...if the fear
of falling into error is the source of a mistrust in Science, which in the
absence of any such misgivings gets on with the work itself and actually does
know, it is difficult to see why, conversely, a mistrust should not be placed
in this mistrust, and why we should not be concerned that this fear of erring
is itself the very error. (Hegel, Phenomenology
of Spirit, Introduction)
A little over a year ago we
reprinted an article by Bryan Palmer on the events of Jan 6. The article was titled, The
Insurrection that Wasn't. One
cannot help but be struck by the irony of that title given all we have learned
over the past year about the depth of Trump’s aborted coup attempt as a result
of the investigative work of the House Jan 6 Committee as well as other ongoing
investigations. Clearly, we have to
admit that the emphasis of the article, captured in that title, was off
base. After all the information that has
come out since, it can hardly be denied that Trump and his accomplices did
indeed conspire to stage a Presidential coup in order to nullify the results of the
2020 Presidential election and maintain power through a Bonapartist
dictatorship built around the cult of Trump.
This was and remains a watershed moment in the history of the American
republic. There has been nothing like it since the Civil War and it is not by
accident that much of the symbolism of the failed insurrection of Jan 6th
borrowed from the heraldry of the Confederacy.
The attempted coup was made
possible by the rapid transformation of the Republican Party from what was
traditionally a Center Right party into a neo-fascist authoritarian party. This is still a work in progress but it is very far
along and clearly there is no going back to the Republican Party that our
parents and grandparents knew. The historian
of Italian fascism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, speaking of the recent election victory of
the Italian neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni, made the following point about the
trajectory of the Republican Party,
…the GOP,
I’ve been saying for a long time, has to be seen as a far-right authoritarian
party in the model of European parties. And what’s going on right now, we’re
having — history is being made before our eyes. The party is remaking
itself to support whatever form of illiberal rule it wants to have in the
United States. And, of course, we’re seeing this at the state level, in Texas
and especially in Florida.
And so, when a
party is remaking itself, it pushes some people out, and these are, let’s say,
moderates, like Cheney, Kinzinger, all these — all the people who were
anti-Trump. And who is being invited in? Lawless people, violent people. That’s
why, if you want to get ahead in the GOP, your campaign ad has to have you
and an assault rifle. People who participated in January 6th — criminals — are
being invited to run for office, and actual extremists, like Mark Finchem in
Arizona. He is an Oath Keeper. He is very proud. He’s very public about being
an Oath Keeper, a member of the violent extremist group. And so, he is now the
Arizona candidate for secretary of state. So, getting ahead in today’s GOP,
being an extremist is a help to that, because they are remaking themselves as a
far-right party. So there are going to be, I predict, a lot of interchange
between Meloni’s neofascists and the GOP. [1]
It should also be emphasized that
a major contributor to the Jan 6 coup attempt was the subservience of the
Democratic Party to the corporate elite and their abandonment of the social
contract with the working class that was central to the coalition built by the
Democratic Party since Roosevelt’s New Deal.
This created a political vacuum where millions of working-class victims
of neo-liberalism felt betrayed by their putative defenders and abandoned the
Democratic Party in droves. Many of
those disinherited working-class voters gave one last chance to Barack Obama. When
Obama’s “Hope and Change” turned out to be nothing but desolation and more pain
embodied in the opioid crisis that devastated so many working class communities,
the feeling of abandonment by the Democratic Party and the liberal elite turned
into rage. This was a perfect storm for
a demagogue like Trump who manipulated the enraged middle class and working-class
masses into the social basis for the MAGA movement. The psychology behind convincing tens of
millions that the billionaire and corrupt businessman Trump was a genuine anti-establishment
spokesman and represented the interests of the working class was already
anticipated years earlier in Thomas Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with
Kansas?
The evisceration of the norms of
bourgeois democratic forms of rule and the plunge into authoritarianism and a
revival of fascism is not limited to the United States of course but is part of
a well-documented international phenomenon. It is the political expression of the global crisis
of capitalism which has evolved into a crisis of legitimacy. It is the final
chapter of a decades long process that has seen the atomization of the working
class, the practical disappearance of class solidarity and the near complete
isolation of the left from the working class. Given these conditions, it was
almost inevitable that right wing faux populism would step in to fill the
vacuum.
Seen in this context the events
of Jan 6, as well as the continuing efforts by Trump and the Republican Party
to overthrow the 2020 election should not be a complete surprise. In fact, since Jan 6 the authoritarian turn of
the Republican Party has hardened. Whereas
the Republican Party has been a minority party for decades, winning office only
as a result of gerrymandering and relying on the anti-democratic institutions
enshrined in the Constitution to stay in power, a document drawn up by 18th
century landowners and slaveholders, they had in previous years tried to hide this
inconvenient truth from the public. No
more! Today they proudly broadcast their desire to overturn elections, to deprive
millions of the right to vote and to impose draconian legislation through an unelected
Supreme Court that takes away rights that had been previously won in long
struggles. With its overturning of the Roe v Wade decision the Supreme Court
has stepped back into the role it has harbored for the great majority of its
200 plus years existence, a bastion of reaction and protector of privilege, a
role only briefly interrupted by the short interregnum of the liberal Earl
Warren Supreme Court of 1950s and 1960s. This was nicely summarized by the
historian Alan Singer,
Politically
conservative decisions by the Supreme Court have been the norm, with possibly
the only exception being the Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s. From 1840
until the Civil War the Supreme Court was
a pro-slavery Court dominated by Southerners Roger Taney (Maryland), James
Wayne (Georgia), John Catron (Tennessee), John McKinley (Alabama), Peter Daniel
(Virginia), and John Campbell (Alabama). After the Civil War the Court
dismantled civil rights protections for formally enslaved Africans and free
Blacks with a series of decisions culminating in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Eric
Foner argues in The Second Founding,” the post-Civil War 13,
14, and 15th Amendments “were nullified in the generation after Reconstruction,
that, little by little, the rights - the right to equal protection of the law,
the right to vote, things like that - were just taken away in the South with
the acquiescence of the Supreme Court of the United States.” Post-Civil War
Supreme Courts through the 1930s were also notoriously pro-capital and
anti-labor, even declaring unconstitutional early New Deal legislation aimed at
addressing conditions during the Great Depression. [2]
The Dobb’s decision overturning
Roe was therefore no anomaly but a return by the Supreme Court to its proper
home. Although the Court has been moving in a reactionary direction for many
years there is no longer even the fig leaf of pretense that the Court
represents some version of impartial justice. It has more than anything else in recent
memory punctured the liberal myth that the “moral arc of the universe is long
but that it bends towards justice”.
These words, originally penned by the radical abolitionist Rev. Theodore
Parker, have been repeated by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Barack
Obama. While those words are inspiring, they can also become a rational for
complacency and duplicity as they did when Obama uttered them. The negation of those illusions may be the
single most positive effect of the Supreme Court decision.
Returning to our consideration of
the Palmer essay, one problem was its concentration on the amateurish and
sometimes comical as well a tragic antics of the Jan 6 mob that stormed the
Capitol. To be fair, given the lack of
information available at the time, Palmer could hardly be blamed for concentrating
on this aspect of the Jan 6 events. It
was also to Palmer’s credit that he exposed the indignation of the Democrats in
relation to Jan 6 for what it was, an opportunity to demonstrate their fealty
to the bourgeois state and its repressive institutions. They never missed a
chance to wail against the violation of the sanctity of the “People’s House”. This
hypocrisy on the part of the Democrats is a continuing saga. The FBI raid on Trump’s residence in
Mar-a-Lago has been used by the Democrats as an opportunity to pay homage to
that most reactionary institution of the American police state. This is the same FBI that has been responsible
for the murder and false imprisonment of tens of thousands of political
dissidents over the decades. And their
colors have not changed as witnessed by their recent raid on the offices of the
African People’s Socialist Party. We
have yet to hear any prominent Democratic politician say anything negative
about this latest atrocity of the FBI.
But for all that we now know that
the mob that attacked the Capitol was only one element of a complicated scheme
to overturn the election and far from the most important element. The real
nature of the conspiracy could only be discerned in hindsight from testimony of
those who were privy to the behind the scenes plotting. It is now clear that Palmer, and us,
attributed far too much import to Trump’s penchant for acting out in a kind of
primal rage without any strategy. It is
true enough that Trump’s sociopathy manifests itself in bouts of rage and even
violence, but what was not known at the time were the plans directed by his
close lieutenants to use the chaotic attack on the Capitol as a pretext for declaring
a State of Emergency.
There was in fact a months-long
plan hatched long before the election by Trump and his inner circle to overturn
the election. The first chapter was the
legal phase where the counting of ballots in many constituencies was challenged
in court. When Trump lost all those
court cases the next phase kicked in, the attempt to convince state
legislatures controlled by Republicans to invalidate votes and to name hand-picked
Electors who would vote for Trump regardless of the outcome of the popular
vote. When that looked like it would
fail, the next plan was to pressure the Vice President, Mike Pence, to refuse
to certify the election and send the outcome of the election to Congress or the courts where
the Republicans would prevail. When
Pence refused to go along the mob was released to spread mayhem. And while there was certainly amateurish
posturing by the mob, there were also within its ranks highly trained fascists
armed to the teeth and looking to assassinate members of Congress. As it turned
out those who thought that the coup consisted of this mob were not looking in
the right place. The mob as dangerous as
it was, was never a serious candidate for overthrowing the United State
government and taking power even given the crippling of the Capitol police and
the refusal by Trump’s man in the Pentagon to intervene with National Guard
troops. Trump and his inner circle were
well aware that the mob could not by itself effectuate a regime change. But what they were hoping for was to use the
mob as an excuse to declare a national emergency and martial law, giving Trump
the pretext he needed to overturn the election.
In addition to revising our
estimate of the level of coordination between the legal and extra-legal, i.e., insurrectionary actions of Trump’s phalanx of rioters on Jan 6, it is also
worth revisiting some of the prognostications in Palmer’s essay,
prognostications that were written in the heat of events as they were unfolding. For instance, take this one.
Impeachment has
proceeded, but its finale in a Senate trial has been deliberately
delayed by Republicans, who are happy enough, under the circumstances, to have
the Democrats carry the impeachment can. Biden is anything but enthralled with
the prospect of an impeachment trial and would much prefer that Trump simply
fade away into the Mar-a-Logo night. If enough GOP Senators get on board with
the ultimate Congressional sanction of convicting Trump in the forthcoming
impeachment trial, it will be because there are those among the Republican
elected elite who want to cut the Party loose from Trump. This will unleash an
unseemly raft of repugnant pretenders to the throne and allow vindictive
venalities like Mitch McConnell a chance to settle a score with an ex-President
who did them dirt. If, however, impeachment fails to get the two-thirds Senate
majority vote required to convict – which appears likely – it will allow Trump
to yet again claim, however tortuously, victory. [3]
Palmer wrote this essay after
Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives but before the delayed
impeachment trial in the Senate. There
is nothing he needs to apologize for here given what was known at the
time. But given the greater
understanding we now have we can revisit this period with better clarity. It
seemed to many for a moment that there was a possibility of Republicans
breaking with Trump. Clearly the
Democrats hoped for this outcome. In so
doing they were relying on the tried-and-true formula that has guided American
politics since the post-war era, that when the dangers of extremism are
exposed, the political compass will move toward the center. On this was based the hope that some kind of
post-Trump Republican party would be able to collaborate with Democrats on
behalf of the “greater good”, i.e., the defense of capitalism and U.S. hegemony
internationally. But what was not noticed was that the movement
to the center was no longer the guiding light of American politics. The rules
had changed and sometime in the past few years a nodal point was reached. Movement to the center turned into its
opposite. The more Trump acted against
the rules, the more outrageous his actions became, the more support he
garnered. The hope for “responsible
Republicans” replacing the Trumpists in the Republican Party was seen to be an
illusion. The purge of dissident Republicans like Liz Cheney from the ranks of
the Republican Party is now almost complete. The Democrats held onto these
illusions long after their due date because to acknowledge the reality of a
neo-fascist Republican Party implied a political battle they are unable and
unwilling to confront. The logical conclusion to draw from this is that the
fight against Trumpist reaction must be undertaken independent of and opposed
to the Democratic Party. Only an extreme
Left - “extreme” in the sense that it brooks no illusions in capitalism and
openly calls for a new socialist society - can pose a viable alternative to the
extreme Right.
While the attempted coup
orchestrated by Trump and his allies failed due to the refusal of the national
security state and the military to go along with Trump, there is no assurance
that another attempt, this time better prepared, could not succeed in the
future. That being said, talk of a
“fascist coup” as some left groups have done, is a formula for spreading
confusion rather than clarity. If what
Trump and the MAGA movement represent is fascism, it is definitely a different
variety of fascism than the classical fascism of the 1930’s. What Trump and the Republicans are trying to
achieve in the U.S. has more in common with the “illiberal democracy” of Orbán‘s
Hungary than the fascism of Mussolini’s Italy.
As the historian Andrew Gawthorpe has observed,
In some ways
Orbán resembles Trump, but in the eyes of many conservatives he’s better
understood as the man they wished Trump would be. Where Trump was a thrice-married
playboy who boasted of sleeping with porn stars and managed to lose the 2020
election, Orbán seems both genuinely committed to upholding conservative
cultural values and has grimly consolidated control over his country, excluding
the left from power indefinitely.
Among the
terrifying implications of the American right’s embrace of Orbán is that it
shows that the right would be willing to dismantle American democracy in
exchange for cultural and racial hegemony. [4]
But while the methods of
achieving power and the social basis for the neo-fascism of the 21st
century is very different than its predecessors in the first half of the 20th
century – a topic that would require a separate article - there is also an
ideological kinship between these two phenomenon that should not be ignored;
extreme nationalism, xenophobia, racism, anti-semitism, anti-intellectualism, misogyny, the
systematic employment of violence against political opponents and the
destruction of class solidarity and all independent institutions of the working
class. Furthermore, today’s neo-fascists have worked for decades to rewrite the
history of fascism and normalize the fascist butchers of the 1930’s while
demonizing their left-wing opponents. This is the common heritage that unites Giorgia
Meloni with Steve Bannon and Victor Orbán.
We should learn from this that sometimes
one has to revisit immediate reactions to events. It is no crime to admit your estimation of a
particular event was one-sided and revise it as new facts emerge. That in fact is the very model of the
scientific method.
Epilogue:
Marxism does not consist in a set
of formulas whereby one can predict the future.
While it is necessary to anticipate tendencies at work in the current
situation on a national and international scale, it is not possible to work out
in advance which of the possibilities inherent in a fluid dynamic will
prevail. These must be tested through
practice and observation. Those who
claim that their perspectives are “always confirmed”, who never acknowledge a
misstep or a reversal, are a sad caricature of Marxism.
We anticipated in general the
direction of the Trump presidency shortly after the 2016 election. We wrote,
The crisis of
liberalism is also the crisis of liberal democracy. The incoming Trump
administration will be fundamentally different from its predecessors: it will
be an authoritarian government, rule by a strong man… The cancer of social inequality has eaten up liberal
democracy. This doesn't mean that Trump is omnipotent, quite the contrary. It's
easy to foresee many and varied crises that will afflict the new administration
and possibly even lead to Trump's impeachment. But whatever happens personally
to Trump, there will be no going back to “the days of decency”. Either the
system will continue its descent into authoritarianism and worse, or a new,
social, democracy will emerge from the ruins of its liberal predecessor.[5]
But we had no way of knowing
exactly how this turn to authoritarianism would play out. Immediate reactions to events, while valuable
and necessary, have to be revisited in light of new information. Failure to do so is a sign of formulaic
thinking, the very opposite of a dialectical approach. A perfect example of formulaic thinking can be
found in the following assessment from the International Editorial Board of the
World Socialist Web Site, published three days before Russia’s invasion of the
Ukraine. They belittled the possibility of an invasion, writing,
In its report on
the planned summit, the Washington Post wrote, “Although senior U.S.
officials say they believe that Putin has made a decision to invade, White
House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that U.S. officials ‘are
committed to pursuing diplomacy until the moment an invasion begins.’ She
confirmed that Biden accepted the invitation again, if an invasion hasn’t happened.’”
This statement
is absurd. If Putin had already decided to invade, as Biden claimed at his
press conference on Friday, Putin would not be inviting Biden to a summit. Can
one seriously believe that having given the final go-ahead to a vast military
operation, Putin can simply shut it down with a wave of his hand? [6]
As it turned out the WSWS
International Editorial Board was dead wrong, while the public pronouncements
from U.S. intelligence were correct, a Russian invasion of the Ukraine was
imminent. That in itself should not be a
reason to berate the WSWS Editorial Board.
Lots of pundits, many of whom were serious students of Ukraine and
Russia, were caught flat-footed when Putin launched the invasion on February
24. And while it is true that when the
CIA makes public their assessment of an impending military crisis they often
lie or distort, in this case they achieved their goal, spreading anti-Russian
sentiment, by simply reporting the truth, that Putin had indeed mobilized the
Russian military for an imminent invasion.
The real problem comes when one
refuses to own up to a mistaken assessment or even acknowledge that it ever
happened. Unlike some of the pundits who
were caught off guard, and who did some serious re-examination of their
assumptions, the World Socialist Web Site continued as if nothing had happened. This
mode of operation is par for the course for this sectarian outfit. You can search the archives of the WSWS as
much as you like, and you will never find an admission that they were wrong
about anything.
One hopes that our reassessment
of the events of Jan. 6 provides some insight into the genuine science of
Marxism as opposed to its dogmatic caricature.
Alex Steiner
[1] Interview
by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, Sept 26, 2022. https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/26/giorgia_meloni_italy_prime_minister_fascism#transcript
[2] The
Dobbs Decision Punctures the Supreme Court's Sacred Mythology, Alan J.
Singer, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/183297
[3] 01/06/21:
The Insurrection that Wasn't, Bryan Palmer, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2021/03/010621-insurrection-that-wasnt.html
[4] Conservatives
want to make the US more like Hungary. A terrifying thought. Andrew
Gawthorpe, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/20/conservatives-republicans-cpac-hungary-orban
[5] Trump
and the crisis of liberalism, Frank Brenner, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2016/12/trump-and-crisis-of-liberalism.html
[6] Stop
the drive to World War 3!, Statement of the WSWS International
Editorial Board, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/02/21/pers-f21.html
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