Dear Bernie: Wake Up and Smell the Fascism

A Critique and an Invitation

NBC's Meet the Press last fall: "Do you believe Donald Trump is a fascist?"

Sanders: "Well, I don't like using those words, but clearly he has a strong, strong tendency towards authoritarianism and towards undermining American democracy...look, he is an authori-...call it what you want, this is a guy who does not believe in democracy, who is trying to divide us up. You can describe him as a fascist, you can describe him as an authoritarian, but to my mind what I focus on is what's happening to the working class in this country."

"Strong tendency towards authoritarianism"....do ya think?!

Senator Sanders, please. Enough of your lame economistic squeamishness about what's happening in plain sight: FASCISM --- militant white supremacism + virulent patriarchy + xenophobic nationalism informing a fierce drive to replace previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law and truth itself with dictatorship, the rule of men and force.

Case in point among an exhausting onslaught of cases in point, Bernie: Zhoran Mamdani, the Indian American US citizen who is running on your social democratish program (like you within the reigning two party system) and who just won the NYC Democratic Party mayoral primary.

The party of Trump and the Trump administration are now talking about stripping Mamdani of his citizenship (denaturalization) and deporting him.

The Republifascists may or may not move on that. The fact that they are even discussing it is yet another example of why (we not merely "can" but) should call Trump, his party and his regime fascist.

Yes, the quote above comes from an interview right before the 2024 presidential election. It’s more than half a year old. I get that. But we have had abundant proof beyond any reasonable doubt that Trump and Trumpism are FASCIST since the orange sack of shit announced his 2016 candidacy and you spent Trump’s first fascist presidency denying his fascism (please see my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America). And I have read a number of your speeches in which you continue to talk only of "oligarchy" and "tendencies towards authoritarianism" (what an understatement!) well into a second Trump presidency that one of your billionaire class oligarchs, Illinois governor JB Prtizker, easily and early described as a “five-alarm [fascist] fire” richly reminiscent of Hitler’s early Third Reich.

You didn't/don't "like those words." Why, is it because you are attached to a dysfunctional American Exceptionalism which says that fascism can't happen here?

Get over it! Bernie, please. To paraphrase the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian, your shining city on a hill is chock full of fascists.

What great pre-existing "American democracy" has Trump been attacking, Senator Sanders? You are aware, no doubt, that majority public opinion has long been trumped on one key political and policy issue after another by "billionaire class" (your language) rule — the oligarchy inherent in capitalism — in the United States. There's a vast literature on this. This has been the case for as long as we can remember, whatever the different configurations of partisan office-holding in Washington DC and the states, no?

Bernie how do you comprehend all the Amerikaner volk in your imagined working class that are on board with fascism, with what you bloodlessly call “authoritarianism”? How do you understand the fascism that happened to the hearts and minds of many in the American working class? Do you seriously want us to think we can just wave Single Payer, collective bargaining and "tax the rich" wands at them and thereby magically and economistically transform virulent racists, sexists, nativists, and cult followers of a wannabe dictator into (imaginary) Scandinavian social democrats? Do you not understand that white supremacism, patriarchy, and xenophobic nationalism are major material social and historical forces in their own right, something more than just divide-and-rule mind games played on the masses by "the billionaire class"? Do you think everything simply reduces to the economic anxiety and needs of working people/“the” working-class?

"This is a guy who is trying to divide us up"? Hello? Because we're really all united around shared economic and social democratic goals underneath it all? Is that some kind of social democratic twist on Obama’s ridiculous 2004 statement that “there's not a liberal America and a conservative America…. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.”

Do you really believe your rhetoric about the two countries that make up the US today being “the 1%” and “the 99%”?

This year, Bernie, we’ve got a fascist America and a non- and anti-fascist America. The first America is good with what Trump and his regime are doing to the country and the world. The second America, the decent country, hates what Trump and his regime are doing to the country and the world.

Bernie, you are descended from Eastern European Jews who were slaughtered by the fascist Third Reich. When you see videos of heavily armed masked white federal gendarmes tearing Mexican American mothers out of their cars, dragging them into unmarked SUVs and off to detention camps while their children cry in fear and despair do you not flash to the rounding up of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe?

I also oppose billionaire class-rule, Bernie (check out my book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy). I oppose it so much that I advocate an actual socialist revolution, something far more radical than anything you ever remotely call for. But right now we’ve got something standing in the way both of your reform agenda and my revolution agenda, Senator: a fascist regime atop the world’s most powerful and dangerous state.

It's long past time for you to stop dancing around what is as clear as day. This is fascism.

Please have a look at the following document from Refuse Fascism: A Declaration of Independence from Trump’s Fascist America. Would you like to add your name to the signers of this declaration?

Check this out: “Four Days of Historic Struggle in DC.” You are invited. Bring your pen.