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astra taylor
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on Building a Movement to Fight 'End Times Fascism'
"We are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world—on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species."
Apr 16, 2025
In a "must-read" piece published Sunday by The Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor laid out in over 5,000 words the "powerful possibilities for resistance" against the global rise of what they term "end times fascism."
Klein and Taylor began with "the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters ('seasteading') or pro-business 'freedom cities' such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island."
"The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 'freedom cities' on federal lands," they noted. After winning the U.S. presidential contest last November, Trump returned to the Oval Office in January.
As Klein and Taylor detailed:
One might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving "America first" platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the MAGA mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as "technofeudalists" who "don't give a flying fuck about the human being"—let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump's awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.
The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity, and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: In a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers.
One of Trump's primary campaign promises was "mass deportations," which he has begun delivering on by having plainclothes immigration agents yank foreign students critical of U.S. policy off the streets and sending hundreds of immigrants—many of them seemingly innocent of any crimes—to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The president has pursued this agenda despite expert warnings about the human and economic impacts, and it's not just his anti-migrant effort expected to cause harm on both fronts.
This is an era of climate breakdown, rising risk of nuclear war, skyrocketing inequality, and unregulated artificial intelligence, and "Trump 2.0's economic project is a Frankenstein's monster of the industries driving all of these threats—fossil fuels, weapons, and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI," Klein and Taylor stressed. "Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world—these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium."
While reclaiming the most powerful post in the world, Trump has surrounded himself with billionaires, putting tech leaders willing to give big donations in prominent seats at his inauguration and installing ultrarich individuals—including Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on Earth and the leader of companies including SpaceX—in key positions within his second administration.
"For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence," Klein and Taylor wrote. "Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk's drive for humanity to become 'multiplanetary' is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home."
This is the most powerful thing The Guardian has published in years. “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”
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— Vivian Blaxell ( @vivianblaxell.bsky.social) April 13, 2025 at 9:44 AM
That rejection of protecting Earth and its myriad species is key. As Klein and Taylor argued, "The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism."
"To bet against the future on this scale—to bank on your bunker—is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home," the pair wrote. "This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line."
"Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions," they continued. "Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet."
Klein and Taylor also offered a solution for how to "break this apocalyptic fever." According to them:
First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: We are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world—on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.
"To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of 'ordered love,'" the pair asserted, "we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures, and to the possibility of a livable future for us all."
The essay has been met with high praise from academics, activists, advocacy groups, journalists, and more, many of whom described it as "essential reading" and "terrifying but ultimately hopeful."
Climate campaigner and writer Bill McKibbencalled it "the darkest—and in some ways most light-filled—take on our dire moment."
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor offer hope through understanding, allowing us to counter their narratives with a far better story. @naomiaklein.bsky.social @astra.bsky.social
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— The Sanders Institute (@sandersinstitute.bsky.social) April 15, 2025 at 3:25 PM
J. Mijin Cha, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said: "This piece by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor is so sharp in its diagnosis of what we are facing and the way we fight back. We don't fight fascism with fascism-lite."
"What I mean by fascism-lite is the way the Dems have seen migrants, trans people, people of color, and other marginalized people as disposable in this call for 'moderation,'" she added. "You don't get ahead by leaving people behind. We need to have a positive vision. Not just—we aren't as bad as the other side."
Professor Deborah Lupton, leader of the Vitalities Lab at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, wrote on social media, "Read, weep, and then take action."
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I Don't Think Jonathan Chait Read the Book on 'Solidarity' He Reviewed
The New York Magazine pundit spent 2,900 words criticizing a book with no resemblance to the one which prompted his piece.
May 19, 2024
Earlier this year, progressive philanthropist Leah Hunt-Hendrix and organizer Astra Taylor published Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. I’ve admired both Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor for years now (full disclosure: I’m a fellow at Revolving Door Project, and Hunt-Hendrix’s organization Way to Win has been among its many funders), but hadn’t gotten around to reading their book. That is, until last Friday, when New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait suddenly wrote an impassioned critique of it. Chait’s piece, titled “In Defense of Punching Left,” fervently pushes back against censorious groupthink dressed up as political strategy, a dangerous conflation which he attributes to Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor.
“Solidarity provides the lengthiest and most serious case I’ve seen for why liberals should withhold criticism of the left,” Chait claims. He argues that “while they urge liberals not to criticize the left, they do not make any similar demand that leftists withhold criticism of liberalism. The requirements of factional quietude run one way.” Chait claims that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor “misunderstand my job description” with their critiques of his brand of punditry, before solemnly declaring that “Liberals have serious differences with leftists over both strategy and first principles, and those distinctions shouldn’t be subsumed into a popular front.”
Chait’s piece confused me. This didn’t sound like either Hunt-Hendrix or Taylor, both of whom I know to have worked in coalition with center-left liberals on multiple issues. Out of curiosity, and with a rare block of free time, I bought a copy of Solidarity and read it over the weekend. Then I reread Chait’s 2,900-word piece and compared.
To put it simply, Chait is arguing against a book that doesn’t exist. He either didn’t read Solidarity or is too self-centered to take in any information which he cannot relate back to himself (or perhaps both). In any case, it’s a disservice to his readers, New York Magazine, and the quality of our public discourse.
To put it simply, Chait is arguing against a book that doesn’t exist.
According to Chait, “‘Don’t punch left’ is the core tenet of Solidarity,” a maxim which he calls “a growing, if not yet universal, norm of movement discipline. [...] when disagreement arises within the progressive family, the liberal’s role is to accept critique from the left without returning it.” There’s really no other way of saying this: “Don’t punch left” is not “the core tenet” of Solidarity. It’s just not what the book is about. At all. Instead, the book is an attempt to coherently define the titular concept and theorize what a society built around it would look like. Structurally, it’s one-part intellectual and movement history, one-part sociology, and one-part philosophy.
Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor trace the origins of “solidarity” to the Latin “obligatum in solidum,” a form of communal debt in the Roman empire. (Taylor, notably, is a co-founder and lead organizer of the Debt Collective, the United States’ largest and most militant debtors’ union.) They discuss the French solidarist movement of the 1850s, which helped formulate our modern understanding of the word, before analyzing contemporary sociopolitical movements. The book then critiques elite philanthropy, while arguing how to make the best of a bad system; envisions a reformulated welfare state built firstly around listening to the public’s demands; applies similar principles to global trade policy, emphasizing a lens of decolonization; and finally touches on the spiritual and soul-feeding aspects of building a solidaristic community.
Virtually none of it is about how liberals need to pipe down and praise leftists more. I don’t think intra-elite discursive norms come up at all, except in passing. As far as I can tell, Chait only got the idea that the book’s “core tenet” is liberal-policing from one-half of one paragraph of a Washington Post feature about the book, in which Hunt-Hendrix mentions Chait and his contemporary Matt Yglesias as examples of public figures whom she hopes read the book’s fourth chapter on conservatives’ “divide-and-conquer strategy.” That chapter mostly discusses organized right-wing efforts like the Southern Strategy, not the topic preferences of contemporary pundits.
This may come as a shock to Chait, but I don’t think that Hunt-Hendrix or Taylor think about him—or figures like him—very much at all. Their book’s actual argument is that individuals, and even groups of individuals cohered around a common identity, are not the protagonists of history. To Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor, it’s only when dedicated groups of people stand up, sacrifice, and risk blood and teeth for other dedicated groups of people, who then return the favor, that society advances and complex problems can be solved. The point is mutual interdependence, in all its messiness and beauty. By contrast, Chait’s singular focus on the nobility of liberals standing up to leftists not only has nothing to do with the book’s argument, it’s self-centered in a way directly opposed to the real thesis of Solidarity. Chait doesn’t seem to realize this.
This may come as a shock to Chait, but I don’t think that Hunt-Hendrix or Taylor think about him—or figures like him—very much at all.
So what does Chait have to say about Solidarity? Well, he hinges plenty of analysis on one quote, in which Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor write “Too often, liberals seek to legitimize their positions by punching left, distancing themselves from social movements to make themselves appear reasonable by comparison, which only strengthens the hands of conservatives and pulls the political center to the right.” This quote is from page XXXIII of the introduction. Yes, this quote is before the title page of the book! It’s also the only entry in the book’s index for “liberals/the Left, danger of popular passions of.”
He likewise claims that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor “have no apparent sense of what liberals believe” because they contrasted, in their words, Democrats’ “growing progressive flank pushing to redistribute wealth, tackle climate change, and further racial and gender justice” with “a corporate wing clinging to the increasingly unequal status quo.” This quote is on page XVII of the introduction. Notably, Chait says it’s wrong to imply liberals hate change and love corporations…but Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor never said they were talking about liberals. The fact that Chait self-selects into the “corporate wing clinging to the increasingly unequal status quo” says much more about his view of where he is within the party than the authors.
His final characterizing quote from Solidarity is “If conservatives wield a scythe, demonizing different groups with sinister and destabilizing abandon, their liberal counterparts prefer to use garden shears, perpetually trimming solidarity back to manageable, and certainly not transformative, proportions.” That’s from page 94, which is the second page of chapter four, the chapter which Hunt-Hendrix specifically said Chait should read in her WaPo interview. To reiterate: it’s a chapter about racist violence, regressive laws, and industrial deregulation, not about pundits criticizing non-profit organizations.
The only other part of Solidarity which Chait addresses directly is one quote about education reform. By “one quote,” I do not mean that he focuses on something Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor wrote themselves. No, instead he spends five paragraphs lambasting the authors for themselves quoting one sentence of a 504-page Rand Corporation report (Chait doesn’t name the highly pedigreed source) about an old Gates Foundation initiative called the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IPET).
In Solidarity, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor use the quote to help illustrate Gates’ failed education initiatives, which are just one example in a wider chapter about the chauvinism of philanthropy. Rand wrote that IPET—essentially a standardized testing regime—failed because “the near-exclusive focus on TE [teacher effectiveness] might be insufficient to dramatically improve student outcomes.”
Chait stretches this example within an example into five paragraphs, castigating an apparent conspiracy of teacher’s unions for scaring “some of the experts” (which ones?!) away from “breaking ranks with the left.” To his credit, he notes that his wife works “at a nonprofit firm whose clients include both traditional and charter schools." According to her online bio, she "led policy for a D.C. charter school group."
I can’t tell you how strange it is that the most sustained policy discussion in Chait’s piece is about his own policy preferences, which are completely tangential to any of the ones in Solidarity, a book which argues for the total reorganization of American domestic spending and trade policy. There is truly so much to talk about with this book — and, if one disagreed, so much to criticize! I thought the book was good, but Chait might not have. It’s a shame that his own intellectual laziness foreclosed the kind of high-minded, nuanced debate which Chait claims the left won’t allow these days.
It’s also hard not to see this, at least to some extent, as a male intelligentsia dismissing out of hand the work of two women writers. And that fits a broader theme, since what they are writing about, Chait misunderstands at a pretty basic level.
Chait advises Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor to spend less time organizing protests—“the primary form of political activity” for leftists, according to Chait—and more time persuading moderate or cross-pressured voters. “Persuasion, though, plays little role in their understanding of politics,” Chait writes. Apparently Bernie Sanders won multiple presidential primaries, and Squad members knocked off establishment Democrats, primarily via protests.
If Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor didn’t want to persuade people, then I don’t know why they wrote a 300-page book in the first place. Solidarity argues that everyone benefits from movements that uplift everyone—for example, Hunt-Hendrix writes about being a wealthy heiress-turned-class traitor, and argues that ending economic inequality would actually help the (currently) rich too. In other words, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor are saying that anyone, including current moderate and cross-pressured voters, would benefit from joining progressive movements. Chait’s advice only makes sense if he takes the labels “moderate” and “cross-pressured” as static fixtures, rather than political orientations that can be changed through (gasp!) persuasion.
He also warns that “when conservatives use well-organized factions to steamroll over the preferences of a majority, we call that ‘minority rule.’ Electoral politics, for all its shortcomings, is a more democratic method for resolving differences than bringing bodies into the streets.” Protests can also “create legitimacy problems even within the progressive movement itself,” Chait claims, because “every cause is framed as a matter of absolute moral urgency.”
There’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, the “well-organized factions” in conservatism are located in Congress, C-Suites, and national media outlets, to say nothing of terrorist militias. They can “steamroll over the preferences of a majority” because they already have institutional power, and are willing to kill people if they lose it. Progressives don’t and aren’t, which is why they turn to protest, as Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor painstakingly reiterate multiple times: “regular voters have virtually no impact over public policy in the United States, largely because they lack the economic resources required to sway elected officials accustomed to pandering to big donors,” they write, citing a classic Cambridge political science study. All of this is before one factors in the electoral college, gerrymandering, Senate disproportionality, and all the other parts of the American system that lock the preferences of numerical majorities out of power.
Moreover, Chait’s argument about intra-progressive prioritization again makes me wonder if he actually read the book. Through countless examples, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor show that across American history, movements which challenge established hierarchies either succeed together or fail together. This is, again, what the word ‘solidarity’ means. It’s when one cause double-crosses their would-be allies that the betrayed movement crumbles, followed shortly by the betrayer.
In this respect, Chait’s column is helpfully clarifying. He is straightforwardly declaring that he will willingly and gladly break ranks whenever it is convenient for his personal pet causes—that he does not believe in the virtues of solidarity. I’d warn the good people of the NYMag Union that Chait is a scab through and through, but well, they already know.
It’s clear that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor believe in solidarity because they care deeply about other people. They want all of humanity to flourish, and they don’t need any credit or kudos to act toward that goal—improving the world is its own reward. It’s hard to come away from “In Defense of Punching The Left” thinking the same is true of Chait.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the publication date of the book. That error has been corrected.
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