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The American Reckoning
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know US leaders belong there too.
Sep 11, 2025
I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me.
As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame.
The United States cannot keep living in that shrug. We armed, funded, and protected Israel as it has carried out the genocide of the Palestinian people. We have supplied not only weapons but coordination, intelligence, and political cover. We let the American Israel Public Affairs Committee function as the arm of a foreign government, not as a lobbying group. We looked away from the checkpoints, the administrative cruelty, the killing of children. This is our legacy.
But Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror held up to the long history of our interventions. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953, not because he was a tyrant but because he dared to nationalize oil. We turned that nation toward dictatorship and decades of repression, then had the arrogance to call it democracy. In Central America, we toppled leaders and propped up death squads. In Chile, we helped usher in the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet, betraying yet another democratic choice in favor of authoritarian brutality.
We speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous ways as if they are foreign to us. They are not. We have assassinated leaders. We have sanctioned extrajudicial killings, calling them “targeted strikes.” We have funded militias and trained torturers. We still carry Guantánamo on our conscience. We are not better than Putin. We are his rival and his mirror.
We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
In Vietnam, we unleashed hell. Entire villages were burned to the ground. At My Lai, US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed civilians, women, children, elders. It was not an accident, not a one-off. It was part of a culture of violence we exported and excused.
And then there is the School of the Americas, now rebranded as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US military institution in Panama where we trained some of the worst dictators and death squad leaders in Latin America. The manuals we gave them were explicit: torture, execution, terror as tools of governance. We sowed horror and called it security.
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know we belong there too. For Mossadegh, for Pinochet, for Central America, for My Lai, for every extrajudicial killing and every sanctioned massacre, and most immediately for Gaza, we should be in the dock as well. We should stand in handcuffs, our heads lowered in shame, finally facing the truth of what we have unleashed in the world.
The truth is that our foreign policy has been one long history of intervention, violence, and betrayal of human dignity. We were in Haiti. We were in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan. We have left the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa littered with the bones of our experiments. Always we tell ourselves it was complicated. Always we tell ourselves we meant well. But what we meant was power, and what we left was ruin.
What reparation looks like now is not cash or aid dropped into a void. It is restoring justice. It is ending our culture of nation building and intervention, and replacing it with support for people, families, language, culture, dignity, and jurisprudence. It is standing against genocide, no matter who commits it. It is admitting that our strength lies not in military power but in whether we can build schools instead of prisons, communities instead of empires.
This is not just a populist opinion. It is a moral imperative. We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
I am a doctor. My oath is to heal, to do no harm. But as a citizen, I see harm everywhere our government touches. We cannot keep pretending that this is someone else’s crime, someone else’s burden. This is ours.
The reckoning will not wait forever. The question is whether we face it with honesty now, or whether we let it destroy us later.
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How to Research Your Way to a Better World
In the midst of the torrent of lies and repressive practices emanating from Washington, the use of research to guide strategy and support organizing is more important than ever.
Sep 03, 2025
I have spent the bulk of my career—on and off since the late Carter administration—following the money that drives war and repression. What I have finally learned after so many decades of doing research on the war machine is that while research is critical, it must be in the service of a smart strategy backed by a lot of hard work by organizers from all walks of life.
My interest in using research to promote social change was sparked by my years at Columbia University in the 1970s, when I was a researcher and advocate in the divestment movement targeting the apartheid regime of South Africa and a participant in other social justice movements like the boycott in support of the United Farmworkers Union and the opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.
Henry Kissinger’s justification for the US-backed coup in Chile that put Augusto Pinochet in power still sticks in my mind: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
So much for the land of the free and the beacon of global democracy.
The US role in the coup was eventually recounted by many media outlets, but for me the first and most important was the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), which devoted several issues of its magazine, then called The Latin America and Empire Report, to the origins of the coup, including the role of US corporations. I was so impressed with their research and commitment that I applied to work at NACLA after graduating from Columbia in January 1978. They wisely demurred, since my background on Latin America was largely limited to what I had read in their own reports. Still, their skill in deploying detailed research to debunk the official lies that surrounded the coup stuck with me.
Research Against Apartheid
My real schooling in research, however, came in the anti-apartheid movement, starting with the divestment campaign at Columbia and expanding into my work with national anti-apartheid organizations like the American Committee on Africa (ACOA). Again, research was front and center. In order to make effective demands for divestment, we needed to know which companies were supporting the apartheid regime, and which of those companies our universities held stock in. ACOA was of great help in this, including through Richard Knight, who worked in a back room of their offices at 198 Broadway and had what may well have been the messiest desk in the history of progressive politics. But if my memory serves me correctly, he seemed to be able to remember exactly where he put a given document in one of the many piles of paper that obscured his desktop. The work he did, along with colleagues at ACOA, helped fuel the student divestment movement, along with research by students on campuses around the country.
Another key group at that time was Corporate Data Exchange (CDE). Tina Simcich, who worked at CDE and was also part of the New York Committee to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa (COBLSA), did the definitive research on which banks were lending to the apartheid regime.
At Columbia, we made an interesting discovery that put the lie to the university’s position on divestment. In response to demands to divest from firms involved with the apartheid regime, university leaders argued that, if there were objections to the actions of companies they were invested in, they felt it would be more productive to support shareholder resolutions seeking to change their conduct than to divest from those companies’ stocks.
if there were not people organizing for change, my research would be little more than a peculiar hobby.
But after digging around in past Columbia University documents, we found a memo from a prior year in which the university had responded to a request to support a shareholder resolution on behalf of trade unionists in Chile, some of whom had been murdered by the Pinochet regime. The university’s position then proved to be precisely the opposite of what it said just a few years later when asked to divest from companies involved in South Africa: They didn’t think it was productive to engage in shareholder resolutions. If there was an ethical issue with one of their holdings, their preference was to divest from the stock of that company.
Although it was a small instance of hypocrisy, it was nonetheless revealing. At that point, the university had been determined to do absolutely nothing to hold companies that were complicit in repression accountable. Our divestment campaign of the mid-1970s did not succeed, but in 1985, another cohort of student activists did finally persuade Columbia to divest. The next year, in 1986, Congress passed comprehensive sanctions on South Africa, overriding a veto attempt by President Ronald Reagan.
Obviously, research was only partly responsible for our success. It was research in the service of organizing and sound strategy that won the day. The fact that the liberation movements in South Africa, including the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement, were calling for divestment greatly strengthened our case. And inspiring organizers and speakers like the incomparable Prexy Nesbitt and the late Dumisani Kumalo, a South African exile who went on to be liberated South Africa’s first representative to the United Nations, played a huge role, as did thousands of campus activists, religious leaders, trade unionists, state and local officials, and heads of pension funds.
Eight years later, in 1994, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the first president of a free South Africa. The vast bulk of the credit for that historic change goes to the people of South Africa, but the divestment campaign and the larger global boycott of the apartheid regime played an important supporting role, a role much appreciated by activists in South Africa.
As for me, my work in the anti-apartheid movement shaped my career. I worked for a while as part of the collective that put out Southern Africa magazine, an independent journal that supported the anti-apartheid movement and the liberation movements in Southern Africa. The original editor was Jennifer Davis, the brilliant exiled South African economist who went on to direct ACOA. I wrote articles about the divestment campaign, violations of the arms embargo on South Africa, and the role of US firms in propping up the apartheid regime. The skills and values I learned there were far more important to my career than my philosophy degree from Columbia, an institution whose leaders have now covered themselves in shame by cracking down on students speaking out against US-financed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The Impact of ‘68
Our work against apartheid was inspired in part by the generation of 1968, whose research exposed the role of companies fueling the war in Vietnam, including Dow Chemical, which produced napalm that was used to kill and maim untold numbers of people. We were also influenced by publications like “Who Rules Columbia,” as well as a handy publication on how to research the corporate ties of one’s university, published by the ever-relevant and crucial NACLA. And groups like National Action Research on the Military-Industrial Complex (NARMIC) were invaluable for peace activists from the anti-Vietnam War period onward.
Other influences on me from that generation of researchers and analysts included Michael Klare, whose reports and books like Supplying Repression, War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, and Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New Foreign Policy were foundational in forming my understanding of US military spending and strategy. And my perspective on the domestic factors driving Pentagon spending began with The Iron Triangle, written by my friend and mentor Gordon Adams (now Abby Ross).
The Corporate Role in Fueling Genocide in Gaza
Activists pushing universities to divest from companies profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza have made connections with the earlier generation of researchers described above, from webinars with members of NARMIC to essays that link to documents like “Who Rules Columbia?”
A key organization in the middle of current efforts is Little Sis—a powerful research organization whose name is based on the idea that they are the opposite of Big Brother. They facilitate research and make connections on a wide range of issues, but at this moment one of their most important products is a webinar they did with Dissenters, a youth anti-militarism group based in Chicago, on how to research the corporate ties of universities. It’s a tutorial on researching university ties to war profiteers, going well beyond the issue of stock holdings in arms makers to look at the connections of trustees, financial institutions, and other relevant ties to weapons makers.
As the Trump administration stops collecting some kinds of data and destroys other kinds altogether, the job of research will be ever more difficult.
Groups of dedicated students within the ceasefire and anti-genocide movements on US campuses have done excellent work in researching the corporate ties of their own universities. I appeared on Santita Jackson’s radio show in February 2025 and connected with Bryce Greene, a student at the University of Indiana involved in the ceasefire-Gaza movement there. He and his fellow students were researching the military ties of the university, and they wanted me to review their research to see if they were missing anything. As it happened, they had dug up far more information than I would have, in part because of local connections. Their biggest find was related to the university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Crane Division, which provides technical support for everything from missile defense systems to Special Operations Forces. University professors had gone back and forth between Crane and campus, and Crane had a direct presence at the school. Students then started a “keep Crane off campus” campaign.
Researchers focused specifically on Israel and Gaza include the American Friends Service Committee, which has a web page on “Companies Profiting from the Gaza Genocide,” and No Tech for Apartheid, which, among other things, reaches out to workers at Google and Amazon to encourage them to take a stand against technology from tech firms going to support the Israeli war effort. One of the most valuable current resources is the United Nations report, From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide, produced under the supervision of Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, which describes its purpose this way:
This report investigates the corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory. While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now, genocide. The complicity exposed by this report is just the tip of the iceberg; ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives.
Models of Research and Strategy
The most effective current model for using data to shape the debate on security issues is the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Their work on the costs of America’s post-9/11 wars ($8 trillion and counting), the number of overseas US counterterror missions, the cost of US military aid and military operations in support of Israel (over $22 billion in the first year of the war in Gaza) is routinely cited in the press and by political leaders, and provides fuel for activists in their writing and public education efforts.
The best current example of merging research, organizing, and strategy is the new Poor People’s Campaign, cochaired by Reverend William Barber of Repairers of the Breach and Reverend Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center. Their campaign was inspired by the effort of the same name announced by Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1967. King was assassinated before his campaign came to fruition, but the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and other groups picked up the work of making its signature event, The Poor People’s March on Washington, happen.
One of the bedrock principles of the current Poor People’s Campaign is that the people most impacted by poverty should lead the movement. But cultivating such leadership, especially among those who have been excluded from the halls of power and influence for so long, requires an ongoing process of research, education, and training. Theoharis, director of the Kairos Center and cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign, underscores this point in her new book on the history of poor people’s organizing, coauthored with Noam Sandweiss-Back:
Without a continual process of learning, reflecting, and growing intellectually, our organizing is reduced to mobilizing, an exercise in moving bodies without supporting existing leaders and developing new ones... mobilizing people is important, but when it becomes our sole focus, we sacrifice long-term power for short-term action.
As Theoharis notes, King made a similar point in Where Do We Go From Here?:
Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy… Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.
In the midst of the torrent of lies and repressive practices emanating from Washington, the use of research to guide strategy and support organizing is more important than ever. But as the Trump administration stops collecting some kinds of data and destroys other kinds altogether, the job of research will be ever more difficult. That can be partially compensated for by drawing on the collective knowledge of researchers, organizers, and community members alike, taking our lead from people who are on the front lines of dealing with repressive policies.
Occasionally, when I am giving a talk on how to reduce the influence of the war machine, I point out that, if there were not people organizing for change, my research would be little more than a peculiar hobby. That is only a slight exaggeration. We need to bring together researchers, organizers, and strategists, taking our lead from members of impacted communities, to work in partnership against the challenges we now face on a daily, at times hourly, basis.
This means the content of our work may take different forms. Rather than reports and briefings, we may need to rely on music, storytelling, art, and ritual to share insights on the political terrain and tales of resistance and revival in these times of escalating crisis. This may become even more to the point as traditional forms of protest continue to be criminalized.
We have a rich history to guide and inspire us, but the task is ours.
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The Pain of Repeating "We Told You So”
On issues ranging from the Vietnam War and the War on Terror to the genocide in Gaza and Trump's authoritarianism, progressives have a history of being prematurely, fruitlessly right.
Aug 19, 2025
I spent the summer of 1965 arguing about the Vietnam War. I was 13, and my interlocutor was my 18-year-old camp counselor in Vermont. She was headed for UC Berkeley in the fall, where she would, as she later described it, “major in history and minor in rioting.” Meanwhile, I was headed back to junior high school. I was already convinced that our government was lying about why we were fighting in Vietnam (supposedly to protect our sworn ally, the South Vietnamese government, in response to a trumped-up "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin). I was also convinced that the war was unjustified and wrong. She seemed less certain about the war but was similarly convinced that expending energy opposing it would distract activists from supporting the civil rights movement.
As it turned out, we were both right.
Our summer camp subscribed to the Boston Globe, which I read daily, probably when I was supposed to be doing something more physically edifying like playing tennis. I remember the day the Globe ran a story quoting an informal adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson—it might have been Dean Acheson—suggesting that, even if the South Vietnamese government were to ask the United States to withdraw its forces, it wouldn’t do so. I cut the article out (property damage is not violence!) and ran to show her. “See? I was right. They’re lying about the war.”
It’s been 60 years since that summer, and she and I are still arguing about politics, now as life partners of more than four decades. (Don’t worry: it took me another 14 years to convince her I was a grown-up and therefore a legitimate object of romantic affection.)
The Vietnam War Was Wrong and Some of Us Knew It
Although she and I are indeed still arguing about politics, like millions of people in this country and around the world, we were right then about Vietnam. We may not have foreseen it all—the assassinations, carpet bombings, tiger cages, and the Phoenix Program (the Central Intelligence Agency’s first mass torture scheme)—but we were hardly surprised when it all finally came out. Today, there’s a consensus in this country that the Vietnam War was more than a mistake; it was a decade-long exercise in overreach and overkill.
That war would eventually result in the deaths of 58,000 members of the American military and millions of Vietnamese, both soldiers and civilians. We’d see a generation of Vietnam veterans come home with visible (and invisible) injuries: amputations; cancers born of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Air Force to defoliate jungle terrain; heroin habits; the illness we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD; and moral injuries caused by following orders to murder civilians. It tells you something about that war that Vietnam vets would prove more likely to become homeless than the veterans of previous or later wars. They would also suffer contempt from many of their fellow Americans for having been drafted into a vicious and ultimately pointless conflict.
I sometimes think it’s the fate of many progressives for once in our lives to be right—over and over.
Many who actively opposed the war also suffered. I knew young men who went to jail for resisting the draft. Others took on false identities—it was easier in those pre-internet days—or moved to Canada to avoid being drafted. My college boyfriend never registered for the draft (also easier before networked computers permeated the country and when you had to apply for a Social Security number rather than being assigned one at birth). Since many employers demanded to see your draft exemption or, after the war ended, your discharge papers, he worked for his housepainter father until President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 amnesty for draft evaders.
A friend I came to know during the 1980s had spent nine months in the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, for pouring blood on draft board records. Thousands were beaten bloody during the police riots outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, where activists had gone to protest the nomination of pro-war presidential candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey. And on May 4, 1970, four students were shot and killed by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University during antiwar protests. They were all right about the war, but too few Americans believed them—until decades later, when just about everyone did.
For Once in Our Lives
My father had a few sayings he thought were pretty funny. On meeting a child for the first time he’d ask, “How old are you? 10? When I was your age,” he’d continue, “I was 21!” A favorite of his was: “For once in my life, I’m right again.” He’d make that joke whenever he’d been proven right about anything. I sometimes think it’s the fate of many progressives for once in our lives to be right—over and over. This isn’t because we’re particularly good people, although some of my heroes are indeed good people. It’s at least in part because we are people with good luck. It’s been our good luck that, at some time in our lives, somebody offered us a place to stand, a viewpoint, an ethical way of grasping the world.
I think for example of Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan just days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. On the House floor, she got up and responded to the almost universal calls for revenge with these words: “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”
As I wrote about her courage at the start of the Biden years:
The legislation she opposed then, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), has indeed allowed “this”to spiral out of control. It has been used to justify an ever-metastasizing series of wars, spreading from Afghanistan in central Asia throughout the Middle East, south to Yemen, leaping to Africa—Libya, Djibouti, Somalia, and who knows where else. Despite multiple attempts to repeal it, that AUMF remains in effect today, ready for the next president with aspirations to military adventures.
And four years later, it’s still in effect, providing legal cover for a once-isolationist Donald Trump to drop bombs on Iran and threaten Russia with US nuclear submarines.
Back in 2001, Lee was excoriated for her vote against that war. The Wall Street Journal called her a “clueless liberal” and the Washington Times claimed that she was “a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies.”
Twenty years later, the Washington Post celebrated her courage, noting that no one in Congress—not even Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders—had shared her prescience at the time.
…We’re Right Again
The best response to the horror of September 11 was never a military one. The attacks were a criminal act best prosecuted as such, both in this country and in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. It was clear to anyone who remembered Vietnam that the Afghan war would become a murderous quagmire, and some of us said so at the time.
We were similarly right that the Iraq War that followed would never be the “cakewalk” Bush administration officials promised. We knew that Bush speechwriter David Frum, who invented the phrase “axis of evil” for Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, was deluded when he said, “The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.” We were convinced at the time that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were lying about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction. We knew, in part at least, because Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in Iraq, had told the UN Security Council so on February 14, 2003, writing in part, “So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons [of mass destruction], only a small number of empty chemical munitions…”
Twenty years later, and remembering the US response to the 9/11 attacks, some of us had an inkling of what October 7, 2023, portended for Gaza. On October 25, 2023, just a few weeks into the now almost-complete destruction of that tiny strip of land, journalist Omar El Akkad tweeted this sentence: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” (He has since published a memoir of his reporting life, covering everything from the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the war on Black people in Ferguson, Missouri.)
In June 2024, I wrote that both the Democrats and Republicans were offering uncritical support for the demolition of Gaza. Here’s what I said then:
Right now, it’s not too hard to foresee the approaching catastrophe in Gaza. Indeed, at my own university and across the country and the world, even in Israel, students are desperately trying to prevent a genocide already in progress. While the “grown-ups” debate the legal definition of genocide, those young people continue to point to the murderous reality still unfolding in Gaza and demand that it be stopped before it’s too late.
Now that it is too late, it’s no longer forbidden to use the word “genocide” in polite company. Now, as Gazans starve, as they are shot by soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces while seeking food aid at sites run by the farcically-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the world has decided it is, after all, “against this.” Only recently, in fact, two Israeli human rights organizations used the word “genocide” for the first time to describe their own government’s attempts to rid Gaza of Palestinian life.
France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have all called for the recognition of a Palestinian state, again many years too late. No contiguous land remains where such a state could be constructed. The world looked passively on for decades as Israel fulfilled Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s dream of turning the occupied West Bank into a “pastrami sandwich.” Back in the 1970s, he explained the plan to Winston Churchill’s grandson. “We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements,” he said, “in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” Over 20 years ago, The Nation magazine reported that Sharon’s mission had already essentially been accomplished. And now? This past May, the Israeli parliament the Knesset approved another 22 settlements there, a move that, as the country’s defense minister explained, “prevents establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”
Recent weeks have seen increased attacks on Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but on the West Bank. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded 757 such settler attacks by mid-July. As the newspaper Al-Jazeera reports, “The violence also includes the demolitions of hundreds of homes and forced mass displacement of Palestinians as well as annexations of more land in violation of international law.”
Premature Antifascists?
During the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, a group of Americans formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to help defend the Spanish Republic against the forces of fascist General Francisco Franco (aided by Adolf Hitler’s military forces). Almost a quarter of the Brigade died, the Spanish partisans lost the war, and Franco’s dictatorship lasted until he died in 1975. I knew a few of those Lincoln Brigade members in their later years, including Commander Milt Wolff, who was also a staunch member of the movement in solidarity with the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution.
In the 1950s, when this country was gripped by an anti-communist fervor, the Lincoln Brigade members and others who had opposed Franco came to be known as “premature antifascists.” Unlike the good (and timely?) antifascists who fought the Axis powers in World War II, they had recognized the dangers of fascism too early—before, that is, the United States had decided to enter the war on the side of France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Those Americans who’d jumped too early for the Allies were derided as communists (as indeed, many of them were) rather than being congratulated for seeing the danger ahead of everyone else.
The 2024 election cycle contained what some might call a resurgence of premature antifascism: those of us who warned that electing Donald Trump (and by proxy, his coterie of anti-democratic monarchists) would bring a dictator into the White House and fascism to the nation. During the first Trump administration, of course, many people could already discern his despotic trajectory. And yet, in August 2017, the New York Times ran an op-ed headlined, “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” Its authors ridiculed the (presumably premature) opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism as “tyrannophobia,” which they defined as “the belief that the overwhelmingly important political issue is the threat to our liberal freedoms and institutions.”
Well, yes, some of us did see that threat as an, if not the, overwhelmingly important political issue. There’s no joy in saying, “We told you so.” Sadly, the first six months of Trump’s second term have proved us—disastrously—right again.
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