Resist fascism by embracing municipalism

Donald Trump is now the President-elect of the United States of America.

Many people in the U.S. and around the world are alarmed by the results of the 2024 election. Donald Trump will soon be President again. The Republicans will control both the House and the Senate. The reactionary Federalist Society has taken over the Supreme Court. Project 2025 has become the new playbook for the incoming administration. Trump is already making unhinged cabinet appointment announcements that are raising alarm bells even for many Republicans.

I predicted Trump’s victory with a high degree of confidence. That doesn’t make me any less alarmed by what’s already happening and what’s likely to happen in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Trump’s return to power is just the latest development in the ongoing resurgence of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism in many places around the world. Now that one of the most powerful governments in history has been captured by a candidate and movement that many have characterized as fascist, the outlook for human civilization and the habitability of the planet we call home seems increasingly bleak.

What can the people of the world, and the U.S. in particular, do about the rise of fascism?

Resist fascism by embracing municipalism

I’m not going to spend much time in this post defining fascism, or documenting its resurgence in the twenty-first century, or convincing you that we ought to resist it. Analyzing fascism and tracking its resurgence in the U.S. and elsewhere is vital work, but I’ll leave that work to other authors for now.

What I do want to talk about is an approach to resisting fascism that has tremendous potential. It’s a political movement and practice that I’ve been studying and supporting off and on for over twenty years. It’s known by several names and has considerable overlap with other movements and practices that are antifascist, anti-authoritarian, cooperative, and self-governing in nature.

For the sake of this post, and hopefully future posts, I’ll call it municipalism. And I firmly believe that municipalism is one of our best options in the U.S. and beyond for resisting fascism and creating a more liberatory society, one community at a time.

What is municipalism?

Municipalism is a movement rooted in the practice of self-governance at the municipal level.

There’s a growing body of theory, practice, discourse, and research associated with municipalism, but the basic premise is exceedingly simple. Meet with your neighbors in your community, talk about how to meet everyone’s needs, organize systems to meet those needs, vote on public policy, and network with other communities who are doing similar work.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Practice direct democracy at the municipal level and work together with other communities who are doing the same.

Some people call it radical municipalism to emphasize its radical departure from systems where city governments are subordinate to more centralized layers of governance like the state or federal government. Others call it libertarian municipalism to emphasize its rejection of centralized authoritarian institutions – but since “libertarian” unfortunately has a strong right-wing association in the U.S., I no longer use that term with most audiences. And some people use related terms like communalism and democratic confederalism – terms which have somewhat distinct histories and nuances, but share municipalism’s emphasis on self-governance at the local level.

I just call it municipalism without any modifiers for the sake of simplicity and the broad inclusion of many municipal-centric perspectives and practices. 

Here are a few resources with free and informative introductions to municipalism.

• Building Power in Place: A Municipalist Organizing Toolkit. This is a good place to start, especially if you’re already involved in local community groups or already know that you want to emphasize organizing and action rather than reading and discussing theory. It has a solid grounding in theory but emphasizes organizing, as the name implies.
• Municipalism: A Critical Review. This is a literature review for people who want to do more reading on the theories and histories behind municipalism.
• I first learned about municipalism through the writings of Murray Bookchin and my studies at the Institute for Social Ecology. ISE continues to play a vital role in organizing and encouraging radical movement education in the U.S. and around the world. They offer both online and in-person programs.
• Fearless Cities. The Fearless Cities movement has produced books called Fearless Cities: Municipalist Politics in Action and Fearless Cities: A Guide to the Global Municipalist Movement. These books are available for free in PDF format in several languages on their site.

Whatever you call it, municipalism embodies a directly-democratic approach to social change. We the people hold all of the decision-making power in our own hands and share it as equals with our neighbors rather than giving it up to politicians, billionaires, and the authoritarian institutions they represent and perpetuate.

When we live in a municipalist community or society, we can still rely on public administrators and other experts to play vital roles in the development and maintenance of public infrastructure. We don’t need the public to vote every time city workers need to make administrative decisions about the day-to-day operations of the city. But all of the policy-level decisions are made together by everyone who is affected by those decisions.

When we embrace municipalism, we will no longer have to surrender our economic and political decision-making authority to wealthy and powerful elites. We’re not children who need adults in positions of power over us to make decisions allegedly on our behalf. We will make all public policy decisions ourselves, directly and democratically. We will govern ourselves and join together with others who have decided to do the same.

This is the work of municipalism – to empower people to govern ourselves, in our local communities and beyond.

How can municipalism resist fascism?

Municipalism empowers individuals and communities to resist fascism in a variety of ways. I find it helpful to sort the work of municipalism and social change generally into two broad categories: the constructive program and the resistance program.

This is a bit of a simplistic framework. Many municipalist projects and practices will have both constructive and resistance aspects. But this framing is helpful because it identifies two distinct but vital purposes of municipalist organizing and popular organizing in general.

What are we trying to create? And what are we trying to resist?

The constructive program builds systems that meet people’s needs in ways that support the type of community and society we’re working to create. This can involve both creating entirely new institutions from the ground up and pushing for “non-reformist reforms” to existing institutions. Non-reformist reforms are proposals that go beyond changing policy on a single issue by shifting the way that the institution in question operates. This serves as a means of challenging existing power structures and bringing us closer to meeting everyone’s needs through mutual aid and the practice of self-governance at the municipal level.

Whether we’re working within or beyond the existing economic and political systems, we’re working to empower the people of our municipality. We practice what we intend to create from the very beginning and keep on practicing it until it becomes the guiding principle behind public life in our municipality and beyond.

Ultimately, this constructive program is the first and greatest line of resistance against fascism.

That may seem counterintuitive. How does meeting in our communities and making decisions about how to meet everyone’s needs, protect everyone’s rights, and so on do anything to resist the spread of fascism?

Fascism is fueled by disempowerment and fear. When people feel threatened and frightened, they look for sources of security and comfort. This sometimes takes the form of community organizing and workplace organizing – forming unions, forming civil society groups, taking collective action for the common good. But sometimes the “leaders” and institutions that people trust the most play to their worst impulses – feeding their fear and bigotry, blaming The Other for all of their problems, promising to solve all of their problems if only they’ll give their money and support to the Fearless Leader and other wealthy and powerful people associated with him.

Fascism projects itself as all-powerful because it’s ultimately the mentality of a fearful child. People who succumb to fascism are looking for a strong parental figure to swoop in and make them feel safe, secure, special, and powerful again. This is why they fetishize billionaires, “strong man” politicians, mythical war heroes, and the like. Yes, some of them dream of being that powerful figure someday – but many are just content to earn the protection of the rich and powerful. 

The constructive program reduces and ultimately releases the hold that this fear has over the supporters of fascist leaders and parties. People who feel empowered – their voices heard, their needs met, their community supporting them as they support their community – have no need for fascistic leaders and movements who promise to make their lives great again.

Fascism can’t take hold in empowered, cooperative, collaborative communities. Municipalism leaves no space for fascism. Therefore, as fascism spreads from city to city, and country to country, the constructive program of municipalism is one of the greatest methods of resisting fascism before it can fully take hold in a place.

If we lived in a society where fascism had not yet taken hold, this constructive program might be enough to prevent its spread entirely. We could create lovely little self-governing municipalities, organize them into broader confederations spanning entire regions or continents, and use dual power strategies to contest and replace the existing power structures. We would have a successful popular revolution that benefited everyone and only found opposition from the oppressive institutions that we were dismantling and replacing.

Unfortunately, the United States has been home to a remarkable amount of violence and oppression throughout its existence.

The indigenous peoples of this continent have been resisting the horrors of colonialism on this continent for hundreds of years. That work continues to this day. Patriarchy, racism, cisheteronormativity, and many other ills still run rampant here, stubbornly reasserting themselves once again despite the best efforts of movements for social justice. American-style neoliberal capitalism reduces all meaning and value in our lives and this land to numbers on a spreadsheet balanced in the service of the owners of capital.

Despite many worthwhile efforts to constrain this systemic violence, and reform the inherent authoritarianism out of it, we still live in a country that is replete with systemic violences and injustices. There are popular movements working nonstop in pursuit of a better life for the people and the land we call home – but also institutional and cultural forces working to advance systemic violence, and to convince millions of people to join in that work.

Because of this “pre-existing condition” of incorrigible systemic violence and oppression plaguing this country, the constructive program is necessary, but not sufficient. If we want to resist fascism, it won’t be enough to have peaceful meetings in our communities where we organize mutual aid efforts and public policy initiatives. We must also directly resist the violent machinations of the existing systems of power and their agents. We must protect our communities and the people in them from the violence of the system while we work to establish a social reality where systemic violence and oppression are no longer the norm.

This direct resistance program will take many forms. I’m not going to get into the details of strategy and tactics of radical and revolutionary resistance to fascism for several reasons. That has never been my main focus; the details will vary wildly from context to context; and now is not the best time for someone living in the United States to post detailed thoughts about civil disobedience, direct action, and related resistance activities in a blog post. These are topics to discuss in your local community with people you know and trust.

Having said that, I do want to explain why a municipalist approach is vitally important to resisting fascism.

Municipalism gets us out in our community – attending meetings, talking with our neighbors about politics, making connections with like-minded people, finding common ground with people we don’t see as like-minded, building decentralized mutual aid and infrastructure, and so on. This constructive practice lays the groundwork for the resistance practice. Working together to meet people’s needs and protect people’s rights in your local community is a wonderful way to build the social networks and support infrastructure that will help you to resist the escalating governmental and non-governmental violence that overt fascism will bring to your community.

How does municipalism relate to other forms of resistance and social change?

As I advocate for a municipalist approach to our response to fascism, I can already hear the objections from some leftists and liberals alike.

“We need to support centrist Democrats who can appeal to swing voters! We need to support progressive Democrats who can appeal to populist anti-establishment voters! We need to build progressive/leftist third parties to challenge and replace the Democratic Party!”

Personally, I think that these objections are mostly nonsense. Relying on Big Political Parties to solve all of our problems is a large part of what got us here in the first place. If our system continues to be dominated by large political parties, any gains we make in the direction of protecting our rights, meeting our needs, responding to the climate crisis, and so on may be swept away the next time a fascist candidate gets more votes than a “lesser evil” candidate, or the next time your favorite party decides to sacrifice your rights in the hopes of appeasing donors or winning elections. We will only have any real measure of freedom, democracy, rights, and safety when we govern ourselves as much as possible.

But you know what? If you think the most important way to fight fascism right now is to support a political party or candidate, you can go to a local municipal assembly and advocate for that. Locally, I will almost certainly advocate against it, except perhaps in the case of local or state-level candidates who support “non-reformist reforms.” And locally, the people in my community will hear out both/all sides of the issue and draw their own conclusions.

That’s how a real democracy works! We turn to our neighbors, make our case, and hope for the best. Municipalism has inherent anti-partisan tendencies because political parties generally constitute a form of centralization of political authority. But in the real world, any system – particularly a semi-democratic one – will involve a mishmash of different ideas, strategies, and tactics. One municipality may eschew all semblance of political parties and representative democracy. Another may push heavily for a favorable candidate to win local or “higher” office. And that’s okay.

One of the strengths – and challenges – of municipalism and similarly direct approaches to democracy is that anyone can advocate for any approaches that they think would work best and don’t violate anyone’s rights. This is why I say start by meeting in your local community with a municipalist mindset and see where it takes you.

How does municipalism start in a local community?

The good news is that you may already have the beginnings of a municipalist practice somewhere in your community.

If you live in a small rural town in the U.S., you may have nothing closely resembling municipalism going on in your community. Many such towns don’t have “home rule” and don’t have much political organizing going on other than filling whatever basic municipal and county offices exist in the area. Even if that’s the case, you can always start somewhere – a meeting at the library, a book club at someone’s home or place of worship. The Building Power In Place toolkit can be a starting point for both discussion and organizing in your community.

If you live in a larger town or city, there’s really no need to reinvent the wheel. Start with what exists and do what you can to improve it. I can almost guarantee you that in any city in the United States with more than a few hundred people, there are individuals and groups in your area who have been working on some form of mutual aid, advocacy for people’s rights, advocacy for environmental concerns, and so on since long before this election happened. See what they’ve been up to. Encourage dialog among different groups and factions. Support and improve what’s already happening, and talk with your friends and neighbors about how to fill the gaps. You will need to change some things and build others from scratch – and you can figure that all out together with other members of your community.

The same applies to resistance efforts. Advocacy campaigns, protests, direct actions, and other resistance tactics rarely start in a purely spontaneous manner. They start with like-minded people having conversations that turn into meetings and organizing efforts. So get together with people in your community, do what you can to meet each other’s needs, and talk about what you may need to do to resist and mend the harms caused by oppressive institutions in your community.

Can municipalism defeat fascism?

I’ve spent over three thousand words explaining what municipalism is and how it can help us to resist fascism in the United States and beyond. But will it be successful? Is it really possible that millions of people in the U.S. and beyond will meet in their local communities, organize, and play a decisive role in resisting the rise of fascism and changing the course of society for the better?

Honestly? Nobody can answer that with any degree of certainty.

We can look to past fascist and antifascist movements for insight into what may or may not happen in the coming weeks, months, and years. If we go back as far as World War II, it’s hard to make comparisons given the almost incomprehensible amount of economic, political, cultural, technological, and ecological change that has unfolded in the intervening decades. If we look at more recent localized outbursts of fascistic and authoritarian movements around the world, it’s hard to know where to look or what lessons to draw about the current rise of fascism and the efficacy of antifascist organizing in the here and now. I leave it to more qualified experts to delve into the details of which examples in the recent past or present may offer the most insight into our current situation.

But I’m not going to lie. When I look at the big picture, it doesn’t look good.

In my estimation, the odds are stacked against any popular movements seeking to resist fascism and advance any sort of favorable new social order, whether it may be decentralized like municipalism or centralized like some people on the left envision. The world’s economic and political systems are increasingly controlled by centralized economic and political institutions that serve the interests of the few rather than the public. And the climate crisis and broader polycrisis will only serve to create more of the suffering and chaos that fuels the rise of fascism.

But we have to try. We won’t know until we try – and I still see value and meaning in the effort either way. Even if we see terrible losses without many gains for the rest of our lifetimes. Even if various strains of authoritarianism dominate this small chunk of rock we call home until we’re all gone or we all fall into the Sun together in a few billion years.

Regardless of the outcome, I believe that we can find meaning and at times even joy in the struggle for liberation. Let’s meet in our communities, do what we can to make each other’s lives better, and face the future together.