Peter Gelderloos: Breathing Room

from Peter Gelderloos’ substack page, Suviving Leviathan, 05/11/2026

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Breathing Room

from the apocalyptic, fascistic Right to the insufficient, hypocritical, quietly genocidal Left

In the recent elections in Brasil, one of the largest countries in the Global South, leftwing darling Lula beat Flavio Bolsonaro, the fascistic dynast supported by the country’s plantation owner class. In Israel, the extreme Right lost the elections to the far Right (not a typo). And in the US, a “blue wave” has given the Democrats an ample margin of control in both chambers of Congress as well as a strong majority of governorships (for non-US readers, for whatever weird-ass reason related to our especially amnesiac, isolationist culture, in the US blue is the color of the Left and red is the color of the Right). In once Republican-held or toss-up states like Texas, North Carolina, and New Jersey, Democratic candidates won by double digits while conservatives won in what were, until yesterday, solidly Republican states like Florida or Louisiana by only 1 or 2%.

A high level Republican operative connected to Trump admitted to the press that these elections were just “too big to rig,” casually acknowledging how common it is to redraw electoral maps or send the precise vote-counting machines to the friendly districts and low quality, high-failure-rate machines to the unfriendly districts, in order to win an extra percentage point and tip elections.

Brasil

In Brasil, where former far Right president Jair Bolsonaro serves a sentence of house arrest in his mansion for launching a failed coup attempt after he lost the 2022 elections, his son Flavio Bolsonaro carried the first round of the elections in early October but failed to attain a majority. In the second round, held October 25th, voters turned to the Left and re-elected the incumbent, Lula, off the Workers’ Party. Wealthy investors punished the country for their vote, with the Brasilian stock market taking a plunge after the election even though Lula is a very business-friendly politician who has overseen a large deal of growth and “development” in the Brasilian economy. In practice that means he promotes oil drilling and mining in the Amazon, he subsidizes the intertwined beef-soy industry causing so much destruction in the south and west of the country, and he also supports manufacture and higher tech industry.

If Bolsonaro’s son Flavio had won this past 25th of October, the death squads that work for the ranchers, soy plantation owners, miners, loggers, or directly for the state, would have had free rein. Several of my friends and many of the Indigenous, African diasporic, and lower class mestizo or white people I met last year, people at the forefront of rural and urban struggles against the ongoing violence of colonial capitalism and for a better world, would have been at greater risk of getting murdered for their resistance. For sure, a lot of people are breathing a very valid sigh of relief. But they’re not naïve about the meaning of the leftwing victory.

[Some of those links above go to Antimidia videos in Portuguese. Before pressing play, scroll down to “Legendas” and you’ll see buttons for English subtitles.]

As one friend put it, “If Bolsonaro wins, they kill us; if Lula wins, they let us die.” A second friend referred to a “mono-polarization” in which there are not two competing poles, just a single pole, “the extreme Right, which pulls everything into its proximity.”

Another friend described the following:

“Bolsonarismo already won. I don’t say that just because the Congress and Senate are controlled by fascists, I’m referring to Lula’s campaign replicating the methods of communication that are very close to fascism (including the name “Lula’s Army”). A few days ago on TV, Lula openly defended lowering the age at which children can be tried as adults (in order to appease the Right) and other similar things. Every time there is a “vote against fascism” which includes the attempt to also convince the Right or “center right,” the pendulum moves to the right.

“After the conservative reaction to the 2013 revolt, some people (like the author Paulo Arantes) said that we were living in a situation with a horizon of diminishing expectations, without a view towards amplifying the struggles and the capacity to dream of a new world. It seems to me that now it’s worse: not only are they [the Left] slamming on the breaks, but the vital energy to struggle was channeled into the methods of the enemy.

“Perhaps what most calls my attention is how the argument for a “struggle for national sovereignty” was adopted in a terrible way. To combat Trump’s intervention pushing for a brutal extractivism to get so-called rare earth minerals, it is affirmed that [these lands and resources] are exclusively Brasilian, as though the problem were only who gets to destroy the Earth and not the destruction itself.”

And a fourth friend shared with a fair amount of alarm and heartbreak over how Lula’s campaign capitalized on the fear of Bolsonaro to break the sense of autonomy of a great many people in one of the strongest, most radical anticolonial and anticapitalist projects in the territories occupied by the Brasilian state. It even got so bad that some comrades accused those who refused to vote of secretly being Bolsonaro supporters.

This quote is from a message they sent me just before the election: “We’ll keep fighting, whoever wins. But here the possible re-election of Lula is referred to as a defeat of Bolsonarismo, and it’s nothing of the kind.”

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They also recommended some texts, this one is an academic article in English, Portuguese, and Spanish about the People’s Web, an anticolonial “land back” network of communities based on direct action, mutual aid, and autonomy, and these two, which are in Spanish, address “What Do They Mean When They Say Sovereignty?” and “Lands Without Borders, Owners, and Flags in Brasil and Argentina.”

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Friends, strangers, comrades, neighbors: we have been making this mistake for too fucking long. Literally millions of us have died in this struggle. We have to get smarter than binary thinking. If we can only consider two different options for our world, both of them are Death. Fuck antifascism, fuck anti-imperialism, and fuck the democrats, liberals, and Marxists who manipulate those concepts, if all they come to mean is that we have to support a slightly gentler form of colonialism, of white supremacy, of ecocide, of patriarchy. The slower path to Hell still takes you to Hell and, look around folks! We’ve arrived. False pragmatism and the extremely simple-minded strategy of “you have to vote for A because B is worse” have failed us catastrophically. Why on earth would we keep using a strategy that has brought us to this hellscape?

Other worlds are possible, they are already and still alive here in the cracks of the present system, and we desperately need to remember them, imagine them, believe in them, commit to them, and fight for them.

Israel

Let’s turn to the Israeli elections as a great example of the problem of supporting the lesser evil.

In Israel, 11 parties won seats in the Knesset. Nine of those parties are rightwing. The two leftwing parties won only 6% of the vote. And one of those parties (Democrats) isn’t even anti-genocide – they want to stop the ongoing wars and land theft but not necessarily to reverse the land theft and ethnic cleansing Israel is based on. The other, the Joint List, is led by Palestinians who have never been allowed to join the Israeli government. This was, truly, an election between the extreme Right and the far Right. The Opposition coalition won 48 seats in the Knesset, 40 of which are divided amongst three rightwing parties, and 8 of which belong to the only Israeli leftwing party. (Yep! That means that of the Israeli [non-Arabic] part of the electorate, less than 8% vote for the Left, and the rest vote for the far Right or extreme Right.)

The primary campaign promise of the Opposition coalition, led by Gadi Eisenkot’s Yasher party, was to remove Netanyahu from power, not because of all his wars and genocide, but because he’s not doing a great job at those wars and genocide. Polling consistently shows that the vast majority of Israelis are in favor of the genocide and the wars against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, but majorities were upset with Netanyahu that his government did not win the release of the prisoners held by Hamas quickly enough and that the methods being used by West Bank settlers might lead to more sanctions and a loss of support from “the international community” (Europe and the US). Also, many are miffed that *Haredi or Ultra-Orthodox Jews have historically been exempted from obligatory military service; they want all Israeli citizens to participate in the military. Others are upset with the fact that Netanyahu is avoiding a prison sentence by staying in office. He got convicted, not for war crimes, but for a pretty clear case of corruption.

*(Haredi make up a significant number of the 800,000 settlers living illegally—but with the full support of the state—in the West Bank and East Jerusalem on recently stolen land, and the political parties representing them are a part of Netanyahu’s coalition. To be clear, the Ultra-Orthodox are often the vanguard of the genocide as they attack, burn, plunder, and murder in the West Bank, they just don’t put on a uniform to do it. The number of West Bank settlers has roughly doubled in the last 20 years.)

The second major promise made by the Opposition was to maintain the official, white supremacist tradition in Israeli politics and not to let any Arabic-led party into the government. Since Netanyahu’s party, Likud, still got the most votes (though they lost 9 seats in the Knesset and their ultra-nationalist allies lost a cumulative 5 seats), the only way for the Opposition to keep both of those promises is to rule with a minority coalition that does not include the two Palestinian-led parties but relies on their votes for investiture and critical legislation, which means a really solid practice of compromise. That shouldn’t be so difficult. Both of those parties have said they would do whatever it takes to get rid of Netanyahu and stop some of the more extreme new settlement projects in the West Bank.

That shouldn’t be too hard a compromise. After all, the rightwing Opposition wants to get rid of Netanyahu, and they’re okay with stopping some settlement projects since those empower their political competitors in the Orthodox camp and could hurt their economy by leading to more sanctions. The only thing that could stop them from winning control of the government is their own racism. So… I give them a 50/50 shot, at best. Recent polls support that kind of pessimism.: incredibly few Israelis believe any land should be given back to the Palestinians* or that recently built settlements should be dismantled. They don’t believe the settlements are wrong, but 50% said the policy of land theft and construction in the West Bank should be “adjusted to avoid sanctions escalation and international isolation”. Amongst Netanyahu’s bloc, however, a solid majority said “the government should continue the policy ‘whatever the price’.” 52% of those polled said they could accept sanctions on individual settlers who were especially violent, but 63% opposed international sanctions being placed on goods coming from illegal settlements (“illegal,” in the media, referring to Palestinian lands stolen since the Oslo accords of 1993, not all the land stolen before that). With very few exceptions, most Israelis only oppose the daily violence of settlers in the West Bank if it might hurt them personally. As The Guardian put it: “The poll suggests that the more people feel they will be damaged personally, the more they oppose the settlement policy.”

[*Some Israeli politicians do support giving desert lands, much of it the traditional territory of Bedouins, to Palestinians as a non-consensual exchange to permanently take over more fertile Palestinian lands.]

Here’s more detail from other polls. In May 2024, after 7 months of the war on Gaza, only 4% of Israelis thought the country’s assault had gone too far, half thought Israel should directly govern Gaza after the war, and only 8% thought that the people of Gaza should be allowed to choose their own government. By that point, Israel had directly killed over 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza, not counting increased deaths from disease or hunger, they had seriously injured 80,000, and forced 1.7 million out of their homes – completely destroying most of the homes along with all the belongings in them. Over 90% of Israelis thought that was the right thing to do. Actually, that’s incorrect. Half the Israelis polled thought the genocide “had not gone far enough”.

Another year of genocide didn’t soften that view. In August 2025, a poll carried out by an Israeli organization found that 76% of Israelis believed that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” tacitly approving of the mass murder of children and noncombatants. The poll was conducted “amid rising racist attacks against Palestinians in occupied territories and Palestinian citizens of Israel.”

An August 2026 poll found that the Israeli public supported the wars against Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, but were “dissatisfied with the results,” namely the failure to achieve regime-change in Iran and the slowdowns (so-called ceasefires that the Israeli military violates multiple times every day) in the invasions of Lebanon and Syria. A March 2026 poll published by the Times of Israel found that 78% of Israelis supported the war against Iran (which at that point had killed at least 1,500 Iranian civilians and an unknown number of Iranian soldiers). Even half of Israelis who identified themselves as leftwing supported the war.

In conclusion, elections, democracy, and the Left won’t stop Israel’s genocide and ongoing wars because:

• the vast majority of Israelis are pro-genocide
• even the Left is pro-genocide and half of the Left is pro-war
• the Israeli leftwing party only got 6% of the vote, which was a huge gain for them.

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The US

The sweeping victory of the Democrats in yesterday’s election illustrates a point I was trying to make in “The Right’s Rollercoaster to Hell.” By huffing the fumes of their own ideology of power too deeply, by zealously attacking anyone they perceive as a threat to the established order, the Right frequently damage the basis of their own power. And, at least in the anglosphere, the Right have not had intelligent strategists since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger. Since then, they’ve just been getting dumber and dumber.

Many people have gotten furious with the rightwing attacks: people who need abortions, people who need access to healthcare, trans folks who want to be treated like people, Black folks who need an end to centuries of lynching, exclusion, and exploitation, Muslims sick of being portrayed as terrorists and invaders, latinas and African immigrants who were being attacked regardless of their status, and all the people who don’t belong to those groups but have loved ones who are, or all those who oppose bigotry and oppression on principle. (Basically, all those whom moderate Democrats refer to as fringe groups or the “woke.”

Then there’s the fact that the stupidity of the Trump regime was wrecking the US economy. While the billionaires keep raking it in, the dollar has lost about 9% of the value it had at the beginning of 2024, real wages have been stagnating or falling, underemployment is high, groceries have been getting more expensive, food insecurity, electricity, and gas prices are all going up, rent has increased 44% since 2019 and mortgage rates are almost three times as high as they were in 2021. Obviously, all those things are much harder on working class and lower income people, while the rich don’t even notice the price of gas and groceries.

So again, it’s no surprise that most people wanted a big change. This map, showing how far to the left or right the vote went compared with 2024, is a pretty clear illustration.

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Incidentally, the US stock market surged after the leftwing victory. Remember how the opposite occurred in Brasil? The market has no invisible hand, and there’s no cutthroat, mercenary competition intrinsic to human nature. It’s evil rich fuckers who want Brasil to maintain itself as a plantation for the global economy, where the millionaire landowners and mine owners can easily pay cops or paramilitaries to murder labor organizers or Indigenous people who might get in the way of their investments. The very same banks, corporate execs, and multimillionaire or billionaire investors want the US to maintain a more complex economy with a huge market to import goods from around the world alongside a well educated class of researchers who can be subsidized to develop pharmaceutical, chemical, alternative energy, and computing technologies that will result in trillions of dollars of profits. But a poorer population and major cuts to research subsidies can’t sustain that kind of economy. Clearly, the State is more powerful than capitalists on their own and the capitalists don’t always get their first choice, but they’ll make do with their second. They’ll profit in Brasil under Lula, and they’re happy that things in the US are turning around but if the most powerful government in the world goes too far Left or too far Right or just too far stupid, the capitalists will take their investments elsewhere and a new coalition of powerful states will arise to uphold the global order once NATO can’t hack it. They’re already in the wings, preparing. But maybe there’s another sort of change that could happen…

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With a solid majority in Congress, the Democrats will get the opportunity to pass a budget next year that they could use to defund ICE, end military aid to Israel, and restore money to public education, scientific research, and social services related to healthcare, food poverty, and support for disabled people. They can also investigate corruption in the Trump administration, ICE conspiracies to murder or otherwise violate the rights of immigrants and rapid response people, and other instances of law breaking by government officials. And if they don’t fuck it up, they’ll probably win the presidency and keep a congressional majority in 2028.

What’s more, progressive candidates swept a number of elections, including in toss-up states and districts, disproving the rhetoric of the Party establishment that more voters will support moderates and leftwing candidates can’t win competitive elections. That means there’s a possibility for the party as a whole to support more progressive policies by 2028, though of course the New York Times is scrounging for any statistical manipulation or talking head or can claim the elections were a vindication of the moderate Democrats, CNN is offering AIPAC a free platform to spread Islamophobia and reinforce the idea that responsible politicians have to support Israel’s genocide, and every person or institution with power and money to the left of Hitler is trying to reinforce the idea that Jeffries and Schumer are the best possible leaders of the Party, in the hopes of preserving a pro-police, pro-deportation, pro-billionaire, pro-AI, pro-Israel agenda.

So what do all these results mean for some important questions? What kinds of changes might we expect from the electoral victories of the Left?

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Possible

• The most recent right-wing wave that has seen governments across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia shift to the Right may break, at least for now.

• More marginalized and lower class populations will probably get access to government-funded resources.
• Some workplace protections, environmental regulations, and rights to healthcare will be expanded or restored.
• The repression against anticolonial and anticapitalist movements might shift to softer tactics.
• The war against Iran might end, for now.

As a low-income person who relies on government assistance for healthcare, with a lethal (but fortunately very slow-moving) cancer caused by environmental toxins, who generally works jobs that involve dangerous or unhealthy conditions and few to no benefits, and who participates in movements constantly subjected to surveillance and repression, and with beloved friends who experience more brutal forms of repression that I don’t, I’m happy for all of these things. They make a difference. But is that difference enough?

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Not Gonna Happen

• We won’t be freed of the obligation to work for bosses in jobs that are often humiliating, unhealthy, and unsafe.
• Poverty won’t disappear.
• We won’t be allowed to have an unalienated relationship with our homes and the land: housing will continue to be designed as a way to enrich the wealthy and preserve our dependence on them, and land will continue to be treated as property.
• Prisons and police won’t disappear, and the routine torture and brutality they produce will continue.
• Political repression of anarchists, autonomous movements, and Indigenous communities fighting to get their land back won’t end, and when the Left is in power those facing repression will receive less solidarity and more isolation.
• No historical form of oppression like white supremacy or patriarchy will disappear; they will continue to operate through and intensify systemic features like work, poverty, housing, policing, and repression.
• Israel will not stop the genocide against Palestinians.
• Indigenous peoples around the world will not be allowed to have autonomy over their land and culture.
• Governments and corporations from Europe, North America, and South and East Asia will not stop sponsoring wars, genocide, slave labor, and deadly mining and plantation industries across sub-Saharan Africa.
• Greenhouse gas emissions reductions will not happen fast enough to avert the acceleration of the worst mass death and mass extinction events in human history. Many years, there will be no emissions reductions at all.
• Real emissions reductions, when they do occur, will be based on energy technologies that prioritize economic growth and cause a huge boom in land theft, toxic mining, death squads, and habitat destruction.
• Other forms of ecocide and extractivism like industrial agriculture will continue to kill the soil, destroy the forests and wetlands, abuse workers, brutalize hundreds of millions of non-human animals, and drive ongoing land theft and genocide against Indigenous peoples.
• The list only continues…

These elections have won us a little bit of breathing room, nothing more. The only way to create the kinds of change we need for survival is through waves of revolution that destroy, abolish, transform, and heal all the vestiges of that trinity of evil – capitalism, colonialism, and the State.

Those three forces are inseparable. They can’t be reformed, and none of them can be abolished while leaving the others intact. Only the State has ever existed without the other two but the emergence of colonial capitalism transformed all the various state models in the world into the modern state, which has proven unable to abolish capitalism no matter how many red flags it waves.

We have an extremely low chance of helping to launch these waves of revolution, sticking to it, adapting, overcoming, and winning, and if we do succeed it’s a labor that requires generations. And yet, it’s a bet we need to take, because there’s a 100% chance of immense suffering and death under the present system. There’s a 0% chance of reforming this system into something good through the methods of change it offers us, like elections. And, of the dozens of authoritarian Left revolutions that have succeeded in their strategy of seizing state power, exactly 0 have abolished capitalism, oppressive hierarchies, poverty, wars, or ecocidal ways of living.

How about we give a chance to the methods and traditions of struggle that have always predicted that would be the outcome of electoral reform or revolutionary states? How about we give a chance to the methods and traditions of struggle that have always rejected colonial society and fought for a world of ecocentric communities organized through rooted networks and mutual aid?