Two Essays and One Interview

Reflections on Thought Provoking Commentary from Barbara F Walter, Rick Perlstein, David Neiwert, and Bob Avakian

Today I recommend some critical reading of people not named Paul Louis Street — stuff I have recently found and found useful in trying to sort through, understand, and perhaps even counter (imagine!) the political madness of our times. Below I link and say a thing or two about two essays and one interview that merit attention in my humble opinion.

I. Barbara F. Walter, “Democracy Needs the Loser,” The New Yorker, August 24, 2024.

Walter is a political scientist who has been studying contested elections around the world for many decades. “It’s a rich field filled with experts who have analyzed enormous amounts of data,” Walter writes. She starts with the story of violence that killed many hundreds of people before and after the 2011 presidential election in Nigeria.

Professor Walter finds three consistent themes/factors in election-related political violence across the planet over the years:

(i) winner-take all presidential systems with strong presidencies as opposed to parliamentary systems where there is a significant measure of power-sharing between different parties and cooperation is required between parties. In the former system, “losing an election may leave significant portions of the electorate without representation, reduce incentives for inter-party collaboration, and allow the winning side to impose its agenda on the losers.”

(ii) “Government with parties that are organized by race, ethnicity, or religion make elections even more fraught…If your group is shrinking as a percentage of the population, then you can anticipate…the year you will be essentially shut out of the system.”

(iii). “Finally, elections are particularly dangerous in democracies whose institutions are weak or under attack. If citizens believe those in power can manipulate the outcome…then some wil believe that violence and even war may be justified. Demagogues and would-be dictators, anticipating a potential loss, can groom their supporters to reject the results, using claims of fraud and calls for retribution.”

Sound familiar?! These three factors are all in place in the USA, where:

A. (unmentionably bourgeois-) “democratic norms are…degraded by…long-harmful features of our political system.” Here Walter mentions gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Electoral College, corporate money, and lifetime judicial appointments (she might also have included the absurdly powerful and malapportioned US Senate, the Senate filibuster, the corporate media monopoly, and states’ rights).

B. The two dominant parties (the “blue” Democrats and “red” Republicans) are increasingly split along racial, ethnic, religious and other cultural (and I would add regional) lines.

C. The Amerikaner Republi-fascist Party is fueled by and channels widespread white paranoia about coming white racial and “European cultural” minority status.

D. Trump and Fatherland/FOX News have seeded the Republikan base with Hitlerian red-meat lies about a stolen election and immigrants being brought into the country (by the “radical left deep state”) to illegally vote for Democrats.

Political scientists have long failed to relate the well-known (inside academia and presumably in the US intelligence community) risk factors for political violence to the United States, but, Walter notes, “it’s now impossible to ignore that America has all the characteristics of a country at risk.”

Walter offers some chilling thoughts on what political violence will look like in the US if Trump loses: right-wing riots targeting the election result/count; far-right militias attacking “traitors within their own party, Republicans deemed too moderate” (because they “rejected MAGA”); assaults on minorities in red and purple states; ethnic and ideological cleansing of perceived “outside interlopers” in “red” turf.

Walter thinks violence is quite possible after a Trump win, too. Protest from “the left” would yield a “heavy-handed military response” from Trump, something that would in turn “radicalize” many Americans.

One very useful thing about the Walter essay is that it helps moves people off the horse race to encourage them to think about and prepare for the election aftermath, which seems likely to be quite a battle with real potential for bloodshed. It also helps move folks off the childish American exceptionalism which claims that such things “don’t happen here.” They sure AF do. January 6 happened.

How refreshing it is to see the USA, the supposed shining light of democracy and “envy of the world for 240 years” (Genocide Joe Biden) properly discussed as prone to election violence alongside “inferior” Nigeria, Rwanda, Venezuela, Burundi, Northern Ireland and many other nations past and present.

That said, I find six things missing from this important article:

• Any sense of the role of the underlying capitalist system/mode of production and de facto class dictatorship in critically undermining and de-legitimizing “democracy” and rendering transparently inauthentic the egalitarian. populace-pleasing promises and pretense of bourgeois politicians and elections.

• Any proper reference to the Adolf Trump party and movement as not merely violent and authoritarian but as specifically fascist (more on this below).

• Any reference to the distinctive and wildly extreme spread of guns and even military-style assault weapons - disproportionately in Republi-fascist hands — in Armed Madhouse America.

• The distinctive menace to humanity posed by fascist violence and takeover in the most powerful, dangerous, and mass-murderous imperial power in world history — the United States.

• Any call for the revolutionary transformation and radical reconstruction of a society so sick and depraved as to have hatched horrific obscenities like Trumpism-fascism, capitalogenic Ecocide, and the National Rifle Association.

• Any sense of the coming contested election and possible civil war as a reflection of splits within both the US ruling class (and the broader populace) that could provide an opening for liberating Left forces to re-polarize the nation away from “blue” v. “red” to humanity versus class rule and dictatorship…to the people vs anarchic capitalism-imperialism, the underlying taproot of ecocide, war, pandemicide, genocide, and fascism.

II. Rick Perlstein, “The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About: A Q&A with David Neiwert, America’s foremost writer and thinker on far-right extremism, on what might happen if Trump wins—or loses,” American Prospect, August 28, 2024.

Two neat things about the clever liberal-leftish anti-communist Perlstein is that he knows there’ a big Republi-fascist movement in the US and he tells folks to focus not just on the presidential horse race but to also think and plan for the election’s potentially bloody aftermath. As part of his effort to turn attention to potential and likely (if not certain) violence following the vote, he interviewed the long-time dogged tracker of the far-right, his fellow liberal David Neiwert, who reports that neo-fascist paramilitaries are gearing up for mass bloodshed following the contest. If Trump wins the coming contested election, Neiwert says, the far-right thugs will come out to shoot protesters they’ll label as “radical terrorist antifa” and they’ll get heavily involved in violent immigrant round-ups. If Harris wins, Neiwert says, the paramilitaries will show up brandishing assault weapons “at ballot-counting centers, as well as at any other sort of body involved in counting and certifying the votes. We certainly saw in the spring of 2020, these armed bodies of men entering state legislatures. I think that this is their hope: that they can create a lot of chaos in places like Arizona and Georgia so that they can’t actually carry out their votes, can’t actually certify the votes. Then they will say, ‘Well, we’ll now throw it to the state legislatures.’”

A Harris inauguration will be followed by “at least a year or two of dedicated domestic terrorism against various government entities, as well as liberal figures, including stepped-up attacks against drag queens. They’ll lean quite heavily into the Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda, against anyone supporting the, um, ‘demonic liberal agenda.’”

According to Neiwert and I suspect he’s correct on this, the coming chaos, evident to anyone following right wing online channels, holds chillingly little interest for mainstream and liberal media, Democratic politicians and federal, state, and local law enforcement. A problem here is fascism inside the gendarme forces. As Neiwert tells Perlstein, “the FBI has shown itself to be extremely problematic under Christopher Wray in terms of the ongoing presence of dedicated Trumpists within the FBI. That’s the wild card. Law enforcement is our main guardrail for these kinds of things, and we have Trumpist cops working on the local level, we have them working on the state level, and we have them working on the federal level.”

No shit! (The cop problem is very underestimated.)

Again, this is all very good as far as it goes. There are in my view four problems here:

+1. Perlstein is correct that this story is absurdly absent in the mainstream media, but the people who run and follow the remarkable Refuse Fascism podcast and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (the Revcoms) are NOT “Nobodies”! They not only “want to talk about” this story. They have been talking, writing, trenchantly analyzing, warning about and agitating and organizing against American fascism and the political violence of the Trumpist-fascist phenomenon for many years now. (In at least one previous American Prospect, Perlstein has exhibited a stunning and depressing level of dismissive ignorance about to the actual radical Left and particularly the Revcoms).

+2. Neiwert is certainly the foremost up-close journalistic investigator and chronicler of the far right and the paramilitary fascist movement in the US (I cite him at length in my latest book) but to call him “America’s foremost writer and thinker on far-right extremism” is too much. When it comes to getting to the historical and systemic root and carrying out a proper theoretical and empirical analysis of the new Amerikaner fascism, I’d nominate a number of rigorous commentators ahead of Neiwert: the leading revolutionary communist Bob Avakian (who has been digging into the systemic basis of Amerikan Christian Fascism and warning about the menace it poses since the 1990s), the prolific social and political critic Henry Giroux, the prolific left political scientist Anthony DiMaggio, the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, the New School historian Federico Finchelstein and numerous other rigorous left thinkers, including myself — author of the shockingly brilliant monograph This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, adn the Trumping of America! — who have been featured (along with Perlstein) on the Refuse Fascism podcast.

+3. At the risk of repeating a point from my critique of Barbara Walter above, there’s no reference to the underlying class rule system that has brought us to this dystopian and supposed “Third World” moment — no understanding of how nothing less than a people’s socialist revolution (yes, liberals and many progressives, I see your eyes rolling!) can get us out of this capitalist and imperialist quagmire, which has brought us to the mutually reinforcing brinks of environmental collapse, nuclear war, and fascist rule.

+4. Again at the risk of repetition, there is no sense of liberating opportunity as well as eliminationist and authoritarian menace in the current perilous moment. It is possible that civil conflict and even civil war between hyper-polarized late bourgeois-democratic “blue” America and fascist “red” America this and next year(s) could provide an opening for actually radically Left forces to re-polarize America between humanity and class rule/capitalism-imperialism and bring forth a serious movement for what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters: “the radical reconstruction of society itself” and for what Marx and Engels rightly called the only alternative to “the common ruin of all” – “the revolutionary [socialist] re-constitution of society at large.”

III. Bob Avakian, Revolution 78: More Stale, Rotten Garbage from the Obamas, Bob Avakian Official, August 28, 2024

This is a brilliant take down of the tired old noxious bourgeois and imperialist rhetoric flowing from the mouths of the American Empire’s first couple between January 20, 2009 and January 20, 2017. I’m not going to summarize the whole essay here (please read the short commentary in full). Instead I merely want highlight Avakian’s important reflection on why the Obamas and other top Dems consistently “avoid calling out the actual fascist nature of Trump and the Republicans,” reflecting their “determin[ation]…to downplay and distort the very real differences [between the two major capitalist US parties] — deliberately leading people away from the understanding that the Republican Party, with Donald Trump at its head, is a fully fascist party: overtly and aggressively racist, woman and LGBT-hating, immigrant persecuting, environment plundering, science-denying theocrats, determined to rule society based on a fanatical fundamentalist rendering of Christianity, and to crush, as violently as necessary, any opposition to their rule, including rivals in the ruling class.”

What’s this fascism-denying bullshit all about? Why do they do it? Avakian’s answer is I think dead-on:

“Because, to acknowledge the fact that one of the two ‘legitimate’ ruling class parties of this system is fascist can call into question the legitimacy of the system as a whole. And, as I pointed out in [a previous essay], the Democratic Party is deathly afraid of mobilizing masses of people in the way that would be necessary to decisively defeat the fascists, because the Democrats fear that this could lead to things ‘getting all out of control,’ threatening their whole system.”

Avakian is right in my view to say “deliberately leading people away” from understanding the fascist essence of the party of Trump. Yes. Here’s what Barack “There’s No Red America or Blue America, there’s Just the United States of America” Obama said in private to Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton in October of 2016: “this is no time to be a purist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.” Hillary said she agreed. Obama, the Clintons, and many other leading Dems know very well that the party of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is fascist but they make sure not to say so in public for precisely the reason that Avakian gives. It bears repeating: “the Democratic Party is deathly afraid of mobilizing masses of people in the way that would be necessary to decisively defeat the fascists, because the Democrats fear that this could lead to things ‘getting all out of control,’ threatening their whole system.”