Anti-Fascist Movements Have Succeeded in the Past. Can They Work in the U.S.?

There has been a constant onslaught of terror from our new autocratic administration, which can make us feel powerless. But there is nothing futile about resistance. Here’s why.

For many of us, the idea of life under dictatorship tends to conjure images from George Orwell’s 1984, where we imagine the government is all-powerful, and resistance is futile. Perhaps that’s where things are headed, but we’re not yet there—and an omnipotent autocracy is not the only possibility. There’s a whole framework of government, “competitive autocracy,” with which Americans need to become familiar, because that’s where things are rapidly headed, and history can be instructive here.

The histories of anti-authoritarian or anti-fascist resistance are not usually happy ones. Not because they all end in tragedy—though many do—but because it is a slow, dogged, painful struggle, and one that is often quite boring because there are long periods of forced inactivity. Americans usually consume stories such as these through TV shows and action movies, and this has warped our sense of what “resistance” really looks like. It’s not blowing up rail lines or narrowly escaping capture or daring gun battles. Nor is it impassioned speeches about freedom to convince the other side how wrong they are. It can be boring; it also tends to be a game of relationship-building.

Electoralism

Fascist systems often maintained the façade of having regular, public elections or referenda. These were frequently farcical: Nazi Germany’s 1938 referendum on annexing Austria produced a 99.1% “yes” vote based on 99.6% turnout. The result was obviously fraudulent, so why did they bother having the election?

Elections actually have a certain amount of value for authoritarians and fascists, and at times they might even look competitive. Apartheid South Africa consistently held elections, though of course the only people who could vote were white. Under the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, elections were held regularly, but opposition candidates invariably withdrew before election day. They can be a safety valve, especially if there’s a controlled or weakened opposition: Disgruntled citizens can blow off some steam and air grievances in a structured way. They also allow the party to engage supporters. Even a toothless legislature like the Cortes in Francoist Spain was still a place where money or favors could be traded, and an election is a chance for the autocrat to demonstrate their strength to the rest of the party.

In short, elections are not likely to go away even in the worst-case scenario in the United States. On the flip side, just because we’re continuing to have elections and see the trappings of democracy does not mean that we’re living in a functional democracy. So, what value is there in electoralism in an authoritarian system?

In a fully authoritarian or fascist system, as with Italy under Benito Mussolini, pursuing an electoral strategy is ultimately a waste of time. At best, it burnishes the regime by adding a veneer of legitimacy. But in a more competitive system, opposition can still be effective. Blatantly anti-democratic tampering worsens the United States’ image globally, and over time it has an economic effect as the country becomes an investment risk. Opposition parties still have a chance to rally whole segments of the public by speaking out, even if they lack the power to do more than that. Helen Suzman was a South African politician who consistently spoke out against apartheid legislation. She called attention to abuses by the government and became a repeated source of embarrassment.

The challenge for opposition parties is to remain competitive. Appeals to legalism and procedure are a waste of time; once the other side has demonstrated that they can break the rules and get away with it, invoking the rules is no longer useful. They have to keep their supporters engaged and convinced that continuing to show up is worthwhile. Once apathy sets in, blatant electoral tampering becomes something people accept with a shrug. Moreover, they have to remain apart from the government to position themselves as a credible alternative, and adopting the government’s positions usually ends with them being outflanked. The United Party in South Africa lost power in 1948 to the National Party and never regained it. It steadily lost seats and never acted as a meaningful opposition force; at times, it tried to win back supporters by asking for even stronger apartheid legislation. None of this worked, and it eventually dissolved in 1977.

Defending Civil Society

One of the first things authoritarians try to do is undermine civil society. Mussolini was quite explicit about this: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” Any place that can become a focal site of resistance, or even a narrative that goes against what the regime promulgates, has to be torn down. This means that universities, labor, churches and cultural institutions all had to be subordinated to the state.

The first step is to refuse any seats offered by the current administration. The Trump administration wants to simultaneously destroy organized labor while pretending to be pro-worker and already have endorsed employer-run “workers councils” or internal unions. These are a sham and only serve to support the regime by destroying any organizing basis. It is not a coincidence that Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler all did very much the same thing, banning unions and strikes while also claiming that workers were “represented” in their government because the government appointed worker representatives. In Spain, all workers were forced to join the Francoist Spanish Syndical Organization. They had no right to strike, and membership was closed to women.

We need civil society for a variety of reasons, one of them being that they are a free space in which to organize. They offer physical space and resources. They also offer an intellectual space where people can speak more freely. Churches, unions, and NGOs can offer meaningful support to people. Even in fascist Italy, the group DELASEM (Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants)—an Italian and Jewish resistance organization that worked in Italy from 1939 to 1947—raised money from overseas and worked with local sympathizers to smuggle Jews to safe havens. When states go in a fully totalitarian direction, it is still possible to rebuild authentic civil society. To get around the fact that the Polish communist party dominated civil society, the Polish academic Leszek Kolakowski suggested building institutions from the ground up. His essays inspired the creation of Solidarity, the independent trade union that challenged the ruling communist party and ultimately won after years of struggle.

Civil society also offers an incredible advantage, one that many authoritarian governments actively turn away from: They can help make people’s lives better, and they can continue doing that work when the regime goes away. Brazil was under dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. Concurrently, the country’s healthcare system was deeply stratified and largely available only to the rich. Progressives in the healthcare system—many of whom were low-level bureaucrats in the public system—gradually organized a movimiento sanitario that fought for universal healthcare. It formed links with existing left-wing parties, supported a constitutional government, and in turn was well positioned after 1985 to fight for universal healthcare. Left with few legal means to organize labor under Franco, worker-owned cooperatives actually managed to flourish in Spain in the middle of the 20th century and they’re still around today.

Legal Systems

The anti-authoritarian struggle Americans know best is the one that’s close to home: the Civil Rights movement. But the way that Americans are taught this history is warped in many different ways, one of which is by the optimistic belief that the court system will ultimately override unjust laws. High school social studies courses focusing on Brown v. Board of Education neglected to cover the decades of litigation by the NAACP and others that led up to the decision—and for years those lawsuits had little success or made minimal impact. Take the white primary in the American South, which prohibited African Americans from participating in Democratic primaries—the only party that had any chance of winning elections. It took more than two decades of litigation and multiple suits to finally bring the practice to an end, and when it was finally dismantled in Smith v. Allwright, there remained a host of other Jim Crow barriers to voting.

Moreover, we have lost most of the federal government to Trumpism. The Justice Department is more nakedly hostile to civil rights than it was at any point during the 20th century and has been weaponized to go after Trump’s critics. Even sympathetic judges have suddenly found themselves faced with a terrible problem: They have no enforcement mechanisms. They can tell DOGE to stop laying off workers, but they can’t make them do so.

So, what use is a court system under an authoritarian government? It’s grit in the gears, and bad publicity. The U.S. judicial system has been captured, but not wholly taken over. There are federal judges appointed by former President Biden, and state judicial systems, even when deeply hostile, who still have to adhere to established processes—at least for now. Court cases can be bad publicity for the administration if they drag on, or be used to slow implementation of a new law. Trials might have to become extended press conferences where the goal is likely not winning, but raising a profile.

In South Africa in 1956, more than 150 anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, were arrested and collectively tried in what became known as the Treason Trial. It lasted for several years and wound up becoming an opportunity for those activists to become better known globally. Whole organizations, such as the International Defense and Aid Fund, were founded to monetarily support those at trial and then continued to do so in other trials until apartheid ended. The trial also went poorly for the government, and many of those on the stand used it to highlight the incompetence of the police and the government’s policies. The Treason Trial ultimately collapsed in 1961, and though many of the defendants, Mandela included, were subsequently arrested it cemented an image of the South African government as repressive and incompetent.

Information

By now, it seems clear that many of the mainstream media organizations, from NBC to the Washington Post, are going to toe the administration line. Some of it is out of well-deserved fear: CBS is facing a lawsuit to the tune of $20 billion over basic editing it did in an interview with Kamala Harris. Other outlets will continue applying a “both sides” framework to everything the administration does. X will continue to be a vector of disinformation, while Meta and other established social media have teed up behind the current administration. Even information coming from the government is increasingly suspect: The wholesale firing of people in the CDC, NIH, and elsewhere will make disinformation that much easier.

Authoritarianism thrives in information vacuums, and activists have to fill in the gaps to challenge those narratives. In prior contexts, activists navigated this in many different ways. In the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, there was samizdat, which was the clandestine circulation of documents. Because even typewriters were tracked, people reproduced texts manually to circulate them. Some samizdat was fiction, but there were also political tracts. In the American South, African American newspapers such as the Chicago Defender were banned because they discussed civil rights or the benefits of migrating North, so Pullman Porters would bring issues with them to distribute as they traveled In occupied Europe, people used hidden radio sets to listen to the BBC. Leafleting was a popular activity for antifascists in no small part because it could happen dynamically. Activists could flood a location and spread information about an event or an action and then disappear.

How can we apply these lessons today? Building independent media, for one. Both-sides legacy media is no longer useful, and liberals and leftists need to build their own information ecosystems. Amplifying media from outside the United States is important too. In plenty of authoritarian states, independent media continues to exist, though it may be persecuted if it crosses certain lines. If we head in that direction, international media will become more important.

International Solidarity

Americans are used to thinking of themselves as the main characters. We’re supposed to be the cowboys that ride to the rescue. This myth is a problem for lots of reasons, but it’s going to serve us especially poorly in this moment. Even though Trump’s legislative base of power is thin in the House of Representatives, he’s going to try to rule by executive decree and fiat, and presidents have been empowered to do so by decades of overreach.

But one way that anti-fascists and anti-authoritarians have attacked repressive governments is by building international solidarity. The most famous example today would be the anti-apartheid movement. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, activists pressured companies to stop doing business in South Africa and boycotted the sale of South African goods, such as the Krugerrand. There were other, similar movements: The rise of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile fostered solidarity movements that tried to pressure banks to stop lending to his government.

One pressure point would be to go after the various oligarchs who support Trump. There’s already a movement in the United States to encourage people to ditch their Teslas and boycott the company. We should encourage similar boycotts in other countries. American labor unions have international counterparts that they can network with, as do churches in the United States. The same can be done with major tech companies such as Meta, all of which need to be regulated anyway: Their collaboration with the Trump administration is just the latest and best argument for doing so.

Anti-authoritarian resistance is a long game, and we have to be prepared to play it. All of a regime’s dysfunctions can make it seem like it’s imminently on the verge of collapse: Nazi Germany spent most of the 1930s so short on foreign exchange that it was always just a few weeks away from running out, leaving it unable to trade. It defaulted on its foreign debt. The Argentine military junta in the 1970s experienced runaway inflation that exceeded 100%, and in 1974, a year after Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile, inflation was 374%. These were all economic catastrophes; none of them immediately laid their governments low.

In short, there is no “one bad day” that brings authoritarian rule crashing to the ground. It happens because of constant pressure over the long-term, and a willingness to keep trying things when earlier strategies don’t work out. We can’t assume that the chaos and harm inflicted by the Trump administration will do the job by itself.