Two preliminary thoughts.
“Radical Left Lunatics”
First, like the neo-McCarthyite fascists they are, Trump, Vance, Fatherland – I mean FOX – News talking heads, and other Republicans have been throwing around the words socialist, communist, and Marxist in a completely absurd way. They even use these terms of supposed insult and menace to describe completely capitalist-imperialist politicians like Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Adam Schiff – people Trump calls “radical left lunatics.” The language is meant to paint their immediate enemies, the ruling class Democrats, as evil and crazed “totalitarians” outside the civilized human and “American” norm who want to destroy freedom and enslave humanity
I really resent this vicious demonization of socialists, communists, and Marxists. I strive to be a decent and sane human being, sometimes with more success than other times. I have no desire to enslave anyone – quite the opposite, in fact. I believe in the full airing and debate of political and intellectual differences. My notion of the world I want to live in has big space for dissent.
I do all kinds of normal US-American stuff. I wash my car and walk my dog. I watch cop shows and shoot baskets. I go through drive ins for ice cream and shop in malls. I drive too fast and spend too much time on social media and worrying about how Chicago and University of Michigan sports teams are doing. I also identify as a revolutionary communist – imagine that!
“Let’s Not Get Extreme”
Second, I am guessing that a considerable part of my real and potential audience here is a product of middle-class origins and training and is therefore struggling with the middle-class sentiment that “we shouldn’t get all extreme and radical” about things. “Let’s not be extreme and radical,” the message goes: “don’t listen to [so-called] extremists and radicals,” categories that typically include scary Marxists and communists.
Well, guess what? You want to know what’s extreme and radical? What the capitalist class and more fundamentally the capitalism-imperialist system is doing to the climate, what capitalism is doing to biodiversity, what capitalism is doing to millions upon millions of sweatshop workers and child laborers and trafficked girls and women and desperate migrants around the planet. What it is doing to the people in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon. What it is doing to inner-city populations, immigrants, and working-class people more broadly right here in the belly of the world’s most powerful and destructive Empire. And what it is doing to US politics right now.
Funding, equipping, and protecting genocidal ethnic cleaning and a wider regional war in the Middle East is pretty extreme. So is fighting a lethal proxy war with the nuclear superpower Russia on its long and repeatedly invaded southwestern border. So is encircling and menacing the rising superpower China and maintaining more than 800 military bases across the planet. So is turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber through the heedless mass extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
And so is turning one of the United States’ two dominant political parties into a fascist organization[1].
Checking All the Fascist Boxes
Let’s dive into the “democratic choices” the US American system is giving to its corporate-managed electorate this fall. Stop and imagine that the demented fascist maniac Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is re-installed in the White House on January 20, 2025. It’s a real possibility. It might even be the most likely outcome.
In 2021, I published a book titled This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (2021). I worked in this volume with the following definition of fascism worked up by the organization Refuse Fascism (on whose Editorial Board I sit), which was formed after Trump’s first election in 2016:
“Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights.. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors.”
The first Trump presidency checked off all those and more fascism-defining boxes, as I showed in This Happened Here.
A second Trump presidency will be worse – far worse. Trump this year has left little doubt about his fascist essence. He has been opening channeling Hitler like never before. He has said that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and claimed that he will “clear the Marxist vermin out of this country.” That is straight out of Mein Kampf.
Trump has set Jewish Americans up as scapegoats and for retribution if he loses. He has continued his arch-racist Nazi-like attacks (“they’re eating the pets!”) on legal Haitian immigrants. He continues with his wild Hitlerian lies about the “stolen” 2020 election, foreign countries supposedly sending hardened criminals (“their worst people”) into the US, and Democrats’ mythical recruitment of “illegal” immigrants to vote against him.
Trump says that police should be granted “one really rough day” to end urban crime – a not-so-veiled call for a day of extrajudicial assassinations in the nation’s Black and brown ghettos and barrios. He has recently called for the National Guard and Army to be deployed to crush “radical left” activists – those he calls “the enemy within” and the primary threat to America – after the election.
This is straight up classic fascist rhetoric, not to be laughed off. Every day brings a new outrageous Nazi-like statement from Trump and his fellow neofascist and textbook sociopath running mate JD “Women Belong in the Home” Vance.
“The Gates of Hell”
Once again, Trump and his fellow Republifascists have made it clear they won’t accept an election that doesn’t go their way and are threatening considerable violence even civil war in the wake of the election. Listen (for just one example among many) to the rhetoric of Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Donald J. Trump’s former national security adviser and a key figure in Trump’s effort to subvert and overthrow the 2020 election:
“At the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, a far-right event in Pennsylvania this month, Mr. Flynn told the crowd that after a Trump victory: ‘Katie, bar the door. Believe me, the gates of hell — my hell — will be unleashed.’…Ivan Raiklin,… who serves on the board of directors of Mr. Flynn’s organization America’s Future, urged Trump supporters in Pennsylvania to go to the state capital, Harrisburg, and ‘confront’ their state representatives with ‘evidence of the illegitimate steal’ after the election if Mr. Trump loses… Raiklin also called on Republican-held state legislatures to withhold their electors in the event of a Trump loss …In a September interview on a podcast dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, Mr. Flynn applauded right-wing activists who are surveilling election infrastructure as the ‘modern-day Minutemen of this cold civil war that we are currently facing,’ a reference to the Revolutionary War militia.… Trump has signaled his ongoing endorsement of Flynn’s activities and hinted at a place for him in a future administration. Calling into a live event where Mr. Flynn appeared last year, he told him, ‘We’re going to bring you back,’ to cheers from the crowd.”
The radical fascist coup rolls on. Trump’s re-ascendancy will mean a dramatically sharpened consolidation of Republi-fascist power in the United States. The nation’s powerful executive branch will have fallen under nearly complete fascist control in a nation where the Reichmost of the two viable ruling class political parties already holds the powerful Supreme Court and possibly both houses of Congress, certainly including the powerful US Senate (thanks to the 2024 Senatorial election lineup). Half of the nation’s powerful fifty state governments are already under Republi-Nazi domination. And this time, Donald “Retribution” Trump will preside over a party and executive branch far more united and determined to conduct the takeover and makeover of US government and society on Christian white nationalist grounds than in 2017-21. Project 2025 is all over Trump’s Agenda 47.
Trump’s victory and the heightened consolidation of fascist power will represent a stark existential threat to basic civil liberties, “democracy,” livable ecology, social justice and decency, and to truth and to life itself.
“The Democratic Party Will Not Stop This Nightmare”
And who, pray tell, is going to save us from disaster? The dismal, demobilizing, dollar-drenched Democrats, the other one of the nation’s two dominant capitalist-imperialist parties, whose leaders and media have waited until the last two weeks of the 2024 campaign to abandon their taboo on publicly describing Trump and Trumpism as fascist? Know any other good jokes?
The leader of “the inauthentic opposition,” as Sheldon Wolin pithily labelled the Democrats on the eve of Barack Obama’s militantly neoliberal presidency, has badly abused the hopes of those who thought that removing Trump through voting would make a better world. “Genocide Joe” Biden has sparked a reckless imperialist proxy war with nuclear Russia – a war that has helped spike global prices while bringing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than any time in recent memory. Biden has sickeningly funded, equipped, and militarily and protected Israel’s vicious war (also inflationary) of livestreamed genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Israel’s horrific attacks on Lebanon and Iran. He has “overseen the largest cuts to social welfare ever coming out of the pandemic, e.g., [slashing] food stamps, Medicare, child tax credit” (Arun Gupta). He has boasted of overseeing a significant expansion of domestic oil and gas drilling amidst an accelerating climate catastrophe driven by fossil capitalism. He has failed to use his power to preserve women’s right to an abortion in all fifty states. He has signed on to a right-wing border bill meant to steal the Republifascists’ white-nationalist and nativist thunder – a bill defeated in Congress because Trump wanted to deny Biden a legislative victory on “border security.”
He has failed to promptly and properly prosecute Trump despite abundant evidence of Trump’s fascist assault on the 2020 election and other high state crimes. He has therefore granted “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (Noam Chomsky’s reasonable description of Trump in January of 2020, even before Trump began badly exacerbating the Covid-19 disaster) a third straight shot at destroying human society.
As shown by their massive expenditures on behalf of war in Ukraine and the Middle East while masses go without proper social protection in the US, the imperialist Democrats care more about killing people overseas than they do about helping distressed people in their own country – not to mention far more impoverished, miserable, and numerous masses in a world disfigured by the US-led capitalist-imperialist order. They privilege Zionist ethnic cleansing and the reckless provocation of nuclear Russia over “saving [bourgeois] democracy” in “the homeland.”
The Obama-Biden Dems are collaborators in the nation’s potential takeover by Christian white nationalist Amerikaner fascism, which has grown stronger since Biden assumed office. This is very much as predicted by Refuse Fascism years ago: “The Democratic Party will not stop this nightmare. Trump, fascist Fox News, and the Republi-fascist Party have branded them as enemies and ‘traitors.’ Yet, the Democratic Party will consistently pull to try to work with, conciliate with and collaborate with them. There can be no reconciliation with fascism except on the terms of the fascists. Fascism must be resolutely opposed.”
A centrist Dem with a long history as a mass incarcerator in California, Kamala “I Don’t Want to Restructure Society” Harris has not voiced a significant objection to any of Biden’s horrible record. As president she will certainly strive to continue each of Biden’s disastrous policies including the continued brazen US military encirclement and provocation of China.
Never forget that Harris ended her nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention by promising to keep the US military “the most lethal fighting [killing] force on the planet.” That is a promise of future epic US war crimes under a culturally re-branded America.
Biden and Harris’ backing of the livestreamed genocide in Gaza could well cost them the 2024 election by alienating a significant and strategic part of the electorate – a problem of special significance in the critical battleground state of Michigan (home to a significant Arab minority). So what? Their imperial agenda trumps their sense of electoral risk.
Even if she wants to be better than this, and that is highly questionable, Harris as president would be unable to do much to make herself and her party look like a desirable and progressive alternative to the Republifascist coup party. An imagined liberal and progressive President Harris would be checkmated at every step by the right-tilted Minority Rule structure of US politics and governance, something myself and others have written about at great length[2] The fascist coup will keep on rolling, waiting to strike again in 2028 if not before, with Harris in the White House and doing everything she could to conciliate the “red” team in the name of holy bipartisanship and “pragmatism.”
Time’s Up
In the meantime, the ecological and nuclear war doomsday clocks tick closer to Midnight with ever more deafening sound, with no regard or respect for the paralyzing “quicksand” and “siren songs” (BobAvakian’s excellent metaphors for what he rightly calls “the bourgeois electoral bullshit”) of America’s savagely time-staggered four-year election cycles. We are badly out of time for continuing to measure our moments of meaningful mass political engagement in quadrennial electoral extravaganzas.
Ecocide and Homeland fascism aside, a system that makes “ironclad” US support for the Judeo-fascist burning of Palestinian children in hospitals to death “the lesser evil” is a system that has made apparent its utter moral depravity.
This system has a name: US capitalism-imperialism.
Refusing to Reinforce a Terrible Illusion
No, this is not a pitch for campaigning and voting for a third-party presidential candidate – a completely useless and arguably reactionary activity for reasons explained by the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian:
“This system forces the people who rise to the top of it, and rule it, to be literally—without any exaggeration—cut-throat exploiters, murderous oppressors on a massive scale, and relentless plunderers of people and the environment, regardless of the suffering this causes for masses of human beings. For individual capitalists, and for the ruling classes of capitalist countries, if they do not beat out and beat down others, by whatever means, no matter how monstrous, they will go under. This cannot be ‘reformed away,’ and it cannot be changed by changing the people who rule in this system—they will all be bound by the very nature, the ‘logic’ and dynamics, and the demands of this system. By running for President, I would only contribute to reinforcing the illusion that all this could, somehow, be ‘reformed away’ or ‘changed by changing the people who rule in this system.’ [Wrong!:] This can only be changed with a revolution—to overthrow and abolish this system and replace it with a fundamentally different and much better system, which does not rest on, does not require, and aims to fully do away with ruthless exploitation and monstrous mass murder and destruction.”
The Future is Already Extreme
As revolutionary communists have been saying for years now, the future is already radical. The only question now is, will it be radically and extremely terrible and ugly or will it be radically and extremely emancipating and beautiful? It will be either – to use Marx and Engels language in The Communist Manifesto – “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or the radically reactionary “common ruin of all.” Five hundred years of capitalism has brought us to this choice. If we get (a) seriously organized to repolarize the nation from “red v. blue” to the people v. capitalism-imperialism [3] and (b) take proper advantage of the current deepening crisis of previously normative bourgeois-democratic rule (US-American style) and the severe divisions that exist between elites and masses in the US today – greater than any time since 1860-1861 and certain to produce significant political violence after the 2024 election – to (c) build a real movement to undertake what Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. called at the end of his life “the real issue to be faced – the radical reconstruction of society itself” (something that requires a real revolution well beyond anything King ever advocated) we can (d) earn and deserve the undying gratitude of future generations.
Endnotes
1. The whole US capitalist ruling class – and this includes our oligarchs who align with the Democrats – is a leading culprit behind American fascisation. The nation’s wealthy and parasitic owners and their many allies and agents in the nation’s legal, intellectual, cultural and political superstructure – and this includes elites aligned with the Democratic Party – had the power and every opportunity to take the Hitler-channeling malignancy Trump out of the game. They failed to do this basic decent thing after Trump’s open effort to overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy in 2020-21. The United States’ owners left the orange-brushed monster free to make a third viable campaign for the most powerful and dangerous job on the planet. Our imperialist masters kept this fascist maniac and the movement behind him in play, granting him a third shot at destroying human society. Some of “our” big capitalists, including the world’s richest parasite Elon Musk, are very much behind the fascist project. At the same time, our bourgeois ruling class makes sure that the Democrats will never offer the kind of policies, politics, and vision required to defeat the other and now fascist party. More fundamentally, however, the capitalist system behind the ruling class fuels fascism. It’s not just that capitalism tends to generate support for explicitly authoritarian “solutions” to the grave problems it creates by exposing the inauthenticity of its politicians’ “democratic” pretenses thereby delegitimizing so-called democracy in the eyes of millions. At the same time, beyond class rule and in support of class rule, capitalism relies on and stirs up three key forms of oppression that are critical ingredients of fascist movements and politics: white supremacism/racism, patriarchy, and nativism/immigrant bashing. These are three of what the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) calls “the five stops”: five problems that can never be overcome under the capitalist system. The other two are the destruction of livable ecology and inter-imperial warfare, both of which currently pose grave threats to human survival with or without fascism in power. Defeating fascism for good means transcending capitalism and replacing it with a revolutionary socialist system that takes concerted aim at each of these “five stops” on the path to a world in which no part of humanity exploits any party of humanity and the reigning maxim is “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” (to communism). The constitution for precisely such a system already exists in highly developed draft form, courtesy of the RCP and it prolific leader Bob Avakian. Read it here.
2. Beyond capitalist rule and intimately related to that rule, the Amerikan fascist menace draws great strength from a US political order that is distinctive in the extent to which it contradicts standard Western bourgeois-democratic norms of “one person, one vote.” As the liberal political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have recently shown in their book The Tyranny of the Minority, the United Sates is an outlier right-tilted Minority Rule regime in comparison to all of its “democratic” peer states. US-Americans don’t elect their presidents on the basis of a popular vote. The 18th Century presidential Electoral College helps tilt the nation’s politics well to the right, over-representing the nation’s rightmost voters and regions while effectively reducing presidential elections to a small handful of states and making it irrelevant for the Democratic candidate to win by 5 million votes instead of by 5000 votes in a blue state like California, or New York. This archaic and anti-democratic institution at the heart of a Minority Rule system traces back to slavery as do three other parts of the same problem: the absurdly powerful and mal-apportioned and right-tilted US Senate, states’ rights, and the Second Amendment. All of this and more (gerrymandering, the Senate filibuster, corporate media, and a “wild west” campaign finance system) that helps fascism win and consolidate power in the US is of course eliminated under the Revolutionary Communist Party’s Draft Constitution for a Socialist Republic of North America.
3. The US-American capitalist political order has sharply polarized the nation along the partisan and related regional and social lines of Republican “red” (with a strong white hinterland and heartland tilt) versus Democratic “blue” (with a strong metropolitan and bi-coastal emphasis). This polarization is now so extreme that significant political violence and possibly even civil war seems distinctly possible if not likely and even certain after the 2024 election, the contest over which will certainly roll into the next year. The resistance we need to this madness should understand “red” America as brown, the shirt color of Hitler’s early paramilitaries. It must work to re-polarize the nation. It must pit decent and truth-seeking people, under the real red banner of revolutionary socialism against the fascism-promoting red, white, and blue ruling class and that ruling class’s capitalist-imperialist system.