Fascism Feeds Off Despair. We Refuse.
Like you, we’ve spent the last few days processing our anger, grief, and worry about the recent election results. All of us here at IPS have friends, colleagues, loved ones, and members of our community who will be at risk in the years to come. You probably do too.
But also like you, we know that fascism feeds off despair. So there’s only one path forward: “Fight like hell,” as the legendary labor activist Mother Jones urged us.
In our country and across the world, voters feel abandoned by their politicians. They’ve suffered on the front lines of a pandemic, sifted through the wreckage of climate disasters, and tried to make ends meet in an unequal economy while corporations rip us off and CEOs run off with the profits.
The far right has weaponized that pain to turn people against each other rather than the real villains. Beating them starts with telling that story — and creating new ways for people to pull together, just like we’ve done time and time again.
Together, we’ll:
Resist. During the last Trump administration, we saw electrifying movements for racial and gender justice, immigrant rights, and economic justice. Those movements provided a real check on what Trump was able to do — and with our solidarity, they will again.
Refocus. It’s not enough to stop Trumpism — we also need big ideas to organize around. Going forward, we’ll have close allies in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, 17 state governments (home to a majority of Americans), and in local communities across the country.
With organizing allies like the Poor People’s Campaign, we’ll work to pass transformative policies at the state and local levels to tax the rich, make housing more affordable, protect our planet, and more. These are ideas we can then rally around at the national level.
Rewire. Political consultants may write off conservative communities, but we don’t. We bring progressive viewpoints to tens of millions of Americans in red and purple areas through our op-ed syndication work, media pitching, and social media organizing.
In fact, we’re reaching even more people in these markets than we were in 2016, so we’ll be making the case for progressive policies to more people than ever in all 50 states.
Rebuild. In the last few years, we’ve trained over 100 diverse young progressive advocates from impacted communities across the country — and we’re scaling up that effort to train more people, share more skills, and reach deeper into rural communities alongside our cities. The future of the progressive movement is bright — and it runs through IPS.
Even in the most unlikely places, people in this country are ready to push past hatred and division and solve our real problems. As Sarah Anderson writes at Inequality.org, voters in states like Washington, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska overwhelmingly supported common-sense measures to tax the rich, guarantee paid leave, and raise the minimum wage in this last election. Red state voters also overturned abortion bans and cannabis prohibition.
Those are huge progressive wins in a deeply polarized election. Now imagine what could be possible when we start breaking the far right’s firewall.
As the nation’s oldest progressive research institution, we’ve seen a lot in our 61 years. We’ve weathered political storms before — in fact, that’s often where movements find the most urgent, bold, and creative solutions to the crises of our time. We can’t wait to share these, organize around them, and win.
It’s okay to take a moment to heal, recover, and check in on the people you care about. But whenever you’re ready, so are we. We’re in this together.
