Word count: 802
Paragraphs: 12
Do you feel it? Everything has slowed down and gotten quiet. All the yelling and screaming has subsided for a bit. The images are coming up more slowly and further apart, the colors are a little brighter, and the patterns are more insistent. Groucho Marx comes onscreen and says “Everybody out there—everybody, no matter who you are, get out and vote no.”
I remember the first time I voted, in 1972. We were the first ones to be allowed to vote at age 18, after the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in July 1971, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, based on the rationale: “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” When I went into that shabby little booth in a small-town firehouse in Kansas, I almost bolted, because I immediately felt hemmed in, trapped really. When I settled down a bit I was overwhelmed by the sudden realization that there wasn’t any way to say “No” in that booth. You could only say “Yes,” to one choice over another. If you wanted to say “No,” you would have to do it some other way.
I was spending most of my time then doing radical organizing against the Vietnam War and working on the George McGovern campaign, which we thought was a way to say “No” to the war, to stop the killing. The Republicans painted McGovern as the “Triple A” candidate, in favor of “amnesty, abortion, and acid.” We lost in a historic landslide to Richard Nixon, and the war went on for another year, killing another 40,000 on the Vietnamese side.
In 2024, a lot of Americans think, for very different reasons, that they can say “No” by voting for Donald Trump. They think they can say no to the post-industrial world that has replaced many of the things they loved and believed in with a new world order they hardly recognize and do not condone, and that they can say no to this new world that has treated them badly and brought in all kinds of new pressures and uncertainties. But, in the process, they’re saying yes to a con man who has sold them a narrative that has no chance of actually coming true. And they have said yes to an autocrat who will desecrate the Constitution and try to dismantle democracy and set aside the rule of law. For all Americans, this is a meta-election, presenting an existential choice.
Fascism has been a part of the American story for a long time, certainly since the 1930s. So has anti-fascism, although the homeland part of that story has not been told as much as it should be. The features of the fascist pitch are the same as they were in the past: we are a nation in decline, the rest of the world is laughing at us, some group—Jews, communists, immigrants—are bringing us down and “poisoning the blood of the people” and need to be expelled or extinguished, and one man, one strong man, will lead us out of all this, using state violence, including the military, deployed at home against the “enemies from within.”
Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, defines fascism in this way:
[A] cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists, and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and history of a nation . . . . The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.1
I don’t know what’s going to happen on November 5th. But I know that if Trump and JD Vance win the election, America will move much closer to fascism in a hurry.
Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, says Trump is raising the stakes in the waning days of this race and getting darker and darker in his pronouncements about what he’ll do if elected because he is “energizing his base for the authoritarianism he hopes to bring about. And he is preparing his voters for complicity.” That’s what’s happening in all those rallies.
But I am still hoping that when the votes are counted, enough Americans will have decided to say “No” in this election. No to fascism. No to the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law. No to abandoning the Constitution. There is plenty to vote yes to in the candidacy of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but the ultimate test of democracy in this election is whether enough people of good will stand up and say “No” to Trump and Vance.
This is a country riven in its soul. Which way will it go? Yes, or no?
1. Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York, NY: Random House, 2018).
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.