As someone who has long identified Trump, the Trump base, and the Trump-captive Republican Party as fascist (no prefixes like “proto-,” “neo-,” “semi-,” or “para-“ required), I have learned not to jump for joy – maybe I should say “for Joy” as in MSNBC host Joy Reid – when I hear another mainstream centrist or liberal commentator use “the F-word” to describe the 2024 Republi-fascist presidential candidate Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump and his supporters and party.
There are six interrelated and overlapping reasons for this…
Kinda Belated
The first reason is how belated the open public recognition commonly is. I’m like: “So, you finally figured this out in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 or 2024? Damn, ya’ll, a bunch of us folks were pointing this out from the start, well before the orange-hued Malignant One was elected US president for the first time in 2016. Hello?”
But I suppose I shouldn’t overdo the problem of belated recognition. Better late than never, right?
No Recognition Given to Those Who Understood it All Along
The second reason I don’t jump for joy when Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow et al. call Trump, Trumpism, and even the party of Trump fascist is that they give no recognition to those who understood and said it out loud long before some establishment voices acknowledged the Amerikaner nationalist menace. It’s as if those of us who understood the threat early on never laid out the many ways in which Trump and Trumpism checked all the key fascist boxes (and in some cases the ways in which Trumpism-fascism was rooted in longstanding and recent North American and United States history, reflecting a toxic mixture of white supremacism, patriarchy, Christian fundamentalism, nativism, and capitalism-imperialism). But we did. Here I am thinking especially but not exclusively of the officially invisible (in mainstream media-olitics culture) organization Refuse Fascism (RF), formed immediately after Trump’s first election. RF called for the removal of the Trump-Pence regime from the monster’s 2017 inauguration through the long rolling 2020 Trum coup attempt that RF easily predicted.
It is no mere coincidence that most of those of us who receive no acknowledgement for getting Trumpism-fascism right from the beginning are on the actual “radical Left,” people with basic Marxist/historical-materialist understandings of US politics and the world, not the Trumpists’ fake “radical Left,” which absurdly includes devoted capitalist-imperialists like Barack “Drone King” Obama, “Genocide Joe” Biden, and the rest of the Democratic establishment.
Free Pass to the Weimar Dems
The third factor tempering my excitement over establishment liberals and centrists saying and writing the F-word is their consistent failure to acknowledge the critical “Weimar” role of their own capitalist-imperialist party in the rise of the fascist menace. As RF says in its mission statement: “The Democratic Party will not stop this nightmare. Trump, fascist Fox News, and the Republi-fascist Party have branded them as enemies and ‘traitors.’ Yet, the Democratic Party will consistently pull to try to work with, conciliate with and collaborate with them. There can be no reconciliation with fascism except on the terms of the fascists.” From Clinton through Obama and Biden, the dismal neoliberal Democrats have opened the door to Republi-fascist ascendancy and accommodated and appeased fascism their own “neoliberal” shift to the right of the populace and the common good.
While they have not crossed over to full on blood and soil, flag and cross white Christian nationalist neo-fascism like the other US major party, moreover, the Dems maintain their own blue variants of the fascist strain. Three examples: Democrat-run metropolitan police states that feed US racist mass incarceration while enforcing de facto racial apartheid across blue/urban America; support for repressive right wing governments abroad, including one that is currently conducting a flat-out racist genocide under the command of a fascist state (Israel); ownership and management of an “entertainment” (and propaganda) industry that sells sadistic mass violence, dehumanization, horrific spectacle, and military nationalism.
System Taproot Deleted
The fourth thing keeping me off the dance floor when I hear establishment Dems say fascism is that they never go to the historical-material taproot of that terrible political pathology — that is, to the inner workings and contradictions of capitalism-imperialism. That is of course intimately related to their erasure of actual “radical Left” voices (as noted above).
The Dems aren’t Really Saying it All That Much
The fifth thing keeping me in my seat while Joy and Rachel et al. sing a song or two against fascism is that they have failed to get proper concern over the Amerikaner fascist menace taken up as widely and seriously as it ought to be in their elite circles. In an August 2022 appearance before wealthy campaign finance donors in Manhattan, Biden had the semi-courage to semi-publicly refer to “the MAGA philosophy” as “something like semi-fascism” (SLSF). In his big “January 6” speech denouncing Trump as a “threat to democracy” in Valley Forge ten days ago, however, “Genocide Joe” didn’t say the F-word at all. He couldn’t even say SLSF – this even as Herr Trump has gone full Hitlerian by calling socialists and Marxists “vermin,” saying that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” pledging to invade Mexico, promising to build big concentration camps for migrants, calling for the extrajudicial execution of suspected shoplifters, threatening vengeance against his political enemies, and promising to be “a dictator for one day,” whatever that really means.
The eloquent liberal New York Times columnist Jamal Bouie never says the dreaded F-word once in a recent chilling Op Ed on how Republicans have held back from voicing any criticism of Trump because they worry that his base will kill them and their family members.
The liberal-centrist Times’ real-time coverage of Trump’s sweeping triumph in last night’s Republican presidential caucus in Iowa followed in accord with the usual normalizing “horse race” approach, making no reference to the remarkable fact that a Hitlerian candidate who tried to overthrow the government as president three years and ten days ago just cleared a major hurdle on the path to a return White House engagement. Today’s Times headline on what the paper calls Trump’s “crucial first step in his bid to claim the Republican nomination in a third consecutive election” wasn’t “Malignant Fascist Who Wishes to Establish a Right-Wing Dictatorship Takes a Big Step on the Path to the Nazification of America.” No, it was this: “Voters Look Past Legal Problems to Give Trump a Big Victory.”
Times political correspondent Shane Goldmacher did cover his ass to some degree by referring to Trump’s “vision of vengeful disruption” and by writing this:
“Supporters of Mr. Trump were animated by his dark portrait of a nation in decline and his apocalyptic rhetoric about wresting a country controlled by the left back from the brink. Mr. Trump’s vows to exact retribution on his political enemies have earned warnings from academics and Democrats of a drift toward authoritarianism yet have won cheers from his rapturous crowds.”
Still, “earned warnings from academics and Democrats of a drift toward authoritarianism” is far too polite and tame. Anybody (whatever their partisan affiliation or occupation) with a decent knowledge base and a hint of gumption would instead write something like this: “Mr. Trump’s vows to extract retribution on his political enemies are yet another indication of the fascism that has been mainstreamed in the Republican Party.”
“Legal Problems”? Gosh, is that a reference to the orange fascist being indicted for trying to overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral and constitutional rule of law democracy, among other crimes?
Would the Times like to comment on the classically fascistic, paranoid-style nature of the claim that the capitalist-imperialist United States is “a country controlled by the left”?
Also insulting informed intelligence: Goldmacher’s description of the hard-core right-wing Iowa Republi-fascists who caucused for Trump (and for Trump’s distant runner up Ron DeSantis) on a brutal arctic night as “voters;” Goldmacher’s reference to “Mr. Trump” as “the first former president in the modern era who has sought to return to the White House” (so Grover Cleveland was before modernity?); Goldmacher’s claim that “voters looked past his mounting legal jeopardy.” What “mounting legal jeopardy”? Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Want to Kill Nancy Pelosi Not Me” Trump is sitting pretty for a return to power that permits him to escape the most serious charges against him.
No Serious Answer Beyond the Horrible US BEB
The sixth thing stopping me from doing the Charleston or Tangoing over the increased acceptance of the F-word in establishment liberal and cenrist venues is that the elite folks saying it offer no serious action against fascism or against the social and political order that has given rise to a new Amerikan fascism and put the world’s most powerful and dangerous nation on the precipice of vengeful Christian white-nationalist takeover. Their only real advice is for people to take two minutes to vote for the remarkably unpopular and decrepit capitalist warmonger Joe Biden on the first Tuesday of next November – that is to rely on the same old “bourgeois electoral bullshit” (what revolutionary communist Bob Avakian calls “BEB”) that has done so much to get us in this deplorable mess in the first place. And it’s not just any old BEB, it’s the noxious United States BEB where: presidential election outcomes in a 50-state country are decided by winner-take-all Elector slate contests in just 6 or 7 “swing [contested] states”; the Democratic presidential candidate has to win the national popular vote by 4 to 5 percentage points to have any chance of retaining or gaining the White House (via the preposterous and archaic Electoral College); individual states in the most reactionary and rural parts of the country are free to make neofascist policies in blatant disregard of national majority opinion; the lower house of the national legislature and the 50 separate state legislatures are badly gerrymandered; the absurdly powerful upper branch of the national legislative body is ridiculously tilted to the right by the “rotten borough”-like malapportionment inherent in granting every one of the 50 state 2 US Senators regardless of wildly divergent state population sizes; the nation’s God-like Supreme Court - currently stocked with a Christian Fascist majority - is appointed for life by the undemocratically elected US president and approved by the absurdly malapportioned and conservative US Senate. This monumentally corrupt Court’s many terrible decisions include two key rulings (Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United) that mean there are no serious limits to plutocratic election funding in the US.
The other thing we are supposed to place all our sad little hopes in are the ongoing prosecutions of Trump. Never mind: that Trump’s legal team, his allies in the judiciary, and the belated and flawed nature of the prosecutions are pushing most of the Trump verdicts past the election; that the prosecutions are a boon for Trump’s fundraising and for his paranoid style deep state persecution narrative; that none of the 91 felony charges against him block him from running for or becoming the 47th president of the United States (since the belatedly appointed federal special prosecutor Jack Smith decided not to charge the insurrectionist Trump with insurrection).
At Refuse Fascism, we called for masses to take to the streets and the public squares to transform the nation’s politics and society in a way meant to sweep the political and societal nightmare that is fascism into the proverbial dustbin of history, where it has long belonged. The message from the establishment Dems who dare to (accurately enough) say “fascism” now is very different:
“Stay passive and rely on voting, elections, prosecutors and judges to save the day. Hope for the best. Rely on our failing late bourgeois-democratic electoral and legal institutions to save you from fascism. Voting for one of two monstrous ogres is what you get under this system, the greatest democracy of all time. It’s the Orange Fascist Menace or Genocide/Ecocide/ Warmonger Joe. If you criticize Biden and the Dems for backing and advancing senseless and evil war, genocide, and ecocide, then you are foolishly helping the Republicans and hurting the wonderful American Empire. Biden gets to cross one red line after another, he gets to betray one manipulative campaign promise after another because…well, because he’s not Trump.”
Wow, thanks US capitalism-imperialism. Revolution anyone?
Postscript: Obama Knew…Privately
In many cases, I suspect a fair number of US centrists and liberals knew that Trump and Trumpism were fascist early on but chose not to say so because the “F-word” was considered too “radical” and un-American for public acknowledgement. The generally understood US “exceptionalist” wisdom is that that doesn’t happen here, not in “good,” far-seeing, and “democratic” America, the land of liberty.
Take Barack Obama, no idiot. Have you ever heard the ultimate capitalist-imperialist neoliberal icon Obama call Trump and his movement and party fascist? Not unless you are a fly on the wall in one of his residences or offices. Here’s what Obama said to Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2016, as the malignant orange thing lurched towards an Electoral College victory it did not itself expect: “remember, this is no time to be a purist. You've got to keep a fascist out of the White House.’” Check this out from NBC News four years ago:
“Barack Obama called Donald Trump a ‘fascist’ in a phone conversation with Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia during the 2016 presidential election, Kaine says in a video clip featured in an upcoming documentary about Hillary Clinton. Kaine, Clinton's running mate on the Democratic ticket, recounts the call during an exchange with Clinton that was caught on camera in 2016. Kaine's wife, Anne Holton, was also present. ‘President Obama called me last night and said: *Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You've got to keep a fascist out of the White House,* Kaine says before adding with a laugh that Obama ‘knows me and he knows that I could tend to err.’. Clinton replies, nodding, ‘I echo that sentiment.’ She then puts her hands to her chest and says, ‘But that's really — the weight of our responsibility is so huge.’…The clip appears in an episode of ‘Hillary,’ a documentary series that will be available on Hulu on March 6.”
Compare Obama’s candid understanding of Trump when speaking to his fellow ruling class Democrats in October of 2016 with Obama’s statement (with Biden smiling over his right shoulder) to the American public right after Trump won in 2016. While the nauseating election results reverberated through a disbelieving and bewildered media, Obama went out to the White House Rose Garden to, in the soothing and normalizing language of his press office, “address the nation on…the next steps we can take to come together as a country and ensure a peaceful transition of power.” Obama’s oration was a tour de force of accommodation, appeasement, and denial. He spoke in muted terms of conflict-avoidant conservatism, unity, and normalization:
“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 I heard when I spoke to him directly. And I was heartened by that. 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 a respect for each other. I hope that he maintains that spirit throughout this transition, and I certainly hope that’s how his presidency has a chance to begin.
…A lot of our fellow Americans are exultant today. A lot of Americans are less so. But that's the nature of campaigns. That's the nature of democracy…. 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.
The point, though, is, is that we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens—because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy. That's how this country has moved forward for 240 years. It’s how we’ve pushed boundaries and promoted freedom around the world. That's how we've expanded the rights of our founding to reach all of our citizens. It’s how we have come this far. And that's why I'm confident that this incredible journey that we're on as Americans will go on. And I am looking forward to doing everything that I can to make sure that the next President is successful in that…”
Joy Reid’s messiah Obama to fellow members of the political ruling class before the election: “you’ve to keep a FASCIST out of the White House.” Obama to the American masses after the FASCIST in question – the guy who is now well ahead of Obama’s creation Biden while promising “Retribution” against his political enemies, calling leftists “vermin” and accusing nonwhite immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” – won: we are all on the same team on “this incredible journey we’re on as Americans.”
Love this. Thank you.
Good article as usual. Minor correction: The NYT columnist is Jamelle Bouie.