"Let’s remember who these elites are" -Henry Giroux

They’re the ones who cheered the Iraq War, orchestrated the 2008 financial collapse, greenlit the surveillance state, and now enable the purge of pro-Palestinian voices from academia. Figures like Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Bill Ackman, and Mark Zuckerberg; these are not champions of democracy. They are profiteers of a scorched-earth capitalism that thrives on exploitation, inequality, and repression. Why would we expect those who have benefited most from the architecture of cruelty to dismantle it?

This is the liberal fantasy: that salvation lies in polite conversation, bipartisan compromise, and technocratic tinkering. That the institutions which enabled Trump’s rise will somehow, magically and reform themselves. That the system is sick, and the cure will come from those who benefit from it the most. This logic betrays the great lie of liberalism which is the belief that capitalism and democracy are synonymous and no other notion of democracy such as a socialist democracy is possible.

But the truth is more unsettling. As I have long argued, following Brecht and the Frankfurt School, fascism is not an aberration of capitalism, it is its endpoint. It is capitalism stripped of its democratic mask, armed with a gun, wrapped in a flag, preaching moral purity while embracing war, staggering levels of economic and racial inequality, and colossal misery as normalized and taken for granted elements of society. Neoliberal fascism is colonialism turned inward, settler violence deployed against citizens, white supremacy weaponized to divide and conquer. It thrives on inequality, fear, and the spectacle of punishment.

Trump’s Fascism No Longer Creeping

No, it will not be elites who save us. It will be the workers fighting for livable wages. The students protesting on campus lawns. The teachers defending critical pedagogy. The activists blocking pipelines, marching for Palestinian freedom, or organizing against mass incarceration. It will be the artists, the feminists, the dreamers, the radical educators, and the dispossessed. These are the architects of a new future.

To place our faith in the powerful is to ignore the radical democratic energy that pulses through every act of defiance by those on the margins. Levitsky’s position is not simply wrong—it is cowardice dressed in academic robes. When public intellectuals turn to the ruling class for hope, they abandon the people they claim to represent. They trade in analysis for appeasement. They weakly name the danger but dare not name its source.

What hope remains when those entrusted with understanding fascism refuse to confront capitalism? When those with the platform to amplify resistance instead turn their backs on it?

The answer lies in the streets, not in the boardrooms. It lies in the collective power of everyday people who, despite the risks, rise up to challenge a regime that treats human life as disposable. These are not the footnotes of history; they are its authors.

If there is to be a future beyond Trumpism, beyond this long night of cruelty, repression, and manufactured despair, it will not be handed down by elites or salvaged by institutions that have long betrayed us.

If there is to be a future beyond Trumpism, beyond this long night of cruelty, repression, and manufactured despair, it will not be handed down by elites or salvaged by institutions that have long betrayed us. It will rise from below, from the courage of workers, students, artists, educators, the dispossessed and the defiant--those who dream beyond the suffocating confines of capitalism’s death-driven logic and fight for a world rooted in justice, dignity, and care.

Real change is not born in boardrooms or Senate chambers. It is forged in struggle, across picket lines, campus protests, prison yards, mutual aid networks, and acts of everyday resistance that defy the machinery of disposability. It begins with the courage to see with unflinching clarity, to name the forces of domination, and to speak the truth and hold power accountable, even when it is dangerous. It begins withstanding unapologetically with those who resist and refuse to look away.

Now is the time to make power visible, to listen deeply to the suffering of others, to trace that suffering to its systemic roots, and to think historically and radically. We must cultivate a collective consciousness, a culture of resistance, where people no longer see themselves as isolated, but as agents of history, bound together by the urgency of liberation.

This is not a call for reform. It is a call to rupture the death grip of gangster capitalism—a system that thrives on inequality, cruelty, and fear. It is a call to reclaim democracy not as a hollow slogan, but as a shared, radical practice of freedom. 

Imagining a future beyond the shadows of the present begins the moment we refuse to look away, and choose, instead, to resist together. The time has come to shut this system down through bold, nonviolent direct action—fueled by clarity, sustained by courage, and guided by the fierce hope that another world is not only possible, but already being born in the struggles of those who refuse to give in.

-Henry Giroux