Peril, Pets, and Possibility

Republi-Fascists, Weimar Dems, and Post-Election Scenarios

Published today — minus a few additions (see below) and images— as “Peril and Possibility: Republi-Fascists, Weimar Dems, and Post-Election Scenarios,” CounterPunch, September 13, 2024, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/13/peril-and-possibility-post-election-scenarios/

Dear readers: I added the word “Pets” to the title and I’ve made a few additions, including two endnotes, to this piece, shown in boldface.

Tim Walz is telling people to “leave it on the field” of the election.

Americans better not follow his advice. The 2024 election day will kick off a much bigger game full of peril but not without some opportunity on the path to the emancipation of humanity. 

Poisoning Our Blood

Let’s start with some peril.

We will live now in a time where one of the two major and electorally viable US-capitalist  political parties has gone fascist.  And that means, among other things, that that party no longer accepts elections and jury verdicts that don’t go its way and is determined to eliminate its political opposition.

The “Republican” Party is united behind a frothing, demented, decrepit, twice-impeached fascist maniac who previously tried and remains determined to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law “democracy.”

Donald “Be Wild” Trump advocates the extra-judicial execution of suspected shoplifters. 

He promises a draconian mass deportation campaign. 

He promises to end inner-city crime “in one day” (a promise of live-ammunition, IDF-style military deployment in Black and Latino communities). 

He says he wants to be “dictator for one day so that we can build the Wall and drill, drill, drill” – an at once arch-nativist and eco-cidal ambition in a time of escalating climate catastrophe.

He tells Christian fascists that they only have to vote one more time for him and then they’ll never have to vote again because he’ll have fixed the nation. 

He says he’ll declare the Insurrection Act to crush protest on his next Inauguration Day. 

He promises to end “Marxist domination of higher education” – something that does not remotely exist.

He channels Adolf Hitler (of whom he has long been a fan) by promising to “clear the Marxist vermin out of the country” and claiming that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

He has gathered around him an army of far-right policy wonks led by the Heritage Foundation with a giant detailed blueprint for the Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of US government and society. (The head of the Heritage Foundation says that its neofascist Project 2025 is a “second American Revolution” that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” – a not-so veiled threat of bloody repression.)

Red states have outlawed teaching about racism and have passed bills making it legal for MAGAts to run over liberal and left protesters with their cars and pickup trucks

Trumpist Republicans have recently conducted raids against Latino civil and voting rights activists in Texas and sent out police to intimidate citizens who signed a pro-abortion rights petition in Florida.

In Georgia and elsewhere the MAGA party has recruited local and county election authorities, securing pledges to refuse to certify votes that don’t go the Republi-fascists’ way.

Fascist paramilitaries are networking with local and county police to intimidate Democratic voters. 

Trump has recently asked the nation’s local police forces, loaded with Trump fascists, to join in the voter intimidation project, reminding cops that their badges and guns inspire “fear…they fear you!”

The putschist Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump promises long prison sentences for those who have opposed, investigated, and prosecuted him. 

Trump laughs about a sick Trumpist’s savage physical assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

This deranged, orange-hued malignant narcissist and pathological liar continues to deny that he lost the 2020 presidential election and has now added the related Hitlerian lies that the Democrats have “opened the borders” to bring in “illegals” from “prisons and insane asylums” who are being put up in luxury hotels while “eating dogs and cats” and being registered to vote for the Democrats while being given Social Security and Medicare[1].

Three days ago, the demented lunatic Trump got up in front of 52 million Americans on prime-time television to insanely call the centrist corporate Democrat Kamala Harris “a Marxist,” to wildly claim that Democrats want to “execute the baby” (with abortions after birth!), to absurdly deny that draconian tariffs on imports will increase prices for US consumers, to absurdly claim he had nothing to do with January 6 other than “give a speech,” to absurdly insist that he has nothing to with Project 2025, to preposterously claim that most Americans wanted to end women’s constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, and to continue his insane story line about the Democrats bringing in “illegals” as an electoral force to “destroy our nation.”

It's quite chilling that 75 million-plus US adults will vote to make this toxic asshole Trump (credibly described by Noam Chomsky in January of 2020 as “the most dangerous criminal in human history”[2]) the president of the most lethal Empire of all time.

And Yet He Could Well Win

Despite all this head-shaking insanity and Kamala Harris masterfully beating the living crap out of him during last Tuesday night’s “presidential” debate, Donald “They’re Eating Dogs” Trump has a decent shot at winning back the presidency. Five Thirty-Eight quite realistically has Trump batting .450 coming to the election plate next November.  Whatever you think of Five Thirty-Eight, Trump is very much in the horse race.

This is thanks to numerous factors, including these:

+  The right-tilted archaic, 18^th Century slaveowners’ Electoral College, which effectively shrinks POTUS elections to a small handful of states and requires the Dem POTUS candidate to beat their Republican opponent by 4 to 5 percentage points in the national popular vote to win the White House.

+  A fascism-denying and fascism-normalizing mass corporate media that has granted Trump years of massive free exposure while downplaying the existential menace he poses to what’s left of US democracy and indeed to life itself.  

+ A Weimar-like Democratic Party that refuses to properly call out Trump and Trumpism as fascist (since doing so would suggest the need for a popular mobilization the dismal Dems don’t want to encourage) and that is too conditioned by and too committed and captive to capitalist-imperialist imperatives to respond to the needs of the masses in a way that might make their elitist party seem like an attractive and authentic people’s alternative to the other ruling class party.

+ Oceans of right-wing dark campaign money, much from billionaires and other rich donors happy to see the US go fascist if it means more wealth for them through tax cuts and deregulation.

+ The toxic role of so-called social media in the spread of conspiratorial, racist, and fascist narratives among millions of angry and ignorant citizens

+ The overwork, alienation, apathy, cynicism, under-education, ignorance and sheer mass manufactured stupidity of millions upon millions of US citizens.  

+ Harris’s identification with the problem of inflation during the Biden years.

Post-Election Violence

Contra “leave it on the [election] field” (Walz), America is likely to experience significant post-election violence and quite possibly major civil conflagration after the election. The political scientist Barbara F. Walter, the world’s leading student of contested elections, has recently noted that the United States today is marked by the three main factors that historically predict election-related political violence across the planet over the years: 

(i) winner-take-all presidential systems with strong presidencies as opposed to parliamentary systems where there is a significant measure of power-sharing between different parties and cooperation is required between parties. In the former system, “losing an election may leave significant portions of the electorate without representation, reduce incentives for inter-party collaboration, and allow the winning side to impose its agenda on the losers.” 

(ii) “Government with parties that are organized by race, ethnicity, or religion make elections even more fraught… If your group is shrinking as a percentage of the population, then you can anticipate… the year you will be essentially shut out of the system.”

(iii) “Finally, elections are particularly dangerous in democracies whose institutions are weak or under attack. If citizens believe those in power can manipulate the outcome… then some will believe that violence and even war may be justified. Demagogues and would-be dictators, anticipating a potential loss, can groom their supporters to reject the results, using claims of fraud and calls for retribution.” 

Sound familiar?! These three factors are all in place in the USA, where: 

A. (unmentionably bourgeois-) “democratic norms are… degraded by… long-harmful features of our political system.” Here Walter mentions gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Electoral College, corporate money, and lifetime judicial appointments (she might also have included the absurdly powerful and malapportioned US Senate, the Senate filibuster, the corporate media monopoly, and states’ rights).

B. The two dominant parties (the “blue” Democrats and “red” Republicans) are increasingly split along racial, ethnic, religious and other cultural (and I would add regional) lines. 

C. The Amerikaner Republi-fascist Party is fueled by and channels widespread white paranoia about coming Caucasian and “European cultural” minority status. 

D. Trump and Fatherland/FOX News and other parts of the right-wing media have seeded the Republikan base with Hitlerian red-meat lies about a stolen election and immigrants being brought into the country (by the “radical left deep state”) to illegally vote for Democrats. 

Political scientists have long failed to relate the well-known (inside academia and presumably in the US intelligence community) risk factors for political violence to the United States, but, Walter notes, “it’s now impossible to ignore that America has all the characteristics of a country at risk.” 

Walter offers some chilling thoughts on what political violence will look like in the US if Trump loses: right-wing riots targeting the election result/count; far-right militias attacking “traitors within their own party, Republicans deemed too moderate” (because they “rejected MAGA”); assaults on minorities in red and purple states; ethnic and ideological cleansing of perceived “outside interlopers” in “red” turf. 

Walter thinks violence is quite possible after a Trump win, too. Protest from “the left” would yield a “heavy-handed military response” from Trump, something that would in turn “radicalize” many Americans. 

Scenarios

Let’s look at some of the post-election scenarios going forward…

 If Trump prevails, he will likely do so with critical help from voter suppression/intimidation and vote-count manipulation and quite possibly through the intervention of the now fully MAGA-tized Supreme Court. Many Americans will protest, leading to right-wing attacks encouraged by Trump even before he takes power and tries to crush demonstrations with federal military force.  Popular outrage and protest will be especially intense if he wins after losing the national popular vote and/or if he gets in through the corrupt, illegitimate, and fascist Supreme Court. Violent state and extra-state repression of “left” protest will feed escalation that will provide pretext for more repression that will be “justified” in the name of putting down “antifa terrorists.”

But even without protest, Trump promises legal and physical “retribution” against immigrants and urban minority communities and against anyone and everyone who previously opposed and current opposes him, starting with people in current or former positions of power.

A second Trump presidency will simply not be accepted by a vast swath of the US populace and many blue states and cities may find them engaged in various forms of nullification and rebellion.

(If Trump wins the coming contested election, David Neiwert recently told Rick Perlstein, far-right terrorists will come out to shoot protesters they’ll label as “radical terrorist antifa” and “they’ll get heavily involved in violent immigrant round-ups.”)

A civil war could evolve, raising the question of which side US military personnel align with. We already know which side rural and metropolitan police will join: Trump.

If the former mass incarcerator and ongoing imperial killer and genocide-backer Kamala “STFU About Gaza Unless You Want Trump” Harris wins, she’ll do so by a maddeningly small margin, Trump and his many revanchist minions will scream steal. Fascist thugs will go on a bloody rampage across the country (an attack on the US Capitol seems unlikely since the Dems currently hold the White House and will have the legislative branch ringed with military force,  but vengeance will be inflicted on blue/Democratic areas and gatherings and individuals from coast to coast).  Lone wolf incel fascists with assault weapons will be activated   Early targets will include vote counting centers and Democratic towns and cities surrounded by angry Trumpist-fascists in “red states.” The new Harris administration and Democrats across the nation will be dealing with right wing violence well past her inauguration. Animated by extreme patriarchy combined with virulent white supremacism, many of the nation’s bitter Amerikaners will be driven over the edge by the presence of a Black/South Asian female in the White House  (never mind that she will bend over backwards to accommodate the right wing and “unite” the country under the banners of national chauvinism and imperialism). 

(If Harris wins, Neiwert says, paramilitaries will show up brandishing assault weapons “at ballot-counting centers, as well as at any other sort of body involved in counting and certifying the votes. We certainly saw in the spring of 2020, these armed bodies of men entering state legislatures. I think that this is their hope: that they can create a lot of chaos in places like Arizona and Georgia so that they can’t actually carry out their votes, can’t actually certify the votes. Then they will say, ‘Well, we’ll now throw it to the state legislatures.’” A Harris inauguration will be followed by “at least a year or two of dedicated domestic terrorism against various government entities, as well as liberal figures, including stepped-up attacks against drag queens. They’ll lean quite heavily into the Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda, against anyone supporting the, um, ‘demonic liberal agenda.’” )

Again, a civil war could evolve, raising the question of which side US military personnel align with. We already know which side both rural and metropolitan police will join: Trump.

A Gridlocked President Harris

A President Harris can forget about getting much done that she can use to make a “progressive” case for her re-election to millions of voters whatever sick faux-populist  the RepubliNazis run in 2028.  The Dems are almost certain to lose their slim Senate majority this fall and the Supreme Court is already firmly in Christian Fascist hands.

Half the nation’s absurdly powerful state governments will stay in Republi-fascist hands.  They will continue to impose various draconian and revanchist policies and nurture fascist politicos and movements.     

If she wins and survives the post-election challenges and violence, Killer Kamala will stew and stink in the combined capitalist and archaic constitutional clusterfuck that is late bourgeois democracy, American Minority Rule style. She could come to see her domestic political profile dependent on her willingness to act on her repeated campaign promises to keep the US-imperial military machine (what she boastfully calls “the world’s most lethal fighting force”) set on kill. As a Black female, she will feel especially compelled to wield imperial power with mass-murderous force.

Radical Opportunity in Bourgeois Democracy’s Crisis: for Re-Polarization

What could possibly be hopeful about the coming madness? America is more polarized and divided between its two major parties and between regions, with the harsh divisions reaching up into its ruling class, than any time since 1860-61. The conflict, chaos, and insecurity likely to break out beneath the Democrats’ teary-eyed calls for “unity” and “getting things done” on a bipartisan basis can create an opening for seriously radical and even revolutionary forces fighting to re-polarize the country away from (a) “red versus blue” to (b) the people versus the ruling class and the class ruled system – capitalism-imperialism – that vomits up the revolting “choice” between ever-more right-wing and nativist ruling class War Democrats and vicious authoritarian ruling class Republi-fascists. There is liberating opportunity as well as eliminationist-authoritarian menace in the current perilous moment. It is possible that civil conflict and even civil war between hyper-polarized late bourgeois-democratic “blue” America and fascist “red” America this and next year(s) could provide an opening for actually radically Left forces to re-polarize America between humanity and class rule/capitalism-imperialism and bring forth a serious movement for what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters: “the radical reconstruction of society itself” and for what Marx and Engels rightly called the only alternative to “the common ruin of all”—“the revolutionary [socialist] re-constitution of society at large.”  

Notes

1. The Onion should do a satirical piece including something like this: "Room service? Eh, hello, yes? I am Roberto, a convicted mass murderer just released from a maximum security prison in Venezuela. Please send me a broiled pit bull, medium rare, and a baked curry Siamese Cat. Put it on Biden's tab and please let me know when my voter registration and Social Security cards arrive. Gracias!"

2. “Are the crimes discussed [during Trump’s first impeachment trial - P.S.] a basis for impeachment? Seems so to me. Has Trump committed vastly more serious crimes? That is hardly debatable. What might be debatable is whether he is indeed the most dangerous criminal in human history (which happens to be my personal view). Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen.’ But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species). Trump is. And those who think he doesn’t know what he’s doing haven’t been looking closely.” Noam Chomsky, “Sanders Threatens the Establishment,” Truthout, February 3, 2020.