Four More Definitions as Amerikaner Fascism Spreads its Wings

Fossil Capitalism, Bourgeois Democracy, Christian Fascism, and Minority Rule

Dear readers: here as promised is another installment in my series on vocabulary and definition (see this and this) — a piece on what I mean when I use the phrases “fossil capitalism,” “bourgeois democracy,” and “Christian fascism.” I added another one of my common usages: “minority rule.”

Fossil Capitalism: a mode of production whose core class-ruled imperative of ceaseless private accumulation of capital necessitates endless growth and the constant expansion of an underlying energy base of (in long durée historical order) peat, coal, oil, and natural gas – an imperative that has created the contemporary capitalogenic climate catastrophe. (See this and this for brilliant left academic analyses of fossil capitalism and the catastrophic carbon-addicted Capitalocene that now threatens to cancel livable ecology.)

Bourgeois Democracy

The American philosopher John Dewey, no radical, once observed that American “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey significantly observed that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as underlying material power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.”

When I use the phrase bourgeois democracy, I mean the class rule of capital cloaked by nominally democratic and representative electoral and parliamentary institutions and the formal rule of law. Under bourgeois democracy, “popular self-rule” is seen as tolerable only insofar as it does not impinge on the operation of the underlying capitalist mode of production and broader bourgeois class rule system.

Lenin put it well in 1918: “bourgeois democracy…always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”

Bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and rule of law democracy is ultimately democracy for the bourgeoisie alone. It is a cloak for the de facto class dictatorship of capital.

Fully consolidated fascism (to which Trumpism aspires) means among other things the cracking of the democratic shell surrounding the underlying class dictatorship of capital. It is an openly despotic form of capitalist governance, stripped of egalitarian pretense. The bourgeois-democratic space within which the masses can sometimes win substantive reforms and freedoms is shut down as the rule of law, elections, civility, and parliamentarianism are replaced by the crass, repressive, and bloody rule of force and men.

(VI Lenin, “Soviet Power and the Status of Women,” Pravda, 6 November, 1919)

American Christian Fascism

As the commentator and activist Annie Day said on the Revcoms’ highly recommended “Revolution Nothing Less Show” last December 4^th, American Christian fascism is “the Biblical-literalist loony tunes notion that America is a God-ordained nation that needs to impose Biblical, patriarchal rule, with schools indoctrinating children with the Ten Commandments and prayerful mis-education.” As Day elaborated:

“Trump’s alliance with the Christian Fascists can be seen in his selection of judges, including the Supreme Court judges who overturned women’s right to an abortion. It can be seen in the dangerous and delusional declaration, which Trump repeated on the night of the [2024] election: ‘God spared my life for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore our country to greatness.’ And Christian fascism can be seen in Trump’s current nominee to lead the Department of Defense, Pete ‘Pig of Death’ Hegseth…[a] Christian lunatic, Crusade-loving Armageddon-mongering fascist….Listen to what Hegseth said about how the United States ‘enemies’ should be treated: ‘If you surrender, we might spare your life. If you don't we'll rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.’ Now, this would be the fighting doctrine of the world’s largest machinery of death and destruction. At the center of Hegseth’s world view is his Christian fascism. In his 2022 book Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth yearns to turn the clock back to the 1500s in Europe, when large parts of society believed that ‘truth was discoverable through God’s revealed word (the Bible) and His revelation.’ And he sharply criticizes the Enlightenment Movement of the 1700s. A feature of the Enlightenment was a fight for science and reason in opposition to Dark Ages religion and blind faith. Again, even if Hegseth doesn’t actually become the Secretary of Defense, the fact that that kind of anti-scientific Biblical literalist lunatic was considered is enough to reveal the Christian fascism that has been built up for decades and which Trump has put on steroids. Bob Avakian has been sounding the alarm about this Christian fascism since the mid-1990s.” (See this and this for some of Avakian’s prescient book-level work and warnings about Amerikan Christian Fascism).

At one level, the term Christian Fascism might seem merely to mean the wrapping of the fascist agenda in a Christian cloak – the provision of a Christian veneer for fascism. But that ignores the underlying deeply reactionary and fascistic nature of American fundamentalist Christianity itself, with its emphasis on stern patriarchal order, strict social hierarchy, insane textual literalism, insistence on blind and irrational obedience to authority, and readiness to trump democracy and the rule of law with the violent rule of God and God’s supposed “chosen” instruments on Earth. Fundamentalist Christianity isn’t simply added on to American fascism; it is a critical, potent, and richly formative ingredient of that fascism, consistent with the Christian Holy Bible, which is packed with approving and even glorifying stories of genocide, kidnapping, maiming, rape, femicide, slavery, and environmental destruction ordered and delighted in by a vengeful and malicious “God” and his dutiful “Chosen People.” For numerous chilling examples of this, see the “God the Original Fascist” series on the Revcoms’ Website here.

Minority Rule

This is a phrase I have commonly used to describe the United States’ distinctively archaic and reactionary form of bourgeois democracy. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt show in their book The Tyranny of the Minority (New York: Crown, 2023), the US is an extreme Minority Rule “outlier” compared to other contemporary (unmentionably bourgeois) “democracies”:

* The US is the planet’s sole “presidential democracy” in which the chief executive is indirectly elected through an Electoral College instead of directly by the voters. Only in the self-declared “world’s greatest democracy” can a president be elected in violation of the popular vote, as occurred 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. Thanks to the rightward bias of the Electoral College, a Democratic Party candidate today effectively needs to defeat their Republi-fascist opponent by 4 or more percentage points in the popular vote to win the US presidency.

* The US is one of the last few “democracies” with a bicameral legislature containing a powerful upper chamber (the US Senate) functioning as an anti-majoritarian check on its more majoritarian lower chamber.

* The US is one of even fewer “democracies” where this powerful upper chamber is extremely malapportioned thanks to “equal representation” being granted to states with vastly unequal populations (this is also true in Argentina and Brazil) – a privileging of territory over people, of land over the elementary democratic principle of “one person, one vote.”

* The US is the world’s only “democracy” with both a powerful and malapportioned upper legislative chamber and a de facto “legislative minority veto” granted to that upper chamber. The Senate filibuster requires the support of 60 of the body’s 100 members to permit consideration of a bill, meaning that 40 Senators can block a bill.

* The US is one just one of a small handful of “established democracies” with anti-proportional “first-past-the-post” electoral and representation rules that permit parties to win legislative majorities without winning the majority of popular votes in legislative elections (the other ones are Canada, England, India, and Jamaica).

* The US is the world’s only “democracy” to grant lifetime tenure to its Supreme Court justices.

* The longstanding constitutional federalism of the US grants substantial policy and lawmaking authority to local and especially state governments, regardless of national majority opinion.

* The US is home to rampant gerrymandering, whereby the geography of voting districts is manipulated for partisan advantage – another triumph of territory over people.

* The US Constitution is the most difficult national constitution to change in the “democratic” world. Under Article V, a single constitutional amendment in the US requires supermajorities in both branches of Congress plus support from three quarters of states. These are incredibly high barriers.

The Tyranny of the Minority argues that these Minority Rule institutions and practices carry lethal authoritarian consequences. One result is a government “glaringly at odds with public opinion” on one key issue after another. Beyond the cancellation of majority opinion, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, American Minority Rule entrenches “authoritarian extremism” by “shielding authoritarian parties from competitive pressures,” allowing them to hold power while appealing to “just a narrow extremist base.” Electoral institutions that “overrepresent certain territories or groups” let parties “win elections without capturing the most votes,” thereby “weaken[ing] the[ir] incentive[s] to adapt” and to “broaden their appeal” rather than to “turn inward and radicalize.” The obvious leading embodiment of this problem is Donald Trump and his takeover of the election-denying Republi-fascist Party.

Thanks to its extreme anti-majoritarian political order, Levitsky and Ziblatt show, the US Republi-fascist right today is distinct from its European counterparts in two ways: it rejects election outcomes that don’t go its way (even to the extent of trying to stage a coup on January 6, 2021) and it has actually ascended to national power (now twice).

Another consequence of Minority Rule is the discrediting of “democracy” in the eyes of many US citizens. “Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “The Democrats have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the U.S. Senate and all but one presidential election during her adult lifetime. And yet she would have lived most of adult life under Republican presidents, a Republican-controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees. How much faith should she have in our democracy?” (p. 182, emphasis added)

What has made the US such an extreme anti-majoritarian “outlier” compared to other “democratic” states? Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that “historical timing” is a key part of the explanation. The US has “the world’s oldest written constitution…an eighteenth-century document, a product of a pre-democratic era.” Its core electoral and governance charter was set in place prior to the existence of “modern democracy, with equal rights and full suffrage” anywhere on the planet.

At the same time, Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly show, the US Constitution, the source of many (though not all) of the nation’s Minority Rule extremism, bears the dark imprint of Black chattel slavery. The Electoral College, the powerful and mal-apportioned Senate, and states’ rights (all reflecting the privileging of territories over people in the determination of representation) were required to keep the young republic’s slave states on board with the new government at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Without these protections against the abolition of slavery that southern slaveowners feared would result from the direct election of the president and a Senate that granted membership to each state on the basis of its number of voters, the slave states would have stayed outside the new national government and formed their own alliances with England and other foreign nations.

“The issue of slavery – and protecting slavery – thus powerfully shaped the drafting of America’s constitution,” write Levitsky and Ziblatt. “The world ‘slavery’ didn’t appear in the final document, but its institutional legacies were far-reaching. Never has a silence echoed so loudly” (p. 154).

********************************************************************************************************

And so for now ends my series on terminology.

For what it’s worth, the absurdly malapportioned and right-tilted US Senate is on the verge of very possibly confirming the open Christian Fascist Pete “Pig of Death” Hegseth as head of the world’s largest and most lethal killing machine – the imperialist US Department of “Defense.” Hegseth is a menace to humanity abroad and at home. He advocates the sadistic torture, maiming, and murder of Americas “enemies” abroad and fascist repression at home. To repeat my reporting from five days ago, this Christian Fascist motherfucker sees himself and his fellow “true Christians” as enlisted in a holy war against “domestic enemies” he accuses of trying to take down God and country: LGBT folks, non-Christians, leftists, liberals, feminists, and anti-racists. The Christian Fascist theologian atop Hegseth’s religious order (Doug Wilson) preaches that women should have no authority in home or society and says that the years of Black chattel slavery were a time of welcome “harmony between the races.” The religious expert and pastor Brad Onishi told the “Public” Broadcasting System (“P”BS) six weeks ago that “If you want to be the kind of president who uses the Insurrection Act, to call in the military against uprisings in American cities, to use military force against protesters, Hegseth is the man for the job.”

That’s precisely the kind of president Donald “God Saved Me To Make Amerika Hell for The Millions I Hate” Trump is.

A fascist takeover of American government and society is now moving forward at rapid speed. Courtesy of the Trump-crafted Christian Fascist Supreme Court’s July 1st 2024 Reichstag Fire Ruling , the putschist Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump is operating with full legal immunity against prosecution for any crimes he commits in connection with real or supposed “official duties.”

The US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment was blown up when it came to Trump47 re-taking public office in open violation of the amendment's third section, which technically prohibits former insurrectionists from holding US public offices unless Congress waves the prohibition by a two-thirds vote. It seems naive to think that the Fourteenth Amendment couldn't be blown up on birthright citizenship.

We have a CHRISTIAN FASCIST Supreme Court and everything is on the table, including women’s right to an abortion in the states that have yet to pass abortion bans under the high Trump court’s women-enslaving June 2022 Dobbs decision.

Herr Trump’s top oligarch and the world’s #1`capitalist parasite Elon Musk has just celebrated Trump’s inauguration with two brazen Nazi Heil Hitler salutes.

Donald “They’re Eating the Dogs and Cats” Trump and his deranged Amerikaner team is moving forward with a fascist mass immigrant round up, detention, and deportation plan and the disastrous rollback of environmental regulations. He is moving ahead with mass pardons for the fascist thugs who attacked the US Capitol and tried to cancel a presidential election in his name on January 6, 2021.

Think Hitler as German Chancellor pardoning all of his fellow participants in the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

I have recently encountered knuckle-dragging white Christian nationalist fascist motherfuckers who would like to bring back Black Chattel Slavery.

There is going to be Hell to pay for this fascist shit all the way around.