Terminology Matters

Getting Our Language Right in the Dark Age of Trumpism-Fascism

It’s important to call things by their proper names.

Terminology matters.

Fascist, NOT “Monarchical”/Hitler, NOT King George

How shall we understand the United States (US) Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Trump v. United States, which grants US presidents broad, presumptive, and absolute immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit as president?

I have heard and seen Trump v. United States described as  a “monarchical” ruling that makes the US president “a king.”  The leading liberal legal commentators Daliah Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern say that the Court’s “conservative supermajority has created a monarchical presidency.”

Hold on. We are not in late modern Europe or the North American colonies in the late 18^th Century, dealing with the “divine right of kings.”  We are far into the “modern” capitalist era,  confronting contemporary Amerikaner fascism, a critical component of which is dictatorship.

If one is looking for historical analogies, the ruling is like the Nazi Third Reich’s Hitler-empowering 1933 Enabling Act, not King George’s imposition of a tax on the colonial North American tea trade. A revolutionary communist friend of mine rightly calls Trump v. United States “a fascist Fuhrer decision.”

“Authoritarian”

Lithwick and Stern understandably describe Trump v. United States as “a recipe for authoritarian rule.” This is technically accurate and much closer to historical reality than “monarchical.”  Still, “authoritarian” is too bland and colorless. It deletes the specifically fascist nature of  Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump, the now fully Trumpified High Court, the Republican party of Trump, and cultist Trumpism in general. The rightmost/Reich-most major US political party and its openly Hitler-channeling Dear Leader check off one fascist box after another: “palingenetic ultranationalism,” virulent racism/white supremacism, the substitution of the rule of men over the rule of law and elections/the embrace of political and mob violence, militant patriarchy, sexual hysteria, constant truth inversion and propaganda, manic border obsession, conspiratorialism, anti-intellectualism, a Social Darwinian “survival of the fittest” ethos, toxic anti-socialism/-Marxism, cult of personality, and more.

“A Judicial Coup”?

I’ve seen and heard liberal and progressive friends say that we are witnessing “a judicial coup.”  That’s not fully accurate. It’s true that the Trump High Court has absurdly elevated judicial authority over that of Congress and policy and agency experts in recent cases, most especially last week’s horrific Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which undid the 40-year precedent establishing “Chevron deference, the “rule that federal courts should defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous laws.” As Lithwick and Stern observe, “It has seized power from Congress, strictly limiting lawmakers’ ability to write broad laws that tackle the major crises of the moment. And it has hobbled federal agencies’ authority to apply existing statutes to problems on the ground, substituting the expert opinions of civil servants with the (often partisan) preferences of unelected judges.”  It’s a judge-led fascist coup that lethally expands the unaccountable “homeland” power and sheer impunity of the imperial presidency. “As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in dissent,” Lithwick and Stern note:

“it frees the president to engage in corruption and violence, including the assassination of his rivals, without fear of criminal charges. And it lets the president transform the executive branch into a fiefdom of self-enrichment and cruelty—wielding dictatorial power to entrench his own rule, then pardon every subordinate who facilitates any coup. …Trump intends to govern by punishing his enemies and rewarding his friends, issuing a ceaseless stream of executive actions that benefit his allies (billionaires, corporations, white nationalists, foreign dictators) and oppress the frequent targets of his ire (journalists, public servants, immigrants, women, minorities). The Supreme Court has now allowed Trump to carry out this agenda in a second term through literally criminal methods of repression so long as he calls them ‘official acts.’”

The Christian fascist Supreme Court that Donald “Immigrants are Poisoning Our Blood” Trump appointed is determined to “share power,” as Lithwick and Stern add,  “with a strongman president who seeks to govern in line with the conservative justices’ vision.”

“Conservative”?

Yes, but hold on…“conservative justices”? “Conservative [court] supermajority”? Really? No! The openly corrupt and illegitimate Trump High Court is radical. Along with a literal Christian handmaid (Amy Coney-Barrett) and a lying right-wing rapist (Brett Kavanaugh), it includes two election-denying insurrectionists, one of whom, Sam Alito:

• recently flew a Christian white nationalist “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his beach home.

• cited Medieval state Christianity as “precedent” for the sick 2022 decision he wrote ending women’s half-century constitutional right to an abortion.

• was recently caught on tape agreeing with the following stand building on the following statement: “people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that – to return our country to a place of Godliness.”

“Someday,” Lithwick and Stern write:

“historians will explain why the same Roberts court that declined to rig the 2020 census in favor of Republicans, declined to intervene in the bogus 2020 election fraud cases, declined to rubber-stamp a wholly fabricated ‘Independent State Legislature Theory,’ and refused to protect from investigation Trump’s personal papers and advisers made the sharp turn in 2024 to become his handmaids. At some point the rumors that there was a 3-3-3 court with a careful and moderate center became simply laughable, and those same ‘moderate’ justices made the decision that whatever impulse toward public legitimacy had constrained their conduct in recent years was for suckers: Having taken on far too many high-profile game-changing cases, the choice for the 2023–24 term was go big or go home. They went big…. Whatever braking mechanism once existed at the court is now broken. We wake up this summer in a new government order.”

The Christian Fascist Supreme Court that Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump and Malevolent Mitch McConnell created between 2016 and 2020 is radical: radically revanchist, radically reactionary, radical right…neofascist. Trump v US is the open granting of a platform for Trump’s promise of violent retribution against all his enemies beginning next year. That’s radical, not conservative.

 Fascism and Capitalism

I am told by fascism-denying Trumpenelftish sorts and various self-described “leftists” that this Court is “plutocratic” and “neoliberal” and therefore supposedly not fascist. No. Wrong. Yes, the 2023-24 Trump Court has made brazenly plutocratic, arch-capitalist decisions like Snyder vs. USA (okaying the plutocratic bribery of public officials), Ohio v EPA (deepening industry’s ability to trump anti-pollution measures) SEC v Jarsky (devastating government agencies’ power to bring civil penalties against corporate malefactors) and Loper.  But the Trumpenlefties are caught up in a false dichotomy here.  There’s nothing anti-capitalist or even anti-neoliberal about fascism[1]. Quite the contrary! Among other things, fascism is Iron Heel capitalism without the pretenses of democracy, multi-party parliamentarianism, and rule of law. Fascism’s supposed anti-bourgeois populism and pro-worker/working class sentiments are deceptive cover for a virulently racist, sexist, and classist world politics that abhors unions and social welfare and sees the savage economic inequalities of capitalism as signs of the wealthy elite’s supposed genetic and racial superiority.

A “Second American Revolution”?

Let’s dig into some ridiculous and ominous terminology from Kevin Roberts, president of the granddaddy Republi-fascist think tank the Heritage Foundation. Commenting on Trump v. the US, Roberts proclaimed that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution.” This judge-led “revolution,” Roberts said, “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Say what?  The United States has never had a first actual revolution.  The so-called American Revolution of 1776 was a national break-off meant to create an expanding, independent, arch-racist, imperial, genocidal, and rebellion-free merchant capitalist slaveowners’ republic.  There were revolutionary aspects of the American Civil War and Reconstruction years (1861-1877 and especially between 1863 and the late 1860s) but a potential bourgeois-democratic and anti-racist revolution in the former slave states was crushed in the white supremacist (“Redeemer”) reaction that gave rise to the proto-fascist Jim Crow South (a great inspiration for Hitler’s Third Reich along with the United States’ genocidal ethnic cleansing of indigenous North Americans).

There’s nothing “revolutionary” about making a fascist monster immune from prosecution for trying as president to overthrow an election and the rule of law.  There’s nothing “revolutionary” about granting dictatorial powers to the current and future presidents of the capitalist-imperialist United States. Trump v the US is counter-revolutionary.

What Fighting Left?

“…Bloodless…if the left allows it to be?” Hello? Where is this militant, potentially violent “left”? There is no single coherent or powerful US “left,” a term Republi-fascists absurdly use to describe the militantly capitalist and imperialist Democratic Party of Jelly-Brained Genocide Joe Biden. The notion of the dismal, dollar-drenched, and demobilizing Democrats – “the party of inauthentic opposition” (Sheldon Wolin, 2007) – seriously fighting back (violently or otherwise) against Republi-fascist consolidation is chimerical.   Refusal and failure to fight is at the weakly heart and soul of the nation’s not-so “leftmost” major US party. The deeply conservative capitalist-imperialist Democrats are a fake-progressive Weimar party headed by corporate-crafted cowards and cynics who will follow the path of the French collaborationist Vichy regime after the right-/Reich-most major US party (the now fully “MAGA-pilled” Republifascists) complete the trifecta, owning all three branches of the federal government (along with at least half the nation’s powerful state governments) next year.

Imagine

Just to clarify this point, let’s imagine what an actual and real left party and movement would have done in response to the fascist Fuhrer decision (US v Trump). In a recent brilliant passage from her introduction to the latest Refuse Fascism (RF) podcast (featuring yours truly), my fellow RF editorial board member Samantha Goldman takes us briefly into a fantastic anti-fascist alternative history and then wakes us up from our delightful democracy day-dream:

“And so obviously, the minute the decision came down, the Biden administration and congressional democrats set a detailed and robust strategy into motion. They immediately moved to expand the court, filed airtight insurrection charges against Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, with a few corruption charges on the side for Thomas, and kickstarted impeachment proceedings for all 6 fascists on the court. To enable all this to come to fruition, they whipped out long-awaited insurrection charges against members of Congress who had participated in January 6, gutting their ability to obstruct such moves. Biden directly addressed the nation from the steps of the Supreme Court minutes after the decision and called the people into the streets against this fascist menace. He promised to do everything legally in his power to reverse this decision and uphold his beloved constitution. Meanwhile the American people could not be held back from protesting in their millions nationwide. Their outrage against the Supreme Court was palpable. Unsatisfied with Biden’s response, connecting this outrage with the larger fascist threat, and losing allegiance to the whole setup, people shut down federal buildings, highways and ports, saying we refuse to be governed by fascists and questioning the legitimacy of any system that would bring this to pass. That’s how the revolution started, Right?.

Wrong. Instead Biden hobbled up to a podium nine hours later and made clear that in the face of the Supreme Court granting the president unprecedented powers, there was nothing that he - the current president - could do. He didn’t even say it, it was simply off the table. Instead he said all that could be done - by anyone, anyone at all, the only thing humanly possible - was to vote for him again in November. So that he could what? continue to enable the rise of fascism. The majority of Americans, steeped in the mythology of a forever stable and good America, indoctrinated in the passivity of 'American democracy,' cowed by an ever-more powerful fascist movement, responded with a shudder and a whimper, if it registered with them at all. Any outrage limited to a tweet, maybe a thread. And the growing fascist movement, empowered by this decision, doubled down on their fascist agenda, with one more key milestone reached ahead of schedule.”

Yes. If there was a serious and respectable American “left” with the power and inclination to actually rise up against fascism and capitalist plutocracy, the recent Trump Court decision(s) would have elicited mass demonstrations and strikes bringing the nation to a halt.  The streets and public squares would be flooded with angry masses. 

Good Metaphors: “Quicksand” and “Siren Song” (Avakian)

But nothing remotely close to a hint of a scent of an inkling of a wisp of that kind a response is in the works. The “fascist Fuhrer decision” has elicited a whimper, not a bang on the big bad “Marxist” and “communist” portside that Trump and Trumpists keep warning their cult followers about. “The left,” which for Kevin Roberts means anything to the portside of Steve Bannon, is mired in pathetic arguments about the lame electoral viability of a transparently decrepit and historically unpopular president who is quite properly loathed by decent Americans for his criminal embrace, funding, equipping, and protecting of Israel’s Ziofascist genocide in Gaza.  

“The left” is stuck in the “quicksand” and “siren song” (Bob Avakian’s excellent metaphors for bourgeois electoral politics[2]) of the savagely time-staggered big money, right-rigged, corporate-crafted and candidate-centered “quadrennial electoral extravaganza” (Noam Chomsky) that is sold to us as “the only politics that matters” (Chomsky, 2004).” The blaring quadrennial sirens of the national “election madness” (Howard Zinn, 2008) has untold  masses of “left”-identified Americans arguing over what ought to be the obviously woeful elder-abusive absurdity of running Biden again when they ought to be out in the streets demanding the replacement of a faux-conservative MAGA High Court that rules to the radical right of majority US public opinion on one issue after another.

“Dismantling the Deep State”?

Right-wingers are hailing other recent Trump Court decisions (especially Loper) as “the dismantling of the administrative state” and the “demise of the deep state.”  This is nonsense.  Trump’s team and its many cult partners in the “conservative” (neofascist) movement (including the six fascist Supremes, the Heritage Foundation,  and numerous “red” state governments) are NOT trying to destroy the “deep” and “administrative” state.  They are determined to take and make the “deep state” over in order to use it to build a Christian White Nationalist Amerika.  That is the essence of the interlocked Trump 47 agenda and “Project 2025,” the massive far right policy plan worked up by more than 80 “conservative” organizations led by the Heritage Foundation. (Trump’s recent claim that he and his campaign have nothing to do with Project 2025 is a bald-faced lie – imagine that!)

Goodbye Bourgeois Democracy, Hello Amerikkka

Speaking of heritage, this is NOT “the America Farewell Tour,” to paraphrase the title of a recent book by Chris Hedges.  It’s the United States Bourgeois Democracy, Civil Decency,  and Rule of Law Farewell Tour. White nationalist Trumpism-fascism is not some deviant anomaly for the supposedly exceptional and liberal United States’ imagined long democratic march towards “a more perfect union.” As historian Steven Hahn shows in his latest book  Illiberal America: A History, Trumpism has “deep roots” in potent “illiberal disposition[s] and ideolog[ies]” that run through the nation’s history from its colonia and early republican origins through the present. Many liberal Americans look at January 6 and the latest Trump or Trumpist outrage and think to themselves “That’s not us.”  They should think again. “Illiberalism,” Hahn demonstrates, “is part of the American bedrock….Illiberal ideas, relations, practices, sensibilities, places of empowerment, cultural hierarchies, and political projects have been” — Hahn writes in his conclusion — “deeply embedded in our history, not at the margins but very much at the center, including the soil of social and political life, and often ensnaring or entangling much else that grows there” (Hahn, Illiberal America, 351). Hahn fails to properly understand the current reigning “illiberalism” as neofascism, but his deeper historical point is well-taken.

Dear readers: if I tried to hyperlink every single source relevant to my arguments/commentaries my pieces would never go up. I simply don’t have time or energy for that gargantuan task. Feel free to write me for any sources not linked or provided in text or notes.

Note

1. Hence my new moniker for the “socialist” Senator from Vermont: “Bernie QuickSanders.” In early 2020, Chomsky did a Truthout interview in which he said that Bernie Sanders threatened the establishment by inspiring rank and file social movements. No. The opposite is true: the whole Sanders thing was and is about cranking up the Homerian siren song and sinking everything in the "quicksand"  (Avakian's perfect metaphors) of US electoral politics. By all indications, Sanders is not saying anything public against the catastrophic Biden candidacy.  Will he enable the elder-abusive and Weimar-like madness of running Biden again when no president has ever won re-election with an approval rating as low as Biden’s this late in a presidency and while 72% of Americans(!) say Biden is too old and feeble for a second term?