Digging into Dangerous, Stupid, and False Takes on the Fascist Election
Originally published on the Paul Street Report
Much of what I am hearing from mostly decent and non-fascist US-Americans on the presidential re-election of the fascist brute Donald Trump is dangerously erroneous and misguided. Here are nine forms of this bad thinking:
“We got through the first Trump presidency and so we’ll get through a second Trump presidency.”
· “All the fascist rhetoric of Trump and his party is just campaign rhetoric and bluster. He won’t really act on all this menacing braggadocio.”
· “Trump is too stupid and venal to oversee fascist policy and governance.”
· “Fascism doesn’t fit here in the liberal United States. It’s an aberration that can’t take root here.”
· “The Dems will recover and come back to save us in 2026 and 2028…”
· “We’ve still got our constitutional checks and balances. They’ll keep Trump reigned in. Thank God for our Founders!”
· “It’s hopeless. It’s time to give up, maybe leave the country.”
· “Trump’s victory isn’t about white supremacy, nativism, sexism and fascism; it’s about the economic pain of the working class. It’s about the economic populist revenge of the working class.”
· “It has nothing to do with fascism because capital doesn’t face a revolutionary proletariat and fascism is unprofitable.” As the “Marxist”-electoralist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant purports to explain on CounterPunch:
“No, this is not the beginning of a fascist dictatorship. Trump would of course like to be a dictator, but there is simply not the objective basis for that. The mass of working people do not support the undermining of democracy. One of Trump’s most unpopular political moves was January 6th, which was strongly opposed by the overwhelming majority of the working class, including most people who vote Republican….The capitalist class also would not support Trump destroying democratic institutions in the United States. The capitalists see capitalist democracy, which is highly limited and mainly democracy for the billionaires, as the best possible shell for their interests. They know that if those institutions are shattered (as they were under Hitler and Mussolini) it would be a huge danger to the stability of their system and their ability to make profits….The capitalists have no love of democracy at all, and will support (and have supported) fascism when they felt sufficiently threatened by revolutionary working-class movements, as they did in Germany and Italy in the interwar period of the 20s and 30s. But right now, the capitalist class feels almost no threat at all from the left, which is incredibly weak and divided, as we just saw in the election….The main problem with this kind of exaggerated rhetoric about ‘fascism’ is that Democrats and their liberal supporters use it, as they did against George W. Bush (whom these same liberals now adore), in such a way as to suppress the independent left vote and to divide the working class and block it from developing independence from the two capitalist parties. We need a movement that will fight against the rich and their two parties, that includes working people who voted for both major parties as well as those, like us, who voted for Jill Stein.”
Let’s dig into all these nine lines of bullshit, one by one….
1. “We survived a Trump presidency before and this time will be no different.” How comforting. How stupid. Hundreds of thousands of US Americans did not make it through the first Trump presidency because of his anti-science and pandemo-fascist response to the Covid-19 pandemic and his broader attack on public health and environmental regulation. That key fact aside, anyone who does not understand that Trump’s second ascendancy and the 2024 elections mark a dramatically escalated stage in the fascist takeover of the executive branch and US government more broadly as a whole is simply not paying adult attention. I’ve been explaining this in great detail – see this, for starters: Paul Street, “Looking the Nightmare in the Face,” TPSR, November 8, 2024.
2. Just bluster. For real? The first Trump administration ended with Trump trying to declare martial law to crush the George Floyd Rebellion, with Trump fueling a pandemic he thought was particularly killing off Democrats and people of color, and with an attempted physical coup. The guard rails that limited the reach of his fascism have been systematically dismantled over the last four years. The Republifascists are soon to be in control of the full executive branch (Google up “unitary executive”) and all three branches of the federal government as well as at least half the states. Their party swept the contested states and won the presidential popular vote for the first time in two decades, something they see as a mandate for the enactment of a massive and detailed plan (Project 2025) for the Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of US government and society. They are dead serious about acting on this agenda. Just watch them move on mass deportations and see how they respond to those who resist it. Look at who Trump is appointing to his Cabinet: a team of lethal fascist lackeys including a full-on white supremacist FOX News hack atop the Department of Defense – a neo-Nazi with far right chest tattoos who would love to act on Trump’s pledge to deploy the US military to crush those who dare to protest the coming assaults on decency and democracy,
3. Trump’s too dumb and venal for fascism? Seriously? Trump is smarter than his liberal critics acknowledge but fascist leaders don’t have to be intellectually astute. Fascism is not exactly known for scientific and philosophical sophistication. And Trump has a bunch of far from brain- dead operatives working for him – plenty of agents and enablers who can string words and numbers together with terrible effect to make the case for the Project 2025/Trump 47/Amerikan Reich agenda. (Steve “Spank Your Children More” Bannon, Stephen “Camp of the Saints” Miller, and Heritage Foundation chief Kevin “Our Fascist Agenda Will be Bloodless if the Left Permits it to be” Roberts are evil, not stupid.) As for venality, it doesn’t contradict fascism in the slightest. Fascism embraces and protects the wealthy and institutes forms of “gangster capitalism,” functioning very much like a racket for those who cozy up the reigning party and leader.
4. Fascism doesn’t fit in the wonderful and exceptional liberal USA. (“It Can’t Happen Here”). Is that so? Know any other good jokes? A deep and pervasive racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, nativism, and fascism are all built into ongoing history of this country, the United States of America, from its very genocidal and slave-based origins through the present. The notion that Trump’s racist, sexist, nativist, eliminationist, violent, “illiberal”/authoritarian, and, well, fascist rhetoric and pledges are somehow outside the US American historical norm and societal DNA – “not who we are” – is a liberal and American Exceptionalist fantasy. These things are “as American as cherry pie” to this very day. The sixth chapter of my 2021 book This Happened Here: Neoliberals, Amerikaners, and the Trumping of America is titled “America Was Never Great: On ‘The Soul of This Nation.’” It is a tour through a vast US historical record suggesting that Trumpism-fascism is richly consistent with “who we are.” This record up to the first three decades of the 20th Century were a great inspiration for Adolph Hitler, who initially named his personal WWII train Amerika as a sign of his great admiration for the nation’s violent history of racist ethnic cleansing, enslavement, Jim Crow terrorism, territorial expansion, mass production, and more. (See also historian Stephen Hahn’s important and latest book Illiberal America: A History and Adam Hochschild’s brilliant study American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, which shows how the US descended in to something very much like fascism during and after World War I.)
5. Get ready to the Dems’ big comeback in 2026, 2028, 2032, 2034, 2036…? No, sorry Nany Pelosi et al! How many more times does it have to be demonstrated that the Weimar Dems are great appeasers and enablers of the nation’s rightmost major party, which has gone full-on fascist since Obama and under Trump? As the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian has been explaining in his latest social media posts, we can’t defeat fascism under the terms and within the political and societal boundaries of capitalism-imperialism, an anarchic class rule profits system of ruthless exploitation that relies fundamentally on what the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA calls “the five stops”: (i) white supremacism/racial oppression, (ii) patriarchy, (iii) nativism/immigrant-bashing, (iv) ecocide/environmental destruction, and (v) imperialism/war. These “five stops” are the critical seedbeds of fascism. The Democrats are a capitalist-imperialist party and thus wedded to each one of them.
Fascism cannot and will not be overcome by the Democrats. If there is any doubt remaining about that, look at how quickly the Dems have gone from calling Trump as a fascist to bending their knees for a peaceful transition to his coming nightmare presidency. As Avakian wrote two days ago:
“After calling Trump a fascist, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and other leading Democrats are now busy bragging about how they are upholding ‘the peaceful transfer of power,’ are helping Trump with his ‘transition’ to power, and they hope he will succeed as President! …Once more, the Democrats themselves are driving home the crucial point I have repeatedly emphasized (for example, in my article FASCISM AND THE WHOLE SYSTEM): The Democrats, and the ‘mainstream’ section of the ruling class that they represent, cannot fight the fascists the way they need to be fought—and this fight needs to be waged as part of fighting to abolish this whole system… Fascism, as represented by Donald Trump, is a white supremacist, male supremacist, anti-LGBT, immigrant-hating, aggressively environment-destroying, anti-scientific, religious fundamentalist fanaticism, determined to use the power of the government to forcibly compel obedience to its dangerous and destructive lunacy, and to viciously persecute those who oppose or resist. And, now that the election is over, here are the leading Democrats anxious to cooperate with and assist the fascist Trump!..For the Democrats, the ‘stability’ of the rule of this system of capitalism-imperialism, even in the form of fascism, is more important than actually defeating fascism.”
Yes – and the Democrats are asking us to continue down the deadly path of hitching our hopes on savagely time-staggered two- and four-year election cycles as the system cancels livable ecology and sets us on a path to nuclear war at an ever-escalating pace!
To get a sense of how bad and Vichy-like the Dem capitulation is, read this November 9 New York Times interview with perhaps Trump’s leading Congressional antagonist, former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even as she complains that Trump and Vance made sickening light on the campaign trail of a Trumpist’s horrific physical assault on her husband in the Pelosis’ home in the fall of 2022, and even as she says that January 6 “was insurrection instigated by the president of the United States,” Pelosi actually said this to the Times:
“The people have spoken, Donald Trump has won and now we will have a peaceful transfer of power in our country… I didn’t come here today to go through the list of grievances against Donald Trump. He’s now the president. We wish our country well under the leadership of any president… I’m not here to take him down. He won the election, congratulations, good luck to him there, but hopefully we can find common ground… I think that we make a very big mistake if we underestimate the greatness of the American people and the greatness of our democracy and the greatness of our country… We always try to work with Republicans…. He’s the president. We all want the president to succeed….Let’s give this a chance and see where we can find our common ground. We’ll see what is rhetoric and what is real. Let’s see what materializes…Let’s just move on….It’s going to be pretty exciting for what comes next in the Democratic Party.”
You can’t make up shit like that!
6. Saved by the Founders’ constitutional checks and balances? LOL! Good one! All three branches of the federal government are going to be under Trumpist-Republi-fascist domination. That cancels the formula for checking tyrannical power. Look, those absurdly venerated 18th Century US Founders mistakenly believed that they had developed a new republican form of government that would prevent the formation of political factions and parties. They did not anticipate that single party domination could wipe out the checking and balancing power of their three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. They also did not anticipate the problem of partisan gridlock.
7. The Trump vote was really just about the price of eggs, rent, and gas for the wonderful working class? Wrong. World-wide post-covid inflation has been a boon for Trump and non-incumbent candidates around the planet and certainly helped his electoral margins. Trump won voters who say that their family’s economic situation is worse than it was four years ago by 64 points — 81% to 17%. He won those who say that inflation has caused their households severe hardship by 50 points – 74% to 24%. He won those who said that “the economy” was their top issue by 61 points – 80% to 19%.
Still, we should be skeptical of exit poll data showing concerns about “the economy” on the part of Trump voters. Partisan politics has broken/polluted economic perceptions for many years: we have folks telling pollsters that “the economy” is terrible regardless of how “the economy” is actually performing when the party they dislike (and often even hate) holds the White House. Many a Trumpist who is making out great with his salary or business will say “the economy” sucks as long as an Obama or a Biden is in the White House. If Trump gets in and “the economy” and even the Trump fan’s economic situation goes south, the Trumpist will tell a pollster that “the economy” is just peachy. The same dynamic is in play for the famous polling question “how do you feel about the direction of the country right now? Is it on the right or the wrong track? (I’m not saying “the economy” doesn’t suck. I think the capitalist economic system is literally sucking the life out of livable ecology, oppressing billions of people, and even helping put us on a path to nuclear war among other terrible things. But my point is that this polling question is badly tainted by partisan identification when it comes to figuring out why people voted Republi-fascist or Dem-imperialist.)
At the same time, the exit polls also show that the Trump vote was evenly split between those on both sides of standard measures of affluence vs poverty (with cut offs at $50,000 and $100,000 in annual family income) but heavily weighted towards those who identified as follows: deniers of the fascist Trump’s “extremism” (94% for Trump), Republican (94% for Trump), believers in the centrist capitalist Kamala Harris’s supposedly “radical” left “extremism” (92% for Trump), opponents of abortion rights (91%), anti-immigration (90%), “conservative” (90%), pro-mass deportations (87%), fans of the Christian Fascist US Supreme Court (83%), white evangelical (82% for Trump), pro-US-Irael genocide in Gaza (82%), white evangelical Protestant (72%), white male without college degree (69%), white without college degree (66%), Protestant (63%), white male (60%), and Catholic (58%). By contrast, Trump beat Harris with those in households with total family incomes under $50,000 by just three points (50% to 47%) and with total family incomes under $100,000 by just four percentage points (50% to 46%). Harris beat Trump by five points with union households. Trump’s victory rested not on either economic anxiety or revanchist and reactionary values and identity but on all of the above.
Of course eight plus years into the fascist Trump show, no sentient American has any excuse for not understanding that Trump is an ecocide, fascist and existential menace to humanity, decency, and life itself — a danger far greater than rising living expenses in a nation where living standards are far higher for poor folks than for billions of people around the world.
8. We Can Count on Capital to Prevent Fascism. Really? Wow. That’s good but wrong to know! Look again at that Kshama Sawant quote I put up early in this essay. The socialist Seattle City Council member gets it right about how capitalist and imperialist the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats are and always have been – not just in the “neoliberal” era but back through and before the Great Society (LBJ) and New Deal (FDR) years. But no, there is today no unified US ruling class with a definite shared preference for “democracy” and against fascism on profitability (or any other) grounds. Some parts of the US capitalist elite cling to long normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, such as they are (a clock for the underlying de facto “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”) atop their system’s political superstructure; other parts are fine with a crossover to openly authoritarian and fascist governance. Some big capitalists embrace Trump for purely bottom-line “neoliberal”/capitalist reasons (tax cuts and de-regulation) and others sincerely embrace the Amerikaner fascism of Trump and his virulently racist, nativist, and sexist party and base. The notion that “the capitalist class” will reject fascism as a threat to their bottom line is ridiculous. Some sectors of the investor class expect (with reason) to do quite well with a Christian white nationalist Project 2025 Amerika.
Sawant should have read my August 26, 2022 CounterPunch essay titled “Only Fools Count on Capital to Stop Late Fascism.” It takes on earlier Trumpenleft versions of the argument she has unfortunately and foolishly run out after the 2024 elections.
Sawant might also consult Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Group’s brilliant book Black Skin, White Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. Contemporary fascism arises out of a toxic mix including racial and demographic forces and fears, nativism sexual hysteria, patriarchy, and fundamentalist religion, all in a context of chronic chaos and instability rooted in the anarchy of capital/capitalism-imperialism. Sawant’s notion that it requires a radical proletarian left like the ones found in post-WWI Italy and German is idiotic. It is true that the first mission of classic, mustachioed European historical fascism was to smash the mobilized post-World War I proletariat and its radical and social democratic leaders and allies. But in the third decade of the 21st Century, as Malm argues, “race has primacy over class” in the making of capitalist fascism. As Malm explains:
“ The duty of Italian and German fascism [in the 1920s and 1930s] was indeed to crush the organized working class…But if fascism were to assume power in the decades ahead, the immediate target would be racially defined – in Europe, immigrants, Muslims or other earmarked nonwhite populations. This is not, of course, to suggest that classic historical fascism was not racist – ‘in Bavaria, the fascist program is exhausted by the phrase “beat up the Jews,”’ Clara Zetkin noted in 1923 – or that it could return without dominant class content. But…the hammer would not need to fall first on labour, but would rather hit enemies defined by descent. This might change: a sudden upswing in class struggle would alter the calculus, as would a climate movement as frightening as the Commies once were. But on current trends, it will be race first.”
In a nice example of outmoded proletarian reification and “class truth” mystification (please see this important polemic for a brilliant revolutionary communist takedown of the lethal “Ajithian” distortions fueling Sawant’s foolishness), Sawant sees Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s fascist victory as welcome working-class revenge that helps clear the way for US workers and unions to build an independent workers’ party. Happy that the orange fascist malignancy won (!), she thinks that the holy proletariat is mainly immune from supporting fascist dictatorships even though the Hitler-channeling Republi-Nazi Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump won more than half of voters in households with annual incomes under $50,000 and under $100,000 and even as union households that voted broke nearly half for the orange-brushed brute who praises the mass firing of striking workers and promises to invoke the Insurrection Acto to crush future US protests with the US armed forces.
As if all this isn’t bad enough, Sawant creepily steers workers and others back into the paralyzing quicksand of the American slaveowners’ and capitalists’ Minority Rule electoral system. She childishly dreams of that system being used for victory by an independent anti-capitalist workers party. That is shameful electoralist sheep-dogging and Judas-Goating (likely encouraged by her idiosyncratic electoral success as an open “Marxist” in a single city council office in a nation of 19,491 municipalities).
Sawant’s union- and ballot-fetishizing nonsense deflects from the actual Marxist mission, a socialist revolution for and on the part of all oppressed people – one that overthrows the whole damn system, including the archaic US voting set-up.
Contrary to Sawant, the fact that Democratic politicos belatedly used the words “fascist” and “fascism” to help induce working class people to vote for capitalist-imperialist Democrats hardly means that Trump and his party aren’t fascist. It simply means that the Dems came around late in the game to going public with the accurate characterization of Trump and his party for the Dems’ selfish partisan and electoral reasons – not to actually fight fascism, but to keep their fascism-conciliating party afloat. Refuse Fascism and the Revcoms don’t call Trump and his capitalist party fascist out of a desire to elect imperialist Democratic candidates like Harris or leftish third-party candidates like Stein and Sawant – or any candidates at all, for that matter. They don’t play around in the Quicksand Box of bourgeois electoral politics. They call Trump and his party and backers fascist (a) because the description is a historical and social and political science fit (an objective reality) and (b) order to spark masses to rise up against this lethal political pathology and the system (capitalism-imperialism) that produces it (along with ecocide and the rising potential for nuclear war) – to spark mass resistance to and revolution over the terrible, humanity-enslaving system that shit up the false “democratic” choice of Trump or Harris.
9. Lost hope? Run away? Cut it out! Giving up and fleeing (flight over fight) doesn’t help, as I recently explained. Join a group of people who are ready and determined to fight back against fascism the way it needs to be fought, not on Democrats’ terms, not through collective bargaining or elections, not on the terms of capitalism-imperialism. Your new comrades will help you shed self-reinforcing fatalism and pessimism, reminding you that it isn’t about the crystal ball and the odds, it’s about rising up with thousands and then millions of others against the whole sick capitalist-imperialist system that gave us the grotesque “democratic” choice between a malignant fascist (Trump) and a genocidal imperialist and mass incarcerator (Harris). Turn your anger from inward (depression) to outward against the system – to resistance and revolution. Last words here to Avakian:
[October 31, five days before the election]: “We are being told to choose between a lunatic racist, woman-hating, all-around fascist (Donald Trump) and a genocidal war criminal (Kamala Harris). When these are the ‘choices’ offered by a system, it is time to recognize that this system is a thoroughly rotten, monstrously criminal, massively destructive, thoroughly outmoded system (long past the time when it can represent anything positive). It is time to look seriously for solutions outside and beyond this system. It is time for a revolution to overthrow and uproot this whole system and bring into being a fundamentally different and much better system.”
November 7, two days after the election: “This is not a time for demoralization and despair—it is a time for righteous anger and revolutionary determination…There can be no good resolution under this system because, despite the false promises and lies of the ‘mainstream section’ of the ruling class (represented by the Democratic Party) the whole system rests on ruthless exploitation—and oppression based on race, sex and gender, the plunder of the environment and of people throughout the world, as well as the devastation of war—all this is built into the ruling system of capitalism-imperialism.”
Fascist Trump, Genocide Joe, the Whole Damn System’s Got to Go!