The Vichy, Not Weimar Dems

Vichy Democrats - nickname for contemporary members of the Democratic Party, who have sold out to the increasingly fascist Republican Party just as the Vichy French collaborated with the Nazis. The Vichy Democrats include all Democratic officials who voted to invade Iraq…

— Urban Dictionary

I’ve been calling the Democrats “the Weimar Dems” for years. I think maybe I’ll be shifting to “the Vichy Dems.”

“Weimar” refers to the Weimar Republic, which was the German historical period between November 1918 and March 1933, when Germany was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in its history. The constituent assembly that established this new republican and constitutional government was held in the city of Weimar. "Weimar Republic," a term introduced by the republic’s destroyer Adolf Hitler (curiously enough) in 1929, was not commonly used until the 1930s.

“Vichy” refers to the authoritarian French rump state headed by the octogenarian French general Marshal Phillip Petain during World War II. This nominally independent government was seated in the southern resort city of Vichy. With France occupied (including the entire nation after November of 1942) by Nazi Germany, the Vichy regime adopted a policy of explicit collaboration with Hitler.

Under Vichy, French police rounded up Jews and other "undesirables" such as socialists, communists, and anarchists. It joined with the Gestapo in torturing and killing occupation resisters. Vichy French media disseminated antisemitism and anti-Sovietism along with Vichy calls for a new “moral order” based on Catholic nationalist “regeneration” and strict social hierarchy. More than 70,000 French Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps during and after Petain’s sick reign.

(As a personal aside, it was the Vichy French forces who killed my mother’s beloved older brother Connie Freed and hundreds of other US and British soldiers during a horribly ill-conceived Allied forces action in the Port of Oran in November of 1942.)

One part of the Weimar designation that fits the Democrats is the pre-dictatorship feel of the times, with Amerikaner fascism now possibly on the precipice of attaining triple branch power atop the United States government. It may do so under the idiotic but lethal rule of the malignant fascist and narcissist, Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump,” who has been openly channeling Hitler in recent months. Donald “Nonwhite Immigrants are Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is backed by an army of revanchist post-republican Republi-fascist policy wonks who are drawing up detailed plans for the full white Christian nationalist takeover of US government (Google “Heritage Foundation and Project 2025”). Donald “Clear Out Marxist Vermin” Trump’s white supremacist, nativist, and palingenetic ultra-nationalist party of forced motherhood and environmental destruction already reigns in half of the nation’s highly empowered states.

Other parts of the Weimar designation that fit the dismal Dems are the ridiculous nothingness of Democratic Party efforts to fend off the Fearless Orange Fascist Leader and the readiness of much of the nation’s capitalist ruling class to work with a second disastrous and indeed worse Trump presidency. The Dems’ absurdly belated and half-hearted attempts to punish the putschist Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump for trying to…you know…um, overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law seem pathetic and farcical as the porn star Stormy Daniels relates her grotesque sexual experience with the tangerine-tinted super-predator in a New York court — this while the Trump-appointed Supreme Court chillingly actually takes seriously Donald “Chosen One” Trump’s insane claim that he essentially possessed the divine right of a king as president, empowering him to legally assassinate political opponents if he so desired! Adding to the dark Kubrik-eseqe comedy, the Trump-crafted high court and a lower federal court headed by an open Trumpist hack (“judge” Aileen Cannon) are delaying Trump’s serious federal felony election interference, obstruction, and classified document theft trials past the point of no return. Three cheers for Genocide Joe Biden and his attorney general Merrick Garland (aptly named after an inert decorative object) for delaying the key legal proceedings so long!

Hitler at least served nine months behind bars for the Beer Hall Putsch attempt of November 8, 1923. Trump will likely serve no time in jail for the Capitol Hill Putsch attempt of January 6, 2021. He could very possibly pardon himself for that and other of his many crimes.

It’s all very reminiscent of Weimar Germany under its hapless and ancient president Paul von Hindenburg, the old fool who (amidst rampant depression-induced social and political crisis) appointed Hitler Chancellor in January of 1933, putting in place the maniacal fascist who would soon use the Reichstag Fire to end all serious pretense of constitutional democracy and rule of law in Germany for the next twelve years.

The German bourgeoisie was for the most part happy to dispense with bourgeois democracy and rule of law, and the same is true today of much of the US bourgeoisie today.

But here’s where the Weimar label maybe doesn’t fit so well. The Weimar Republic’s 20th Century constitution was in its time the most democratic bourgeois national constitution in the world. The American Constitution that the Democrats uphold is by comparison a deeply reactionary 18th Century slaveowners’ charter that imposes white nationalist Minority Rule in numerous ways — states’ rights (whereby millions of US-Americans live under revanchist regimes whose policies are far to the right of national public majority opinion), the right-tilted Electoral College, the absurdly mal-apportioned US Senate, the undemocratically and lifetime-appointed Supreme Court, the racist 2nd (gun) amendment, and more.

And, as a brilliant Marxist historian writes me, “Vichy Dems, I think fits them better; Weimar at least sometimes tried. A substantial majority of Democrats in the House voted for a vile Antisemitism bill that would outlaw nearly all anti-IDF genocide protests, including those of JVP, IfNotNow and Jewish profs.”

The historian is referring to the sick-AF Antisemitism Awareness Act, which passed the US House 320-91 one week ago with the support of the preponderant majority of the House Dems. The measure absurdly tars as antisemitic the beautiful campus protests that have arisen against US funding, equipping, and protection of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza since October 7, 2023. It embraces and advances an egregiously false narrative that Vichy Joe Biden shamelessly channeled in a speech marking Holocaust Remembrance yesterday. (And yes, untold thousands of Jewish people, high school and college students included, have risen up against the US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza, saying clearly that “One Holocaust Does Not Justify Another!”). The bill is an open endorsement of neofascist assaults on free speech and public assembly rights within and beyond university and college campuses.

In one blue/Democratic zone after another, homes to militarized urban police states dedicated to the mass incarceration and crippling felony branding of millions of Black and brown people, the presidents and trustees of “liberal,” Democratic Party-affiliated colleges and universities have worked with local Democratic authorities to crackdown harshly on anti-genocide protesters. The repression is endorsed by the bloody-jawed warmonger Biden, who called anti-“Vietnam War” protesters “assholes” back in the 1960s and who led cheers for the mass murderous and monumentally criminal US-imperialist invasion of Iraq as a US Senator in 2002 and 2003. The open Zionist Biden loves to repeat his infamous 1986 comment that the United States “would have to invent [judeo-fascist] Israel if didn’t already exist” (in order to advance US “strategic” [imperial] interests within and beyond the Middle East).

This is the bipartisan axis of neofascist opposition to basic civil liberties and in defense of US-backed Zionist terror, occupation, apartheid and genocide — a perverted space wherein “liberal” Democrats call the Christian fascist US House Speaker Mike “an adult in the room” for signing off on the continued US funding and equipping of: genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza; mass-murderous imperial proxy war in Ukraine; the lethal provocation of China.

Many, perhaps most, ruling, political, and professional-managerial class Democrats will submit meekly to the Republi-fascist takeover of the country should it come to pass. They’ll tell us to relax and look forward to the 2028 elections as the Republi-Nazi Dear Leader sets up immigrant detention camps in the national interior as well as on the border, invades Mexico, he sends the military into US cities to end urban crime “in one day,” declares the Insurrection Act to crush the next major Black Lives movement, replaces thousands of civil servants with obedient followers in the executive branch, strips one environmental and public health regulation after another, continues the general validation of mass cruelty and stupidity, and …. the list of very real threats goes on (I can’t repeat them all yet again).

Meanwhile, major league academic fascism-deniers like Samuel Moyn and minor league ones like Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins will explain to us why its “not really fascism” since it isn’t an exact match for the 20th Century fascist regimes in Italy and Germany.

The Catholic patriarch Genocide Joe — a nearly decrepit and deeply conservative corporatist empire man who promised to veto Single Pater national health insurance if it ever came to his desk and who says that he’s never really backed women being able to do what they want with their bodies — is looking to me as much like Petain as von Hindenburg.

Maybe Donald “Retribution” Trump can find a way to keep Maréchal Biden around Washington DC, inside or outside jail, after January 20, 2025.

Kidding. Sort of.

Remember Barack Obama, the guy who not just once but twice (in 2008 and 2020) rescued Genocide Joe from what EP Thompson once called “the enormous condescension of posterity”? Weimar/Vichy Obama knew very well in October of 2016 that Trump was a fascist. He said so, flat out to Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton: “you’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.” But this is what he said to the American people the day after Trump won his first presidential election:

“Now, everybody is sad when their side loses an election, but the day after we have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We're not Democrats first. We're not Republicans first. We are Americans first. We're patriots first. We all want what's best for this country. That's what I heard in Mr. Trump's remarks last night. That's what the country needs -- a sense of unity, a sense of inclusion, a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of law, and respect for each other. A lot of our fellow Americans are exalted today, a lot of Americans are less so, but that's the nature of campaigns, that's the nature of democracy. It is hard and sometimes contentious and noisy and it's not always inspiring…But to the young people who got into politics for the first time and may be disappointed by the results, I just want you to know, you have to stay encouraged. Don't get cynical, don't ever think you can't make a difference…Sometimes you lose an argument, sometimes you lose an election…You know, the path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back, and that's OK. I've lost elections before. Joe hasn't, but...(LAUGHTER). You know. So I've been sort of sure.. [BIDEN: But  you beat me badly.] (LAUGHTER). That's the way politics works sometimes. We try really hard to persuade people that we're right and then people vote. And then if we lose, we learn from our mistakes, we do some reflection, we lick our wounds, we brush ourselves off, we get back in the arena, we go at it. We try even harder the next time.”

Wow, how Weimar/Vichy. What a disingenuous creep.

Which reminds me: I’ve been meaning to write a piece about what a disaster the Obama phenomenon and presidency was for the USA and the world. Coming up soon.