In times of rising authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, progressive movements in the United States are regrouping and re-strategizing, and, more than ever, need to look to the past to develop an understanding of how movements succeed.

“When we think about the moment we’re in now, historically, we should not be surprised,” Vanessa Priya Daniel, an organizer with 25 years of experience in social movements and philanthropy, told me in a recent interview.

Reflecting on the widespread political changes since 2020, she said, “There is no way that after the largest uprising and protest movement in the history of [the United States] there was not going to be this backlash.”

That backlash, in part, has led political scientists to now consider the United States on the fast track to what is known as competitive authoritarianism. In such regimes, a leader is elected democratically and then erodes checks and balances, particularly through attacks on freedom of the press and assembly.

Of course, the United States is by no means the only country facing these issues. According to the latest Democracy Report from the University of Gothenburg’s V-Dem Institute, there are more autocracies than democracies globally for the first time in over 20 years. Nearly three out of four people in the world now live in autocracies.

“You can look around the globe and see that the path to fascism is usually paved with the eroded rights of three groups: LGBTQ people, women, and oppressed racial and ethnic groups,” Daniel said. “Fascism is essentially the very worst of [the United States of] America on steroids. It’s that three-headed monster of patriarchy, White supremacy, and extractive capitalism.”

However, this is not the first time—and likely won’t be the last time—that these forces threaten to roll back hard-won rights in the United States.

As Daniel told me regarding how movements succeed, “Women of color who have been fighting some version of that monster for hundreds of years for our very survival have something to teach America about how to fight.”

Read the full article about learning from women of color by Holly Jonas at Nonprofit Quarterly.