HENRY GIROUX
NOVEMBER 6, 2026

With the Democratic Party’s landslide victory, a day of reckoning appears to have arrived for Trump and the far-right, white nationalist forces that have turned cruelty into a governing principle and hatred into a political language. Something has broken in the machinery of fear. The old fascist ideas, the politics of racial hatred, and the relentless assault on human dignity have encountered a moment of resistance. Too much suffering, too much misery, too much authoritarian violence. Too much blood in the streets, too many deaths, screams, and a deafening silence. Enough is enough, at least for the moment. The Trump regime has exposed some of the darkest impulses of political life, resurrecting the ghosts of a past that should have taught us where the glorification of state violence, racial cleansing, the crushing of dissent, and organized cruelty inevitably leads. Its legacy is written in the expansion of the carceral state, the staggering investment in prisons and punishment, the unleashing of masked agents of repression across the country, and the unapologetic embrace of a language of racial cleansing that strips entire populations of their humanity and destroys lives and civil liberties.

Yet the celebrations now dominating liberal and mainstream media risk turning this electoral victory into an exercise in historical amnesia. Trump’s defeat is being hailed as a crushing repudiation of the far right, as though the political conditions that made his rise possible have suddenly disappeared. Missing from this triumphalist narrative is any serious reckoning with the Democratic Party’s own complicity in creating those conditions. From Clinton to Obama, Democratic administrations embraced neoliberal policies that deepened economic inequality, strengthened corporate power, weakened working-class institutions, and helped create the social and political landscape in which authoritarianism could flourish. Nor can the party’s leadership escape responsibility for its support of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, its exporting of horrendous military weapons, and its broader allegiance to a colonizing authoritarian order, sustained through violence and dispossession. A party so deeply implicated in the machinery of neoliberal capitalism cannot be entrusted with dismantling the very structures of power it has helped legitimate and preserve.

For a fleeting moment, democracy may be able to breathe again. But breathing is not liberation, and an electoral victory is no substitute for dismantling the gangster capitalist order that breeds authoritarianism, feeds on human suffering, commodifies every aspect of life, and makes fascism an enduring possibility. The forces that produced Trump did not emerge overnight, nor will they disappear with an election. They are embedded in institutions that concentrate wealth, manufacture fear, normalize inequality, and transform human misery into a source of profit and political power. Trump may be defeated at the ballot box, but Trumpism cannot be defeated without confronting the economic, political, and cultural foundations of a system that turns greed into virtue, cruelty into policy, racism into a badge of honor, and human disposability into a governing principle.

Unless those foundations are dismantled, the nightmare will return, perhaps wearing a different mask. The serpent’s egg, to invoke the haunting metaphor associated with Ingmar Bergman, is a warning that fascism does not simply disappear when its political representatives are defeated. It lies beneath the surface of seemingly democratic societies, nourished by the dark and volatile forces of a capitalist order that breeds inequality, authoritarianism, and organized cruelty. Brecht understood that fascism could not be confronted without exposing the capitalist relations of power that give rise to it. Its poisonous seeds remain embedded in the political, economic, and cultural machinery of gangster capitalism, waiting for the conditions under which it can hatch again. Fascism may suffer an electoral defeat, but the serpent survives, sustained by the very system that gave it life.

There is another historical lesson that cannot be buried beneath the celebrations of an electoral victory: the need to recover the spirit of the Nuremberg trials. Nuremberg established a principle that must never be forgotten: those who organize, authorize, and carry out state crimes cannot hide behind the authority of government or the excuse of following orders. The Trump regime has left behind a record of actions demanding criminal investigation, from the killing of people aboard boats in international waters, including attacks that legal experts have warned may constitute war crimes, to the abduction, imprisonment, and deportation of people in violation of fundamental rights and due process.

The Democratic Party has a responsibility to ensure that these abuses are investigated and that those responsible, from Pete Hegseth to Stephen Miller and others who directed or enabled such policies, are held accountable wherever the evidence establishes criminal responsibility. There can be no reconciliation purchased at the expense of justice, no national healing built on organized forgetting, and no democratic renewal that grants impunity to those who turned the machinery of the state into an instrument of terror. The lesson of Nuremberg is not that history repeats itself in identical forms, but that crimes committed under the cover of state power must be exposed, judged, and punished through the rule of law. Without accountability, the promise of  an electoral victory in the spirit of reviving democratic values and policies becomes another empty slogan, and the forces of authoritarian violence are given permission to return.

I do not want to underestimate the magnitude of what amounts to a historic political rebuke. As Ryan Bort observes, Democrats swept the House and Senate, captured governorships once considered beyond their reach, and delivered a crushing defeat to Trump and the Republican Party. As Jeffrey St. Clair rightly reminds me in an email, there is no shame in celebrating, even for a moment, “the crushing defeat of some of the most venal people on the planet.” Nor should we minimize the repudiation of Elon Musk’s obscene efforts to purchase political power, the ability of voters to overcome the assault on voting rights and “the extreme gerrymandering enabled by the Supreme Court, or the triumph of El Sayed running a pro-Palestinian campaign over AIPAC and the Islamophobes?” Taken together, these victories mark a powerful rejection of the machinery of racial hatred, billionaire domination, and authoritarian rule. Yet celebration must not become a substitute for political reckoning. The defeat of Trumpism at the ballot box, however historic, does not mean that the economic, political, and cultural forces that produced it have been dismantled.

The possibility of genuine transformation will not emerge from the exhausted leadership of a Democratic Party unwilling to break with the capitalist order it serves. It will emerge from the streets, from organized workers, from young people refusing to be written out of history, and from collective struggles that reject the politics of fear, austerity, racial hatred, and disposability. Elections may interrupt the march toward authoritarianism—a crucial pedagogical function– but they cannot abolish the conditions-the myriad economic, political, and cultural forces-that make fascism possible. The task now is to turn this moment of resistance into a sustained struggle against the structures of power that have made democracy increasingly subordinate to wealth, militarism, and corporate domination. The future cannot be entrusted to political elites in suits, who promise to rescue democracy while preserving the economic order that is destroying it. The struggle is not simply to defeat one authoritarian leader, but to dismantle a system that makes authoritarianism possible and to build a world in which justice, equality, collective freedom, and human dignity become the foundations of democratic life.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

Originally published on CounterPunch.org.

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