A radical rethinking of resistance in the age of Trump’s return: why the absence of mass mobilization may be the most telling political act of all.

Why didn’t the streets fill the way they did in 2017, when Trump first took office and resistance surged? Journalist and theorist A. M. Gittlitz delivers a provocative answer: today’s political stillness isn’t surrender—it’s evolution.

While most books rush to celebrate or critique the resistance, Beyond Antifascism dares to ask what its absence reveals. Drawing on radical communist theory and on-the-ground analysis of flashpoints from Charlottesville to ICE facility closures, Gittlitz argues that traditional leftist frameworks—social democracy, apolitical workerism, and vanguardism—are no longer suited to our fragmented reality. Rather than mourning the decline of mass movements, he shows how this apparent dormancy may signal a strategic pause: an intuitive recognition that new forms of collective action are needed.

With clarity and urgency, Beyond Antifascism reframes our understanding of power, protest, and political change, offering not nostalgia but a compelling vision for what might come next.