It’s Fascism and the Dems Won’t Fight It

A Response to Some Trumpenleftish Nonsense and Worries About Being "Too Extreme"

There’s a tendency among some on what passes for a “left” these days to claim that describing Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump and his party as fascist marks one as a liberal Democrat or a lackey of Democrats.

Even I have caught this accusation over the years. I say “even I” because I may hold the word count record – both online and in book form – for published Marxist criticism of the capitalist-imperialist Democrats since the turn of the millennium. I’ve gone after the dismal, dollar-drenched imperial Dems from the actual “radical Left” as hard as any other writer for two decades. My publication record includes three books[1] taking down the 21^st Century Dems’ top saint, Barack Obama, whose fascism-accommodating conservativism, “neoliberalism,” and imperialism I called out from the birth of his rise to prominence[2].

And, yes, even I (I say with some irony since actual “radical Left” analysis is pushed to the margins by the gatekeepers of left and liberal discourse) have to get the knuckle-dragging Trumpenleft lecture about how it is nuzzling up to the imperialist Democrats call Trump and his party fascist.

Checking Off the Boxes

So let me set the record straight on two things. First, I call Trump and his party fascist not out of any partisan motive or affiliation and certainly not out of any love for the dismal Dems but out of fidelity to evidence-based reality – because Herr Donald and his party check off all the boxes of the definition of fascism. I’ve spilled a lot (probably too much) of ink on precise and hair-splitting academic delineations [3] and don’t have the time (or energy) to go through all of that here (see the source in the last endnote if you want to dig into that). For now I’m quite content to quote the brilliant revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian, who writes the following: “Fascism, as represented by Donald Trump, is a white supremacist, male supremacist, anti-LGBT, immigrant-hating, aggressively environment-destroying, anti-scientific, religious fundamentalist fanaticism, determined to use the power of the government to forcibly compel obedience to its dangerous and destructive lunacy, and to viciously persecute those who oppose or resist.”

Further:

“Fascism is the open, undisguised dictatorship of an oppressive system. Trump/MAGA fascism represents the open, undisguised dictatorship of the system of capitalism-imperialism that rules in this country—the country that is the world’s most powerful capitalist-imperialist plunderer of people and the environment…In the ‘democratic’ form of this capitalist dictatorship, people are, to varying degrees, allowed certain rights, and the ‘rule of law’ is applied as a general principle, even while all this is based on, confined within, and conforming to the rule of the capitalist class and the oppressive relations of the capitalist system.)…In the fascist form of capitalist dictatorship, the ‘rule of law’ is essentially what the fascists say it is, and the rights of people are more or less openly limited to what is allowed by the fascists, while such rights are only extended to those who go along with the rule of the fascists.”

That’s bang-on (as they say in England) and a good match for how the second Trump presidency is shaping up. After a campaign in which he openly channeled Hitler, animalized legal Haitian immigrants, and promised to deploy the US military on home soil to round up, detain, and deport millions of “illegal” immigrants, to “end inner-city crime in one day” (a call for extra-judicial executions in Black ghettoes), and to crush all protests against his regime, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” is putting together an administration dedicated to the Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of United States government and society. He has purged all opposition in the Republi-fascist party, which will soon run all three branches of the federal government, capped by the now fully MAGA-tized Supreme Court (its blood poisoned by three Christian fascist Trump appointments), which earlier this year granted their Dear Leader full immunity from prosecution for any crimes he commits in connection with his “official duties.” As the liberal justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote about this Reichstag Ruling in a scathing dissent:

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”

This fascist shit is “serious as a heart attack,” to use a phrase I picked up in Black Chicago. Actually, it’s as serious as a heart attack and a stroke during a car crash.

Lots of folks on the broad “left,” ranging from “liberal” to supposedly radical, are trying to pretend otherwise. They are sticking their heads in the sand and up their asses. The denial and minimization take different, often overlapping forms, all unsupported by evidence and some so dangerously false as to make their proponents effectively complicit with Trumpism-fascism:

· “We should not call Trump fascist because Trump’s base is working class populist and driven by economic anxiety, not racism, sexism, nativism, authoritarianism, and fascism.”

· “Trump’s so-called fascism is nothing to worry about because the capitalists find fascism unprofitable and unnecessary in the absence of a true radical working challenge to their power.”

· “Trump is too stupid and venal for fascism to advance under him.”

· “Trump is an anti-imperialist/isolationist opponent of war – a man of peace, which a fascist can never be.”

· “Nothing new here to get worked up about: this is all just the standard bipartisan US authoritarianism, equally backed by both of the equally fascist ruling class parties, between which there are no real differences[3A].”

· “Stop being hysterical: we survived Nixon, Reagan, two Bushes and the first Trump administration and this is nothing different.”

· “The Democrats will easily take advantage of his coming failures and we’ll get back on the path of multiracial democracy in 2026 and 2028.”

· “The Founders’ checks and balance will keep him in check.”

· “Relax: we still have a vibrant civil society.”

· “Same as it ever was. Let’s get some good collective bargaining agreements and maybe form a power labor party to incrementally advance social democracy one of these decades.”

So, you know, “stop crying wolf,” sit down, and “get with the program,” which is no program at all. Stay in your comfort zone and wait it out. Never mind the detention camps and the raids and the escalated ruination of livable ecology and the insane pandemo-fascist science deniers being in charge of national “health” agencies and the coming invasion of Mexico and… (the list of coming horrors goes on and on).

“The Democratic Party Will Not Stop This Nightmare”

Second, here again in agreement with Avakian, I have been arguing for years that seriously fighting this Amerikaner Fascism – this horrific political formation that has just taken big leaps towards consolidation in the US – has nothing to do with trying to restore the Dems to power. The organization Refuse Fascism (RF), formed after Trump’s first election with the explicit purpose of driving out the Trump-Pence regime through mass action in the streets, got it right during the initial Trump reign. “The Democratic Party,” RF said, “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” – something the dismal Dems will never do.

The dismal dollar Dems will never resolutely oppose Amerikan fascism because doing so would mean mobilizing masses in the streets and public squares and schools and workplaces beneath and beyond bourgeois electoral politics in ways that the Dems cannot corral, cage, and control for their capitalist and imperial masters and in accord with their own doctrinal capitalist-imperialist (what lefties like to call “neoliberal”) world view. The Dems can’t do it because they are too attached to the system that has by its very nature given rise to the new Amerikaner fascism. US capitalism-imperialism is deeply invested in the class rule “five stops” that provide the fetid and fertile soil for the growth of the fascist cancer: white supremacism, patriarchy/misogyny, nativism/immigrant-bashing, war, and the ecocidal ruination of a livable environment[4]. A party owned by and attached (both doctrinally and institutionally) heart and soul to capitalism-imperialism and its simultaneous equations systems of oppression (hardly limited to class rule alone) cannot stop the system’s transition from covert and disguised bourgeois class dictatorship to overt and undisguised bourgeois class dictatorship.

The real and lasting defeat of fascism means no return to the conditions that give rise to fascism. It’s NOT about a “united front” with Democrats to get us back to “the way things were.” It’s about going beyond class rule and “the five stops”[4] altogether. It’s about revolutionary socialism on the path to a world where no part of humanity exploits any other part of humanity and where the reigning maxim is “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

“Let’s Not Get Radical and Extreme”

Decent Democrats I know cry out loud, “but that’s too radical, too extreme”!

“Too radical? Too extreme”?

Radical and extreme like Joe Biden provoking and conducting a deadly imperialist proxy war with Russia on its long and repeatedly invaded southwestern border, thereby pushing the world closer to a nuclear war than any time since October of 1962?

Radical and extreme like the Biden administration granting ongoing massive and “ironclad” support for Judeo-fascist Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza and mass murderous war on Lebanon?

Radical and extreme like Joe “I’ll Never Pardon Hunter” Biden boasting about the United States leading the world in drilling oil and gas in a time of escalating and perhaps irreversible climate catastrophe courtesy of fossil capitalism?

Radical and extreme like the many-sided white nationalist fascist agenda of the incoming Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump administration and his party that is taking power atop all three branches of the federal government and already holds down half of the nation’s powerful state government?

Proud Trump suypporters: “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong”

Radical and extreme like the cringing post-election capitulation of the Democrats, replete with Biden inviting the malevolent orange ogre to the White House and Kamala “Don’t Come” Harris saying this just one day after concluding a campaign in which she was compelled to accurately (if weakly and super-belatedly) call Trump a fascist: “I spoke with President-elect Trump and…told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power”? [5]

(Wait, now let me get this straight: you acknowledge he’s a fascist and then you declare your desire to help him peacefully take power? For real?)

Radical and extreme like that level of supine surrender to fascism?

Radical and extreme like turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber? Like turning away asylum-seekers from poor countries that your nation’s blood-soaked imperialism has devastated for many decades?

Oh my, let’s not get radical and extreme.

Here again key counsel comes from Avakian, who some US leftists refuse to read even as they childishly denounce him as a totalitarian cult leader: the old bourgeois-democratic order is passing into the dustbin of history; the center cannot hold in the face of the contradictions of the underlying system. The only question is will it be something radically horrible and oppressive under the persistence of the capitalist-imperialist order or will it be “something truly emancipating” thanks to socialist transformation on the path to a world beyond all forms of oppression and exploitation? How ‘bout we choose the latter? Revolution, anyone?

Please report any typos or other mistakes in comments or via email.

Notes

+1, Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008); Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Routledge, 2010); Street, Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement (CounterPunch Books, September 2020).

2. Paul Street, “Keynote Reflections,” ZNet, July 28, 2024.

3. Paul Street, This Happened Here: Neoliberals, Amerikaners, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021).

3A. Is it true that the Women's March and ACLU will storm the Capitol screaming "Hang Kamala Harris" on January 6, 2025? I ask because Trumpenlefties I know are still telling me that both of the two ruling class parties are equally fascist/the same.

4. Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, “The 5 Stops, the 2 Choices, and the 6 Points of Attention” (May 6, 2019), https://revcom.us/a/594/what-is-5-2-6-en.html. “The 5 Stops —five horrific forms of oppression that this system cannot eliminate, that cannot be reformed away.” It might seem strange at first to include Ecocide as one of these five stops. In reality, it fits well: see Paul Street, “Ku Klux Climate: Coal, Petro-Palingenesis, and the Historical Materialism of Fossil Fascism,” CounterPunch+, 27 February, 2022 here.

5. So what if the Hitler-channeling brute Harris belatedly acknowledged to be a FASCIST with three weeks to go in the campaign triumphed in the third straight presidential election whose outcome he promised to honor only if he won? Never mind that Donald “They’re Eating the Pets” Trump mocked her racial identity and family of origin and essentially called her a lazy and stupid whore as well as a “communist” (a supposedly terrible thing to be). Or that he is an openly eco-cidal white supremacist and women-hating authoritarian spearheading a movement for the Christian white nationalist transformation of the USA – a movement with a highly detailed and many-sided plan to lock in white supremacist, environmentally exterminist, nativist, and arch-patriarchal rule for the foreseeable future. Nothing to get all “hysterical” about!