![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/27/3.jpg\")
\nWhether Trump tries to steal the election or Biden wins and tries to continue the same policies, we can come together to stop them. Here, we offer a selection of resources to prepare for post-electoral unrest, including posters, primers on protest and security skills, and information about what different groups are organizing around the country. Everybody out!
\n\n\nIf Donald Trump leaves power in January, the credit will not be due to Joe Biden, nor simply to those who voted in the election, but to the social movements that have demonstrated that the United States will be ungovernable under four more years of Trump. Whether or not Trump leaves power, we cannot count on any government or political party to look out for us—we have to do that ourselves.
\n\nIf protesters had not filled the streets, if anti-fascists had not shut down the white supremacists who were trying to build a movement to silence Trump’s opposition, if angry and heartbroken people had not forced the issues of police killings and detentions and deportations to the forefront of public discourse, the ruling class would probably have thrown all its weight behind supporting Trump’s presidency, giving him the money and support he needed to hold on to power regardless of how unpopular he is. Only our resistance has set a limit to what he can do; the rulings from judges and pushback from local politicians came after our mobilizations—and we can’t count on them, anyway, especially not as Trump continues to stack the judiciary. Trump is still trying to figure out how to hold on to power, but he is in a much weaker position than he would have been if people had stayed at home and waited for voting to take care of everything.
\n\nIf Trump tries to hold on to power, it will be up to us to stop him—regardless of what disinformation appears in the media, regardless of Democrats’ intentions to cede power to him once again. That could mean mass protests like the ones that took place in Portland over the summer when Trump sent in federal forces in an unsuccessful attempt to suppress dissent. It could mean coordinated disruptions. Rather than focusing on symbolic marches and displays, go where your actions will be most effective in exerting economic pressure. Be careful not to present a vulnerable target to far-right attackers.
\n\nSome people have been speaking about the possibility of a general strike. In 2020, when the market already treats most of us as expendable, a general strike has to look very different than the strikes of a hundred years ago. If the idea is to carry out a general strike, refusing to show up to work is not enough—we have to intervene to interrupt the functioning of the economy itself. Identify infrastructure and activities that are essential to the circulation of commodities, the accumulation of profit, and the maintenance of control. Study previous efforts to interrupt them, such as the November 2, 2011 general strike in Oakland at the height of the Occupy Movement and the port blockades that accompanied it.
\n\nIf there is going to be a movement powerful enough to change the outcome, it will not be the property of any particular organizing group, nor will it be limited to any particular strategy or code of conduct. It will have to draw together all the different participants in all the existing movements—against police violence, against prisons and deportation, against colonialism and ecological destruction and capitalism and war—along with all the tactics and perceptions they have developed throughout years of experience. It will have to be diverse and inclusive—a movement in which many movements fit.
\n\nEverybody out means this is not just about Trump or “preserving democracy.” If Biden wins the election, we must not permit his administration to continue Trump’s policies, we must continue to fight against every imposition on anyone’s liberty or well-being. If Biden wins, there will still be police, prisons, deportations, ecological destruction, capitalism—a Biden victory is not the end of this struggle, it is just the beginning of a new chapter. If Biden becomes president, on January 20, we should mobilize at ICE detention facilities and police stations and prisons to show that our opposition to all of these racist and oppressive institutions will continue until they are abolished.
\n\nEverybody out means we don’t trust any politician to control our future. It means we won’t legitimize institutions that have never looked out for us or kept us safe. It means coming together to determine what our lives should be, ourselves, directly.
\n\nWe have prepared a poster promoting this effort. Please print these out and distribute them widely this week, to let people know what’s coming!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/27/everybody-out_front_color.jpg\")
Click the image to download the PDF.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/27/everybody-out_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image to download the PDF.
\nLearn about how to make wheatpaste to put up posters here.
\n\nWe will update this list shortly as more events and organizing efforts are announced.
\n\nIn New York City, people have planned three months of events between the election and January 20.
\n\nIn Portland, people have planned a week of events between November 4 and 11.
\n\nDenver, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Raleigh are also organizing to prepare for electoral unrest.
\n\nLabor unions have also called for a general strike in the event that Trump attempts to steal the election. The 70,000 member AFL-CIO Rochester Labor Council became the first regional AFL-CIO body in the US to call for a general strike. The Western Mass Area Labor Federation AFL-CIO had passed a resolution calling on labor movement to launch general strike to ensure a “peaceful transition” of power. The 100,000-member MLK Labor Council, an AFL-CIO regional body of labor groups representing more than 150 unions in the Seattle area, is also calling for general strike. While our own values and political objectives may differ from the leadership of these unions, their interest in this indicates the scale of disruption that could occur.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/GrimKim/status/1323479807687036930\n\n\n
A centrist coalition under the banner “Protect the Results,” claiming to represent millions people, aims to mobilize if Trump “interferes” with the results, though it is not clear exactly how they define “interference.” It’s likely that any institutional reaction will follow a grassroots response, chasing behind popular momentum rather than galvanizing it. Of course, electoral politics generally functions to keep people in a state of paralyzed spectatorship, waiting to see an outcome rather than taking the initiative; if the news about the election results is confusing, it is possible that unless unaffiliated rebels immediately take action, nothing will happen at all.
\n\nYou can read an overview of what the government is planning in the way of repressive violence around the election here courtesy of It’s Going Down.
\n\nTrump’s term is ending as it began, with a likelihood of street conflict.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/27/2.jpg\")
\nThe following guides offer a great deal of information about how to participate in effective protests while protecting yourself and your community.
\n\nYou can find a lot of important information about general security in protest situations here.
\n\nThis thread spells out how to protect your privacy via proper phone safety at demonstrations—before, during, and after the protest.
\n\nYou can read some more tips about protest gear from protesters in Hong Kong here.
\n\nThis thread covers how to extinguish tear gas canisters.
\n\nYou can obtain more graphics on this subject here.
\n\nThese zines from the Rosehip Medic Collective include a range of useful information.
\n\nThis collection of resources that appeared shortly before Trump took office includes more topical material, addressing non-violence, solidarity, white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and more.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/27/1.jpg\")
\nAs Election Day approaches in a context of anxiety about the prospect of Donald Trump attempting to hold onto power by force or cunning, the revolutionary potential that was palpable in early June has receded almost beyond the horizon. Anarchism, abolitionism, and direct action tactics have gained traction throughout the Trump era; thanks to the fearmongering of the administration, anarchists have as much visibility as we have experienced in a century. Yet once again, we are watching the election crowd out any other subject or strategy. Many anarchists, despite decades of rejecting representative democracy, are focused on hoping for a Biden victory—or trying to figure out how to block a Trump coup, lest democracy give way to autocracy. Others are echoing the far right in anticipating a civil war.
\n\nThis is an old story, in which the twin threats of tyranny and civil war serve to discipline rebels back into supporting representative democracy, foreclosing the possibility of revolutionary change. But what if we want none of these—neither tyranny, nor civil war, nor to perpetually settle for being ruled by the lesser of two evils?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/3.jpg\")
Subtle signs of unrest.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/2.jpg\")
The best this system can offer us.
\nIt’s not surprising that anarchists are concerned about the outcome of the election. Which administration comes to power—whether by electoral victory or by other means—will determine what kind of challenges we confront as we continue fighting to abolish police, prisons, borders, and other forms of oppression.
\n\nHere is the strongest argument we can imagine for voting: if we understand ourselves as engaged in an outright conflict with an opposing army comprised of all the forces of the state, it might make sense to take advantage of a chance, however small, to influence who will lead that army against us. From this perspective, it could be worth taking a half hour to cast a ballot—assuming there really is no more effective way to employ that particular half hour—but it could never justify diverting our attention from our offensive efforts or letting our enemies know where we sleep at night.1 (To those who worry that voting legitimizes our rulers, we might counter that the chief way we legitimize their rule is by not overthrowing them.)
\n\nOf course, the vast majority of people do not understand voting this way. The liberal obsession with voting as the be-all-end-all of political participation is a symptom of—and an alibi for—a perverse refusal to take responsibility for all the more effective ways that one can go about making change. Likewise, leftists who grant that the state presents a structural obstacle to their aspirations nonetheless tend to get their hopes up that the periodic reign of the lesser of two evils represents a step towards a better world rather than a way to stabilize the existing order. Consequently, they are always taken by surprise by the ways that state actors coopt and undermine their efforts.
\n\nTake the Workers Party in Brazil, Syriza in Greece, and—not so long ago—Barack Obama in the United States. All of these used progressive rhetoric and minor social reforms as cover to continue implementing a neoliberal agenda and cracking down on movements for social change, stoking popular disillusionment and ultimately creating the conditions for the far right to come to power. Only by comparison with Bolsonaro, New Democracy, and Trump—the far-right successors whose victories they rendered inevitable—can these administrations seem desirable to anyone on the left.
\n\nThis time around, no one has any illusions that progress or reform are anywhere on the ballot. Cynicism abounds. If, in his first presidential campaign, Trump essentially promised that he would return the white working class to the 1950s, Joe Biden is proposing to take America back in time to 2016. Politically speaking, Biden is a nonentity representing voters’ fear of being ruled by Trump, their despair of ever seeing meaningful change through the political system, and their failure to imagine a more effective approach to self-determination.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/6.jpg\")
“Without revolution, there is no change. Vote PCPE!” This graffiti promoting the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain aptly illustrates the contradictions of the leftist relationship to state democracy. Since the mid-19th century, Marx and his successors have acknowledged that there are structural reasons that the state does not serve the working class—while nonetheless urging workers to form parties and run for office.
\nThe more we focus on the election, the more we tend to internalize the logic of electoral politics: representation, majority rule, sovereignty as a winner-take-all competition, deference to procedure. Liberal concerns about preserving the rule of law and reforming the Electoral College serve to instill these premises.
\n\nFor example—if the reason that it would be unconscionable to accept a second Trump term is that we believe that the majority of duly registered voters in this country oppose his candidacy, what if Trump surprises everyone again by winning the election with a solid majority of the electoral college, or even winning the popular vote? Will we then be duty-bound to accept his authority and obey the rulings of his Supreme Court?
\n\nFrom our standpoint, it is moral cowardice to frame the problem with Trump remaining in power as a concern that he might do so illegally. The people who are focusing on this are forgetting that the reason we’re in this mess in the first place is because Trump was already elected through the same democratic electoral system that they are urging us to defend at all costs. Focusing on the possibility that Trump might pull off an underhanded victory this time around is tantamount to priming everyone who opposes Trump to be prepared to give up fighting and accept another four years of his administration if he wins “fair and square.” Just as significantly, this serves to accustom the same people to complacency if Biden takes power but goes on enforcing at least some of the policies of the Trump era—as he undoubtedly will. Democracy itself is the problem, beguiling people to disregard their own consciences in favor of protocol, regardless of the cost in human suffering.
\n\nAs anarchists, we didn’t set out to interrupt Trump’s inauguration because he lost the popular vote in 2016—we did it because we opposed his entire agenda and the idea that anyone should be able to wield that much power in the first place. We didn’t shut down airports because we anticipated that a duly appointed judge would eventually rule Trump’s Muslim ban unconstitutional—we did it because we believe that all human beings deserve the right to travel freely, whatever any president, judge, or voting bloc decrees. Our ethical compass is not majoritarian or procedural. Even if Trump were reelected with 100% of registered voters casting their ballots in his favor,2 we would continue to stand up to his attacks on immigrants, his federal interventions against Black Lives Matter protests, his force-propped authority.
\n\nThere is nothing inherently just about the will of the majority, any more than there is anything inherently ethical or honorable about obeying the law. If you really want to do away with injustice, make it impossible for any group—be it a minority or a majority—to systematically dominate others. Until we build extensive horizontal networks of solidarity to accomplish this, tyrants like Trump will continue coming to power, and centrists like Joe Biden will continue trying to meet them halfway in a manner that ratchets our society ever closer to tyranny, and all the voting in the world won’t help.
\n\n\n\n\n“Everything that happened in Nazi Germany was legal. It happened in courtrooms, just like this. It was done by judges, judges who wore robes and judges who quoted the law and judges who said ‘This is the law, respect it.’”
\n\n-Jerry Rubin, February 15, 1970, facing sentencing for contempt of court.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/4.jpg\")
\nThe threat presented by Trump’s candidacy and the violence of his supporters is convenient for centrists like Joe Biden and his supporters at the New York Times. They have already spent the summer using this excuse to urge protesters to exit the streets and give up their leverage on murderous police departments, baselessly suggesting that protests could drive voters into Trump’s arms.
\n\nIn fact, if we study the polls over the course of 2020, Biden consolidated his lead after the George Floyd Rebellion got underway at the end of May; Trump only began to regain ground when the protests died down. If Trump loses this election and fails to retain power by other means, much of the credit must go to the rebels for compelling a subset of the ruling class to shift their allegiances to Biden by showing that four more years of Trump could render the United States ungovernable.
\n\nCentrists have always benefitted from the threat posed by the far right. Thanks to Trump, if Biden wins the election and secures power, millions of people who have every reason to fight against his express agenda will breathe a sigh of relief all the same. Liberals who would have continued to protest against racist immigration policies and police violence under Trump will quietly accept them under Biden, leaving the radicals who continue to oppose them isolated and exposed.
\n\nWe’ve come a long way since June 2020—a long way the wrong way. In the immediate aftermath of the uprising, when people around the country had seen demonstrators in Minneapolis abolish a police precinct via direct action, it was finally possible to imagine doing away with the institution of policing itself. Reformists diluted this bold proposition, substituting their proposal to “defund” the police via lobbying. Unsurprisingly, moving the struggle back to the terrain of party politics and government procedure produced dismal results. Now that the contest between Biden and Trump occupies everyone’s attention, even defunding the police seems hopelessly idealistic.
\n\nSo the Biden campaign represents the counterrevolution, no less than Donald Trump does. Trump’s absurd efforts to portray Biden as a far-left radical mobilize right-wing voters, but they also serve to close the Overton window to the left, framing the Biden campaign as the most radical platform conceivable.
\n\nThis tendency to water down radical proposals and reduce the scope of the popular imagination is inherent in majoritarian democracy. The exigencies of competing to form the biggest voting bloc in order to capture power tend to reduce all political platforms to the lowest common denominator, suppressing difference. Minorities of all kinds are structurally compelled to become junior partners in coalitions that have little incentive to prioritize their needs. Centralization gives rise to homogenization, marginalizing those who will not or cannot pretend to be like everyone else, reinforcing the existing order as the only possible reality.
\n\nPressuring people to support the lesser of two evils rather than pursuing their own dreams, electoral politics puts those dreams further and further out of reach.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/7.jpg\")
Graffiti in Italy: “Death to democracy. Anarchy and freedom!”
\nSo what’s the alternative? If we don’t grant whichever politician wins the election the right to govern us, what does that mean for the future of the United States of America? If the consensus reality imposed by majoritarian democracy makes radical change impossible, how do we proceed?
\n\nThe far right has already advanced their answer to these questions: civil war. If they cannot retain control of the state—the machinery of centralized violence—by electoral means, they are threatening to take violence into their own hands.
\n\nSome anti-fascists have adopted this rhetoric as well—and indeed, for some, the war has already arrived. “I see a civil war right around the corner,” Michael Reinoehl said to a reporter immediately before police murdered him in cold blood.
\n\nMost of those who warn of impending civil war aren’t explicitly advocating for it—they are just arguing that we should be prepared. Yet, as Emma Goldman spelled out in her essay “Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter,” preparing for war can hasten its arrival. It can also make it difficult to recognize other possibilities.
\n\nThe reasons that the far right are clamoring for civil war are complex. At the grassroots level, rank-and-file racists sense that they are on the losing end of the culture war and demographic shifts. Some have apparently concluded that the longer they put off open hostilities, the worse their position becomes. As they radicalize, demagogues like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson must radicalize along with them in order to retain their loyalty.
\n\nMeanwhile, the extractive industries that supply much of the Republican Party’s funding are concerned about these demographic changes eroding their voter base, leading to increased taxation and environmental regulations. They likely see pandemic safety measures as a practice run for ecological measures that could cut into their profits permanently—COVID-19 denial and climate change denial arise from the same sectors. They intend to keep maximizing their profits at all costs, ecological catastrophe and civil strife notwithstanding. Just as the George Floyd rebellion exerted leverage on the institutions of our society, Republicans aim to use the threat of mass violence as leverage to preserve the status quo.
\n\nBut do we stand to gain anything from escalating towards civil war? If the far right are calling for it, we should be especially suspicious of this paradigm.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/11.jpg\")
September 5, 2020: Militia members in Louisville, Kentucky.
\nDemocracy is often framed as the alternative to civil war. The idea is that we have democratic institutions so everyone won’t just kill each other in direct pursuit of power. This is the social contract that liberals accuse Trump of violating.
\n\nBut if, as Carl von Clausewitz said, war is simply politics by other means, we should consider what representative democracy and civil war have in common. Both are essentially winner-takes-all struggles in which adversaries compete to control the state—i.e., to achieve a monopoly on violence, control, and perceived legitimacy. The exigencies of civil war, no less than the exigencies of electoral competition, reward those who can appeal to the wealthy and powerful for resources and those who can reduce their agenda to the lowest common denominator in order to build mass.3
\n\n\n\n\n“Guided by the experiences of those who participated in the original uprising in Syria, we can learn a lot about the hazards of militarism in revolutionary struggle. Once the conflict with Assad’s government shifted from strikes and subversion to militarized violence, those who were backed by state or institutional actors were able to centralize themselves as the protagonists; power collected in the hands of Islamists and other reactionaries. As Italian insurrectionist anarchists famously argued, ‘the force of insurrection is social, not military.’ The uprising didn’t spread far enough fast enough to become a revolution. Instead, it turned into a gruesome civil war, bringing the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ to a close and with it the worldwide wave of revolts.”
\n\n \n
If war is politics by other means, then politics as we know it—the state and its most resilient and stable form to date, representative democracy—may have emerged as war by other means. Militarized conflicts that compel everyone to take sides according to a binary framework tend to engender the same hierarchies, the same mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and the same centralization of coercive force that are fundamental to the state. The state emerges when one side wins a war and imposes its authority; civil war resumes when the incentives to compete for power via elections rather than brute force break down. But in the end, civil war per se is bound to end with the reemergence of the state; anything else would require a revolution that transforms the participants, not a binary conflict that ends with one party dominating the other. In this regard, if war is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote, we might say that goes for civil war as well.
\n\nA brief review of US history confirms that representative democracy has always existed on a spectrum with civil war. Bleeding Kansas is perhaps the best known example of this: for years, people fought and killed each other in a struggle to determine whether Kansas would vote to preserve the institution of slavery. The same rivals who would beat and shoot each other one week would cast ballots against each other the next, then go back to beating and shooting each other.
\n\nTrump and his supporters are part of a centuries-old tradition that understands democracy as a variant of civil war. Trump’s strategy of voter intimidation, for example, draws on a long heritage extending back to the Plug Uglies and other gangs that employed violence to systematically rig the outcome of elections.
\n\n\n\n\n“Stealing elections is how democracy works. It’s how it has always worked. If you legitimize a monopoly on coercive force and authority by claiming to represent the will of the people, then obviously subsequent power struggles will focus on defining which people constitute ‘the People.’”
\n\n-Peter Gelderloos, “Preparing for Electoral Unrest and a Right-Wing Power Grab”
\n
In this context, we can recognize Trump’s emphasis on Nuremberg-style mass rallies as a demagogic form of democracy originally descended from open clashes within the polity:
\n\n\n\n\n“Winning an election is one way to claim the legitimacy of having been chosen by the people; being acclaimed in the streets or instituted by popular violence are other ways. In ancient Sparta, leaders were elected to the council of elders by a shouting contest—the candidate who received the loudest applause won. The technical term for this is acclamation… This is the oldest form of democracy—Spartan rather than Athenian—in which the masses legitimize a movement or ruling party as representative by acclaiming it in person, rather than through elections.
\n\n \n
So civil war is not a solution to the problems with representative democracy. It simply continues the logic of the majoritarian contest for power on another terrain, the terrain of open violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/1.jpg\")
Both representative democracy and civil war are essentially spectator sports, subordinating the agency of ordinary people to politicians or militia members.
\nIf the risk of focusing on the election alongside liberals is that we will internalize the logic of electoral politics, then one risk of spending so much time fighting the far right is that we will internalize their premises, as well, coming to assume that the only alternative to electoral politics is militarized clashes. The proliferation of guns at demonstrations seems to reflect this—not so much the guns themselves as the way that they are coming to dominate our imaginations.
\n\nA few accelerationists have welcomed the escalation of hostilities, hailing a post-democratic era in which those who are mobilized by different ideologies, value systems, and notions of belonging will fight it out openly. This is redundant at best: we already live in an era of civil war that will almost certainly intensify. Ukraine—Charlottesville—one, two, many Syrias. The question is not how to foment social conflict, but how to maximize the likelihood that the outcome of these conflicts will be more freedom, more egalitarian relations, and hopefully, in the long run, more harmony.
\n\nOrdinarily, the anarchist position on elections is to reject the centrality of voting as the be-all-end-all of political participation. In 2020, it is just as important to reject civil war as the alternative. This is not an argument against partisanship per se—rather, it’s a question of what kind of partisanship we want to foster. Rather than joining one of the rival factions competing for control of the state, let’s look for ways to transform these struggles and the social bodies that are engaged in them, ways to broaden the horizons of possibility.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/8.jpg\")
\nIn place of civil war, which pits discrete factions against each other in a contest of arms, we aim to spread revolt on a horizontal and decentralized basis, destabilizing the institutions of power and the allegiances and conflicts that underpin them. The first step in this process is to dismiss the idea that any law, majority, or leadership has an inherent claim on our obedience. The second step is to throw out any lingering romanticism about what we can accomplish by force of arms alone—we seek to transform our relations with others, not to exterminate them. The third step is to refuse our roles in perpetuating the existing order, whether as active participants in it or passive accomplices who permit it to continue, setting contagious examples of rebellion that can spread throughout society at large.
\n\nThe ungovernable uprisings of May and June demonstrated how effective this can be. Civil war revolves around fighting an enemy; in revolt, we offer those who are not yet involved roles as protagonists in their own version of a shared narrative. The further rebellion and refusal spread from one sector of society to the next, the greater the potential for real social change. Altering the conditions in which people conceptualize the issues that affect them and decide how to align themselves, we can redraw the lines of conflict—for example, from “conservatives versus liberals” to “residents versus evictions.”
\n\nWe should also explore all the other ways we can relate to each other besides warfare, setting positive precedents for coexisting and cooperating across lines of difference. The mutual aid programs that have multiplied since March have the virtue of creating connections between people who might not otherwise identify with each other, diminishing the likelihood that conflicts will escalate to lethal force. In addition to interrupting the prevailing order, we also have to weave a new social fabric, making peace as an offensive measure against needless destructive conflicts.4
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/10.png\")
Necessary but not sufficient.
\nThis November, if Trump attempts to hold on to power and legalistic solutions fail to resolve the crisis, some liberal centrists will press us to serve as the shock troops of democracy, taking risks that they would never take themselves in order to preserve the integrity of an electoral system that has always suppressed our voices and our autonomy. Far-right Republicans and outright fascists would love to see us locked in symmetrical warfare with better-armed militias who want nothing more than a fixed target and a legitimate excuse to employ their weapons. We should be careful not to end up playing either of these roles, but to chart our own path, evaluating the effectiveness of our actions according to the extent to which they achieve our goals.
\n\nIf armed militias attempt to seize the capitol buildings to pressure the state to permit Trump to retain office, reprising the tactic they tested out during the “re-open” protests in April, we should not go to meet them there in open combat. Rather, we should identify all the pressure points throughout this society via which we can exert leverage asymmetrically, all the supply chains that deliver the resources that the militias, their backers, and the state itself depend on. Imagine a wave of blockades, strikes, self-organized assemblies, and cooperative actions targeting a variety of aspects of the state and the economy, arising from a multiplicity of overlapping forms of organization that cannot all be coopted by Democrats eager to dictate terms, setting precedents that will stand long after this particular political moment has passed. By seizing the opportunity to interpose our own narratives and our own agendas, speaking directly to the everyday needs of ordinary people, we could come out of the crisis stronger and better connected.
\n\nIf there has to be a crisis, let’s make the most of it.
\n\nIf there is any unambiguously good news this electoral season, it is that neither of the major candidates represent anything like a radical agenda. Had Bernie Sanders become the Democratic candidate and won the election, he would have faced the same internal sabotage from career politicians that prevented him from winning the nomination, not to mention the structural challenges that doomed the socialist aspirations of the Workers Party and Syriza. His efforts to temper cutthroat capitalism could only have failed, inducing some of his supporters to embrace centrist realpolitik while leaving others disillusioned and bitter. Better that the center is discredited under Biden.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/5.jpg\")
2016 was a lifetime ago.
\nFor years, we have argued that owing to the consequences of neoliberal globalization, the state can do little to mitigate the impact of capitalism on the general public. Under these conditions, no party can hold power long without losing legitimacy and catalyzing opposition. We saw this under the Workers Party in Brazil, under Syriza in Greece, under Obama in the US. Now we have seen it under Trump as well—the grassroots nationalists and white supremacists who suffered so many reverses under his administration would probably be in a stronger position today if they had been able to present themselves as the opposition to an unpopular Clinton administration. As we argued the day after Trump won the 2016 election:
\n\n\n\n\nLet us look for silver linings in this cloud of oncoming tear gas. Perhaps it is for the best that someone like Trump is coming to power now, rather than four years hence. Let the right wing demonstrate that their solutions are just as inadequate as those proposed from the Left. In a time of economic crises, ecological collapse, and spreading war, the state is a hot potato: no one will be able to hold it long.
\n
If it is true that state power has become a hot potato that burns whoever tries to hold it—a thesis that will be tested again this November—the last thing we need is for our revolutionary proposals to be conflated with the watered-down program of some political party. If we are to make deep and lasting change, our movements must continue growing from the grassroots, demonstrating the efficacy of direct action, fostering an appetite for fundamental change, never confused with a party program that could be implemented through the existing apparatus of state power.
\n\nIf Biden succeeds in securing the presidency, we must immediately pivot to confronting him, showing all the ways that his administration will continue carrying out Trump’s agenda. There must be no confusion about the distance between grassroots social movements and the political party in the White House.
\n\nUnder a Biden presidency, we will likely see increasing attacks from a frustrated far right. The millions of racists Trump has emboldened will not simply shift their allegiances to the likes of the Lincoln Project if he is defeated at the polls. We should be able to weather their attacks the same way we defeated the fighting formations of the far right during the Trump era, provided our comrades on the left and towards the center do not leave us to fight alone. Once more, this will be determined by whether we permit Biden and his cronies to create the impression that the crisis of the Trump years has been resolved.
\n\nIn any case, rather than facing a choice between democracy and civil war, we face a future that almost certainly holds both. It’s up to us to make sure that it holds something else as well—contagious momentum towards liberation.
\n\nAs we wrote four years ago, hours after Trump won the election,
\n\n\n\n\nCradle the seed, even in the volcano’s mouth.
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/9.jpg\")
\nIn many states, registering to vote renders your home address a matter of public record. Those who wish to avoid this can register as homeless. ↩
\nIncidentally, no US presidential candidate has ever received the votes of even a quarter of the population. ↩
\nIn an interview earlier this month, a longtime anarchist fighter in Rojava described how this played out in the early years of the Syrian Civil War: “As the fights escalated and the war intensified, weaker factions were absorbed by stronger factions or just disbanded. When ISIS started to penetrate into Syria in 2013, the opposition factions had to chose sides—with Daesh or against them.” ↩
\nIn this regard, we are inspired by the recent anti-war statements from rebels on both sides of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. We can learn a lot from anarchists and other anti-militarists who lived through the civil wars in former Yugoslavia, Colombia, Peru, and Northern Ireland. ↩
\nIn the following analysis, Peter Gelderloos explores the motivations and capabilities of the various factions that are likely to participate in the forthcoming conflict over the outcome of the 2020 election, describes how this figures in right-wing efforts to establish a revamped white supremacy in the context of the existing democratic system, and reviews what we can hope to accomplish by resisting.
\n\nOf course, it’s far from certain what will happen starting in November, especially with Donald Trump now in the hospital. But we should never underestimate Trump’s ability to bounce back. Though he has failed to implement much of his agenda thus far, nothing has yet halted his efforts.
\n\nAs our colleagues have explored, Trump’s strategy of voter intimidation draws on a long heritage in the United States, extending back to the “plug uglies” and other gangs that employed violence to systematically rig the outcome of elections. But Trump’s plan extends far beyond the voting process, as explored in the Atlantic.
\n\nEvery possible outcome of the struggle over the 2020 election involves considerable risks. No matter how it occurs, a Trump victory would further polarize the country, radicalizing many liberals and leftists, but it would also likely lead to a tremendous amount of bloodshed and repression. If Biden wins the election in a landslide without significant resistance from Trump’s supporters, he will surely crack down on radicals and introduce policies that are oppressive to poor, Black, brown, indigenous, and undocumented people in order to placate the right-wing forces with whom he hopes to re-establish a truce. If Biden ends up in office thanks chiefly to the efforts of social movements in the street, it could discourage him from immediately cracking down on them, but this path involves passing through a very dangerous period of open conflict in which victory is by no means guaranteed.
\n\nAnd regardless of what happens between now and January, social polarization in the United States will continue to deepen. A large segment of the Republican Party is openly and perhaps irrevocably committed to a program of brute force, and they will still be pursuing this strategy regardless of who holds power in February.
\n\nAs usual, we will get out of the coming crisis what we are able to accomplish for ourselves on the basis of our own capabilities and efforts, nothing more. No one is coming to save us. The outcome of the Egyptian revolution shows us how badly things could go awry if we count on the military and Silicon Valley corporate executives to resolve a crisis, as many Democrats do. Rather than just scrambling to respond to the immediate threat of Trump seizing power, participants in social movements should strategize for a long-term struggle, evaluating the effectiveness of different approaches according to whether they deepen grassroots relationships and collective power. This will hardly be the last battle.
\n\nFinally, we urge those who are speaking in general terms about a general strike to study the example of the November 2 general strike at the high point of Occupy Oakland.1 In an era when so many of us are out of work or fill inessential roles in the service industry, it is not enough simply to walk out on the job; one must be proactive, interrupting business as usual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/5.jpg\")
\nPeter Gelderloos
\n\nIt is vital that anarchist strategy be situated: that we see strategy not as a chessboard from above, as in the authoritarian worldview, but as a perspective on the situation we inhabit, looking outward with our own eyes.
\n\nNonetheless, we should not make the mistake of assuming that everyone we see on the other side of the barricades, those we are fighting against, are on the same side or want the same thing. In the conflict that is building up pressure around the US elections, combative fascist organizations want a victory in the streets, whereas the Republican Party wants a victory in the courts. They each see the other as a naïve ally but also as a means to an end. They will each try to pull the conflict into their chosen terrain. Of course, the conflict will occur in both terrains simultaneously, but which one is dominant, the relative degree of their strength, will have a huge effect on events.
\n\nWhat follows is a brief approximation of the strength of the different sectors that will be on the other side of the barricades, and the direction they will try to pull in. I will try to use an evidence-based approach that assumes grand social machinations leave a footprint, in contrast to conspiracy theory thinking that assumes the motivations and conniving of important sectors of society can be entirely hidden from view.
\n\nThe military brass generally dislike Trump and they roundly oppose an interventionist domestic politics. Historically, military coups are rarely airtight secrets in their preparatory phase, and over the last four years the military has shown itself willing to leak information that is harmful to Trump. In this case, we can read the lack of evidence of coup preparations as evidence that no such preparations are taking place.
\n\nOn its face, this means that a coup is not in the cards, if we are going to use that word with any precision. Without the military, and with existing paramilitary organizations lacking anything near the level of strength and coordination they would need pull something like that off, we have to turn our attention to other kinds of power plays that can be equally dangerous but that function in completely different ways.
\n\nThe neutrality of the military, however, bears examining, as many in the center Left have already misinterpreted it. Many Democrats have predicted that the military will frog march Trump out of office if he tries to seize another term, but this is a grave misunderstanding, both of how the military view their neutrality and of exactly what kind of power grab Trump is planning. The brass have openly stated that they will make no interventions into the electoral process, and in this case I think we can believe them. And as we shall see shortly, it is actually the Democrats’ strategy, and not Trump’s, that relies more on a military intervention.
\n\nThe main terrain in which the military actually comes into play is in street conflicts. In a settler democracy, the only time the military is systematically used against the citizenry is to put down anti-racist, particularly Black and Indigenous, rebellions. However, throughout the George Floyd uprising, there has been significant resistance to the deployment of the military against the protests.
\n\nIn unrest around the elections, they will be similarly resistant to deployment against protests, while they will gladly accede to deployment against an uprising that appears to threaten democratic continuity. The threshold between protest and uprising is subjective and contextual. To us, the outpouring of anger and solidarity after George Floyd was murdered was an uprising, because it was aimed at the heart of power in Amerikkka. To progressives and centrists, it was a protest movement, because they were convinced they could discipline the movement to adhere to watered-down demands that could be integrated into the present system. For the military to accept that it was an uprising, and thus a valid target for their violence, they would have had to accept that all those millions of people had already cast off allegiance to the state. Obviously, they do not use a revolutionary criterion to determine whether something is an uprising. Rather, their criterion is: Can this rebellion be reincorporated into the dominant system? And do we want it to be reincorporated?
\n\nOther factors play a role in this determination: how multi-racial the movement is and how much social support it has, how lethal the street conflict is and the extent of material damage it causes. They will prefer to view any unrest arising in the sensitive period of an election as a civic demand for a properly functioning democracy that obeys its own rules. An uprising, in their eyes, will be when the crowds decide to kick out their current rulers by any means necessary.
\n\nBecause our institutions see white people as citizens and always doubt the civic status of Black people, the fascists and the militia movement enjoy a much higher threshold before the military is used against them. And their modus operandi is for lone wolves to carry out the most violent actions, meaning their movement can effectively escalate towards conditions of civil war without collectively reaping the repression or the full force of military pacification.
\n\nThe anti-racist movement, on the other hand, will be the target of military pacification if the level of conflict goes beyond the subjective line between violent protest and incipient civil war. And this is problematic, because the police, the fascists, and the Democratic Party will probably have a greater influence over the level of conflict than the anti-racist movement. It should also be pointed out that military pacification involves multiple thresholds, encompassing the mobilization of the National Guard for symbolic effect and logistical support, the use of the military for patrolling streets, and green-lighting the military to use lethal force in the epicenters of conflict.
\n\nIn the most violent scenario, the military take action in the streets to squelch an incipient civil war and restore the constitutional order, which in effect would mean defending the prerogative of the courts and legislatures to decide a contested election (a legal contest Trump has an advantage in). This action would set a dangerous precedent and most of the casualties would be radicals and people on the far left. However, it is unlikely that this would change the military and political culture enough for Trump to stay in power beyond the legally limited eight years. We might recall that the military has been used against the US population multiple times over the last half century without changing the constitutional order.
\n\nIt should be noted that the military today are at a twenty-year high in the amount of social legitimacy they enjoy, thanks primarily to the Democrats. After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the military’s involvement in atrocities was widely known. By favoring troop draw-downs and shifting lethal force to the more impersonal drone strikes, Obama facilitated a narrative in which military brutality was political in character, and thus a property of Bush administration excesses rather than the military itself. Under Trump, Democrats have gone even further, fawning over the military and holding them up as the gold standard of a democratic institution (which, historically, they are—though people who use “democracy” as a synonym for liberty fail to understand that). And because Trump has been a decidedly un-hawkish president, the movement has not had as many opportunities to spread critical awareness about what sorts of things the military trains people to do.
\n\nThe lack of effective organizing among veterans becomes apparent at times like these, when we have few or no channels of communication with soldiers. Revolutionary movements are usually only able to withstand military levels of repression by sparking mutinies. At least in the short-term, we are faced with a conflict with high risks and not a lot to gain. As such, we should probably focus on what negative outcomes we might be able to prevent, and what sorts of partial victories we might accomplish, given that the meaning of the movement at this point will be watered down to simple opposition to Trump. Creating revolutionary relationships and spreading non-reformist visions starting in 2021 might be the most we can win at this point.
\n\nThe police, in contrast to the military, are at an all-time low in terms of their social legitimacy, thanks to the George Floyd uprising as well as social movements before and since. However, policing is a constant activity, and the more criticism and contempt they receive, the more they double down.
\n\nOn election day, it is likely police will play a role in some of the disturbances. Long-simmering tensions will boil over in response to the voter suppression efforts that are already being planned in racialized neighborhoods. Cops will be called in to pacify subjects who are angry about their vote being denied because they don’t have the right ID or for some other excuse, or, most likely, in the case of people defending themselves from right-wing harassment. The cops will do as they do. People will film it, and something might even kick off on site, in front of all the frustrated people waiting to vote. With a riot on their hands, the police may close down the polling station. More gasoline for the fire.
\n\nAs we shall see, the most significant conflicts are likely to happen after Election Day. In these, we will witness an already familiar pattern. Police, often in concert with right-wingers, will attack anti-racist protestors who are in the streets to show their opposition to Trump, the racist suppression of votes, other acts of police brutality, and the system as a whole. Many city governments will attempt to stage-manage large peaceful protests in coordination with the Democratic Party, but in at least some cases, the police will sabotage these spectacles of peaceful citizenry, starting police riots. And in places where people decide to riot for their own good reasons, plenty of “citizen journalists” will spread the conspiracy theory that police provocateurs started it. Such conspiracy theorists delegitimize people fighting back, and they obscure the fact that true police riots are impossible to miss: the pigs bull rush the crowd, laying out left and right, with no provocation.
\n\nResults will vary from city to city. In some places, police brutality will pacify the movement, but elsewhere it will provoke more people to come out into the streets, or to move from protest to revolt. In general, police will help create an impasse that cannot be resolved by police action alone.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/4.jpg\")
\nCustoms and Border Protection (CBP) are Trump’s favored police force, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is probably the segment of the government bureaucracy that is most loyal to him, though a large portion of career bureaucrats in the middle levels of the Department—between the jackbooted cops on the bottom and the appointees at the very top—are still not in his camp.
\n\nAn honest evaluation shows that Trump does not have a high degree of control. The Atlantic accurately refers to him as a “weak authoritarian.” He clearly has authoritarian impulses and an authoritarian effect on any organization he manages to dominate (e.g., the Republican Party), but most of his attempts to translate his will into policy have actually failed. The CBP distinctly represents a force he can use to make strategic interventions.
\n\nIn post-electoral unrest, he is likely to send his federal police to epicenters of unrest and revolt to provide a level of force superior to the local police but short of the military. In July, CBP and other federal officers were not able to neutralize the revolt in Portland, and no matter what agency uses them, riot policing tactics will be unlikely to pacify the movement across the board. However, the CBP does possess the military force of a mid-sized army, though their experience and training for deployment in urban settings—not as cops but as a military—is an open question. If they were instructed to use a level of force consistent with a military intervention, it is very possible the movement would be unable to withstand them. Such an intervention would cause an immense amount of political blowback, but Trump has been able to weather most of the blowback he has provoked so far, having to walk himself back only a couple times in his whole presidency. His current view is certainly that he can get away with almost anything.
\n\nWhen Barr and Trump declared several cities “anarchist jurisdictions,” it was widely seen as an attempt to justify federal intervention, and at the time, the President and his AG were without a doubt already thinking about the elections. Those cities are probably the most likely sites for a brutal federal police intervention. However, none of them are in the key swing states. What would the relation be between a CBP assault in those cities and Trump’s shady electoral campaign?
\n\nFor starters, Trump obviously hates the anti-racist movement. When people protest against him, he wants his supporters to “rough them up.” The right tends to favor strategies of breaking the resistance rather than recuperating it. This never works in the long run, but it can definitely work in the short run.
\n\nGoing beyond his authoritarian personality to questions of strategy, Trump is most intelligent—and this is one of the few regards in which that word can be applied to him—at working the media spectacle. His recipe for victory has always relied on having an extremely motivated base, even though that base has always been a minority. Unleashing extreme police violence against the anti-racist movement is guaranteed crowd pleaser for his voters, especially the millions of cops who will see the repressive campaigns as an inspiring call of duty, a nod to the paramilitary mobilizations that resolve the crisis of whiteness, as I describe in Diagnostic of the Future.
\n\nOn another level, such a strategy would create spectacles of chaos and lawlessness in Democratic cities that could serve as a further rallying cry to frightened white voters and to the militia movement. This was Trump’s strategy throughout the George Floyd rebellion, and though the CBP intervention in Portland emboldened people in the street rather than pacifying them, the way the media portrayed the unrest decreased support for the Black Lives Matter movement among white people likely to vote Republican, the only demographic to considerably withdraw support from the movement after June.
\n\nUsed again after the elections, this strategy would have the added bonus of distracting media attention from the legal maneuvers in battleground states where Republican lawyers were trying to disqualify votes, creating a bloody spectacle in which the most militaristic scenes are associated with Democratic states.
\n\nIn view of this possibility, it’s noteworthy that the chief long-term impact of the September 26 Proud Boys rally in Portland—which many feared would involve considerable violence in revenge for the shooting death of a member of Patriot Prayer a month earlier—was that Portland police officers were designated as federal marshals for the remainder of 2020. It often turns out that the greatest threat fascists pose is in what they enable the state to do, rather than what they can do by themselves.
\n\nThe capitalists who support the right-wing populism that has taken hold in several of the world’s most powerful countries are a small minority. Most capitalists, especially those who are significantly higher up the ladder than mid-grade investors and real estate developers, are strongly opposed to a second Trump term.
\n\nHowever, they know they can profit under either president, and the global capitalist economy is currently in a situation that favors short-term strategies, due to the grave uncertainties around long-term growth. Far from being a president who has increased government interventionism, Trump has represented a politics of extreme deregulation that has provided a windfall to capitalists in extractive and financial industries. The fossil fuel sector makes for a great example. They are among the most conservative of capitalists, but nearly all of the ones who are higher up understand that fossil fuels have no future. Stalwarts like Exxon have been losing considerable ground to companies like BP that got on the energy transition bandwagon years ago. They all know that they need progressive policies, they need something like a Green New Deal to get government funding to pay for a transition to so-called green energy infrastructure. But because longer-term investments are so uncertain—in no small part because of a lack of political will to fund the energy transition—the nature of their trade compels them to stick their faces in the trough of short-term profit.
\n\nFrom the World Economic Forum to the Milken Conference, capitalism’s smartest planners, innovators, and technocrats are warning that the chief dangers to the future of their system are climate change, right-wing populism, and trade wars, with Christine Lagarde, one of the most important technocrats in the world, warning that capitalism might not exist anymore in just 20 years because of these dangers. All of these dangers are caused by or exacerbated by the right, whereas the left is the only sector currently offering proposals that might save capitalism.
\n\nSo yes, a majority of mid-level capitalists and the overwhelming majority of high-level capitalists prefer Biden. However, even greater is their preference for stability—for a relatively smooth election that most people will accept as valid. They do not want tanks in the street of the country that, for the most part, is still the center of global capitalism, and certainly not on an occasion as routine as an election.
\n\nYet they face an unprecedented problem. The development of technocratic governing structures has not kept pace with the rise in social conflict and the crisis of democracy, so at a moment of considerable instability, capitalists find themselves with less fine-tuned control over government.
\n\nIn a way, this indicates the demise of the political-economic system created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which has served as the basis for the so-called American Century. FDR’s rise to power was effectively a coup of Washington over Wall Street. Capitalists accepted this relative loss of power because they saw that an extremely powerful, interventionist government pursuing the best conditions for capital accumulation on a global scale would be better for them than a regime of less regulated markets, less interventionism, no central planning, and more competition. Subsequently, all major political parties were united in seeking the best conditions for capital accumulation. That situation has come to a crashing end, with isolationist Trump coming to power in the US and the pro-Brexit Tories in the UK. Neoliberal capitalists are still unsure how to respond. In the short-term, a number of billionaires are making sure Biden is the better funded candidate, and some are even financing voter registration in Florida, but we will probably see their more salient, forceful interventions after the election is resolved.
\n\nAnother question concerns the new technologies at the cutting edge of the capitalist economy, specifically social network technologies. It is well known that Facebook enabled Trump’s 2016 victory and that Facebook has specific algorithms that favor divisiveness—divisiveness is more attention grabbing, and attention is what represents value to advertisers. This provided the far right with a huge platform. It is equally well known that Silicon Valley as a whole, one of the most important sectors of global capitalism, tends to oppose the far right and the policies they espouse, and it is evident that the growth of the far right has created a social polarization that undermines social consensus and perhaps even the possibility of democracy itself.
\n\nCan all this instability be explained as the result of the myopic obsession of a Harvard man-child seeking to maintain his company’s dominant share of the advertising market in an environment of fierce competition, to hell with the consequences? Can any of it be chalked up to the concealed racism of the Silicon Valley elite, or the religious mystique that the advertising industry invests in their ability to make the masses believe anything they want? It wouldn’t be the first time the powerful undermined themselves through a narcissistic fascination with their own power. In this case, that means figuring out exactly which lies they can best sell to which people, based on purchasing history, and exploiting it to the maximum, as Cambridge Analytica did with Facebook data.
\n\nFacebook is relaxing fact-checking standards in an election year, and they already know such policies helped Trump win in 2016. Insider accounts reveal the highest levels of the company are sensitive to politicized right-wing accusations about liberal bias: Facebook has recognized that Trump’s base is a highly profitable, niche clientele for them. It is probably relevant that Facebook has been losing market share for years now, most dramatically in the US, but that this July its stocks shot up as it managed to beat a trend of slumping revenue growth.
\n\nHowever we interpret the current allegiances of Silicon Valley, the fact that capitalists are realizing their unrivaled wealth does not currently enable them to buy certainty in their efforts to exert control over the future will likely motivate them to support a rational reorganization of society and government once the dust settles. As soon as they close the next deal…
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/1.jpg\")
Stockbrokers have been enthusiastic about Trump’s efforts to deregulate the economy, but they are not enthusiastic about the United States descending into chaos.
\nThe far right is a hodgepodge that runs the gamut from Constitutionalist militias to neo-Nazi gangs, with plenty of crypto-fascist umbrella organizations and Western chauvinists in between. Two things have become clear over the last few years. First, they have the capacity and the willingness to murder significant numbers of people in oppressed communities and anti-racist protests. Second, they do not have the power to stand up to large social movements—and even against just the most radical sectors, primarily organized anarchists, they often cannot hold their own.
\n\nAnti-fascist strategies of the last few years have proven very effective at limiting the spread of fascist and racist discourses and preventing the growth of the far right movement itself. With no easy victories and more than a few resounding defeats, the far right has crumbled into frequent infighting, snitching, and equivocation. Most of its individual members and constituent groups are still out there, but they are much weaker than they would be if not for all the anti-fascist activity.
\n\nBecause of this disorganization and sense of frustration, one of the ways they will take action is through lone wolf attacks. Such attacks may be the main cause of deaths related to electoral unrest, but they will not be effective at stopping the anti-racist movement. In the month that remains, anarchists and other anti-fascists would do well to consider what the most likely targets for such attacks are and take measures to defend them, while also reaching out to spaces we might not have affinity with, such as churches and nightclubs, to make sure they are thinking about these possibilities.
\n\nLone wolf attacks from the far right sometimes include attacks against police. While such attacks may make it more difficult for the police to work together with the far right, that may be too charitable a view, as it assumes that police will act rationally to protect their own interests.
\n\nThe far right has signaled that they want a civil war, spreading the idea that they’re just waiting for the moment that the gloves come off. But Trump has not formally integrated the far right in any organizational way. There is no command structure like the one that was central to historical fascist movements or more recently to Golden Dawn in Greece.
\n\nThis does not make the far right any less dangerous, or any less capable of murdering our comrades and loved ones. It does mean that they will not be able to play the role of a paramilitary force backing a coup attempt, which I’ve argued the Republicans aren’t planning anyway. It also means that some of the things they do during electoral unrest may clash with Republican strategies—for example, killing cops, giving their power grab the appearance of a racist coup, or suppressing votes in a way that cannot be defended in court.
\n\nIn a settler state like the US, paramilitaries work in a diffuse, decentralized manner. Their job has been to attack social enemies on their own initiative. Historically, this has meant enslaved people and their descendants, indigenous people, and anti-capitalist movements. Their historical role has not included major maneuvers in the political sphere such as coups (understanding politics in the alienated sense as the poleis)—and it has been more than a century since the organized brawls that used to decide elections in the 19th century. Such maneuvers require operational coordination across the board.
\n\nThere have recently been key moments when far-right forces have developed a certain level of operational coordination with specific police forces—on the Mexican border and more recently in Portland and Kenosha, for example. They may try to achieve an even greater level of coordination around the elections, which could include protests and attacks on state houses in battleground states where the governors or legislatures are Democrat-controlled and are trying to appoint electors for Biden. But the majority of far-right forces around the country will be uncoordinated, attacking any institution or group Trump might name in his tweets, definitely attacking the anti-racist movement, and quite possibly also attacking judges, media organizations, Black churches, synagogues, and other spaces.
\n\nEven as they work together with the police, some of their actions will actually cause the protest movement to grow—and as we have seen throughout 2020, they will frequently not be able to win control of the streets.
\n\nIn any case, it will be a moment of truth for the far right, and we should be able to see how much of their rhetoric and self-image is bluster and how much they have actually prepared themselves, psychologically and physically, to attempt to eliminate anarchists and the left. The fallout from this conflict might well define the relationship between the far right and the Republican Party for years to come.
\n\nOne of the best ways to minimize the harm they will cause is for every community to think about what strategies local militias and street fascists will try to take, how to respond when they attack protests, and how to respond if they attempt more symbolic actions like taking over government buildings. Rather than putting themselves in needlessly dangerous situations, people should evaluate on a case-by-base basis what is to be gained from attempting to eject the far right from a specific place.
\n\nIn very general terms, I think the most important place to be is protecting the anti-racist movement, which is currently the most radical expression of struggle. Protecting polling places should probably be left to progressive de-escalation activists, both to give them the opportunity to see if they actually have the organizational capacity to make their own chosen strategies viable rather than just attacking real social movement participants for being “violent,” and because of the certainty that if anarchists are present at any polling place where there is unrest, the Democrats will try to pin the blame on us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/2.jpg\")
Coordination between the state and paramilitaries remains uneven, to say the least.
\nThe Republican Party is attempting to win the election through legal, semi-legal, and extralegal means. Donald Trump is not preparing a coup attempt in any traditional understanding of the term. This needs to be emphasized so we can prepare effective strategies for November and beyond. In the previous section, we have seen the fruits of an effectively deployed anti-fascist strategy. Every strategy has its advantages and disadvantages, and one of the risks of focusing chiefly on fighting fascism is that it can reinforce democracy—and with it, capitalism and the state.
\n\nStealing elections is how democracy works. It’s how it has always worked. If you legitimize a monopoly on coercive force and authority by claiming to represent the will of the people, then obviously subsequent power struggles will focus on defining which people constitute “the People,” giving a bullhorn to the ones in your camp and silencing the others. When we discuss the specific ways the Republicans are planning to steal this election, let’s not encourage the ahistorical naïveté that this is somehow shocking or unprecedented.
\n\nGranted, this year the theft will be a little more crass—though we only have to go back to the Civil Rights era to find even more extreme examples. Electoral manipulation is completely in line with Trump’s psychology, unlike a coup. Normally, the psychology of a candidate would not have a huge impact on the functioning of a large institution, but in the case of the Republican Party, Trump has effectively tamed it—only, of course, through his effective use of equally powerful institutions like Twitter, Facebook, and Fox News. Many Republicans dislike and disagree with Trump, but they recognize that he can cause them to lose re-election, so they focus on maintaining the strength of the Party and hoping they’ll be rid of him in another four years.
\n\nAs a real estate magnate, Trump prefers and understands the battlefield of lawsuits and legal loopholes. It is also abundantly clear that Trump is a cowardly person, and though flirting with a fascist fan base stokes his authoritarian ego, in questions of policy he avoids open conflict and militaristic disputes.
\n\nOver the last 20 to 40 years, strategies for stealing elections have differed markedly between the two parties. Nowadays, Republicans win elections through voter suppression. In elections with high turnout, they lose; in elections with low turnout, they win. They accomplish voter suppression by making it harder to register, by purging felons from voter rolls, by harassing people and making it harder to vote the day of the elections, and by installing vote-counting machines with lower accuracy rates in poor and racialized districts so that a higher percentage of ballots will be thrown out.
\n\nAll of the evidence suggests that Republican efforts to win this election focus on legal measures. Their front line soldiers are lawyers. Aside from the maneuver to gut the Post Office, they are trying to make it easier to challenge voters at the polls, to create long lines so that the polls close before everyone can vote, to throw out mail-in ballots, and to mount legal challenges the day of the election and immediately afterward to stop or delay vote counting.
\n\nTrump’s calls for supporters to show up at polling places and harass “suspicious” voters is not the main thrust of the Party’s strategy. In some cases, it may even create legal headaches for Republicans—though it could also provoke riots, which is as good an excuse as any for police to close down polling places.
\n\nHowever, it’s possible that this friction between Trump’s populism and the bureaucratic efficiency of the Republican Party machine represents a sort of growing pain. Trump is probably too much of an amoral opportunist to be understood as an ideologue, but he is undoubtedly an enthusiastic white supremacist—and as such, he has been instrumental to an ideological shift in the Republican Party from genteel good ol’ boys to avowed white nationalists like Stephen Miller. These are both modes of reactionary white supremacists (as opposed to the progressive white supremacists of the Democratic Party), but Trump’s violating of taboos has enabled white nationalists to gain ground and move in the open.
\n\nOne of the ways they are doing this is to encourage white militias and spread the conspiracy theory that the left wants to start a civil war, so that when the right carries out paramilitary actions, they can pretend to be victims acting in self-defense. It also seems clear that these white nationalists, still a minority even in Trump’s camp, have not thought out the consequences of their own strategy; they are acting in response to the crisis of whiteness, promoting white mobilization as a good thing, without fully understanding how to integrate it in the existing system. However, there are plenty of precedents for them to choose from.
\n\nAn article in the Intercept argues that Trump is enacting a fascistic pattern, starting out by calling attention to an external danger—immigrants—and then turning on an internal enemy, antifascists and anarchists. While this is certainly true, what his team is aiming for is a common occurrence in US history, contrary to the progressives who see Trump as an aberration. We can call it patrician democracy: the longstanding, classical idea that only the “right sort” of people ought to vote, including their loyal dependents if necessary. Through much of the 20th century, KKK terrorism was designed to limit the political participation of the racialized lower classes, as well as to attack the Jewish communist bogeyman who supposedly came to stir them up.
\n\nIt is fully compatible with the Republican imaginary to project a democracy ruled by upstanding middle- and upper-class citizens, protected from any threats by mobilized white patriots. Most of US history has looked something like this. Whether they can actually reinstitute that state of affairs now is doubtful, and many veteran Republican pollsters have been sounding the alarm that catering to reactionary whites is a losing strategy in the mid-term, centering as it does on a demographic that is steady shrinking. But the fact that they are trying is itself a real enough danger.
\n\nRepublicans had faced an uphill battle for winning this election, but Democrats have handed them an opportunity to stay in the game. By unilaterally encouraging mail-in voting instead of favoring bipartisan proposals to encourage hygienic protections for the elections, Democrats have created an unprecedented situation in which a solid majority of mail-in votes will be Democrat. This is a golden opportunity for voter suppression. In the primaries, 2% of mail-in votes were thrown out, and the number appears to be even higher for BIPOC voters. Excuses for throwing out a vote can include a change in address or a change in signature—and how fluid someone’s signature looks is definitely related to class. By contrast, standard voting machines throw out between 1% and a fraction of a percent of the votes. Now Republican lawyers in battleground states are working on legal changes to make it even easier to throw out mail-in ballots—and they will also rely on their specially trained “poll watchers,” the “Trump army,” to make in-person voting more difficult for certain people. The Democrats have voluntarily created a situation in which they have to win battleground states by margins of 2-5%.
\n\nThe Democrats have given up the defensive advantage they held, wrapped it up in a bow, and gifted it to the Republicans. Previously, Republicans would have had to find a way to make a significant number of votes disappear while exit polls were announcing a crushing Biden win. But because mail-in votes take longer to count, Trump will probably be ahead in the polls on election night, which is when the public and a frenetic news cycle expect to be able to announce the winner. Trump will declare victory, claim that Democrats are trying to steal the vote, and Republican lawyers will step in to stop the counting of votes wherever they can, with multiple cases likely to end up before the Supreme Court.
\n\nAn explanation of how contested election results must be resolved can be found here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/3.jpg\")
The new face of the Republican Party is just the old face, once again.
\nDemocratic strategies for electoral manipulation center on suppressing and delegitimizing third parties while convincing demographics who Democratic politicians spend the rest of the year betraying that the Democratic Party is still their best bet. Though it has been clear since at least the 1990s that Republicans are only able to win many elections via voter suppression, Democrats have not undertaken a concerted push to prohibit these tactics, to make voting rights universal and automatic, or to abolish the electoral college. There was a consent decree in place to prevent voter intimidation, which federal judges recently allowed to expire, but that decree did not prevent more typical kinds of voter suppression, like the unequal distribution of polling machines that won Florida for Bush in 2000, or the standard practice of poll watchers demanding more rigorous proofs of identification in poor and racialized neighborhoods, and other methods for creating long lines so not everyone gets a chance to vote. The consent decree didn’t even prevent Trump from calling for supporters to go to polling places as vigilantes in the 2016 election, and of course it did not change the electoral college system that allows someone who loses the popular vote to win the election.
\n\nDemocrats had a chance to make all these changes, not just as a court order with an expiration date but as established law or even a Constitutional reform, when they held the majority during Obama’s first term. Why didn’t they?
\n\nFor once, it’s not because they’re stupid—it’s because they hate and fear racialized people and poor people, and they recognize that universal voting would give control of the Party to its progressive wing. History has already showed us that the political center prefers the far right to the far left. Recently, the Labor Party in the UK intentionally sabotaged their own election campaign in order to force out Jeremy Corbyn, the progressive party leader. Likewise, in 2016, the Democrats rigged internal party votes to block Bernie Sanders, even at a time when polling showed that Sanders had a better chance of winning than Hillary Clinton. Earlier, during Obama’s first term, Democrats were careful to lavish their attention on the investor class rather than promoting policies tailored to the needs of most Black people. Making sure that everyone was automatically registered to vote and could get their votes counted would have seemed downright radical —likewise, introducing punishments for voter suppression.
\n\nSo though Democrats are indeed stupid, not everything they do is an effect of their stupidity. If we take a calm view of the situation, they actually constitute one of the most dangerous sectors in the upcoming electoral unrest, and they are probably the group that most anti-fascists have thought about least. This is another chief disadvantage of prioritizing the framework of anti-fascism: it often means privileging the left and obscuring its true historical role.
\n\nActively or reluctantly, Democrats will encourage a peaceful, symbolic protest movement in response to Republican machinations to steal the election. Such a movement will represent an explicit break with the tactical intelligence and collective self-defense that has repeatedly overcome the police and the far right over the past few months. That experience of revolt—that know-how, determination, and solidarity—is one of the only things that can keep people safe through the coming turmoil. It’s also one of the only things that can change the outcome of the crisis. In specific cities, people can kick out the far right—and just as the George Floyd rebellion forced the state to begin dismissing and even arresting police officers, similar actions might stop courts and legislatures from throwing out uncounted votes. Generalized unrest might compel large segments of the government to conclude that Trump and his Party are just not worth so much destabilization.
\n\nTo be clear, I am not advocating riots in order to make sure votes are counted. In the coming situation, riots are likely regardless of how anarchists feel about the election. People who are fed up with being delegitimized and stolen from constantly in everyday life may very well pick this highly symbolic opportunity to pour out all their anger. This is one of the implicit dangers of the situation: a social conflict that revolves around a contested election.
\n\nIncidentally, I am referring to the movement that might contest far right power grabs as “anti-racist” rather than as “left.” There is no emancipatory horizon that focuses on electoral results. The historic role of the left is to institutionalize and thus strangle emancipatory movements. This only works because so many people in the rank and file of the left are sincere in their desire for change—but all the same, they are roped into a chain of co-optation that stretches from the center to the margins. The movement will be strongest if it understands itself as a continuation of the Black-led, anti-police rebellion that broke out once more after the murder of George Floyd. Even though elections will not free anyone, voter suppression is part of the arsenal of white supremacy, and far-right power grabs pose a threat to all of us. Centering anti-racism allows us to aim at the foundation of the United States. It also gives us more possibilities of linking up with an international movement.
\n\nDemocrats will do everything they can to foreclose all these possible connections. By calling for a peaceful protest movement, they will attempt to leave people exposed to far-right attacks and police violence, and they will blame anarchists for the disturbances, leaving us exposed to repression and vigilante attacks. If things go poorly for them, they may try to blame anarchists for giving Trump another four years, and they will spend those years trying to discipline social movements and impose authoritarian control over the ideas and practices of anti-racism, climate activism, housing struggle, and other points of mobilization.
\n\nMy experience over the last five years, both in the United States and adjacent to the Catalan independence movement, leads me to believe that anarchists fatally underestimate the force that center-left parties can have in the streets. This is because we have experienced amazing, communal moments when we win in the streets and state forces flee, and because there aren’t many Democratic Party canvassers and similar types in the important protests. The Party machine, however, possesses immense resources that give it levers of influence that pass through the mainstream media, labor unions, NGOs, churches, academics, alternative media, and far-left groups, allowing it important opportunities to enforce nonviolence or to render a movement isolated and vulnerable.
\n\nThe significant growth of authoritarian left groups under the umbrella of anti-fascism only facilitates this trend, as authoritarian leftists, in such moments, tend to attack anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left, lining up in a facile popular front with the forces of moderation.
\n\nRemember, it was not the far right that finally tamped down the George Floyd rebellion or the Ferguson uprising in 2014. It was the left, working in an unbroken chain from the center to the activist margin.
\n\nTo pull a victory out of this election, the Democrats probably have to win back the Senate—which will give them a decisive advantage in the final stage for resolving electoral disputes—but this only matters so much. They have already made abundantly clear their support for the police and antagonism to social movements. Whatever happens, democracy will not resolve its crisis of legitimacy. Society will remain polarized.
\n\nAnything other than a Democratic victory and a relatively smooth transition of power will only accelerate the erosion of the status of the United States as global leader. Absent a powerful, international, revolutionary movement, all that means is that there will be more systemic chaos as other equally unsavory governments try to fill the void.
\n\nA Trump victory with a high incidence of voter suppression will encourage autocratic tendencies and a tolerance for dictatorship in other countries around the world. It will also spark a renewed reform movement, another reiteration of the snake oil of “real democracy.” How capitalists respond to these movements and where they find the best investment opportunities will probably play a major role in deciding which tendency is dominant. At the moment, progressive capitalists have all the best long-term plans, but they suffer a major disconnect when it comes to translating those plans into government action.
\n\nAs detailed in the aforementioned article in the Atlantic, there are several dates spread throughout November, December, and January that mark the official choosing of the President. Each of these dates offers an opportunity for Republican and Democratic lawyers to battle it out while contesting the vote—and as voter suppression maneuvers become public, there will also be protests to try to sway the outcome. The Democrats will try to keep these protests peaceful, and the streets will be the site of a polygonal battle between cops, fascists, leftist organizers, and uncontrollable elements. These will be dangerous moments, and the combined force of the police and the fascists will not be enough to get people off the streets, whereas Democratic pacification will be effective in many places.
\n\nThe Democrats might win the legal maneuvers, given that they will almost certainly win the popular vote and should be able to carry enough critical states. The current Supreme Court remains untested on the question of whether all votes must be counted. They are likely to respect states’ rights to determine their own criteria for counting or disqualifying votes, but they will also favor the processing of all votes rather than closing the tally after election day. If there is severe rioting and instability sparked by flagrant attempts to suppress voting, they might be moved to favor the popular vote in order to preserve an appearance of democratic legitimacy.
\n\nIf anti-racist uprisings are complemented by labor strikes and interruptions in the flow of commodities, that could significantly change the equation. Such a multifaceted movement would be harder for police, fascists, and even the military to suppress, and it could make it harder for Democrats to co-opt the movement via a watered down anti-racism, insofar as economic disruption could introduce a more explicitly anti-capitalist agenda. Unrest that triggers a wildcat workers’ movement in the US will certainly make courts and legislatures afraid and more likely to favor an outcome that promises to restore stability—i.e., a Democratic victory. However, if the movement were strong enough, centrist Democrats would remove all support and might come to favor a Trump victory if that could mean an end to the instability.
\n\nThe specific outcome, and which institution plays the decisive role in determining it, will influence what kind of reformist discourses flourish in January. A Democratic victory will be followed by concessions to the center right and possibly some tepid reforms for ethical government and voting rights, as well as some extremely inadequate legislation related to police training, healthcare, and the environment. A divided government with Trump still in office will mean four more years of political spectacle and destabilized governance, as well as a reconfiguration of the relationship between the far right and the Republican Party. This could mean the Party taking more distance from the far right or creating a closer, more coordinated relationship with it, depending on the role it plays in the election unrest and the effectiveness of public backlash.
\n\nIn either case, we can expect a new wave of repression against anarchists—and a continued need for anarchist and other radical initiatives for mutual aid, healthcare, housing defense, and land defense. Countless people have done an amazing job so far of dealing with extremely difficult circumstances including the rise of the far right, a series of rebellions, police repression, a pandemic, a major recession and staggering unemployment, out-of-control climate change including hurricanes and wildfires, and the loss of comrades and loved ones. This is a global movement; many more amazing moments of struggle and community lie before us. At this juncture, two opposed strategies for the continuation of capitalism are battling for the right to determine our future. The whole world is watching. When the time comes, we will all be in the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/6.jpg\")
\nAlready in 1907, Errico Malatesta emphasized that simply ceasing to work cannot itself exert much leverage on the authorities, nor bring about transformative social change, unless it is coupled with other measures. ↩
\n![quarter](\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections#/media/File:U.S._Vote_for_President_as_Population_Share.png\"){kind=link}