Community Is the Antidote to Fascism: Why Belonging, Not the State, Defines Our Freedom

Community Is the Antidote to Fascism: Why Belonging, Not the State, Defines Our Freedom 

Fascism does not begin with marching boots or flags waving over conquered cities. It begins in the quiet places  in the moment a population starts to believe that their identity comes from the state rather than from one another. When people allow the nation to define who they are, when they surrender their sense of self to a political structure, the door to authoritarianism opens. Fascism thrives on this surrender. It needs people to forget that identity is something lived, not assigned. 

The only true antidote to fascism is community identity  the kind that grows from the relationships we build, the families we raise, the neighbors we share meals with, and the diverse networks of people who shape our daily lives. Community is not an abstract idea; it is the lived experience of belonging. It is the antidote because it gives people something fascism cannot control: connection. 

A real community is made of families, friends, chosen kin, and the countless threads of personal connection that weave together into a shared life. It is messy, diverse, imperfect, and human. And because of that, it is powerful. Only from this foundation can we build parallel institutions systems of care, support, and solidarity that exist outside the reach of authoritarian control. These institutions are how people shake off the chains of fascism: not by appealing to the state, but by building something stronger than the state’s fear‑based identity. 

Fascism, by contrast, depends on isolation. It needs people to feel alone, disconnected, and resentful. It teaches you to blame “the other side,” to see difference as a threat, and to treat diversity as a weakness. It thrives on stereotypes, on dehumanizing jokes, on the slow drip of propaganda that convinces people that marginalized communities are the problem rather than the victims of systemic harm. 

Fascism wants you to take pride not in your own growth or creativity, but in the accomplishments of strangers who share your nationality. It wants you to believe that greatness is inherited rather than earned. It wants you to look outward for validation instead of inward for purpose. 

It also wants you disconnected from love. Fascism benefits when men are isolated, when families are fractured, when loneliness becomes a political tool. It tells men that feminism is the enemy, that women are the problem, that partnership is weakness. It weaponizes resentment and turns it into ideology. 

Fascism also seeks to infiltrate faith. It wants to take your church, your mosque, your synagogue, your spiritual community, and redirect your devotion away from God and toward a leader or a nation. It replaces humility with nationalism, compassion with obedience, and spirituality with “blood and soil.” It turns religion into a tool of the state rather than a refuge for the soul. 

The remedy to all of this is community identity not the identity imposed from above, but the identity built from below. 

Community identity looks like families reuniting and healing. 

It looks like neighbors sharing meals, laughing together, and building trust. 

It looks like friendships that grow into love, and love that grows into families. 

It looks like people finding work, raising children, and participating in the life of their neighborhood. 

It looks like people pursuing goals, building confidence, and supporting one another’s growth. 

Community identity means accepting and uplifting LGBTQIA people, BIPOC communities, immigrants, the disabled, and the unhoused. It means making life easier for those who have been pushed aside. It means practicing mutual aid not as charity, but as solidarity and lifting others up because our liberation is tied together. 

It means building a world where people know their neighbors, where children play outside without fear, where elders are cared for, and where no one is left behind. It means creating spaces where people can gather, talk, disagree, reconcile, and grow. It means building institutions that reflect our values rather than the state’s demands. 

Fascism isolates. 

Community heals. 

Fascism divides. 

Community unites. 

Fascism demands obedience. 

Community cultivates responsibility. 

And only one of these paths leads to a future worth fighting for. 

If we want to resist fascism, we cannot rely on the state to save us. We must build Communities that make fascism impossible. We must create Relationships and the Institutions, and the shared identity that give people something real to belong to something stronger than fear, stronger than propaganda, and stronger than the state. 

The fight against fascism begins at home, at the dinner table, in the neighborhood, in the community center, in the mutual‑aid network, in the friendships we nurture, and in the love, we choose to give. It begins with us together.