Nothing. The simple matter is that ordinary people can do nothing, at least not on any kind of meaningful political level as politics is a sphere which precludes most of those who didn't start out in life privileged. Trump is a mega-rich entrepeneur; British parliament is full of Eton alumni and lawyers who are practiced in the skill of arguing that grass is red. People from other backgrounds have to fight - hard - to be allowed admission. Hell, the suffragists found that out.
As of the question of standing by. In 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' - seeing as the thread's talking about fascism - Daniel Goldhagen argues that one of four variables needed for the Holocaut to succeed was the complicity of ordinary Germans. The ones who spied on their neighbours and reported those 'harbouring' Jewish people. The ones who didn't, but who stood by and did nothing. And what if they'd stood up against the system in a show of more than simply passive resistance? We know the answer to that. They'd have been added to the figure of 6 million and more.
Those were ordinary, ostensibly decent people.
I don't think we can shelter behind the left/right distinction anymore. And that's a tough pill to swallow. When betrayal comes from the left it stings all the more, because that is the site on which structural and systemic inequalities have traditionally been challenged. That is not what's happening in our contemporary context. Because, what actually IS left and right anymore? The seemingly arbitrary shift between the two is indicative of how unstable these concepts are. Take Israel and Palestine. Israel started out on the left. The oppressed populace. 'Militant' Islam, as it was sometimes called - a monotheistic religion with traditionally conservative values - was 'right'. That whole distinction now seems to have done an about-face.
And what of misogyny and feminism? I witnessed, over a brief window of around 20 years - what I thought was progress. Misogyny, uttered in public, had reached the point where it was laughed at, stamped down on, or dismissed as antediluvian. But it wasn't progress. It was a mere blot on the horizon and we have since moved backward - far, far back, to arguably a worse position than women were in before the second wave. And where is a lot of the male rights activism clustered? Around the 'left'. (It looks nothing like anything I've ever recognised as left). Around the precept of regulating and shouting down dissent, to the point that women have lost their livelihoods and been threatened with death for voicing anything other than an approved opinion. Our traditional oppressors are claiming to be our victims - isn't that a turn-up? And the sad thing is that some women are buying it.
I hate, HATE the rhetoric that asylum seekers and other groups (the 'underclass') are responsible for all the country's woes. Tommy Robinson's crowd should be forcibly tied to chairs and made to watch Remi Weekes' 'His House', IMO. A poster upthread has mentioned that the privileged banking and political sectors cream off most of this country's wealth whilst the rest of us scrap like crabs in a bucket over the remaining spoils. Then they decry each other over the perceived unfairness that someone is getting more than they are - all the while avoiding the glaring issue that it's the fat cats who should be at the butt of their ire. Of course poltical parties won't 'tackle immigration', no matter what they promise. This set-up suits them. They want the status quo kept precisely the way it is, because they are the ones who benefit. All whilst a convenient scapegoat takes the rap for it.
What can people do? We can join protests. We can lobby. We can crowd fund. We can stand up in public - having risk-assessed this very carefully if we happen to be female - and decry racism when we witness it. And we can use our vote. We can also take solace in the fact that despite our extremely flawed, nepotistic, out of date constitutional system, the FPTP voting system at least means the more extreme fringe parties won't seriously get a look-in. And the British cluster around the centre, as a rule. We don't like the far end of the spectrum and our way is evolution, not revolution.
It's not about 'far right' anymore, but about far everything, as far as I can see. Rather than the old horseshoe effect that was once the analogy for the converging left and right on the political spectrum, now seems to me to have come full circle.
I did not leave the left. The left, left me.