The institutions Still Won’t Save Us

The Institutions Still Won’t Save Us

Refuse Fascism Episode 189

Sun, Feb 11, 2024 3:24PM • 48:02

Paul Street 00:00

They want to remove any political opposition whatsoever. This thing in 2016, where Trump was sort of pinching himself and couldn’t believe he was elected and was sort of astonished that he was able to have all these kinds of establishment Republican and some centrist types of policy wonks and experts and generals and so forth around him, that’s over this time. That’s done. It’s like you must be obedient to the Dear Leader or you’re not on this team, and they’re drawing up huge plans to make sure that’s the case, as well as huge plans for deportations, for full on eco-fascism, for taking over the military, and we could go on and on and on.

Sam Goldman 00:55

Welcome to Episode 189 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. I’ve been battling a sinus infection for most of this week, so we’re going to go straight to sharing an interview that I did yesterday with Paul Street.

But before we do that, I want to take a second to thank our patrons and sustainers who make this show possible. If you aren’t one yet, and want to help us increase the reach of this resource. Join our Patreon community today. Donate for as little as $2 a month and learn about the perks over at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism. Or, if you can’t make the commitment right now, we get it, make a one time gift over at RefuseFascism.org, and hit the donate button.

In what we could be referring to as a recurring segment entitled ‘No saviors but ourselves’ or ‘Why the institutions still won’t save us’, I am delighted to bring my friend, your friend, Paul Street, back on. Paul is no stranger to regular listeners of the pod. He is a historian, author, frequent guest of the show and fellow Refuse Fascism Editorial Board member. He’s got a Substack that we hope you are subscribed to already, The Paul Street Report. Hey, Paul, how’s it going?

Paul Street 02:40

It’s going all right. It’s good.

Sam Goldman 02:42

Let’s jump into it with what, right now, about the fascist threat is sticking out to you? What does your mind keep going back to? What do you think people should be paying attention to that they might not be?

Paul Street 02:58

Well, of course, I don’t know entirely what everyone was paying attention to, but you know, it’s the full heil Hitler tilt of Trump’s rhetoric. Actually, even surprising me. I wrote a whole book about his first term and his initial campaign and how horrific and fascistic his actions and his rhetoric were, and yet I’m a little taken aback by him saying that we need to root out the vermin, and then he specifies communists, Marxists and socialists. This is classic Hitler rhetoric. This is like something out of Mein Kampf. When he says Marxist, communists, and socialists, bare in mind that Trump absurdly and falsely conflates the Democratic Party in general with the radical left.

So, those of us who do have backgrounds in Marxism and socialism and communism are just like: Huh? You think Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are radical leftists? Are you serious? But he means that. They mix all those up, and they would go after — they do want to go after all their political enemies. When he says we’re gonna root out the Marxist vermin, he really does mean he wants to have retaliation against, retribution against, and defeat all of his political opponents. But pay attention to the specification of radicals too. That’s a big deal. I take that kind of personally.

There’s that rhetoric, that utter, really bold, just flat out Hitlerian thing I’ve heard Trump say recently is that immigrants — and let’s be very clear, he does specify non white immigrants — non white immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. That is also Mein Kampf. That is Hitlerian rhetoric. That is blood and soil, eugenicist, sexual anxiety about pollution of our supposedly pure white Volk, Amerikaaner bloodstream. That is absolutely horrific. I guess he recently spoken in, was it Pennsylvania, claiming that on his first day or once he’s in office, he will undertake the biggest deportation operation in American history — which is clearly a reference to rounding up so called illegals — brown skinned people, immigrants from South and Central America and putting him in great big concentration camps. We know from his policy network and his campaign’s policy documents that they do have plans for an unprecedented expansion of — really what amount to concentration camps.

This is what they’re talking about. He has called for the extrajudicial assassination of suspected shoplifters. He has said that his former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley should maybe have been executed for having warned China that, no, Trump is not going to launch nuclear weapons at you after January 6th. The argument that the Trump legal team made before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the claim that he has full, absolute immunity for anything he’s done — unless he was previously impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate for it.

The judge actually pressed the Trump lawyer and said, does that mean that you think Trump could send out SEAL Team Six and kill one of his political opponents, if he’d have immunity from that crime? [In mocking voice] Unless you’ve been previously impeached by the house and convicted by the Senate? The lawyer said yes. His lawyer said yes! Does that mean the Trump campaign thinks that Joe Biden can send out SEAL Team Six to kill Donald Trump and they have absolute immunity from it? This just divine right of kings for the Fuhrer type of shit. That’s strong man 101. That is just absolutely horrific.

The judge in the [E.] Jean Carroll case, the recent $83.3 million lawsuit victory that she won, had to tell the jurors: Make sure that nobody knows that you sat on this jury and knows your name. What does that mean? Well, that’s like New York City bosses. [Judges] used to have to say to juries that had shut down Big Five Italian mafia family bosses — don’t let them know. What that means is that Trump will encourage, and has backers that will kill you, and maybe members of your family and all that. That’s pretty straight up fascist shift. This is really extraordinary stuff. I’m even a little surprised myself. This border thing in Texas, which maybe we’ll talk about more, is really quite extraordinary.

The last couple of months I’ve been away from cable TV, so I don’t know what’s going on on CNN and MSNBC, but I’ve been following the New York Times and The Washington Post, and I’m surprised that there isn’t more coverage of this, just abject neo-fascistic, nativist defiance of the White House. Even as the Texas military department, comprised of the Texas National Guard and the Texas Rangers, is literally physically, militarily denying U.S. Border Patrol access to a big swath of the southern U.S. border, and literally calling into question to sovereignty of the federal government over border control — which is reminiscent of the 1831 Nullification Crisis by the slave owning elite of South Carolina.

It’s reminiscent of Fort Sumter and secession. It’s reminiscent of the Little Rock crisis in 1957, when their, then right wing, racist Governor, Orville Faubus — mispronouncing his name, I’m sure — had to be compelled by Eisenhower, physically, to allow the desegregation of Little Rock public schools as ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s an extraordinary development, and I’m surprised it’s not getting more coverage — as all this kind of shit, this is just sort of extraordinary stuff, this defiance in this physicality, and this vindictiveness, and this talk of retribution, and this open racism, and he’s calling for concentration camps, and promises to respond to political opposition with flat out violence.

While that’s going on, the media, by and large, seems to be now in quadrennial election year, horse race mode — candidate centered with the smiley faces on PBS coming in and talking about the polls and the data here. And then, it’s like: Wait a minute, one of these candidates is a flat out freaking neo-Nazi. He had a whole fascistic presidency. He tried to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral, parliamentary and rule of law democracy. And now he’s back again, and your piss poll says this, and that poll says that, and it might go this way, and it might, it might go that way.

Sure, you’re gonna get some very smart, progressive and liberal scholars of fascism like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Jason Stanley, and some other people that you’ve interviewed, and that are friends of the show, and of Refuse Fascism, will probably come on MSNBC, maybe they’ll come on Joy Reid, maybe they’ll come on Chris Hayes, and even then, they never really quite sit with it, and get deeply into exactly what fascism means, and how it could happen here, and how it’s rooted in our underlying history and social institutions — the overall trend is towards a horse race. That’s very chilling.

Sam Goldman 09:35

It’s chilling to me as well, and I know too many of our listeners too. I’ve just been thinking a lot about how open and clear the fascism is. And you alluded to a lot of that and what you were talking about. You have the horror of everything he says, every time he opens his mouth, from the mass deportations day one, the dictator day one, the poisoning the blood of our country type language. You have his plans — and the plans not just of Trump and those immediately around him, but of a whole legal team, a whole professional… lawyers and policy wonks alike who want to install fascist rule, whether it’s Trump or whoever. They have a blueprint for fascist consolidation that is not secret at all. You can go on, you can read it.

This isn’t hidden. And here’s where I’m like: What is going on with people? You have the four years that Trump spent in the White House and his whole rolling coup that preceded January 6th. Then then you have that the violent insurrection. I am struggling with, like: Is it just good old American historical amnesia that people don’t want to remember something so awful? Or what is behind people underestimating just how dangerous a Trump return would be? [PS: yeah] And just how possible that is?

Paul Street 11:12

This is different than 2016, when he sort of had the Mercers — the very rich, right wing Mercers, who had hired Steve Bannon, who is a international fascist propagandists — and Bannon whispering in his ear, and later became Stephen Miller and this vague kind of white nationalism infecting his brain — which didn’t take much because he was already kind of there because he’s such a racist and a patriarchal monster in the first place.

This time around, he’s co-opted the great lion’s preponderance share of the so-called establishment Republican policy infrastructure. You’re absolutely right, the Heritage Foundation has spearheaded and collaborated with more than 80 other Republican policy shops to create this massive blueprint — which is hilarious, they said they want to take down the deep state, and then when you read it — what’s it called, Project 2025? — no, they want to take over the deep state and become the deep state. They wanted to remove any political opposition whatsoever.

This thing in 2016, where Trump was sort of pinching himself and couldn’t believe he was elected and was sort of astonished that he was able to have all these, kind of, establishment Republican and some centrist types of policy wonks and experts and generals and so forth around him, that’s over this time, that’s done. It’s like you must be obedient to the Dear Leader or you’re not on this team. And they’re drawing up huge plans to make sure that’s the case, as well as huge plans for deportations for full on eco-fascism, for taking over the military — to attack the cities and to use federal troops to assault blue regions.

Even I am sort of shocked by some of the levels of where the rhetoric has gone, but it really shouldn’t be all that surprising. People need to remember, this is a president, who from the very beginning, even in his first election would not promise to honor the outcome if Hillary Clinton won. He announced his initial campaign with an all out neofascist nativist assault on Mexico and Mexican people. As president, this guy told U.S. Border Patrol agents he’d pardon them if they shot migrants. And as President, this guy said he wanted to electrify the southern border. And as president, this guy referred to African countries and Haiti as “shithole countries” and complained that we get migrants from them, and then asked how can we can’t have more migrants from white, Scandinavian, Nordic, Norway.

It was whack-a-mole trying to keep up with all the fascism of Trump. I mean, he pardoned a sadistic racist war criminal and tried to make a hero out of him — a guy named Eddie Gallagher. That’s a very underestimated aspect of the Trump presidency. He embraced Kyle Rittenhouse after Kyle Rittenhouse slaughtered two people in a Black Lives Matter rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He campaigned, on his very last night of the 2020 election, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in honor of Kyle Rittenhouse — his fascistic act. So the first Presidency was really awful, and it shouldn’t be surprising. The denial about, it or the weirdness about it, I think there’s always a strong dose of American exceptionalist, “It can’t happen here”-ism. There’s just a denial about it.

The New York Times had a piece recently, based on polling data, that was really interesting. Neither side, on either the Republican side or the Democratic side of the people they polled, could actually believe that the other side is actually going to run the guy that they’re clearly going to run. There may be more basis for their belief on their side than there is on the Democrats. The Republicans are just convinced: Oh, they’re gonna pull a fast one, they’re not really going to go with 81 year old Joe. He’s too old. He’s on the way out. They’ll do something. They’re gonna to pull a fix at the convention. They’re not really gonna run Biden. Well, they’re probably gonna run Biden.

The Democrats — the majority of them in the poll — are in denial that Trump will actually be on the ballot. And the main thing, the main sticking point for them, seems to be they think the legal system is going to take him down. They believe in the courts and constitution. They believe that this Colorado thing will work. They believe that Jack Smith will cripple him. They just can’t process that. I’ve been writing about how courts and constitutions are probably not gonna take him down — how they’re failing.

I think that’s probably one of the really central aspects of this continuing, lingering faith in the power of the ballot, and a continuing lingering faith in the power of the legal system. There’s just this kind of clinging to the establishment bourgeois electoral, parliamentary and legal, rule of law institutions. There’s just a disbelief that they might actually be disappearing or getting irreversibly crippled, and even sort of destroyed, in our lifetimes. We just can’t sort of see that happening, but maybe it is.

Sam Goldman 15:45

A big topic is that this week, the Supreme Court has signaled that they’ll be ruling in Trump’s favor on the Colorado ballot case. They don’t want to be the ones that “set events in motion” for what we all know is a legitimacy crisis. But it appears that the ship has sailed already on that, and it’s just a matter of time before it hits some rocks. Can you talk a little bit about this case, but most importantly, what this crisis and the different scenarios you see playing out because of it.

Paul Street 16:16

There’s so much illegitimacy already that it’s hard to know where to start. We know that Clarence Thomas and other Justices receive gifts from billionaire donors that have vested interests in court decisions. We know that Trump should have been convicted for insurrection by the U.S. Senate in January of 2021, and that many Republicans wanted to do that to bring him across the two thirds threshold, but failed to do so partly out of fear of retribution — and not just political retribution, physical retribution. We know this from Mitt Romney’s memoir. How fascist is that? They couldn’t do their constitutional duty to convict this guy — which, by the way, would have made it illegal for him — then he couldn’t run again — if you’re convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors by the U.S. Senate after being impeached by the House.

We know that the Dobbs decision, that took away the half century constitutional women’s right to an abortion, was an absolutely illegitimate ruling that rejected stare decisis; the principle that you don’t undo a constitutional precedent without evidence of some major significant societal transformation or a big huge change in public opinion — there was no change in public opinion — two thirds of the population wanted Roe to stay in place, and yet they went ahead and did it anyway. We know that that court was, in many ways, illegitimately appointed by a president who didn’t win the popular vote, and I could go on and on about how the Electoral College works, how the Supreme Court appointments happen, and the nature of the U.S. Senate, which approves Supreme Court appointments, which is ridiculously mal-apportioned, and massively over-represents the most revanchist and reactionary parts of the country, because of how the Constitution gives two senators to every state, regardless of what the size of their population.

We know that the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, just took a ridiculously absurd long amount of time to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Trump for January 6th. It’s just idiotic. It’s just preposterous. It’s illegitimate. What the hell were you thinking? January 6th, select committee report and hearings in 2022 laid this whole thing out. This guy should have been taken to court on the charge among other charges of insurrection, and they didn’t do that. They refused to make the insurrection charge. On and on and on, there’s just all these failures and these illegitimacies, and these comings up short. And now the court system is in with cases against Trump that liberals are clinging to, believing like a cargo cult that this is going to save them from a second Trump presidency. Now they’re in a time squeeze, and it seems entirely possible that there won’t be verdicts until after Trump gets reelected, whereupon he rapidly ends the investigations, ends the cases, and nullifies the state cases against him with ease — he’ll have no problem doing that.

Liberals tell me: Well, he can’t stop the state cases. Of course he can. He absolutely can. He doesn’t have to honor them. And one of the big things people have been clinging to is this Colorado case: We’re gonna keep them off the ballot at the state level on 14th amendment grounds. At one level, the case seems to have a lot of merit. The 14th amendment is clear: If you have participated in a insurrection — and I’m sorry, anyone reads the January 6th Select Committee report, you just read its executive summary, shows it was an insurrection — a many sided rolling coup that turned into an out and out physical assault on the U.S. Capitol, meant to black the certification of Joe Biden as President and to create a state of emergency and martial law, into which Trump would have dreamed, and his team dreamed, that he’d be able to send in the military, seize voting machines and re-hold the election. It was an attempted coup d’etat with mass participation.

Trump wanted Three Percenters and Oathkeepers and Proud Boys to be able to carry a AR-15s into a physical assault. “Take down the metal detectors”, he said, “let them in”, “they don’t want to hurt me”, ~”they want to shoot Nancy Pelosi, they want to shoot Mike Pence”. So it wasn’t insurrection. The Colorado case seems to make sense. The 14th amendment passed after the Civil War says you can’t hold public office again after participating in an insurrection, and it was an insurrection. The arguments back against them from this right wing Supreme Court, against Colorado trying to ban Trump, really seem disingenuous, stupid and transparently on Trump’s side, against common sense — against basic legal common sense.

Sam Goldman 20:55

I will chime in, Paul, just to say that I’m not gonna make predictions, but there are a lot of legal scholars who have warned people to not be surprised that it is likely to be a 9-0 decision.

Paul Street 21:08

Oh, really, so the Liberals are on board.

Sam Goldman 21:10

And if you listen to the questions, and why I’m saying that, is it was It wasn’t just the usual suspects. It wasn’t just Thomas and Alito and [PS: Kavanaugh] Kavanaugh and gang that were seeming like: Maybe this officer’s point kind of had a good idea. Maybe we don’t want states to be able to individually be carrying out the 14th amendment. There was a lot of, like, acceptance that I think surprised people.

Paul Street 21:37

It’s also Ketanji Brown [Jackson] and Kagan, and well, yeah, absolutely.

Sam Goldman 21:42

Well, there’s a possibility, I think that, for instance, Sotomayor would be the one. Again, I don’t get into those kinds of numbers questions.

Paul Street 21:49

You’re absolutely right. So the arguments against it, I’m just struck by how bizarre they seem. One of the arguments against Colorado is that: Well, he’s allowed to run, but he can’t sit in office. Can you imagine if he’s allowed to run and then he wins, but then they tell him, he can’t sit in the office? All hell break loose. It would really mean that he has to be able to not run. Congress can ban him, but the states can’t? There’s an argument I heard against it. Really, what’s that?

The U.S. federal system dedicates a lot of ballot making power to the states, and it has forever. It’s it’s not a Congressional matter. The 14th Amendment says Congress can give amnesty by a two thirds vote to banning him from the thing. That’s in the 14th Amendment. So that’s where Congress could step in, that’s right. And I think this was from Kagan, you know, not one of the far right wing people: Well, if this goes through, then one single state can cancel a whole national candidacy. I don’t follow that. It was Colorado trying to ban Trump from Colorado ballot. Then other states would try and ban Trump from their state ballots.

There’s no state that’s able to dictate what goes on in other states. Colorado can’t kick Trump off the Illinois ballot. Colorado can’t kick Trump off the Alabama or the New York ballot. Really, the one that really got me is, I think, Roberts, the Chief Justice said: Well, this could lead to a situation where presidential elections are determined by just a few states because democratic states are kicking Trump off and republican states will start kicking Biden off of their ballot and then we’ll just have a small handful of states — presumably Roberts must mean states that kicked off neither — determining… And then we’re gonna have elections determined by just a few states.

That’s what we have as a system right now, where presidential elections, preposterously, come down to just six or seven states. It’s called the electoral college, and it’s ridiculous. Was it Roberts? I don’t remember which one said that if this goes through, that would mean that the southern secessionist Confederate States after they were readmitted to the Union, after the Civil War, would be able to block a Republican presidential candidate from being on the ballot. And I’m like: What? No, it doesn’t. Not unless they could show that that candidate had engaged in insurrection, as is banned under the 14th amendment. It’s just not true.

When you see this kind of coming together of these kinds of dubious, illogical kinds of arguments, it really makes you think that they’re just politically, illegitimately reaching to shoot this down. And, by the way, that’s what many of us predicted. Do you really think this largely Trump appointed court was going to keep Donald Trump off the presidential ballot? Are you serious? I think Samantha, you’re absolutely right, and thank you for making a bit more about that. What’s surprising about it is that it could be 9-0, and how participatory the Democrats were in the kind of questioning and commenting that leads one to think it could really be a unanimous decision or 8-1, maybe Sotomayor will hold out.

Sam Goldman 22:40

We’ve talked about this on the show a lot. There’s this constant pull, that isn’t just a spontaneous pull. It’s something that people are corralled into. There’s this magic bullet, there’s this case, and then this case, and then this method for accountability, and then that method for accountability, and it’s all going to work out. There’s never a need to fight. There’s never a need for struggle. There’s never a need for panic. We’ve got this, there’s a grand plan here, and we’re going to be all good.

Sometimes you’re just looking at a pile of shit and being told that it’s a pile of gold. It’s frightening how long this has played out, where people are celebrating something that can only be described as a absolute loss in the immediate aftermath of people coming to see: Oh, he is gonna stay on the ballot, but, oh, we’ll still have the other D.C. case about the immunity, we still have that case. And we still have this other case, and it’s gonna work out. Then it will be: Uh, the election, that will be the real accountability.

Paul Street 25:55

It’s all been pushed smack dab back into the middle of the election season, and the polling data looks terrible for Biden, and it’s distinctly possible that he’ll get in and be able to cancel all of this, and then nullify the state cases against him. And of course, he’s got a legal defense team. I’m so tired of liberals calling the Trumpies and the Trump team stupid. They’re playing the game the best way they can, and he’s got a shit ton of money diverted from his political campaigns, going over to pay for his legal campaign. I don’t even know if that’s legal.

An expert on campaign finance law can tell us about that. The game is delay, delay, delay. This was always his game. This was his game in the private sector. He’s carrying it over into the public sector. This belief in this this magical fix out there somewhere. It’s like, I saw a New York Times report recently on how they’re going to build giant sunscreens in outer space to black the sun, and so we don’t really have to worry about reducing carbon emissions, we can just kind of wait for ‘Dr. Science’ to fix that one. [chuckles]

Sam Goldman 26:49

I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about the Democratic Party side of what you, in your writing, define as part of the ruling class. These are the ones who people look to, and expect to lead resistance to fascism in this country. From Al Gore conceding to Bush “for the sake of national unity” after the Supreme Court stopped the hand recount of ballots in Florida, to Jamie Dimon, the head of Chase Bank, recently saying his company will prosper whether under Trump or Biden, or KBJ [Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson] and other supposed the Liberals on SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] not wanting to take responsibility for removing Trump from the ballot, to Biden, aka ‘genocide Joe’, himself. How and why are they enabling fascism? And why do people keep investing so much faith that they will make them stop this?

Paul Street 27:40

The Democratic Party has been always a relatively conservative and corporate and capitalist/imperialist party, not just in the neoliberal era — I date, the neoliberal era, which is a sort of turn to the right, and moving into space had previously been held by moderate Republicans, as the Republican Party itself moved further to the neo-fascist right. It’s nothing new. I used to be a labor historian in another lifetime, and I remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response to the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago in 1937, when the Chicago Police literally shot dozens of United Steel Workers in the back, just at a picnic, during the middle of the strike against Republic Steel. FDR, the next day, announcing: A plague on both your houses — against both labor and capital — just refusing to aggressively take the side of the working class.

And this was in a time in which the Democratic Party was pretty much on board with Mussolini and Hitler as bulwarks against socialism in Europe and as bulwarks against the Soviet Union. So, there’s a long old history of not fighting extremism all through the 40s and through the 50s, the Democrats, and particularly southern Democrats were participatory and the neo-McCarthyite assault on radicals and the left and communists. My grandfather absurdly — it was kind of a family joke, because he wasn’t left wing at all — was run out of a job at Northern Illinois Teacher’s State College by a Democratic university president in the 1950s.

The Johnson administration participated heavily in the neo-fascist assault on the new left. Then Al Gore just completely surrenders to the obvious theft of the 2000 presidential election. The Democrats are on board with the sort of proto-fascistic Patriot Act and all of that. I’ll never forget Obama who knew privately and said to Tim Kaine in October 2016: Tim — with Hillary Clinton listening — you’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House. He actually said that. A lot of these people who won’t say fascism know that Trump and Trumpism is fascist. They just never say it publicly because not acceptable, it’s a radical word, it goes against the grain of our American exceptionalism because that doesn’t happen here, or whatever.

Then, after Trump is elected, the next day, Obama has a press conference in the Rose Garden and just says: Sometimes you lose an election, but we’re all on the same team and I have complete faith that the next President is going to honor the rule of law and democracy and the Republic. On and on, just lying through his teeth, because if he’s tells Tim Kaine you’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House, he knows better. There’s just this kind of denialism. It’s like a religion, really, this notion that voting is the solution. That’s all they have. It’s all they ever have, is pointing people to the ballot box. Got a guy like Jamie Dimon — I remember Jamie Dimon from Chicago, he was the head of Bank of America. In Chicago, a Democratic city, the game was to be aligned with the Democratic Party, it’s the only party in town.

But Jamie Dimon is just expressing the viewpoint of the business class, which is they want a seat at the table. A lot of “liberal” business elites are like that. They’re reading the handwriting on the wall. They don’t mind fascism. They didn’t mind it in Italy, they didn’t mind it in Germany, they certainly don’t mind it in the third world and all the fascist regimes that the U.S. has imposed over the many decades. It’s gotten to the point now where it looks like Biden might be a loser. His memories being exposed as really bad, his numbers are really awful he’s going to lose youth and Black population. His his embrace of the assault on Gaza is damaging and terribly. He was already in dire he was already in Jimmy Carter, polling data territory, and it looks like it could be Trump.

So Jamie Dimon goes to Davos and he says: Look… A lot of the business class feels this way — they might pretend to be liberal — we’re gonna get more deregulation, we’re gonna get tax reductions. If they call Trump for what he is, and they call him a new Mussolini, a new Hitler, they say the ‘F’ word, they’ll be denied access to the table. These guys have showed, DeSantis has showed in Florida, they’re ready to discipline the business class. They’re ready to deny them access. They’re ready to attack them. The Republi-fascists are ready to cause grief for business elites who don’t play ball with them. And Jamie Dimon and other “liberals” like him don’t want to mess with that, they don’t want to get in that kind of trouble.

So do they really think that Trump is the guy they can beat? They believe that, and I think they don’t realize how unusual Biden’s victory was. For those of them who think Biden can win, I don’t know that they’re processing — liberal elites — I don’t know if they’re processing how distinctive, just a really bad politician — Joe Biden had terrible record in his previous runs for the Presidency. How lucky Joe Biden was in 2020. I don’t think Joe Biden wins without the conjuncture or accidental factor of COVID-19, and maybe also without the remarkable George Floyd incident and the rebellion, it’s sparked, Trump probably would have got himself a second term in 2020 but for those chance occurrences,

Sam Goldman 32:32

Just to clarify, again, to make sure that I’m understanding what your analysis is, you talked a little bit about how, if we were to look at why the Democrats are enabling Trump and fascism, that’s connected to the fact that they think that they can beat him, or does it go beyond that?

Paul Street 32:54

They have no interest in mobilizing people beyond anything except the quadrennial — I guess, the biennial — electoral processes. They don’t want to spark the type of energy that would be involved in contributing to a mass movement, direct action as politics beyond the ballot box. Because then that has the possibility to become something else and become more radical, something that could question the privileges, I think, of the whole system. So they cling religiously — its doctrine to them — that politics amounts to people going into ballot boxes, as a consequence of class consciousness, and making little marks next to the name of a candidate.

Sam Goldman 32:54

Even if that destroys [PS: right] their possibility to ever holds power again. The question is, how to save the Democrats. And just to be clear, I want to say the Democratic Party [PS: right], not people who see themselves as Democrats, there’s a distinction there. But I just do think it’s worth thinking about because every step of the way where there was a possibility to, in any way, dampen or stifle the movement, short of stopping the fascist movement anyway, to like, curb it just a little bit, the Democratic Party almost always has been like: Ooh, no, we’re not going to do that. Now there is a question of people keep looking to them and saying: If we don’t want fascism, we need to spend the next nine months doing nothing but campaigning for Biden.

Paul Street 34:25

Look at Biden. I mean, he could have responded to the Dobbs decision by immediately holding a press conference and said: Look, this is an illegitimate decision, I don’t accept it. It’s a Christian fasist — well, he wouldn’t say that, but — it’s a far right wing decision that is out of step with popular opinion, and I’m here by issuing an executive order mandating the free legal and safe abortion in all 50 states and federal properties. He had full power to do that, and free delivery through the postal services of abortion medications — mifepristone and so forth. There any number of kinds of steps. They would rather hand power over to the right wing party than mobilize the masses of people.

Sam Goldman 35:03

You spoke some about this truly five alarm fire moment situation that’s happening with Abbott versus the Biden administration. And it’s not just Abbot, it’s every GOP governor with maybe the exception of one, I think. The fascists in Texas are ramping up their confrontation against the federal government, and the fascists in the legislature are running Biden’s immigration plan into the ground for supposedly being not cruel enough. These are both having immediate impacts, but that’s not the end goal in terms of my understanding. I was just wondering how you see things playing out in relation to the fascist campaign to take back the White House and beyond, and if there were any developments in the past week or so that you wanted to make sure that people were aware of?

Paul Street 36:02

25 governors on board. 12 of them went down there in the midst of the crisis, including my own governor, Kim Reynolds. A bunch of them are sending their own National Guard troops there. That’s kind of an interesting issue. I wonder if the taxpayers of those states — how they feel about millions of dollars being spent sending their own National Guard, and I think at some cases, their own state highway troops, and so it’s just insane. Ron DeSantis, who is known in liberal circles in Florida, as Ron ‘DeFascist’, has his own personal taxpayer funded Florida State Guard, which is for all intents and purposes, a quasi military, paramilitary, fascist agency. He’s sending his Florida fascist guard there.

Sam Goldman 36:39

I think it’s also Oklahoma and Utah [PS: sure], and a few other states as well, as you were saying.

Paul Street 36:45

Yeah, this was almost like: Well, are you guys gonna form a nativist nullification confederacy? Are we seeing the beginnings of a civil war? Are you thinking about an alternative government? We’re talking about sort of quasi military cooperation between different state governments in defiance of the White House and in defiance of, even the Supreme Court, and in defiance of long standing Constitutional understanding that the United States has sovereignty on the national border. And bear in mind, what sparked all of this off down there in Eagle Pass is the laying of razor wire, that is putting gashes in the skin is in the muscles of children and their mothers as they tried to get across the border, and also that a family drowned in the Rio Grande, and the Mexican authorities told the U.S. border control about it.

And they tried to investigate and perhaps to try and save this family and they were militarily, physically prevented from access to Shelby Park. And by the way, Shelby Park is named after a Confederate General. And meanwhile, while you have the sort of direct action-ist policy being carried out by a, essentially, a fascist state — the fascist state of Texas — you have the wacky, crazy, wild House Wrecking Crew, Republican Party, under the command of an open Christian fascist Mike Johnson, who doesn’t really like the separation of church and state, and who is regularly on the phone with guess who? the orange menace himself who is sort of, like the de facto Speaker of House.

This is really extraordinary. He is ordering for all intents and purposes, this guy with 91 felony counts, this guy about whom a civil case judge in New York has to say don’t let it be known that you were on the jury that found against him, because his backers will come and kill you. This malignant tangerine tinted tyrant, Trump, is ordering the House to black any immigration bill no matter how far to the right Biden and the Democrats are willing to go — no matter how difficult the Democrats are willing to make it for asylum seekers — no matter how far down in the limits of the numbers of people that can cross the border a day can be made — no matter what there can be no solutions. In other words, the Republican Party under the command of heir Trump is ceased to be, and this is not new, an actual, normal, bourgeois democratic, parliamentary power.

There can be no deals. Biden cannot live his bipartisan ambition. He cannot be permitted to have his name signed to anything that looks like an end to this crisis. This is a kind of, when you think about it, fascistic approach to policy on the border. They are determined to beat Biden over the head with the border. Which is a perfect match… This is a key aspect and Jason Stanley’s lay down of the elements of fascist political thought; obsession with the border, which is also a racial obsession in this case, and it’s also kind of a psychosexual obsession about the mixing of blood. It’s a perfect match with Trump saying immigrants are poisoning our blood — these disease drug dealing criminal inferior people are not gonna cross this border. We’re gonna let them drown in the Rio Grande, we’re going to carve up their kids in concertina wire.

And of course, why not? That’s where this party has gone. It’s a fascist party now. Of course, nobody of either party can talk about the real issue, which is imperialism, and how America historically stole — like Southwestern California — from Mexico, and how U.S. policy creates misery, and has forever in Central America, and Mexico, but that’s a whole other topic. I want to give a shout out to the Revcomms, the Revolutionary Communists who went down to Shelby Park and went down to Eagle Pass with a poster saying we don’t have an immigration problem, we have an imperialism problem. That’s bipartisan, that we can’t talk about that.

The Democrats refuse to talk about it, as well. But that’s the real historical material basis for all this. Frankly, in Europe as well, with all the people dying in the Mediterranean. The Imperial exploitation of the non whites of the Global South in the periphery is critical, historical material basis for all these border crises, which are heating up, literally, with the climate crisis, which is particularly hitting these parts of the world, particularly hitting the globe.

Sam Goldman 41:09

Just to loop back to one point: How do you see this connected? Or is it connected with the return to power? Or is it just to impede Biden from carrying forward his already anti-asylum, anti-immigrant policies?

Paul Street 41:31

Oh, yeah, they want to impede him having any perceived victories, anything that he can campaign on, anything that he can claim he brought in to this crisis. A lot of Trumpists fantasize that he’ll end the Biden presidency even before the election. They’ve been talking of civil war for some time. Maybe they want to make this into a crisis that could even precede the 2024 presidential election. I don’t doubt that those kinds of fantasies and agendas exist on certain parts of the right maybe including some folks in the Republican Party itself — certainly in state level Republican parties.

Look at the the insanity that goes on in the Iowa State Legislature and the and among that this Texas state Republicans, it’s just mind boggling. You’ve got QAnoners in there. You’ve got conspiratorialism, and you’ve got anti vaxxers in there. They opened up a can of worms and let loose a virus of fascistic insanity that I think future historians, if we have future historians, will be shocked to [laughs] think when they go through the correspondence and the memoirs of these people.

But I think it’s largely about helping guarantee that that Trump wins in November. Trump could very well just win flat out. He could win with the way things are going right now. Not have to steal it. Let’s put it that way. We’ll never know because there’s gonna be a shit ton of physical coercion, and it’s gonna be all kinds of crap going on in in local precincts, and there’s gonna be terrorism and there’s gonna be militia; all kinds of madness on election day.

Sam Goldman 42:44

If not before. Is there anything that we didn’t discuss, that you’ve been writing about thinking about that you want to share with others?

Paul Street 42:55

Just please do take a look at my Substack. I’m regularly commenting on current events. My most recent one is a takedown to this notion that the courts and the Constitution are going save it. And by the way, I got into the Special Counsel report that just came out on Biden in his classified documents problem. That was an interesting thing to research because that didn’t work out very well [laughing] for Joe. It’s early, there’s a lot of shit they’re gonna happen between now November. I’m not a very good election prognosticator, but it’s not looking good right now for the Democratic candidate.

And I really think it’s long past time for people to get really fucking serious about the distinct possibility of a second Trump presidency, and how we’re going to respond to it? Whether we’re going to question the legitimacy of it? I think there’s a distinct possibility that he could lose, again, the popular vote, and win the electoral college. What’s the point in which we say: We don’t accept that anymore? That’s just ridiculous. We need to reconstitute our socio political order when that kind of shit can happen. It’s happened what five times?

No more this bullshit where millions of tallies just disappear into insignificance because they took place in states that were already red or blue, and it all comes down to six or seven states. That’s preposterous. We can’t have that. We need a different Constitution, perhaps. We certainly need a whole different electoral system. We need to reconstruct this whole regime. We can’t have the U.S. Senate with two representatives regardless of the size of the state. That’s ridiculous. Gerrymandering is just utterly preposterous. So we need to draft alternative systems. We need to look into that. This one has birthed a fascist nightmare, and we’ve got a problem on our hands.

Sam Goldman 44:40

I want to thank you, Paul, for taking the time to chat with us and share your expertise and perspectives. And we will of course, be linking in the show notes to your Substack.

Paul Street 44:51

Nice talking to you, Sam.

Sam Goldman 44:53

As Paul’s work pretty consistently reminds us, it can happen here. Trump can win. Fascism can seize and consolidate power. But the operative word here is ‘can’. That doesn’t mean that it is inevitable. It doesn’t mean it will. The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us right now. Share this podcast with one, five or 5000 people you know, because we can do every little thing in our power to escape reality. Or, we can take action to wake people up to this reality. We can keep the peace with fascists and enablers and cowards and people who can’t find it in themselves to give a damn. Or we can build up strong communities among people who share our values, who together recognize the threat of 21st century fascism, who encourage each other to take action to change the course of history. It’s up to all of us.

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. If you appreciate the show and want to help us reach more listeners, to understand and act to stop the fascist threat, please become a patron. Whether you can give $2 or $20 a month, it all makes a difference in producing and promoting this independent, all volunteer weekly podcast. Give today at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism or by visiting RefuseFascism.org and hitting the donate button — selecting recurring donation to make it monthly. Thank you for your support. We love hearing from you. Connect with us on social media. You can find us @RefuseFascism on pretty much every platform; Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, of course, X, or you can leave us a voicemail — see the show notes for the link — we’d love to hear your voice. Reach me at the site previously known as Twitter @SamBGoldman. Or if you want to drop me a line, you can do so at [email protected]. And I have a TikTok, still haven’t figured it out, so join me, help me on that journey over @SamGoldmanRF.

Thanks as always to the wonderful Richie Marini, Lina Thorne, and Mark Tinkleman, who produce this show and produced this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each show, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox. Until next Sunday, In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!