there's no fascist tomorrow
there's no fascist tomorrow
the specter of Trump, Bidenism, and the falseness of "preserving" democracy
During the unrest following George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent repression, those heralded as experts on “democracy” like Timothy Snyder warned of Trump’s looming fascism, his now exposed nerve.
“Obviously, we are in a slow-motion Reichstag Fire right now,” Snyder had said, referring to the Nazi takeover of Germany through a promise of “law and order” amidst propaganda blaming communists and other “subversives” for destabilizing the “proud” German nation. Of course, similar to now, it was the communists and the left helping save the nation, while the rightwing gnawed away at the remnants of bourgeois democracy following the humiliation of WWI.
Aside from the irony of how easily Snyder and other liberal and conservative critics like to suggest somehow the far left and far right are somehow mirror images of one another, Snyder and others like him have been correct in warning against the ways in which Trump and his breed of politician and economic leader would cause far more harm and oppression compared to the more conventional liberal or conservative. Indeed, under Trump’s watch, families were literally torn apart along the U.S.-Mexican border, as ICE agents felt emboldened by the Trump administration to be even more explicitly cruel and violent against brown and black migrants fleeing parts of the world left in ruins by the U.S.-led global economic order. Trump himself would refer to countries across the Caribbean and predominantly black and brown nations as “shithole” nations, openly saying he’d prefer immigrants from northern Europe instead.
Throughout his time in office, Trump and his allies in the GOP, the party of white nationalism and nihilism, would praise the far-right and Neo-nazi groups as “good guys”. In fact, as protests spread in 2020, in response to blatant examples of police abuse against unarmed black people, Trump portrayed them as “unlawful”, seditious, and destructive. Far-right groups sympathetic to Trump, an echo of the brownshirts under Mussolini, found ways to support the police in their momentum to crush the protest movement, leading to protestors being detained, disappeared, and sometimes, in broad daylight, thrown to the ground and left to bleed on the ground.
“The heavily armed, camo-clad white far-right “patriots” were often indistinguishable from the militarized forces sent in to quash the revolts,” Natasha Lennard writes, “Dozens of videos captured instances of cops and federal agents thanking the vigilantes for their presence — the state and civilian fascists in deadly union for whiteness and property against Black life.”
It should be obvious that another Trump, or Trumps (plural), either dominating Congress, or winning another term in the White House, would be a disaster for many historically oppressed groups and for most people in the U.S. and abroad. It would lead to an extreme decay in our civic life, and people will be explicitly hurt in ways that wasn’t necessarily the case before, such as ICE feeling the support to openly detain and disappear people into police vans in the dead of night, like a Gestapo.
And yet, as another election season is underway, as Snyder continues to promote the mission to help “preserve” our institutions, it is politically naive to suggest that somehow, normal politics, prior and after politicians such as Trump, are somehow devoid of these similar issues surrounding extreme precarity and mass trauma.
Once again, it is true our political system cannot afford more Trumps, or Marjorie Taylore Greenes, or a Ron DeSantis eager to twist the knife when it comes to some of the most oppressed groups, such as trans and nonbinary peoples. But it is also true that “normal” politics, politics that may not have a Trump at its head, remains destructive, violent, exploitative and very much forces so many to navigate what some would call a right wing authoritarian political system, even when it’s consisting of Democrats or “moderate” Republicans, locally or nationally.
Uriel Garcia, a reporter at the Texas Tribune, stated the following at the end of 2021, the second year of Biden’s administration, who presented himself as a stark “rebuke” to Trump and his political klan (pun intended),
“On Oct. 1, a recorded 22,129 immigrants were in ICE detention centers, a 56% increase since Biden took office, according to statistics compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, also known as TRAC. Overall, 75% of ICE detainees have no criminal record — ICE classifies a person as a convicted criminal even if the crime is as innocuous as not keeping a dog on a leash, according to TRAC’s analysis.”
In the subsequent years, the Biden White House has persisted in its funding for law enforcement, as well as encouraging local Democrats across the country to do the same. This, while most police forces still constitute a major threat to the lives of many, especially working class and lower income black and brown people. As recently as last week, there’s been another case of yet another unarmed black man, Keenan Darnell Anderson, attacked, detained and later, killed while in police custody.
“The problems that activists called out in 2020 are still very much at work: Police budgets are ballooning while people struggle to access quality housing, health care, and other essentials,” Mike Ludwig reports in Truthout, “For example, in Chicago, public schools are slated to lose $30 million in state funding while the police department enjoys a significant boost in funding.”
It’s important to state here that I am not making a direct equivalency between someone like Biden, as disreputable and disgusting his own track record has been, or someone as noxious and deadly as Trump. In the end, even a center-right Democrat is slightly more open to certain reforms compared to a far-right looney tune Republican. During Biden’s run, we have a more open National Labor Relations Board, one that is more sympathetic to working people during a time of renewed labor organizing in the private sector. Student debt relief and other issues have at least been floated, or in some instances, gradually become part of government policy.
Yet, it would also be politically naive, and a deadly distortion, to suggest that somehow, “normal” politics under a Biden or a conservative anti-Trump Republican (anti-Trump in terms of Trump’s explicitness), places most people on a road to liberation or represents a complete break from Trump-style buffoonery and cruelty. Rather, as has been the case historically, normal politics itself contains within the capacity to hurt, harm, traumatize, and to devalue the lives of most people in the U.S. Government and private enterprise may not operate exactly the same as under Trump, or a Reagan, but they actively work against the interests of most working people, and most people of color, regardless of rhetoric or language used to obscure this burgeoning reality.
As mentioned above, the obsession over our southern border very well preceded our lifetime, and more recently, the creation of fascistic entities such as ICE had occurred under George W. Bush, a so-called “compassionate conservative”, who may have called out Trump for his explicit racism but all the same, provided the funding and resources for border police to rampage and ruin brown migrants fleeing, desperate for some type of refuge. Despite Ronald Reagan’s amnesty for millions of immigrants, something that some may suggest separates him from Trump, the Reagan administration remained a nightmare for immigrants, many of whom from central America at the time. Reagan, the great communicator of falsehoods and propaganda, allied with reactionaries in central america, and the CIA most willing to support some of the most dastardly rightwing forces in the region. Such forces included mercenaries and fascists, those willing to murder communists, liberals, and priests who spoke out regarding systemic issues of poverty and multinational corporations dominating local resources. In many ways, the Reagan White House was far more alienating and soaked in blood than even Trump’s when it comes to foreign policies. Not to mention Reagan being the one who managed to also deregulate major corporations and reorient the anger and frustration of many white workers, middle class and lower, against their mainly black counterparts, many of whom fell victim to the so-called War on Drugs and Crime.
The flatlining of democracy itself had started in the early 1970s, with the rise of Nixon, after a brief period of expansion and flourishing. It is worth remembering that by the mid-1960s, with the formal end of Jim Crow in the south and liberalization of an immigration system explicitly designed to favor northern and western Europeans, there was a second reconstruction possibly underway. This had much to do with the organizational efforts of civil rights groups like the SCLC and SNCC, and with a broader left international bridging divides, or trying to at least. Much of this fell apart to some internal contradictions within the New Deal coalition, such as the looming fact that part of this coalition included racists and white supremacists, and another part wanted very badly to simply become a junior partner in the Democrat Party interest-group world, which meant willing to purge leftwing dissenters and communists when asked to. It is also worth mentioning that the communists themselves, eager to organize against the fascists in WWII, kept themselves aligned behind the Democrats as well, thus melting away what should’ve been an independent constituency into the ambit of “mainstream” politics. This “tactic” would prove disastrous as liberals and conservatives in the coalition would start to lead political inquisitions against the “Red” subversive in U.S. politics and society, compelling labor unions to force leadership and organizers to choose between being a communist party member or just a run-of-the-mill labor organizer instead, someone who wouldn’t raise objections to broader problems, such as capitalism or American empire.
Claudia Jones, a black woman Marxist who was originally from the Caribbean but spent a significant portion of her life growing up and working inside the U.S., warned against the shrinking of the battlefield among communists and progressives. During the run-up to WWII, Jones did believe in forging connections with liberals and socialists, even those who were vociferously anti-communist, in the war effort against Germany’s Nazism, Italy and Japan. Yet, once the war was over, Jones feared some falling victim to the moment, losing sight of the fact that already fascistic elements existed within the U.S., in the form of Jim Crow, as well as capitalism, however reformed it had been.
“We Communists adhere to the fundamental belief that complete and lasting equality of imperialist oppressed nations and peoples can be guaranteed only with the establishment of Socialism,” Jones stated in one of her essays on world peace and international solidarity. “We must have a clear and precisely formulated political program to guide our work in the achievement of that goal,” she would add (160-161).
Although not an avowed communist but certainly a fellow traveler, Charlotta Bass, agreed that “normal” politics itself in the U.S. was very much rightwing already and authoritarian, regardless if an explicitly fascist figure were to take power eventually. Even under Truman, someone who believed sincerely in some forms of desegregation, one would see the political repression of the left who disagreed with the objectives of the U.S. empire, as well as so-called “moderates”, whether business or explicitly political, being provided the means to expand their power across society. Social policies remained very much lean, and often corrosive, for many in the U.S., despite the country’s victory over explicit forms of European fascism. Of course, the U.S. in these years would also turn around and support fascist, or neo-fascist, leaders against socialists and democrats in countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Chile, Iran, and the list would go on.
In a speech to fellow progressive and socialist African American women, during her historic run as the vice president candidate on the Progressive Party ticket in 1951, Bass stated,
“We fight to live. We fight that my people and all people may live. We want the $65 billion that goes for deaths to go to build a new life. Those billions could lift the wages of my people, give them jobs, give education and training and new hope to our youth, free our sharecroppers, build new hospitals and medical centers. The $8 billion being spent to re-arm Europe and crush Asia could rehouse my people living in the ghettoes of Chicago and New York, and every large city in the nation.”
The fight for justice and democracy was ongoing, clearly. It wasn’t about “preserving” but rather expanding, or in some instances, replacing what was there with truly liberating and freeing institutions instead, as well as social policies. This is why Bass ran independently of the Democrat party, being the first African American woman on a national ticket as well. As mentioned, the left was gradually being liquidated, and war and violence was unleashed on the globe, and in major cities and towns where black and brown, a number of them still struggling tremendously despite some of the advantages of the New Deal, were forced to endure state surveillance and white-led vigilantism.
After the late 1970s, with the rise of the Reagan cult, and afterwards, center-right cowards such as Bill Clinton and his own clique of neoliberal hawk, even the minimal social democracy that was starting to bloom had been ripped out from the soil. It was soon replaced with a politics of extreme greed and lust for power for power’s sake among conservatives and liberals who very much feared the “crowd”, as Jodi Dean would say.
While low income black and brown communities were met with SWAT raids, with battering rams pummeling peoples’ front doors and flash bangs, the power of “private enterprise” was allowed to expand. With Clinton gutting what remained of some New Deal welfare programs in the 1990s, most people were now faced with the choice of having to work for the lowest wage at some warehouse or Walmart, or face being thrown out into the street. For some who made it into the Valhalla of modern U.S., the “middle class”, they too would have to maintain a positive image to their boss and their army of managers, and to even other white collar professionals itching to out compete them for the next cycle of promotions.
Essentially, a capitalist system creates rightwing, anti-freedom, anti-democratic, anti-socialist fiefdoms. How else to describe the modern workplace where you either prove your worth daily, which includes answering emails, filing reports way past your official hours, or expect to fend for oneself, and ultimately, die earlier than expected from stress, from lack of healthcare, from a lack of basic amenities you can only access, even marginally, through having a job.
Again, why wait for an explicit Gestapo, with men and women marching down the avenues wearing grotesque insignias on their arms, when our society already has law enforcement and ICE? Why worry over prison camps for labor when we have the modern workplace in an era of extreme precarity, and a society overall that’s dominated by corporate behemoths such as Amazon. During the pandemic, it was Amazon that people had to turn to for basic necessities being ordered, or supermarkets, rather than a government institution where such items could be produced swiftly and in bulk, and much easier to procure and own.
“No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.” Marx had understood and explained generations ago, during the emergence of modern industrial capital.
Fascism is, therefore, not some monster lurking on the horizon, or specifically, mass harm, mass trauma, exploitation, facets of life associated with it are already with us, perhaps intensifying over time. There is no liberated humanity, no true freedom or collective agency and joy without replacing our existing political institutions and the framework they thrive in. This includes a Senate that aportions power based on land rather than population, and a Supreme Court, an unelected body of elite men and women, deciding the fate of millions, serving as a “check” on progressive policies like access to abortion. Who needs to wait for Gilead to emerge when already, millions of women have been condemned to die or to leading lives they never wanted?
The struggle, as Jones recognized prior to her being deported for being a communist, was never about “democracy” versus far-right authoritarianism and fascism. The challenge has been between socialism, a society whereby peoples’ labor is for the public good and rights and resources are available and determined in a classless society, and capitalism and the monsters such a horrid and unequal system inevitably produces.
“American monopoly capital can offer the masses of American women, who compose more than one-half of our country’s population, a programme only of war and fascism,” Jones stated in her famous essay, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace” (92).
Through capitalism, those with money can be heard far more easily. Such forces will always have a need for reactionaries to defend them, even if such wealthy people condemn them in public. In the meantime, most people of color, most working people with a progressive view or open to it, are burdened with work, with paying the rent, with stitching together some forms of joy and respite on the weekends.
It was correct for the communists to find ways to ally with New Deal democrats, especially during WWII and yet, it was naive to do so while not developing their own independent constituency, a constituency that would be very clear on the need to replace capitalism with socialism, a constituency that would vote for Democrats when strategically advantageous but more so be committed to building power from below. This is a point one could gather from Prisoners of the American Dream by Mike Davis and Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley.
When black and white communists from the north positioned themselves as not only against some forms of voter repression in the Jim Crow South, but were explicitly organizing against lynching, police abuse, and the Jim Crow order as a whole, a number of African Amerian sharecroppers rushed into the party. Word of mouth had spread, and people felt energized for the first time in decades for something big.
“The Communist movement in Alabama resonated with the cultures and traditions of black working people, yet at the same time it offered something fundamentally different. It proposed a new direction, a new kind of politics that required the self-activity of people usually dismissed as inarticulate,” Kelley explains.
But once the CPUSA leadership and some rank-and-file insisted on building alliances with the New Deal coalition that was forming, believing this was the future of more mainstream success, the onus was now on appealing to establishment liberals (many of whom believed in Jim Crow) and in working with socialists who expressed a delusional reformist attitude. Over time, it would be the CPUSA local organizers who allowed for some issues to be deprioritized, in order to maintain the coalition. Issues like policing and lynching were slowly dropped, leading to African Americans leaving as well. Soon after, the CPUSA would find themselves forced underground, as their liberal and establishment allies looked the other way.
Contemporarily, people are slowly beginning to see how it’s a broader political system undermining them. That normal politics itself is the problem affecting their health and aspirations. At the same time, a significant percentage of people, especially people of color, feel a closeness to the Democrats, since the GOP has essentially become an explicitly rabidly white nationalist and Evangelical force. This explains why some on the left, including in organizations like the DSA (of which I’m a part of), have considered supporting progressives and socialists from within the party itself. To build a third-party apparatus itself remains an incredible challenge, especially now, with dwindling resources and constant crises.
But as has been the case in the 1930s and later, there’s a difference between working with Democrats against the right wing when it’s strategic, and refusing to build power that could totally change society and reckon with the authoritarianism that already persists. Even though it will be difficult and something that may take a considerable amount of time to do, there’s no other way in confronting the existing authoritarianism in our society and in those institutions that embolden such political impulses until socialists and progressives actively intervene by organizing campaigns and movements, and institutions of our own (i.e. labor unions), that go beyond the prerogatives of electoral action or coalition-building with groups more so aligned with the Democrats. Not voting is still not an answer, but it is politically silliness to behave as if the last several years have worked in terms of shifting the political landscape considerably in the favor of people of color and most working people.
Again, there are reasons to be involved in government, since short term policies, such as healthcare and social security, do matter significantly. As the Italian Marxist Gramsci, and the Russian Revolutionary, Lenin, noted in the early 20th century, abstentionism from the daily pratice of politics for most people is political suicide. But so is blind following of a pattern that hasn’t developed power for the true struggle ahead.
In recent months, the Biden administration, along with Republicans, have agreed to end the railroad workers’ strike, condemning many to go to work sick, and to die, forced to miss critical doctor’s appointments and to get the rest a body requires. The Supreme Court continues to pass down decisions harming peoples’ lives and the electoral college will most likely help elevate another rightwing figure into the White House soon.
What is required is organizing that’s going to build a pro-socialist constituency, not merely a pro-Democrat one, and one that will fight to defund, to abolish ICE, to promise universal abortion rights and reproductive care, as well as workers’ control over the means of production, not simply sitting back and allowing the correct technocrat to speak for them.
What is required, as Jones and others had said, is an independent group of socialists willing to challenge the far-right, and to challenge politics as usual, which would mean confronting Democrats and “moderate” Republicans, regardless of their tonal shift on “saving democracy.” There is no democracy here to preserve. But there is a democratic society worth fighting for and creating, and that involves challenging what exists and masquerades as “normal”.