Looking the Nightmare in the Face

Beyond Republi-Fascist Rule and the Weimar-to-Vichy Dems

Note to readers and listeners: I will be speaking and taking questions along with Sam Goldman of Refuse Fascism and Andy Zee of the Revolution Nothing Less tonight during this open Refuse Fascism Zoom event (register at link. If this link does not work I’ll put a different one up in comments).

Fascist Consolidation

The malignant racist and women-hating fascist Donald Trump has won a second term in the world’s most dangerous office. This Hitler-channeling maniac, accurately described as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” by Noam Chomsky in January of 2020, will soon preside over a dramatically sharpened consolidation of Republi-fascist power in the United States. 

The fascists have achieved the “trifecta”: control of all three branches of the federal government. The nation’s powerful executive branch will come under complete fascist “unitary executive” control in a nation where the Reichmost of the two viable ruling class political parties already holds the monumentally corrupt Christian fascist Supreme Court. Add Congress to the Trump Reich: the powerful and malapportioned US Senate will also now fall under Republi-fascist control and so in all likelihood will the US House. And half or more of the nation’s powerful fifty state governments are already under Republi-Nazi domination. 

This time, Adolph Trump will preside over a party and executive branch far more united and determined to conduct the takeover and makeover of US government and society on Christian white nationalist grounds than in 2017-21.

The rolling Trump-fascist coup has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. It has seized full state power.  Who needs dystopian political science fiction? A Republi-Nazi nightmare is unfolding in real time. Gilead beckons. While a slew of over- and under-educated minimizers tell us that Trump’s Hitlerian language is just harmless rhetoric we shouldn’t get all “hysterical” about, we can expect significant movement on each of the following horrific policies from the coming new fascist government within its first months: the draconian closing of the southern border; enlistment of the US military in a mass deportation program targeting “criminal” immigrants under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act; the imposition of giant inflationary tariffs; the rollback of key environmental protections and the madcap approval of new gas and oil drilling, climate be damned; executive orders targeting transgender rights and “critical race theory;” the granting of pardons to hundreds of January 6 thugs; a draft national abortion ban; more that is terrible to contemplate and worse to experience.

My Pre-Post-Mortem of October 17, 2024

I reflected on why this catastrophe has occurred and how to respond to it three weeks before it actually happened in my October 17^th CounterPunch essay Ten Draft Principles for the Coming Resistance to MAGA – yes, 19 days before the election.  There (and in other essays) I have explained how the nation’s capitalist ruling class, the capitalist-imperialist system, the “neoliberal” and “Weimar” Democratic Party (of hollow resistance and “inauthentic opposition”), and the Minority Rule US electoral system combined to create this ominous moment. I also made recommendations on how decent people should think about and respond to the coming disaster, arguing that:

+ There is no such thing as a legitimate and acceptable fascist government, no matter how it arises.  (Hitler rose to power through “normal” bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and legal channels at the end of the German Weimar Republic in the 1930s.)

+ We must abandon the wrongheaded notion that we can defeat fascism with voting and electoral politics.

+ We cannot meaningfully oppose fascism through the Weimar Party – the dismal, demobilizing, and dollar-drenched Dems (the Democrats).

+ The resistance to the new Trump fascist regime cannot  be about putting the Dems back in office.

+ While the resistance will need to hone its capacities in response to various coming promised Trump actions – mass deportations being the likely initial flash point – it must become revolutionary.  It must take a highly organized and disciplined form and life beyond sporadic protests while working to “re-polarize” the nation away from “red v blue” to humanity v. the red, white, and blue capitalist-imperialist order.

+ We must reach out to sections of the military who may refuse to carry out Trump’s draconian policies.

+ Extreme polarization evident at the top of society down through the populace provides an opening for revolutionaries who understand the need to dismantle the entire US capitalist order, the taproot of the horrific “choice” on display in the 2024 election – either the malignant fascist Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump or the genocidal imperialist and mass incarceration Kamala “Israel Has the Right to Burn Children Alive” Harris.

Four Further Reflections

Here are four post-election reflections, containing some revisions of and additions to my October 17th take:

+1. While I did not say anything in “Ten Draft Principles” on how I expected Trump to win I did not anticipate him chalking up the popular vote as well as the Electoral College. I expected there to be significant legal and political fights around his victory in some of the contested states Trump won, leading to wrangling and even violence in connection with his Electoral count. The fact that Trump won the popular vote decisively and seems to have won the Electoral College cleanly (without evident and egregious vote count shenanigans and the like) means that we are unlikely to see much if any of the post-election violence that many of us expected  – at least not until Trump begins to implement the most brutal aspects of his agenda (mass deportations, the deployment of the military in cities, and more).

+2. I left something critical out of my pre-post-mortem’s reflections on why Trump won: the deep and pervasive racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, nativism, and fascism that are all built into ongoing history of this country, the United States of America, from its very genocidal and slave-based origins through the present. The notion that Trump’s racist, sexist, nativist, eliminationist, violent, “illiberal”/authoritarian, and, well, fascist rhetoric and pledges are somehow outside the US American norm – “not who we are” – is a liberal and American Exceptionalist fantasy.  These things are “as American as cherry pie” to this very day.  (The fifth chapter of my 2021 book This Happened Here: Neoliberals, Amerikaners, and the Trumping of America is titled “America Was Never Great: On ‘The Soul of This Nation.’” It is a tour through a vast US historical record suggesting that Trumpism-fascism is richly consistent with “who we are.”)

+3.  When I said (in “Ten Draft Principles”) that American fascism is rooted in American capitalism-imperialism, I did not wish to imply that capitalism does this in a simple and mechanical way.  Here is some useful elaboration I attempted in a recent rambling audio (edited here for clarity) I put up right before the election on The Paul Street Report:

“…[Trump] could win the popular vote. And people are just shocked about this...But what’s the mystery here?  We have big-time racism, big-time sexism and patriarchy, big time nativism, big time stupidity, and big-time fascism and political violence deeply built into the longtime and ongoing history of this country, the United States of America, from its genocidal and slave-based founding through today. And we are under a capitalist system — a soulless, anarchic profit-based social order that has long relied on all that nasty shit to buttress its class rule and its imperialism. We live under a capitalist system that has long exacerbated, stirred up and exploited sharp conflicts along the lines of race and gender, nationality, region (metropolis vs. country, coasts versus heartland, etc.) and more (know people who do manual labor versus people who do intellectual or mental labor people who own small businesses versus folks who work in giant bureaucratic structures) --- divisions that capitalism has developed but also appropriated and transformed and stirred up, pitting people against one another along these and other lines. At the same time, we live under a capitalist system that recurrently undermines the perceived authenticity of politicians’ democratic- and egalitarian-sounding promises. Capitalism does that, not in some simple mechanistic kind of way, but through the gravity pull of the underlying capitalist mode of production (the economic base of the world capitalist system) - the negative impact of that economic base on what politicians really can do to put meat on the bones of their democratic promises, ‘our’ politicians' egalitarian sounding pledges are recurrently made to look inauthentic again and again and again. And as that happens, ‘democracy’  gets de-legitimized in the eyes of millions and millions and millions of people…[and] when democracy is de-legitimized in the minds of people, they turn to a ‘leader,’ says, ‘I alone can fix it.’ It opens the door for authoritarian rule.”  Under capitalism, the authoritarian ruler can only be from the Right, never the Left.

4. In “Ten Draft Principles” I went through a number of things the Democrats Biden and Harris said and did – especially but not limited to their “ironclad” support for the genocidal US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza – that helped Trump win. Just to be clear, however, I am not at all concerned with Monday morning quarterbacking on what the Dems could have done differently and how they might win in future elections (bear in mind that we may not be having future presidential elections). I agree with Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party that the Democratic Party fails to fight fascism the way it needs to be fought NOT out of some mistaken strategy that can be corrected going forward but because its core and fundamental nature as a capitalist-imperialist organization prevents it from (a) functioning as a decent human alternative to the Republifascist Party and (b) taking up a proper struggle against fascism.  Such a struggle requires stepping outside of the ideological, moral, and programmatic boundaries of the underlying system in ways that are simply impossible atop the Democratic Party. It would mean stirring up masses of people in ways the Dems could not control – that is, ways they could not corral and channel into the nation’s disastrous plutocratic and minority rule election system.  It would also mean (among other things) breaking with their deeply ingrained and doctrinal American Exceptionalist faith in the United States as a great 240-plus year beacon of democracy and liberty and opportunity for all where fascism can’t really happen (the Hell it can’t!).

Enough with the Weimar and now (see below) Vichy Dems. We cannot and will not defeat fascism with voting, the right-tilted US elections system, and "new and improved" Dems. Surely by 2024 it could begin to sink in that the Democrats will not fight fascism the way it needs to be fought because they can't fight fascism the way it needs to be fought.

In any event, time's up on "what the Dems need to do going forward to coming elections" The notion of turning our focus to 2028, 2032, or 2036 is morally irresponsible given the pace at which the ecological crisis and the drift to global war and fascism are moving, courtesy of the capitalist-imperialist system regardless of which party or party configuration stands atop the system’s political superstructure in the US.

From Weimar to Vichy Dems: “We Accept the Choice the Country Made…The American Experiment Endures and We’re Going to be Okay”

The Democrats are now hiding under the cloak of American Exceptionalist denialism while making the transition from Weimar (the enabling and appeasement of the Nazi Party in early 1930s Germany) to Vichy (name of the French regime that collaborated with Hitler’s Third Reich during the Nazi occupation of France between 1940 and 1945). Yesterday “leftist” MSNBC brought on the “moderate” Republican John Kasich to claim that Trump isn’t going to be as bad as his Nazi-like rhetoric makes him sound and to argue for giving the coming fascist Trump presidency “a chance” to improve American lives. “Let’s see how it works out,” Kasich said. Jesus Fascist Christ!

The telescreen soon shifted to the White House Rose Garden, where “Genocide Joe” Biden tried to re-assure Americans that everything’s going to be peachy-keen as the United States moves into a new era of full triple-branch fascist consolidation.  Here’s what the president said to the nation yesterday about the re-ascendancy of the orange Hitlerian atrocity:  

“For over 200 years, America has carried on the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world — the people vote and choose their own leaders and they do it peacefully and where, in a democracy, the will of the people always prevails…the struggle for the soul of America since our very founding has always been an ongoing debate and still vital today.  I know, for some people, it’s a time for victory, to state the obvious.  For others, it’s a time of loss… Campaigns are contests of competing visions.  The country chooses one or the other.  We accept the choice the country made.[1]  I’ve said many times you can’t love your country only when you win.  You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree. ..Something I hope we can do no matter who you voted for is see each other not as adversaries but as fellow Americans, bring down the temperature…The American experiment endures, and we’re going to be okay…we need to keep the faith… God bless America.  And may God protect our troops.”

Wow. Sweet words of American Exceptionalist harmony two days after the presidency was re-taken by a vicious criminal who Biden, Harris, and much of Democratic Party and the nation’s establishment know damn well to be a fascist (something my circle of analysts and activists have understood very well since 2016 and that Harris and cable news talking heads finally said in the last three weeks of her predictably failed campaign.) Never mind that US voters select from a list of political candidates vetted and selected in advance for them by ruling class operatives under an archaic right-tilted system of Minority Rule that bears the significant crippling imprint of slavery. (Another quibble: who is this “God “and why would he decide to side with the soldiers of the most destructive global military empire in history?)

Shades of Barack Obama’s ridiculous Rose Garden speech (delivered with Biden grinning behind him) the day after Trump’s 2016 election – the one where the 44^th POTUS waxed eloquent about how he trusted Trump to continue to uphold “democracy” even though Obama had just privately told Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine that they needed to “keep a fascist out of the White House”!

Harris spoke in similar Weimar-toVichy terms during her concession speech three days ago:

“I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it, but we must accept the results of this election. Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power. A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny. And anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time, in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God.”

Never mind that the sick fascist ogre who beat her 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 – I think the opposite).  Never mind that he is an openly eco-cidal white supremacist and women-hating authoritarian  spearheading a movement for the Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of American society. Never mind that he openly pursues tyranny.  Never mind that the monstrous Hitler fan “and his team” that she wants to “help with their transition” into power atop the world’s most lethal nation have a many-sided plan to lock in white supremacist, capitalist, environmentally exterminist and arch-patriarchal rule for the foreseeable future.

Note to readers: things are moving very fast and I am all over the place: report any typos or other errors in the comments.

Note

+1. Just to be clear regarding “the choice the country made”: the US voting age population is 262,083,034 and Trump’s total popular vote (so far) is 73,376,041, so Trump’s popular vote equals 29% of US voting age population. Yes, the country is chock full of fascists and a fascist party is about to be in control of the entire federal government along with at least half the state governments, but no, “half the US population” is not fascist.  While I agree that no voter should have been unaware that Trump is a malignant racist and women-hating sack of noxious shit by 2024, I'd say that a fifth and at the most a fourth of the country is fascist (which is of course more than enough to fuck things up royally in the mass-demobilizing and Minority Rule US political system).