Patrimonialism is one answer to the devastation wrought by the antisocial state. It teaches subordinates that their only hope of security lies in the patronage of the boss or the landlord. All loyalty is funneled upwards, and all obligation reduced to the individual or familial form of household debt. This is a state form that tolerates only one type of horizonal solidarity: that between brothers vying for the goodwill of the chief executive. Trump embodies this style of power like no one else. His success in reducing the Republican Party to a swarm of warring fraternities, hanging on his every word, defies historical comparison. But Trump’s mesmerizing personalism can also obscure the vulnerability of the project. For Trumpism to sustain itself as a popular movement, patrimonial relations of hierarchy and dependence must be replicated at every level of society, from the household to the workplace.

Horizontal forms of solidarity such as workplace strikes, rent strikes, and bail funds pose an existential threat to this project because they offer safety outside the bounds of clientelism. By turning individual liability into collectivized credit, debt strikes of all kinds offer an at least temporary release from the blackmail of personal dependence. These actions are valuable not just on their own terms—as punctual efforts to raise wages and lower rents—but also as incubators of a new kind of social relation. The struggle against the far right demands nothing less.