Drag icon RuPaul has joined the ranks of celebrities who can recognize something terrible is happening, even name it as fascism, only to lead people straight into passivity and capitulation. In a recent social media video, after a wave of Supreme Court decisions sharpening the attacks on LGBTQ people, and decimating Black voting rights, RuPaul’s message was essentially: fascism is here, the bad guys won, and “the only thing we can do” is party, dance, and have fun.

This counsel of capitulation comes in the wake of a 6-3 Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais that gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act, which has led to an avalanche of white supremacist redistricting efforts in Republi-fascist controlled states to weaken and break apart Black and Latino majority voting districts nationwide. People are right to be alarmed, and descriptions of this attempt by the fascists to rig the upcoming elections as a “political earthquake” are right.

RuPaul sees the horrors a fascist America will mean for Black people, LGBTQ people, and all those who care about justice, but he draws a very wrong conclusion. He says, in effect: It’s too late. The fascists have won—so dance, enjoy yourself, and party while the clock to oblivion counts down.

This is the logic of the warning of Cabaret, the musical about nightlife in early 1930s Berlin as the Nazis rose to power: the show goes on while the fascists march, ultimately crushing under their jackboots any artistic space that doesn't conform. There is something here of tragedy turning into farce. The first time, in Nazi Germany, people failed to recognize the danger until it was too late. The second time, with all the warning signs flashing in front of us, with the lessons of history screaming at us, people are being led to put on the music and pretend there is nothing left to do. It should be clear that RuPaul’s logic is not only morally bankrupt, but it is based on an illusion. If anyone thinks the horrors won’t hit them, they don’t understand the depth of the danger. What the Trump regime represents is not just greatly heightened suffering for the masses of people, but a threat to the very existence of humanity itself.

Let’s be clear: the problem is not dancing. The problem is not pleasure, queer culture, nightlife, art, sex, beauty, performance, or refusing to let fascists turn life into one long forced march of obedience and shame. Fascists hate all that. They hate it because it represents people, in however partial and contradictory a way, refusing the suffocating patriarchal, white supremacist, Christian fascist order they want to impose.

When the courts are legitimizing attacks on trans people; when the MAGA fascist movement is working through law, executive power, state violence, and intimidation; when voting rights are being gutted in ways that target Black people and other oppressed people; when Christian fascists are pushing women and LGBTQ people back under biblical literalist submission—our answer cannot be: they won, so enjoy the party while it lasts. This is not resistance, but capitulation to horrors that will only escalate if we stay silent.

The fascists are advancing. This must be faced without illusion. They have courts, police, many state governments, mass media networks, fundamentalist churches, white supremacist militias, and a major bourgeois party (the Republican Party) remade in their image. 

They are in power, and that is deadly serious. But they have not won in a final sense. They have not fully consolidated their rule... yet. The whole society has not been permanently locked down under their command... yet. There are still huge divisions and contradictions running through this country—among the people, within the institutions, and within the ruling class itself. Millions hate what is happening, even if they have not yet been led or organized to act on the scale required. 

This is where the material basis exists to remove the regime: not in wishful thinking, not in waiting for “the next election” while the fascists work overtime to rig those elections, and not in individual escape, but in millions rising in struggle, taking up the task of uniting all who can be united in massive, sustained, nonviolent mobilization to defeat this fascism. 

We need dance, joy, and fun, in the struggle to oust the regime and in the fight for a different system and a whole new world. A genuinely liberating new communist outlook does not want a world of gray conformity. We need a world where human beings can flourish in all their diversity—where art, music, dance, science, love, debate, dissent, and experimentation can flower on a scale impossible under capitalism-imperialism.

There has to be a solid core: a scientific understanding of the system, a revolutionary orientation, a commitment to uprooting all exploitation and oppression, and a refusal to let society be dragged backward into the long dark night of class society that is bound together with patriarchy, white supremacy, national chauvinism, and religious obscurantism. But that solid core must give rise to, and make room for, a lot of elasticity: many different forms of culture, many different voices, a wide sphere of dissent and experimentation, people approaching the struggle from different angles, art that provokes us to think differently, shakes us out of narrow ways of thinking, questions said and unsaid assumptions, mourns our collective and individual losses, and imagines new ways of being human.

All this should be able to encompass and embrace the RuPauls of the world, while sharply challenging them to break outside of harmful approaches that work against resistance to the worst of the existing order, and against the struggle for human emancipation.

With that said, NO! Dancing is not “all we can do”—but it should be part of what we do now. Let’s dance in the streets as we struggle to change the direction of everything. Let’s bring the club to the streets, and bring the joy of resistance into the clubs. Let’s involve all sorts of artists in joyful defiance and protest to defeat fascism.

The day that the Trump regime is removed from power, it should be said, would be the biggest party the world has seen. To say nothing of the celebrations that would follow a real revolution.