Six More Words and Phrases

"Amerikaner," "Weimar Democrats," "Vichy Democrats," "Eco-fascism," "Pandemo-fascism," and "Trumpenleft"

The highly word-sensitive, scholarly, and anti-fascist canine Oreo approved this post

Following up on my January 14^th PSR titled “Let’s Get Our Words Right: On Definitions in the Age of Trumpism-Fascism”[1], I elaborate here on six words and phrases that have appeared in my writing over the years Amerikaner, Weimar Democrats, Vichy Democrats, : eco-fascism, pandemo-fascism, and Trumpenleft.

“Amerikaners”

As far as I am aware, I am the only person to use the term “Amerikaner” in left political discourse. It is a play on the name of the white Dutch-Anglo minority that imposed a regime of savage racial apartheid and white minority rule on South Africa during the last century. Like the South Afrikaners, I maintain, much of the neo-Confederate Trump base is heir to an earlier history of genocidal and imperialist white un-“settlement.” It is opposed to majority multi-racial bourgeois democracy and committed to the enforcement of racial and ethnic separatism and inequality. Caucasian fears of coming minority white demographic status in the increasingly non-white United States are a key part of this parallel, reflected in the adoption of “Amerikaner” years ago by some on the US “alt-right.” Color- and gender-blind class left analysts and commentators who reduce Trumpism-fascism to working- and middle-class economic anxiety foolishly exaggerate the economic insecurity and poverty of Trump’s backers. They also give this Amerikaner fascism and other parts of the Trumpist-fascist synthesis (misogyny/patriarchy, LGBT-bashing, xenophobia, the embrace of political violence, Christian fundamentalism, and anti-intellectualism, among other things) a moral free pass.

“The Weimar Dems”

This is a simple historical metaphor. “The Weimar Republic,” History.com points out, “was Germany’s government from 1919 to 1933, the period after World War I until the rise of Nazi Germany. It was named after the town of Weimar where Germany’s new government was formed by a national assembly after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated. From its uncertain beginnings to a brief season of success and then a devastating depression, the Weimar Republic experienced enough chaos to position Germany for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.”

During the final years of the Weimar period, Germany’s fledgling bourgeois democracy and weak liberal and left parties collapsed. Germany fell into the clutches of the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist Nazi Party leader Adolph Hitler, who became dictator atop the genocidal Third Reich. One decade he led a failed coup attempt – the Beer Hall Putsch in November of 1923 – Hitler rose to power through “normal” bourgeois electoral and constitutional means, within the “democratic” legal and political framework of the Weimar Republic, which he rapidly overthrew after the Reichstag Fire.

When anti-fascists like me refer to the dismal Democrats as “the Weimar Dems” we analogize the weak, Trumpism-fascism-enabling, and bourgeois-democratic Obama-Clinton-Biden-Pelosi Democratic Party to the established liberal, conservative, and social democratic parties that essentially handed power to Adolph Hitler in 1933. The Weimar analogy refers also to the decadence and weakness of a bourgeois-democratic electoral and legal order that was lame enough to give rise to a fascist government. We must now be on guard for Trump’s second attempt at a “Reichstag Fire 2.0.” His first and failed effort at such a moment was his response to the George Floyd Rebellion in the summer of 2020.

“Vichy Democrats”

This is another historical metaphor from the time of classic European fascism. The basic point here is collaboration with in-power fascism. The Jewish Virtual Library notes that:

“The Vichy regime was the French government which succeeded the Third Republic from July 1940 to August 1944. It was proclaimed by Marshal Philippe Pétain following the military defeat of France and the July 10 vote by the [French] National Assembly to grant extraordinary powers to Pétain, who held the title of President of the Council. The ‘French state,’ (L’État Français) in contrast to the ‘French Republic,’ willfully collaborated with Nazi Germany to a high degree: raids to capture Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were organized by the French police not only in the northern zone - occupied by the German Wehrmacht - but also in the southern ‘free zone’ which was occupied only after the Allies invaded North Africa in November 1942.”

Beyond obvious differences, this metaphor rightly analogizes the French collaborationist Pétain government with the pathetic capitulation of the Democratic Party to the fascist Trump and his fascist party following the electoral defeat of Kamala Harris and the Congressional Democrats last November. After a brief period (the final three weeks preceding the 2024 elections) in which Harris and other Democrats publicly acknowledged that Trump and Trumpism are fascist, Harris and Joe Biden pledged full and welcoming support for a “peaceful transition” to fascist power in the White House. Mein Trumpf is waltzing back into the Oval Office with cringing Democratic Party approval.

Also indicating “Vichy Dem” capitulation to Republi-fascist takeover is Democratic Party support for the likely bipartisan passage of the Laken Riley Act, a bill that will crackdown on “illegal” immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes, giving state attorneys general the power to contest individual federal immigration rulings. The bill cleared the US House with nearly a fourth of Democrats voting for it. It has strong “bipartisan momentum” in the Senate.

Eco-fascism

The radical ecology professor Andreas Malm and his comrades in the Zetkin Collective (a group of antifascist scholars and activists who study the “political ecology of the far right” from a historical-materialist perspective) show in their book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism that contemporary neofascism and fossil capitalist Ecocide are joined at the historical hip. Through an exhaustive survey and analysis of “far-right” (neofascist) climate politics (including that of the Trump Republi-fascist Party) in Europe and the Americas, Malm/Zetkin discover numerous forms of mutually reinforcing synergy between the two menaces:

· The frequent neofascist claim that the real existential crisis facing rich nations isn’t climate collapse but the immigration of non-whites – this while millions of Africans, Arabs, and Latin Americans try to flee the climate crisis that the wealthy nations have created with their interrelated capitalist addictions to endless growth and fossil fuels. “A rule has remained in force up to the moment of this writing,” Malm/Zetkin observe: ‘Every time a far-right [neofascist] European party denies or downplays climate change, it …says: the problem facing our societies has nothing to do with climate – forget about the hoax – the real danger is the presence of too many non-white foreigners in …our land…The [liberal/Left] elite is to be despised because it has opened the borders and invited the enemy…Thus [Dutch fascist leader] Geert Wilders [said in 2017 that] European government[s] …’worry about climate change. But they will soon be experiencing the Islamic winter.’”

· Neofascists’ common portrayal of climate activism and non-white people/immigrants as two sides of the same coin of a supposed anti-Western primitivism that seeks to undermine the glorious fossil-fueled technological modernity that has made rich white nations “great.”

· Racist “spillover” whereby the first Black US president Barack Obama’s declared belief in climate science sparked white supremacists to reject climate science. “If global warming was something Obama believed in,” the fascist “logic” went, “it must be a hoax to disinherit the whites.”

· Ideological spillover whereby belief in basic climate science on the part of fascism’s enemy “the Left” encourages the right to reject climate science.

· Faith in the exploitation of domestic fossil fuels as the material base for the return and expansion of national strength and “greatness,” sold as “energy independence” and even “energy dominance” (Trump). (“Energy independence” from the demonized but oil-rich Muslim world, whose capacity to disrupt rich white nations was demonstrated during the first Arab oil crisis of 1974.)

· National energy and racial “stock”-ism: neofascist identification of rich nations’ white demographic “stocks” with their national fossil fuel stocks.

· The neofascists’ claim that climate activism is part of a nefarious plot whereby poor nonwhite nations are trying to rob rich white nations of their supposedly natural and hard-won wealth.

· The racist, xenophobic, and conspiratorialist narrative of climate change as a “Chinese hoax.”

· The racist notion that climate change should be a “secondary concern” for rich white nations since the initial catastrophic consequences of global warming fall hardest on nonwhite nations and peoples in the global periphery (so “let them drown”).

· Right-wing identification of governmental regulation – required for climate change mitigation – with supposedly oppressive “big government socialism” (never mind that neofascists embrace big government regulation of immigration and repression of nonwhites and leftists).

· Racist demonization of non-white Indigenous people accused of obstructing national growth and greatness by insisting on their tribal right to inhabit lands that investors want to rape for fossil fuel extraction and/or (as in the Amazonian rain forest) agro-industrial “development.”

· The creation of a “fossilized proletariat”: the identification of certain surviving proletarian sectors – coal, peat, gas, and oil workers (employed in “primitive fossil capital” industries) and autoworkers, truckers, and aviation workers (working in “fossil capitalist” sectors removed from initial/ “primitive” extraction) – with fossil fuels.

· The Malthusian claim that the real cause of the climate problem is over-population driven by non-white peoples and that the real source of environmental spoilation within rich nations is the globalist Left-instigated influx of overly fecund nonwhite immigrants whose arrival “ruins the commons.”

“Pandemo-fascism”

I began using this phrase during the Covid-19 pandemic to describe two things: (i) how Donald “Shoot Clorox” Trump and Trumpism-fascism’s anti-intellectual rejection of science helped fuel disastrous opposition to basic public health measures – vaccines and lockdowns – required to slow and stop the pandemic’s spread; (ii) how the Trump administration initially resisted public health measures required to stem the pandemic because it calculated that Covid’s victims were especially concentrated in political enemy territory – in blue, Democratic-voting metropolitan areas.

Trump has nominated two anti-vax pandemo-fascists, Robert F Kennedy, Jr and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, to head the Department of Health and Human Service and the National Institute of Health (the world’s largest funder of biomedical research), respectively. These pandemo-fascists could kill millions during the next pandemic.

“Trumpenleft”

I invented this term in (maybe) late 2018 as something of a joke and then quickly determined that it captured a real phenomenon. “The Trumpenleft” refers to the (at first surprisingly) large number of avowedly “left” fascism-denying thinkers and activists I have encountered who have dismissed, mocked, and smeared leftists and progressives’ concerns about Trump and Trumpism-fascism as “hysteria,” childish “wolf-crying,” stupidity, “virtue-signaling,” “identity politics,” “political correctness,” and collaboration with the corporate-neoliberal Democratic Party. I have encountered “leftists” who have actually embraced Trump’s elections and fisrt presidency, absurdly positing Trump as a pro-working-class populist and anti-imperialist. For true Trumpenlefties, it’s as if the Democrats are the only ruling class party that matters even as Trump has committed one new outrage after another. (The other day I asked a local Village Trumpenlefty “so what do you think about the Pete Hegseth pick for Secretary of Defense?” He didn't know who the Christian Fascist Pete Hegseth is. ["Hegs who? Who's that?"] This is a Rosa Luxembourg-posting “leftist" who will tell you that “the Mueller Report was more fascist than anything Trump ever did,” who thinks January 6 was “not that big a deal” [he thinks it was a working class outing that got a bit too excited], who thinks Trump should never have been impeached [not even for January 6!], who hopes that Trump pardons people convicted for violently assaulting the US Capitol on January 6, who thinks Hunter Biden’s corruption is a bigger problem than Trump’s mass deportation plans, who thinks that “people should relax about Trump,” and so on.) There's a bunch of these Trumpenleftish folks. Many of the ones I have encountered over the years are fifty- to seventy-something white men who were into Bernie Sanders and now essentially deny the fascism of the nation's dominant capitalist party. They often suggest that you are with and for the neoliberal Dems if you have any serious issues with Trump and Trumpism/MAGA fascism. They might as well become full-on fascists themselves.)

Having written this piece, it strikes now that I ought to do a future one on the meaning of three other phrases (none of which are anything at all like my invention) that appear often in my writing: fossil capitalism, Christian Fascism, and bourgeois democracy.

Endnote

1. We can add “autocrat” and “autocratic” to my January 14^th roster of words that fall short when it comes to capturing the specifically fascist ideological content of Trump and Trumpism – horrible content that (as I argued in last Thusrday’s PSR) is richly evident in Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. The point here is the same as with my January 14^th critique of the use of the words “authoritarian” and “oligarch” to describe Trump: the description is accurate but leaves out the politico-ideological meat of the matter.