Dispatch on American Political Dystopia
Refuse Fascism Episode 216

Sun, Sep 08, 2024 5:30PM • 52:17

Paul Street  00:00

There’s all kinds of promise of violence that Trump is making if he wins. He wants to send out the military to round up people for mass deportations and all of that, and it’s looking like some sort of civil conflict and constitutional crisis in the wake of this election. And this is regardless of its outcomes, because you can’t fight fascism just with voting. We’ve got to develop our organizing capacity and hit the streets, it would mean really engaging people in a vast social movement to take a hard look at and confront the deeply entrenched systems of class rule and white supremacists and in patriarchy and Empire.

Sam Goldman  00:53

Welcome to episode 216 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. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Paul Street. 

Thanks to our patrons who make this show possible. Become one today at patreon.com/refusefascism. Thanks to those who are spreading the imperative by purchasing and wearing our Refuse Fasism T shirts, link in the show notes to get yours, and those who take the extra step to share the show, to rate, review and subscribe, it helps so much in helping people discover this resource and join the community. So hopefully, after today’s show, you’ll be inspired to do the same, if you haven’t already. And note to patrons, it’s decided we are going to do a discussion of the War Game documentary for our next virtual event at the end of the month. So stay tuned to our Patreon page for an update on time, date and link, and if you want to join, you always can. So sign up at that Patreon page and you’ll get the information. 

Before we get to the conversation, some updates as they relate to the fascist threat. Now, at 57 days to the election, the Republi-fascist party’s overt efforts to suppress the vote and overturn unfavorable results are only escalating. Just yesterday, in a lengthy Social Post, Trump vowed to go after his political opponents with “Long term prison sentences for anyone who “cheated,” (that’s in quotes) in 2020, or 2024, elections,” he stated.  “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught and prosecuted at levels unfortunately never seen before in our country.” 

Proliferating unhinged conspiracy theories about election fraud, laying the foundation for declaring the election rigged in the event of a Trump electoral loss is a key part of their plans. One of the new most pronounced lies is that non citizens are going to vote for Democrats, thus, “stealing the election.” Right now, the House GOP is threatening a government shutdown to force through a voter ID measure based off this deadly lie. The goal here is to create an ecosystem where millions are deluded into believing that if Trump loses, the election was stolen, to force a situation in which people are demanding intervention from Trumpist courts and/or Congress and are prepared to commit violence to right this wrong, with the added bonus in their eyes of furthering the demonization of immigrants and intimidating non white voters into not voting. 

One of the themes Paul and I discuss in our conversation is this likelihood for fascist violence in the event of a Harris win. One of the components that adds to the volatility was well articulated by Bob Dreyfus, writing for The Nation, when he stated that the danger is, “Conservative elected officials, sheriffs and Republican Party offices are tacitly and sometimes, even if explicitly, cooperating with encouraging and supporting militia groups. The membrane that has long separated the state and local governments from non governmental and private Ultra right actors, including violence prone ones, is becoming increasingly porous.” 

This is something that we have delved into in previous episodes, including episode 198, my April 21 interview with Devin Burkhart and Carolyn Gallaher, and episode 187, my January 20 interview with Kathleen Belew. In my conversation with Paul, we also talk about Attorney General Ken Paxton of the fascist Republic of Texas, using search warrants, undercover operations and more, to terrorize and intimidate Latinos in San Antonio, Texas, including several elderly members of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Shortly after Paul and I spoke, we learned about similar Gestapo style tactics in the fascist laboratory that is Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis is sending cops to the homes of people who signed a petition to get amendment four on the November ballot. Amendment four would overturn the six week near total abortion ban in the state and protect abortion access in Florida until viability. 

This is on top of earlier in the week, the Florida Department of State requesting information on 36,000 people who signed the petition. They are inspecting thousands of already verified and validated petitions in the final two months before election day. Also, is it legal that DeSantis launched a website against the amendment? Oh, and guys, remember when Trump and his fascist-stacked Supreme Court said they were giving abortion back to the States? Well, to the degree that it wasn’t 100% bullshit, this is what they intended. In Missouri, a judge just ruled that their abortion rights amendment that would be on the ballot in November was in “blatant violation of state requirements.” While it will be appealed, it’s not without precedent or possibility that this initiative will never see the ballot in November based on bogus technicalities. Just see Arkansas. 

In a surprise to hopefully nobody, the National Fraternal Order of Police, FOP, endorsed Trump for now the third time as “America’s fighter.” Sure he is a criminal. He’s their criminal, keeping in mind that Trump is less gearing up for the November 5 election, and more gearing up for re-seizing power, no matter what, it’s really worth listening to just some of what Trump had to say when speaking this week to the FOP. He is not only justifying and encouraging any brutality they inflict, but essentially enlisting them into the mission of fighting for Trump, no matter what any election or court might say.

Donald Trump  07:14

But as soon as I’m back in the White House, the conquest will end and the great liberation of America will begin, and you’re going to be the ones leading the pack.

Donald Trump  07:29

We will take back every single square inch of American territory, and that’s been invaded by these migrant gangs. It’s been taken over. I mean, real estate patches have been taken over, and this is just the beginning. You haven’t seen anything yet, because they’re just getting they’re just sort of assimilating. And how about what they’re doing to our schools? They’re going into schools. They’re beating the hell out of our other pupils. We’re giving them chairs, and we’re telling people that have been their families, that have had their children in that school, you can’t go to that school anymore. And I hope you as the greatest people, just as great as there is any body in their country. I hope you watch for voter fraud. So it starts early. You know, it starts in a week. But I hope you can watch, and you’re all over the place, watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud. We win so easily. Hopefully we’re going to win anyway, but we want to keep it down. You can keep it down just by watching, because, believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge. They’re afraid of you people. They’re afraid of that more than anything else. They’re afraid so I hope you can watch.

Sam Goldman  08:34

And, you may have heard Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris. Let’s be clear, Dick Cheney hasn’t changed. Dick personified the Bush agenda more than W himself ever did, an agenda of unending Global War for Empire, of open torture, of unlimited surveillance, of using evangelicals as a political bludgeon, of ICE, of militarizing the police and the border, of dehumanizing Muslims and Arab people and so much more. He became Vice President in an election where they lost the popular vote and very likely lost the Electoral College, but still took power. He’s against Trump, because, from that perspective, he thinks Trump is bad at doing bad and he isn’t endorsing Kamala because he’s had a change of heart. He’s for her because she more closely represents that aforementioned agenda.

Dick Cheney hasn’t changed. If you’re excited about that endorsement, sad to say, you may have. This endorsement does mean something, but not what many want it to mean. It’s not the arch neon cons moving left. It’s not even just the Democratic Party moving right. In this period of increasing global crisis without a “reasonable” Republican Party, we are seeing a transformation of the Democratic Party and often desperate mutual embrace under their branding of anyone and everyone committed to the stability of American Empire over the inevitable riskiness of fascist transformation. To be 100% clear, this isn’t a big tent that expands both ways. 

The Democrats are eager to get these demons on board, to have former Republicans speak at their convention, to even float appointing Republicans to their cabinet, while excluding, shouting down and even brutalizing anyone who stands up against their Empire’s crimes. Example number one being the genocide in Gaza. About two months ago, people who detest American fascism were ecstatic over the election in France, where it seemed that the French center had united with the French left to stop the advance of Marine Le Pen and her fascist Popular Front. At the time, it was very unclear what would come of this, but that didn’t stop many of these Americans from loudly proclaiming that Anti Fascist unity in the voting booth for their candidate was necessary and could be fruitful for everyone. 

People were surprised that French president Macron initiated these unscheduled elections and that he accepted this unity at the last minute, and many thought this might signal a shift away from his reactionary, pro corporate, anti migrant, and notably, anti Muslim policies. For years, Macron, a former banker, has been perceived as an effective centrist moderate, imposing reactionary policies, but always with an even tone. In 2017 when he became president, his type was referred to as someone who’s willing to work with anyone, what we might call in the context of 2024, a fascist collaborator. Fast forward two months, and Macron has all but thrown the results of that election out, appointing someone significantly to his right to be the new prime minister. 

It’s a profound reminder that those who value order over justice will do everything in their power to make the fascist assent as orderly as possible. When we feel forced to defer to so called centrism or moderation, those centrists and moderates are all too willing to defer to fascists. With that, here is my conversation with Paul. We’re in that time where it seems like decades happen over the course of just a week, sometimes even over the course of just a day. And I find when that happens, you need some help from a trusted friend, and some help to dissect what is going on, what’s driving it, and how in this seemingly chaotic, maddening mess, we can find a pathway to not just understand what we face and what’s happening, but to actually refuse fascism, as we aim to do on the show. And one of those friends for me is Paul Street, as any listener knows, as a frequent guest of the show, we’re so glad to have Paul with us again to talk about some of the things that are developing and what’s right underneath the surface. Paul is a historian. He’s an author, and he has a wonderful, very active sub stack The Paul Street Report. Paul, how you doing? Thanks for joining me.

Paul Street  13:20

Yeah. Not bad. Not bad. It’s nice here in Chicago. I covered the DNC, you know, and so, here we are. The Kamala Sugar Buzz is still hovering over the near west side of Chicago. You can see it over there where the convention was.

Sam Goldman  13:33

You recently wrote, “There is seemingly no end to the lethal and dystopian absurdity of U.S. American political life right now.” And I wanted to talk more about that in relation to the fact that Tuesday, September 10, this fascist menace, Donald Trump, will be having a presidential debate, his second one, possibly his last one, and the whole world’s gonna be watching, and this is seen as completely legitimate. I just thought it might be helpful to remind ourselves of what insanity this is.

Paul Street  14:12

It really is mind boggling. I said somewhere on social media a couple weeks ago, you don’t debate arch criminal fascism, you lock them up. Let’s just review Trump a little bit. I mean, this guy actually has, according to 538, he’s got a 41 to 45% chance of being a president again. This could really happen. He could do a Grover Cleveland, skip a term and then come back and have a second presidency. This is a guy who, as President, killed untold tens if not hundreds of thousands of people with his pandemic policy, his pandemic fascist policy, referred to Neo Nazis in Charlottesville as very fine people. He told the Proud Boys to stand by and be on duty to be paramilitaries for him too, in case he needed them to overthrow the election. He told Border Patrol, “I’ll pardon you if you shoot asylum speakers.” He wanted to shoot George Floyd protesters in the legs. 

He wanted to deploy the U.S. military to crush the George Floyd protests. He embraced Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot two people dead in Kenosha in a Black Lives Matter protest in August. He sent out unbadged Border Patrol paramilitaries to Portland and Seattle to haul people away in unmarked vans. And then, of course, January 6, which he wanted to participate in himself. And he wanted Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and Three Percenters, he said, “Take down the metal detectors.” He wanted these people to be able to carry AR-15s up to the U.S. Capitol to go after Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. That’s the presidency. And then since then, we found out he’s an adjudicated sex offender. 

He has hosted Nazis at his estate in Mar a Lago. We know he stole and obstructed attempts to get back federal classified documents. He’s been convicted on 34 felony counts in connection with the Stormy Daniels thing, he’s been openly channeling Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, saying things like, “brown skinned immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country,” which harkens back to when he was calling African black nations, “shithole countries,” and hoping for more immigrants from Norway with pure white Scandinavian blood. He said he wants to clear Marxist vermin out of the country. He will clear out Marxist vermin. This sounds like Hitler talking about Judeo Bolshevism, and speaking of that, he routinely calls militantly centrist, corporate, capitalist, imperialist, Democrats, communists. 

This is a classic fascist narrative, merging everything you’re against and merging liberals and centrists in with communism. Now the election lie is being deepened with the claim that Democrats are opening up open borders in order to bring in supposedly illegal immigrants to vote. There’s no evidence for this at all, but he’s claiming that he mocked Nancy Pelosi’s husband, after a Trumpist broke into their condo in San Francisco and broke the guy’s skull. He says he’s going to invade Mexico. He says he wants to be a dictator for one day, one day, right? He wants to send in the military to undertake mass deportations and to end the crime in one day in the inner city, and on and on and on. ‘’

And this time, whereas in 2016 he couldn’t even believe he won, and he was just gobsmacked about all these establishment Republicans coming around him, this time, he’s got the whole Republican policy network, led by the Heritage Foundation around him, and they’ve created this massive document for the full on Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of American government and American society. And this guy, we’re going to debate him? He has a chance of becoming of the President of the United States again. It’s just horrifying. It’s just mind boggling. The odds makers right now have got Harris winning. I don’t know if they’re right or they’re wrong. 

The odds makers certainly had Hillary Clinton winning in 2016, right? They had her at 60 something percent and Trump at 30 something percent. 538 right now has Kamala at 58% likelihood, and they have Trump at I think, 41%. That means Trump’s coming to play batting 410, that’s a pretty good batting average in baseball. I suspect that polling data, like in 2016 you have a lot of hidden Trump voters that don’t show up in a lot of the polling data. I think it’s a nail biter. And really could come down to just a few thousand votes, perhaps in the state that you’re talking to me from right now, from Pennsylvania. We have this absurd system called the Electoral College, where we really only have a presidential election in six or seven states, and the Democratic candidate effectively has to typically beat the Republican by four to five percentage points in the national popular vote, so he’s not out of it by any stretch of the imagination. The Democrats failed to properly and promptly take this guy out of the game to prosecute him in time.

Sam Goldman  19:07

There were a lot of things that you just mentioned that I want to delve deeper into. It is worth speaking, I guess, first to what you just mentioned, that I think anybody who feels rightly so, that it’s completely illegitimate that this fucking fascist is even up for a second go at this with still a real chance to win. The question that then begs to be asked is, how did this happen? We’ve spoken about this before, but where we are now, September. Why do you think it is that the Democrats, when faced with a party that if they are able to get in power again, the Republi-fascists, not only will these democrats never hold power again, but they will be eliminated from existence. They’re being threatened with basically death. I don’t want to dance around it, but why haven’t they addressed the fascist threat?

Paul Street  20:02

Just briefly, you know, and you’re seeing hints of the kind of shit that would go nationwide, potentially in Texas right now. I mean, this far right wing, Christian nationalist Attorney General Paxton has literally undertaken far beyond Nixon style, much more Mussolini-like flat out invasions and seizures of computers and phones, going into the homes of really fairly moderate Latino voting rights activists with LULAC. I’m familiar with LULAC. They go way back. They’re not a radical left organization at all, all on this false Hitlerian Goebbels worthy Leviathan lie that they’re sneaking immigrants across the border in order to enlist them as Democrats, and they invaded the personal homes in the offices of these people. That’s what they do in Texas. 

Texas has actually engaged in nullification against the U.S. Border Patrol, and has actually kept U.S. Border Patrol out of a key section of the Rio Grande border, is engaged in the military confrontation, and this is fascism. Okay? What’s going on in Iowa, in various states, with wiping out the teaching of real history of black history, or telling the real story about the history of slavery and Jim Crow, the white nationalist whitewashing of American history teaching is very fascistic, the back the blue laws, which make it almost impossible to protest in various red states. I could go on about this stuff, the forced motherhood, abortion decision, and what’s going on in the states, that to really call it out for what it really is, seems to be something beyond the willpower and calculations of the Democratic Party. It’s really fascinating. 

I’ve been engaging liberals at online friendship networks and in real life about this for a while. You’re really getting into this Tim Walz narrative that the Republicans are weird. They’re weird. They think that’s the word to use with them. F word, you know, the one they like? Felon. They’ve been really getting into calling Trump a felon. Right now, we don’t want to have a felon in the white house. I said they’re getting into this whole demonization of felons, which is very problematic because we have a racist criminal justice system and a mass incarceration system that has saddled one in three black male adults with a felony record. And you go around screaming, felon, felon, felon. 

I think sometimes they don’t know it, but it’s a big raised middle finger to a vast section of black America, whose life chances are blown up by a felony record. We’re going to say, well, you want to call him an F word? Call him a fascist, because he and the party that he’s at the head of check off all the boxes for the reasons we’ve been talking about on the Refuse Fascism podcast for two years. Palengenetic ultra-nationalism, Christian white nationalism, militant patriarchy, anti intellectualism, border obsession, political violence. Just going down the whole list of the stuff we talk about. Look at the Refuse Fascism definition and the Refuse Fascism website. It’s all there. 

Why won’t you call him that? And your leaders, some of your most articulate, top spokesmen. They know it. They know that Trump and Trumpism are fascist. Back in 2016 in October, Obama called up Tim Kaine. We know this from the Hulu movie about Hillary Clinton, called up Tim Kaine in 2016 and said, Tim, this is no time to be a purist. We’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House. And then Hillary was listening on the call, and she nodded along. Obama has never said fascist in public. Bill Clinton certainly knows it. He hints at it. 

There was just one little moment when Biden was talking to some donors in Manhattan in 2019 he said, Hey, you know guys, I’m going to say something, but MAGA is kind of almost a little bit like semi fascism. Remember that? Something kind of like semi fascism. It’s not kind of like, and it’s not semi, okay, it’s fascism. Why won’t they say it? And that’s a very, very interesting question. What I think it’s about is that a) you’d have to give up the American exceptionalist ghost and admit how fucked up this American system is, how American capitalism and imperialism has, in fact, organically generated its own fascist movement. It’s a hell of a statement about our political system that one of our two major parties has crossed over into Amerikaner white nationalist, Neo fascist space. 

The other part of it, I think, is then you’d have to admit that you’d have to mobilize people and stir them up in a way that went beyond these quadrennial candidate centered big money, corporate crafted election cycles and telling people that that’s all the politics that really matters, because you can’t fight fascism just with voting, and certainly not under the American voting system, which is a minority rule system, thanks to the Electoral College and thanks to the Senate malapportionment, and all the minority rule things that I’ve been writing about on Counterpunch in recent weeks. 

It would mean really engaging people in a vast social movement to take a hard look at and confront the deeply entrenched systems of class rule and white supremacism and in patriarchy and empire that all make up the matrix of social and political forces that produce this nightmarish scenario in this country, which is saturated with guns, incidentally, which, if we do make this transition, and I have no idea that we’re going to, or not to, a full consolidation of fascism, there’ll never have been a country with as many arms loose in it, where that happened. I’m sounding rather dark here and noir, excuse me.

Sam Goldman  25:22

Well, I’m not sure what I’m going to say next is going to make it any less dark, but we’ll always work together to find the light, not just to make ourselves feel better, but because I do think that there is possibility in this moment.

Paul Street  25:33

Well, I think there’s something radical about always telling the truth about what’s really going on. You always serve a real, objective situation. A lot of people think that’s depressing. I think it’s exciting that people can communicate to each other about what’s really going on, and it is predicated on the notion that we can and must do something about it, yeah.

Sam Goldman  25:52

One of the things that was striking me in in what you were saying and is in a piece that you have up on your sub stack, one of the resources that you’re directing people to is not your Substack, another Substack from revolutionary Bob Avakian, and some thinking from Avakian on the Obamas’ role in the DNC, that there will be no frontal confrontation of that this program that’s represented by the GOP is a fascist program. And what you were saying about people having to think about what kind of system produces this as a legitimate option, where this could come to power that breeds this, was one point. And then the other point that Avakian raises was what happens if they would call that out? And you did have a situation where they were saying, this is a fascist party?

Paul Street  26:49

Yeah, you know, 

Sam Goldman  26:50

I think the full fear that they in this case, I’m talking about the Democrats, if they were to unveil the threat as fascist, as opposed to weird, as some aberration, that people would start looking for what real solutions are. And if people did go to want to oppose fascism in the way that it needs to be resisted, it could get way out of the control the Democratic Party. And from that people not being so corralled and restrained in that way, people could begin to seek out, to look for, to find and perhaps even fight for radical solutions, if not outright revolutionary emancipating solutions.

Paul Street  27:38

Well, you know, Recuse Fascism, in its original mission was trying to get rid of Trump the way he needed to be gotten rid of, mass pressure in the streets, in the public squares, and not simply through what Avakian calls the bourgeois electoral bullshit. I’ve got caught hell on the left from people saying, well, what you ended up saying, We got to vote for him. I go we wouldn’t have to vote for if we gotten rid of him the right way we needed to. It was a failed effort, but the noble effort to get millions of people in the streets to get rid of him, Puerto Rican style, revolutionary style, wasn’t just to get rid of him and to get Democrats into the White House, but rather to completely reconfigure and re-polarize American politics and bring the masses into play in a way that would have set whole new terms for politics in this country, for all the parties. 

Now, what I see with Avakian on this question is yes, this very important point about the Democrats don’t want to say and call out fascism, because it would mean calling people into action in ways that could get out of their control. I think that’s really important. The other thing I see Avakian saying in his Substack commentaries is, folks, enough just focusing on the horse race, one of the whole half of the political structure in this country having gone fascist. Let’s get serious about what’s going to happen after the election. And there are various scenarios, and it’s looking like some sort of civil conflict and constitutional crisis, God knows, potentially even something on the scale of a civil war in the wake of this election. And this is regardless of its outcome [SG: that’s really important]. 

And that sounds horrible, and if you talk to your liberal cousin about this, they’ll probably get all scared and all that, but at the same time, the civil conflict that’s going to emerge, that may well emerge between these two parties that are at each other’s throats, the very interesting point in Avakian that I’m seeing in this regard too, is that the divisions that exist within society all the way up to the ruling class And then drifting down into much of the populace, this intense polarization that’s probably more extreme in this country now than any time, literally since the Civil War, since 1860 and 1861 the divisions and the chaos that might emerge from this fraught, conflictual situation might create an opportunity. 

Opportunity for dedicated radical forces to try to re-polarize the country, not just blue versus red, red versus blue, bourgeois democratic Weimar versus Amerikaner neo-fascist Republicans, but the people against the capitalist, imperialist system of class rule that hatched this madness, that hatched both wings of the bird of prey, both of which are dedicated to private ownership and profit of society and of its economy and of its political system, and both of which support this rapacious, endless, cancerous empire that backs genocide in Gaza.

Sam Goldman  30:40

Well, I appreciate your perspective and walking us through all of that. I also wanted to lift up what you were saying earlier about what happened in Texas last month, where Attorney General Ken Paxton signed off on a series of Gestapo style raids across the homes of campaign workers and Democratic Party politicians in multiple counties. The basis of these lies, this utterly xenophobic, racist nonsense about illegal Democratic voters. I just think that it’s a story that should be on the front pages, that there were grandmas who had their house raided, their computers stolen through these raids, and then that’s a fucking ominous sign of more to come. This is September. What you were saying. 

I just wanted to underscore about the process that is already afoot of one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, actively working on two tracks to re-seize power. And neither of those tracks are fundamentally about getting votes. They are about getting power. And one is a track of “legal maneuvers” that we would detest, but they’re working through lawyers to have lawsuits in multiple states, to purge voter rolls, to do all these kind of things through gerrymandering and “legitimate voter suppression” and then extra legal avenues if necessary, which they’ve demonstrated multiple times that they are are not only willing to do, but prepared to do. 

I’ve seen this talked about as if what happens on election day, or is it what happens immediately after? I just think that people have to stop fucking around if they think that we can rely on a strategy of trouncing the Republi-fascists by having enough votes, and thereby any attempt to subvert the election, which they’re already doing now, oh yeah, the Republicans could be averted.

Paul Street  32:38

Down to the level of county and local precincts, exactly, a whole bunch of people in, literally in the counting. And that’s another reason not to just think everything’s okay because of the polling data. They’re in a mess with how the votes are counted in a very intense way. There’s also reports out about participation between white nationalist paramilitary….

Sam Goldman  32:56

One thought, so I wanted to get your take you wrote “The nation is careening to some kind of constitutional crisis and potential major civil conflict after the next election (And I’m skipping ahead) whose reich most wing no longer accepts defeat through mere elections, no matter how tilted to the right the nation’s electoral rules are.” I think that, to me, this is a situation that I think not enough people are thinking about. We now live in a world where just because Harris has more votes, even if they’re able to overcome the electoral college that you spoke and all these other factors, even if all that happens, that just because she won doesn’t mean that she becomes president, and the danger of what happens doesn’t get resolved through who has more votes. 

And I know that you’ve been thinking a lot about that scenario and reading a lot from experts and listening to a lot of different things to understand what that situation might look like. And I wanted to give you an opportunity to give us a little bit of a reality check.

Paul Street  34:04

Well, we have a very unusual …..Steven Levitsky and Andrew Ziblatt, in their recent book The Tyranny of the Minority, we have an outlier system. It’s just extraordinary. Just, you know, put Marxist critique aside and just on elementary bourgeois Western democratic one person, one vote terms, we have an outlier system in many ways, the lifetime appointed Supreme Court, ridiculously powerful and malapportioned upper branch of the U.S. of the legislative branch, incredibly powerful states rights, which veto national majority public opinion. 

If you happen to have the misfortune of living in the wrong territory, the wrong state, and of course, the Electoral College, which is really off the charts. Other democracies, so called democracies, have experimented over the centuries and decades, without having popular presidential elections. They’ve all gotten rid of that, except us. We still don’t popularly elect the president. This is something that I hear from young people that I was like, we’re not putting up with that shit anymore? We’ve had two of these in this century, Bush 2000 and Trump, 2016, I mean, it’s happened five times in American history where the person who won the popular vote lost the election. 

The one very distinct possibility is that Kamala Harris comes in with a significant popular vote victory and an electoral college loss, depending on how some of the six or seven swing states go. And I think there’ll be significant protests, and I think this time, it could really heat up in response to that. I don’t think this Trump administration, this time would respond anywhere near as mildly to protest as it did in 2016 and 2017 so that’s one of the many scenarios. There’s the scenario that Trump wins flat out, which I think is highly unlikely. 

Probably the most likely scenario is that Harris squeaks it out in an electoral college, wins significantly in the popular vote, and we see a really big paramilitary neo-fascist, that we deal with months of violence and payback. It could go into the next year, and who knows where that goes, but her losing could get quite ugly. And of course, there’s all kinds of promises of violence that Trump is making when, if he wins, what he’s going to do, he’s wants to send out the military to round up people for mass deportations and all of that. There’s all kinds of scenarios. 

Tim Walz has been telling everybody you know, let’s gear up for the election. Let’s do everything we can, football coach, let’s leave it all on the field. Leave it on the field. You better not leave it all in the fucking field. You better not be completely exhausted on election day. I wonder. What are your plans? You know, what do you what are people thinking about? Our elections aren’t just on Election Day anymore. 

We’re in a new phase now, like you were quoting me, one of the major parties no longer accepts elections just, you know, just because we lost an election. Well, so fucking what? We’re going to keep fighting. They don’t accept jury verdicts that don’t go their way. They don’t accept the rule of law. They don’t accept previously normative, electoral, bourgeois rule of democracy. So really, we’re looking at 2024-25, this thing is going to roll on. And so what deeper things are people thinking about, how they getting ready for potential civil conflict, and would they like to take a look at the society that gave rise, the social order, the capitalist, imperialist system that gave rise to this chaos in the first place. 

Sam Goldman  37:09

There were some insights  insights that I think are worth sharing that you were highlighting in terms of helping people understand this most likely right now, scenario of a Harris getting by and just getting it and the rage and unhinged violence that we could potentially and likely see, in addition to all the cases that I’m sure we would see in that event that would go to the fascist Trump stacked Supreme Court. Are there any particulars that you found helpful? I know you had been reading some by Barbara Walter and the interview with David Newirt about what that scenario might look like and why people need to not just be, not be getting caught up or sucked into thinking about this as a horse race, but what happens after?

Paul Street  38:00

I think a lot about Iowa City, and I think of places like Nashville or I think of whatever town the University of Missouri is in, or Lawrence, Kansas, these blue zones in red states. I think people should go to their city councils and their mayors, and they should organize, and they should demand a real public safety plan to deal with all these guys that ride around with Ford  F150 pickup trucks, where fully loaded means having an AR15, not just all the goodies for the truck. You know, the guys out at the Tractor Supply in Iowa City, where I go to buy dog food for my lovely dog Oreo, tell me that everyone’s buying a gun locker these days. They’re paying 1000 bucks for gun safe. So storing up their ARS in there. 

There just seems to be a cluelessness about, there’s a denial about the level of potential violence out there. So that has to go away. That has to stop and public safety is going to be a really big issue and moral intervention and all of that kind of stuff. I think that’s key. Barbara Walter has sent out some warnings about how the United States is actually very primed, historically and comparatively speaking, for post election violence, and we should take her very seriously. She’s been studying contested elections around the world for years. She’s a political scientist, and she had an article in The New Yorker recently. Maybe you can put it up for your readers. I can’t remember the exact title of it, but what she finds is there are three key factors in every society that’s had a really violently contested election. 

One is non parliamentary systems. Instead, presidential winner take all elections. Second one is an aggrieved sense of ethnic difference between contesting parties, and particularly when one of them thinks that they have no chance whatsoever, that their time is running out, that they’re moving towards minority. But you add them up, and we are very, very strong candidate for post election violence. I mean, the first thing to do, and Neiwirt talks about this, what you’re referring to, the David Neiwirt was a big interview in American Prospect that Rick Perlstein did with Neiwirt, who David Neiwirt is, is maybe the leading investigative reporter expert on the far right. 

Perlstein asks him at one point, is this on the radar screen? What’s going on is on the radar screen of law enforcement is on the radar screen of the Democratic Party is on the radar screen of the media and Neiwirt, who really follows this stuff real close to the level, all the way down to following the dark web and listening to hearing and researching directly what all these paramilitaries are saying and the plans that they’re making. And Neiwirt says, No, it’s all about the election, and they just blow it off. I don’t know if you remember after the election in 2020. I was in numerous Zoom sessions with liberals and progressives,  Democrats mainly, both in Illinois and Iowa, these gigantic Zooms about Okay, so where are we right now? 

I was lhis lone voice saying they’re not going to accept an election loss. They’ve said it. Trump has said many times over and again that he can’t be actually defeated in a fair way, that will have to have been stolen, and they’re going to try and have a coup. And people looked at me like I was nuts, like I was some sort of paranoid schizophrenic Boy Who Cried Wolf, and then fucking January 6 happened as I think we kind of predicted, didn’t we? Didn’t we know that? Pay some fucking attention people! That would be, that would be job one, get some public safety plans and get serious about what’s going on in this political and social order, right? And that’s just a start. I’m not giving any great organizing advice about what is to be done, because I’m a PhD intellectual with my head in the clouds.

Sam Goldman  41:30

That is such bullshit. Your head might be in the clouds, but it’s also amongst people and fighting for people, so not just for people, but for the future of a livable planet for any species.

Paul Street  41:44

So, I’ve been on the streets. I’ve almost got killed in a few factory jobs.

Sam Goldman  41:47

So even if you didn’t, people that think about why the world is the way it is and doesn’t need to be, is that a poopoo task

Paul Street  41:57

I didn’t mean to say yes, that people have to go out and work in factories in order,

Sam Goldman  42:00

no, no, no, no.

Paul Street  42:01

I’m just saying that’s the class truth. Okay, yeah,

Sam Goldman  42:06

I’m just saying that to you. One of the things that the Neiwert interview, I thought highlighted well, was that the Christian nationalists, which we talked about on last week’s episode, movement, is going to be a really driving force in the event that there is a Harris win and a Trump loss, and that you won’t just see these paramilitary folks showing up with assault weapons at ballot counting centers, although you definitely will, but that there’s the threat of what, what he calls domestic terrorism against, I think he names government entities and institutions, along with figures that are associated with the Democratic Party and people who would be more likely to be under attack, from immigrants to LGBTQ people, people that they see as enemies, and that the tip of the spear would be this Christian nationalist movement,

Sam Goldman  43:07

Which I’ve been following very closely, yeah, many, and he’s an expert on it, yeah.

Sam Goldman  43:13

I think it’s really worth noting that, as you were pointing to that right now, where people see as the guardrail. People see a few guardrails. There’s the election will resolve it. Guardrail. There’s the if that doesn’t the courts will, which we’ve seen both of those. They don’t exist. Whatever degree of guard railing they did, they don’t guard rail. Then there’s in this law and order nation, it’s law enforcement that if the paramilitary was in the streets, if, if they were shooting immigrants and blue spots in red states that would be taken care of. And I think one of the points that he makes is, well, look, we have Trumpist cops on the local level to the state level.

Paul Street  43:56

You’re talking to me from Philadelphia.

Sam Goldman  43:57

Exactly, at the federal level. It goes all the way through.

Paul Street  44:01

Listen what are the only wards in Chicago that Trump won in 2016 and 2020? Well, up on the far northwest side in Albany Park and down on the far southwest side of Mount Greenwood. Hey, guess what? That’s where the cops live, or Staten Island in New York City. I’m in Iowa City a lot and I’m in Chicago. You see the resentful, angry time of fascistic type of guys. They’re right outside town in Iowa City, and they ride around in the pickup trucks, and they’ve got guns racks up there, and they don’t like the all the gay kids walking around, and they don’t like the multi ethnicity and all the Paki and Indian students and so with Pakistani and Indian students and all of that, you don’t see a lot of those real, true blue kind of red state fascists in Chicago, but you do see plenty of fascists. It’s called the white cops. When I’m at actions here in Chicago, I would just kind of slyly step over the black cops, saying you don’t have to watch out for the white cops. There used to be a progressive Afro American Patrolmens League here in Chicago. Watch out for these motherfuckers. And what’s going to happen after the election. 

This is the first election that I felt like in my lifetime. I’m at my advanced age when I think about, how is this going to play out? And experts who follow this stuff closely are saying this too. For the first time, I feel like, where are people in the military on this? I mean, this is like, Latin American or African an election is coming up, and we’re wondering which side are people in the military going to line up? Are the officer corps, constitutionalists? Anti Fascist? You know, they study the Constitution, supposedly worship it at West Point, but the rank and file officers are reportedly watching Fox News, 24/7 at all the bases where, when they’re in the workout rooms, they’ve got Fox News up on TV. 

Where are these people going to line up? Bunch of them are minorities, right? And they had to exempt the West Point and the naval academies from the right wing, anti affirmative action ruling. They know how many minorities are involved in the military. Where are they going to line up? This is indicative of just how fraught this situation is now that we actually sit around and think about these things. And the cops are very, very problematic in the cities, and the guy that runs the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago, Cataranza, is a flat out Trumpist fascist. I’m guessing it’s similar in Philly. It’s not good.

Sam Goldman  46:04

It’s, in fact, very bad, all right. But I think that there’s also a lot that people who are not afraid to look at this situation can do. We’ve had people ask, you know, besides knowing about it and telling other people about this possibility, what could we do or should we do now to prepare for that possibility?

Paul Street  46:30

Well, we got to develop our organizing capacity and hit the streets, and we got a little bit past this sleep inducing American exceptionalism, that this can’t happen here, and I think in Europe, because they have the living graphic history. In Germany of the Third Reich, and in France of the Vichy Regime, which completely capitulated, in Italy of Mussolini, you’ve actually seen, in response to the menace of fascism, advancing its political profile and presence in their national governments, you’ve seen tens and hundreds of thousands of people come out in the streets and just say, No! We will not put up with this type of backwardness and arch reactionary sentiment. 

There’s space for that because of their historical experience. So we’ve got to stop thinking that we get people to understand that we are not exempted from historical patterns, whereby class ruled capitalist Imperial society tends to give rise to fascism. So public education is absolutely critical. I hate to sound like Henry Giroux in a previous podcast there, but we really have to up our rhetorical, intellectual and educational game, not just in classrooms, not just in universities, but with each other. We really have to start having meaningful, non evasive conversations with our friends, with our relatives and all of that.

Sam Goldman  47:59

I want to thank you, Paul, for taking the time to chat with me, to sort some things out, to give us a lot to think about, to read further, to listen to. If there was anything that we didn’t talk about, that you wanted to mention, I want to give you the space to do so, and most importantly, I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about ways that people can connect more with your work and the community that you’re building with The Paul Street Report.

Paul Street  48:26

i think we covered most of what I was thinking we were going to talk about terms of that last thing you just mentioned, The Paul Street Report,  it’s a Substack. I’m trying to get more people to be subscribers, and particularly paid subscribers, so that we can keep it going into this throw down year, and this, which I think is going to extend into next year, I think this stuff is really heating up and really intensifying. So it’s called The PaulPaul Street Report, and I just found out I can do videos with it, not just audios. So it’s the coolest Substack out there. I’ve got rock and roll. I play a little music on it. Like I said, I’ve got video on it. Do a little poetry. It’s a many sided forum, so let’s put it that way. Let’s jump on board here. 

Sam Goldman  49:05

Thanks, Paul. 

Sam Goldman  49:06

I wanted to share a couple more thoughts on what people can do to prepare. One thing we can say for sure right now is that having networks and communities of people wrangling with what’s happening, what could happen makes a difference, including specifically to quickly mobilize actions that bring society to a halt through nonviolent, massive, sustained protests. If Trump and the MAGA Republicans take power in 2025 or make moves to overturn election results right now, I think it also means not allowing the vicious, lethal anti immigrant rhetoric to go on unopposed, working to defend immigrants now building up networks and supporting those working to defend the rights of non white people to vote, setting up plans to protect oppressed peoples, especially immigrants living in red and purple states and those where power is contested. 

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