On Understanding, Predicting, and Changing History

: The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go

On Understanding and Changing History

“Philosophers,” the young Karl Marx wrote, “have tried to understand history; the point is to change it.”

I’ve long thought that famous quotation advances something of a false dichotomy between understanding and changing history, or at least that it does this if you want to change history in a decent and desirable fashion.

Any deranged nut with an AK-47, an AR-15, a suitcase bomb, or a truck filled with explosives can change history to some degree – in a terrible way.

If you want to change history in a wonderful way, helping move humanity from oppression, exploitation, and ruin to survival and emancipation, you do in fact need to know and understand history to grasp numerous things including the lessons (both positive and negative) of past revolutions and movements for human liberation.

That said, yes, ultimately we progressives, radicals, and revolutionaries want to change and not merely understand history.

Prediction Says Something

I thought of young Marx’s pithy comment this morning as I reflected on the limits of the intellectual work I’ve done over the last three decades.

I have this memory of something the world systems Marxist political economist Giovanni Arrighi said in a graduate seminar I took back in the 1980s at Binghamton University. Arrighi related how a historian had recently asked him if he’d ever “set foot in an archive” to find empirical proof on past events to support his work. “Once,” he had said, “in [apartheid] South Africa. Never again!.”

His main point was that one can find proof for one’s analysis in future as well as past events – in the ability of one’s assessment of the objective situation to predict future developments. He claimed that his particular analysis of capitalism and class struggle (I don’t recall the specifics) had foreseen and explained the economic stagflation of the 1970s.

Well, I’ve spent many days in the archives (my doctorate is in history) and I’ve also – more to the point of this commentary – been fairly good at predicting some key future developments. I had Barack Obama picked as the next US president once John Kerry was defeated by George W. Bush in 2004 --- not a common belief at the time thanks to the color of Obama’s skin – because I thought Obama was perfectly matched to the political and cultural rebranding US capitalism-imperialism would require after the long national Bush nightmare.

I predicted the terrible neoliberal, imperialist, and objectively white supremacist nature and ruling class-friendly trajectory of the Obama presidency and that it would spark and empower a white nationalist “populist” reaction.

(A funny story on this: in late 2007, my wonderful progressive editor at Routledge Press shot down my original proposed title for my third book, my first one on Obama, which came out in the spring before Obama was first elected president. My title idea: “The Empire’s New Clothes.” The editor rightly thought such a brazen and predictive title would hurt the book’s chances of being picked up by libraries and big bookstore chains. We went with Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. When it came time for me to write my next book, on Obama’s first year plus in office, I got my original title with some elaboration in the subtitle: The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power.)

I wrote in March of 2016 on CounterPunch that a fascist Trump presidency could in fact “happen here” and went on later to join others in predicting that Trump would not accept an election outcome that didn’t go his way.

I predicted that the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats would respond to Trump with Weimar-like appeasement, conciliation, and even complicity, consistent with the Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s analysis of them as “the inauthentic opposition.”

I predicted that Trump would win again in 2024 (wrong, Allan Lichtman!) and that his re-election would mark a great acceleration in the march towards fascist consolidation in the United States. That is happening now.

I am perhaps exaggerating my clairvoyance (hardly unique to me) a bit but not all that much, really.

But the Thrill is Gone

Okay, so what? Hooray for me?

I’ll admit that there is a certain amount of intellectual satisfaction in seeing one’s sense of likely future developments validated. “See,” you get to boast, like I said. I must be on to something. Maybe folks should start listening to me if you want to understand history and prepare for the future!”

It has been somewhat gratifying to say, “told you so” to all the Trumpenlefty creeps who have accused me and others of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and being a “hysterical” “boy crying wolf” on the US-Amerikaner fascist menace. It’s a shame more Germans didn’t develop Hitler Derangement Syndrome n the 1930s, no?

But the fun of being proven right by future developments wears off. For me, “the thrill,” to quote BB King, “is gone,” as the world’s most powerful country moves at an accelerating pace along the dark path of fascist consolidation – a catastrophe for all humanity in a world already mired in existential climate crisis and chock full of nuclear weapons, mass poverty, savage inequality, authoritarian rule, rampant irrationalism, maddening fundamentalism, and demographic destabilization and flight, the next global pandemic waiting in the wings.

“I saw it all coming. I tried to warn you.”

Great. Good for me. That and $2.50 will get me a ride on the subway. Or a trip in a Homeland Security van to a detention camp one day.

The Main Gap is on What is to be Done

No, understanding shit is great but the point is to change it, something that takes not just brains, science, theory and empirical knowledge but courage and conscience.

Here in the US I think the main gap in properly responding to Trumpism-fascism is going to revolve less around understanding what it is than around what is to be done about it. There’s still a lot of denial, disbelief, disinterest, dread, and dumbness getting in the way of acknowledging what’s really happening here, but the cold fact that the Trump regime is fascist is less and less of a tough sell every single day thanks to the ever more transparently fascist conduct of the Trump47 regime (the details of which I’ve been writing about since before the second Trump inauguration).

“Fascism,” says Refuse Fascism (on whose board I sit):

“ is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights…Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors….History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”

That this is what we are up against in the US is ever more clear as day in the wake of the Trump fascist regime’s vicious extrajudicial kidnapping of Mahmod Kahlil and its open defiance of federal judicial orders regarding their rounding up and deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans and their denial of the visa-holding Lebanese national and Brown University physician’s Dr. Rasha Alawieh’s right to return to the United States from a trip abroad.

The real tough nut to crack is acknowledging the need for prolonged mass action to bring down the whole Trump fascist regime (TFR). Without the collapse of the TFR, resistance will be damn near futile. As Refuse Fascism’s (RF’s) Coco Das recently said in her spoken appreciation of RF’s new Call to Conscience and Action:

“The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go! Imagine this demand resounding through the streets and institutions and airwaves of this country, bringing society to a halt, filling people with the determination to stay in the streets until their demand is met. Until this regime faces that kind of political crisis, it can absorb protests against one attack or another. With their bloody hands on the levers of power and their bloody fangs on people’s necks, the regime will constantly have the initiative while the people will constantly be on the defensive, vulnerable to being divided and conquered and beaten into submission, physically, mentally, and morally…”

As the RF Call says, this has to happen sooner rather than later:

“The hour has come for each of us to ask: If we do not act to stop this, what kind of people will we become?...Waiting for the next elections will be too late. We cannot rely on the Democratic Party’s leadership who complacently rely on the very norms and processes that the Trump regime shreds by the hour….. Let it not be said that when there was still a chance to stop an unprecedented threat to the future of humanity, we did not rise to meet the challenge of our time. Let us not allow the watching world today to despair of our silence and our failure to act. Instead, let the world see our determination and courage and hear our righteous demand: In The Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America. The Fascist Trump Regime Must Go!”

Robert Reich: Good on What’s Happening, Not so Hot on What to Do

This – a forceful call for the end to the TFR (Trump Fascist Regime) – is what is missing from the popular liberal commentator and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s recent call for acknowledgement and resistance below:

“Friends, I cannot say this any other way: We are in deep sh*t. These are truly scary and rough times. Trump appears at the Justice Department and calls for his opponents to be jailed. He ‘detains’ students who have committed no crime but peacefully expressed their negative views about Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza. He invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove unauthorized immigrants, without evidence or hearing. Sides with Russia, China, and North Korea against Ukraine. Purges career officials and installs political hacks more loyal to him than to the United States. Fires inspectors general. Demotes senior prosecutors. Threatens law firms that represented people he considers his personal enemies. Pardons the hoodlums who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He and Musk mow down wide swathes of our government. Republican lawmakers, fearful or unprincipled, say and do nothing.

Democrats are in disarray. Chuck Schumer green lights a continuing budget resolution that allows Musk and Trump to close down even more of our government.

And on it goes. You have every right to feel depressed and enervated. You have every reason to despair.

But wait. It’s possible that future generations will look back on this scourge and see something else — not just what was destroyed but also what was born….It’s entirely possible that future generations will look back on this awful time and see the seeds of fundamental reform.

Many of you are leading this. In hundreds of thousands of ways, you are beacon lights. You are the beginnings of positive change. Whether it’s your appearances at Republican town halls, or your phone calls that are daily jamming the Capitol and White House switchboards, or your mountains of emails and letters, or your myriad actions protecting the vulnerable in your communities, or your grass-roots activism in Wisconsin and elsewhere: You are the groundswell of America’s new resistance, the green shoots of our future democracy.

The backlash to Trump is growing. His disapproval ratings have jumped nearly 10 points since he was sworn in. People are flooding meetings and rallies, demanding an end to Trump and Musk’s reign. Bernie, AOC, and other progressive politicians are drawing huge crowds. These are terrible times — the worst I’ve lived through, and I’ve lived through some bad ones. (Remember 1968? Nixon’s enemies list? Anyone old enough to recall Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts?). But as long as we are alive, as long as we are resolved, as long as we are taking action to stop the worst of this, as long as we are trying to make America and the world even a bit better — have no doubt: We will triumph.”

Okay, that’s Reich, who knows very well that Trumpism is fascism even if he doesn’t say so here. He gives a very sharp and concise summary, well worth reading, of recent fascist Trump outrages, even if he once wrote a book with one of the dumbest titles of all time: Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not the Few. He’s right to call out the inauthentic opposition – the Hollow Resistance (the title of my 2020 CounterPunch book on ex-president Barack Obama’s stunning silence on the first Trump administration) – of the Weimar Democrat Charles Schumer ($D-NY), whose budget cave and that of nine other Senate Vichy Democrats is a despicable surrender straight out of my longtime writings on the neoliberal, fascism-appeasing nothingness of the capitalist-imperialist Dems.

Good for Reich. He gets it that, as he says at the outset, “we are in deep shit.”

No shit!

Reich comprehends a good bit that matters about past and present history. His understanding that Trump and Trumpism are fascist goes back to 2016 if not before. He sounded the alarms early on. Good for him! But what does he propose to change history? While there is a passing reference in his commentary to people “demanding an end to the Trump and Musk’s reign,” whatever he means by that (when? In 2029? now?), he offers nothing really, beyond applauding folks for doing traditional civic things like making noise at town halls and calling into Congressional switchboards. He calls these actions “green shoots of our future democracy,” even though a functioning democracy is impossible under the class rule system – capitalism – he’s on record saying he wants to “save.”

Where is the call to conscience, moral responsibility, and frankly sacrifice to bring down a regime that is a grave existential threat to all humanity, not just Americans? For that I refer you not to Robert Reich but instead to Refuse Fascism.

Please note the painfully limited and incremental, minor nature of the history change Reich heralds: “action to stop the worst of this” and “to make America and the world even a bit better.”

Seriously? No! The Trump Fascist Regime must go! It is a dire white supremacist, women-hating, LGBT-bashing, xenophobic-nationalist, warmongering, pandemicist, and eco-cidal fossil-fascist threat to humanity that must be removed as soon as humanly possible!

In These Times of Sorry Surrender

It is truly amazing how pathetic and lame what some parts of what “the left” – a designation forged in (French) revolution (1789-95 ) – call "resistance" can be. A recent article at the liberal, social-democratish journal In These Times actually – I am not making this up --- trumpets a supposed new labor and “social movement” call for a general strike to win better collective bargaining agreements for U.S. union members (less than 10 %of US workers “in these times”) on May First in – are you ready for this? – 2028.

Yes, 2028. You read that correctly: Twenty F’ng Twenty-Eight. The article is titled “How a ‘Plan 2028’ Could Bring Labor and Social Movements Together.”

Forget the moral and practical limits of a trade unionist appeal to economistic snout-in-the-trough self-interest – “more for us” – under a fascist regime in the parasitic core of the world capitalist empire….Wait, no, don’t forget that, but put it to the side for a moment (if you can) and reflect on the time frame: three years and forty four days in the future – May 1st, 20freaking28!

Is that a joke? A put-on? Was it satire, a piece originally meant for and rejected by The Onion? 2028? What the holy gradualist, incrementalist, and surrender monkey fuck! Imagine the supreme and possibly irreversible mutilation the TFR will have inflicted on humanity and the planet by 2028!

Why 2028? Cuz that’s how the masters’ savagely time-staggered election cycle has trained millions of Americans, including the essay’s author – City University of New York Labor and Urban Studies professor Stephanie Luce – to understand the brief little moments in which all of us corporate-managed peons get to engage in “politics” by making marks next to the names of candidates selected in advance for us by the un-elected dictatorship of capital.

The In These Times essay should be re-titled “A Call to Surrender and Inaction.”