The Bloody Promises of the Orange-Hued Malignancy

The Bloody Promises of the Orange-Hued Malignancy

Refuse Fascism Episode 174 with Paul Street

Sun, Oct 08, 2023 1:15PM • 48:00

Paul Street 00:00

It’s a MAGA episode. They’ve even, just to show the depth and degree of their fealty to their orange hued tyrant leader, Cyrus Trump, they were seriously broaching Trump himself as the speaker! Their role within the division of labor of the fascist project in this country is to wreck things and to tear shit up. They’re not anarchists, but they’re part of the project of creating space for Trump to come back in and not to just take down the administrative state, nor to take down the, the so called “deep state”, but to take it over. This fucking guy, this fascist leader, instigated a physical assault on this very body, the Congress, on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to physically black the peaceful transfer of power. This sleepwalking that we’re doing, and us thinking we’re all okay because the normal rule of law and electoral institutions will save us, is pretty dangerous thinking right now.

Sam Goldman 01:17

Welcome to Episode 174 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. On a week like this, where there’s just so much to talk about from the unprecedented ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House to Trump escalating the language of violence and retribution as his trials have begun and much more. As MAGA advances to crush any opposition and moves to attempt to re seize power, I am so glad to get to chat with fellow Refuse Fascism editorial board member, frequent guest of the show historian, author and my friend, Paul Street, to unpack and make sense of this all.

But first, thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. As proof that we read them all. Here is a comment from Brian, posted on Pod Bean. He wrote: “The fascists who over recent years and decades have excitedly amassed themselves over a glorified shared vision of a great destruction of all things that are, to a grand super nationalist renewal that only exists in their imagination, are playing a fantasy death game with the lives of everyone. Far, far worse than merely infantile minds, they strive toward their imposed armageddon reality like motherfucking goose stepping with immeasurable suffering and blood in that wake.” Thanks, Brian, for writing to us with your thoughts. If you appreciate the show, and want to help us reach more people who want to refuse fascism in the name of humanity, be a hero, go write a review and drop five stars wherever you listen to your pods. Tell the good folks out there in podcast land why you listen and they should too. Subscribe/follow so you never miss an episode, and of course, keep up all that great commenting, sharing on social media and the YouTubes. And I want to give thanks to our patrons and show sustainers we seriously could not do this without you. Become a patron for as little as $2 a month. I mean, can you get coffee that cheap anymore? I don’t think so. Go over to patreon.com/RefuseFascism.

With all that business out of the way. I want to welcome Paul back onto the Refuse Fascism podcast to help us make sense of this fascist madness from the past week. Hey, Paul, what’s happening?

Paul Street 04:01

How are you doing? I’m here in Chicago. It’s a beautiful day, even as the world descends into terror.

Sam Goldman 04:08

I want to just start our chat today with the unprecedented ouster House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. No speaker in US history has ever been removed by a “motion to vacate” vote. What is going on here? What does this signify? What are the implications? Walk us through this?

Paul Street 04:29

You know, I think in a way, Boehner probably quit before he might have been removed, and I think that may have been the case with another recent Republican Speaker. It’s like, say that Trump was the first person impeached since Andrew Johnson, when, in a way, in a de facto kind of way, Nixon was because he would have been impeached if he hadn’t gotten out of there. But they actually carried out this really bizarre parliamentary maneuver that McCarthy had agreed to as the price of getting in to the speakership, which he was just really hungry to have that title on his name.

He agreed to a deal where at any time any individual member of the house, including the most far right fascist, MAGA maniacs in the Republican caucus, could call a vote. Chickens came home to roost and it happened because they wanted to pay back for his unpardonable sin of agreeing for a 45 day suspension in the Republi-fascist assault on the debt. It’s a MAGA episode. From everything we can tell this was very much in consultation with, and at the behest of the great leader; the great orange malignant rabid dog, Donald Trump.

By all indications the front runner to get the new job is another arch Trumpist, or running dog lackey of the Donald and that is Jim Jordan. The media narratives on it are sort of very deceptive because they make it sound like the MAGA aspect of the house is just these eight or 10 or whatever number of folks around Matt Gaetz, when really the House Republican caucus is MAGA, what we would call Republi-fascist — which is about all but 12 to 15 holdouts that some Democrats are dreaming of being able to collaborate with — and those are disproportionately Republicans in districts that supported Biden.

The bigger caucus was full of people who voted for Trump’s election lie even after January 6th, and Jim Jordan certainly voted for Trump’s election lie after January 6th. None of the serious GOP presidential candidates — and this applies into the whole party except, you know, a tiny few that don’t have a chance, but none of the serious contenders — will ever say one thing serious about January 6th or about the extremism and fascism of Trump. This thing wasn’t really about the deficit, and we’re going to replay this now, and we don’t know what’s going to happen in 45 days.

This thing about crashing a government, which is not about reining in spending — these people supported Trump’s huge deficit fueling budget deficits because he was their dear leader, because he was their white Christian, white nationalist Cyrus; their fascist leader, and they sign on with him all the time. They all signed on with him against Biden because they want to delegitimize Biden, they want to make Biden look bad, they want to make it look like he can’t control the government, so to help get their dear leader back in. So it never really actually was about that. And they supported a huge tax cut under Trump, which is a huge driver of the deficit that they claim to be so concerned about.

They’ve even, just to show the depth and degree of their fealty to their orange hued tyrant leader, Cyrus Trump, they were seriously broaching (the caucus around Gaetz) Trump himself as the speaker. The speaker job is too detailed for a guy like Trump, I can’t see him doing it, and I expected him to embrace Jordan, and that’s exactly what he did. But I think he’s still going to come to the House next week and make a public appearance to rally the right wing, I guess for Jordan, who he now has formally endorsed.

It’s actually an extraordinary moment. This fucking guy, this fascist leader, instigated a physical assault on this very body, the Congress, on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to physically block the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the election, and in fact, he was pissed off that the metal detectors were kept up to prevent the Oathkeepers and the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys and other fascists from bringing AR-15s to the Capitol. He wanted an armed assault on the Capitol. I find that just absolutely extraordinary, now the MAGA Republicans, which in reality are much bigger than just the eight to ten people around Gaetz, are functioning, in essence, as a wrecking crew.

They’re constantly treated as buffoons that are just completely out of it in the media, but actually, they have a very specific and fascistic mission. Their role within the division of labor of the fascist project in this country is to wreck things and to tear shit up. They’re not anarchists, but they’re part of the project of creating space for Trump to come back in, and not to just take down the administrative state: In order to take down the the so called “deep state”, but to take it over and to completely refashion it and to consolidate a Christian white nationalist, neo fascist takeover of this country.

If you look in states where the Republican Party has full control, you see the positive fascist Republi-fascist agenda in full play. Where they have the governor’s office in places like Iowa, places like Florida, like places like Missouri, and you just fill in the blank, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re remaking. They’re trying to create a new type of darkly revanchist, ultra reactionary, governance order in those states and that’s the goal ultimately, nationally for this party. It’s not just eight to ten people around Matt Gaetz and Lynne [Lauren] Boebert or whatever the hell her name is.

Sam Goldman 09:48

Yeah, I really appreciate that, Paul, because I do agree that that is something that has been — the media narrative that people are are delivered is this — I think the Washington Post said it most acutely, but — the notion of this being a fringe section of the party. [PS: Right, right] They call it the party’s ideological fringe. I think that it’s really important, as you were saying, that there is an argument, but it’s really, let’s be clear, McCarthy was no moderate either. There’s an argument, there’s a tension over methods in the centrality of their role to amplify the undisputed leader of the Republi-fascist Party, which is Trump.

It is this group, that is not the minority, as much as people would like it to be, that is setting the tone and tenor for politics across this nation. It is the MAGA movement, and Trump at its center that are shaping politics, that are setting the terms. Which is why this appeasement that McCarthy attempted failed so miserably. If they’re continued to be called a fringe, or that this is a fringe movement, or that they’re not the majority, or that it’s just a section, we’re continuing to minimize the threat.

Paul Street 11:13

There’s this just ongoing continuing myth that somehow there are a significant number and ballast of rational, normal functioning parliamentary voices to be found in the Republican Party, and just focusing on Gaetz and a small handful was a way of obscuring this, and essentially normalizing a party that’s behind January 6th; a party that even, insofar as some of its members in Congress have a lot of personal, private distaste about Trump, they’re so goddamn scared of the power of the 74 million Trumpists in the country and the Trumpist base — which is beholden to Trump, which also gets its news from right wing outlets and from Fox News, which had a host recently who is saying in essence that we can’t rely on elections anymore, it looks like we need to a fascist takeover a revolution — and this is what they listen to.

Sam Goldman 11:58

Greg [Gutfeld], or, what’s his name? [PS: Gondorfeld or something.] Yeah, exactly. I think that what you were saying about Trump, I saw an interview where he was saying that he told McCarthy that if he didn’t shut down the government and make it a problem for Biden that he could lose his speakership — this normalization of that kind of threat. I think that there is a difference between the analysis that you were bringing forward about the role of this wrecking ball, if you will, because a lot of the media has kind of painted it as like chaos for chaos sake. These are agents of chaos.

Paul Street 12:39

Like they’re just nihilistic anarchists with no real ideological vision.

Sam Goldman 12:44

Right, that they just want to wreck things, whereas you’re talking about what they’re wrecking serves. There was this article in the Philly Inquirer by Will Bunch, about the “Red Caesar” aspect, which I think is actually what the Greg guy was talking about — the idea that they would, “suspend democracy,” — that they’re seeing this as a crisis, where, as he put it, “The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement, wants an American dictatorship that would, ‘Suspend democracy’ in January 2025, just 15 months from now.” [PS: “Absolutely!”] Creating such a situation where people feel like: Oh, there needs to be Trump back in power in order to, to calm the chaos. I think that this is a moment where people are having to look at why do they need to? Why are they trying to blow up the normal operations of this political rule of this system? As you were pointing to, that it’s to get this anti woman, anti immigrant, anti science, anti LGBTQ anti humanity program into place.

Paul Street 13:53

It’s covered by this kind of illusion of it’s sort of meant to deceptively, I think, bring in libertarian sentiments and to bring in populist sentiments that we’re trying to crash this deep state that is beholden to a globalist elite. Maybe I’m repeating myself here, but they don’t want to crash it. Anyone who wants to understand how ambitious and bold their vision is for the future they want to create, can look at Agenda 47, a link on the Trump website, and it’s just an elaborate detailed plan for the takeover of one part of the federal government after another and the replacement of normal civil service operatives with thousands of staff members, whose sole criterion for presence in the federal government is ideological fealty to the Christian, white nationalist agenda.

Or look at their Heritage Foundation’s Project 25 Mandate for Leadership, it’s only 900 pages and it’s, again, very detailed. Trump this time is different than 2016. He is been bringing along hundreds and hundreds, an army of far-right wing so called conservatives (because we can’t say fascist) conservatives, so called, who are actually radical right wing policy wonks and policy operatives with very ambitious plans about expanding executive authority to an unprecedented level in this country, and really fundamentally changing the very governance of this society on far right, authoritarian lines. So it’s not anarchist at all. It’s not libertarian at all. It’s not particularly populist, because they won’t go after the rich, actually. Trump loves the rich. Fascism loves the rich. There’s a book out about Hitler’s billionaires and how well they did under fascism.

Sam Goldman 15:30

I wanted to move the conversation to Trump’s trial, his latest threats, and the deafening silence of so many people and so much of the media so clearly trying to just wish him and his million strong movement away. Recently, he claimed “migrants are poisoning the blood of this country,” he threatened to deport anyone who he deems a communist or Marxist. He said that the outgoing Mark Milley deserved death. He, in a recent speech, talked about shooting shoplifters, killing them. And this was just his latest in his mortal threats against his political enemies and opponents, and some of what I said was just the tip of the iceberg.

I want to get into what he has been saying, and the role that this violent rhetoric plays. To me, it’s clear that the splits are growing more intense, and the language of political violence is at a fever pitch. There’s just real, like, frightening levels to me of normalization at the same time that there’s this escalating. In your recent piece on your substack you had said, “This is Trump’s core campaign promise, fascistic vengeance.” I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about what you’ve been noticing in his language.

Paul Street 16:51

It was just astonishing, incredible and depressing that we still had to argue within the intellectual class about whether Trump was actually a fascist. Even after January 6th, the arguments still continued. The extent and the degree of the denial is just mind boggling. I’ve got a chapter in my book, ‘This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neo liberals and the Trumping of America’, titled “The Anatomy of Fascism: Denial,” but if you want any more proof in the pudding, listen to post January 6th, Trump, and Trump over the last years, and particularly Trump this year, and particularly in recent months.

Here’s one that is an interesting example of what we’re talking about, and then it being underplayed in the media. Trump recently, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, went gun shopping, to demonstrate his fealty to the Second Amendment and the holy right to bear arms in this country and the NRA and all of that. But didn’t go to just any gun shop. He went to the Palmetto State Armory in South Carolina, which was the same gun store that sold the racist killer who bought two guns there to then go to Jacksonville, Florida, and shoot three black people dead in a predominantly black neighborhood, in that city of Jacksonville, Florida.

At least one of the weapons that he purchased, this killer, was painted with a swastika. So of all the 16,700 and whatever gun stores in America to do this, Trump went to that particular place. I guarantee you that wasn’t just by accident. The comment that he made recently in speaking to the GOP convention in California about how if you rob a store, you ought to get shot, essentially amounts to an endorsement of extra judicial executions of suspected shoplifters, right? That’s very reminiscent of something he said during the George Floyd rebellion when he recycled a quote from the racist Miami mayor in 1967, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” also not new.

Also, in that same California convention of the California GOP, he made a quip about Paul Pelosi, who was gravely attacked. He had to have skull surgery and he was attacked by one of Trump’s maniacal supporters who believed the many Hitlerian lies about a stolen election right now. He made a quip, he said something like: How’s Paul Pelosi doing anyway? Does anybody know? That was chilling enough, but what was even more chilling was the hundreds of California Republicans who roared their laughter and roared their applause and cheered.

Of course there was the comment about maybe Mark Milley, the former chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves execution for just reassuring his Chinese counterpart in the waning days of the Trump administration, that the maniacal Donald wasn’t going to attack them in an attempt to make sure that the transition didn’t involve World War III. Yes, he has called this year for invading Mexico.

And by the way, the other present GOP presidential candidates all seem to be on board with that. Alvin Bragg, the New York prosecutor who is in charge of the Stormy Daniels case, earlier this year, when Bragg’s indictments came down — by the way, not just Bragg’s, but voted on by a grand jury of New York citizens — Trump posted a picture of him with a baseball bat aimed at Bragg’s head. He’s told people to go after — that’s his actual call — Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, who’s been prosecuting him in the civil case on his fraudulent business practices in the state of New York.

To report Marxists — the context of that is, he was talking to Ralph Reid’s Christian fascist group and he was saying: You know, we already have a law, it goes back to World War I that prevents, technically says, communists can’t come to this country from other countries they can’t migrate in — and then he says: But you know, maybe I think we ought to think about our own homegrown Marxists and socialists. And when he has accused MSNBC and its parent network, NBC, of treason, because of they’ve had unfavorable coverage of him.

The repeated comment that he makes that I think is very telling in his campaign rallies — which are really hate rallies — he says: “I will be your retribution.” Your retribution, that’s a very violent word. It means vengeance, it means pay back. When Michael Reinoehl was on the run and was killed by a Trumpist, federal Fugitive Task Force in the late summer of 2020 in the Northwest outside Portland — Michael Reinoehl had, under circumstances that aren’t completely clear, killed a fascist street thug — I’m not embracing violence — in Portland, during all the Black Lives protests there. He was on the run and the Fugitive Task Force was sent to get him and killed him without questioning him. It was essentially an extra judicial assassination, really. Trump’s comment about it was “retribution.”

Retribution, that’s a very powerful word, and he used it. As David Remnick said in The New Yorker recently, these are Trump’s bloody campaign promises, and they’re very consistent with the Trump administration. None of this should be taken lightly at all. This is not just bloviating, this is a guy who wanted the Department of Defense to send the troops to crush the George Floyd rebellion bloodily in the streets. He said to his Defense Secretary at that time, a guy named Esper, he said: “Can’t we just shoot them? Can’t we just at least shoot them in the legs?”

I don’t know, a lot of liberals and moderates just seem to be sleepwalking about all of this. There’s the normal electoral thing where we’re all conditioned to think that our politics only matters, that we can do anything, for those two minutes in voting booths every four years. But I think it’s reinforced too, by all the trials. How many? There’s 91 indictments against Trump, plus the civil trials over rape and the civil trials over fraudulent business practices. So he’s in court so much, it’s just reinforcing the sense that the system is working, and it’s taking care of them. Guess what, folks, he’s the runaway GOP nominee, and nobody else is coming close.

It seems almost completely inevitable he is going to be their nominee. He’s running ahead of Biden, or at least matched up with him in all the matchup polls, almost a year before. Biden’s popularity levels are in the death zone. His approval numbers are in the 30s the year before the presidential election. That is typically a death knell; that’s Jimmy Carter territory. And a tie under the American electoral college system goes to the Republican because the electoral college is, which is an archaic institution, which goes back to the slave owners’ constitution from the late 18th century. A tie goes to the Republican, so this guy, right now, the betting money is he could get in there. He could get in there and kill the federal prosecutions against him.

Some people still cling to: Well, he can’t pardon himself out of the state prosecution in Georgia. If this guy gets elected to the White House, and he’s president, he would easily and clearly nullify. There’s just no way in hell, the Supreme Court would let the state… What? The state of Georgia is gonna deploy their own national guard and send them up to DC and take out President Donald Trump [chuckles] and bring him to a Georgia prison? I don’t think so. It’s not gonna happen.

The sleepwalking that we’re doing, and thinking we’re all okay because the normal rule of law and electoral institutions will save us, is pretty dangerous thinking right now, and people better start thinking another way. They’d better start thinking about what the hell they’re gonna do when this guy gets elected again, and what our resistance is going to look like. We better start building our resistance right now, and it can’t just be about elections and lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

Sam Goldman

Yeah, especially when he has gone after every judge, every witness. This is not just Trump being Trump, as it so easily gets dismissed by. Well, it is Trump being Trump, but it’s not only Trump. There’s a logic to this and there’s a trajectory that it’s going on, that wishing it was different, hoping that it goes back to the days before Trump… That America, which was part of bringing Trump to the fore anyway, is incredibly dangerous.

In addition to him remaining the Republican front runner by miles, the fact that he’s not banned or prevented from continuing his campaign, he’s also backed up and defended by, as you talked about earlier in our conversation, a thoroughly fascist GOP and escalating threats of violence that extend from the top and people in power across state houses across the country, but also a legion of followers who are armed to the teeth and gunning for civil wars. What you’re saying makes a lot of sense, and yet is very different from what people are being told.

Paul Street 25:43

The comments about deporting Marxists and all of that, I take that very seriously. I take that stuff quite personally, but we would not be the first targets. One of the things fascism does is eliminate the other party; it goes after the other party that has any real power, and that means Democrats. This incitement of political violence is one of the really key and defining aspects of fascist movements and of fascist politics. I think you’re absolutely right to mention the gun thing.

One of the many reasons to take this shit really seriously, particularly in the U.S. context, is that there are 125 weapons in circulation for every 100 Americans. There is no other country anywhere that comes remotely close to that, and those arms are disproportionately owned by folks on the right. I am so happy that before — and I forgot to mention this — you mentioned the remarkable quote about how Trump recently said, talking to one of the more far right Christian fascist groups that he cultivates, he said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our nation.” That is one of the most explicitly fascist things that I’ve heard Trump say. And that’s saying a hell of a lot, because he said a whole lot of fascist stuff.

But that’s extraordinary. “Poisoning the blood of our country.” I mean, that is that’s right out of Mein Kampf. That is blood and soil. I mentioned that in relation to Biden, because in the speech that he gave recently, in Tempe, Arizona, he went off on this whole American exceptionalist rant about what a great country we are, and we were founded on an idea, never in connection with any notion of blood and soil, which is, in many ways, just incorrect. But here we are with the living embodiment of the blood-and-soil-ism of American manifest destiny. It’s deeply synergistic with fascism and there’s a lot in American history that inspired classic historical fascism. And here’s Trump saying that kind of stuff. That’s an extraordinary comment, that he would say that.

Sam Goldman 27:31

I did want to talk a little bit about that speech that you had mentioned, because there are some really intense takes about how that was the best speech that Biden ever delivered. It was the absolute defense of American democracy, and it is Joe Biden, that is single handedly going to stop the fascist threat. There’s multiple big pieces on this right now. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack. We’re not going to do it all today, but Biden gave a speech at — let’s just say where the speech was — it was at the John McCain institute in Arizona.

He essentially said that Trump threatens U.S. democracy. He called out some of the real awful things that Trump has done and said and represents. And he used that to go straight into talking about: If Trump destroys our democracy, then the U.S. won’t be able to, “Lead the world,” aka, in my opinion, act as the top dog imperialist. If the U.S. democracy goes down, then other imperialists, like China or Russia could have more influence. I just think that it’s really important that we understand that this is their concern with opposing fascism. But your latest piece talks about why our concern has to come from a different place. I was wondering if you could talk some about that?

Paul Street 29:02

Well, it was a hell of a speech. You know, he just can’t express enough love for John McCain, who, along with Joe and is supposedly a beacon to the world with the way life should be the homeland and headquarters of freedom, both Joe and John, great friends going back to the 60s, voted in the fall of 2002 in the U.S. Senate to let George Bush imperialistically and quite undemocratically, invade Iraq if George W. Bush wanted to. And guess what? George Bush wanted to, and they did it, and a million people died.

The speech was just loaded with American exceptionalism: the reference to the United States as the indispensable nation, the beacon to the world and, and he pitches our democracy off of our Constitution. Briefly, Biden, when speaking to donors last year, was able to call Trumpism at least “semi-fascism.” And he won’t even do that anymore; now he just says MAGA Republicans and he stops there. Even when he said it last year, it was only to elite donors.

This notion that we’re some sort of great democracy is just utterly preposterous in, I suppose, ways that we’ve talked about before, there are about 85 different examples I could give you of policy being implemented without any democracy in complete violation of majority opinion. I mean, just bing bing, bing, you go down through the issues, and there’s just massive empirical research not just by leftists, or Marxists, like myself, but by mainstream liberal political scientists like Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern and it’s to link our democracy to our Constitution, which is this profoundly authoritarian and anti democratic institution, including the Electoral College, which is just openly undemocratic; the absurdly powerful and malaportioned Senate, which is just openly anti democratic; the appointed for life, God-like Supreme Court, which is monumentally anti democratic; state’s rights going back to the slave owner and merchant capitalist Gentry origin, this country, with a charter drafted by merchant capitalists and planters and publicists for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare.

He’s just going on and on about this constitution. Biden talks about how terrible it is that Trump is attacking this constitution, when in fact Trump is enabled by this constitution; he’s deeply enabled by it, and the minority rule Republi-fascist, white nationalist movement is over empowered far beyond its numbers precisely by this constitution, — among other things, but precisely by the Electoral College, precisely by the malapportioned Senate, precisely by the gerrymandering that is all too allowed under the Constitution, and precisely by this far right wing Supreme Court, which is advancing the fascist agenda in reproductive rights and voting rights, in college admissions policies and more.

So, there’s just this absurdity about it. And wrapped into the whole speech, of course, was Biden’s notion that Trump and Trumpism, and neo-fascism — he can’t call it fascism, what he calls MAGA Republicanism — are some sort of wild aberration, that have absolutely nothing to do with American history; they’re completely outside American history — which is just false. It’s just false. The forces of white nationalism, the forces of fundamentalism, the forces of conspiratorialism, the forces of political violence, and all of this stuff that was greatly inspirational to Hitler — just read Mein Kampf, he named his wartime train, Hitler did, America, because he wanted to mimic the segregation laws and the manifest destiny, and he wanted his eastward expansion from Berlin to Moscow and Leningrad to mimic the American western expansion from the East Coast, taking over Mexico and all of that. I think I lost your question, Sam, it was something about how we understand it and oppose it.

Sam Goldman 32:56

Yeah, their concern being maintaining order, including order in terms of world power and dominance, and how we oppose fascism from a very different place that’s gone into some in your in your latest piece on Substack. [PS: Right, right] I was wondering if there was there was anything along those lines that you wanted to speak to?

Paul Street 33:17

So, you do see some horror with Trump’s latest comments. A really good example of that is Remnick’s piece in The New Yorker. Remnick is a very good writer. He’s a very sharp guy. It’s titled: Trump’s bloody campaign promises. And he’s right, these are campaign promises, all this shit he’s saying right now; this is the future. But then he ends up praising Biden. It’s the limits of liberalism and the liberal worldview; all we can do is we can hope that Biden gets reelected. And he seems to sense some sort of anti-authoritarian aspect to Biden.

What’s missing here and what’s missing from a lot of our liberal friends, is any understanding of the systemic and the structural material historical underpinnings of why fascism has happened in this country, and where it comes from. If you ask me, if you really get down to it, not only do we at Refuse Fascism say voting isn’t enough, there was a moment where we realized that the way we wanted him out, which is through mass action in the streets hadn’t happened. We made an effort at that. We tried that. I was in some very impressive marches and mobilizations to remove Trump the way the Puerto Ricans had removed Ricky Rossello; through mass action and destabilization in the street.

So okay, this guy is so freakin dangerous, we’ve got to vote him out. Because there’ll be some breathing room, there’ll be some breathing space. Well, he did get voted out. Trump denies it and tens of millions of Americans unfortunately believe him that the election was stolen. Not a whole hell of a lot has happened. Our hope was there would be some breathing space to form the types of social movements that would not have just removed Trump, but have made a whole new political statement to the political class and to the nation to change the terms of politics in this country; you do really right wing dangerous ecocidal crap, we’ll shut this place down — with a vision beyond.

We need a vision beyond normative quadrennial elections and so called rule of law. I think that the Biden years are really very instructive and very educational and pedagogically useful in that we got him voted out and look where we are, right now. Well, fascism doesn’t just come from bad voting decisions. Fascism is fundamentally rooted in the nature of the system we’re living in. Capitalism tends towards it in my opinion. I think fascism grows out of capitalism, particularly in its later phases of crisis because capitalism regularly and routinely by its very authoritarian and power centralizing nature, delegitimizes the very idea of democracy that it cloaks itself with. It regularly trumps majority public opinion on one issue after another.

There is this fundamental contradiction between concentrated wealth and power on one hand, and one person one vote and democracy on the other. Louis Brandeis was right. The old Supreme Court justices said: You’ve got to choose, you can have wealth concentrated in a few hands, or you can have democracy, but you can’t have both at the same time. Now Brandeis was a liberal, so he thought policy could be jiggered in such a way as to stop that concentration of wealth. No. The concentration of wealth and power and on a global scale, incidentally, and the imperialism that grows out of that and the competition between your capitalist country and other countries, those are the inherent characteristics of the system. It delegitimizes democracy.

At the same time capitalism regularly produces various crises of different kinds; economic crises, boom and bust, but now particularly in our time that we’re living on the planet, it’s environmental crisis — with all kinds of collateral resulting epidemiological crises and economic crisis and economic. So it constantly generates crisis that require big government intervention at the same time that it’s it’s delegitimizing and rendering inauthentic democratic promises from allegedly liberal politicians like Obama, or Clinton, or Biden, thereby opening the space for the fascist leaders who say I alone can fix it.

Those fascist leaders still need popular support from enough of the population to play their game and to pull off their power seizures both through parliamentary and extra parliamentary kinds of ways. So they do need to make certain populist kinds of outreaches, but under the rules of capitalism, that’s not going to be to the proletarian majority, it’s going to be around very revanchist backward reactionary kinds of sources of identity like nationhood, palingenetic ultranationalism, make our country great again, patriarchy, an obsession with borders and all of that kind of stuff.

They play this game of divide and rule. The fascist is not anti capitalist, fascism actually upholds and worships private wealth. It’s not going to attack them, so it’s deeply invested in its own particular way, in racial and ethnic and gender oppression and divide and rule. These are ultimately the types of things that we’re going to have to confront if we want to make this problem go away. Then there’s the international dimension too, of the struggle between different capitalist states, which is constant fuel for the ultranationalist xenophobia that is a central part of fascism.

Anybody on the Trumpenleft who thinks that Trump’s not an imperialist or that this movement is not imperialist is just smoking something; they’re just living in a dream world. Trump did more drone attacks in his four years than Obama did. He threatened war. He damn near provoked a full on war with Iran. It’s kind of amazing that he didn’t. He’s very serious about attacking our direct proximate southern neighbor, Mexico, and if he gets in, there will be military incursions into Mexico. He nuclear terrorized China and North Korea repeatedly.

Let’s not for a second pretend that Trump’s not an imperialist. He’s an ultra-militarist; he wants to fight wars. But the way to resist fascism is not just by trying to vote it out. Particularly under the American system where we don’t even have one person, one vote. That alone is massively inadequate; voting. And dreaming about lawsuits and prosecutions as the answer is also monumentally inadequate. Who wouldn’t want to see Trump locked up and thrown in jail? Of course, I want that, but these fall in painfully and egregiously short of the kind of presence that we need to defeat fascism, but also to create the presence in the streets, the presence in the public squares, the presence in the culture more broadly, that we need in the streets, and the public squares and the broader political culture, not just to defeat fascism, but to go further and create a new way of living and a new kind of society — which to me is socialism — that really does sweep fascism as a menace and as a threat into Karl Marx’s proverbial dustbin of history.

Because if we don’t create a new type of society, it will constantly rear its head. Even though the more liberal sections, I think, of the American ruling class have a kind of interest in it still hanging on, and it still being out there. Even while they don’t want it to actually hold governing power, it’s useful as a foil to have all these revanchist ideas out there, and unfortunately empowered, because then you get to run against it. Then you get to see the whole system, even your party, the whole system tilts further to the right, and more to the unmitigated advantage of capital.

Sam Goldman 40:39

I wonder what gives you hope in this moment, how do you keep going, hear all this and feel like it’s all destined to be just horror after horror headed towards unspeakable horror?

Paul Street 40:56

On one level, it’s almost like a spiritual thing. There’s an existential sort of commitment to changing the world, whatever the odds are. I’ve spent a lot of my writing, it’s not about the crystal ball. Let’s say the chances of transformation are two in ten. Why in the hell bring them down to zero in ten by giving up in advance? This is sort of the radical left, the left wing version of Pascal’s bargain, you know, the medieval monk who said: You lose nothing by believing in God, but you lose everything, by not believing in god. So, one is just that sort of existential commitment.

I think secondarily, a really good way to retain hope is to actually participate in movements, even when they’re small. Because you really see — it’s extraordinary, I saw this when I was teaching too — I was always amazed at how there was always, in a class, a cadre — it wasn’t as big as I want it to be — there’s always five to ten kids who really got it, who hung around and talked after the lectures and wanted to be part of movements. Become part of movements, and you do see people undergo transformations.

I was very inspired by my participation recently in the protests against Jason Aldean, the fascist country singer. A bunch of us, and we weren’t masses, but 25 of us, 30 of us, I don’t know, went down to Tinley Park and protested. We got right in the middle of these fascist faces that were all for this Klan song, you know, this lynch mob song, Try that in a Small Town. And there are some youth from the Southside of Chicago and just to see them go through that experience of actually confronting the right wing and the solidarity that they built. You do see people transform and movements through their interactions with each other and through their confrontation with the state.

There’s also, I think, the way this paralysis is going on right now, between the polarized parties and the populace is very historically interesting in terms of what it suggests about the possibility for real transformation. You often see this prior to moments of transformation. You see splits within the elite. Right now we have an epic split within the populace, but also within the elites, between those who are still clinging to what’s left of what’s called democracy — which I would call bourgeois democracy, but — previously normative decades and decades of bourgeois parliamentary rule of law and electoral democracy of the type where, when you lose an election, you go home; you honor the outcomes of elections. And then, on the other hand, a whole wing of the elite and significant tens of millions of people in the populace now have gone the other way, and they can’t get anything done. That’s very delegitimizing for people in it. It’s gonna cause all kinds of problems. It’s not going away anytime soon.

It’s an opening, I think it’s an opening for a different pole, a different potential leadership to come to the fore, to say: Look, this polarization is the wrong polarization, we need to think about the polarization between the whole system at the elite level, and everyone else; the underlying structural and institutional system that’s given rise to this epic and now lethal dysfunction, and think about fundamental structural transformation in how we organize our society and our political lives. If bourgeois democracy is fading, and I think this might be the case, I think we might be in late bourgeois democracy in this country, then we’re going to need some other kind of intervention. It’s going to have to be a real kind of movement that actually would reflect the interests of the majority of the people in the country and in the world.

Sam Goldman 41:45

Thanks so much, Paul, for taking the time to chat with me, to share your insight, your perspective, your expertise, and of course, your time. It’s always good to talk with you, especially in these dark times, to have someone to help us sift through this madness, if you will. We’re gonna put a link to your latest piece that’s up on your Substack. And we encourage folks to go to PaulStreet.Substack.com, to sign up, to subscribe, to stay connected to Paul in his writing and to engage with his work. Is there anything else, Paul, that we didn’t talk about that you wanted to mention or other projects that you’re working on that you wanted to let people know about?

Paul Street 45:26

My Substack is called the Paul Street report, and I usually have a piece on every Monday and every Thursday, sometimes on a Friday. And occasionally, I take my recorder over to the piano and write a crazy song. That’s just for paid subscribers though.

Sam Goldman 45:39

Awesome. Thanks, Paul.

Paul Street 45:41

You bet.

Sam Goldman 45:43

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