The Right's Rollercoaster to Hell Part III

The effects and strategies of the Right right now

The summary: Trump is focused on flexing his muscle, punishing perceived enemies, and rewarding friends, without a long-term strategy. The overall result will greatly weaken the US both politically and economically, to the point that it will lose much of its power and another coalition of states will step forward to try and rescue and reorganize global capitalism. Before that happens, these changes will greatly increase the poverty experienced by people in the US and closely allied or dependent countries. These changes will also increase the frequency or intensity of regional wars. In fact, we are already seeing these effects.

Want to know why, and see the research? Keep reading!

After the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2020, Democrats and progressives wrung their hands and called it an attempted coup. They had good political reasons for doing this: it’s an effective strategy for getting people to the polls and voting against their opponents. I have a harder time understanding why radicals were calling it a coup attempt, and why they were predicting an imminent fascist takeover already in 2016. In most cases, these radicals weren’t building up an armed movement irl, off the internet, capable of stopping a military takeover, nor were they preparing safehouses and underground railroads to help people on the Kill List escape to Canada and México, which is what anarchists do if we have reason to believe in an imminent far Right uprising (check out Ready for Revolution, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, Repression and Resistance in Franco’s Spain and a whole lot more sources if you read Spanish or Italian). Unsurprisingly, I’m not aware of anyone rectifying and modifying their theoretical framework after events proved them premature, at best, and at worst, unaware of the realities of the current century.

(Now, in 2025, a lot more people are being highly practical, at least, but there’s still a lot of unhelpfully alarmist rhetoric.)

Back in 2020, John Bolton disagreed “with the premise that Trump attempted a coup, which he said requires cunning and elaborate planning.” John Bolton, former assistant attorney general, State Department apparatchik, ambassador, PNAC conspirator, and National Security Adviser—basically a total scumbag—would know. In his own words, “As somebody who has helped plan coup d’état, not here but other places, it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [Trump] did.”

“That’s not the way Donald Trump does things. It’s rambling from one[…] idea to another, one plan that falls through, and another comes up.”

Evidence suggests he’s correct. Cops that day didn’t open fire on all the rightwingers storming the Capitol not because police leadership was in on the plan, but because the cops usually do their best to avoid shooting rich white people. The moment a few protesters actually breached a room with high-ranking congresspeople, the one leading the charge got shot through the heart and the rest melted away.

Trump had no support amongst command levels in the military, which is a sine qua non for a coup. And, something few people have remarked on, he was effectively detained by his Secret Service detail, who put him in an armored car and drove him against his will and against his requests away from Capitol Hill, not towards it.

In October 2022, when he lost his own reelection, Jair Bolsonaro, the far Right former president of Brazil, tried to convince the commanders of the Army, Air Force, and Navy to declare a “state of siege” to allow him to annul the election of the progressive Lula da Silva, as thousands of his supporters stormed the capital. Bolsonaro and his closest conspirators circulated detailed plans to different branches of the state and he got the support of high-ranking members of his government, including the head of the Navy. In other words, Bolsonaro had an actual plan, he understood the preparation required for a coup, and he tried to build the necessary support. However, since most of the military and police leadership opposed him and remained loyal to the constitutional transition of power, his attempt failed. The military police and Army quelled the uprising, and Bolsonaro and his closest conspirators are now on trial, facing decades in prison. At this point, the only feasible path for the rightwing to take over would be to win the next election against the progressive PT party, and try harder to ply the military leadership away from the constitutional process. That’s a process that would require years, unless a total economic collapse or a revolutionary insurrection makes those in power feel imminently threatened.

Under a democracy and with a leftwing government currently in power in Brazil, the Right and capitalists of any stripe are getting away with murdering land defenders and labor organizers, stealing Indigenous land, stripping the Amazon and other ecosystems bare, and condemning most of the population to exploitation and precarity, if not outright poverty. They’re doing just fine.

The Right in Brazil had motivations for a coup, but these motivations weren’t strong enough to get more key players involved.

• the Left was instituting some measures of social protection to aid the poor and middle classes, but they weren’t ending the system that produces poverty and class, and they were focused on creating economic growth for the whole capitalist class

• they were slowing the despoliation of the Amazon and other Indigenous lands, but it was still relatively easy for plantation owners and miners to steal land and expand their operations.

The rightwing psychology of entitlement was the major motivator: all those regulations and protective measures are an insult to Brazil’s colonial legacy. Why should those who follow in the footsteps of founders of the country have to bend over backwards for fucking poor people and Indigenous people? There was no strategic need for a coup, but the sense of entitlement was enough of a motivation to get hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and win the support of some politicians, high level bureaucrats, and military officers. Just not enough for a successful coup.

In Turkiye, the Right under Erdogan has been more successful. One might even say—and I think the next few years could easily prove them correct—that Erdogan’s party has achieved an administrative coup, changing the rules so that they will be able to remain in power through future elections. Their motivation? A perceived existential threat to the Turkish nation-state, given the Left’s greater tolerance of the Kurdish liberation movement. I’m sure others with much more knowledge of Turkish politics can add other reasons, but it certainly seems that, in the last decade, Turkiye has been playing an aggressive and dangerous game to increase its regional power, coming into potential conflict with the EU, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, and the United States. Such a high stakes policy does require some continuity in leadership to avoid costly reversals.

What were the motivators behind the successful fascist takeovers of the 20^th century?

In the 1920s and ‘30s, fascists gained power through elections or military takeovers in Italy, Germany, and Spain. The motivations that caused most of the military and capitalist class to support that turn to dictatorship were numerous and convincing.

First of all, none of those three countries had been full democracies half as long as Brazil had been in 2022.¹

All three faced a much greater existential threat in the imminent possibility of revolution, by anarchists in Italy and Spain, and in Germany by a mix of socialists, communists, and anarchists or by Communists (depending on if we’re looking at the early 1920s or later). And at that point in history, democracy was not yet firmly established as a criterion for full participation in the world system. There was less of a perceived penalty attached to abandoning democracy.

German and Italian fascism were also motivated by huge strategic barriers to state power. Having colonies was the mark of a major European power in those days, and Italy was having great difficulty maintaining its African colonies, and had none to speak of elsewhere in the world. They needed to gear up militarism and patriotism and remove the disturbances caused by industrial workers’ rebellions. Germany, which only became a nation-state in the late 19^th century, had also arrived late to the “Great Game” of global colonization. They rapaciously occupied some parts of southern Africa, and barely anywhere else. What’s more, neither country had secure access to petroleum, which was clearly going to be the main fuel of the 20^th century. But Germany was hemmed in by France to the west, Britain on the seas, and the Russian Empire—at that point under Communist guidance—to the east. Basically, Germany and Italy had to amp up domestic repression to survive, and they had to go aggressive and start a war to create economic opportunities and avoid being choked off by their European rivals. Fascism offered a methodology for all of these strategic needs.

The United States and senior NATO partners today are not in a similar situation. The conditions they are facing are opposite. They’re already on top, they have all the opportunities in the world for political and economic power, and they’re pissing them away.

The far Right has been extremely effective at mobilizing, and their recruiting efforts are so dynamic that rightwing propaganda as well as congressional and bureaucratic tactics have raised the first serious challenge to the liberal paradigm in nearly a hundred years: without a doubt, the Right is subverting democracy, even as they participate in it and take advantage of the many tools democracy offers to oppressors and exploiters. (Simultaneously, the economic and political dynamism of the Chinese government, which comes from the Left, raises another serious challenge to democracy).

Rightwing mobilization has occurred almost exclusively through appeals to entitlement and its corollary of scapegoating (see Part II for an explanation of how these are related). Cis people shouldn’t have to acknowledge or allow the existence of trans people anymore. Cops shouldn’t have to apologize for murdering Black people anymore. Men are entitled to objectify and abuse women and they shouldn’t have to feel bad about it. The US is the most powerful, the greatest country in the world, other countries should show deference, they should bow down, they shouldn’t make any demands or expect fairness. The UK and its Australian and Canadian subsidiaries used to be the greatest, so they should have more latitude in exploiting and killing in their former African colonies, their current internal colonies… And if anyone is not as rich and powerful as they clearly deserve to be, obviously it’s immigrants who are to blame.

There’s no evidence of substantive support from military leadership for the suspension of democracy in these countries.

How about capitalist support for the far Right? We can analyze this in three different categories.

1. Monstrous billionaires. As humans become wealthier, they begin acting less and less like people, and develop more and more of a capacity to act monstrously, whether by valuing profit more than life and justifying mass suffering in the course of business as usual, or by becoming obsessed with strange ideologies that justify their grandiosity and superiority. Such ideologies tend to come from the Right. Also, the mega-rich have the ability to become independent of corporations, which have a stabilizing bureaucracy and, if they’re publicly traded, a minimal form of internal democracy which also maintains the dominance of institutional strategy—or at least institutional self-preservation—over the crusades of extremely powerful individuals who might well be madmen. (Consider the example of Elon Musk, who significantly devalued Twitter and almost wrecked Tesla in the pursuit of his own quixotic agenda.)

2. Quick return industries. Some capitalist industries, particularly most sectors of finance and fossil fuels, are most interested in quick returns, i.e. making money fast. This is where the most money is to be made on the stock market and the derivatives market. As for fossil fuels companies, just like they knew way back in the 1960s that global warming was real and hid this fact, they know now that within a few years and at the outside a couple decades, most of their oil, coal, and gas fields will be too expensive to extract profitably, giving the falling price of green energy production. So, their entire existence is predicated on extracting and selling as much as possible today and tomorrow, without thinking beyond that.

--Even though strong regulations can help prevent market crashes in the long run, short term traders know that such regulations slightly decrease the amount of profit they can make in a day. And fossil fuel execs know that stronger environmental and labor regulations might bring an end to their profitability one or two years sooner than weak regulations.

3. The rest of the capitalists. A capitalist has no ethic other than murdering life and turning it into profit. They face this ethical quandary every day of their existence. The moment they choose to be a person, the moment they choose life, they begin to quickly lose their capital. Unless they reaffirm monstrosity and dedicate themselves once more to the banal evil of dominant society, they will eventually become a person and face the same sorts of choices the rest of us face, like, what job do I need to work to be able to afford my rent? Should I talk back to this boss and risk getting fired, or just etch some insulting graffiti in the bathroom?

--In other words, when the far Right takes power, capitalists will adapt so as to maintain access to the State, since capitalism can never exist without the power of the State. We saw this when Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, who fancied themselves progressives, knelt and kissed the ring once Trump won the elections (and Bezos made sure the Washington Post, which he owns, did not endorse the Democrats once it became clear Trump had a good chance of winning the election).

Is capitalist support for the far Right strategic? For the first and third categories, it is not.² For the second, it is, but only on the very short timeline they operate within. And we can see this from the results.

Economic Results

• It was only a few days ago that the Dow Jones, an index of the US stock market, recovered the value it had when Trump took office 6 months ago. In other words, under Trump stock market growth has been a hair over 0%, while in the previous ten years it grew an average of 11% every year.

• The NASDAQ composite, another US stock market index that is weighted more towards companies in the information technology sector, grew approximately 5% during Trump’s first six months in office. It grew approximately 10% in the six months before that, over 15% in the six months before that, just under 10% in the six months before that, over 25% the six months before that… In other words, during Trump’s time in office the stock market, particularly the strategically important tech sector, is growing less than half as fast compared with the two years before he took office. And that is despite the increased opportunity to profit thanks to market deregulation and major government support for gas and oil production.

• The S&P 500, the other of the three most important stock market indexes, has been growing substantially after major stock market crashes early in Trump’s tenure. This growth is due to deregulation, an apparent calming of the tariff wars, and the immense increase in the value of American companies connected to breakthroughs and projected breakthroughs in AI. However, market analysts are predicting that a correction is coming—a sudden popping of the bubble and a sharp decrease in values after a period of overly optimistic investing.

• Gross Domestic Product measures the market value of all the goods and services produced and sold in a country. During the first quarter of 2025, Trump’s first three months in power, the US GDP contracted (shrank) for the first time in over two years. In Q2, GDP rebounded with 3% growth, but that still puts GDP growth under Trump at about half of what it averaged in the previous administration, representing “the tamest growth in consecutive quarters since the Covid pandemic” began, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Analysts predict minimal growth in Q3 and Q4 this year, with a 50% chance of recession.

• The purchasing power of a dollar—how much you can buy with a buck—has been steadily decreasing. What you could buy with $1 in 1990, today you’d have to spend $2.46 to get it. 1990 is the same year when the federal government raised the minimum wage to $3.80. Today, the minimum wage is only $7.25. In other words, the purchasing power of the dollar has gone down by two and a half times but the minimum wage hasn’t even doubled. The drop in the purchasing power of US consumers has accelerated since Trump took office.

• The dollar has lost ground compared to other major currencies (euro, pound, franc, yen…) throughout this summer.

• Though unemployment is lower in the US than in many other countries, job growth in the US from May-July was the weakest it has been since the beginning of the pandemic.

• Low unemployment hides the real problem of underemployment, which will become worse with the expected price surge from tariffs and inflation. Most people are getting poorer, working harder for less, and with fewer opportunities to make a living wage, while those in power flaunt their wealth.

• US exports and imports have increased and decreased precipitously throughout Trump’s tenure, often in reaction to his announcement and cancellation of huge tariffs. Overall, though, there has been a major increase in tariffs, leading to the likelihood of shortages and increased prices on a wide variety of consumer goods by the end of the year.

• In the last year and a half, the debt of the US government has grown by over 10%, $4 trillion, and the US debt will quickly increase by at least another $3 trillion thanks to Trump’s tax cuts and spending plans.

• As of May, all the major credit rating agencies have downgraded their rating of US debt, meaning they no longer consider that lending money to the US government is the most secure investment.

• Foreign lenders are increasingly selling off their US treasury bonds (a form of lending money to the US government) or investing in other countries, and more international transactions are happening in other currencies, which presents a problem for the US government and the US economy.

• US investors are increasingly putting their money in stocks from other countries, effectively divesting from the US.

• Trump’s government has, in effect, also divested from the US economy by sabotaging the most strategic, competitive sectors that might enable continued US dominance: AI, quantum computing, and biomedical research.

• The CEPR in Europe, which is not as vulnerable to political pressure from the White House nor as influenced by the enthusiasm of pro-deregulation US investors, has this to say: “The declining US fiscal picture, challenges to international alliances, tariff wars, questions of Federal Reserve independence, and deregulatory financial sector policies also have raised concerns about the sustainability of the global dollar-based system.”

Let’s explore the CEPR quote above, which politely remarks that the “global dollar-based system” is at risk. What does that mean?

Currently, a huge part of the global economy is pegged to the US dollar. Major banks and governments all around the world lend money to the US government to pay for Washington’s deficit spending. International transactions around the world often use the dollar. The dollar is the standard other currencies are measured against. The dollar has been the world’s principal reserve currency since 1944, meaning governments and major companies around the world keep a reserve of money in dollars since it is the most stable currency. This “allows the United States to borrow money at a lower cost and use currency as a tool of diplomacy […] extending the reach of U.S. financial sanctions” in the words of the Council on Foreign Relations.

• 54% of foreign trade invoices use the dollar (2022 data).

• About 60% of global foreign currency reserves are in dollars, with the runner up, the euro, making only 20% of reserves.

• 64% of world debt is in dollars, since governments and corporations around the world borrow money in dollars, which creditors—lenders—feel is safer than giving loans in a currency that might be more unstable.

The debt of the US federal government is currently at $37 trillion and rising. In other words, the US government owes $37 trillion to other governmental institutions, to US citizens, to banks and corporations around the world, to citizens of other countries, and to other governments. $37 trillion is about 50% more than the product of the entire US economy in a year. It’s more than twice the GDP of China, the second largest economy in the world.

With inflation of the dollar growing (inflation means you have to pay more dollars to buy the same things), the Federal Reserve will soon have to raise interest rates. The reason: as the dollar loses value and it becomes less attractive for people and institutions to buy US treasury bonds, hold dollars as their currency reserve, and invest in the US, the US government needs to do more things to prop up the dollar, like offer high interest payments.

The conditions are coalescing for a domino effect. The US government—and hence the entire US economy—rely on borrowing massive amounts of money. Fewer and fewer people and institutions think it’s a good bet to lend that money. Rising debt --> rising interest payments on that debt --> more of the US budget that has to go to debt repayment and not to supporting the economy. The US could quickly find itself in a position the IMF has forced numerous African and Latin American countries into, debt bondage, in which the governments of poorer countries are forced to spend much or most of their budget not on infrastructure, health care, or education, but on paying back the predatory loans of big banks.

The difference, though, is the US is an entitled, neocolonial superpower. It’s hard to imagine any US administration accepting that degrading status. If, or perhaps when, debt payments spiral out of control, the US government has only two options.

1. Allow the hyperinflation of the dollar, to the extent that a loaf of bread might cost $1,000 or $10,000 dollars. Since the US debt is in dollars, making the dollar worthless would make the debt more affordable. It would also mean nobody in the US would be able to afford products from other countries. Aaaaand thanks to highly profitable (and highly ecocidal) global supply chains that were forced on the world economy by the IMF and WTO—in other words, by the US—what product today is at least partially produced in other countries?

Pretty much all of them.

Result:

• Extreme poverty and scarcity of resources in the US

• Economic collapse of any country that relies on selling goods to the US

• Major losses to all the countries that keep significant currency reserves in dollars or own large quantities of US government bonds

• Global investment rapidly shifts to countries with better economic policies

2. Default on the debt. When the population of Greece voted in favor of defaulting on their predatory loans, the referendum results were rejected by SYRIZA, the most leftwing government ever in the postwar history of Europe or North America. SYRIZA accepted punitive bailout conditions to avoid a default, but still the institutions of the European Union manufactured a crisis to punish the country for even raising the possibility of a default, plunging the country into poverty.

• If the US government chooses not to pay back internal debt, the consequences could include a loss of services like healthcare or transportation, the impoverishment of those who depend on those services, bank accounts losing their FDIC protections, and the domino effect of sharply reduced spending and productivity causing a major depression.

• If the US government chooses not to pay back external debt, for example money owed to China, Japan, the UK, or the EU, they would temporarily wreck or damage the economies of those countries, but would also lose the faith of investors worldwide and likely face retaliatory measures, meaning investment in the US would tank, the economy would shrink, and the US government would not be able to pay its obligations (funding for retirement, healthcare, transportation infrastructure, the military…) and would have to slash spending on some or all of these outlays, with the attendant consequences.

Since the global economy is pegged to the dollar, the result in either scenario would be a collapse of the global economy: the biggest depression in any of our lifetimes. When the dust settles, it might be the global proletariat, Indigenous societies, and post-colonial diasporas that seize the initiative, abolishing capitalism and the State if we can finally learn from the historical failures of the Left. It might be a coalition between China, India, Brazil, and other BRICS countries that end up on top, promoting the WTO and a principle of absolute national sovereignty³ that in practice means multiple zones of influence centered around powerful countries. It might be the European Union, promoting democracy, the ICJ, the IMF, and policies of economic austerity. But it will not be the US and the countries most dependent on it.

Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta.

Political/Military Results

I’m going to spend less time on the interconnected political and military results of the rightwing in power, but the patterns are similar.

At the end of World War II, the US designed the institutions that would govern the global economy and international political disputes: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and later on the World Trade Organization. Obviously, government planners designed these institutions to favor US strategic interests, but to ensure universal participation, they needed a rules-based order that would be more or less “fair” insofar as it would be good for capitalists from any country, and would guarantee basic rights of sovereignty and redress to all governments, big and small. It also scored a lot of points by completing the project of colonialism under a guise of decolonization: basically the UN charter says that any country or people without a state can get fucked, and essentially any armed organization that can claim to be from a territory is allowed to take over and dominate a stateless territory.

The UN, centered in New York City, was really good for the US. And yet no country has defied the United Nations more than the US, either in its own operations or to protect Israeli atrocities.⁴ Since 1970, the US has used the veto far more often than any other country. As for the IMF, the US structured it in a way so that the largest donor (the US) has an unofficial, backdoor veto power to block any major decisions.

Republican and Democratic administrations have both been responsible for undermining the global structures intended to cement the dominance of the US-authored system. They cannot shake their belief that the US is more equal than anyone else and has a right to coup whomever they want to. However, flaunting the rules or going on coup sprees happens more under rightwing governments.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq under Bush increased the US debt, eroded the trust of multiple US allies, and substantially improved the position of US rivals and enemies from China to Iran to al Qaida.

Trump’s back-and-forth, his idiocy and inconsistency, his vulnerability to flattery, his tendency to insult allies and threaten allies and enemies alike, have all forced other countries to treat the US as an unreliable ally or an outright danger, increasing cooperation between often hostile countries like China and India or China and the EU.

The combination of US hostility and neglect towards Latin America and Africa has made it much easier for Russia and China to invest, pick up allies, or even gain satellites on continents that for over two centuries were treated as “America’s backyard” and a sandlot for European genocides and mineral exploitation.

For a while, it seemed Russia’s power had crashed irreparably. Multiple countries that had been occupied or dominated by the Russian Empire or the USSR broke out of Moscow’s orbit in the ‘90s, ‘00s, and ‘10s (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Azerbaijan). Then Ukrainian resistance showed Russia’s massive military to be a paper tiger. However, Trump’s friendly position towards Russia empowered pro-Russian political parties that took power in Hungary, Slovakia, Italy… This disunity severely hampered the ability of the European Union to act with a shared strategy against Russia. MAGA reticence to support Ukraine gave Russia the opportunity to update its tactics, reorganize its military, and recover lost ground in its war against Ukraine.

US military spending is the highest in the world, over three times that of China, over twice that of China and Russia combined (the #2 and #3 spenders, respectively). And yet, the US failed at regime change in Afghanistan, the poorest country in Asia. Its 2003 regime change in Iraq has resulted in a government that is much more favorable to Iran and opposed to Israel. Decades of US military action in Somalia have done little to change the map, US military intervention in Libya has failed to create a unified government the US can count as an ally, and in 2024 the US military was effectively kicked out of Niger after 11 years of ineffective interventions.

US support for Ukraine has not led to any decisive victory against Russia, and it seems increasingly unlikely that the US would be able to stop China from taking Taiwan or expanding its maritime reach in the South China Sea and East China Sea.

The US military was only partially successful in defending Israel from the missile barrages of Iran, Hizbollah, and Yemen. And Trump’s recent attack against three of Iran’s nuclear facilities “was counterproductive from the perspective of U.S. interests,” caused limited damage that Iran will be able to recover from in a matter of months, did not remove Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons in a short time span, and increased Iran’s motivations for doing so.

Again, all of these are trends that continue from Democratic to Republican administrations, but the proactive campaigns of rightwing administrations (Iraq in 2003 and Trump re: Russia and Iran) have more dramatically hurt the US’s global position. Trump brings the added disadvantages of his inability for sustained strategic focus. He’s a headline chaser, which has proven quite effective for winning elections. It’s not an effective way for a neocolonial superpower to maintain dominance through effective military strategies over time. Trump lacks the consistency for that.

The Conclusion, For Now

The probable end of the US empire is a good thing, without any doubt, and Trump is undermining the basis of US power on every front I can think of.

However, it’s nothing to celebrate if it means those of us who live in the US, México, and many other countries will be plunged into extreme poverty, and in the meantime immigrants and trans people are targeted with unspeakable brutality.

Neither is it cause for celebration if colonial capitalism led by some other alliance of states maintains its stranglehold on our collective future. Any form of state, any form of growth-based economy—even if it’s painted red—forces us to remain on this path of mass death, suffering, and extinction. Without a serious change in what is going on, this growing catastrophe will result in the deaths of several billion humans in the coming decades, and in the total extinction of many or most other species on the planet.

We need an ecological, anticolonial revolution, we need to destroy all the institutions, modes of production, and forms of power responsible for extractivism, genocide, and ecocide. None of them have demonstrated an ability to function in healthy ways. None of them have demonstrated they deserve our trust.

Every government in the world favors economic growth, and growth is always accompanied by an increase in global warming and other forms of harm. All the most powerful states in the world have been complicit in genocide, currently or in recent years. Every powerful state in history that we are aware of has destroyed its environment.

The rightwing is especially pernicious, especially hateful, and especially volatile. However, it’s been a long time since there has been a far Right leader with an effective strategy for control, beyond how to stay in power and promote their self-interest (like Trump, Orbán, Netanyahu). We need to understand the effect of rightwing governments to better prepare for the future. They are causing an extreme amount of harm, but they do not have any plan that resolves the huge crisis that powerholders currently face.

I hope this three-part essay has been helpful. In the coming months, I plan on publishing other essays on the role of the Left in all this mess, and on strategic framings that those of us who are interested in collective liberation and survival might be able to adapt to their specific circumstances.

Will you help me spread an empowering, evidence-based anarchist analysis?

And would you consider supporting my writing and research?

1. Italy had granted the right to vote for men from the propertied classes for 60 years before Mussolini took power, but “universal” male suffrage only arrived in 1913.

2. Individually, any capitalist like Bezos can justify kissing the ring to keep their company from getting frozen out of government contracts and trade deals, but collectively they know he’s bad news.

3. “Absolute national sovereignty” here means any form of government within a country is valid and other countries should not meddle in questions of human rights or the environment.

4. The USSR/Russia is a contender for this distinction, frequently using the veto in the Security Council, though the context is important that the USSR was an underdog there.