Watching the Rachel Maddow show this past Thursday evening stirred a whirlwind of emotions—admiration and anger, inspiration and despair. On the one hand, Maddow remains one of the few mainstream journalists committed currently to documenting the ever-growing wave of resistance rising against Trump’s increasingly and openly authoritarian rule. On the other hand, the show laid bare the bankruptcy of liberal thought in this moment of democratic collapse. What it exposed, with alarming clarity, is the extent to which liberal elites still cling to fantasies of redemption by the very institutions that has given rise this crisis. In this case, elites who refuse to acknowledge that capitalism and democracy are not synonymous and that fascism is the logical extension of a gangster capitalism that now governs not only the U.S. but much of the globe.

Maddow has bravely exposed the sheer cruelty, lawlessness, and ideological extremism that now define Trump’s regime of terror (though she is silent about the slaughter of Palestinians). At the heart of Trump’s authoritarian project lies a politics of calculated abandonment—one that targets the most vulnerable while protecting the powerful. A particularly chilling example is Trump’s assault on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global health initiative credited with saving over 26 million lives in more than 50 countries. Its dismantling is not a matter of policy—it is a declaration of medical genocide, rooted in spite and indifference to human suffering.

This regime’s cruelty is not limited to distant shores. It strikes at the heart of everyday life in the United States. Trump is gutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), slashing billions from a program that keeps millions of poor children and families from starving. He has attacked the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), undermined Head Start, and targeted Title I school funding that supports students in underfunded, low-income districts. These are not budgetary adjustments—they are weapons of class warfare waged against the most defenseless—children and their tragically impoverished families.

And the brutality extends across generations. Older Americans are under siege, as Trump has sought to defund Meals on Wheels, Medicaid, Social Security Disability Insurance, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). These lifelines, which provide food, health care, and heat in winter, are being sacrificed to fuel obscene tax breaks for a class of billionaire oligarchs whose wealth insulates them from every form of social and moral accountability.

This is gangster capitalism at its most grotesque, a death cult of the rich, a system that cannibalizes the poor to feed the insatiable greed of the walking dead billionaires. What we are witnessing is not mismanagement or negligence. It is a state-orchestrated campaign of abandonment, cruelty, and slow violence, executed in the name of profit, maintained by white supremacists such as Stephen Miller, and enabled by a political class that has lost all connection to moral responsibility.

To her credit, Maddow did not flinch in showing the courage and dignity of those resisting this all engulfing fascist Trump regime of engineered despair, misery, and violence—protesters, students, workers, educators, artists, and the young, all fighting back against the brutality of fascist rule. These acts of defiance are not marginal; they are the heart of a radical democratic project. They remind us that power does not only reside in the corridors of state or corporate authority, it lives in the bodies, minds, and voices of people refusing to be silent.

But then the conversation veered off course. Maddow invited Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, who—despite his academic credentials—offered one of the most defeatist and elitist narratives I’ve heard in recent memory. Levitsky argued that the hope of resisting Trump’s brutal regime lies not with grassroots movements, but with “the powerful”: elite law firms, banks, and universities. In one staggering moment of condescension, he mocked local resistance efforts, singling out “little old ladies protesting at Tesla dealerships” as trivial, even laughable. This is the rot at the core of liberalism, a belief that the powerful will save us from the powerful.

To her credit, Maddow pushed back, noting that local protests are far from inconsequential, they often provide the political and moral force that compels even some elites to speak out. But the damage was done. The message was unmistakable: real resistance must come from the powerful, while those who risk arrest, violence, job loss, and prison are relegated to the margins, spectators in a struggle they have long been leading.

Levitsky’s dismissal of grassroots struggle is more than naïve. It is morally reprehensible. It betrays a failure to understand history, a failure to grasp that every great movement for justice in this country—from abolition to labor rights, civil rights to LGBTQ+ liberation—was built from below, not imposed from above. To suggest that CEOs, hedge fund managers, or elite academics will deliver us from fascism is not just laughable, it is a betrayal of the very idea of a viable and radical democracy. While a few among the wealthy may act with integrity and a sense of social duty, they are rare exceptions in a system that thrives on greed and rewards power with moral decay.

Let’s remember who these elites are. They’re the ones who cheered the Iraq War, orchestrated the 2008 financial collapse, greenlit the surveillance state, and now enable the purge of pro-Palestinian voices from academia. Figures like Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Bill Ackman, and Mark Zuckerberg; these are not champions of democracy. They are profiteers of a scorched-earth capitalism that thrives on exploitation, inequality, and repression. Why would we expect those who have benefited most from the architecture of cruelty to dismantle it?

The liberal belief in the transformative power of elites has become utterly untenable and contemptable, even drawing sharp critique from unexpected quarters. David Brooks, a vanilla conservative columnist for The New York Times, has openly acknowledged what many are reluctant to admit: the current crisis in America is unprecedented, and what is urgently needed is a “comprehensive national civic uprising.” His words carry a stark warning: “It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits, the scientific community, and civil service to unite into a single, coordinated movement.” Trump’s grip on power is only deepened by the complicity of those who remain silent or serve him from the sidelines. Brooks’ call to action goes so far as to echo Marx’s timeless declaration: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” In this era of escalating authoritarianism, even some notable conservatives recognize that compromise is complicity, that the US is about to fall deeply into the abyss of fascist politics, and that mass uprisings are the only hope for real resistance and change.

This is the liberal fantasy: that salvation lies in polite conversation, bipartisan compromise, and technocratic tinkering. That the institutions which enabled Trump’s rise will somehow, magically reform themselves. That the system is sick, and the cure will come from those who benefit from it the most. This logic betrays the great lie of liberalism which is the belief that capitalism and democracy are synonymous and no other notion of democracy such as a socialist democracy is possible.

But the truth is more unsettling. As I have long argued, following Brecht and the Frankfurt School, fascism is not an aberration of capitalism, it is its endpoint. It is capitalism stripped of its democratic mask, armed with a gun, wrapped in a flag, preaching moral purity while embracing war, staggering levels of economic and racial inequality, and colossal misery as normalized and taken for granted elements of society. Neoliberal fascism is colonialism turned inward, settler violence deployed against citizens, white supremacy weaponized to divide and conquer. It thrives on inequality, fear, and the spectacle of punishment.

No, it will not be elites who save us. It will be the workers fighting for livable wages. The students protesting on campus lawns. The teachers defending critical pedagogy. The activists blocking pipelines, marching for Palestinian freedom, or organizing against mass incarceration. A different world will rise from the hands of young people, feminists, radical educators, the working class, and the marginalized—those who transform pain into resistance and imagination into action.

To place our faith in the powerful is to ignore the radical democratic energy that pulses through every act of defiance by those on the margins. Levitsky’s position is not simply wrong—it is cowardice dressed in academic robes. When public intellectuals turn to the ruling class for hope, they abandon the people they claim to represent. They trade in analysis for appeasement. They weakly name the danger but dare not name its source.

What hope remains when those entrusted with understanding fascism refuse to confront capitalism? When those with the platform to amplify resistance instead turn their backs on it?

The answer lies in the streets, not in the boardrooms. It lies in the collective power of everyday people who, despite the risks, rise up to challenge a regime that treats human life as disposable. These are not the footnotes of history; they are its authors.

---