All You Fascists Are Bound To Lose

Collection: Resist Rebel Revolt

Format: Article

Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana

Date: February 28, 2025

Tags: Fascism, Resistance, History, The Future

Resist Rebel Revolt is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana; Author, Women's Rights Activist, & Philosopher.

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The Definition of Fascism, by Encyclopaedia Britannica, says:

An authoritarian or totalitarian form of government with: 

- Extreme militaristic nationalism;

- Contempt for electoral democracy or liberalism;

- A belief in a natural social hierarchy & the rule of elites;

& - The desire to subordinate the individual’s interest for the good of the regime

Robert Paxton writes in his 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism, that fascism is:

A form of political behavior marked by: 

- Obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, 

- Compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, 

- A mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,

- Working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, 

- Abandoning democratic liberties, 

& - Pursuing with redemptive violence—without ethical or legal restraints—the goals of internal cleansing & external expansion

Yikes. That sounds terrifyingly accurate.

In Paul Mason’s book, How To Stop Fascism, he reminds us that:

“The number one thing we need to learn from history is that fascism takes off when large numbers of people experience a kind of mass religious conversion to far right ideologies. This conversion happens quickly. From 2% of the voters in an election to 17% practically over night.”

He goes on to say 

That in the 1930s, a French anarchist toured early Nazi Germany during the beginning seeds of their religious fascism fever. 

The Frenchman said that the only thing that might have stopped this takeover was a living, breathing, alternative to the problems that fascism promised to solve.

An alternative that is more promising, more attractive, more visionary than the racist, misogynistic utopia that the fascists are proposing.

And that this alternative proposal or vision needs to be built by a coalition of the center left and the extreme left. 

Paul Mason said that when the center left and extreme left are at war with each other, the fascists win (as happened in Germany during the rise of Hitler). The only thing that can stop them is a coalition with a strong enough vision for the future.

So this is it. This is our time to become radical and to build a coalition of radicals. 

But not radical in action––radical in VISION.

The fascists are trying to burn everything down. The only way we can stop them is to rise up with a more inspiring vision of the future for America.

So if you have a radical people-power movement that was too fringe in 2010 - now is your time to bring it out. Universal income? Environmental sustainability? Take it out.

Start talking about bolder and bolder solutions.

Why? Because the truth is, we have to get to work creating a new vision for America that combats a seductive, nearly-religious conversion that provides simplistic, comforting solutions for our current problems.

As Paul Mason says: fascism provides solutions that answer to “a collapse of a belief system, the collapse of an identity that a society holds. The mass disorientation of new systems and new paradigms emerging.” 

But it does so by relying on simplistic solutions that your average white, male can reliably fall back on. For example, white supremacy and gender superiority. Which aren’t visionary ideologies. In fact, they’re lazy, but also reliable and comforting ideologies that simply promise to restore stability within a paradigm that is bringing mass disorientation.

In order to build a vision that can answer to this mass disorientation, the center left and the far left need to build a radical coalition around a new vision for the future.

And that means that we have to ditch the paradigms we inherited from 50 years of Republican Capitalist propaganda. 

We have to fight back against the subtle conditioning that technology has given us through two decades of cellphones, apps, & social media.

We have to create a radical vision that fights to represent us, against the world order that the tech autocrats are trying to turn us into.

And the bigger and grander our vision, the better.

I don't know what our protests can do to his presidency now.

But the next four years that third paragraph gets written by us.

We have the choice to write into history that even if our own democratic process was flawed enough to commit this wrong to its own people... we didn't take it lying down.

We can't rewrite the wrong that already happened.

But how can we be okay with sending that message to our future generations?

"Well - after a year of ignorance, chronic lies, and insanity—he won fair and square, so Americans simply decided he deserved our support."

We don't only have power—as a people—on election day.

(And if we really believe that: maybe that's why this happened to us).

We all need to learn what responsibility we have to this country. Because the fact is the president isn't the only one who writes history.

Of course, as you know: aside from the small protests I attended after Trump won in 2016, the next big march I attended ended up being the largest protest in U.S. history—

The 2017 DC Women’s March. Around 500,000 people in DC, alone. (And millions more around the world).

I doubt I’ll ever stand in a crowd that large again.

This year, we’re dispersed all over the country, showing up in smaller cities that never got a chance to hold protests before. And that may seem watered down.

But it’s not.

It means that there’s an ever greater opportunity for ordinary people to show up in the streets—those who never felt compelled to do so before.

Or those who felt the protests were happening in some exciting place far away from where they live.

The truth is, I used to be upset when the media didn’t air the smaller protests I attended. But I soon realized that they’re not the only witness that matters.

Every person who goes to the streets to fight for democracy remembers that feeling For. Ever.

And if enough people take that collective action NOW—it DOES get written into the history books.

Maybe Donald Trump wasn’t only 3 paragraphs. Maybe he’s going to be a couple pages more.

But the future hasn’t been written yet—we’re writing it right now with our present actions.

So what’s it going to say?