The New United States Civil War is Heating Up

On Bourgeois-Democratic Indictments, Fascist Reaction, and the Need for Revolution

Look at the remarkable political situation in the United States today.  The deadly and declining global Superpower is torn between two competing capitalist-imperialist parties with very different ideas and values on how the political and ideological superstructure atop US capitalism-imperialism should function. They are, as Upton Sinclair noted in 1904 (as the US Army continued its mass slaughter of Filipinos resisting  American colonization) “two wings of the same bird of prey,” but that hardly makes them identical.

The imperialist Democratic Party retains a commitment to the norms and institutions of bourgeois electoral and parliamentary “democracy” and the “rule of [bourgeois] law” inside the USA,  It embraces the ideals of racial, ethnic, gender, cultural, and sexual “tolerance” “diversity,” and “inclusiveness”  in the imperial homeland along with an attachment to a significant measure of rational, evidence-based discourse. The neoliberal Democrats find their  primary constituency in the nation’s more racially, ethnically, religiously (and irreligiously), sexually, educationally, culturally diverse, and polyglot urban areas and disproportionately metropolitan east and west coasts.

The other major US capitalist party, also imperialist (contrary to what Trumpenleft buffoons think),has crossed over into Amerikaner neofascism.  It has broken with the nation’s long normative bourgeois democracy, parliamentarianism, and rule of law even as it seeks to wrap itself in the flag of those conventions. It has embraced noxious and brutal personality cultism, political violence, election cancellation, Christian palingenetic white nationalism, militant patriarchy, paranoid-stule conspiratorialism, political eliminationism, obsesseive anti-Marxism, Social Darwinism, racial supremacism, national border obsession, anti-intellectualism, anti-urbanism and a revanchist war on truth, science, and press freedom. It engages in the horrific pre-genocidal demonization, denigration, disenfranchisement, and Othering of those it shames as racial, sexual, cultural, and moral inferiors and as threats to “American values.”

The Republi-fascist Party finds its disproportionately white, male, and fundamentalist base outside cities and university towns, in the rural and small town “heartland” and vicious sections of white suburbia. It is significantly overrepresented in US government thanks to core Minority Rule components of the nation’s archaic slaveowners’ Constitution: the right-tilted presidential Electoral College (which requires the Democrats to win the national popular vote by 4 to 5 percentage points to keep or gain the White House); the absurdly powerful and mal-apportioned US Senate (where the granting of two representatives to each state regardless of widely different population sizes produces drastic overrepresentation for the nation’s most reactionary regions), the great power granted to fifty separate states (“states’ rights”), and the God-like lifetime-appointed Supreme Court, chosen and confirmed by an undemocratically elected president and the unrepresentative Senate.

The Republi-fascist Party stands behind Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump, a wannabe fascist strongman who prefers the rule of men (led by himself) over the rule of law and electoral “democracy.”  As the nation’s 45^th president, the fascist Trump did something unprecedented in US-American history.  He tried to procedurally and even/then physically prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his successor after he was clearly defeated (despite the Repubicans’ Electoral College advantage) in the 2020 presidential election.  

Trump’s subsequent theft of highly classified documents and his brazen obstruction of government efforts to retrieve those documents after he left the White House was a continuation of his fascist conduct as president, reflecting his belief that he is beyond the rule of law (“I can do anything I want”).

And now the contest between these two different modes of ruling class power — late bourgeois parliamentary democracy, American-style, linked to the neoliberal Democrats, and Amerikaner Republi-fascism, linked to the post-republican Republicans — is on. With the latest Department of Justice (DOJ) indictments of Trump for election fraud and an attempted coup, the stakes are high indeed.  The bourgeois-democratic party in executive branch power has taken the leader of the other major party, now fascist, to federal court, seeking felony convictions that raise the mind-bending prospects of Trump running for and even sitting in the White House after being found guilty of high state crimes.

Did Joe Biden’s DOJ have any choice? Not really. How could the bourgeois-democratic party in executive branch power not investigate and indict Trump for an attempted coup in the imperial nation that continues to boldly advertise itself both at home and abroad as the homeland and headquarters of global freedom and democracy? To not try to inflict serious legal consequences for Trump’s fascist transgressions would be to admit that the 24-decade US  bourgeois-constitutional republic, so-called American democracy (always a cloak for an underlying capitalist class dictatorship) is over.  It would be to openly acknowledge that law has become meaningless and thoroughly perverse in the USA, the self-appointed world-policing City on a Hill.

What is the point of having much-ballyhooed “democratic” American elections and laws if a malignant orange fascist like the odious mob-boss Trump can get away with using the pinnacle “democratic” and “rule of law” office – the U.S. presidency – to try to cancel his own electoral defeat through bald-faced and bloody lawlessness? It’s one thing for Uncle Sam to sponsor and equip “Third World fascism” and other forms of authoritarianism (in the name of “democracy”) beyond its borders; it’s another thing for “the world’s greatest democracy/country” to let fascism win without a legal fight inside the belly of the imperial beast.

The neoliberal Biden Democrats have taken their time about it, far too long, but necessity compels those parts of the U.S. political ruling class who continue to believe in American legalist homeland “democracy,” such as it is, to advance the attempted judicial punishment of the tangerine-tinted transgressor.  If Trump gets back in power, possibly alongside the full Right takeover of Congress (the 2024 election lineup strongly favors the Republi-fascist Party in the Senate and the fascist major party already has the US House), Republi-fascists atop the federal and executive and representative branches will work with the Christian Fascist Supreme Court they created (under Trump and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) to make sure that the nation is ruled in Christian white-nationalist ways, without serious popular electoral recourse, for years to come.

Top Democrats know this – and that a victorious Trump and his political class minions and heavily armed base will be coming after them, looking for revenge and humiliation. There has always been a lethal, eliminationist, and genocidal undercurrent to Trumpism. The Malignant One is now openly promising “Retribution” and compiling an Enemies List certainly headed (for all Trump’s paranoid-style railing against “Marxists, socialists, and communists”) by bourgeois Democrats. (Fascists in power go first at enemies within the establishment). An army of right-wing policy wonks has worked up detailed plans (“Agenda 47”)  to drastically expand US executive branch power beyond anything previously enjoyed by the imperial US presidency. 

For his part, Trump knows very well that the stakes are high for him as well. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s election coup and classified document cases against him are strong. He’s as obviously guilty as he can be, and he knows it.  He is under no risk of incarceration under the current bourgeois-imperial sociopolitical order: the notion of a recent former US president being put behind bars is fantastic without a long overdue and (by the way) existentially necessary socialist revolution in this country. But he needs to win the White House back to avoid epic historical ignominy and likely house (estate?) arrest and enforced muzzling.   

His strategy is to double down on rallying his demented base with his sickeningly durable and potent Hitlerian claims about a stolen election and a “Marxist deep state” (LOL) that is now persecuting Dear Leader Donald with politically motivated “election interference” (how ironic). Trump has responded to his latest indictments with a Mafia-style Truth Social post saying that “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU.” He is daring the Black female judge overseeing the January 6 case to punish him for criminal intimidation of witnesses, prosecutors, and jurists – this while he audaciously calls for the presiding judge’s removal, and for the trial to be moved out from “radical Left” (LOL) Washington DC.

The main Trump legal gambit is delay, to try to make it so that he can win the White House back to cancel all federal prosecutions against him and pardon himself and his fellow conspirators along with hundreds who attacked the US Capitol in his name on January 6.  And here a critical enabler of Trump has been the centrist US Attorney Merrick Garland, who should have hit Trump with January 6 charges one year ago if not sooner, when most of what is included in the latest indictments was already known and matter of pubic record.

Could Trump pull it off and cancel his own federal prosecutions and possible convictions while standing atop a vengeful triple-branch Republi-fascist Amerikaner federal government in 2024-25?  Of course he could. A preponderance of Republicans and roughly three in ten US citizens actually buy his big, multiply disproven Leviathan Lie about the 2020 election. Most of the Trump base thinks it is legitimate to threaten and employ violence to intimidate public officials and negate elections “to protect European values” – that is, to put and keep patriarchal Christian whites in unquestioned authority. Thousands of Republi-fascists have been recruited to serve as precinct and county-level election workers to mess with the counting of the vote in 2024. The indictments are fundraising gold for Trump and have helped consolidate his position as the runaway Republican presidential contender in 2024 (his closest challenger, Ren DeSantis, is an even more menacing fascist than he is). And Special Prosecutor Smith hasn’t made the charge that would make Trump ineligible for the presidency under the Constitution: insurrection.

The American “democratic” system is an authoritarian mess. It is quite capable of letting the odious fascist and multiply accused rapist Trump — arguably the biggest asshole as well the “most dangerous criminal” (Chomsky) in the history of the human race — back into the world’s most dangerous office. We are lethally straight-jacketed by an (sorry for the repetition but it bears repeating) archaic 18^th Century Minority Rule slaveowners’ Constitution that grants absurdly outsized political voice to the now fascist Republicans through the preposterous, openly undemocratic Electoral College, the absurdly powerful and mal-apportioned US Senate, “states rights,” and the lifetime-appointed and arch-plutocratic, now Christian Fascist and transparently corrupt, wholly illegitimate Supreme Court.   And the Hitler fan Trump is currently tied in the polls with the decrepit, dollar-drenched corporate-neoliberal, imperialist, and warmongering US president Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden, whose current miserable approval rating is hauntingly similar to that of the doomed one-termer Jimmy Carter at this time in 1979. To repeat: a tie in the popular vote means a Trump victory under the nation’s ridiculous, democracy-flunking Electoral College system.

What stance should decent people take towards this wild situation? Reflexive cowering under the umbrella of the electoral and legal promises and reassurances of the arch-imperialist, strikebreaking Democrats, whose commander-in-chief is now provoking war with Iran on top of his potentially disastrous incitement of the leading nuclear powers Russia and China?  Putting their hope and trust in the system and party of Biden, who has recently given eco-cidal fossil capital a green light to drill for planet-cooking oil in a pristine section of the Arctic — a president who makes no serious effort to reverse the biggest crime in human history, the transformation of the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber? Obedient faith in the dismal, dollar-drenched, and demobilizing Democrats, whose president refuses to use his power to block the vicious Republi-fascist re-imposition of the female enslavement that is forced motherhood? Continued clinging to the incremental, top-down elitism and “stay off the streets” counsel of the inauthentic opposition party of hollow resistance, the Weimar Dems, who maintain a viciously militarized southern border and whose metropolitan police departments regularly murder, maim, and imprison Black and brown people with reckless impunity? Seriously? 

No! At this critical juncture, the decent position is to boldly advance a revolutionary socialist perspective on the whole damn imperialist and eco-cidal system that has recently brought the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than it has ever been. Capitalism-imperialism — the Democrats’ system no less than that of the Republi-fascists — is marching humanity (and countless other species) to extinction at a gravely escalating pace even without the menace of fascism within and beyond the US.  The neofascist threat must not be ignored, of course, but the ecological (and related epidemiological) time-window is closing for overthrowing the capitalist order (the system that produces fascism) and radically replacing it with revolutionary socialism. There’s no social justice, no beauty, no popular sovereignty, no love, on a dead planet and planetary death is the rapidly approaching destination of the underlying class dictatorship of capital whether its reigning superstructural form is late bourgeois-democracy or fascism.      

Seen in that context, the fascism v. “democracy” split in the ruling class and among much of the US populace might be seen as an opportunity.  It signals a legitimacy crisis, a period of norm-smashing crisis in which the capitalist oppressor and exploiter class can no longer properly rule in traditional and “normal” ways. It augurs a qualitative transformation wherein radical outcomes are certain, for the center can no longer hold. It becomes the responsibility of decent people to organize and act to make the coming radical outcome beautiful and liberating — revolutionary socialist — rather than arch-oppressively fascist-capitalist[1].   

Endnote

+1. See/hear Bob Avakian, “Something Terrible OR Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility of Civil War,” https://revcom.us/en/bob_avakian/something-terribleor-something-truly-emancipating-profound-crisis-deepening-divisions