Denial, Avoidance, and Surrender

Not the Way to Go

Italian Fascism-Resisters During World War II

I have twice used social media to ask my thousands of online “friends” what their plans are and how they will respond if the fascist monster Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” returns to power next year – a distinct possibility.

With very few exceptions, the responses are all about denial, avoidance, escape, surrender, and pessimism. 

The silence on fighting back is deafening.

The lack of faith in any notion of resistance is stunning.

I have the distinct impression that all but a few of my “Facebook friends” are poised to do absolutely nothing about the United States’ accelerating slide into fascism.

One common thread among the deniers is that a Trump return can’t occur because he’s “too extreme.”

I’m not sure what planet these folks are living on. The election is by all accounts razor sharp close and the Republican candidate (who happens to be a full-on fascist in this and the last two presidential elections) always gets a significant advantage from the right-tilted Electoral College.  We do not elect presidents on the basis of a national popular vote in the self-described homeland and headquarters of “democracy.”

It's true that only a fifth to a quarter of the US electorate is fully down with MAGA fascism/Trumpism. That’s a terrible and large mass of retrograde white nationalists in our supposed City on a Hill, but not enough alone to swing the election. But there are other big chunks of the Republican electorate who may not themselves be fascistic but think that Trump needs to return in order to put down the mythical “radical Left” menace. Other Trump voters believe that Trump won’t actually act on his terrible rhetoric — they think it’s all show; nothing to take seriously. A bunch of Republicans simply vote out of perceived economic self interest and/or pure partisan identity with little if any concern for Trump’s far-right, Hitler-channeling language and pledges.

At the same time, the dismal Democrats are an uninspiring, deeply conservative capitalist-imperialist party of “inauthentic opposition” to corporate and financial power. They piss around in the blasé, bourgeois, and bipartisan center, doing little to energize and activate masses of ordinary and oppressed people they are charged by the ruling class with keeping under control. For this and other reasons, they are quite capable of falling short of the popular vote they need to get past Trump’s Electoral College advantage.

A Trump victory is not only possible; it may be the most likely outcome given the US electoral and party set-up and the contemptible way in which the mass media normalizes the insane spectacle that US politics have become in the Age of Trump, during which one of the nation’s two dominant parties has gone almost unmentionably (until the last three weeks of the third election with the neo-Nazi Trump atop the Republican ticket) fascist. And this is without even getting into all the various ways in which the Republifascists are planning to steal the election if they have to with help from their powerful agents and allies in county and state governments, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

A common thread of denial — already suggested — says that Trump’s fascist rhetoric isn’t really serious.  It’s all just narcissistic bloviation  and campaign showmanship.  Once he gets back in the White House, this narrative runs, he’ll be held in check by the system’s “guardrails” and “checks and balances.”

This is remarkably naïve in light of Trump and his allies’ now openly fascist calls for dictatorship, mass deportations, the enlistment of the military in domestic repression and policing, violent political retribution, and more – and in light of the fact that a second Trump presidency will be accompanied by a Repulifascist majority in the powerful US Senate, a possible Republifascist majority in the House of Representatives, ongoing Republifascist control of least half the states, and a God-like lifetime appointed and grotesquely corrupt and illegitimate Supreme Court with a Christian Fascist majority that has recently granted Trump blanket immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed in connection with his “official duties.”

Then there’s the people who say there’s no reason to get alarmed about a second Trump presidency because “the Democrats are just as bad,” as if there’s no difference between a party that remains allegiant (however tepidly) to bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, such as it is, and a party that is flat out ready to supplant that “democracy” with explicit dictatorship and fascist authoritarianism.  And as if the Democrats being “the same” would somehow mean that we’d be any less duty-bound to rise up against Trumpist fascism.

Sadly, rejecting denial doesn’t necessarily translate into resistance. I also hear from folks who know that grave concerns about the coming possible fascist consolidation are NOT at all liberal and left “hysteria” and “wolf crying” but for whom real mass resistance is simply unimaginable.  They say things like “half the country is fascist” – not true – and talk about leaving the country or going into a a private shell inside “this nightmare state.”

Expatriation, real or imagined, is a common theme among these folks.  So is keeping one’s head down and plugging away at daily life: working, shopping, taking walks, breathing, “sucking it up” and “carrying on.”  Life goes on, after all – for oneself at least if not for the millions of immigrants that Trump pens up in concentration camps and the protesters he orders the military to kill on American soil.

The themes here are surrender, me-first/individual survival, adaptation, flight, and internal exile. 

Even those who seem to reference resistance often do so in a fatalistic way: “I’ll be killed or jailed.”

The sense of powerlessness and isolation is pervasive.

Some of my respondents have fantasized about borderline Blue secession – the promise of a better life in Blue states that will supposedly function something like autonomous zones somehow immune from the fascist repression and chaos promised by a Trumpist federal government.

Most of my respondents are either in denial or have given up in advance, potentially turning their fatalist and pessimist subjectivity – commonly masked as realism – into a negative objective historical force.  They exhibit little if any commitment to rising up on behalf of others as well as themselves to refuse fascism and create a world in which fascism would no longer find a base and a path to power.

Anything but resistance to Amerikaner fascism and the underlying capitalist-imperialist system that gives rise to it!

This is all very much NOT the way to think about the election, its aftermath, America, and history.  I’ve been trying to model a different and at once more hopeful and more scientific take on things here at the Paul Street Report. I will continue to do so after the big quadrennial Holy Day.   

(For what it’s worth, my mother’s beloved older brother Connie Freed died fighting French Vichy Regime fascists almost exactly 82 years ago.)

For this whole different take, stay tuned.  Even better, listen to the regular podcasts at Refuse Fascism and read the regular brilliant social media dispatches from the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian.

Real resistance and more, revolution, is possible as well as required in coming days, weeks, and months.