It hasn’t been lost on me that we watched a year and a half of a president ceaselessly undermining international law and the ICJ to uphold a genocide he continually denied was occurring – one the U.S. is directly complicit in – only to be followed by the next president undermining U.S. law and the courts to advance domestic authoritarian aims, while shifting the tone on Palestine to: “Well, yes, the ethnic cleansing presents amazing real estate opportunities.”

This is just one – though a particularly telling – example of the rightward progression in policy and politics toward the centralization of power and the construction of authoritarian structures through bipartisan erosion of institutional checks and balances.

When antifascists were brutally critical of the Biden administration for its constant diplomatic and material contributions to the crimes against humanity in Palestine, one reason – concomitant to the primary “never again, no one should be mass murdered” – was our recognition of the precedent being set. Discarding even the façade of concern for human rights created a tone with far-reaching, deeply dangerous ramifications.

Because of the high-stakes election, many Democrats and even left liberal-progressives seemed to misinterpret the harsh criticism as de facto support for Trump. The reality is we saw the Biden/Harris administration’s wholehearted support of genocidal ethnonationalism in one of the U.S.’s colonies/client states (Israel) as building tacit domestic support for the very politics Trump is now advancing.

For serious, long-standing antifascists (i.e., the ones who existed before, during, and after Trump’s first term), our persistent criticism of Biden and company was never the petulant screeching of overly idealistic electoralists – incorrectly condemning Biden to a status equal to Trump within a broken-duopoly analysis blind to nuance, dreaming of a third-party savior to run the American empire – but rather a bellowing of: “If the American liberal-left acquiesces to tacitly supporting ethnonationalist genocide through lesser-evil rationale it will shift the Overton window rightward so drastically that those abhorrent ideals become normalized domestically, inadvertently assisting in building a mass base of support for the right-wing populist ultranationalism of the Trump regime.”

Now, we hear murmurs from the Trump regime suggesting there may be a pathway to send American citizens (only “the worst criminals”) to the infamous concentration camp prison in El Salvador. With green card–holding student activists being labeled as “terrorists” for supporting Palestinian human rights and summarily deported without due process, it doesn’t take a dystopian fiction author to imagine a darker, truly fascist near future. (In Israel, they have some newer laws allowing denaturalization and revocation of citizenship for those associated with “terrorism” – it’s no wonder why internal resistance to the occupation from Israeli anarchists and leftists has been so markedly diminished over the last decade).

I suppose all this is to say: the theory that fascism is what happens when an empire’s exported policies come home to be used against its own citizens isn’t far off the mark. These things are deeply interconnected. Much hinges on how much we care to react to global injustices perpetrated by the United States and on holding our bastard rulers accountable, even when it is the lesser of two bastards in charge.