“When someone said to her that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between two candidates, she replied, ‘a dime can be the difference between life and death.’”
—Aurora Levins Morales
Election Day is but three days away. It is an essentially tied race likely to be decided by razor-thin margins in a few key states. There is, therefore, increasing focus and pressure on uncommitted, disengaged, and third-party voters. A coalition of environmental orgs have called on third-party voters to swing in behind Vice President Kamala Harris, while a coalition of Green Parties from 16 European nations have publicly called on Green Party Candidate Jill Stein to drop out of the race to prevent the global climate catastrophe that a Donald Trump victory all but guarantees. Many of these in the voting margins on the left say they have found a “red line” in the Biden Administration’s sustained support of Israeli even in the midst of what amounts to a genocide in Gaza. If the only issue to be decided this election was the support of Israel’s genocide, the tens of thousands killed—mostly civilians and largely children, women, and elders—and the nearly 2 million displaced, there may be a debate over which candidate is the lesser of two evils.
With an outrageous lack of policy proposals from Harris that would show she has something other than the status quo in mind, it’s been left to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to make the case that as president Harris would be ready to take actions that a candidate Harris has avoided. I share the exhaustion and anger that drives so many to disengage. But in this election there are more genocides we must consider, a global climate collapse that must be repaired, gathering domestic pogroms we are called to interrupt, and—in a breaking development—pledges from Elon Musk, who Trump has agreed to place over “government efficiency,” a plan to intentionally crash the U.S. economy as part of a “Shock Doctrine” austerity project to fulfill the vision of Project 2025. That vision is, at its core, a plan to eradicate virtually all social services and fully “liberate” capital from the influence of democratic control.
Most of the plans to dominate, if not eliminate, religious, sexual, and ideological “undesirables”—which are already off to a good start in too many solidly red states, including Texas—have been vetted in public. Yet it is still hard to conceive of the world that is in store should voters—or dirty tricks, or violence—install Trump once more to the presidency.
For the problem with Trump is the MAGA movement that empowers him, and that he in turn empowers, as an unabashedly white nationalist and Christofascist project. Many of its members have been primed for violence through years of revival-like tent meetings by a network of former military intelligence operatives making use of psychological warfare techniques designed to destabilize populations. MAGA’s “Stop the Steal” efforts have sought to rig a Trump victory before the voting even started. Investigative journalist Greg Palast’s recent documentary Vigilantes, Inc. captures the voices of those ready to secure that win by force, with Facebook’s help, vote be damned. Denied reelection in 2020, Trump himself called to “terminate the Constitution” and promises today to rule “only on Day One” as a dictator. He has open plans to prosecute political rivals, the media, and all who oppose him (particularly those on the left). As Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance said in 2021: “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”
The faults of the current and would-be next Democratic administration are many, but they pale beside MAGA’s agenda. As journalist Masha Gessen, who fled Russia’s autocratic consolidation under Putin, warned us back in 2017, the first rule for survival under autocracy is believe the autocrat.
We’ve already been warned about a coming “largest deportation in the history of our country,” which would round up as many as 20 million U.S. residents—vastly eclipsing “Operation Wetback” of the 1950s. “Put into effect, this scheme would devolve quickly into a vast 21st-century version of concentration camps, with predictably brutal results,” wrote Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.”
We’ve been promised a shut down of the U.S. Department of Education, which the Texas American Federation of Teachers union has said “would remove crucial federal oversight … that ensures educational equity and protects students’ rights.” And Trump has repeatedly pledged to defund any school teaching “critical race theory” (shorthand for any lesson on the history of racism in this country) or promoting “gender insanity” (shorthand for protecting the rights of LGBTQ students to access a free and equal public education). As an extension of that, we are expecting Trump to consolidate and deepen the movement to eradicate transgender people from public life (ie. life, actually) and deny them access to healthcare.
Women are dying in red states around the country due to Trump’s packing the Supreme Court with religious zealots who made possible the elimination of basic rights to healthcare and bodily autonomy. In Texas, maternal deaths “skyrocketed” by 56 percent the year after passage of the state’s abortion ban, according to the Gender Equity Policy Institute.
These are all outcomes of successful Christofascist organizing that this election can block.
The capture of the Republican Party by the white nationalist MAGA project was fully on display at Trump’s hate rally at Madison Square Gardens, the 1939 setting of the largest Nazi rally ever held in the United States. The verbal assault on non-white peoples started with the opening speaker, who described Puerto Rico as a “floating pile of garbage.” While that particular slur has since caught political fire, the night was packed with other racist insults. Stephen Miller, who helped design Trump’s immigration policy and is likely to help execute his mass deportation orders, cried “America for Americans,” which The New York Times recognized as a slogan used by the Ku Klux Klan. Elon Musk, recently relocated to Texas out of fear and hatred for trans people like his own daughter, trolled the moment, wearing on stage what he spotlighted as a “dark, gothic MAGA” hat featuring a Fraktur-like font popular in the early years of Nazis Germany.
While the MAGA movement has been built around the personhood of Trump, it has infused the Republican Party to such a degree that it must be understood today as a vehicle functioning within a global fascist march. This is evidenced in the party’s idolization and desired replication of far-right leaders like Hungary’s Victor Orban, Israel’s Netanyahu, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and (before mass organizing returned socialist president Lula da Silva to power in Brazil) the “Trump of the Tropics,” Jair Bolsonaro—all of whom have or sought to merge state power with religion and “traditional” family values while waging war on familiar scapegoats, including immigrants, LGBTQ people, and the political left.
And then there is the climate collapse.
Today, we are living out a sixth mass extinction, driven by capitalist profit logics and fossil fuels. Across the planet, nearly 47 million people were driven from their homes in 2023—more than half by weather-related disasters that are increasingly being inflamed by climate change.
Around 3 million people within the United States have been displaced by extreme weather since 2020. When 40 trillion gallons fell from the sky in September, submerging large swaths of the Southeast, Trump was fueling disinformation online that manifested as real-world harassment of FEMA workers. When President, he withheld aid from areas hit by disasters where he felt the storm victims were not sufficiently loyal to him.
For years we have been warned that continued unrestrained spewing of greenhouse gases and abuse of natural systems across the globe are shunting us toward an uninhabitable future. After decades of failed efforts, the groundbreaking Paris Agreement signed in April of 2016 secured pledges from virtually all of the world’s governments: A dramatic slashing of half of our emissions by 2030 on the way to zeroing out that pollution by 2050.
Failure at this point means we are on the way to potential “runaway” scenarios in short order, as Jeff Goodell, longtime climate journalist and author of the book “The Heat Will Kill You First,” writes in “The Case for Kamala Harris in a Burning World”:
“What happens on Nov. 5 will go a long way toward determining whether Phoenix will be a habitable city in the years to come, whether wildfires will consume the West, whether the ocean will become a dead pool of jellyfish and coastal cities like Miami and Charleston become underwater theme parks.”
As president, Trump rejected the Paris Agreement and doubled down on fossil fuels. Biden—for his many deep flaws—rejoined Paris. His administration set goals both for slashing emissions in half by 2030 and set a 30 percent target for conserving the nation’s lands and waters. There are serious performance gaps, but the administration released—with Harris serving a tie-breaking role—more money than any former administration toward the necessary transition to lower-carbon energy sources.
By contrast, Trump and his policy teams have committed to rejecting the Paris Agreement (again) and all international environmental treaties. Under MAGA we can expect a return to a ‘Drill Baby Drill’ fossil fuels-first energy policy; efforts to defund the U.S. EPA; the break up and privatization of the best federal climate research efforts, such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and the outright banning of renewable energy such as offshore wind farms. These efforts are coinciding with a movement, led by a Trump megadonor, to rewrite the fucking U.S. Constitution…to protect fossil fuels. This as we barrel through the Earth’s hottest year on record capping the hottest decade ever recorded with no relief in sight.
Trump in 2025 would be total arson.
In such a world, I highlight the reasoning of famed socialist and feminist scholar-activist Angela Davis, who recently explained her support for the Harris/Walz ticket this way:
“When we engage in electoral politics, it can’t be just because a particular individual is running for office. It is to enlarge the terrain of mass struggle, to guarantee a space for the trade union movement to win victories, for the women’s movement to win victories, for people of color to win victories, for working and poor people to win victories.”
Or, to quote from a powerful recent essay by Aurora Levins Morales: “We’re not choosing a leader. We’re picking our fight.” To yield to voices insisting that Democrats are equivalent to (or worse than) the MAGA movement would be, from a climate or human rights perspective, to repeat a strategic error at a comparable historical moment—one that had resounding penalties for millions around the world.
In “The Death of Democracy,” Benjamin Carter Hett meticulously tracks the rise of Hitler, highlighting an underappreciated contribution to that rise: the tragic misjudgment of German Communists which held that political centrists (ie. Social Democrats) must be fought equally with Nazism. “Because Germany’s Community Party was so large,” Hett writes, “Stalin’s German auxiliaries could, and did, frustrate efforts at forming a united left that might have kept the Nazis from power.” Tackling that same period, David Winner wrote in recently the New Statesman that Moscow believed reformist Social Democrats were actually worse than the Nazis, as they threatened to delay the inevitable revolution. “To further the dream of a Soviet Germany,” Winner wrote, “the party was willing to help the Nazis destroy democracy, thinking it could beat the Nazis easily in the aftermath.”
As Ernst Thälmann, chief of the German Communist Party (KPD), reasoned at the time:
“Hitler must come to power first, then the requirements for a revolutionary crisis [will] arrive more quickly.”
The first part of that play came to pass: Hitler did come to power. But a people’s revolution didn’t follow. Instead Hitler’s secret police and stormtroopers surged through the nation and death camps ultimately dispatched tens of thousands of the Führer’s political enemies, mostly socialists and communists. Those who gambled in their electoral strategy on this theory of “social fascism” weren’t the only ones to die as a result. We must continue to recall and mourn the roughly 300,000 people living with disabilities who were eliminated too. And the half million Roma. Nearly 2 million Poles. Six million Jews. Between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men. Forty-five million civilians worldwide were extinguished under the white nationalist fascism of the Nazi regime. The damage to non-human life of that global conflagration was also immense.
If this comparison between MAGA and Nazism feels too extreme, remember: Hitler didn’t adopt the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” right away. It started with years of internal herding of populations and mass deportations—efforts stymied, to the world’s enduring shame, by the refusal of so many nations to receive Hitler’s human cargo.
“The normalisation of the Musk-Trump plan to target and remove as many as 20 million people from the United States—all on the grounds of enhancing American economic productivity—falls within precisely the same parameters of an evolving genocidal ideology visible in the decade before Hitler’s adopted final solution,” writes Nafeez Ahmed, a renowned systems theorist and investigative journalist.
“The U.S. is on the brink of a similar trajectory of ideological radicalisation.”
We must understand that even defeat at the polls may not prevent Trump’s return. In the event of a Harris win, we should be steeling ourselves for waves of violence emanating from the MAGA core and preparing to defend democratic processes and protect our most vulnerable friends, family, and neighbors. There are too many cases where elections have been overturned by legal tricks and targeted violence, including the Brooks Brothers riot, when a small army of Republican operatives shut down a recount in Florida and thereby secured the presidency for George W. Bush.
So vote as you must to block MAGA’s rise. But block MAGA’s rise. Do not dismiss, shortchange, or downplay what it is that confronts us.
The vote is not the totality of how we must organize ourselves for the benefit of all beings, for all life on this planet. But it may, in this case, be that “dime’s worth of difference” between expanding the struggle for liberation and total irrevocable collapse.
