Democracy or Dominion: Why Socialists Must Marginalize the Authoritarian Right

by Chris Kutalik
October 17th, 2025

The Republican Party no longer behaves as a neoliberal consensus political party. It has become almost wholly a rightwing authoritarian formation,  a coalition of billionaire oligarchs, Christian nationalists, dominionists, and revanchists whose central project –beyond merely maintaining capitalism and empire–is to dismantle US democracy itself (as limited and fragmented as that is). 

From Texas to Tennessee, GOP power relies on structural rigging: voter suppression, gerrymandering, expanding executive power, minority-rule courts, gutting the Voting Rights Act designed to make democratic contests of their power impossible. The 30-35% core MAGA base would simply not be enough to give Republicans victories in most places. They have to maintain the means for minority rule and to extend that nationwide.

For socialists and all defenders of democracy, this poses a simple but existential question: How can we build a mass, democratic movement if one of the two major parties is dedicated to ensuring that our limited democracy cannot function at all?

Reconstruction as Lesson

After the Civil War, Radical Republicans faced a defeated Confederate elite determined to reimpose white rule through law and terror. Their response was extraordinary: a political revolution known as Reconstruction. Formerly enslaved people not only gained the right to vote but held political office by the hundreds. Black-majority legislatures rewrote state constitutions. Public schools were established across the South. Freedmen’s cooperatives, Union Leagues, land initiatives, and local militias defended communities and embodied the promise of genuine self-rule.

Historian Eric Foner called Reconstruction: “the most radical moment in American history — the first attempt to construct a democratic, interracial polity on the ashes of slavery.” For a fleeting decade, the South glimpsed what multiracial democracy could actually look like.

The sad irony is that Republicans — once the architects of popular democracy — have, in their modern incarnation, become its chief enemies. The party that freed the enslaved now wages war on voting rights and multiracial governance. 

That first experiment in democracy was overthrown by both political violence and the compromises of the northern establishment. The slaveholding class refused to accept a world in which Black people could vote, govern, or bear arms. They organized paramilitary groups—the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, and the White Leagues—to wage a campaign of terror and assassination. Freedmen’s leaders were murdered. Election officials were lynched. Ballot boxes were seized at gunpoint. Over 2,000 Black people died in lynchings alone. 

From 1868 to 1876, the South witnessed an armed counterrevolution whose goal was to make democracy  impossible. And it succeeded — not because democracy was too radical, but because the federal government withdrew its protection and turned a blind eye. Reconstruction didn’t fail; it was destroyed by reactionary violence, aided by the timidity of Northern capitalists. The result was a century of Jim Crow rule and racial apartheid.

Marginalize the Right

California’s Proposition 50 offers a glimpse of what modern emergency democratic triage looks like. It allows temporary redistricting in direct response to my home state Texas rigging its congressional representation through extreme gerrymandering. Gavin Newsom and his cronies are not our friends and their interests are not ours, but we can’t afford the luxury of abstention. 

Just as Radical Reconstruction used temporary political restrictions on former Confederates to create space for freedmen to govern, today’s democratic countermeasures are the modern equivalent—stabilizing democratic protections in an emergency period.

Recognizing the importance of holding fascism at bay, DSA California and local chapters such as DSA-LA have endorsed Proposition 50 and are organizing alongside unions and community partners to mobilize a Yes vote this November. California DSA has even formed its own statewide working group to coordinate education and voter outreach around the measure. These efforts reflect a growing understanding that safeguarding democracy through a full court press is not a side project for the Left — it’s the ground on which all our struggles rest during the Trump administration.

Mass Politics

This is the core strategic insight of mass politics: that democracy for the multiracial working class must be expanded before the democratic road to socialism can take root. To win socialism in this country, we must defeat the anti-democratic forces of MAGA fascism that make expanding working class democracy impossible.

Socialism depends on the full flowering of mass democracy — not just elections, but the ability of ordinary people to govern their workplaces, communities, and lives. The authoritarian Right’s project is the opposite: permanent minority rule maintained through fear, repression, and hierarchy. Before the Left can democratize the economy, we must expand the meaning of democracy. That means aligning electoral work, labor power, and mass-movement organizing around a shared, urgent goal: defend and expand what democracy we have in order to stave off what MAGA is building..

The first Reconstruction was a revolution in democracy: brief, radiant, and violently overthrown. The second Reconstruction, a democratic socialist one we hope, must learn from both its courage and its defeat. Marginalizing the GOP is not an end in itself, but it is one of the preconditions for a new democratic order: one rooted in multiracial solidarity, worker power, and public control of the economy.

Chris Kutalik is a proud member of DSA LA and former DSA national communications director.