Amid the current rise of fascist leaders, rhetoric, and movements in the U.S., we need to examine contemporary expressions of fascism and how individuals, communities, organizations, and networks can respond and resist. Especially in the context of the 2024 elections, the anti-fascist actions of millions of ordinary people will determine whether our baseline democratic norms and institutions will survive. 

Below is an edited transcript of a panel discussion held at the 2024 Bioneers Conference featuring communications researcher and campaign advisor Anat Shenker-Osorio, host of the “Words to Win By” podcast and Principal of ASO Communications; Emily Lee, Executive Director of the grassroots movement-building organization Seed the Vote; and Tarso Luís Ramos, Executive Director at Political Research Associates, who has been researching and challenging the U.S. right for more than 25 years. The panel was hosted by Linda Burnham, women’s rights and racial justice activist since the 1960s, co-editor of “Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections,” author of Project2050, and co-creator of the online curriculum Fascism101. 

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LINDA BURNHAM: The premise of this conversation is that we can’t afford to succumb to despair, and we can’t afford to be overwhelmed. Those are real feelings, and we have to feel them, because we do, but then we have to work with them so that we can act while we can. That’s the premise. 

First, let’s clarify what we’re talking about when we’re talking about fascism because the term gets thrown around a lot, so I want to talk a little bit about what some of the characteristics of fascism are, so we’re on the same page. Of course, every nation has its own history and set of social circumstances, so when fascism arises, it looks different in every country, but you find some key strands in all of these sorts of movements. 

The first thing is that there’s a cult of the great leader. Another characteristic is a reference to a mythic past and an attempt to resurrect that mythic past. The terminology around Make America Great Again is a clear example. There’s a presumption of greatness in the past and there’s a presumption that it can be resurrected by the leader. Another element is hyper nationalism, an aggressive nationalism that disparages certain other peoples and nations, often because of race or ethnicity or religion. That’s definitely there in the MAGA movement as well, as we can see in its terminology around immigrants and migration, using terms such as “vermin.”

Another characteristic is male supremacy and patriarchy. The male leader is like the patriarchal head of the family, the father who knows all and is the legitimate ruler. From that flows the notion that only certain kinds of families are legitimate. In our circumstances, that has combined with a white Christian nationalism that disparages trans folk, LGBTQ individuals and communities, anybody who’s not on the straight end of our very rich gender spectrum. We saw that sort of patriarchy play out in the Dobbs decision, the delegitimizing of the capacity of women to make decisions about their own lives.

Another trait of fascism is the suppression of democracy and of dissent and the legitimization of violence to achieve the dominant group’s goals. From Charlottesville to January 6, we’ve seen the encouragement and glorification of political violence. 

Fascism is an ideology of concentrated state power as well as a philosophy and a social movement. So, if we take a temperature check of the U.S. right now regarding fascism, where are we? We’ve got the actors. We’ve got the ideology. We’ve got the movement in many different forms, but they don’t yet have state power. So, the key issue is: What’s standing between where we are presently and a full fascist take-over? And what is it that we can do to stand between where we are now and that possibility? 

We have an extremely agitated, flexing-their-muscles sector of the population who would not necessarily call themselves fascist (although a few do), but who are enthralled to a leader with a fascistic ideology and who are intent on taking state power by any means necessary. That’s where we stand at the moment. And we’re here to be in conversation about what can be done about it and what our responsibility is in trying to prevent that state takeover from happening.

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: I spend most of my days and my nights doing qualitative and quantitative research. I can assure you that if you’d like to feel good about America, watching focus groups is not the way to do it, but that is, in fact, a lot of what I do — two to four focus groups a week with various configurations of disaffected voters, swing voters in our battleground states for the last four years, so I get to exit the Bay Area bubble with regularity and actually watch real people. 

In terms of narratively how fascism works, I agree with everything Linda mentioned, but I would add that the core aim of an authoritarian ideology, whether it’s fascism or white Christian nationalism or any kind of a minoritarian force that sees itself as the legitimate majority, is to erode their enemy’s will to resist. As long as we continue to be in struggle, as long as we continue to push back and fight back, that has an extraordinary cost for them. It requires vigorous energy, it requires large outlays of money —look at Trump’s legal bills alone — so what they want is for us to lay down and capitulate.

So, I understand the despair that you feel down to my bones. You’re not watching voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan every night of your lives, so however much despair you think you’ve got, I’m far ahead of you. No matter how many edibles you’re taking, I’ve out-dosed you, but despair can’t be an option because that is giving in to them. 

There are certain contours and hallmarks of these movements that we see the world over. The United States is not exceptional in this regard, as much as we’d like to believe that about ourselves. There’s nothing new under the sun. Narratively, these kinds of regimes operate under very, very simple principles. The first one is that they tell their followers: you belong here; you have a place here; you will be unquestioned here, and there is a hierarchy and you deserve to be at the top of it. You have been unfairly displaced from the top of the heap, but your place will be rightfully restored. 

The number one predictor of political ideology is something we call tolerance of ambiguity. It’s basically how comfortable you are with unknown outcomes, with things not being black and white, with complexity. And if you’re a fundamentally neophobic individual, then the rapidly changing conditions of modern life feel like a relentless assault. And here’s a movement telling you that if you support it, you’re going to know your place here and your place is going to be at the top. 

And it’s offering you an origin story for your problems, because the number one hallmark of these kinds of authoritarian movements—and we see it with Brexit, with Bolsonaro in Brazil, with Orbán in Hungary, with Duterte in the Philippines, etc.—is that the quickest route to an us is a them, a scapegoat, a people who do not look like us, who do not teach their children the “right things,” who didn’t come in the “right way,” the magical immigrant who is both taking your job and not working, the trans person who you can’t understand. The essential element is that they always have to have a scapegoat, who can be presented as the cause of your problems.

If you feel like you’re busting your ass and 20, 30, 40 years ago your family could have made it on one income and had, you know, a decent car and vacation some of the time, and now you can’t anymore, it’s the fault of those scapegoats. Actually, most of us here know that a lot of those structural problems are a result of neoliberalist economic policies, but they switch the blame to easier-to-understand villains, so you blame immigrants instead of Jeff Bezos or hedge funds. This has the advantage of preventing people from coming together across races, places and genders to actually take on the real problems and punch up. If you can convince people to keep punching down, that’s the whole magic trick. We can call it divide in order to conquer, dog whistling, scapegoating. Whatever we call it, it’s a very old trick: there’s nothing new under the sun.

But what do we do about this current rising tide? The first thing is that we shouldn’t do what the left so often does with its messaging. The usual leftist impulse is to have a message that has three components. It goes like this: Boy have I got a problem for you. This is the Titanic, would you like to buy a ticket? And we’re the losing team, we lose often, so you should join us. That is a standard leftwing message, and it is not a particularly effective message. Most apolitical people who could potentially be ideologically aligned with us, they’ve got 99 problems and they don’t want yours, so that’s not really that attractive a sales pitch for them.

What we find works is first and foremost to say what you’re for. The first thing that you should be saying is what you actually want to have happen in the world instead of engaging in arguments: “Can you believe they just said…?” “Can you believe…?” Or: “Immigrants are not taking our jobs;” “Muslims are not terrorists;” “Gender-affirming care is not child abuse,” etc. And that’s all true, but it’s all negation. We have this instinctive negation that we like to engage in over and over. 

One concrete example of flipping that on its head happened in Chile at the end of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime in Chile. There was a referendum to prolong Pinochet’s rule, and the government, which controlled all the media, got to advertise every moment of the day, and the “No” campaign got one hour every night or once a week at midnight on one channel. And initially, what they were going to do, because they were going to lose anyway, was to make ads about how bad the regime was, which was not a hard case to make with a military dictatorship, but there was an ad exec who convinced them to run an entirely positive “No” campaign. Their emblem was a rainbow, and their slogan was: “Chile, la alegría ya viene”—i.e., happiness is coming, and the ad featured rainbow-colored people roaming in the fields on horseback and picnicking. And they won. 

A more recent example of this same say-what-you’re-for phenomenon, for those of you who don’t know, in October, we won a huge climate victory in Ecuador. The Yasuni tribe, which I’m honored to have gotten to work with, were able to win a public referendum in the face of every oil corporation you can possibly imagine, not just acting against them, but having spent the last few years literally assassinating their leaders. They ran a “Sí al Yasuni” campaign, which presented an affirmative message that was basically “here’s our chance to say yes to this region and to our future; to say yes to the life that we want to have.” 

The next point, besides say what you’re for, is that rather than repeat the opposition, you need to call out not just what they’re doing, but why. Ascribe motivation. Narrate the dog whistle. When a magician performs a trick and someone shows you how they did it, the sleight of hand is no longer impressive. What we find over and over again is that when we have a message that actually says most of us believe that people who work for a living ought to earn a living, but today MAGA Republicans want to turn us against each other. They think that by shaming and blaming newcomers, they can get us to look the other way while they steal our Social Security, dismantle the ACA, and take all the wealth our work creates. We see through their lies and we’re going to choose problem-solving over hate peddling. That’s a quick example of an effective message.

And you don’t repeat what they say, but you call out the reason that they’re saying it. A concrete example of that is in Minnesota, a largely white state with a significant Somali immigrant population over the last few decades. And we know many things about Minnesota, not least that George Floyd was murdered there, and the resurgence and uprise of the Black Lives Matter in 2020 happened in Minnesota. You also probably know that Keith Ellison was a member of Congress in the seat that Ilhan Omar now occupies and is now Attorney General of the state.

So, here’s a largely white state in which some of the most prominent politicians are Black Muslims. Think about that. Take a look at the Minneapolis City Council. It’s all women, and most of them are women of color. How did that come to be? Well, there much to the story, but the thing I’m going to focus in on is that in 2018, having seen that the GOP came within around 10,000 votes of winning this purportedly safe blue state—which it’s not; it’s a purple state—the Republicans in the state doubled and tripled down on their dog whistle politics in 2018. They had this whole discourse demonizing Somalis and alleging widespread daycare fraud, so we made a campaign that we called Greater than Fear. We had ads, posters, events, canvassing, and our slogan was: In Minnesota, we’re better off together; vote Greater than Fear. And over and over, we put out the message that they’re just trying to divide us, to distract us because they want to pick our pockets, and we say no. We say we’re going to be better off together, and we’re not going to fall for their lies. 

In 2018, we won all of the races that we worked on in that state. In 2020, we won more. In 2022, we created a one vote majority in the state legislature, and they passed 21 pieces of legislation. Those legislators will tell you that they ran saying what they would do, and then they did it. They said they were going to give driver’s licenses to undocumented people, to create more multi-lingual education and govern as progressives. They didn’t try to hide what they were going to do.

The last thing is that it’s absolutely essential to make the contrast with the other side clear. In 2022, in 15 states where Democrats won, turnout was at historic levels, the largest leap in turnout that we’ve had since women were granted the vote. In those 15 states, in most places we ran a clear contrast under the banner—protect our freedoms. We said these folks are coming to take away your freedoms, and you, the voters, need to vote to protect your freedoms. In the 35 other states, turnout was as anemic as predicted when you’re in the incumbency. Those were the places where Democrats tried to run on traditional lines—we’ll also be tough on crime; we’ll also say shitty things about immigrants; we’ll also blah, blah, blah about the economy. And people didn’t turn out. And those 35 states, I’m sorry to tell you, included New York and also California. The contrast has to be absolutely clear. If you want to win a debate, you have to first set the terms of that debate yourself. 

LINDA: We’re going to turn now to Emily, Emily Lee, who is the co-founder and Executive Director at Seed the Vote. She’s an expert at building multi-racial alliances, at community labor partnerships, and at multilingual field operations. Seed the Vote recruits, trains and mobilizes thousands of volunteers from across the United States to defeat the right. Their work in swing states contributed to the 2020 defeat of Donald Trump. Emily’s going to talk to us a little bit about the electoral landscape between now and November, and how what we do over the next several months has to do with resistance to fascism.

EMILY LEE: Seed the Vote’s mission is to build grassroots electoral power in battleground states by electing progressive legislators and candidates and blocking Trump and MAGA from getting into office. Very basic. It’s something we just started doing a few years ago, actually, partly because we saw in progressive circles and on the left that there were not enough of us who saw electoral strategy and electoral organizing as key to building power for our social movements.

We are helping to win federal elections, particularly by sending volunteers to door knock and phone-bank in battleground states, so that we can actually be convincing voters face to face, in person, about why their vote is so critical to stopping the takeover of fascism and protecting their freedoms. We also work with local grassroots organizations in these battleground states so we’re not parachuting in. We are working directly with local and state-based organizations who do the work before and after the election cycle, because we’re about building power long-term, so we’re supporting organizations who are directing our strategy on the ground, and we also develop the leadership of young people of color, BIPOC folks, to be doing this work through our fellowship called Generation Rising. 

This year, we’re working with other social movement organizations on a strategy called Block and Build, which Linda is very critical to, and that is really just what it says. We are trying to block MAGA’s bid for power at all levels of elections, from local to federal, and we’re building enough independent progressive clout so that our country actually has a vision. We’re not just saying what we’re against but what we are moving towards: a multi-racial, gender-inclusive democracy; an economy that works for everybody; and a sustainable planet. If you want to learn more, check out Convergence magazine. They’re going to be launching a syllabus, a curriculum, about the Block and Build strategy.

I just want to lay out the electoral landscape, but we already know everything we need to know on election day. We don’t need more polls to tell us anything actually. All we need to know is that the outcome on November 5th will be determined, as it was in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, by very narrow margins in six battleground states. The states in play are going to be Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. With those states undecided, the electoral vote tally is Trump 235, and Biden 226. We’ve got to win these states to prevent a MAGA takeover of the federal government. They have taken state power in 22 states, where they have governing trifectas, but they haven’t taken federal power. What we are trying to prevent is a federal takeover by MAGA, and we’re mobilizing thousands of volunteers this year to do that work. 

Previous elections, since 2016, have shown that when the anti-MAGA majority in this country comes out, we decide elections, we decide what is going to be the future of the country. When there’s a very clear choice on the ballot, it’s the anti-MAGA majority—all of us in this room and then many more who don’t agree with us on a lot of other things, but agree that MAGA should not be in charge of this country, who can control what happens on November 5th. 

So, our job is to make it crystal clear to all the voters why they need to drag their butts off their couch, out of their bed, away from their jobs, away from their kids, to actually go vote. We have to do that very convincingly and in great numbers. The outcome in those states will not depend on the margin of error in polls, but by the margin of effort by campaigns, by activists, by the media, and concerned citizens to mobilize America’s anti-MAGA majority. That is us. As the antidote to pessimism and the fear that we all feel, we have to take action, and I’m hoping at least 50% of you join Seed the Vote this year to help us defeat MAGA. 

There’s a lot that’s terrible about this administration that’s involved in supporting genocide, that’s way too corporate, etc., but fighting those things, which we have to do, as hard as it is, will be much easier under a Biden administration that under Trump. If we’re all clear on that, then we know the hard work we have to do. We know we have to keep continuing to hold Biden accountable for everything that is happening, but we also have to actually elect whoever the Democratic nominee is, which right now is Joe Biden.

Some of you may wonder why we focus so much on canvassing in a world of remote, when we’re on our phones all the time. Why is it so critical that we actually go in person to swing states? The fact is that it works. People who have never voted before vote and even encourage their friends and family members to vote if you are able to talk to them in person. We hear amazing, incredible stories from our volunteers who go door-to-door. They come back again and again because they know what they’re doing in these swing states works and is impactful. They know they’re not wasting their time, because they’re getting voters who otherwise would have stayed at home to come out and cast that critical vote in these super tight races. I think it’s such a privilege for anyone who can volunteer with us to go out and meet these voters, and support them, and actually be part of the historic turnout that is necessary for all of us. 

We provide direct financial aid—so that means housing and transportation—for volunteers, so thousands of them are able to go knock on doors because we pay for their hotel, airline tickets, etc. Of course, people who can support and donate and fundraise themselves, we need that as well. We’re a very grassroots operation. We provide the volunteer infrastructure so that people can recruit, train, and coordinate the thousands of people it takes, moving them across state lines and helping them get trained and feel comfortable. Most of our volunteers have never door-knocked in their lives. These are people who are just like all of us, so we’re training and preparing them. We’re with them every step of the way so they feel comfortable. 

We also partner with local leadership on the ground, connecting the volunteers to the local social justice organizations and unions who know that community, know where to send the volunteers and what the message should be. They know what people care about, so they’re the ones directing the strategy and directing the message that we’re communicating to people.

Let me move on to what we’re doing this year. We’re not just trying to block MAGA, we’re also building a progressive front of leaders within Congress, including supporting the “Squad” who’ve been champions on the ceasefire resolution, on climate action with the Green New Deal, etc. We’re focusing on the closest races for the squad, especially the three progressive Black members of the squad—Summer Lee in Pittsburgh, Jamaal Bowman in New York, and Cori Bush in St. Louis. These folks are under attack from PACs that want to take them down the strong positions they’ve taken. They’re getting primaried and these PACs have promised to spend $100 million against them. Defending the squad is one of our number one goals for this year, because we can’t just be defeating MAGA, we actually need to be building up our own people and defending our champions in Congress.

Right now, we are recruiting people to go canvas in Pittsburgh. Summer Lee is doing well in the polls, but last time she ran, she won by 988 votes. That’s too close. She’s the first member of the squad to have a primary this year. Her primary is April 23rd (Editor’s note: Summer Lee handily won her primary; this panel discussion occurred in late March). Next, we really need to make sure that we get a strong showing for Cori Bush, so we’re recruiting for both of those races right now, and the partners we’re working with include the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (they really need Asian volunteers, both English-speaking and speakers of several Asian languages) and Pennsylvania United. In Jamaal Bowman’s district, we’re working with the Working Families Party, and in Minnesota, we are working with Take Action Minnesota; and in Missouri, Action St. Louis and in Michigan, Michigan United. Our immediate goal is to send 200 people right now to Pittsburgh, so please help us get there if you can. 

Our goal for the general election is to work in the six battleground states that Anat mentioned, and we’re partnering with a lot of amazing, powerful social movement actors in all of them. We’re also doing down ballot, not just at the top of the ticket. We’re looking at the really close Senate races, the really important state legislator races, at propositions, including several abortion measures on the ballot, so it’s not just about defeating Trump, though that of course is super important; we also need to be building local power in these places. 

LINDA: I have a question for both of you. Regardless of who gets elected, we will still be faced with a fascist threat. We’re facing a revived fascist movement that is not going to go away if Trump dropped dead tomorrow, so talk to me about that. How do we think about that?

ANAT: I am in electoral politics, which I think of as a “cadena perpetua,” a life sentence for a crime I don’t recall. Electoral politics is the least interesting part of politics, but I think it’s something we have to do right now. It’s obviously true that Trump wouldn’t have come to power and be so close this time and have this large a following if this ethos weren’t part and parcel of our DNA. There is an almost perfect overlap in those red trifecta states Emily mentioned to the Confederacy, and when you compare how, say, how the Germans handled the post-World War II period, outlawing people who had been members of the Nazi Party from being anywhere near office, with this country, it’s striking. There is no statue in any German city or province of a Nazi war criminal the way we have statues of war criminals from the Civil War. Other than the short, remarkable period of Reconstruction, we’ve never really contended with the reality of the fascist faction that has been with us since our founding.

What do we do about that? Short of actually giving in to separating, which on some days sounds like a pretty sweet idea to me, I think the very first thing we need to do is pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote bill. Those are absolutely critical and essential pieces of concrete legislation, along with the codification of Roe, without which we’re perpetually at risk. And then we have to actually confront neoliberalism. Unless people can feel like they don’t have more month than check, they are always at-risk of being “fascism curious,” and that’s not only white people. 

It’s really about taking on capitalism and making it so the wealth that people generate actually remains with them so that they can feel good about their lives and not be susceptible to blaming whomever they’re told is at fault for the perceived threat to their status and/or their economic hardship. It’s voting rights and unrigging this economic system. Those are the ways that you actually handle this. 

EMILY: I cannot go to the scenario of what if Trump is the next president. We cannot start thinking about how we plan for that day because it will kind of be the end of days to me. He’s laid out very clearly where he wants to go. It’s political violence; it’s authoritarianism, so I don’t think it’s a useful exercise for us to think about what will we do next when he gets elected. 

I think we all need to operate on the fact that we are doing every single thing possible this year to defeat Trump, to make sure he is not president. Because otherwise, I personally can’t go down that road. It’s a horrific future, and I know there are other people planning scenarios of mutual aid and what we’re going to be doing, but I think our number one imperative is to do everything in our power to stop that from happening.

But I do think that you’re totally right that our vision can’t just be to keep defeating MAGA. That’s a very short-term thing we have to do in order to actually build power for the long term, but we have to build the political power of our forces and a united front. Defeating fascism requires an enormous united front with people who don’t come to this conference, and that includes people such as Liz Cheney, Republicans who refuse to bow down to Trump, as well as to neoliberal Democrats. It requires us to actually have a really clear, sober understanding of the limited current power we have. The fact is that we don’t have enough power to demand really important legislation that should be happening. To get those things, we need to build up our political strength, because otherwise some of our temporary partners in that united front to defeat Trump will turn on us and try to squash us once Trump is gone, as they’re trying to do with the squad right now. 

We have to do several things at the same time, and that includes working with those kinds of really tenuous relationships and accepting some contradictions, but that’s what is required of us to defeat fascism now, but then, to be really clear, the day after we elect Joe Biden, we’re immediately organizing on the left and in progressive movements to hold him accountable to our agenda. 

LINDA: We have a couple of minutes for questions. And I also want you to consider, I’m going to pose a question to you, which is how is this showing up in your work; how is rising fascism impacting the work that you do, and how are you seeing resistance to fascism amongst the set that you work with? Right? So you can both ask a question or you can answer that question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER (AM): I’m a labor organizer in Colorado, and this year when a younger person expresses real, sincere, valid frustrations and concerns about voting for Biden, the response, instead of being receptive, is: “You’re just going to elect Trump; it’s going to be your fault.” And I understand that frustration, because we are in this frustrating two-party system, but can you speak to a way to hold those conversations productively.

ANAT: I can answer that since it’s like every day of my life. I’ve seen an entire track of focus groups with the kind of young people that you are describing. The easier thing is to speak to the older person first. Get them alone and ask them: “What’s your theory of change? Do you think yelling at a person for their views is productive?” Because I’ve personally never had the experience of telling someone you’re a fucking idiot and had them had them turn around and tell me: “Please tell me more; I would like to follow your guidance.” If what you’re attempting to do is actually create a voter, then that’s not a solid theory of change, but what do you actually say to the young person?

Now, to be clear, this is what works on the margins. Politics is a game of millimeters. Is this going to work with every young person? No. But this is what we have found to be the most effective of all of the things that we’re trying with this very, very real group of people who are saying they’re going to sit it out, or increasingly among the more sophisticated, skip the top of the ticket. There is an increasing movement to not vote the top of the ticket. 

This is what we have been finding. First, this is blanket advice: Don’t start your sentences with “Trump is”—Trump is a liar, Trump is a racist, Trump is a criminal, etc. Shift away from what Trump is to what Trump will do. When you are in the what Trump will do space, people will get into the what Biden will do space, and you’ll be in a better spot.

Better than the first is to not talk about Trump or Biden at all. What we find again and again is that when we shift people away from seeing this election as a contest between two warring individuals toward a fork in the road between two different futures, they flip from being spectators at a sports match where they hate both teams to seeing it as this is going to impact my future. Try not to talk about the candidates. Try to get them to vote for the country they want, not the person they want. 

The third thing, specifically with this kind of young person, that we are finding promise with is to say that when you think about every piece of progressive advancement we’ve ever had in this country—Civil Rights, women voting, the Americans with Disabilities Act, marriage equality, the eight-hour work day, stopping child labor, etc., none of those were gained electorally. None of those things were won by voting for the right person. They were all won through outside agitation. Voting is the tool that we use so the other tools can be deployed, but it still matters who is in charge at the top, because one person in charge might let you strike and protest; another might throw you into a gulag. 

Obviously, our electoral system is a piece of hot trash. That is obvious. We don’t live in a democracy, so how do we actually get the future we want? It’s using every tool in our arsenal, and if we do not have Joe Biden as president in 2025, all of those other tools will be taken from us. That’s what you say to them. 

AM: What about Robert F. Kennedy (RFK)?

ANAT: In our best estimates, six in 10 voters are decided, meaning they are going to vote for Trump or they are going to vote for Biden, and four in 10, which is a massive number, considering this is a rematch between two individuals — you’d think it would be much smaller — are up for grabs. 

Among those four in 10, in the six battleground states where the election will be decided, there are 5% who are RFK supporters. The rest of them are basically toggling between I might stay at home, I don’t know, I might skip the top of the ticket, I might vote third party. Is there going to be more of an authentic attachment to RFK? My feeling is that the more that comes out about him, the less attractive he will become. 

AM: What about the Biden administration’s actions in Israel? 

ANAT: Obviously, the choices that we have before us are bad, but the electoral system that we have, because of money in politics, because of the electoral college, because of gerrymandering, is summarily undemocratic. I think we all agree on that, so the question really is: How do we have the kind of a future that I think probably with some differences most of us want—a future where all people can live in peace, where we have prosperity, where we have sustenance, where we have longevity, where we are not, you know, burning ourselves alive and poisoning our own air and water. How do we get to that? And what does the past teach us? And what are the tools that we have before us? To me, the electoral system is an absolutely vital but absolutely insufficient mechanism. At some point, I genuinely believe that the only way we will have real change in this country is through a general strike. The only way we will achieve change is by withholding our labor. I really don’t think that we can have the things that we deserve and the justice we want without withholding our labor, but we have to be able to live to fight another day, and that means using the electoral system as it is now. 

EMILY: In the last six months the amount of pressure that young people, Palestinian Arab movements, Jewish Voice for Peace and other activists within the Jewish community have exerted has actually shifted this administration somewhat, not nearly enough, but somewhat, and that’s credit to the movements and the people, but with Donald Trump our ability to even protest and do civil disobedience will very possibly be taken away from us.

He has already aligned himself with authoritarian and fascist governments abroad, so our work is not about celebrating Joe Biden, it’s about picking Joe Biden as our continued target.