William C. Anderson: In Fighting Fascism, We Must Choose Our Battles Wisely

“They’re not trying to impose dictatorship from a position of strength, they’re trying to impose it from a position of weakness and fear.” —Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

“In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the dominant aspirations.” —Peter Kropotkin

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The start of 2025 has been unsurprisingly chaotic. As a surge of wildfires engulfed the Los Angeles area, stealing people’s homes and livelihoods, the news broke that the world’s lands and oceans recorded the hottest year on record in 2024. 

Even before his inauguration this week, President Donald Trump floated invading Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal, and making Canada the 51st state. While pointing his “America First” policies toward expansionism and imperialist ends, he threatened the entire “Middle East,” justifying Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. He also sought a public health justification for shuttering the southern border, much like the racist U.S. gassing policies that once inspired the Nazis. 

Since being sworn in, Trump acted on many of his statements immediately and signed a flurry of executive orders redefining birthright citizenship and gender as well as reversing climate regulations, among other terrible things. These issues alone paint just a portion of the picture of what’s coming to those of us who plan to fight back. 

The truth of these moments and many others is that if we plan to defy the order of the day, we must decide between what’s worth fighting about and what’s not the best use of our time. 

Often, the fights we choose to take up may not reflect the urgency other issues demand. Those emergencies can become so great that they choose us when we can no longer deny the need for our full participation. Now is the time to commit ourselves rather than wait to be forced into action by circumstances; this is the difference between proactively planning instead of waiting to see what happens and reacting to it. 

Resistance based on reaction may operate from the point of disadvantage if it usually requires an antagonism or a spark to mobilize a response. So we’re forced to admit that we have priorities if we understand this and then decide what to do about them. 

Some fights are over issues that concern life and death, while others may be about much more trivial things. Internalizing awareness here will provide needed wisdom and precision about what makes the best use of our time during compounding crises. The nonstop news cycle, personal conflict, and the weight of survival make it hard to figure out where to focus our energy. However, as recent years have shown, it’s of the utmost importance to figure this out so that we don’t exhaust ourselves from pointless ventures. 

The political moment we’re in, where fascism is wearing us down, demands intentionality that should disrupt nonsense. Therefore, if we find ourselves amid unserious squabbles, it’s a testament to the unseriousness of the parties who choose to remain entangled. It’s not that we cannot multitask and focus on multiple issues simultaneously or that we should use dismissiveness to avoid accountability by labeling it a “distraction.” It’s that an unending circus of self-centeredness, celebrity drama, and political theater disrupts our focus and degrades our perspective. 

Unimportant fights are disagreements like those that center famous influencers. They’re the conflicts that become inundated with pitfalls of disempowering political representation. That’s how the public ends up arguing for politicians who don’t care about them and stars who don’t share their class interests.  

This means that people must overcome the draw to participate in celebrity worship, symbolic issues, and other quarrels like the “petty ideological struggles” Black anarchist Martin Sostre once spoke about. He said we have to “look at the substance,” and that’s what’s always missing from so much of the messiness capitalist culture inundates us with. If more of us had genuine, deep relationships, too, many of the insignificant spats among us might subside. We can have our differences and even dislike one another while recognizing the gravity of this time we’re trying to survive. 

The oft-quoted psalm of revolutionary and author George Jackson to “settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here” rings hollow among much of today’s “left.” Anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and egos, among other things, make disputes a feature and not a flaw of bickering denominations. Siloed, powerless people fighting over who gets the most influence while those with actual power pummel them all is undoubtedly a goofy scene. 

This reality may overshadow another one of Jackson’s statements: “Each popular struggle must be analyzed historically to discover new ideas.” Rejecting dogma and making movements past into prescriptive guides regurgitates old tactics, offering us new defeat. Bitter unity isn’t the answer; it’s often disastrous, too, but we have to answer something. Who is fed, housed, given health care, safety, and security by what we’re fighting about? Does the fight we’re in lead to a change that can alter people’s lives for the better or advance us toward a revolutionary shift? 

What are the most important fights, then? That may depend on where you’re at and what the conditions say at a given moment. Someone fighting an actual fire knows that putting out the flames around them supersedes everything else at that time.

The beauty of the Black Panther Party’s intercommunalist proclamation “survival pending revolution” is that it recognizes that we have to sustain ourselves to have any struggle whatsoever. It’s what led them to strategically confront problems about health care, housing, food, environment, and state violence. And while the Party was certainly not free from petty drama and avoidable conflicts, the model they established still matters today. 

Nonsensical, repetitive debates on social media and posturing keep tiring us out. We need as much energy as possible to challenge the dominant status quo of capitalism. It’s one of the main reasons we have to be able to differentiate between disputes that happen for dispute’s sake or because people or entities around us want to create problems.

Our efforts should abandon self-aggrandizing optics, clout chasing, and content creation that doesn’t constitute a counterforce against oppression. The way we wage confrontation should be a threat to whomever or whatever is putting our lives at risk. Threats have to become kept promises too. 

When Black Power–era theorist and former member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers Kimathi Mohammed reflected on the successes and failures of that time, he arrived at a conclusion that’s important now. Mohammed stated that we needed to “reorganize our thinking.” That reorganization “of our political thinking,” he said, “is necessary because it has become too narrow, limited, and elitist. Unless we immediately begin to expand our vision, we will constantly find ourselves submerged in cynicism, pessimism, and despair.”

He continued, “a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness has already begun to surface. … But that particular feeling can easily be overcome. … Not only must our analyses show our accomplishments, they must also show our failures and mistakes. If such analyses are properly done, we will have the type of transmission fuel needed to transcend feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness.” One of the main mistakes generations have made in recent years is the sort of radical tourism and spreading of ourselves too thin. Focus is necessary to beat back everything that needs to be destroyed enough to gain new ground. 

Our enemies and the oppressive elements we know all too well may not be as strong as we imagine. Teen hackers have made breaching federal authorities into child’s play. We saw this tyrannical president hide in a bunker when we rose against state violence in response to the killing of George Floyd. Even now, we’ve seen that a lone gunman with something to prove has sent shockwaves throughout the ruling elite. These aren’t distant memories; these things all tell us a lot about what’s possible in today’s world. 

A call to focus and concentrate our efforts is not necessarily a plea for centralization. Instead, it’s about being led by what the world around us is showing us our primary concerns should be. Sometimes, the stakes are so high it’s not even a question or a debate; it’s an immediate action that happens without question. You’re supposed to duck when someone throws a punch, but if you’re too preoccupied, the blow will hurt that much worse. We can look around and see who’s hitting us and who wants to knock us out of the frame completely. Instead of waiting for them to swing on us again, let’s evolve and hit them first.

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WILLIAM C. ANDERSON is a writer and activist from Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Nation on No Map (AK Press, 2021) and co-author of As Black as Resistance (AK Press, 2018).

This story was originally published in Prism, an independent nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color and is included in Vox Populi with permission.