Two weeks: Time to Overdo it

“You can sleep when you’re dead.”

—Benjamin Franklin

There are just two weeks to go before one of the most consequential elections in the history of California. Driving the existential nature of this election is the onset and growth of the fascist cancer within American capitalism, pushed into metastatic overdrive by the election of Donald Trump to his second term in 2024. 

In the two years since, he has checked every box in any rational person’s understanding of what the word “fascism” means. As a result we are facing End Times Fascism— the term (and the title of their new book) coined by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor—meaning that this time around, fascists are sucking us down the chutes of climate destruction, democratic devolution, and rapidly eroding institutional means to reverse the tide. 

While all of DSA’s endorsed election campaigns throughout the state are important and contribute in various ways to the anti-fascist cause, I will go out on a limb to suggest that the campaign that can best serve the anti-fascist struggle is the dual effort to tax the rich via Props 3 and 40.  Why? 

Here we find an unprecedented opportunity—not one, but two tax the rich ballot measures up for a vote in one election. Each is essential to the wellbeing of the working class—one for education, the other for health care. Loss of either would be a disaster and a boon to billionaires.

Conversely, passage of both would send an urgently needed message:  that the wealth of the rich is not invincible, because an organized working class can be the greater force. 

Money shores up the power and power shores up the money 

You recall those two photos of Elon Musk early in 2025: wielding with sick glee a chain saw to demonstrate what his DOGE project was doing to the helping services of the federal government, and his Nazi salute at a MAGA rally? These were accurate signals of an emboldened and newly unified far right sector of capital, melding the formerly antagonistic interests of fossil fuel and big tech, brought together by Trump to supercharge the development of AI and its evil twin, data centers, under the control of corporations. 

The combined resources of these two capital sectors united in support of the fascist program is the reason why political spending hit record levels in the 2024 elections, and why it is on track to break the record again this year.

As Klein and Taylor make clear, mix hitherto undreamed of quantities of capital with Christian nationalism, perpetual war in the Middle East fanning the flames of religious fantasy along with the climate crisis, reckless investment in AI, the Trump administration’s removal of all federal regulatory controls, and you have the perfect cocktail for apocalypse. The richest people in the world think they can escape the dystopia they are consciously unleashing—to island bunkers, to the Rapture, to outer space—as they run the rest of us over the cliff and the earth to the end of its tether.

Here in California the billionaires’ push to defeat Prop 40 will set new spending records for ballot initiatives. That’s pocket change from their bloated portfolios. The campaign to pass Props 3 and 40 directly challenges the fascist program, valuing human need over uncontrolled profitmaking, saying yes to life and to the earth, and reducing the purses of the superrich and thus their power. If we win, we demonstrate that the power of people can outweigh the power of money.  

Time to Overdo it

I’m asking everyone who reads these words to add just a bit of work—something, anything— to election work you are already doing in the next two weeks to help get Props 3 and 40 passed. 

I’m not arguing that anyone should stop their campaigning for a local city council candidate or US congressional seat and replace that work with the Prop 3 and 40 tax the rich campaign between now and November 3. I’m saying something else, and I admit it runs against the grain of the advice that a lifetime of activist labor and socialist politics has led me to consistently offer comrades and other activists, which is, “Don’t overdo it.” Passion for political causes can easily tip over into burnout, which is not helpful for the long run. But we are up against an enemy that is literally attempting to destroy the long run. And so I make an exception this time so that it’s not the last time. 

In other words, for the next two weeks, let’s overdo it. 

Our final California DSA Tax the Rich Working Group meeting of the campaign is this Tuesday night at 6 pm; join us to hear what we’re planning. You could also join the Prop 40 phone bank on 10/21 at 5:30. Here is tonight’s Prop 3 phone bank link. 

It can also be simpler. You can grab a posterboard from an art supply store and make your own sign for Yes on 3, Yes on 40, Tax the Rich and stand on a street corner with a friend or two. You can put a sign up in your window. You can call your friends and tell them to vote yes on 3 and 40 and no on 41, 42, and 43. You can download flyers and pass them out in your workplace. 

With your help taxing the rich is possible. Once we’ve done that we can rest (contra Franklin, we don’t have to wait til we’re dead) recover from burnout, and breathe the air of a world slightly less imperiled by fascism.