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| David Horsey, LA Times |
Have
you heard? Donald Trump is a
fascist. Lots of people say so – Joe
Biden, Kamala
Harris, Liz
Cheney, gender theorist Judith
Butler, even Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John
F. Kelly (“he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are
dictators ... so he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist for
sure”).
On
the neocon side, there are pundits like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, both of whom
agree that Trump is worthy of the f-word. On the left, there’s Maoist guru Bob Avakian,
who heads up a group called “Refuse
Fascism”; radical icon Naomi
Klein who describes MAGA as “end
times fascism,” and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, who recently
published a
9,000-word article declaring that Trump must be a fascist because so many
rightwing forces are lining up behind him, e.g. the Heritage Foundation, the
Claremont Institute, an anti-democratic Silicon Valley pundit named Curtis
Yarvin, etc. The more bad guys on your
side, the more fascist you become. Right?
Not
quite. Although labeling Trump a fascist
may sound militant, it’s not. If rightwing
warmongers like Cheney are reinventing themselves as anti-fascists, it’s not in
order to solve the problem of Trumpism, but to disguise how it arose. They are promoting a false diagnosis whose
purpose is to conceal their own contribution – and certain disoriented leftwing
forces are going along.
Contrary
to such forces, fascism is not just authoritarianism, but a form of
ultra-dictatorship that arose in specific historical circumstances, in this
case the revolutionary upsurge that began in the final days of World War
I. The Russian Revolution is the most
obvious example, but other countries also saw revolutionary eruptions around
this time such as Hungary, Germany, Austria, Spain, and even the United States
where a five-day general strike shut down the port of Seattle in February 1919.
Northern
Italy was another a hot spot. The biennio
rosso saw factory councils, or workers’ soviets, in Milan and Turin while
the Po Valley, the northern Italian bread basket, came under the control of
militant farmworkers and peasants. The
movement peaked in August-September 1920 when half a million workers
occupied factories across the “industrial triangle” of northwestern Italy.
But
then came the reaction. As one historian
said of Mussolini, the socialist turned rightwing adventurer:
During the winter of
1920-21, his Fascist movement gained enormous support as a result of the
successful deployment of counter-revolutionary terror. With the connivance of the government and the
active backing of industrialists and landowners, Mussolini’s black-shirted
squads raided the political headquarters of their opponents, destroyed trade
union offices, burned down cooperative institutions, smashed left-wing presses,
assaulted Socialists with knuckledusters and coshes, and forcibly fed
Communists on castor oil. Hundreds were
killed and thousands injured. By July
1921 Mussolini could proclaim, ‘Bolshevism is vanquished.’[1]
What
distinguished Mussolini’s movement from white terror elsewhere were politics
and ideology. After the suppression of Hungary’s
short-lived soviet republic in 1919, the aristocrat Miklos Horthy was able to
restore order by cracking down on the ultra-right while the old Hungarian
monarchy (but without a king, strangely enough). Mussolini did the opposite. He launched a “revolution of reaction” that
declared war not just on Bolshevism but on stodgy old conservatism too.[2] The Freudian Marxist Wilhelm Reich emphasized
the difference between the old-style right and the new: “A sharp distinction
must be made between ordinary militarism and fascism. Wilhelmian Germany was militaristic, but it
was not fascistic.”[3]
Trotsky
also emphasized the difference. “If the communist
party is the party of revolutionary hope,” he wrote in 1930, “then fascism, as a mass movement, is
the party of counter-revolutionary despair” (emphasis in the original).
He added in 1940:
Both theoretical analysis
as well as the rich historical experience of the last quarter of a century have
demonstrated with equal force that fascism is each time the final link of a
specific political cycle composed of the following: the gravest crisis of
capitalist society; the growth of the radicalization of the working class; the
growth of sympathy toward the working class, and a yearning for change on the
part of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie; the extreme confusion of the big
bourgeoisie; its cowardly and treacherous maneuvers aimed at avoiding the
revolutionary climax; the exhaustion of the proletariat; growing confusion and
indifference; the aggravation of the social crisis; the despair of the petty
bourgeoisie, its yearning for change; the collective neurosis of the petty
bourgeoisie, its readiness to believe in miracles, its readiness for violent
measures; the growth of hostility towards the proletariat, which has deceived
its expectations. These are the premises for a swift formation of a fascist
party and its victory.[4]
In
short, no revolutionary upsurge, no fascist reaction. But “revolutionary” is the last word to
describe the period that has given rise to Trump. To the contrary, the story since the 1970s
and 80s has been one of seemingly endless retreat. Workers’ states have collapsed or have been
bourgeoisified from within while working-class parties of all shapes and
descriptions, from social democratic to Trotskyist, have gone into a long-term
swoon. In the United States, union
membership has fallen from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 10 percent as of 2023, while
man-hours on strike relative to total employment have fallen 50 percent over the same period. The story is the same for the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of advanced capitalist nations,
as a whole. From a peak of 38.1 percent
in 1972, the OECD unionization rate plunged to 15.8 as of 2020, a decline of
nearly 60 percent.
Trump,
therefore, is different. He is not a
revolutionary. Although liberals thunder
that he “hates the Constitution,” it’s clear
that his aim is not to overthrow America’s holy of holies so much as to use the
“imperial presidency” that an antiquated constitutional order has given rise to
in order to foster one-man rule. It is a
matter of using the authoritarian aspects of the Constitution to eliminate the
few remaining democratic vestiges.
Trump
differs in other ways too. He has
flirted with street violence and brawlers.
He told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the 2020
campaign and incited a mob to invade Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. But like generations of conservative
authoritarians before him, he otherwise relies on traditional organs of the
state, e.g. the Marines, the National Guard, Immigrations and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), and the FBI, now under the control of Republican hitman Kash
Patel. The historian Richard J. Evans
observes that the MAGA movement:
...bears no comparison to
the hundreds of thousands of armed and uniformed Stormtroopers and squadristi that the Nazi and Fascist
leaders deployed onto the streets daily in the 1920s and early 1930s to
intimidate, beat up, arrest, imprison, and often kill political opponents. Hitler and Mussolini sought to transform their
countries into perma-war states: a combination of education and propaganda on
the one hand and street-level violence and intimidation on the other aimed to
forge a new kind of citizen, one that was aggressive, regimented, arrogant,
decisive, organized, and obedient to the dictates of the state.[5]
As
for militarism, Trump has been all over the map. Anti-NATO
and China, he started out as an isolationist, attacking the neocon hawk
Hilary Clinton in 2015-16 and declaring in 2021: “I am especially proud to be
the first President in decades who has started no new wars." But he began his second term by threatening
to annex Canada, Greenland, and Panama, cheering on the Zionist war of
eradication in Gaza, and launching a short-lived war of his own against Yemen’s
Houthis. He has gloated over Israel’s
unprovoked attack on Iran. “Certain
Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to
happen,” he wrote on Truth Social. “They
are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!”
Where once he warned against war with
Iran, he now embraces it.
All
of which makes him crude, erratic, unpredictable, and increasingly dangerous. But it doesn’t make him a fascist. What Trumpism most represents, rather, is a return
to the “Big Stick” policies of Teddy Roosevelt, who blustered on about “the white man’s burden,” seized Panama, and established
a US protectorate over Cuba as well.
Finally,
the Trump personality cult is nothing like the führerprinzip of Nazi Germany, based on a mystical union of a
charismatic leader and völk. Blazing torches, firelight ceremonies,
swastikas, mystic runes – all are absent.
Despite the flags and sappy country-and-western ballads about being
“proud to be an American,” MAGA rallies do not come close.
So
Trump is no more a fascist than Liz Cheney is a pacifist. But if that’s the case, what is he? The answer is that he’s an outgrowth not of
revolutionary upsurge, but of liberal collapse.
In the process of sending the left into eclipse, neoliberalism set about
creating a brave new world based on super-financialization, unprecedented
levels of economic inequality, plus corruption, wage stagnation, and a rising
tide of war. The result was a top-heavy
political structure that is now disintegrating.
So intolerable has it become for millions of American workers that they have
opted to vote for a know-nothing reality-TV star in the hope that whatever he comes
up with, it can’t be any worse.
Trump
thus benefited from the collapse, but did not cause it. He did not invent a poisonous “woke” ideology
all but guaranteed to alienate working-class voters; that was something Democrats
did entirely on their own. The same goes
for DEI, i.e. diversity, equity, and inclusion, a management program designed
to intimidate and harass rank-and-file employees. Democrats invented that one too.
Although
liberals don’t want to talk about it, there is no doubt that liberals took DEI to
extraordinary lengths. Robin DiAngelo, “perhaps
the country's most visible expert in anti-bias training” in the words of the
New Yorker, proudly tells of driving a female worker to the verge of physical
breakdown during a workplace training session:
A cogent example of white
fragility occurred during workplace anti-racism training I co-facilitated with
an inter-racial team. One of the white
participants left the session and went back to her desk, upset at receiving
(what appeared to the training team as) sensitive and diplomatic feedback on
how some of her statements had impacted several of the people of color in the
room. At break, several other white
participants approached me and my fellow trainers and reported that they had to
talked to the woman at her desk, and that she was very upset that her
statements had been challenged. (Of
course, ‘challenged’ was not how she phrased her concern. It was framed as her being ‘falsely accused’
of having a racist impact.) Her friends
wanted to alert us to the fact that she was in poor health and ‘might be having
a heart-attack.’ Upon questioning from
us, they clarified that they meant this literally. These coworkers were sincere in their fear
that the young woman might actually die as a result of the feedback. Of course, when news of the women’s
potentially fatal condition reached the rest of the participant group, all
attention was immediately focused back onto her and away from engagement with
the impact she had had on the people of color.
As professor of social work Rich Vodde states, ‘If privilege is defined
as a legitimization of one’s entitlement to resources, it can also be defined
as permission to escape or avoid any challenge to this entitlement.’[6]
This
is the “expert” whom the House Democratic Caucus invited to address it in June 2020 on
“the importance of recognizing that white supremacy and racism are at the
foundation of our country,” with a personal endorsement by Nancy Pelosi no
less. Needless to say, sadism like this
is very the opposite of socialism, which doesn’t bring in management
consultants to brutalize workers, but, rather, combats racism in order to mobilize
workers against management in a
united front.
For
workers, the liberal kulturkampf was
the crowning indignity after decades of economic regression. The backsliding is quite real. Since 1979, real hourly wages have risen just
six percent for middle-income workers, while falling five percent for those in the low-income
brackets. Where a typical
worker had to work for 2.3 years to buy a home in 1950,
2.6 years in 1960, and 2.4 in 1970,the numbers then began to rise – to 3.8
years in 1980, to 5.4 in 1990, and then to 7.0 in 2000. Since 2019, the cost of a single-family home
has surged another 58 percent, better than two and a half times the rate of
inflation, while nearly half of tenants are now officially “cost-burdened,” meaning that they
must spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
Adjusted
for inflation, college tuition and fees meanwhile tripled on average between 1963 and
2022. Where black workers saw real
progress between 1950 and 1974, with average black income rising 50 percent compared
with white incomes, relative growth has since leveled off to six
percent or less. At the
same time, CEO compensation has risen from roughly 20 times that of an average
worker in the 1970s to 351 times by the year 2020.
This
is what made the Trump campaign slogan – “Kamala is for they/them,
President Trump is for you” – so effective. Ordinarily, liberal antics over genderless
restrooms and the like might raise a few eyebrows. But now they represented a growing offensive
by a self-righteous liberal elite against workers whom Clinton had labeled a
“basket of deplorables” back in 2016.
The more economic and social conditions deteriorated, the more extreme
the liberal cultural offensive became – and the more Republicans launched a
counter-offensive of their own based on “traditional values” such as religion,
family, individualism, and opposition to abortion.[7] In the end, Democrats even lost ground among
blacks and Hispanics, core constituencies that were now none too happy with
self-satisfied liberalism as well.
Internationally,
neoliberal decay has accelerated to the point where it is beginning to resemble
the Soviet collapse of 1989-91. NATO is
in disarray, a growing debt crisis stalks the Third World, and far-right
parties are surging from Portugal to Poland.
If Trump feels a certain sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin,
it’s not because he’s a Russian puppet, as Democrats used to say during his
first term. Rather, it’s because he’s
following a similar trajectory. Putin
used authoritarian means to patch together a society on the edge of the abyss
thanks to a decade of misrule by the American puppet, Boris Yeltsin. Once Putting took over, however, per-capita
GDP rose more than seven-fold while oligarchs were
forced to defer to a neo-czarist state. Trump
2.0 is not likely to see anything remotely similar; indeed, thanks to tariffs, it
is more likely to see the opposite. Still,
Trump sees himself in broadly similar terms as a strongman trying to make up
for years of incompetence.
But
if Democrats have stopped the Russian-puppet nonsense and are now calling Trump
a fascist, the underlying message is the same: they still see him as
un-American. Needless to say, the only
thing Democratic politicians know about the struggle against fascism is what
they learned from “Saving Private Ryan,” which is that an all-American everyman
played by Tom Hanks triumphed over Germany at Omaha Beach. America is good, therefore, and anyone
outside the fold – Nazis, Soviets, Trump, whatever – is bad. Like MAGA, liberalism is a
turn-back-the-clock ideology based on restoring to the high-growth economics of
the 1950s and the feel-good civil-rights solidarity of the early 1960s,
something that will come about the instant Democrats are returned to power.
But
it’s not going to happen. It’s a dream
world that is gone for good. Democrats
know it, and Trump knows it too. So do workers
whose interest is not in turning back the clock, but in going forward. Instead of exchanging one pack of
self-serving “Repocratic” demagogues for another, they need a clean sweep
. They need to do away with a pre-modern
constitution that makes a mockery of one person-one vote by allowing profoundly
inequitable bodies like the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral
College to reign unchallenged. They need
to abolish an imperial presidency that was increasingly authoritarian long before
Trump took office. They need to do away
with super-rich Wall Street speculators manipulating the economy for their own
short-term benefit, and they need decent jobs at decent pay so they can rebuild
America’s broken infrastructure from the ground up. Instead of the know-nothing denialism of
Republicans and the do-nothing policies of the Democrats, they need a solution
to the climate crisis that is global, comprehensive, and effective.
Most
of all, they need to do away with the sort of phony anti-fascism whose only
purpose is to return a discredited liberal elite to power. Instead of the pseudo-resistance of the
Democratic Party, they need the real resistance of a united working class.
[1]
Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A
Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Random House, 2002), 25.
[2]
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “What Is
Fascism?” in Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ed., Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism
and America (New York: WW
Norton, 2024), 138-39.
[3]
Wilhelm Reich, The
Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970),
xiv.s
[4]
Leon Trotsky, “Fascism: What it is and how to fight it,” available at https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/trotsky/fascism-how-to-fight-it/fascism-what-it-is-trotsky.pdf.
[5]
Richard J. Evans, “Why Trump
Isn’t a Fascist,” in Steinmetz-Jenkins, Did
It Happen Here?, 192.
[6]
Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s
So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon, 2018),
111-12.
[7] Alex Steiner, The American political landscape in 2016: A Marxist interpretation, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2016/07/the-american-political-landscape-in_13.html
