Want to Call Trump an F-Word?

Drop “Felon” and Go with “Fascist”

It is legal today to discriminate against individuals with criminal records “in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.”  So wrote Michelle Alexander in her widely read book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, which was partly inspired by my 2002 project study The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, and Policy in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation. “Once you’re labeled a felon,” professor Alexander observed, “the old forms of discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of education opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.”

This devastating but all too legal discrimination against felons is disproportionately carried out against Black people. This is thanks to aggressive and racist policing and prosecution conducted largely in the name of the so-called War on Drugs.

According to the US Commission on Civil Rights five years ago, more than 7% of the US voting age Black population is politically disenfranchised because of felony record. In four southern states (Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia) more than one in five Black “citizens” cannot vote because of “the new Jim Crow” (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2019). Black people are disenfranchised by felony record at four times the rate of all other racial groups in the US (The Marshall Project, 2018).

The federal government’s lifetime ban on cash assistance and food stamps for people with felony drug records (in place unless states opt out) “particularly impacts people of color, not only because people of color are disproportionately convicted and incarcerated, but also because they are more likely to meet the poverty threshold qualifying them for such public benefits” (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2019).

People with felony records face high barriers to employment thanks in large part to employers’ not-so “color-blind” reluctance to hire applicants with criminal and prison histories. The problem of felony employment/unemployment is overlaid with the problem of racism in two key ways. First, as the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment noted four years ago:   

“Today, more people than ever before have some form of criminal record, and electronic databases make them readily accessible. However, the criminal record is not a neutral source of information about past conduct. Even though illicit behaviors like drug use cut across sociodemographic lines, people of color—especially Black and Latinx communities living in low-income areas—are disproportionately subject to law enforcement actions, such as arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. As a result, the poor and people of color are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, compounding the sociodemographic impacts of justice involvement on employment for already disadvantaged populations. Thus, employers’ aversion to hiring people with records reinforces socioeconomic disadvantages along racial lines.”

Second, employers’ propensity to discriminate against applicants with felony records is much higher in relation to criminally branded Black job seekers than it is to criminally branded white job-seekers.

Much the same is true in applications for housing, with property agents replicating the same discrimination against people of color seeking access to housing.

We should be careful with the Jim Crow analogy, strictly and historically speaking. The original Jim Crow was explicitly racist, characterized by overt and unconcealed white supremacism.  The “new” version is not.

The original Jim Crow system was part of the white southern ruling class’s effort to economically exploit black labor on a massive scale but the current mass incarceration version serves mainly to warehouse economically marginalized and largely post-industrialized and de-proletarianized Black and Brown people who no longer provide much surplus value-generating labor for the capitalist state.  

The original Jim Crow was concentrated mainly in the former slave states of the South whereas the “new” version is imposed across the whole country.

The old Jim Crow was enforced equally against Blacks of all classes (with a few marginal exceptions) whereas the new version is imposed far more on poor and working-class Blacks than it is on middle- and upper-class Blacks.

Beneath these contrasts, however, the similarities are impressive and depressing. They include legalized discrimination in “nearly every aspect of social, political, and economic life.”

Nobody takes a bigger and more devastating hit from all this than Black males, a third of whom are saddled with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record in the USA.

All of which tells me that US white (and other) liberals and progressives who have been having fun denouncing Trump as “a felon” might want to think twice about their word choices.

This is for three reasons.

First, it’s racially insensitive.  The felon label is a crippling stigma producing massive “collateral damage” to the life chances of many millions of US-Americans and especially for people of color and most particularly for Black folks. Using “felon” as a pejorative term helps keep this racist problem alive.

Second,  denouncing Trump as a felon works to encourage the disturbing rise of Trumpist sentiment among some of the more backward and reactionary, disproportionately male sections of the US Black population.

Third, there’s a much better F-word for decent people to throw at Trump – FASCIST. I have explained how and why that “provocative” label fits Trump (even more clearly in 2024 than at any time since he first emerged on the national political scene in a significant way) again and again on The Paul Street Report and in two books so far[1].

It is telling that so many liberals and progressives are ready to unfortunately denounce Trump as a  felon but unwilling to call properly him a fascist.  What is that all about? Here it worth looking again at the leading revolutionary communist Bob Avakian’s recent 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” (emphasis added).

What is this fascism-denying bullshit all about? Why do they do it? Avakian’s answer is 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.”

I dedicated an entire book chapter[2] to largely but not exclusively academic liberal and “left” denial of Trump and Trumpism’s fascist essence during Trump’s presidency. Beyond considerable intellectual confusion and ignorance, the main causes of this weird denialism are petit-bourgeois-professional class cowardice and comfort – a reluctance to tell the truth about the new Amerikaner fascism let loose in the land because doing so would mean (a) having to admit how horrific the US bourgeois social and political order has become and (b) having to get out from behind one’s computer screen and lectern to do something serious about it.   

In any event, liberals and progressives, please – if you are looking for an F-word to call Trump, go with fascist not felon.

Endnotes

1.  Chapter 1: “Is it the Fascist Apocalypse Yet? This Happened Here,” pp. 9-43 in Paul Street, Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement (CounterPunch Books, 2020); Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (Routledge, 2021), Chapters 1 to 3 and passim.

2. Chapter 4: The Anatomy of Fascism Denial,” in Street, This Happened Here.