Author Archive for: Rupture.Capital

When Russian President Vladimir Putin was photographed shirtless during the Barack Obama years, many far-right Republicans argued that the United States would be better off if Obama could be that macho. Quite a few progressives responded by mocking their messaging as pathetic and buffoonish, yet that Republican obsession with hyper-masculinity continues.

In an article published by Politico on July 10, journalist Adam Wren focuses on a trend in the 2024 GOP presidential race: male candidates trying to win over voters by showing how “masculine” they are.

“Francis Suarez is bragging about placing sixth in an Independence Day 5K in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” Wren observes. “Vivek Ramaswamy, a former nationally ranked junior tennis player, is flexing his weekly pickup victories over former collegiate athletes at a Life Time Fitness outside Des Moines. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the muscle-bound, 69-year-old longshot Democratic presidential hopeful, went viral for doing pull-ups shirtless at a Gold’s Gym. Even Asa Hutchinson, the 72-year-old former Arkansas governor, is boasting about still playing full-court basketball.”

READ MORE: ‘Club for No Growth’: Trump blasts conservative advocacy group for supporting DeSantis

The 2024 election, according to Wren, has “careened into a kind of testosterone primary.” And Wren cites GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s influence as a factor.

“Brawn and bravado are in demand, particularly among a GOP base conditioned by a steady dose of both in the Trump era,” the reporter observes. “Thirst traps are a new wedge issue.”

Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez discussed the Republican obsession with hypermasculinity in her 2020 book “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” And that mindset, she says, is showing up in 2024’s GOP presidential primary.

Du Mez told Politico, “Republican candidates are now needing to play to a base that has really been defined by the Trump presidency and just the Trump persona. Now, to win as a Republican, you need to play that game. This kind of masculinity — physical fitness — goes hand in hand with masculine toughness.”

READ MORE: Stewart Rhodes’ son fears Trump or DeSantis will pardon his father

=Politico’s full article continues at this link.

A Brutal Colonial Legacy Is Tinder for the Fires That Are Sweeping Across France

Kurt Stand

Fri, 07/07/2023 – 17:48

722 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in over $1 trillion in windfall profits each year for the past two years amid soaring prices and interest rates, while billions of people are having to cut back or go hungry.

Analysis by Oxfam and ActionAid of Forbes’ “Global 2000” ranking shows they made $1.09 trillion in windfall profits in 2021 and $1.1 trillion in 2022, with an 89 percent jump in total profits compared to average total profits in 2017-2020. For this analysis, windfall profits are defined as those exceeding average profits in 2017-2020 by more than ten percent.

45 energy corporations made on average $237 billion a year in windfall profits in 2021 and 2022. Governments could have increased global investments in renewable energy by 31 percent had they taxed at 90 percent the massive windfall profits that oil and gas producers funneled to their rich shareholders last year. There are now 96 energy billionaires with a combined wealth of nearly $432 billion ($50 billion more than in April last year).

Food and beverage corporations, banks, Big Pharma, and major retailers also cashed in on the cost-of-living crisis that has seen more than a quarter of a billion people in 58 countries hit by acute food insecurity in 2022.

Extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years.

• 18 food and beverage corporations made on average about $14 billion a year in windfall profits in 2021 and 2022, enough to cover the $6.4 billion funding gap needed to deliver life-saving food assistance in East Africa more than twice over. Oxfam estimates that one person is likely to die of hunger every 28 seconds across Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan. Global food prices rose more than 14 percent in 2022.
• 28 drug corporations made on average $47 billion a year in windfall profits, and 42 major retailers and supermarkets made on average $28 billion a year in windfall profits.
• Nine aerospace and defense corporations raked in on average $8 billion a year in windfall profits even as 9,000 people die every day from hunger, much of that driven by conflict and war.

“People are sick and tired of corporate greed. It’s obscene that corporations have raked in billions of dollars in extraordinary windfall profits while people everywhere are struggling to afford enough food or basics like medicine and heating,” said Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar.

“Big business is gaslighting us all —they’re hiking prices to make monster profits, plundering people under the cover of a polycrisis.”

“A few increasingly dominant corporations are monopolizing markets and setting prices sky-high to line the pockets of their rich shareholders. Big Pharma, energy giants and big supermarket chains shamelessly fattened their profit margins throughout both the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis. Most worryingly —in the absence of regulation, including progressive taxation— governments have invited this,” Behar said.

There is a growing body of evidence that corporate profiteering is playing a significant role in supercharging inflation, echoing fears that corporations are exploiting the cost-of-living crisis to boost profits margins —a trend dubbed “greedflation” and “excuseflation”. Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank, suggested in May that corporations are engaging in “greedflation”, while the IMF last week published a study showing that corporate profits account for nearly half the increase in Europe’s inflation over the past two years.

Huge corporate profits have coincided with the degradation of pay and conditions for workers.

Oxfam estimates that top-paid CEOs across four countries enjoyed a real-term 9 percent pay hike in 2022, while workers’ wages fell by 3 percent. One billion workers in 50 countries took an average pay cut of $685 in 2022, a collective loss of $746 billion in real wages compared to if wages had kept up with inflation.

Oxfam and ActionAid are calling on governments to claw back gains driven by profiteering. A tax of 50 to 90 percent on the windfall profits of 722 mega-corporations could generate between $523 billion and $941 billion both for 2021 and 2022. This is money that could be used to help people struggling with hunger, rising energy bills and poverty in rich countries, and to provide hundreds of billions of dollars to support countries in the Global South. For example:

• An injection of $400 billion into the fund for loss and damage agreed to at COP27 last year. Loss and damage finance needs are urgent, with estimates saying that low- and middle-income countries could face costs of up to $580 billion annually by 2030. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on rich countries to impose windfall taxes on fossil fuel companies and redirect the money to vulnerable countries suffering worsening losses from the climate crisis.
• Cover the financing gap ($440 billion) to provide universal social protection coverage and healthcare to more than 3.5 billion people living in low- and lower- middle-income countries, and the financing gap ($148 billion) to provide universal access to pre-primary, primary and secondary education in these same countries. This would support the hiring of millions of new teachers, nurses and healthcare workers across the Global South.

“Enough is enough. Government policy should not allow mega-corporations and billionaires to profiteer from people’s pain. Governments must tax windfall profits of corporations across all sectors —and invest that money back in helping people and deterring future profiteering. They must put the interests of their great majorities ahead of the greed of a privileged few,” said ActionAid Secretary-General Arthur Larok.

“Taxing windfall profits is smart economic policy —it’s a very clear and direct source of money for development and tackling climate change. Piling more loans onto poorer countries is what makes absolutely no sense when debt is accelerating the climate crisis”.

Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has uncovered a tradition of African American radicalism that was — and is — a crucial part of the American left’s history. He talks to Jacobin about the need to connect struggles against racism and class oppression.

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Black Panther Party members demonstrating outside the New York County Criminal Court, April 11, 1969. (David Fenton / Getty Images)

Historian Robin D. G. Kelley recently published a new edition of his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. The book explores a vast terrain of African American radicalism, from the followers of Marcus Garvey to the Communists who challenged racial oppression and the neglected stories of the civil rights movement.

Daniel Denvir interviewed Kelley for the Jacobin podcast the Dig in January of this year. You can listen to the conversation here. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

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Daniel Denvir

What was the context in which you first published the book in 2002, and how did things differ by the time of its republication twenty years later?

Robin D. G. Kelley

It was before 9/11 when the idea for Freedom Dreams came into fruition. A lot of it centered around a couple of things. When there was police violence, the Amadou Diallo case was important. He had been killed by police in New York. A lot of us were protesting the fact that the cops had been exonerated.

In fact, the killing of Amadou Diallo came on the tails of a whole range of police killings. In other words, there’s not a season where there’s no police killings or beatings. The case of Abner Louima, for example, was a big thing in New York. So that’s one of the contexts.

The other context that was really important for the ’90s is that a lot of the radical movements that emerged in that decade were arrayed against the Clinton administration. One of the things that I’m always reminded of, whether we’re talking about [Barack] Obama or [Bill] Clinton or the [Lyndon] Johnson administration, is that liberal administrations are often the worst in terms of creating the conditions for what becomes a neoliberal agenda.

Liberal administrations are often the worst in terms of creating the conditions for what becomes a neoliberal agenda.

Think about what it meant for Clinton to ultimately back welfare reform — stripping poor people of welfare, moving toward workfare, as well as some of the housing policies and the expansion of mass incarceration under Clinton. The fact that he ended up signing NAFTA, even if he doesn’t take responsibility for it, became part of his whole schtick.

We were coming out of a situation where there was a lot of pessimism, especially among my students, because they were fighting against a liberal government, and they didn’t see how they could win, and they didn’t see social movements in the way that they imagined them to be. They had a romantic sense of the days of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and people in the streets fighting the police.

I was working with these students, trying to reveal to them that there is a long history of struggles that don’t always look like they succeed because we’re trapped in this idea of what success looks like. I wrote the book really for undergraduates, who were looking for models of revolutionary activity. I was saying they don’t always look like what you think they look like, and more importantly, they don’t always win, if we think of that very narrow definition of what winning is — that is, achieving a certain objective.

But the most important thing is that whatever their agenda is, their vision is not something that’s made ahead of time. It is made in struggle and movement. If anything, the basic lesson of Freedom Dreams is not that people need to go to sleep, dream, and wake up in the morning with a new idea, but that what we think of as future thinking — dreams of possibility — comes out of struggle. It doesn’t come out of think tanks or out of taking mushrooms.

Why did I come up with the new edition? Part of it was that I felt compelled to take stock of where we are today in the wake of the 2020 protests. I had been thinking about a new edition for a while, but especially after 2020, I was thinking about the long history of anti-state violence and what we witnessed, because the 2020 protests were a culmination of lots of things.

That upsurge was a culmination of the Occupy movement. It had its roots in the anti-police protests erupting after Trayvon Martin and [Michael] Brown, the 2013-2014-2015 season. The other context, of course, is that we’re facing a resurgent fascism. I say resurgent because fascism has a long history in the US.

With 9/11, there was a sense that the radical movements were derailed, and you really couldn’t say anything critical of the United States.

One thing I didn’t mention, though, is the other context, which is 9/11. Nine-eleven led to a disruption in the writing of the book because we’d obviously been experiencing a kind of suppression of movements, not just civil liberties, but actual movements. With the [George W.] Bush administration, the possibility of creative repression emerged with the creation of the Homeland Security matrix.

With 9/11, it felt like a sea change. There was a false patriotism that erupted. There was a sense that the radical movements were derailed, and you really couldn’t say anything critical of the United States. At the same time, a vibrant antiwar movement did emerge after the invasion of Afghanistan and especially after the invasion of Iraq. That movement was faced with what became an expansion of the national security state.

I was writing this book about radical movements at a time when radical movements, in whatever form they took, were under not just greater suspicion and repression, but a whole apparatus of new technology geared toward surveillance and attacks on whistleblowers. This was not necessarily limited to the Bush administration. It continued under Obama, and it continues as we speak.

That context is important, because when I talk about the resurgence of fascism, it’s a mistake to think about fascism merely as a group of military personnel, ex-cops, or active-duty cops trying to overthrow the Congress or take over the Capitol. They’re not a fringe group. The state itself is moving in this direction, even if the state has been targeted by other fascists in the streets.

Daniel Denvir

How did you first encounter black nationalism? What role did its internationalism — particularly its relationship to Africa, present and past — play in how you experienced it?

Robin D. G. Kelley

My first encounter with politics was as a child growing up in Harlem. No one living on 157th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, or anywhere in Saint Nicholas, would be able to avoid soapbox speakers and black nationalist organizations. It was everywhere, and that’s how I understood politics.

By the time I got to college in California, I jumped into black studies. The authors I read didn’t agree on everything, but what they all did agree upon fundamentally was that African people, no matter where they are, are connected somehow and have a right to self-determination. There were a lot of romantic ideas of what precolonial Africa was like, with an assumption that communalism was the default situation and the natural culture of African peoples.

However, I also encountered other thinkers and movements that said yes, we had certain traditions that colonialism tried to destroy, yet at the same time, we had class distinctions and forms of power. Some of these forms of power existed before colonialism, but they really took off during and after the colonial period.

My first encounter with politics was as a child growing up in Harlem. No one would be able to avoid soapbox speakers and black nationalist organizations.

I’m of the generation where we read Frantz Fanon and The Wretched the Earth. Nowadays, no one wants to read that. They want to read Black Skin, White Masks, which is a very important book. But it was foundational to read in The Wretched of the Earth about the African national bourgeoisie, or in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa about the role that African elites played in the perpetuation of neocolonial domination.

These texts enabled us to hold on to a form of black nationalism without falling into the trap of seeing the roots of exploitation and inequality strictly in terms of racial difference. We saw those roots in terms of class difference, in terms of economic exploitation, in terms of the way capitalism unfolded. Those are the politics that were important to me. We were surrounded by a lot of thinkers who believed that nationalism and Marxism were not antithetical — they could come together.

Daniel Denvir

Why did Ethiopia in particular for so long play such a critical role in the black American and also black international political imagination?

Robin D. G. Kelley

Ethiopianism initially had very little to do with Ethiopia itself. The region we know today as Ethiopia was a mythological place in the minds of European Christians. They believed that there was a religious leader named Prester John, who was white or at least nonblack. The Prester John myth created an exception, even in the minds of European Christians, because Ethiopia, which wasn’t a nation yet, had adopted Christianity before any other part of Africa. In fact, Coptic Christianity in Ethiopia predates the spread of Christianity to much of Europe.

That alone was proof in the minds of European and Christian supremacists that Ethiopia was more civilized. That story was shaping the narrative around Ethiopianism. On the one hand, you had Europeans claiming Ethiopia as a civilized place. On the other, you had Africans in North America and throughout the western hemisphere reading the Bible, saying Ethiopia was a land of redemption and that they were not trying to build alliances with Europe. They were trying to overthrow an oppressive system in which the pharaoh was on the other side of the Mediterranean. That was where Ethiopianism as a religious movement met Ethiopian history.

The region we know today as Ethiopia was a mythological place in the minds of European Christians.

The Battle of Adwa in 1896 was a very important symbol in black American consciousness. This was before the Japanese defeated Russia in 1904–5. You had an African country defeating Italy. What did this mean for black Americans? There were musical theater shows, novels, and other writings and performances that celebrated the victory against the Italians. It hyped up the importance of Ethiopia as one of two regions that were, at least in theory, not colonized by Europeans — the other being Liberia; but of course, Liberia was a colony of the United States.

It created a myth that Ethiopia somehow resisted colonialism. In fact, all around it there was a negotiation with colonists — not just the Italians, but also the British — and it was a nation-state that continued to practice slavery until the 1930s. That was something people didn’t want to talk about, although a figure like George Padmore was criticizing Ethiopia in the 1930s, saying whatever we think about it, they still have slavery; we have to defend Ethiopia’s right to self-determination, but we have to fight Haile Selassie in terms of class forces. That was a realistic approach to understanding the actual Ethiopia versus the symbolic Ethiopia.

Finally, Ethiopia was invaded again in 1935. World War II began with the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy and the colonial slaughter that followed. The black world mobilized to defend both the physical land and culture of Ethiopia, as well as the sacred and symbolic land of Ethiopia.

Daniel Denvir

The idea of going back to Africa was one part of a larger “emigrationist” politics that has been pervasive in a lot of different ways that you describe throughout the long arc of black American history. What does that form of politics tell us about how black people have imagined freedom?

Robin D. G. Kelley

There are two things that are really important in this. One is land, because part of emigration is about being able to access land, wherever that land might be. It’s not like you’re moving from one ownership of land to another. You’re actually trying to establish some land for yourself.

The second thing, of course, is freedom from a government that at one point you might have believed was designed to protect you and your people, but that actually turns out not to be the case. Self-determination in terms of land and governmental authority is part of what made emigration, or at least the dream of emigration, attractive.

Self-determination in terms of land and governmental authority is part of what made emigration, or at least the dream of emigration, attractive.

What I was trying to get at in discussing this wasn’t the question of whether it was effective or a good strategy. It was about trying to tap desire and what people thought freedom might look and feel like. It was never about being able to integrate into mainstream white liberal society so you could live in suburbs with white people.

When you think about what it means to have land, it opens up a different set of conversations about what happens once you are able to establish a free space with autonomy and something like self-determination. What does it look like in terms of organizing society?

We have a lot of scholarship now thinking about maroon societies as a precursor or an example of that kind of freedom. But what we find, of course, is that sometimes the most revolutionary intentions could turn into new forms of hierarchy. Maroon societies were often ones that had their own hierarchy, with rulers that made deals with colonial states or slave plantation societies to give back runaways.

Once you get the land, once you get self-determination, what does that mean in terms of social relations within that community? That to me is really the crucial question.

Daniel Denvir

No discussion of black emigration as politics would be complete without Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). How did Garvey’s movement emerge and then catch such incredible fire among black people? And what were the ideological and theological precepts of the movement that Garvey called black Zionism?

Robin D. G. Kelley

Garvey himself was an amazing journalist and organizer. He traveled around Latin America and elsewhere, before ending up in Europe, where he found himself in conversation with Irish nationalists. The Irish, of course, took great pride in their culture, language, and right to land. It was a case of anti-colonialism par excellence as far as Garvey and others were concerned.

Garvey was also inspired by Zionism. Jamaica had a number of Jewish entrepreneurs who were themselves Jamaican and helped fund the UNIA. Garvey even toyed with the idea of Judaism becoming the official religion of the black nationalist movement. He quickly moved away from that and developed his own African Orthodox Church. But one of his main lieutenants was Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford, who converted to Judaism and eventually ended up taking a congregation to Ethiopia, settling there, and creating a new movement of Ethiopian Jews from the US who are all black.

For Marcus Garvey, black Zionism was the black version of the political movement that we know of as Zionism.

Remember, Zionism wasn’t exactly a religious movement in the way we might think of it. It was a political, nationalist movement, based on the idea of the right to land, and the idea that the Jews, as a dispersed people, had not only a right, but an obligation to find a homeland. In those days, Zionism wasn’t necessarily always linked to historical Palestine. Uganda was one of the possible locations being talked about.

That’s not to say that Palestine wasn’t relevant — it was very relevant — but the most important thing about Zionism was the idea that land was necessary for an oppressed people to thrive. For Garvey, black Zionism was the black version of the political movement that we know of as Zionism.

Why did it expand so rapidly? There are many different reasons. One has to do with the power of print culture. As Benedict Anderson says, print culture is a crucial part of developing nationalism. Whether that nationalism is tied to a state or not doesn’t matter. If you have a paper like the Negro World, publishing in different languages, with a circulation around the globe, then you can develop followers.

The second point was that it tapped into the sense of needing a homeland, of feeling alienated from citizenship and from basic rights, of being treated like a second-class citizen and having to face lynching and violence at every turn. Black intellectuals called that period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the nadir of African American history. The Supreme Court was ruling against the rights of black people, while state governments were supporting white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan was resurrected.

In that context, there was something attractive about the idea of a homeland as well as the idea of power, with the spectacle of Garveyism in the streets of New York. Marcus Garvey was dressed like a general and you had black men dressed in military uniforms as if they were going to redeem Africa through violence. This was the era of imperialism, and they were saying “we’re going to have our own imperialism — we’re going to take back Africa.” That was very attractive to people.

Another reason for its appeal was that the UNIA was so decentralized that people could write their own rules. The biggest, most active chapters in North America were not in cities, but in the countryside. In those rural chapters, people were fighting to receive a decent wage for chopping and picking cotton, or their fair share of cotton production, and opposition to lynching was the order of the day.

A lot of people who were Garveyites had no intention of leaving the US. They intended to fight.

A lot of people who were Garveyites had no intention of leaving the US. They intended to fight, and they were fighting on many different fronts with the belief that they were part of an international movement that would support them. It’s no accident that many of the Garveyites in places like Harlem and Chicago ended up joining the Communist Party after Garveyism collapsed.

Daniel Denvir

In the book, you write: “If the Third International or the Comintern proved more sympathetic and sensitive to the racial nature of American class struggle, it is largely because black folk made it so.” A good place to start is with a group called the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), which was founded in 1918. What perspective did they and other black communists bring to the movement?

Robin D. G. Kelley

The ABB was initially a secret organization made up of socialists. Its leaders included people like Cyril Briggs and W. A. Domingo. Many of them were of Caribbean descent, like Garvey, though not all. Unlike Garvey, they had no intention of going anywhere: they were focused on the fight against lynching and disenfranchisement in the US.

They had chapters in places like Oklahoma and Virginia. They were a black communist organization before there was a Communist Party, because they went back at least a couple of years before the Communist Party was formed in the US. World War I was a crucial moment for their formation.

Some of them joined the Communist Party before the ABB folded. They joined in secret. People like Harry Haywood, for example, were in the ABB and then the Communist Party. They saw their positions as being identical. That led to a split in the Brotherhood because there were those who felt that they should remain independent, even if they were sympathetic to the Communist Party.

It wasn’t until 1922 or 1923 that the Communist Party was consolidated into a single party, after a series of splits, when the Comintern forced some of the different tendencies to come together. It didn’t make a lot of sense for the ABB, which was itself a coherent radical organization, to fold into a movement that was divided. Another point to bear in mind is that there were other black socialists who were not in the ABB, such as Hubert Harrison and Ben Fletcher. They represented another independent black radical or communist presence.

Daniel Denvir

The ideological orientation of the Bolsheviks around national self-determination and colonialism had an obvious appeal to black American communists like Harry Haywood and Claude McKay, who then in turn pushed communists to embrace the so-called Black Belt thesis, which posited that black Americans in the South constituted a colonized nation with the right to self-determination. What did the Black Belt thesis concretely mean for black communists and for American communism more generally?

Robin D. G. Kelley

The party actually did not work very hard to promote the Black Belt thesis in the streets or in the countryside. When you read the party newspapers — the Daily Worker or the Southern Worker — it wasn’t a major part of their organizing or propaganda work. If you read the more theoretical communist publications, there was some debate around it, but it wasn’t necessarily an organizing slogan.

However, it did help secure the right of black communists to have some control over communist print culture and some independent autonomous organizations that could fight for black liberation, such as the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, the American Negro Labor Congress, and publications like the Liberator. Self-determination meant that there was an independent black struggle that was related to class oppression — in fact, fundamental to class oppression — while being specific to the conditions and experiences of black people.

The communists included in the category of “class-war prisoners” black youth like the Scottsboro Nine, who hadn’t been arrested because they were leading a union or fighting with the police around strike activity, but rather because they were falsely accused of raping two white women while traveling on a train. To redefine them as class-war prisoners meant rethinking the nature of the class struggle.

That’s what made the Communist Party unique, no matter what people might say. The CPUSA [the Communist Party of the United States of America] was the first organization on the American left that wasn’t all-black that said black people’s struggles mattered in and of themselves and did not occupy a subordinate or secondary place in terms of class struggle. That was a huge breakthrough, and it was black radicals themselves who promoted it, going back to Clyde McKay when he addressed the Comintern, or Harry Haywood.

Self-determination meant that there was an independent black struggle that was related to class oppression while being specific to the conditions and experiences of black people.

At the same time, the South African communists were pushing for what was called the Native Republic thesis — the right of self-determination for African people in South Africa. This was very significant because there had been a miners’ strike known as the Rand Revolt, in which white miners raised the slogan “Workers of the World, Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.” But that strike was overshadowed by a much larger African miners’ strike.

All of those developments led to a real process of rethinking. It produced the idea that class struggle must include the independent struggles of black people, because of the unique position they occupy within a racialized class hierarchy.

Daniel Denvir

After the heyday of the CPUSA, Maoist China became a strong reference point for black radicals. Closer to home, Cuba also loomed large. One important figure here was the president of the NAACP [the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, Robert Williams, who called for armed self-defense and then sought political asylum in Cuba in 1961. Who was Williams, and what sort of politics did he practice and advocate?

Robin D. G. Kelley

Robert Williams was a former veteran who had served in the Marines. He was familiar with left organizations and would read publications like the Daily Worker. He and his wife, Mabel Williams, settled in Greenville, North Carolina.

As an advocate of armed self-defense, he was not exceptional. Armed self-defense was, generally speaking, the default position of black organizers, not just in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century as well. Don’t forget that Martin Luther King kept a pistol in his house until Bayard Rustin, I think, convinced him not to.

In fact, it was the idea of nonviolent passive resistance that was a rupture in the history of black radical movements or civil rights movements. What Williams was doing wasn’t unique and in fact was replicated throughout the South, especially in places like Mississippi. I don’t want to exceptionalize Rob Williams, except to say that what made him and Mabel Williams exceptional was their internationalism.

Armed self-defense was, generally speaking, the default position of black organizers, not just in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century as well.

He was organizing armed self-defense groups against the Klan composed of men and women, and he was expelled from the NAACP as a result of doing that work. Rob and Mabel Williams saved the lives of a white couple who supported the Klan and had come to the black district of Monroe to cause trouble, but they were charged with kidnapping the pair and fled the country, ending up in Cuba.

Rob already had a relationship with Cuba because he was a supporter of the Cuban Revolution. He became close to Che Guevara but later left Cuba and went first to Vietnam, then to China, where he and Mabel encountered another amazing black radical, Vicki Garvin. There had already been many black visitors to China in support of its revolution, including W. E. B. Du Bois.

Daniel Denvir

Let’s talk about the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a black nationalist organization which declared its support for Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of Max Stanford. What kind of arguments was Stanford making?

Robin D. G. Kelley

His arguments were specific to the social formation of RAM itself and the fact that it initially emerged as a student-based organization. This group was reading The Wretched of the Earth in French before it was translated into English and had a critique of Fanon, partly to do with the fact that they felt Fanon wasn’t really aware of the situation in North America.

Stanford embraced what Amilcar Cabral later called the idea of “class suicide.” He said there was no guarantee that students would adopt the path of revolution, or that the intelligentsia was even capable of leading a true revolution. Stanford himself came out of the black intelligentsia. He was making what was actually quite a popular argument at the time, saying that only the working class is the revolutionary class, but for black people, the working class isn’t always in the factories or in the mines — sometimes its members are unemployed.

The very structural conditions that led to the expansion of white suburbia also led to the organized abandonment of cities that left a lot of black people unemployed.

Why was this significant? This was the period of the Great Society, when there was a mythology that all boats had risen, everyone was employed, and life was good. But the very structural conditions that led to the expansion of white suburbia, enabling a segment of working-class whites to make the leap into middle-class homeownership, also led to the organized abandonment of cities that left a lot of black people (and black youth in particular) unemployed.

The focus of the Black Panther Party was on organizing the so-called lumpenproletariat — those people who are often outside of the formal market, who don’t have jobs, who hustle for a living. There was a romanticization of that class or at least certainly an interest in it. Social scientists called it the “underclass.”

Again, it’s open to debate whether or not it was actually a revolutionary class. But this was the discourse at the time. It was one of the reasons why a lot of American radicals, and not just black ones, decided by the early 1970s that there was no future for them in the university as a knowledge worker. They ended up going into the factories, doing industrial work, organizing unions, and saying that’s where the working class is, that’s where the revolution will happen.

Daniel Denvir

One really important influence on this generation was Harold Cruse. Who was Cruse, and where does he fit into black radical intellectual history?

Robin D. G. Kelley

Harold Cruse was a member of the CPUSA in the 1950s, before he left the party. He was the theater critic for the Daily Worker. This was significant, because he took the position that the Left had failed at the level of culture, especially black liberals and black leftists. He eventually went on to write an essay called “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” which was published in 1967. RAM really dug what he was saying.

RAM was arguing that revolution in the US would be led by black people, often the lumpenproletariat.

There were two strands to his argument. The first strand echoed Fanon’s point that Marxism has to be stretched to be relevant to the conditions of black people. Cruse said that we could not just accept an inherited Marxism rooted in European class relations. The second strand argued that the revolutionary initiative now lay with the Third World (or the Global South, as we would call it today). That was the force that would bring about world revolution, while the US was trying to suppress this revolution against materialism and racism.

You can see why Cruse’s argument would be so appealing, especially to RAM, which made the argument that we were not just talking about international colonialism, but also domestic colonialism — that is to say, black people had more in common with colonized peoples around the world as they were a colonized people within the United States. RAM was arguing that revolution in the US would be led by black people, often the lumpenproletariat.

Daniel Denvir

You write that urban rebellions in organizations like RAM laid the foundation for the Black Panther Party’s emergence in Oakland, and that the Panthers diverged not only from cultural nationalists but also from other revolutionary nationalists on the left. What made the revolutionary vision of the Panthers so distinct?

Robin D. G. Kelley

Bobby Seale and others were members of RAM. In some ways, the Black Panther Party adopted almost all the elements of RAM’s thinking as a ten-point program. What made them distinctive was their embrace of Cruse’s idea of internal colonialism, recognizing black people as a colonized people. They were anti-capitalist and socialist. Not only did they support self-determination, but they also turned to the United Nations as a greater authority than the US state and talked about having a plebiscite for the right of black people to secede.

The Black Panther Party was also formed against the ongoing state violence that black people were experiencing. One way that they argued for to reduce police violence was to replace the police with elected groups for public safety that would help and protect people in the neighborhoods, as opposed to just reforming the police. From the very beginning, the Panthers believed in building alliances across racial lines. The rainbow coalition that emerged in Chicago under the leadership of Fred Hampton was an example of Panther politics moving in that direction.

Daniel Denvir

Medgar Evers only joined the NAACP after abandoning plans to wage a guerrilla insurgency inspired by national liberation movements in the Mississippi River Delta, and he named his first child after the Kenyan anti-colonial leader Jomo Kenyatta.

With examples like that to think about, where do we get the idea that is often put forward that there was a “good” civil rights movement that later tipped over into the more extremist and counterproductive Black Power phase? Where does that distorted picture come from and what function does it serve?

Robin D. G. Kelley

Where it comes from, I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I do know the work it does. It creates a sharp break between what’s considered to be the good, liberal movement and the bad, nationalist movement. The break usually begins with the Watts Rebellion in 1965. That’s ironic, because it’s not as if the Watts Rebellion was a nationalist insurgency.

In many ways, it’s a narrative produced by liberals who felt that the movement had become too militant, that they weren’t grateful enough to white liberals for the work they did and their support. There was a decision on the part of the new SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] leadership, when Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown came to power, to tell the white folks: “Okay, we’re still going to build with you, but you need to work in your own communities.” That is also considered to have been a significant break and a source of pain for white liberals.

Black nationalism had been a consistent presence within the United States since the early nineteenth century.

Part of the myth is that there was one thing called the civil rights movement, rather than multiple movements at multiple levels and scales all at the same time. Black nationalism had been a consistent presence within the United States since the early nineteenth century. There was never a moment when it didn’t exist. This divide obscures much more than it reveals. It makes a bit more sense if we think about all these movements together as the black freedom movement, because they didn’t all agree on what “black freedom” means.

Watts wasn’t the first major rebellion, although it might have been the biggest. Look at a place such as Cambridge, Maryland, for example, where Gloria Richardson led what was essentially a rebellion in 1960. That was an amazing movement where you had the federal government step in and try to maintain peace in a city that was essentially overturning basic civil rights laws.

Richardson and the members of the Cambridge [Nonviolent Action Committee] were fighting for basic rights — they were not fighting for integration. They were fighting for better schools and for the right to move and live wherever they wanted to live. They were fighting for the repeal of discriminatory laws. Many members of the movement carried guns to protect them, including Richardson.

Daniel Denvir

You argue that black radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s were obviously impacted severely by state repression, but you also say that they fell into a fetishization of revolutionary violence that was sometimes dangerous. That’s not just a retrospective assessment: many militants at the time made similar arguments, like Ken Cockrell of the Detroit League of Revolutionary Black Workers, for example.

Robin D. G. Kelley

There is definitely a distinction between armed self-defense and revolutionary violence. That’s not to say that revolutionary violence was limited to the North. In fact, Mississippi, the very place where armed self-defense was probably the most pervasive, also had bombings of courthouses and things like that — retaliatory violence. But I think the distinction is important for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, Ken Cockrell and others were not rejecting the right of armed self-defense. That’s a different matter. When people are coming for you, including the police, for reasons that are basically illegal or extralegal, then you have the right to defend yourself. But they were criticizing the adventurism of some organizations that were engaged in what they perceived to be guerrilla warfare or kidnappings or robberies. That didn’t help if movements had to spend all their time bailing people out.

Doing these defense campaigns was tricky because most of the people they were trying to bail out or defend in court were not the people who had actually committed the crimes. When you think about some of the most high-profile defense cases, there were people who didn’t really do what they were said to have done. Nevertheless, I understand the concern, because it was getting to be very costly to have these defense campaigns.

Secondly, the whole history of black people in North America involves assessing the strategic and tactical choices that are going to be most effective. That’s why you didn’t have a lot of massive slave insurrections during the nineteenth century in the US. You saw revolts like that in the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century, because it was more feasible in terms of security, surveillance, and policing.

The whole history of black people in North America involves assessing the strategic and tactical choices that are going to be most effective.

When those barriers are weak, you can engage in revolt, but when they’re strong, you have to come up with something different. It’s not about fear, it’s not about cowardice. It’s not about trying to support liberalism. It’s about what’s tactically smart and effective. That was a sharp line of division in some of the movements that ended up attempting robberies or other tactics based on direct revolutionary violence. They were the ones that got derailed.

Daniel Denvir

How did anti-imperialist solidarity serve both to stitch together these various black visions for freedom, but also ultimately to tear them apart?

Robin D. G. Kelley

Class was always a factor in black freedom movements, but especially during the period of the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) in the 1970s. They were supporting the armed movements against Portuguese rule in Africa as well as against white-settler rule in Zimbabwe and in South Africa. In the Portuguese colonies, the big divide was around class and Marxism.

This was a period of protracted armed struggle going back to the late 1950s. In the process, those armed struggles led to the creation of liberated zones. There were debates within those organizations about how to build a new society and what it should be based on. The PAIGC [African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde] in Guinea-Bissau, the MPLA [People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola] in Angola, and FRELIMO [Liberation Front of Mozambique] in Mozambique were organizations that had adopted Marxism by the time the ALSC began to meet with some of these revolutionaries after 1971.

At the same time, black radicals in the US were saying “we need a class analysis.” There was a major split between those who said “black liberation means all of us, and we need to do that first before we attend to class,” and those who said “we need to embrace Marxism and class analysis.” Some would say that the split along those lines led to the demise of the ALSC.

Amiri Baraka is an interesting figure here because he eventually came to embrace Marxism during this time. His poetry and the arguments he was making changed as he moved away from the cultural nationalism that had shaped his politics up to that point. Baraka broke with Kenneth Gibson, who was the first black mayor of Newark. Overall, it was a significant split in the movement that is still with us to this day.

Remember the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that King was supporting when he was assassinated. The sanitation workers were trying to get better wages and working conditions for mostly black poor workers against the mayor, Henry Loeb, who opposed them. Fast forward to 1977, and you had Maynard Jackson, the black mayor of Atlanta and a civil rights supporter, also facing a sanitation workers’ strike.

The radical vision of a working-class insurgency that could change the nation was replaced by a black leadership class promoting neoliberal policies.

It was the same situation as in Memphis. They were living with poverty wages, and some of them had to go on welfare to survive, so they went on strike. Jackson broke the strike and refused to negotiate with the union. When the sanitation workers came back and said, “look, let’s just get our jobs back, we won’t even ask for anything in return,” he refused.

Who did he get support from? The NAACP, the Urban League, the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] — that’s King’s own organization. King’s father, Daddy King, supported Maynard Jackson. In the space of eleven years, the radical vision of a working-class insurgency that could change the nation was replaced by a black leadership class promoting neoliberal policies and embodying the very danger that Fanon, Cabral, and others had warned against — in other words, a black petty bourgeoisie in power who would be junior partners in the maintenance of racial capitalism.

Daniel Denvir

What sort of relationships were there between black radical visions and more mainstream black political visions as the power and influence of various forms of black politics shifted over time?

Robin D. G. Kelley

I think it is easy to identify those relationships, such as what Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X might have had in common. However, I also think that the differences are starker than we might think. For example, the Malcolm X of 1955 is not the Malcolm X of 1963 or the Malcolm X of January 1965. Having spoken in terms of black economic power through business, he began to question it, as did King.

There’s a sharp distinction between a figure like Wilson Goode, say, on the other hand, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, on the other — two people out of Philadelphia, as it were. Now, there are moments in electoral politics where those radical possibilities do emerge and erupt. Here are a couple of examples.

In Jackson, Mississippi, there has been a movement around Chokwe Lumumba and his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, trying to implement some form of black economic self-determination based on horizontalism and redistribution. Father and son have both served as mayor of Jackson, and they’re still trying to achieve that goal, but it’s very hard.

Even if you are a committed revolutionary, you have to make strategic decisions based on an assessment of the forces behind you.

When you have outside organizations that are saying “we don’t accept compromise” and making demands, that helps keep political leaders honest in government; or if not honest, it certainly keeps them under pressure. It’s a constant tension.

Amiri Baraka’s son, Ras Baraka, has served for a long time as mayor of Newark, trying to implement some radical ideas, but again, he’s been constrained by the limits of government. He has had to make choices that progressive and radical people in Newark don’t agree with.

No matter what your ideology is, governing is always going to be a challenge. It’s also a challenge when you run an institution versus just running a small organization, where you can pretty much say and do anything you want.

If you’re dependent on funding and being reelected, relying on support from a constituency that may not share your politics, then you have to compromise. There’s no easy answer, because even if you are a committed revolutionary, you have to make strategic decisions based on an assessment of the forces behind you.

Daniel Denvir

The black feminist movement has become extremely consequential in recent years. What, in the broad sweep of these histories you tell, does this signify?

Robin D. G. Kelley

It is very significant. This is not the first time we’ve had queer trans leadership — it’s just the first time it’s been quite open and acknowledged as a key part of the political vision that people are fighting for. The Movement for Black Lives, which of course is a coalition of a hundred or more different organizations, has made black feminism, LGBTQ politics, and disability justice a critical part of black freedom or black liberation. That’s new.

This was what Barbara Smith always meant by identity politics. To the Combahee River Collective, identity politics never meant that your individual identity was going to define your interests, needs, and wants. It was about the way that the structures of oppression intersected.

When we talk about “class first,” for example, you can’t have “class first” unless you can define who the class is. If the class is seen as including those who are female or femme, queer or trans, immigrants as well as native-born workers, indigenous and racialized people, then the analysis of oppression and what liberation looks like is going to include all of those connections and identities, not just your individual interests. That’s what the Combahee River Collective and other organizations brought to the table.

Black feminists have always adopted the position that capitalism is not helping anyone, patriarchy is not helping anyone, and racism is not helping anyone.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re out of the woods, because these are people who took a huge leap of faith and courage and are now facing a backlash, precisely because we have greater visibility. The test for us is whether or not we’re going to choose a form of identity politics that recognizes the way that people who are not us are oppressed and exploited.

That’s also the power of black feminism. Black feminists have always adopted the position that capitalism is not helping anyone, patriarchy is not helping anyone, and racism is not helping anyone. They’re imagining and fighting for a new world without patriarchy and gendered violence, without state violence and class oppression. That is the world they’re trying to build, not a private, exclusive world in which black women and black men alone would benefit.

You can have identity politics as a revolutionary phenomenon, and then you can have identity movements that sometimes impose a litmus test on political participation. We’re dealing with situations where people in movements may make mistakes. They may not be as educated on using gender pronouns or on how to interact with others in a way that allows them the opportunity to speak freely. Those are things that people have to learn. We have to build movements that allow people who make mistakes to learn, advance, and participate.

You build movements in struggle. This goes back to the original theme of the book. Solidarity is not a market exchange. What we’re seeing in these new movements is a principle of solidarity without the expectation that you’re going to get something in return. You show up at Standing Rock, you show up at the border, or you show up in front of a Los Angeles Police Department station. You show up wherever you need to show up for others because you know your liberation is tied not just to your needs, but to the needs of others with whom you may not have any necessary identification.

As the old-fashioned slogan goes, an injury to one is an injury to all. You don’t need to be empathetic — you need to be in solidarity. You don’t need to understand what people feel, but you do need to stand there for them, because you know that oppression is oppression no matter what.

Daniel Denvir

How does utopian imagining relate to the work of evaluating our successes and failures and developing plans for our movements to win?

Robin D. G. Kelley

It all works together. Let me just say a couple of things. I’m not against the language of winning. But so many organizations now depend on the nonprofit-industrial complex. Sometimes the work involves the ability to establish a base, a culture, a sense of community in which people stick together for the long term. Yet if you cannot prove within a short period of time that you are winning a campaign, then you lose your funding. It’s that simple. If funders put their money behind winnable campaigns, then some of the more long-term work doesn’t get funded.

If you’re building a movement around housing, there are several things you could do. One thing, of course, is to make sure that people are not evicted immediately. That’s a win. But if all you’re doing is running around to make sure people don’t get evicted, then you don’t really have the time or the luxury to think about social housing and how to win that.

Du Bois said at one point that socialist states have a right to fail. To fail is not the end, because failure is part of the process of creating the new world. Often, we only want to write about the movements that we think won, because who cares about the ones that didn’t? Part of my argument in the book is that there were all kinds of different movements that laid some foundations and built visions of a new society that we need to pay attention to. We just don’t know about them because they didn’t win.

That’s not the same thing as saying we should not build campaigns that have a tangible outcome, because if you don’t have campaigns like that, you won’t hold people. That’s obvious. But there are multiple ways to solve people’s problems and build movements. Along each one of those paths, you are bound to fail at some point, so don’t turn failure into an end. You should turn failure into part of the dialectic of producing new forms of social knowledge, which is the whole point of being in a social movement in the first place.

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NBC News reported this week that Trump is not only still leading the GOP field, but that his margin is growing:

“Former President Donald Trump has expanded his lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the rest of the Republican presidential field since Trump’s latest indictment on federal criminal charges, according to a new national NBC News poll.”

Another national survey, reported by NBC on Monday, shows a tossup in a Trump-Biden matchup; Biden’s small lead is within the margin of error.

All of which raises the question: what would America be like if Trump or a similarly fascist Republican were to take the White House in 2024? What would the dire warnings about American fascism, were they realized, mean in real life?

Louise and I have been in Spain all this week while Jefferson Smith fills in for me on my radio/TV show, and we’ve learned more than a little that might answer those questions.

Most Americans, when they think of fascism, think of goosestepping Nazi soldiers and death camps, and believe that system of government was totally crushed by the Allies in 1945 at the end of World War II. But Spain was fascist right up until dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 at the age of 82.

There are still many people here in Spain who regard the Franco time fondly; if you were on his side, supported his Falange party — later called simply “The Movement” — or were assiduously nonpolitical, life could be relatively normal.

Just this morning a Spaniard we spent a few hours with told us how most people simply avoided politics back during Franco’s time — and are still, to this day, reluctant to discuss the horrors of his regime.

“There is talk of reparations for his victims,” she said, “but it is very contentious. Mostly, people avoid discussing those times.”

If you weren’t political, life went on like in much of the rest of “free” Europe. People worked, went to theatre and dance clubs, raised their kids, vacationed, cared for pets, engaged in hobbies, fell in love or got divorced: as long as Franco’s regime wasn’t mentioned in a negative light, life was good.

Like in most fascist or neofascist countries through history and today the wealthy were the most well taken care of, but even working people and the poor enjoyed a reasonable social safety net. In 1942, Franco mandated a national healthcare insurance program, for example, and throughout his reign expanded the number of hospital beds and clinics across the country; in 1951 he led a movement through much of the Spanish speaking world to establish what something like American Social Security.

If you spoke out against his fascist movement job opportunities vanished, you could be imprisoned, or even “disappeared,” as happened to tens of thousands. One of the people we spoke with here told us how the media was entirely in the bag for Franco with pro-fascist slogans and news shorts airing constantly, along with commentary praising him even interspersing music and programs on radio and TV.

Trump and his followers have given us numerous insights into how he’d transform American society to resemble something like Franco’s regime. Like with Franco, loyalty to Trump and his cult was a far more important factor in rising through the ranks of government and even private industry.

Trump has promised — most recently just a few weeks ago — that he would use the awesome police powers of the federal government to target his political enemies for persecution, imprisonment, and possibly even death.

Several former DOJ officials, men Trump has suggested could lead the agency if he again becomes president, have endorsed stripping our federal police agencies of their independence and making them armed factions of Trump’s movement.

Republicans don’t talk about it out loud very much, unlike Nixon’s man G. Gordon Liddy, who used to love on fascism back in the day when he signed memos using Hitler’s SS symbol. But MAGA Republicans have a model for a future America and it grows both closer and clearer every day.

What could it be? What would it look like? How will it most likely come about?

First, and essential to American fascism, Republicans envision a strong-man Leader who will hold power for as long as he (it’s almost always a “he”) chooses, with the transition to the next Leader determined by The Leader himself.

This has been the primary characteristic of every fascist-type of government to emerge in the 7000-year written history of the modern world.

When Trump was running for re-election, at rallies in both Nevada and Wisconsin, he came right out and said that not only would he win the 2020 election but that he’d also be re-elected again in 2024 and 2028. He was dead serious.

Sure, our constitution says a president can only serve two terms: so did the Russian constitution, until Putin got it amended. Trump was planning the same, and his followers were — if the response at the rallies when he announced it is any indicator — ecstatic at the prospect.

That single strongman Leader, and his hand-selected toadies at every secondary or tertiary level of government, is the key to understanding everything else that happens when a country flips from democracy to oligarchy to fascism.

For example, in a fascist state the way that you as an average citizen ensure your own advancement and economic, personal, and political security is by sucking up to that one man (albeit often through one of his factotum’s). You either become an acolyte/follower or you find yourself on the outside looking in.

If you think this sounds extreme, just look at today’s Republican Party, which has become the prototype for how these MAGA Republicans will reinvent the United States if they gain power.

Liz Cheney spoke against Trump, and the Wyoming GOP expelled her while Trump supported a primary challenger. Four Republicans who voted to impeach Trump faced such a backlash that they decided to retire from politics: Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Gonzalez, John Katko, and Fred Upton.

Not only is fealty to The Leader required for political advancement, it’s also a requirement for individual economic advancement. Employers eager for state contracts or The Leader’s endorsements of their products or services demote or fire those insufficiently loyal to The Leader.

Psychologist Dr. Bandy Lee was fired from Yale University for writing that Trump was dangerously mentally ill. Schoolteacher Leah Kinyon was fired from her job for saying that “I hate Donald Trump. … He is a sexual predator. He’s a literal moron.” Juli Brisker was fired from her job with government contractor Akima for giving Trump’s motorcade the finger.

Rebekah Jones was fired by Ron DeSantis for telling the truth about his covering up Florida Covid statistics. Florida’s Orange County Health Director Dr. Raul Pino was removed for encouraging his staff to get vaccinated.

When companies defy The Leader they are brutally punished, as DeSantis is doing right now to Disney and the Tampa Bay Rays. Soon companies don’t even try to stand up to The Leader, including media companies.

And now Trump mini-me DeSantis has signed legislation giving him the authority to “hold accountable” college professors, reviewing their politics every five years so those who aren’t totally on board with his agenda can lose tenure and be fired. The headline at Salon says it all:

“DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state: Universities may lose funding if staff and students’ beliefs do not satisfy Florida’s GOP-run legislature.”

You end up doing things on The Leader’s behalf, whether you’re supporting his party, working at a private corporation, or engaged in the nonprofit sector like teaching at a university or medical center.

Defying or challenging The Leader brings opprobrium; supporting The Leader is the path to career advancement. The Trump White House and DeSantis Governor’s Office are filled with examples.

Everything is done for The Leader because The Leader is the state. The state and The Leader have become one.

If you challenge The Leader, you’re challenging the state, and that’s treason. As Marjorie Taylor Greene said of former speaker Pelosi:

“She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law, representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government — and it’s a crime punishable by death”.

Whatever the Leader says becomes the law. This is called “rule by decree” and it’s where every fascist in history – including those for the thousands of years before Mussolini “invented” the word – has ended up.

The power to rule by decree goes back to the days of kings and is also embedded in our laws about the president’s emergency powers. Trump came close to invoking it with an “emergency declaration” when he lost the election. General Flynn begged him to do it and “temporarily suspend the Constitution.”

It now appears that the reason Trump was showing classified Iranian battle plans to reporters at Bedminister was to trash-talk General Mark Milley as “revenge” for Milley’s refusing to use the military like Flynn wanted to complete the January 6th coup.

Next time, he won’t be so restrained and he will have surrounded himself in advance with people like Flynn who will make it happen.

Yet, while it will change how power is distributed in our government, things will still look much the same, just like during Franco’s reign here in Spain.

If a fascist like Trump or DeSantis rises to power again in the United States, there will still be all the trappings of democracy.

The House and Senate, state houses and governors, bureaucracies and political systems will remain intact. Everything looks normal on the surface.

But when you peel off the top layer, you discover that all of those people in all of those offices, whether elected or bureaucratic, are serving only one principle and one person and that is The Leader.

Be they governors, secretaries of state, United States senators, members of the US House, state representatives, or even a part-time guy working at a polling place in Michigan, they might get a call at any time from The Leader demanding that they do something for him, whether it’s legal or not.

There will still be opposition parties and political candidacies in a Republican fascist America, although if any of them seriously challenges The Leader or shows the ability to disrupt the status quo, they’ll be discovered to have a secret drug habit or get imprisoned for corruption or other made-up charges.

Nobody will really notice, though. People will just shrug their shoulders and assume another crook got caught. The swamp is being cleaned up.

The prosperity of the company you work for will depend in part on how well it supports the politics of The Leader. Today we see this writ large in Russia and the GOP’s new role model, Hungary.

The Leader helps a few dozen oligarchs he knows are loyal to him seize control of the nation’s major industries, and every smaller company in each of those industries must directly or indirectly answer to that oligarch.

Those who fail to are bought out, shut down, or simply cannot find customers or supplies because nobody will do business with them.

The industry where this is most visible at first is the media.

Some media organizations will be absorbed by the government itself, as Putin has done in Russia; others will be bought out and run by the Leader’s oligarch buddies, as is the case today in Hungary and Turkey (among others).

Soon opposition voices vanish from all but the most obscure media, and those few opposing voices that are tolerated are pointed to by the Leader as proof the nation “is still an open democracy.”

Jews and people of color may find a rougher time maintaining a job or staying safe from vigilantes, abuse, and discrimination but white conservatives will be just fine, particularly white conservative men. The majority of Americans, so long as they pay attention to football instead of politics, won’t even notice how the nation has changed.

There will still be Christmas parties, although people celebrating Hanukkah or Muslims praying may want to pull the shades closed.

Hate crimes and murders by vigilante groups start happening with such frequency that the media doesn’t bother to report them anymore.

Within a few years a little bit of every business activity in the country ends up in The Leader’s pocket. And The Leader uses that revenue to enrich himself, his inner circle, and those who are part of his military entourage, his private military.

That’s right: The Leader’s private military.

It’d be put together like what Ron DeSantis is organizing in Florida right now, a state-sanctioned militia that answers only to The Leader, in this case DeSantis. Trump tried the same in 2020, flying 700+ Customs and Border Protection and other federal officers into Portland where they hit the streets without identification on their uniforms to beat and kidnap people protesting George Floyd’s murder.

When the private militia is created at the federal level it’ll become a substantial national military force with hundreds of thousands of soldiers under The Leader’s direct command. Hitler’s was called the SS and answered only to The Leader himself. Mussolini and Franco had theirs, as Putin, Erdoğan, el-Sisi, bin Salman, and others do today.

Citing “national security,” The Leader’s private militia will have an undisclosed and therefore vast budget. Outside of times it’s called on to intimidate people or make a public display of power, it’ll largely operate in secret.

Its members won’t have to obey the law because, as agents of The Leader who’s above the law, they are, too. If they have to kill somebody, there will be no investigation unless it’s to cover up the crime. If they need to make somebody disappear, that person disappears. At first it’ll be done by stochastic terrorism: lone wolf actors not directly connected to The Leader but answering his general call to punish political evildoers.

Just ask Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence.

The Leader’s oligarch buddies and their media machine, along with his well-indoctrinated followers, promote a law-and-order crime ideology that results in high levels of incarceration, heavily militarized police, and a disregard for the general rights of the average citizen, particularly racial and religious minorities.

As “future dystopian” as all this may sound, there are more governments in the world run this way today than there are democracies. It’s “normal.”

Once established it’s almost impossible to dislodge without a crisis like the death of The Leader or an actual revolution. Just ask any Russian. Or Spaniards who were alive in 1975.

Some of the governments around the world that are structured like this were democracies that turned fascist, like Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. But many have been this way for centuries, including the hereditary kingdoms in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

So, how do the democratic countries that make the transition to fascism allow that to happen? And what is life like in those countries, both during and after the time that it’s happened?

We can’t say we weren’t warned by our own people, our own politicians, the most senior members of our own institutional power structure.

In a speech that was hysterically criticized by Republicans and Fox “News“ pundits, President Obama in December of 2017 came right out and said it:

“You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we’ve seen societies where that happens.”

Yes, the former President of the United States invoked Nazi Germany six years ago while Donald Trump was President, adding:

“Now, presumably, there was a ballroom in Vienna in the late 1920s or ’30s that looked and seemed as if it ― filled with the music and art and literature and the science that was emerging ― would continue into perpetuity.
“And then,” President Obama said, “60 million people died. And the entire world was plunged into chaos.”

The warnings have been there all along. I wrote of this in 2005, quoting Mayer and going off on Bush and the PATRIOT Act as the prequel to fascism.

Americans have been shouting about it lately, in venues like The New York Times and Madeline Albright’s book and from legislators like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And now the President of the United States warns Americans that a fascist movement within our own nation is at our door, and will either be soundly defeated in the next election or will seize power and end our form of government:

“What we’re seeing now is [either] the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden told a group of Democratic donors. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

His comment got only a passing mention in the news.

But, still, how do we know? Is there a sudden proclamation by The Leader that the nation is now “officially fascist”?

After World War II, a Chicago reporter named Milton Mayer struggled to understand how Hitler was able to flip one of the world’s most stable democracies into fascism.

An American Jew of German ancestry and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany seven years after Hitler’s fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

A German professor who made it through the war by avoiding politics told Mayer:

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

In the next election, many of us will no longer be able to know if our voices, our attempts to vote, will actually decide who leads our nation.

Many Americans will show up at the polls to discover they are no longer registered to vote. Many of our mail-in ballots will be “challenged” by Republican vote observers and we won’t learn about it until after the election is long over.

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that you can be purged from the voting rolls on a whim. In the majority of US states Republicans can take over electoral precincts, install their people (as we just learned they are doing right now) and run them under whatever rules they want.

Already in some states when the GOP inflicts 10-hour lines to vote on people in Democratic districts, for example, and you go to jail if you bring them water. If you make a mistake on your voting registration or ballot, or help another person register to vote, in multiple Red states the governors can choose to send you to prison for five years or more.

Somehow, of the many people from both parties who are busted for this, it seems only the Democrats end up going to prison.

And yet everything seems “normal.” As Mayer’s professor friend told him, when the Leader finally seizes control of all the levers of power from political to economic to spiritual, everything changes but everything also stays the same:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.
“Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

We’re already quite a ways down this road, which is why both our media and our democracy have been rated by numerous international groups as being “at risk” or similar designations.

Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the proliferation of phony media selling rightwing propaganda as “news,” armed militias on our streets (and the GOP recruiting them for “election monitors”) are the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?” Mayer’s friend asked rhetorically.

And, without the benefit of a previous, recent, and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, Mayer had to candidly answer:

“Frankly, I do not know.”

That was 1954; this is 2023. We now know.

We know how the poisonous hate that animates fascism seeps into a society because we saw it ourselves during the 4 years of the Trump administration.

We’re watching it in Red states across the country as MAGA Republicans replace honorable Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

We know how easily a government can be toppled and how close we came on January 6, 2021: if just five Republicans hadn’t refused to go along with Trump we’d be in this fascist dystopia today.

MAGA Republicans across the country are calling for a Franco-like government as you’re reading these words. They believe so long as they’re loyal to Leader and Party everything will be good for them and theirs, and, generally speaking, they’re right.

As President Biden said last year:

“We can’t take democracy for granted any longer. … Make no mistake. Democracy is on the ballot.”

The only way we can avoid repeating the experience of Spain, Germany, Hungary, Russia, and Chile (among others) is to overwhelmingly repudiate — defeat — Trump’s and the MAGA Republicans’ movement at the polls.

And the first step to that is to wake up everybody we know. As Leadbelly famously said, “Stay woke!”

Representatives of hibakusha — the Japanese community of survivors of the United States’ bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — are denouncing an agreement between the U.S. and Japan that equates the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians with at a World War II attack on a key U.S. naval base. The Biden administration last week signed an agreement with Hiroshima Mayor…

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