“You have this kind of pyramid, with the ruling class at the top, and on one side of this are openly reactionary and fascistic forces, like all those clowns — and worse than clowns — competing now for the Republican nomination. Jesus Christ! Donald Trump, 75% of the news these days is about Donald Trump! But there’s a reason for that. Not just one section of the ruling class but the ruling class as a whole feels it’s important to have this atmosphere of anti-immigrant hysteria, and other reactionary fascistic kinds of programs, put forward as part of ‘legitimate political discourse.’ And the more openly reactionary and fascist section of the ruling class, on one side at the top of this pyramid…is very aggressively pushing its program, while the other side is continually conciliating with that —- and even when they fight back, they mainly fight to back to conciliate and copromise more.”
— Bob Avakian, summer of 2015, reproduced in Avakian, The New Communism (Chicago: Insight Press, 2016), p.230.
Some of my readers and listeners may find this early Trump essay of mine interesting — a March 2016 argument on how the dismal, dollar-drenched Weimar Dems could well put the malignant fascist hate machine Donald Trump in the White House (imagine that!): “The Donald Can Happen Here: Trumpenstein’s Neo-Weimar Creators,” CounterPunch, March 11, 2016. My thinking on the Trump base and more evolved somewhat differently in coming years but the key thing to see here (the reason I mention it here and link it above) is the charaerization of the conciliatory and demobilizing, dollar-drenched neoliberal/capitalist-imperialist Dems as deeply complicit in the fascisation process.
"The Ruling Class as a Whole"