Beyond Wishful Thinking and Wrong Conviction

Reflections on the Radical Potential of a Rare Time

The Best Indictment

The fourth set of indictments against Donald Trump — the list of charges handed down by a grand jury in Atlanta, Georgia — is the best one yet for four reasons.  First, he’s indicted along with eighteen other defendants, which repudiates his constant chilidish claim that he is being singled out for personal political martyrdom. Second, the charge of racketeering properly elicits the image of “Don” Trump as a mob boss. Third, it’s an election subversion prosecution that he can’t cancel or pardon himself out of as the potential next US president in 2025 since it has come down at the state, not the federal level. Fourth, the fascist and racist leader Trump’s white nationalist co-conspirators may quite appropriately be booked and briefly detained in a metropolitan jail infamous for its mistreatment of poor people of color. As The New York Times reports:

“To locals, the jail is known simply as ‘Rice Street.’ And over the next nine days, the sprawling Atlanta detention center is where defendants in the racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies will be booked. The local sheriff, who oversees the jail, says that even high-profile defendants like Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, would be treated like everyone else should they surrender there. That means they would undergo a medical screening, be fingerprinted and have mug shots taken, and could spend time in a holding cell at the jail, weeks after the Justice Department announced an investigation for what it called ‘serious allegations of unsafe, unsanitary living conditions’ there….The Rice Street jail is not a place for the faint of heart, said Robert G. Rubin, a veteran defense lawyer who has had many clients booked there. In recent weeks, two inmates have been found dead at the jail. Last year, a detainee was found dead in his cell, his body covered in bites from bed bugs and other insects, according to his lawyer….At least two songs on Spotify are titled ‘901 Rice Street,’ the jail’s address. The popular rapper Latto has a song whose title refers to Rice Street with an expletive. And a line from a Killer Mike rap goes, ‘Locked in like Rice Street without a bond.’ …Typically, as soon as a defendant surrenders to the police, they go to a holding area with other detainees, Mr. Rubin said. ‘It’s miserable. It’s cold. It smells. It’s just generally unpleasant,’ he said, relying on his clients’ past descriptions….'there’s a high degree of anxiety for any defendant that’s in that position.’”

If there was any real justice, Trump would not be exempted from the Rice Street experience, as he surely will be.

Disgust and Horror

I’m disgusted, horrified, worried, uncertain and yet oddly hopeful all at once about the current political situation reflected in and created by the Trump indictments. I am disgusted that US-American political culture is still dominated by the nauseating narcissist and Hitler imitator Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump, who Noam Chomsky accurately described in January of 2020 as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” That someone as lethally degenerate and sadistic as Trump is far and away the leading presidential candidate for one of the nation’s only two viable parties ought to be widely understood as a great badge of national shame. Some fucking “City on a Hill,” some “beacon to the world of the way life should be” (Kay Bailey Hutchinston, in her speech supporting the US Senate’s authorization of George W. Bush’s desire to invade Iraq)!

The Trump presidency was a fascistic nightmare (as I documented at exhaustive length in my 2021 book This Happened Here) that predictably culminated in an attempted coup against previously normative US bourgeois democracy, such as it is.  It’s revolting almost beyond words that we are still in “the Age of Trump” and that this vile Age could well include a second Trump administration (more on that below).

It’s sickening and scary that four felony indictments — including two federal ones, one for the theft of classified federal documets, and two for his brazen attempt to subvert and overthrow an election he knew lost and then to install himself as an authoritarian strongman — have not only failed to knock him off the top of the Republican ticket but have actually solidified his position as the rightmost party’s frontrunner. As Peter Baker of The New York Times wrote after the Georgia indictments were announced:

“The nation once recoiled at presidential candidates caught driving under the influence or swiping lines in a speech without credit. Now one of the two major parties has not ruled out a front-runner charged with conspiring to subvert democracy, endangering national security, [and] obstructing justice…Mr. Trump has moved the lines so far that supporters — including most of his Republican opponents for next year’s presidential nomination — show no signs of turning against him no matter how many indictments are issued, a testament to how much he has forced his party to embrace his martyrdom narrative. The notion that a rap sheet with multiple felonies would not be automatically disqualifying would have stunned the 44 presidents who came before him, including the Republicans.”

That’s pretty damning and dreadful.  

It’s disturbing that the Malignant One is tied with Joe Biden in the latest 2024 match-up polls — this in a country saddled with an ancient, democracy-flunking Electoral College system that typically requires the Democratic candidate to beat his Republican opponent by four to five percentage points in the popular vote to take or keep the presidency. The Republicans, by the way, have recruited thousands of election workers to mess with the 2024 vote count at the precinct and county levels — that is, to cancel votes that don’t go their Christian white nationalist way.

It’s alarming that Donald “I am Your Retribution” Trump is promising vengeance against his political enemies if he regains power, that he has threatened and demeaned legal authorities simply trying to do their basic rule of law jobs in response to his fascist criminality (“IF YOU GO AFTER ME I’M COMING AFTER YOU”), and that he is now surrounded by an army of policy wonks who are working up detailed plans for the full Republi-fascist takeover of the US executive branch and an unprecedented expansion of executive branch power.

It is chilling to contemplate the dark potential of Trump regaining power alongside both the Christian Fascist Supreme Court that he and Mitch McConnell created and a Congress that could well fall under full bicameral right-wing control in 2025 — this in a nation where half the nation’s powerful state governments are under neofascist domination. Much of the Trump party’s “red meat”/brown-shirt base is itching for civil war and in possession of a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s massive stock of firearms including no small number of military-style weapons. For what it’s worth, the orange maniac has fascistically, absurdly, and repeatedly claimed that the nation’s colleges and universities are under the thumb of “Marxist maniacs” and has suggested that he would like to deport all of the nation’s “Marxists, socialists, and communists.”  

It has been terrifying to witness one red state after another reimpose the violent female enslavement that is forced motherhood under the cover of the Trump Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson ruling and to see these states pass and enforce laws that make it a crime for teachers to tell students the truth about the central role racism has played in the American experience past and present.   

It is unnerving to reflect on all the local fascism underway. It has become almost normal in the Age of Trump for right-wing neofascist groups and individuals to harass and intimidate local school boards, teachers, public health officials, election workers, election officials, librarians, social justice activists, and newspapers.

Uncertainty

My sense of uncertainty is due to the unprecedented nature of the current situation. We have little to go on from US American history when it comes to predicting how this sharpening political crisis will turn out.  We’ve never had a president who tried to use his office to cancel an election he lost, to try to stage a coup, to block the previously sacrosanct and much-ballyhooed “peaceful transfer of [US-presidential] power.”

Donald “Be Wild” Trump is the first US president who tried to overthrow previously normative US bourgeois democracy and rule of law. And he is the first former president to face any criminal indictments at all, much less four sets of felony indictments including two sets resulting from his putsch attempt. 

It seems unlikely that Trump can be tried and convicted in time to stop him from regaining power and cancelling all the federal charges against him, and from pardoning himself and others involved in his epic crimes. Trump’s timeworn legal tactic of delay is very much in potentially effective play here and while it’s true that he can’t pardon himself from state charges in New York and Georgia the notion of him being sent to state prison while holding down the White House again is fantastic.

In the Georgia case, there appears to be a good chance that the Trump team can get the latest indictments transferred to federal court and placed under the supervision of a Republican, possibly Trump-appointed judge.

The indictments do not include any charges that would prevent Trump from taking office in 2025 since the Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has not charged insurrection, which he could have charged and could in theory still charge.

Wishful Thinking

I am concerned about denial and wishful thinking. Many in the news media, political class, and public are missing the bigger picture and realities of the building crisis.  I am worried not only about the continuing menace of Amerikaner fascism on the part of the nation’s most reprehensible and fascist volk under the leadership of Trump but also about the denialism and wishful thinking on the part of many among the nation’s more decent, moderate, liberal and progressive people. 

Wiktionary  defines “wishcasting” as follows: “The act of interpreting information or a situation in a way that casts it as favorable or desired, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a conclusion; a wishful forecast.”  I see a lot of exactly that going on when I scroll around my Facebook and Twitter and when I listen to MSNBC, CNN, and N”P”R. Many of the more decent folks seem to have convinced themselves that Trump is historically done because of the indictments.  Some of them seriously imagine Trump going to jail before the election and therefore being unable to run for the presidency again. I hear purported experts on N"P"R talking about Trump being president while also being a prison inmate in Georgia, as if that's really a thing. At a less delusional level, many decent, non-fascist folk see the gravity and incredible number of charges against Trump — I think it’s at 91 by now — as an impossible barrier for him to overcome in the primaries and/or more especially in the general election.

Lots of decent folks want to think that the American bourgeois-democratic electoral and rule of law system is working in ways that mean they can soon finally say goodbye to Donald “The Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump.

There are two problems here. The first difficulty is that the multiply accused rapist is far from cancelled. He’s politically quite alive. He is by no means checkmated by the American system.

Trump is not yet faced with a single charge that would ban him from the White House if convicted.  He has turned the indictments against him into fundraising gold, no small matter under a plutocratic political system that has created “the best democracy that money can buy.” The indictments have solidified his position as the Republican frontrunner.

Much of the country is by now numb to the seemingly endless Trump drama. The nation’s starkly polarized electorate has long been dug in between those who are for the Orange Fascist Reptile and those who are against him, this in ways that may not be altered much if at all by the latest dizzying indictment details and courtroom spectacles.   The Republi-fascist base is undeterred by their master’s legal travails, which feed his “martyrdom narrative.” Trump could be caught on tape eating live children and his fans would call it “fake news.”

The notion of a former US president going to jail, or prison is fantastic: how does that work with Secret Service protection?  

Meanwhile, the wannabe fascist strongman Trump’s neoliberal Democratic opponent Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden (thanks, Obama!) is very old, bumbling, and comically uncharismatic. He looks more and more like a sitting duck with each passing day. The venomous, hate-spitting Trump dominates the news while the sitting president tries to be heard mumbling about his beloved, “boring,” and “bipartisan” infrastructure and “inflation reduction” bills.  Status Quo Joe’s shockingly low approval numbers rival those of Jimmy Carter at the same three-year point in Carter’s one-term presidency.

The 18^th Century slaveowners’ Electoral College is as usual significantly weighted to the right and the party of Trump is working hard to tilt the system further to the starboard side from the precinct level up with an army of legal weapons to be deployed during and after the 2024 elections. Violent intimidation of election workers and voters themselves will be part of its fascistic tool-box. It has the Supreme Court and much of the federal judiciary on its side and could well still claim the House of Representatives, all key players in the resolution of what is likely to be a hotly contested and violence-plagued contest well past election day.  

The second problem is that America has a Christian white nationalist fascism problem that is bigger than Trump.  Amerikaner Trumpism-fascism has an insidious white heartland life that will continue on if and when Trump politically or physically dies. A revanchist section of the American ruling class and a good quarter to thirty percent of the populace has crossed over into neofascist space — a topic I have written about at length. Trump could expire tomorrow and Trumpism-fascism would persist in search of new maximalist Fuhrers while wreaking arch-reactionary, racist, sexist, nativist, anti-LGBT, authoritarian, eliminationist and potentially genocidal havoc across the land.  (One thing we may be learning this year is that Florida governor “Ron DeFascist” lacks what it takes to become that new national strongman, though he is still in the running for the mantle.)  

The Wrong Conviction

My friends in Refuse Fascism,  editorial board I sit, are fond of a poignant passage in a 1919 poem by WB Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Think about that last line: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” One of my concerns about the indictments is that they might seem to intensify what we might call “the Yeats problem.” The indictments have the potential to simultaneously deepen both the passionate and lethally armed intensity of “the worst,” the fascists, and the pathetic passivity of “the best,” the more decent, inclusive, caring, and non fascist folks. On one hand, the indictments are being used by Trump and the right to fuel the revanchist paranoia of the very disproportionately white and fundamentalist quarter or more of the country that has bought into the paranoid-style and palingenetic-nationalist narrative that the United States is under the anti-American control of a globalist, “radical left” Deep State working to “replace” and demean supposedly virtuous and hard-working, God-fearing white folks and their purported noble patriarchy with supposedly criminal and lazy (and otherwise inferior and demonized) people of color and an alleged degenerate culture of Godless gender transgression. This narrative may be a fairy tale, but it is a fairy tale loaded with potential for mass slaughter and civil war.

On the other hand, the indictments reinforce the demobilization of moderates, liberals, and progressives by seeming to show that the elite-managed bourgeois constitutional system is working after all – that no serious popular intervention in the streets and public squares is required to stop the ongoing lurch towards fascism. (Here the impact is much the same as the cargo cult of US candidate-centered electoral politics.) The message is that we don’t need to get up off our couches, turn off MSNBC and “P”BS, and organize to fight for a decent and liberated society because American’s so-called democracy – actually a class dictatorship of capital – is taking care of itself. All we really need to do is Lesser Evil vote once every four or two years and maybe send an occasional check to the ACLU and/or the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, Nature Conservancy, and perhaps 350.org. The unstated faith is this: “The elites have this. Let the politicians, pundits, the talking heads, the lobbyists and the nonprofits take care of things. It’s all good.”

But the elites don’t have this.  The center cannot hold in the mid-2020s. Things have changed. Quantity is changing to quality. “The blood-dimmed tide is [being] loosed” and “the ceremony of innocence” is set to “be drowned.” Civil war beckons. Without a massive and sustained popular intervention in the streets and public squares from the decent folks beneath and beyond the savagely time-staggered ruling class electoral extravaganzas and the new perilously protracted courtroom proceedings, without a movement for a very different kind of politics and society than the one that has given rise to Trumpism in the first place, the outcome will be fascist.

The problem here isn’t quite or entirely that “the best lack all conviction.” Many decent or formerly decent people have checked out of politics altogether, it is true, engaging in a form of internal exile. Many have fallen to depression and illness. But the bigger problem is that many of “the best” – perhaps we should say the better – have an excessive belief in the bourgeois democratic system. They have a misplaced, perhaps I should say outdated, conviction. They don’t lack belief and confidence. They believe incorrectly in the power of the established institutions to keep fascism at bay. They lack conviction in mass mobilization and popular action of the kind that says, “you’ll have to go through us first if you want to build a fascist Amerika” and that challenges the de facto capitalist class dictatorship that gives rise to fascism in the first place.

It might seem odd to find any hope in the current situatioln, but I do – and this for the reasons advanced by the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian in a December 2021 intervention titled Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating. We are currently up against grave existential threats rooted in the capitalist order that “our” (their) bourgeois democracy has long been tasked with legitimizing and coordinating. The leading threat is the escalating menace to livable ecology posed by the capitalogenic climate catastrophe, though related and indeed mutually reinforcing problems of pandemicide and inter-imperialist and nuclear war have joined in to push the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than it has ever been!

None of these momentous dangers will or can be properly addressed and overcome under the old forms of bourgeois democratic and capitalist rule that have been normative in the West since the Nineteenth Century.  It’s like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote near the end of his life (in his posthumously published essay “a Testament of Hope”): “the real issue to be faced” is “the radical reconstruction of society itself.” Without such reconstruction, King sense, the alternative was a fascist police state. Factor in the environmental crisis that the profits system has birthed, and it’s like young Marx and Engels wrote in 1848: it’s either “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or the “common ruin” of all.

Seen from those magisterial and scientific heights, the rise of neofascism in the US is at once horrifying and an opportunity.  It signals a legitimacy crisis, a period of norm-smashing flux in which the now critically divided capitalist oppressor and exploiter class can no longer properly rule in traditional and “normal” ways. The passivity-inducing seductions of electoral politics and legal fixes are being ever more clearly y exposed as inadequate, as insufficient for the tasks of human emancipation and indeed survival. New forms of popular mobilization are required to construct a new way of life beyond the interrelated and mutually reinforcing scourges of class rule, racism, patriarchy, ecocide, imperialism/war, and fascism.

The new ruling class and popular polarization of the current century and decade augur a “rare time” (Avakian) of qualitative transformation wherein radical outcomes are certain, for (again) the center can no longer hold. It opens promise for re-polarization pitting a rising share of the masses against whole damn capitalist-imperialist system. The future is radical — either radically oppressive and capitalist-fascist or radically liberating and revolutionary socialist. It becomes the responsibility of decent people to organize and act to make the coming radical outcome beautiful and liberating.