My Early 2021 Critique of the Trumpenleft

From Chapter 4 of "This Happened Here"

Since I will soon be critiquing recent examples of the bizarre and depressing Trumpenleft phenomenon, I thought it would be useful first to make sure that folks have a clear sense of what I’m talking about when I use the seemingly oxymoronic term “the Trumpenleft.” The term (adapted from Eric Draitser’s “the Trump left” and “the Trumpenproletariat”) was initially developed as something of a joke to describe a certain kind of left-identified commentator — typically white, male, and 50 years or older — who responded to radical criticism of Trump and Trumpism as fascist with a series of false narratives that amounted largely to a “left” defense of Trump and his base and to the idiotic claim that properly identifying Trump and Trumpism as fascist aligned one with the corporate Democrats and the neoliberal-imperial order the Democats serve and protect. It turned out that this ridiculous tendency was no mere joke. It was surprisingly common among certain parts of what I have since called “the pink-brown left” and what a fellow anti-fascist calls “the RT left.” What follows below are the last ten or so pages of the fourth chapter (titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial”) of my most recent book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America, which, bear in mind, was written mostly in 2020 and the first few months of 2021. You will see a few references (in both text and notes) to other parts of my volume, which you should of course purchase at your soonest convenience.

A small amount of what follows was altered in the final galley proofs of the book. Still, this is about a 98% match for what appears in the book:

Trump’s “Single Worst Crime”

Downplaying Trump’s evil deeds was a favorite activity of Trump-fascism-deniers even after the Attack on the Capitol and the pandemicidal explosion of COVID-19 infections and deaths that Trump oversaw in late 2020 and early 2021. The ex-Maoist historian Gary Leupp, a harsh critic of those who described Trump as a fascist, wrote the following in February of 2021: "Question for discussion: 'Who is the MORE vile? Donald Trump—whose single worst crime seems to be the separation of families involving over 550 children losing contact with their parents whose whereabouts is unknown, or George W. Bush—who waged multiple imperialist wars, based on lies, killing hundreds of thousands?'"[i] No serious observer would doubt that George W. Bush, the messianic-militarist invader of Iraq,  had killed more people overseas than Trump,  but this was no reason for Leupp to so badly diminish the terrible outcomes and crimes of Trump’s presidency…. The Chicago Refuse Fascism activist J. Becker noted the qualitative break between George W. Bush’s messianic imperialism and Trump’s specifically fascist politics: “Fascism isn’t just an accumulation of more crimes, it’s a different form of open, terroristic rule that makes no bones about trashing the rule of law and the most basic rights. With [Leupp’s] approach, we could go just go back and count the loss of life in all US imperial wars and rank presidential vileness simply by their total ‘kill’ --- a meaningless exercise.”

Trumpenleft Denialism: Eighteen False Narratives

Leupp’s disturbing commentary appeared in the online Left magazine Counterpunch (the present author’s own main outlet).  It was symptomatic of significant crossover between academic and left fascism denial during the Trump years. Ironically enough given that the “F-word” has long found its most frequent usage on the portside, the most vitriolic and fierce defenses of Trump against the charge of fascism have in my experience come from those who purport to reside on the political left. Trumpist-fascism denialism maintained a stronghold in left circles, where it seemed almost a badge of radical honor to mock and dismiss radical left thinkers and activists who understood Trump and Trumpism as neofascist. Oddly channeling the disastrous and absurd “red-brown” politics of the German Communist Party during the end the Weimar Republic[ii], these Trumpenleftists cited many of the same denialist narratives advanced by the more established and respectable academic and journalistic deniers mentioned above. Beyond endless repetition of the obvious fact that Trump and his sick circle failed to introduce a consolidated fascist regime on the model of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich (betraying a black and white all-or-nothing and interwar Europe-obsessed understanding of the “F-word”), here are the top eighteen forms of Trumpenleft fascism-denialism that I received during the Trump years, listed and critiqued (briefly) as follows:

+1. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist aligned one with both the Democratic Party and the capitalist and imperial American system that the Democrats have long supported.  False. This claim was absurd when applied to radical and Marxist anti-fascists, who placed significant blame for Trump’s rise and persistence in power on the appeasement and conservatism – what I called “hollow resistance”[iii] at the height of the Trump administration – of the Democrats, in service to capital. At the same time, this claim was based on a false dichotomy between antifascism and anticapitalism. Fascism as a regime is a vicious and arch-repressive form of capitalism. Fascism is a product of, and subservient to, the modern corporate and capitalist era. It does not overthrow capitalism. Even in its classic historical form, it never supplanted private ownership of the means of production and investment or bourgeois class rule. Fascism as a social and political movement and fascism as a regime is dedicated to smashing popular resistance to capitalism, among other things.

2. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist affiliated one with a deceptive narrative that had long been trumpeted by the Democrats and the liberal media. False. As seen in the first two sections of this chapter, the dominant “liberal” media and the Democrats bent over backwards to resist such identification for the most part.

3. Left anti-Trump/-fascism activists failed to grasp that “the Democrats are fascists too.”[iv] The Democrats and the Republicans are the same, there’s no real difference between them. This was and remains nonsense, based on a doctrinal, faux-radical refusal to acknowledge clear and plentiful differences (of constituency, region, style, rhetoric, policy, and ideology) between two obviously capitalist and imperial political organizations.  The notion of a Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, or Marjorie Taylor Greene becoming an elected Democrat is absurd, as is the notion of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar winning Congressional office as a Republican or a Bernie Sanders running for president as a Republican. The Democrats have long appeased and collaborated with the rightmost and now white nationalist, neofascist Republican Party, with whom they stand in a co-dependent and mutually reinforcing relationship but they have not themselves crossed over into fascist ideological and political space thanks largely to their more urban and racially and ethnically diverse constituency. The Democrats and the Republicans are indeed what the socialist Upton Sinclair said they were in 1904: “two wings of the same bird of [corporate and imperial] prey.” But they are not “the same.”

4. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist reflects a failure to see that fascism only happens when the state commands the economy under a corporatist scheme directed by a maximal leader atop a one-party dictatorship. This claim was addressed and discredited earlier in this chapter, in the sub-section on Robert Paxton’s initial (pre-January 6, 2021) denial of Trump’s fascism. To repeat, the present volume, following the analysis of Jason Stanley and other astute analysts, understands Trump and Trumpism as a racist and sexist white-nationalist president and movement following the fascist political and ideological playbook, not as a consolidated political-economic regime comparable to Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Third Reich.

5.  Beneath all his racist and sexist strongman bravado, Trump was really just another neoliberal capitalist president. Nope. This form of anti-antifascism is based on a false dichotomy. Trump’s presidency was a monument to what Henry Giroux has called neoliberal fascism.  Trump crossed into fascist and eliminationist ideological and political space to a dramatically unprecedented extent in American presidential history while at the same being a reflection and agent of neoliberal capitalism. Far from being opposed to each other and even (as for the academics Cory Robin and Samuel Moyn) “opposites,” contemporary neofascism (which has now captured much if not most of the Republican Party) and neoliberalism (which has captured both of the nation’s leading political organizations since the mid-late 1970s) are (as argued earlier in this chapter) bound up in a mutually reinforcing, co-dependent, and dialectically inseparable  relationship with each other. 

6. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist misunderstood and betrayed the proletarian, “white working-class,” base of Trump’s “populist” support, alienating people the Left need to “reach out to” and thereby failing to advance the working-class unity required to fight capitalism and neoliberalism.  Please. The empirically false notion that Trump’s base was working class and accessible to progressive/Left outreach (voiced by Bernie Sanders, as we have seen earlier in this chapter) will be addressed and discredited in this book’s next chapter, an in-depth discussion of the Trump base.

7. Identification of Trump as a fascist is invalidated by the (supposed) anti-imperialism of Trump. False. Murderous military U.S. imperialism remained very much alive and well under Donald Trump. Trump continued the heavily air-war-focused global militarism and giant military budgets of the second Obama administration while increasing the pace of lethal drone war,[v] doubling down on the US-sponsored crucifixion of Yemen and Palestine, and terrorizing Iran and North Korea. Trump deployed a dangerous new tactical nuclear weapon and rolled back global nuclear weapons protections. Trump projected aggressive military belligerence, complaining at the start of his presidency that the U.S. needed to get back to “winning wars” and identifying himself throughout his presidency with a strong American military projecting overwhelming national power and greatness.

8. Identification of Trump as a fascist was contradicted by Trump’s response to COVID-19, which, “if Trump had been a fascist” would have involved “draconian” crackdowns in pursuit of authoritarian rule. False. Trump’s failure to go strong with masking, “lockdowns,” and invocation of the Defense Production Act (to order the mass manufacture of medical supplies) reflected not only his desire to keep the economy going (ironically enough since failure to undertake proper public health measures deepened the economic impact of the virus) for his re-election but also his rejection of science and his racist, social Darwinian, and genocidal approval of how COVID-19 especially killed the old, the inform the poor, and the nonwhite and how the virus initially targeted big multiracial urban and Democratic areas. It was all very neoliberal-fascist, but perhaps even classically fascist.  As Jason Stanley reminds, the militant racist and social Darwinist Hitler “had no appreciation for regulations that would protect either consumers or workers, just as he had no appreciation for the protections offered by welfare and trade unions.”[vi] Another fascist, fake-populist, and eco-cidal head of state in the Americas – Brazil’s malevolent president Jair Bolsonaro – followed the same path, also with disastrous consequences suffered disproportionately by the marginalized and racialized poor. Belarus’ authoritarian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, actively engaged in the suppression of mass protests in 2020, also refused to act against COVID-19 in a forceful manner.

9. Fascism only holds relevance when there exists a revolutionary socialist Left and working class that the ruling capitalist class wants violently smashed. False. Fascism isn’t only about crushing the socialist and communist Left in service to capital. It is very much about racial, ethnic, and cultural identity and nationalism – white nationalism today in the US as in 1930s Germany. At the same time, while there may not be a big revolutionary socialist Left to smash in the U.S., much of the American right thinks there is. They hear it all the time from the paranoid-style-on-steroids neo-Bircher right-wing media, which calls conservative corporate Democrats like Joe Biden and Charles Schumer “radical left socialists.” The George Floyd Rebellion, a massive uprising against racist police brutality that Trump’s Attorney General William Barr described (to FOX News’ frothing fascist Mark Levin) as “Bolshevik,” helped fuel neo-McCarthyite Republifascist fantasies of incipient “radical Left” revolution. To deepen the pseudo-plausible paranoia, a semi-charismatic US Senator (Bernie Sanders) who called himself (incorrectly) a socialist made strong runs for the Democratic presidential nomination in the last two quadrennial election cycles.

10. Antifascists in the Trump years were plagued by “Trump derangement syndrome” (TDS), an obsession with Trump himself and his evil, which (supposedly) no longer held relevance once Trump was removed from office. False. This was an unsupported accusation when applied to serious antifascists like the present writer and many others.  “TDS” certainly happened in the mainstream media, which became passionately fixated on Trump’s every action and tweet.  But when hurled at intellectually serious radical anti-fascists, the charge of “TDS” was both a bullying smear and incorrect.  Those antifascists saw Trump as the reflection and agent of a fascistic political movement that had been germinating in the U.S. for many decades and that promised to live beyond Trump’s removal from power.  It has in fact shown a life beyond Trump’s presidency, as we have seen. At the same time, there was nothing inherently wrong or dysfunctional about a certain degree of fixation on Trump: he was, after all, a fascist in the world’s most powerful office.  It’s a shame that more Germans didn’t develop “Hitler Derangement Syndrome” in the mid-1930s. The notion that the menaces of Trump, Trumpism, and fascism disappeared because of Biden’s victory was and remains absurd, as we saw in the previous chapter.

11. Fears of Trump’s fascism were overblown because Trump never won the allegiance of all but a small fraction of the nation’s corporate and financial ruling class, which turned decisively against him[vii] after the January 6 Attack on the Capitol. This is a problematic narrative on numerous levels.  Some relevant and deep pockets sections of the ruling class (especially in the fossil fuel and other polluting industries) did in fact back Trump. And many of those corporate and financial elites who didn’t want the demented monster in the White House in 2017 were perfectly happy to leave him there for a full first term thanks to his tax cuts and neoliberal de-regulation policies.[viii] “Those who hold the levers of the private power that dominates the society and political system,” Chomsky observed in the wake of the Attack on the Capitol, “never liked Trump’s behavior, which harmed the image they project as humanists dedicated to the common good. But they were willing to tolerate the vulgar performance as long as Trump and his accomplices delivered the goods, lining their pockets by robbing the public.”[ix] Indeed, as Doug Henwood reflected last April:

“Trump was not the bourgeoisie’s favorite candidate. He had support from provincial plutocrats but not from the executive suite at Goldman Sachs. When he took office and immediately began ransacking, one wondered if the deep state would rein him in. Maybe the CIA would even arrange a malfunction in Air Force One’s fuel line. But it was not to be. Tax cuts and deregulation made capital forget all their reservations about Trump, and the stock market made 128 fresh daily highs — on average, one every six days — between inauguration and the onset of the coronavirus crisis. It took the encouragement of an attack on the U.S. Capitol for the big bourgeoisie to complain [about Trump’s extremism] openly – 99 percent of the way through his time in office! (emphasis and exclamation mark added).”[x]

The malignant fascist in the White House was good for the bottom line interests of big capital, which waited until he tried not just to legally and politically subvert and nullify a presidential election but to physically overthrow that election to go public with disgust over his tyrannical excess.  At the same time, a respectable wealth and power elite that seriously wanted a fascist out could have pulled the plug well before the fall and winter of 2020-21.  Trump’s fascist essence was fully evident after the summer 2017 events in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the very least. But this “deep state” coup never took place.

If Trump had gotten a second term (as he likely would have but for COVID-19), many corporate and financial chieftains not on board would have accommodated or re-accommodated to his power. A future fascistic presidential candidate and president who knows how to ruffle fewer ruling class feathers can expect to do much better with the nation’s wealth and power elite. And make no mistake: most of the American corporate and financial elite would have backed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections had the Democrats run Bernie Sanders, the leftish contender who campaigned in accord with majority progressive public opinion and called himself a socialist. The America ruling class will pick fascism over even mild social democracy every time.

“The real test of the elite turning against Trump,” Anthony DiMaggio wrote five months after the Attack on the Capitol, “is if they expunge the party of his acolytes in key positions of power now that he's out of power. To date, four months out from him leaving, they haven't done it. He has consolidated his power and that is pretty obvious. Any thesis about the elites exercising agency to turn the tables on him is just wrong. It's fascism denial, plain and simple.”[xi] And lack of full corporate support may well not be enough to prevent Trump or some other, possibly worse white nationalist and neofascist candidate from rising to power in 2024-25 with support from his many millions of small donors and the vast right-wing media hate machine and help from racist ad partisan voter suppression measures being passed in numerous red states.

12. “Trump is too much of an undisciplined clown and a buffoon to be taken seriously as a fascist.” This objection has already been properly addressed and dismissed in this chapter.[xii] Here it is worth noting that this was precisely how many U.S. observers responded to the rise of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s[xiii], something that may have informed Sinclair Lewis’ depiction of fictional fascist president Buzz Windrip’s rise in It Can’t Happen Here.     

13. “Trump never said he was a fascist.” This objection has already been properly addressed and dismissed in this chapter.[xiv] It is, as we have seen, utterly irrelevant.   

14. “January 6^th wasn’t that big a deal, it was just more of Trump’s feckless ‘antics’’” (in an interview after the Attack on the Capitol, Chomsky actually referred to Trump’s attempted coup as “his latest antics”[xv]) and what the clownish Trumpenleft curmudgeon Gary Olson called “a cartoonish spectacle” of “clueless and costumed” buffoons “smashing stuff” and “taking selfies” – a  silly freak show used by the Democrats (the most dangerous “fascists” of all in Olson’s view) to “scapegoat Trump” and crush working-class dissent (in Olson’s view).[xvi] This remarkable claim takes denialism to new levels.  The January 6^th Capitol Riot was a murderous physical assault by a frenzied fascist mob on the nation’s legislative body.  It was instigated by a sitting fascist president with the clear intent of cancelling a free and fair presidential election and creating a crisis that Trump hoped to use to declare a state of emergency and perpetuate his presidency. It may have been delusional and doomed but it was a big, menacing, and ominous event, far beyond a clownish “antic” and a “cartoonish spectacle” to say the least.    

15. People concerned about Trumpism-fascism failed to see that "Trump's open white supremacism was preferable to the Democrats’ more cloaked white supremacism” (in the social media words of the Green Party’s 2016 vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka) because the former produces mass protest while the latter “puts the people to sleep and keeps them off the streets.” This was a richly ironic narrative loaded with bad faith. After Trump had left office, some flame-throwing Trumpenleftists claimed to be what is known on the left as “accelerationists” –radicals who want the system to get worse and become more oppressive so as to spark popular resistance and even revolution.  While an actual fascist, Trump, was in the White House, however, these same “leftists” were de-accelerants, mocking anti-Trump protest as complicity with the other (supposedly also “fascist”) major party. There was a fascist in the White House for four years and the makers of this argument not only refused to fight him but actively opposed and absurdly mocked mass resistance to him as complicity with the Democratic Party and the capitalist-imperialist system. With a Democrat (Biden) sat in the White House, they argued that it would have been better to have a second Trump term because an open white supremacist president is what puts people in the streets.

Historically the claim that Republican presidents push more people into the streets and fuel more popular and progressive social movement activism than do supposedly sleep-inducing Democratic presidents is problematic. The deeply rooted systemic nature of contemporary social and political problems and the limits of American electoral politics as the supposed solution become more evident and transparent when Democrats hold nominal power. This is part of the dynamic behind the rise of the New Left and poor people’s movements during the 1960s, the rise of the anti-nuclear power movement during the late 1970s, the rise of the global justice movement in the late 1990s, and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements under Barack Obama. At the same time, the Democrats are best able to deceptively pose as coopting “sleep”-inducing agent and as something they aren't --- a popular opposition party --- and turn social movements into big electoral get out the vote projects precisely when they out of office. They are most effectively exposed as captive to concentrated wealth and empire when they hold nominal power and the limits of the change that can be accomplished by voting them back into power are made clear.

16. Calling Trump and his supporters fascist and supporting their “cancellation” invites repression of the Left by suggesting the need to repress people outside the mainstream. The critical mistakes here are an absurd lack of confidence in Leftists’ ability to differentiate themselves from neofascists combined with a self-destructive reluctance to understand leftists and others’ need for fascist forces to be decisively defeated. Fascism is a malignant tumor that cannot be allowed to grow. It is perfectly appropriate for leftists to collaborate with non-fascist liberal and moderate elites in trying to cut out this cancerous, life-threatening cancer from the body politic. Wanting the fascist monster Trump, his Capitol Rioters, the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Three Percenters et al. to go free and have full access to the nation’s political, television, radio, and Internet megaphones like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Parler is to fail to understand these supposed (self-described) victims of “cancel culture” as lethal neo-Confederate fascists who would like to re-institute Black slavery and replace bourgeois democracy with an authoritarian ethno-state.

Do leftists seriously think they are incapable of distinguishing themselves from fascists in making their own case against repression and censorship? It is depressing to see “leftists” who couldn’t resist a fascist U.S. president more concerned about Trump’s access to Twitter than they were about his access to the nuclear codes.

17. Calling Trump and his movement fascist was symptomatic of leftists’ habit of overusing the “F-word” to the “the point that it has been stripped of much of any meaning” and became an “empty signifier that, at most, means ‘really bad person on the right’” (to quote a left-identified graduate student who in March of 2021 threatened to “knock [my] teeth in” and who cited Chomsky in defense of his criticism). This claim was highly misleading in relation to myself and others in my political and intellectual circles: the organization Refuse Fascism and numerous radical and liberal anti-fascist thinkers within and outside that group have been quite rigorous and specific in defining precisely what they/we mean by fascism in the specific context of 21^st Century America (see Chapters 2 and 3 of the present volume).

18. People who called Trump and his supporters and allies fascist failed to understand that Trump posed two greater menaces than fascism.  In support of this last criticism, a left intellectual wrote me with this quotation from an interview Chomsky did after the Attack on the Capitol: “Incitement of an attempted coup is no laughing matter, but it scarcely weighs in the balance against a dedicated effort to destroy the environment that sustains life on Earth or demolition of the arms control regime that mitigates the threat of nuclear war.”[xvii] Like much of what one hears on the Trumpenleft, this last narrative is based on a false dichotomy. While there should be no doubt that capitalist ecocide and nuclear holocaust represent potentially terminal, exterminist dangers worse even than fascism (even Hitler would be horrified at the fossil-capitalist project of turning the entire planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber), this last Trumpenleft charge misses a rather fundamental point: there is no forward movement on these and other key issues of gave significance for human and other sentient beings when authoritarians and especially fascist authoritarians hold state power. One must fight fascism as part of fighting against ecocide and nuclear terror.

---

[i] Gary Leupp, “On the Relative Vileness of George W. Bush and Donald Trump,” Counterpunch, February 10, 2021,  https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/10/on-the-relative-vileness-of-george-w-bush-and-donald-trump-liz-cheney-and-marjorie-taylor-greene/

[ii] For the best critique of the German Communist Party mistaken “third period” at the time, see Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder, 1971).  For a first-hand account recalled from Weimar Berlin, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (New York: New Press, 2002), 68-76.

[iii] Paul Street, Hollow Resistance: Trump, Obama, and the Politics of Appeasement (Petrolia, CA: Counterpunch Books, 2020). See also Street, “The Donald Can Happen Here,” written during the 2016 primary season.  

[iv] This is a recurrent theme in the endless Trumpenleftish white male faux-radical writings of Rob Urie. See, for one example among many, his reflection after the January 6 incident: “Neoliberalism is Fascism with Better Manners,” Counterpunch, January 15, 2021, https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/15/neoliberalism-is-fascism-with-better-manners/. An especially egregious but far less prolific perpetrator of the false Trumpenleft equivalency between the two ruling class parties is the thankfully retired Moravian College political scientist Gary Olson, who absurdly cites Urie as his source on the nature of “fascism.” Olson celebrated the three month anniversary of the Attack on the Capitol by publishing a demented reflection on how “it’s a mistake — one that even some on the left are making — to view Biden’s election with a sigh of relief, a welcome breathing space” and by claiming that the threat posed to the nation by the supposedly weak and splintered right-wing “pales in significance when compared to the neoliberal fascists already in power,” led by “Biden, the oligarch’s tool.” Olson had earlier distinguished himself by moronically arguing that American racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and nationalism “are just some of the scams and scapegoats that the Lords of the Universe deftly deploy to divide us and divert our gaze” from the problem of ruling class power. Gary Olson, “Will Neoliberalism Morph Into Fascism?” Counterpunch, March 5, 2021, https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/05/will-neoliberalism-morph-into-fascism-in-the-united-states; Gary Olson, “An Open Letter to Trump Supporters,” Counterpunch, November 27, 2021, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/27/an-open-letter-to-trump-voters-2/ . Olson maintains a Facebook following rife with fascists and white nationalists, to whom he thinks “the left” should reach out since they are in his empirically false opinion largely “working class” and supposedly therefore open to progressive agendas.

[v] Anthony DiMaggio, “Trump’s Empire,” Counterpunch, January 24, 2021, https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/24/trumps-empire-reflections-on-the-changing-nature-of-u-s-militarism/

[vi]Stanley, How Fascism Works, 181.

[vii] Chomsky, who consistently resisted description of Trump and Trumpism as fascist from the left, placed great emphasis on the corporate sector’s displeasure with the January 6^th assault.  "Shortly after the storming of the Capitol,” Chomsky commented days after the Attack on the Capitol, “some prominent corporations and political action committees vowed to cut off support for the Republicans who had fanned the flames of anger and conspiracy that resulted in violence.”  See Noam Chomsky, “Coup Attempt Hit Closer to Centers of Power Than Hitler’s 1923 Putsch,” Truthout, January 19, 2021, https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-coup-attempt-hit-closer-to-centers-of-power-than-hitlers-1923-putsch/

[viii] Thomas Ferguson et al., “Industrial Structure and Party in an Age of Hunger Games,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, January 2018, https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Ferg-Jorg-Chen-INET-Working-Paper-Industrial-Structure-and-Party-Competition-in-an-Age-of-Hunger-Games-8-Jan-2018.pdf; Doug Henwood, “Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class,” Jacobin. April 27, 2021, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/04/take-me-to-your-leader-the-rot-of-the-american-ruling-class

[ix] Chomsky, “Coup Attempt Hit Closer.”

[x] Henwood, “Take Me to Your Leader.”

[xi] Private communication, May 6, 2021.

[xii] See above….traveling, will have to fill in page numbers later.

[xiii] Jennie Rothenburg Gritz, “Early Warnings: How American Journalists Reported the Rise of Hitler,” The Atlantic, March 13, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/early-warnings-how-american-journalists-reported-the-rise-of-hitler/

[xiv] Same as note xii above.

[xv] Chomsky, “Coup Attempt Hit Closer.” 

[xvi] Olson, “Will Neoliberalism Morph into Fascism?”

[xvii] Chomsky, “Coup Attempt Hit Closer.”