I will be the first to say that we will never truly win. We will never obtain all of our political goals. Hell, we’ll probably never achieve anarchism…at least not on a mass scale. But that doesn’t justify doomerism. We may never achieve even a third of our goals but we’ll achieve even less if we don’t even fucking try. People are dying and those numbers only grow when people decide not to stand up and fight. Yes, Trump won the election. So. Fucking. What? We still have to fight.
Even if it feels hopeless, join the fight. Get involved with local activist communities and you will find a sense of hope as you see folks win political battles, no matter how small. And don’t limit yourself to only working with leftists or only working with libertarians (or worse, only working with anarchists!), but be willing to work with any individual or group willing to work on an issue you agree with, no matter if you disagree on pretty much everything else. Short of working with actual nazis or selling your soul to the devil, work with whoever you can to achieve your political goals and you will see greater success and build greater community bonds while breaking down partisan political barriers.
And get creative with it! Wanna protect queer rights? Be strategic and work with the very people trying to take away queer rights but on adjacent issues that they don’t realize help your cause. Work with conservatives and libertarians on issues like gun rights and school choice. Yes, we may have exactly the opposite reasons for fighting for these things. Conservatives may wish to arm our oppressors and increase access to religious and private schools for anti-woke reasons, but that doesn’t mean that queer folks can’t use those same rights to defend themselves and attend more affirming and safer schools. Make their agenda work for us when possible.
In the same respect, don’t dismiss Trump and his supporters as unreachable just because they’re not Harris and her ilk. If you wanted Harris to win over Trump with the hope that the left could pressure her to try and get some shit done, well we can do the exact same thing with Trump. Libertarians took advantage of this and got Trump to free Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht from prison. He’s promised to abolish the Department of Education, to cut unnecessary bureaucracy, sell off a large chunk of state-owned land and property, and to be more pro-union. Yes, these are likely just empty campaign promises from a chronic liar, same as with most politicians, but still, let’s hold his feet to the fire and see how much of this shit we can make him follow through on. Let’s hold Trump and his supporters to their America First stance on foreign policy by urging Trump to cut aid to Israel and the Ukraine and bring troops home from overseas by organizing a politically diverse antiwar movement. Let’s follow up on his signing of the First Step Act and the Not Invisible Act by convincing him to back more criminal justice reforms. It might be an extremely uphill battle but it would have been with Harris as well. We may not be able to achieve much but I damn sure believe we can achieve some of those goals if we try.
Yes, we can still organize against Trump and absolutely should, just as with Harris if she won, but, like with Harris supporters, we can also work with Trump’s supporters on the few issues where we agree as a means to further pressure Trump in the right ways. And when those who voted for him for economic reasons see the economy ruined further by Trump’s protectionist tariffs making everything that much more expensive, take advantage of their disillusion and help to organize them into the labor movement. After all, working class MAGA types aren’t exactly known for being anti-union.
The United States government is fascist and always has been. Hitler cited this U.S. government as an inspiration for several of his Nazi policies. The Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans, Trump just hides it less. With the mask off people have a harder time ignoring the reality and feel more compelled to take action. I’m not an accelerationist but I’m not sure it would have been any better under Harris and at least with Trump, more people are willing to put in the work to organize. Maybe that’s what we need. A politician so hard to ignore that it shakes us out of our doomerism and makes us realize that it doesn’t matter if we’ll ever fucking win every battle, as long as we take down bastards like Trump with us and make the world a slightly better place in the process. No matter what we do, we’ll one day die out as a species and there’s no stopping that inevitability but we can definitely make the journey there a little more pleasant to travel along the way by working together to at least clear away some of the brush.
