Pretty much everyone with eyes open will agree that the Republican Party has steadily devolved over the past few decades into a fascist party. And with the rise of Donald Trump since 2016 as its leader, the rotten cherry is on top of that fully baked shit pie.
More recently Joe Biden has failed to control Israel’s murderous military campaign in Gaza, leading, it is reported, large numbers of people to relinquish what was already a lukewarm desire for Biden’s reelection. Taken together, these developments carry some implications for our spare time before November.
Actual fascism
The term “fascist” is mostly thrown about loosely to mean someone you don’t like or who acts in a bullying manner. Getting closer to what fascism looks like historically, the term is used to describe an authoritarian regime or police state.
But there are various types of those forms of government, and even people serious about a rigorous definition can disagree about fundamentals. The trouble is partly that fascism isn’t a cookie cutter phenomenon, as it crops up in specific geographic and historic circumstances, which causes different surface appearances and even structural variations, with some qualities more prominent than others depending on where and when.
The best attempt I know of to provide a definition useful across time and space is Thomas Paxton’s, from his The Anatomy of Fascism:
[Fascism is] a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
This is a good start (if quite a mouthful) but leaves at least two unaddressed questions for our current situation: the role of the charismatic leader, and how the "mass-based party of committed nationalist militants" matches up in a country without a parliamentary system and only two mass parties. For these questions, the Republican Party has been providing answers, step by step, for decades, accelerating the past eight years with Trump’s foot on the pedal.
Paxton notes but does not fully explore the implications of fascism’s customary appearance as a right-wing populism framed for working class followers as an anti-elitist faux socialism (e.g., National Socialism in Germany) to counter a rise in popularity of actual socialist remedies to economic and political crisis.
Recall how Bernie Sanders restored a socialist analysis to political conversation simultaneously with the rise of Trump. Mainstream media pundits considered them mirror images of “populism” on left and right—the obfuscating result of traditional corporate journalism’s neutrality protocols, rather than the more discerning categories of socialist and fascist discourse attempting to explain the ruination wreaked by fifty years of neoliberalism on our economy, democracy, and culture.
Paxton’s description also lacks a necessary class component. A fascist movement is initially perceived by the saner sections of the capitalist class as a threat; but over time, as the upstart party entrenches itself in state power, a significant fraction of the holders of economic power, accustomed to operating under the fig leaf of political democracy, figures out how to make their accommodation with this more direct form of violent domination of the other social classes. This is what we are on the edge of now.
The word none dare speak
From 2016 on and throughout Trump’s term in office, “fascism” was the word most liberals and much of the left refused to speak. Although evidence began mounting during Trump’s first campaign, people were leery of the term; they should no longer be. He is a fascist. And he is the maximum leader of a fascist movement.
What does this mean? It means on November 6 we could wake up to find ourselves moving via the democratic means of an election to a non-democracy: a police state, a country where the conditions that often have been the norm for African Americans and other historically oppressed and marginalized groups become extended to the entire population.
What might this look like? Take a glance at the treatment of socialists, trade unionists, queers, women under fascism. Recall that the anti-Jewish laws devised in Nazi Germany were modeled on the Jim Crow laws of the southern United States. What goes around comes around. Given the militarization of police departments, growth of armed right-wing militias, advances in surveillance and other potentially repressive technologies in the hands of the state and private corporations today, this would be a fascism on steroids.
No “lesser of two evils”?
With the rise of a mass movement for a ceasefire in Gaza, a new generation has been introduced to anti-imperialist ideas. This is a hopeful development, but the promise of integrating an international dimension into post-Bernie socialist youth politics faces challenges. At an anti-APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Conference) street demonstration in San Francisco late last year, I saw a few young people holding a banner that read, “Dis-elect Biden”. A man of about sixty on a bicycle was riding by and stopped. The dialogue that followed was unproductive. He said he was for a ceasefire, but if we “dis-elected Biden” we would get Trump. The young people said they didn’t care, there was no difference between the two. The man on the bike became apoplectic, and security had to step over and separate the arguers.
A common refrain at the Palestine demonstrations and in individual conversations I’ve been hearing and having with young activists is that they will not vote for the “lesser of two evils”, let alone work for Biden. This is an understandable position but historically blinkered.
Anger against Biden for his failure to pressure Israel into a ceasefire? Legitimate. No difference between Trump and Biden because Biden is not stopping Israel’s genocidal war? Not even close.
Why? It’s not about Biden. Every US president since the late nineteenth century has been an imperialist. The United States is the premiere imperialist country of the capitalist world system. It has military bases all over the world. The president is commander in chief of the armed forces. By definition, any US president is bound by the job to place the interests of US imperialism above the aspirations of the Palestinian people. Exchanging Biden for Trump would not change US policy toward Israel and Palestine for the better; more likely for the worse. It would also squander the momentum building within the Democratic base against the anti-Palestinian bias unquestioned in US foreign policy for decades.
Retaining the possibility for a socialist movement
The possibility to build progressive movements, and especially a socialist or social democratic movement that unites them, remains in place with Democrats in power and supporting the party’s progressive wing. Please do not think I am saying that a vote for Biden or another Democrat is a move in the direction of socialism. I’m saying that we retain the possibility for building a mass movement of the left within a nominally democratic society; under a Trumpian fascism, that possibility would not exist.
I suggest we listen closely to what Trump said at a rally last year: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Under fascism the time horizon for socialism recedes dramatically. Think Chile after the coup against Allende; a quarter century in Italy under Mussolini; four decades under Franco in Spain. Even without considering the obliteration of civil liberties, looming climate destruction tells us we don’t have that kind of time.
In short, to people who say “Let’s not hear about the lesser of two evils; I’m so done with the lesser of two evils”: what, you want the worser of two evils? This would not be just considerably worse; it would be qualitatively, disastrously worse. I don’t want to live out the remainder of my days in a fascist country. But I’m old. What I really don’t want is for my children and grandchildren—or anyone else—to experience fascism first-hand.
We have just over half a year to keep our crumbling democracy on life support for another four years. I plan to keep going to ceasefire demonstrations for as long as it takes to bring it about. I also plan to work to keep the Democrats in power because of abortion rights, relatively progressive labor policies, their acknowledgment of the climate crisis, a stated commitment to civil rights and racial equality and more.
I have no illusions about how far the Democrats will go to make these policies what they should be. It’s a party divided between neoliberalism and progressive forces, and the neoliberals generally have the upper hand. But I also have no illusions that a fascist Republican Party in power will do anything but put us in the fast lane to destruction—of worker rights, women’s rights, civil rights and the planet itself.
Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016) and a member of the State Committee of California DSA
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