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Refuse, Resist, Contest: Block & Build For the Trump 2.0 Era

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The most critical task for the coming period will be to block MAGA forces from consolidating hegemony around their political project. With few formal political levers under our control, our ability to do so will depend on concerted, coordinated opposition from all across society. The tasks involved in doing so will vary with the political terrain.

The Convergence Editorial Board has offered some thoughts on how we can adapt our Block and Build strategy to the new political situation, and is interested in deepening the conversation. Here Liberation Road shares its perspective. Please email [email protected] if you have ideas to put into the mix.

As we head into a second and much more perilous Trump presidency, we are all grappling with huge questions about what just happened, what it means, and what the Left must do to meet this moment. As a contribution to those efforts, we offer the following points, adapted from a longer post-election statement from our organization, Liberation Road. That longer statement included a retrospective analysis of the election, and a first assessment of the changed balance of power. Here, we focus on the most basic forward-facing question: what, now, must we do? That is something that must be answered collectively, so we offer the following points as provisional hypotheses. If we have framed our argument strongly, it is only in order to contribute to a robust and much-needed conversation.

Blocking the Right

The greatest risk right now is that MAGA will manage—through a combination of violent repression and distribution of privilege—to obtain the consent or acquiescence of sufficient forces to consolidate hegemony around a new governing paradigm—a framework for how society, government and the economy operate. Neoliberalism, the dominant governing framework since the 1980s, is no longer able to contain growing social, environmental, and economic contradictions, and virtually all sectors of society—including the ruling class—are unsure about how to restore equilibrium. Amidst this uncertainty, right-wing forces are attempting a “slow-motion coup” to consolidate a new long-term hegemonic power structure, rooted in authoritarianism, white Christian fundamentalism, and ethnonationalism. Their control of all branches of the federal government heightens the risk that they will succeed. 

Luckily for us, right-wing forces have not yet consolidated a hegemonic bloc around their social, political, and economic agenda. MAGA’s electoral victory, while broad, was shallow. Many of their ideas are deeply unpopular, and the “common sense” remains highly contested. With control of all levers of federal government, they may be able to impose major portions of their agenda by force and fiat; but without securing the consent of key social forces, they will not be able to consolidate their control. 

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Accordingly, the most critical task for the coming period will be to block MAGA forces from consolidating hegemony around their political project. With few formal political levers under our control, our ability to do so will depend on concerted, coordinated opposition from all across society—including organized labor, social movements, churches and faith communities, students and universities, culture and media figures, civil servants, military members, and even sectors of capital. The good news is that there are many forces within and across all these social sectors who oppose the MAGA agenda or can be won over to our ranks. From black bloc anarchists to retired military generals, student radicals to soccer moms, immigrant rights groups to small-business owners, the range of forces currently or potentially opposed to Trump’s authoritarian agenda is quite broad. 

Broadening the anti-fascist front

As these examples show, however, this broad anti-fascist front contains many contradictions. Our ability to block MAGA will depend, in part, on our ability to hold together this heterogeneous coalition in the face of internal divisions and external attempts to divide us. Doing so will require us to step out of our comfort zones, embrace contradictions, and be willing to engage people with whom we have deep disagreements. We don’t need to ignore or deny those differences, but we do need to recognize our shared interest in preserving a liberal democracy (however imperfect) where our ability to struggle over those disagreements is defended. Our shared mantra must be defense of civil society, civil liberties, and civil rights. 

Thus, where differences threaten to fracture our coalition’s ability to oppose fascism, we must subordinate them to our shared commitments: to uphold core democratic principles; to oppose right-wing political violence; and to defend those targeted by the state from persecution. Where elements of our coalition waffle on these key points of unity, we must reorient them to the stakes and reorganize them to our side. Because fascists always start by targeting the “weak points” where they perceive our front as most vulnerable, it will be especially important to maintain unity around defense of fascism’s first targets: immigrants, trans people, and other “enemies within” singled out for early attacks. 

Luckily, ours is not the only front to contain deep contradictions. The fight now breaking out between tech billionaires and MAGA populists over H1B visas highlights just one of many divisions among our opponents. The “chainsaw” Elon Musk wants to take to the federal budget would wreak enormous pain on middle-class MAGA supporters. The millions of deportations the latter are clamoring for will be fiercely fought by key sectors of capital. Anti-abortion extremists are pushing policies that will be resented and resisted by everyone from Larry Hogan to Joe Rogan. We must be ready to exploit these and other divisions within the fascist bloc to weaken their front and win more forces to our side. 

Currently, the main thing uniting the various factions of the right-wing front is that they are all emboldened to pursue a maximalist version of their agenda(s). But the boldest ambitions of these different factions—Christian nationalists, right-wing populists, authoritarian statists and anarcho-capitalists—are not only anathema to the broader public, they are also in real conflict with one another. Because of this, points of escalation by right-wing forces, while increasing the threat of authoritarianism, also offer us opportunities to deepen resistance, draw waffling allies closer to us, and peel off supporters from the fascist front.

Building the Left

Even as we work to strengthen the broadest possible anti-fascist front, we must work to increase the power, influence, and leadership of the Left within it. The failure of the centrist Democratic establishment to successfully defeat Trump in this election demonstrates the paucity of their ideas and the limits of their leadership—and offers left and progressive forces an opportunity to increase ours. 

To do so, our organizations will need to scale our communications, deepen our base building, and develop the infrastructure to connect mass mobilizing with deep organizing. Hundreds of thousands are looking to make sense of this loss, to understand the changed terrain, and to reorient to the tasks ahead. The Left must develop a clear vision, program, and strategy that can help people make sense of this moment, and broadcast it widely. Left organizations should hold mass meetings to bring in the many people activated by our defeat—and utilize these as a springboard to connect them to ongoing organizing. We need to harness this and future moments of activation and mobilization to connect people to the durable, long-term, place-based organizing necessary, not only to fight fascism, but to build an emancipatory alternative that genuinely meets the needs of our people. 

Just as our ability to defeat the fascist right depends on maintaining unity across a heterogeneous anti-fascist front containing both left and centrist forces, so too our ability to successfully vie with centrist forces for greater leadership within that front will depend on a unified and coordinated effort from across the progressive and socialist Left. Indeed, precisely because we need to successfully balance those two struggles, our unity is doubly important. It is thus imperative that the Left work towards greater alignment and coordination among labor unions, independent political organizations (IPOs), elected allies, progressive groups, socialists, and mass-based social movement organizations (especially of oppressed genders and oppressed people of color). We must learn to combat what Mao called the “mountain stronghold mentality” in which each compact unit of struggle, cut off and isolated from the others, comes to view itself as the vanguard or the resistance. 

Applying this strategy to diverse terrains

The tasks of blocking the right, broadening the anti-fascist front, and building the Left will look different in red, blue, and purple states and regions:

In states, cities, and regions under Democratic control, we must refuse fascism,

creating sanctuaries and refuges where we have the power to say, “This will not happen here.” In these places, we must enshrine and defend existing rights—around abortion access, gender-affirming healthcare, immigrant justice, civil liberties, democracy, and much more. Simultaneously, we must push for bolder, transformative policies that can provide an alternative governing model to masses of people rightly disillusioned by the failures of neoliberalism. We should strive to make these regions into beacons, sending out bat signals that another, better America is possible.  

In states, cities, and regions under MAGA control, we must resist fascism.

This includes protecting our communities through sanctuary networks and community self-defense; creating alternative institutions that can provide mutual aid and community care; and using cultural resistance, protest, and acts of civil disobedience large and small to rally our people and win over public opinion. Because the Left has more experience than centrist Democrats with protest and disobedience, resistance offers us opportunities to win more leadership inside the multiracial pro-democracy front; simultaneously, we must be ready to take advantage of opportunities to bring in centrist and working-class Republicans disillusioned by MAGA rule. 

In states, cities, and regions that are “swing” districts or under divided rule, we must contest fascism.

This will involve connecting ongoing issue fights with a long-term electoral strategy. Because we know short-term parachute campaigns cannot organize the durable majorities needed to elect and protect pro-democracy candidates as part of a coordinated movement strategy to decisively defeat MAGA, the work of organizing toward the 2026 and 2028 elections must start now. Labor unions should target these areas for deep worker organizing; community-based groups should run issue campaigns; IPOs should begin prospecting, recruiting, and training candidates; sitting electeds should engage their voter base year-round; and all of these efforts need to synergize and integrate with each other as much as possible.

At the national level, we are all now living in the equivalent of a red state. That means movements that have been organizing for years in red states and regions are now our best experts on how to organize within and against fascist rule.

These three terrains are not mutually exclusive. Deep blue states contain contested districts decisive to control of Congress. Deep red states have progressive regions that can become safe havens and sanctuaries. At the national level, we are all now living in the equivalent of a red state. That means movements that have been organizing for years in red states and regions are now our best experts on how to organize within and against fascist rule. Progressives living in major metros and Democratic states sometimes forget that MAGA-dominated states in the South and Southwest contain some of the largest concentrations of Black, Indigenous, and Latine communities, the liveliest social movements, and the longest lineages of struggle. Now is a good time to listen to and learn from them. 

Refusing, resisting, and contesting right-wing authoritarianism on all three of these terrains will be important. But fights on red and blue terrain are both, in different ways, defensive battles—attempts to protect against the attacks of an authoritarian federal government (in one case with the support of local and state officials, in the other, without). Electorally, it is only on purple, contested terrain that we can mount a counter-offensive to break MAGA’s governing majorities. In Fall 2024, our forces flooded swing states and districts with dollars, staff, volunteers, and other resources, rightly recognizing that these regions were the critical fault lines that would determine whether we defeated MAGA. But we maintained this concentration of our limited resources for only a few short months. What would it look like for the Left to be that laser-focused for the next four years?

Challenging ourselves to meet the moment

The tasks outlined above are enormous, multi-faceted, and complex, and no single organization can manage them in isolation. Indeed, any talk of “building the Left” must first recognize the relative weakness and fragmentation of the socialist, labor, and social movement Left in this dire political period. Without seriously grappling with this, any call for a left strategy or program will be quixotic—a call to arms without an army.   

The reality is that we are facing this moment of fascist threat with historically low levels of organization. Our progressive non-profit organizations are many, but far too small. Our authentically mass organizations are few, and rarely consolidated around our politics. (While some mass organizations possess left leadership, few are mass left organizations, precisely because we have not yet won the working-class masses to a left politics and program.) A resurgence of popularity for labor unions has thus far failed to translate into higher levels of organization. The same can be said for renewed interest in socialism, which has not yet led to a renewal of socialist organization—with the notable exception of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which remains internally divided and disorganized.

The reality is that we are facing this moment of fascist threat with historically low levels of organization.

In writing this, we do not mean to discount the many encouraging developments of the past ten years: the tremendous surge of racial justice protest and the Movement for Black Lives; the renewal of an internationalist and anti-imperialist Left and its galvanizing support for Palestinian rights; the election of more and bolder progressive (and in some cases explicitly socialist) officials at local, state, and federal levels; the increasing skill, scale, and sophistication of many state-based independent political organizations and, at the national level, the Working Families Party; the formation of new socialist groups and the growth of DSA; and the emergence of spaces that try to sharpen and synthesize these and other efforts, such as Rising Majority, the State Power Caucus, and Convergence

All these components of the social movement, labor, and socialist Left will be necessary in the fights ahead. But without greater collaboration and coordination among them, we will be unable to form a pole powerful enough to contest against both fascist forces and the backward centrist leadership of our broad democratic coalition. To implement a left strategy, we must cohere and coordinate as a Left, which will be challenging. All organizations have impulses to silo, and for left and progressive organizations these are compounded by additional factors: non-profit funding models that incentivize differentiation over collaboration, longstanding divisions within organized labor, and the socialist Left’s ingrained tendencies towards vanguardism and sectarianism. 

We don’t need to start with a total transformation—and in fact we can’t. Some have already started discussing the need for leftists and progressives to cohere around a single presidential candidate in 2028. If we are to successfully coordinate those kinds of major interventions, we must sow the seeds through multiple smaller, practical efforts that gradually increase the scope of our tactical and strategic coordination, beginning right now. This can be as simple as co-producing events, sharing draft plans with our allies while they are still in development (rather than planning first and seeking collaboration after) or even just getting in the process of asking, “Who else should be in this room right now?” This is how we can build trust, test alignment, and begin to strengthen ourselves as a cohesive Left.

The structural failures of neoliberalism and the three-fold crisis of economy, ecology, and empire have created an opening—an interregnum—where different forces compete to determine what will follow. The fight is so intense precisely because we are in a period where dramatic change is possible. This is a high-stakes political moment for the Left. Our ability to scale our organizing, break down silos, and coordinate our efforts will determine if we can meet it.


Nzinga Amani, Bennett Carpenter and Anca Stefan offer this article on behalf of the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road.

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