Why can’t America march against the far-right like in France and Germany?

With the clock rapidly ticking toward Election Day — and polls showing the country’s extreme right could grab control of the government and implement a radical anti-immigration agenda to codify bias against the foreign-born — hundreds of thousands of voters on the left had the same idea. It was time to take it to the streets.

In France.

“The situation is very grave,” the former French president François Hollande told the New York Times as he joined the marchers in his hometown, Corrèze — one of roughly 150 cities and towns where protests clogged the streets. “For those who feel lost, we need to convince them: The coming together of the French is indispensable,” Hollande said.

The former president joined an estimated 640,000 union activists, college students, and other supporters of France’s umbrella of left and center-left political parties on the streets. Their goal? To prevent gains by the far-right National Rally (RN) party in parliamentary elections that begin at the end of the month.

The mass marches united often-bickering political factions and brought out some young people who’d never protested before. But the demonstrators agreed on one thing: that they would not allow a political movement they see as racist and reactionary to take root in France without the fight of their lives.

“I came because I am angry and I feel powerless,” Lucie Heurtebize, a 26-year-old tech worker, told the Times. “We need to unite.”

With far-right populist movements and strongman leaders on the rise across the globe in 2024, France’s marchers aren’t unique in fighting back. Earlier this year in Germany, large crowds took to the streets to voice their opposition to their country’s up-and-coming ultraright movement, Alternative for Germany (AfD). For many critics in Germany, AfD — with 16% of the vote in recent elections for the European Parliament — carries dangerous echoes of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, which plunged their country into World War II and executed the Holocaust against Jews.

The first part of this story should sound familiar to U.S. voters. Donald Trump’s Republican Party is running in November on a mass deportation proposal that would round up a million or more immigrants in the dead of night and ship them to large, sweltering detention camps on the southern border. Trump’s anti-immigrant plan — a first cousin to the extreme nativism of France’s RN or Germany’s AfD — is just one chapter in a 900-page blueprint for an American dictatorship called Project 2025 that would guide a second Trump administration.

So ... where are the protesters?

An anti-democracy comet is heading straight for Washington, D.C., in four-and-a-half months, and in a chilling case of life imitating art, we are living large in the United States of Denial (where, as I write this, the story at the top right of the New York Times home page is about a U.S. couple’s struggle to find a Rome apartment on their $950,000 budget).

The insanity of doing the same thing over and over — begging millions of utterly tuned-out voters to like the (undeservedly, in my opinion) unpopular President Joe Biden and expecting a different result on Nov. 5 — isn’t working. With the American Experiment on the line, the political slogan of 2024 is “Don’t Look Up!”

What’s weird is that it’s not that America doesn’t have a tradition of political protest. In fact, the last 15 years have seen the most demonstrations, on both the left and the right, since the 1960s and early 1970s. When it comes to our bitterly divided electoral politics today, massive protest movements emerge from whichever side just lost the last election. The 2009-2010 tea party, a supernova of backlash to our first Black president, gave way in 2017 to the Trump Resistance and the giant Women’s March on Jan. 21 of that year, 10 weeks too late to stop the disastrous 45th president. And surely you remember the reaction to Trump’s defeat that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021.

So, here’s a crazy idea — what about protesting and, more importantly, organizing before the wrong guy wins? That’s not the American way, I know, but I think the distinctive crisis in 2024 makes a case for changing things up, and maybe taking some inspiration from our friends in Europe. Just like over there, Trump’s MAGA movement — from the mass deportation scheme to plans to call up troops with the Insurrection Act to the candidate’s alarming echoes of Hitler — is a threat like we’ve never seen before. But also comparable is that — much like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Germany’s Olaf Scholz — our traditional neoliberal leader in Biden is neither popular nor inspirational.

People want something to believe in — so why not the belief that America can’t be ruled by a right-wing dictatorship? The college students and 20-somethings who are telling you they really don’t like Biden — whether it’s because of the war in the Middle East or simply because of his age — are also totally revulsed by Trump. So why not make the Nov. 5 election about that? And why not make this moment into a movement united against the right?

I asked a top expert on the history of U.S. protest who’s here in Philadelphia — Temple University historian Ralph Young, author of the recent American Patriots: A Short History of Dissent — for his thoughts on why Americans aren’t protesting on the streets against right-wing extremism like they are in Europe. Some of the difference, he believes, is a lack of imagination.

“The major issue, and why it’s happening in Germany and France and not in the United States, is they have an experience with that — they had Hitler, and they had the taking over of France and the Vichy Republic,” Young said. “They’ve experienced totalitarianism, and Americans really haven’t.”

So far, anyway. And surely some folks will take to the streets as the election draws closer. The first real test of that may arrive Saturday night, when Trump comes to the Temple campus, in one of the most Democratic neighborhoods in left-leaning Philadelphia. The announcement that the presumptive GOP nominee is coming to Philly drew immediate chatter from would-be protesters, and Pennsylvania Democrats called for a 5 p.m. rally outside Temple’s Liacouras Center.

I actually have mixed feelings. Some folks may not want to hear this, but given the realities of the electorate, I think a successful movement needs to be seen as against the right and not explicitly pro-Biden, which feels a bit astroturfed. I know the conventional wisdom is that people need to vote for something, not against something — but this is a moment that screams for throwing old-school wisdom out the window.

An overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want a president who’ll pardon the Jan. 6 thugs or stop fighting climate change. Let’s work with that.

As a journalist for The Inquirer, I can’t take part in protests — but I can imagine them. I can imagine a coalition of civil rights activists, union leaders, abortion-rights advocates, and college students spending the next 10 weeks of summer doing the hard work of organizing: building their lists of attendees, getting permits, and renting buses. I can imagine the hallowed space stretching down the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial, filling up at noon on Saturday, Sept. 7, for an epic event: the first Unite Against the Far-Right Rally.

I can imagine people energized by that D.C. rally going back to their hometowns and their college campuses and organizing teach-ins so that regular folks can learn about Project 2025 — or about how a Trump 47 presidency would completely ignore the heat domes and the wildfires and the coastal flooding now overwhelming America, and surrender in the war against climate change.

Then it’s time to march in the streets where you live, whether that’s Philadelphia or Peoria, Ill. And then it’s time to do it again until a stake is driven through the heart of un-American extremism.

Because here’s what I can’t imagine, and probably neither can you: a Christian nationalist America where the Ten Commandments are posted in every classroom, where women are forced to give birth, the LGBTQ community is forced back into the closet, and people can be jailed for what they write or what they believe.

That’s the America that is coming if we sit on the couch and wait for the comet to strike. And no one is giving you $950,000 to move to Rome.