Los Angeles, California

In the preface to City of Quartz’s second edition, published in 2006, Mike Davis wrote that “Los Angeles over the past fifteen years became the principal R&D center for the future of the American labor movement.” In fact, Los Angeles, and California as a whole, have served as an R&D center for many of the past century’s most important social and political developments. The garden city, the car-dominated street, capital-P Progressive government, post-war high liberalism, the homeowner revolt, mass media and infotainment, the New Right: all of them are, to a greater or lesser extent, Los Angeles exports.

Los Angeles is the future of America, but which future? Is it a dystopian future characterized by environmental degradation, apocalyptic climate disasters, staggering inequality and segregation, mass homelessness, blatant corruption, and pervasive alienation? Or is it a future in which America becomes a true multiracial social democracy?

It is the latter future — partially instantiated in its pluralist culture, its world-class public institutions of higher education, its tradition of labor activism, and the complementary campaigns to overhaul its transportation network and end its housing crisis — that threatens Trump’s fascist movement. I suspect this is why he seems so fixated on making an example out of Los Angeles in particular and California in general.

And he is making an example, although perhaps not the example he intended to make. In deploying 2,000 National Guard troops to disperse a peaceful protest —a protest, it should be added, against his sadistic deportation campaign — he provided the most striking dramatization yet of his regime’s true character. And the protestors, in turn, have acted out a dramatization of the American character — maybe not the character of America as it is, but as it has long promised to become.

Now it falls to the rest of us to choose which version of America we like better. If Trump’s America is the one we want, then all we need to do is stay home. But if we choose multiracial social democracy, then we’re going to need to follow the example being set in Los Angeles. We need to demonstrate that we won’t be so easily cowed, and that Trump will never have enough soldiers to quash the protests.

Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles a week to the day before the next nationwide mobilization against his fascist takeover. Maybe that was a coincidence, maybe not. Either way, we need to show him that it was a terrible miscalculation. Click here to find the June 14 protest happening closest to you.