Militant democracy is the only politics that will work now

Look on this devastation and despair--then start organizing like your life depends on it!

Emanuel Pastreich

Militant democracy is the only politics that will work now

June 27, 2025

The changes in the United States over the last week are profound. The United States was then, and is now, a military dictatorship in drag, reporting through a covert chain of command to Wall Street while posing as an open society that embraces democracy. But the decay of institutions dating back to the 9.11 incident and the destabilization of the politics, from ideology to systems of governance, from values to symbols of legitimacy and authority, has completely destabilized the system; amplitude in political discourse has increased, leading to a complete breakdown failure that is just months from low-level warfare.

At this point, we are not looking for a candidate or a political party that can win an election. We must take that which still functions in government, in universities, in non-profits and citizens organizations, and yes, even in corrupt political parties and fashion it into a united front against fascism. We do not need a political party, or a charismatic politician, but rather a highly disciplined and strategic mass movement that offers not only an alternative to the Republicans and Democrats, the Greens and Libertarians, but also an alternative to a bankrupt civil society, an alternative to a government captured by billionaires, and an alternative to an economy run for the profit of a handful of the super-rich.

This means real organization, real action and a willingness to risk one’s wealth and one’s life. It means we need leaders who are willing to share with those who fight by their sides, not those who can collect donations from the wealthy at fundraisers.

We must be as well organized as any army, and as willing to take risks, if we wish to defeat the highly organized teams in the military and intelligence, in Homeland Security and ICE with whom we will fight. That means that we must take seriously counterintelligence operations to ward against infiltration of movements.

Two historical events took place this week that has changed everything utterly.

The first event was the criminal bombing of Iran by the United States, an effort intended to establish military rule at home and world war abroad as a means of enriching the few.

The other event was the victory of Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), in the Democratic Party primary for mayor of New York City, beating out the billionaire-funded insider Andrew Cuomo who did everything right with the corporate media and billionaire class and who embraced all the fictions of the Democratic Party.

The bombing of Iran marked the terminal stage of decay of American institutions, leaving the United States without any moral legitimacy or institutional consistency. Thus, the real possibility of massive institutional collapse like the fall of the Soviet Union, or of the Roman Empire after Caligula and Nero. The act created dynamic flux across the entire world that is pushing war on multiple fronts.

The US military, whose top generals were dismissed over the last three months in an unconstitutional military coup by Trump and his boys, attacked Iran without warning, without any justification in terms of international law or diplomacy, without consultation with international bodies, or even with allies, without any input from experts, without consultation with the Congress in accord with the Constitution, and over the opposition of the vast majority of the military itself.

Although, so far, a third world war has not ensued, and some kabuki theatre tricks were used to claw back normalcy, we are looking as something akin to the phoney war (1939- 1940) after the German invasion of Poland when the start of hostilities, oddly, did not to jell into total war for eight months. But war did come, did it ever!

At this point it would be easy, in light of the push in NATO to massively increase defense spending, for a total war at multiple levels to break out. Moreover, when it comes to information warfare and psychological warfare, the use of biological and nano weapons, total war is already underway everywhere under the radar.

So, when we consider how to create a movement that will win, that will take institutional and political control, we need to first accept that the Democratic Party will never be a credible opposition force. Just look at the response of the Democratic Party to Trump’s attack on Iran.

When the Texas Democrat Al Green introduced a resolution to impeach Trump, fully supported by the law and the Constitution, and based largely on Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional attack on Iran, the majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives, serving faithfully their corporate masters, stepped in to block even that weak resolution.

Green’s resolution stated clearly that “President Trump’s unilateral, unprovoked use of force without congressional authorization or notice constitutes an abuse of power when there was no imminent threat to the United States, which facilitates the devolution of American democracy into authoritarianism. Opposition to this statement is not based on values or interpretations, but rather a complete contempt for law and accountability.”

The majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives joined the unanimous Republicans to block the resolution; every Democrat in a position of authority, from Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and former Majority Whip James Clyburn voted to stop consideration of the resolution.

Democrats were not concerned with the illegality and immorality of Trump’s attack on Iran but rather only with the possibility that it would fail militarily and that he launched the attack without congressional authorization.

Trump should be impeached according to the law, for his crimes. It is not a matter of politics or political parties. But the truth is that the Democratic Party itself is up to its elbows in blood from the Covid reign of terror and its support for foreign wars, and for massive repression at home and abroad. Most of the members of the Democratic Party are active collaborators in state crimes and should be impeached themselves. The cancer has spread to the marrow of our very civilization and requires radical surgery.

The other critical development was the victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City of Zohran Mamdani, a man who called out Gaza a genocide at a time when people were being arrested by ICE and placed in concentration camps for such statements, who embraced explicitly socialist policies and who focused on class issues to a degree that has not been seen in mainstream politics in the last 60 years.

Mamdani’s win demonstrated that the anger shown in the No Kings protest is starting to take political shape and can be channeled as a revolution that cannot be contained by sheep dogs and agents like Bernie Sanders.

Mamdani demonstrated that young people were willing to work day and night to support him as part of a larger political movement and that they were not intimidated by the fascist takeover of the court system, or the creation of a secret police in the form of ICE.

Yet, although there is real support for revolution in America, and a movement in opposition to plutocracy is just waiting to be born, it is extremely doubtful that Mamdani’s victory will transform the Democratic Party. Already

former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers denounced Mamdani for not disavowing “working to globalize the intifada” and promoting “Trotskyite economic policies.”

The Republicans were delighted to have a chance to show off their fascistic credentials, denouncing Mamdani as a communist who must be thrown out of the country. Tennessee Republican Congressman Andy Ogles wrote,

“Zohran ‘little muhammad’ Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York. He needs to be DEPORTED. Which is why I am calling for him to be subject to denaturalization proceedings.”

It does not take much imagination to see what will happen next in America. The big question is where will the real opposition come from?

As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it, we are in an “age of monsters” because “The old order is dying, but the new order still is struggling to be born.”

That is the challenge for our movement.

Even at this late date, as we careen forward towards catastrophe, most leading public intellectuals and politicians assume that somehow lawsuits in the courts, or massive public demonstrations, or the midterm elections, will turn things around. History suggests that this is a delusional assumption. The opposition parties will be illegal in the not to distant future and citizens calling out state crimes will be readily disappeared by the secret police.

The only option left for us today is “militant democracy.”

“Militant democracy” grows from practical understanding that there is strategic need to undertake a radical defense of democracy and the rule of law because it is under assault by fascistic forces who are employing the assets of democracy such as freedom of speech, free elections, and transparent systems of deliberative government as tools to advance totalitarian government, weak points that can be employed to destroy democracy.

These militarized fascistic teams are not conservatives in any sense, but a deadly enemy that should be treated as such.

The locus classicus for “militant democracy” is an article by the German constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein entitled “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights” that appeared in The American Political Science Review in 1937, the height of the takeover of governments across Europe by fascist political parties. The similarity between the bleak political reality that Loewenstein described at that time, and what we see today around the world, especially as the heads of NATO countries commit to raising defense spending to 5% of GDP and many nations readily embrace a militarized and repressive political system, goes without saying.

Loewenstein studied different forms of democratic governance over decades and developed a new field of comparative constitutional law. That is to say that Loewenstein was keenly aware of the specifics of how a militarized fascist movements took over countries step by step and why they could not be defeated at home through attempts to debate laws, or to contest actions in courts because fascism depends on emotionalism, not rational thought or logic, and it treats the systems of democratic deliberation as mere soft targets to be taken over by brutal means.

Loewenstein saw remarkable uniformity in fascist movements and he recognized, accurately, that fascism was not an ideology or political philosophy at all, but a technique for the hostile takeover of a government.

Fascism, he noted, is similar in its “hatred towards communism, Marxism, and socialism, antisemitism, hostility to freemasons, pacifists, and similar international organizations; the ‘leadership principle’ and abolition of liberal democracy and its institutions; a hazy sort of corporativism; general house-cleaning under the slogans of ‘regeneration’ and ‘renovation;’ rampant nationalism.”

Little has changed 90 years later.

Karl Loewenstein fled Germany in 1933 when he and fellow defenders of constitutional governance were subject to personal threats from the Nazi Party. He ended up in the United States teaching at Yale and then at Amherst College.

Loewenstein was unambiguous in his postmortem for Germany and other states overrun by fascism. He wrote,

“Democracy and democratic tolerance have been used for their own destruction. Under cover of fundamental rights and the rule of law, the anti-democratic machine could be built up and set in motion legally. Calculating adroitly that democracy could not, without self-abnegation, deny to anybody of public opinion the full use of the free institutions of speech, press, assembly, and parliamentary participation, fascist exponents systematically discredit the democratic order and make it unworkable by paralyzing its functions until chaos reigns. They exploit the tolerant confidence of democratic ideology that in the long run truth is stronger than falsehood.”

Karl Loewenstein

He suggested that those defending democracy must form a common front and that democratic movements across the world must cooperate with each other as closely as the fascistic movements do. Most importantly, he held, based on his experience in Germany, that democratic forces cannot imitate the emotionalism used by the fascists, but that they must adopt a militant democracy that is organized and that denies democratic rights of expression and political action to those who use those rights to carry out political warfare for the purpose of domination. Allowing fascists to have complete freedom of speech was suicide in his opinion.

This is an opinion that is unacceptable in mainstream American politics, and the public discourse on political life in the United States, but I highly recommend that people start reconsidering their position in light of Loewenstein’s insights, and recent political developments—fast!

Loewenstein went far beyond what progressives or libertarians, or most political commentators in the United States are willing to accept. But we must recognize that he knew what he was talking about in a sense that we do not.

Just look at how the Trump administration, with full cooperation of the Democratic Party, is militarizing the state against its own citizens, and creating regulations in the “Beautiful Big Bill” that make it impossible for states, or courts, to contest how multinational IT corporations use AI for social and economic control.

Loewenstein goes further,

“Few seriously objected to the temporary suspension of constitutional principles for the sake of national self-defense. ‘During war,’ observes Leon Blum, ‘legality takes a vacation.’ Once more, democracy is at war, although an underground war on the inner front. Constitutional scruples can no longer restrain from restrictions on democratic fundamentals, for the sake of ultimately preserving these very fundamentals.”

Leon Blum, the socialist leader in France of the 1930s, was one of the most sophisticated politicians of that age and he was correct in recognizing that refusing to suspend law as a means of protecting the system guaranteed failure—even if that meant risking an undemocratic system for the period of the conflict.

The paradox is deep and we must be vigilant. But we must also must become militant. We need a movement made of flesh and bones, not just citizens who show up for a protest on the weekend. We need a movement that can evolve into a provisional government that will contest the authority of the criminal organizations posing as government in Washington.

Loewenstein concludes his article thus,

“Constitutions are dynamic to the extent that they allow for peaceful change by regular methods, but they have to be stiffened and hardened when confronted by movements intent upon their destruction. Where fundamental rights are institutionalized, their temporary suspension is justified. When the ordinary channels of legislation are blocked by obstruction and sabotage, the democratic state uses the emergency powers of enabling legislation which implicitly, if not explicitly, are involved in the very notion of government.”

What we need to do now

Elections are not going to save us. We need not masses of protesters on weekends, we need people organized into teams with specific tasks who work as a whole day and night to oppose fascistic government.

Electing a few good politicians here and there by begging rich people with progressive pretentions is a recipe for catastrophe. If opposition parties respond in that foolish manner, they will be most likely made illegal and their leadership imprisoned.

This movement must go far beyond the Gaza protests, embracing truth politics, demanding that state crimes like the Kennedy assassination, the 9.11 incident, the Federal Reserve counterfeiting operation, numerous false flag attacks on citizens, and the Covid 19 reign of terror be made public (everything declassified) and that the rich who ordered these attacks have their assets confiscated. Sweeping reforms of the military, intelligence, police, and government that end the criminal privatization of government and restores accountability must be demanded without fear or compromise.