Dear Dahlia, What Democracy?

A Postcript to My Most Recent Essay

Please review my last Paul Street Report, “The Republi-Fascist Specter Looms as the Weimar Dems Dither.”

Postscript: Dear Dahlia, What Democracy?

Recently a progressive  friend sent me the super-smart liberal Salon writer Dahlia Lithwick’s latest reflection on the fascist menace staring the United States in the face. Read it here. 

Lithwick notes how a number of other liberal-leftish mainstream commentators now observe that Trump and Trumpism reflect “an objective, verifiable, and historically predictive set of preconditions for authoritarianism, or fascism, or the end of free and fair elections…” Lithwick observes that this “has been said or written, succinctly and brilliantly, in recent days by Jamelle Bouie, Joyce Vance, Ruth Ben Ghiat, Rachel Maddow, John Cassidy, Seth Meyers, Jason Stanley, Zack Beauchamp, Chris Lehmann, Michael Tomasky, and Scott Lehigh and who knows how many others…..The horse race we are describing? The odds we are clocking? The contest we are all betting on? It’s now,” Lithwick says, “just fascism versus democracy. These ‘stakes’ we are all of us fretting about, this question of whether democracy survives the next twelve months, is the very thing everyone is watching like it’s the NCAA playoffs” (emphasis added).

It's good that Lithwick and the highly placed names she cites are calling or starting to call Amerikaner Fascism by its proper name (well, minus the “Amerikaner” part) and that she brings up the real danger of passive mass spectatorship (see my comments at the end of this essay), but there are two problems with her essay in my view. First, she either doesn’t know about (most likely) or chooses not to mention the considerable number of Marxist/communist, and other radical Left writers and activists (myself included) who have been correctly calling Trump and Trumpism fascist (in very precisely defined ways) from day one. I’ve been on this beat  for at least five years now.  Refuse Fascism (on whose cutting-edge podcast Ms. Lithwick has been interviewed) was formed in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election.  The Revolutionary Communist Party has had a sophisticated understanding of Trumpism as fascism from the start and the World Socialist Web Site has long evinced a strong grasp of the same thing.  At some point we need to release the actual “radical Marxist Left” from the invisible shadows of “who knows how many others,” for its leading thinkers are always far ahead of the mainstream liberal curve. (Please stop cancelling us, for your own good, liberals!)

The second and bigger problem is that it’s NOT actually “fascism versus democracy.”  What US “democracy” are Lithwick and her fellow liberals and progressives referring to? Where is it? Four in every five US Americans think serious gun control legislation should be passed. A vast majority think health insurance should be de-commodified and a made a human right in the US. Most Americans by far support progressive taxation and meaningful government action to reduce economic inequality, reduce the disproportionate influence of money on politics, and meaningfully tackle the runaway climate crisis.

So what? Who cares? None of these opinions and much more that the majority believes determine policy in the US.

As the distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched volume Democracy in America?:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout…[so that] the general public has been virtually powerless…Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs].”

It isn’t just on the political economy issues that Gilens and Page emphasized that the great American “democracy” defies its holy words of popular self- rule with icy deeds of autocracy. US policy stands well to the right of majority opinion on abortion rights, gun control, affirmative action, and voting rights, for example.  

And it isn’t just because of the political-economic power of concentrated wealth alone that “American democracy” is a frankly misleading term. Another cause of democratic morbidity is the cold and timeworn Minority Rule nature of the US constitutional set-up, which drastically overrepresents the nation’s most revanchist and reactionary, racist, fundamentalist, gun-worshipping, woman-hating, and, well, fascist regions and people. The critical institutional elements here include the following:

+ an undemocratic Electoral College presidential election system that renders millions of popular presidential votes irrelevant while focusing presidential races on a small handful of contested states while grossly inflating the electoral power of the nation’s most reactionary regions and states.

+ strictly time-staggered elections for federal legislative offices and the presidency.

+ an unnecessarily bicameral legislature with an exceptionally powerful upper chamber – the US Senate.

+ a grossly undemocratic and right-leaning US Senate apportionment regime that grants each state two representatives (Senators) regardless of population size. (If liberal and progressive, multiracial and multi-ethnic California, home to 39,237,836, had the same populace-to Senator ratio as super white, rural, and far-right Wyoming [pop. 578,803, less than 5% of the total population of Los Angeles], it would have 135 US Senators. If the New York City borough of Brooklyn were a state and US Senators were apportioned there with the same populace-to-Senator ratio as red Wyoming, it would have none 9 U.S. Senators.)

+ federalism and states’ rights whereby fifty states possess remarkable autonomous power to make highly relevant policy in defiance of majority national public opinion with their own separate executive, legislative and judicial branches. This includes remarkable freedom for individual states to anti-democratically gerrymander state legislative and US House of Representatives districts.

+ a “wild west,” openly plutocratic campaign finance regime chock full of untraceable dark money, sanctified in two key Supreme Court decisions (Buckley v Valeo/1976 and Citizens United/2010).  

+ the awesome autocratic, God-like power of judicial review granted to a presidentially and lifetime appointed and Senate-vetted Simon Says Supreme Court (currently under Christian Fascist control) free to violate majority public opinion on any matter at all.

With all due respect for subsequent modifications, this is a constitutional set-up for class rule, not democracy, consistent with the slave-owning US Founders’ original propertarian, militantly anti-democratic intent. And it is shockingly well suited to Republi-fascist consolidation in 2024-25.

It’s kind of hard to sell “democracy” to the US masses as the alternative to onrushing fascism when the nation’s already authoritarian (though not yet fully fascist) bourgeois republic and empire is what you are calling “democracy.” And that harsh historical reality and the broader Aldous Huxlean/Herbert Marcusean/Neil Postman-esque/Rollerball culture of moral nothingness and diversion produced by corporate war and entertainment media (among other things) is no small part of the explanation for a dark question that Lithwick cleverly asks in her sharp essay (which is perhaps flawed by the assumption that most Americans possess enough sense of what democracy is to even recognize its passing) :

“What if the media is actually covering the spectacle precisely because the stakes—casual brutality, violence, callousness, lawlessness, and the descent into anarchy—are perfectly visible, legible, and clear?… What if the problem is really that watching this MMA smackdown between fascism and representative [so-called] democracy is, in fact, the 2023 version of good clean fun?”

In other words, what if the Trumpist-fascist crushing of what’s left of (unmentionably bourgeois) “democracy” (American Style) in the world’s most powerful and dangerous nation is perceived as just more entertainment and sport by millions upon millions of that nation’s dangerously degraded, demobilized, diverted, and desensitized subjects?  A chilling query.