing of antifascism as a political opponent. The administration is attempting to heighten the force of repression against what they themselves call anti-fascism, purporting to designate “Antifa” (an organization that doesn’t exist) as a “domestic terrorist organization” (a category that doesn’t exist under U.S. law) so as to redirect law enforcement resources to prosecute individuals designated “antifa.”
It is within this discursive and political context that the prosecution and sentencing of fifteen defendants for, among other things, “providing material support for terrorists” in relation to a “noise demonstration” at an ICE detention facility in Prairieland, Texas, began to get growing media attention. In response to this, Samantha Hancox-Li of Liberal Currents published “Prairieland: A Tactical and Strategic Analysis,” which took as its task the evisceration of the decisions of those Prairieland defendants as a matter of political strategy (and largely took the prosecution’s word for the underlying facts). Hancox-Li claimed her intervention was intended as a “cold-hearted strategic and tactical analysis” from a putative poltiical ally to assess whether the Prairieland defendants achieved their goals (as Hancox-Li understood them) but withhold judgment on the morality of their actions.
As it happens, I had written a piece, for Liberal Currents, on Prairieland, making the exact opposite argument: I wanted to speak to a reader who is convinced of the moral seriousness of the fight against fascism but who is uneasy about the methodology the Prairieland defendants used, to attempt to invoke their moral sympathies for the defendants who face life sentences and their cause of ending immigration detention into a critical and perhaps even abolitionist attitude toward the terrorism statutes that pre-date Trump and even 9/11. That essay was rejected a few days ago. I assumed well, I guess it wasn’t very good. And then I read the Hancox-Li piece and realized no, the editors simply had a completely different understanding of how to handle the Prairieland sentences from within the anti-fascist coalition.
My ego was assuaged, but I was furious. Furious enough to get up this morning and decide I needed to articulate why.
Ironically, I was enraged by Hancox-Li’s piece in precisely the same way I understood her to be enraged by the Prairieland defendants themselves–here was someone who I considered (and consider) a political ally in an existential fight making a strategic misstep that I thought detracted from our shared political goals. Prairieland is an example of dramatic overreach by the opposition in the deployment of state violence (because prison sentences are, indeed, a form of violence, if less spectacular than public executions) by an expressly ideologically-motivated judge against a set of reasonably sympathetic defendants. Rather than leverage outrage at the sentences to either build political will to fight Trump’s use of antiterrorism laws or draw attention to the underlying abuses the Prairieland defendants themselves sought to call attention to (what was happening in Prairieland that made them feel the need to take such extreme measures), Hancox-Li chose to use the Prairieland case to attempt to impose internal discipline by criticizing the strategy of individuals who share her goal of abolishing ICE.2
Those kinds of strategic conversations are entirely valid and indeed necessary, but they are internal conversations–which means they are conducted among people who recognize themselves to be part of a shared political endeavor and who have built up a modicum of mutual trust. Perhaps I am wrong as an empirical matter about Liberal Currents’s readership, but I do not think those elements of the anti-MAGA coalition who might be contemplating action akin to what the Prairieland defendants undertook are reading LC or feel themselves to be in political community with its editors such that they are going to be dissuaded from taking action on the basis of the essay. The article simply could not do what it claimed it was trying to do (convince tankies not to be stupid) but had the effect of demobilizing in the face of—or worse, lending credence to—an escalation in the administration’s repressive efforts in their use of the terrorism statutes.
Essays are praxis. Writing for an audience of thousands, in the voice of a publication that has earned considerable credibility among a fairly broad group of sometimes-influential political commentators and a decent number of ordinary people, is a responsibility. Hancox-Li claimed to be writing from a place of cynicism, evaluating the Prairieland defendants in terms of their success or failure, rather than the moral content of their actions.3 But it is no less cynical, and considerably more productive to the cause of anti-fascism, to look at the Prairieland case and ask: “How can we use this to get people out of ICE jails? To build popular support for eliminating the laws that produced these unjust outcomes? To delegitimize the Trump administration?” What the essay does is exactly the opposite of each of those things: Explaining why, for folks who may be on the fence about the whole incident, repression is not something they need to worry about: Just don’t be stupid.
Public perception of a protest does not follow inevitably from what happened at the protest itself; it is produced by those who choose to write about it. Alex Pretti brought a gun to a protest, too. He did not fire it. What would have been the impact of his death had those who supported Minnesota rapid response litigated his decision to bring the gun in essays after the fact?4 To put it in Hancox-Li’s terms: Whether the Prairieland protests achieved their goals is simply not a question that can be answered yet because the goals were ending ICE terror and freeing detainees that battle is, presumably, ongoing. In choosing to intervene at this moment, in this way, to characterize their actions as failed, is to contribute to their failure by refusing to understand the actions as an opening to engage in a discursive effort to undermine the moral authority of Trump and ICE.5 If you see yourself as part of the struggle, rather than an expert on it, the point is to identify a tactical defeat as something that can be used in pursuit of our shared goals. The point is not to be right - the point is to win; being right in one’s strategic analysis is often a precondition of acting effectively, but it should never come at the expense of well, successfully fighting fascism—if that is, indeed, what we are fighting.
And so here’s where I come clean about my motivations. My earliest political activism was against kidnappings of Muslim men following 9/11. I spent one summer in law school working at Center for Constitutional Rights where I contributed to a First Amendment challenge to the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and did document review for the Ashker v. Governor of California case that challenged the use of tattoos for placing people in solitary confinement for years more than a decade before Venezuelan immigrants were classified as Tren de Aragua and sent to CECOT on the basis of crown tattoos.6 I challenged a classmate who went on to work in the White House to a public debate over Obama’s immigration policy and use of drones, including the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki.
My point is not to say “I told you so” but to articulate my political priors: We are in a moment where a lot of state violence that to which Americans, including Democrats, broadly acquiesced is now being deployed against individuals who cannot be easily racially othered and whose putative terrorism is being carried out on behalf of political goals - Abolish ICE! - that are widely shared. This is a terrifying moment but also a moment of tremendous opportunity for dramatically broadening the political coalition and strengthening the political will for dismantling these tools of state violence so that they cannot hurt anyone in the future. And I see the internal danger to the anti-Trump coalition in this moment not just (or even primarily) as the possibility that disorganized violence by left-aligned adventurists will spin out of control but that the bulk of the political commentariat who now quote Andor and talk about themselves as “antifa” will fall back on a position of punishing MAGA without uprooting the legal frameworks MAGA used to hurt so very many people. In other words, I’m concerned that those with discursive and agenda-setting power in exile from a MAGA-controlled DC will continue to view themselves temporarily embarrassed wielders of state violence, reassuring themselves if they can just take it back, we’ll be OK, rather than remaining committed to dismantling the legal tools that are deployed to justify that violence.7
Liberal Currents named its policy opus “The Reconstruction Papers.” There has been a lot of talk about what comes next as a Reconstruction, both to convey the magnitude of the task and to connect the current struggle with the unfinished work of the post-Civil War era and implicitly argue that MAGA is, indeed, a continuation or at least a descendent of the Confederacy. I agree completely with this characterization, and usage. But “Reconstruction” itself as a descriptor of the post-Civil War political moment is also something of a misnomer. The union wasn’t reconstructed, it was remade. The Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments did not put the union back as it was, they completely changed who was considered part of the political project of America. It’s perhaps a too-convenient metaphor, given this self-conscious historical lineage, but Paul Crider (another Liberal Currents co-editor) pointed out to me that Frederick Douglass both declined to join John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and criticized it in letters but–after Brown’s death–publicly canonized him. Douglass understood Brown’s sacrifice, however ill-advised and futile, could be a tool for calling attention to the ongoing violence of slavery and the necessity of extreme action to defeat it. (And it would, in fact, take extraordinary violence, of a previously unseen scale, to do so.)
Let us be cynical like Douglass. If this is a moment of reconstruction, there is a real political urgency to focus on what must change about what came before to not just prevent more violence, but end the violence we have accepted for too long. Our writing should serve that goal.
As it happens I read London Falling this week (compelling, but ultimately the scope of inquiry was smaller than I had expected/hoped) and am still grinding through Carbon Democracy as my current Verso read.
One could plausibly read the article as an effort, by distancing other forms of protest from the Prairieland noise demonstration, to protect those other protests from public opprobrium. But if that was the effort, I don’t think it does so effectively because it simply insists that the ambiguous non-violent acts (moving zines) were, as the prosecutors asserted, of a piece with the later violence. It makes the case for the prosecution in connecting the violence to the intellectual context in which it occurred, which puts more organizers at risk in the future because it is not, ultimately, up to us whether a random person fires a gun at a protest we organize. It also doesn’t address the fact that the Trump administration has simply redescribed cars as deadly weapons to justify its violence and this hasn’t been successful in part because people do not take the government’s word for it that people like Renee Good or Salgado Araujo were using cars in that way.
I am, I will admit, not entirely convinced by this disclaimer, both because of the essay’s tone and because Hancox-Li takes a pretty decided position on the First Amendment issues in the prosecution. The First Amendment questions in the case would be a live issue on appeal and I, a lawyer, am not in a position to opine on the legal merits of those arguments without considerably more legal research and a closer study of the record than the essay reflects.
Another note on the juxtaposition with Minnesota rapid response in the essay. The Prairieland noise demonstration took place before both Operations Midway Blitz and Metro Surge, that is, before there was anything like mass opposition to ICE kidnappings, when the protesters were themselves trying to draw more attention to an ongoing crisis where popular opinion had not yet tipped as decidedly as it has since. That doesn’t immunize the action from criticism, but the better comparison is to the inflatable frog protests at the ICE facility in Portland, and which happens to be reproducible nationally in a way that Minnesota no longer is, precisely because ICE has adapted its tactics and is now kidnapping people in isolated grabbings rather than through citywide invasions.
One could say the protest failed to liberate specific detainees in that facility–if that was understood as the goal–but then the tactical failure is one of ineffective use of violence, not the choice to use it at all. I don’t read Hancox-Li to prefer an outcome in which better training and planning enable stochastic raids on ICE facilities that successfully extract individuals at gunpoint.
The essay uses the fact that the ACLU would not represent the Prairieland defendants as an argument for their ineptitude. ACLU was also slow to challenge Guantanamo–they filed FOIAs and amicus briefs, but it was CCR who was willing to step in and actually represent detainees. I’ll also note that the organization does not have a spotless record in choosing its clients and has increasingly positioned itself as a general left policy org rather than civil liberties bulldog in recent years.
I also worry this is a self-understanding that will leave us totally unprepared in the absence of electoral victory. I am agnostic about whether Trump will try or succeed to invalidate bad-for-him election results in 2026 or 2028, but if you only think in terms of what needs to be done after the electoral victory is won, you have no strategy for minimizing harm and resisting repression if you lose. It is foolhardy after 2024 to simply assume that Trump’s failures, however self-evident and however bad the opinion polling, can overcome the structural inequities of the electoral college or hyper-partisanship before even taking the possibility of an autogolpe into account.