Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

Earlier this month, amid increasing death threats, the synagogue of the judge who signed the…

President Joe Biden delivered a speech last week from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in which he warned that former President Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters “represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

Nick Fuentes, the racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, America-hating, Christian fascist leader of the white nationalist America First movement, is precisely the sort of MAGA activist that Biden was warning about. So naturally, Fuentes reacted to Biden’s speech Thursday night by unleashing an extended rant in which declared that “the United States of America is controlled by Satan” and has been taken over by “the Jews.”

“[Biden] is saying ‘Look, I’m the big gay American empire, and I’m gonna kill all the enemies of liberalism,” Fuentes said. “That’s what he’s saying. Biden is there saying, ‘This is global homo and I’m the puppet face of it. I’m the puppet face of world Jewry and global homo and we’re gonna crush all these fascists.’”

“The whole thing is just a lie,” Fuentes continued. “The whole thing is a sham. Biden is a puppet. The elections are fake. The social media companies are rigged. The elections are rigged. The news couldn’t be more Jewed-up; Jewed-up, moneyed-up, corporate, under the thumb of the Illuminati, whatever. It’s all real man.”

“The devil is in charge of the world,” Fuentes griped. “Satan is in charge of America. If you don’t realize that, you’re not paying attention. And that’s not even an exaggeration. Satan runs America. I’m a patriot, but the United States of America is controlled by Satan right now. The United States is the great Satan in the world. The United States is controlled by Satan. The regime that runs America is controlled by Satan. And the regime that controls America is the empire that casts a shadow over the world. Satan runs the Western world. When you talk about the West, when you talk about democracy, you’re talking about the devil.”

“If you don’t see the hand of the demonic and all of this, you’re not paying attention,” he said. “It’s the porn empire. It’s the gay porno, abortion, feminist, diabolic empire. That’s what America stands for and it’s wrong.”

“Wake up and smell the coffee, this is an evil country,” Fuentes went on. “Until this country stands for God and the godly, this is an evil country. So, that’s just the way it is. And look at who runs it: a lot of Jews. The Jews hate me. The Jews hate me. And do you know else the Jews hate? Jesus Christ. I hate to say it. Nobody wants to say that part. People want to talk about the [Chinese communists] and everything else. I’m sick of it. You know what? It’s Jews.”

“Fuck democracy,” Fuentes proclaimed. “I stand with Jesus Christ. You can have Philadelphia, and you can have democracy. Democracy is the soul of our nation? You can have it. Christ is the soul of this nation. You can have the United States. Christ is the soul of America. We’re going to have a new country; it’s not going to be called the United States, it’s going to be called America [and] it’s going to be a Christian nation.”

Earlier this year, Fuentes hosted an America First conference at which the audience of white nationalists was addressed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Paul Gosar, Arizona state Rep. Wendy Rogers, far-right former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpiao, and Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin. Fuentes is also the founder of an “anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Black, antisemitic” streaming platform that is populated almost entirely by far-right anti-LGBTQ bigots, misogynists, antisemites, racists, and Christian fascists.

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The post ‘This Is an Evil Country’: Christian Fascist Nick Fuentes Fumes Over Biden Speech appeared first on Right Wing Watch.

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Harlem’s Riverside Church to a crowd of thousands that flowed out the door as far as 120th Street. King publicly condemned the Vietnam War because it had “broken and eviscerated” the civil-rights and anti-poverty movements at home. The American government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Read: Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War

In 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked another MLK speech while asking Congress to help his country repel the Russian invasion. “‘I have a dream.’ These words are known to each of you today. I can say, ‘I have a need: I need to protect our sky.’” Two months later, Democrats voted unanimously in favor of a $40 billion package of arms and other assistance to Kyiv.

These two moments capture an important shift in how the American left thinks about the U.S. military and war more generally. Progressives typically see war as inherently murderous and dehumanizing—sapping progress, curtailing free expression, and channeling resources into the “military-industrial complex.” The left led the opposition to the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and condemned American war crimes from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib. Historically, progressive critics have charged the military with a litany of sins, including discrimination against LGBTQ soldiers and a reliance on recruiting in poor communities.

Meanwhile, for decades, the right embraced America’s warriors. Defense hawks were one of the three legs of the “Reagan stool,” along with social and fiscal conservatives. The military itself leaned right. One study found that from 1976 to 1996, the number of Army officers who identified as Republican increased from one-third to two-thirds. In 2016, according to a poll in the Military Times, active service members favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly two to one.

In the past few years, however, these views have started to change. From 2021 to 2022, the share of Republicans who had “a great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in the military fell from 81 to 71 percent, whereas for Democrats, the number increased from 63 to 67 percent—cutting the gap from 18 points to four. And the military’s views shifted in tandem. In 2020, dozens of former Republican national-security officials endorsed President Joe Biden because Trump had “gravely damaged America’s role as a world leader.” In one poll before the 2020 election, more active service members backed Biden than Trump (41 to 37 percent).

Why has this happened? Two big reasons are Trump and Ukraine.

Trump saw the military as a symbol of power and surrounded himself with a phalanx of generals. But when he realized they were not a Praetorian Guard that would do his bidding, defend him against all enemies foreign and domestic, and keep him in office by force if necessary, he soured on the military. Trump trampled on its most sacred beliefs and rituals, saying that U.S. generals were “dopes” and “babies” who “want to do nothing but fight wars.” Americans killed in battle, he said, were “losers” and “suckers.” Trump suggested that Gold Star families had spread COVID at the White House. He railed against American prisoners of war: “I like people who weren’t captured.” He pardoned three service members accused or convicted of war crimes, even though military leaders said it would erode the military’s code of justice. In his testimony to Congress, Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, said that Trump had told him to ready the National Guard to protect his supporters on January 6, rather than Congress itself. All of this created a fundamental clash with the military’s code of honor and its commitment to the Constitution. Trump wondered why American generals couldn’t be more like Hitler’s generals—by which he meant the loyalist fanatics who battled in the ruins of Berlin, not the Wehrmacht officials who tried to assassinate the Nazi dictator.

Since he left office, Trump has fueled the conservative belief that Biden is indoctrinating the armed forces with liberal ideas. Republican Senator Ted Cruz said the U.S. military is suffering from a “woke cancer” and is in danger of becoming “a bunch of pansies.” The Fox News host Laura Ingraham suggested defunding the military until it abandons its diversity programs: “Go after their budget.”

It’s true that the military has moved left, and not just because of Trump. After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, Kaleth Wright tweeted: “Who am I? I am a Black man who happens to be Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force.” Last year the Pentagon warned, “To keep the nation secure, we must tackle the existential threat of climate change.”

This shouldn’t be so surprising. The military is the epitome of big government, with egalitarian wages, socialized medicine, and the best government-run child-care system in the country. No wonder General Wesley Clark joked that it’s “the purest application of socialism there is.” Now progressives are expressing a new gratitude for an institution that understands the value of diversity, cares about the rule of law, and was willing to stand up to Trump when the future of democracy was most in danger. At a time of rampant conspiracy theories like QAnon, liberals appreciate that the military operates in a world of tangible threats and complex logistics and has a basic respect for reality. George Orwell said people often cling to falsehoods until the lie slams into the truth, “usually on a battlefield.”

Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. No foreign conflict since the Spanish Civil War has so captured the imagination of the left. Nearly a century ago, many progressives saw Spain as a pure fight between democracy and fascism. Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls and Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica captured the horror at fascist brutality. About 3,000 Americans traveled to Spain to fight in the international brigades. Today, many on the left see Ukraine as another contest between fascism and democracy, and that rare thing: a good war. Thousands of Americans have gone to join the struggle.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is the antithesis of everything the left stands for. Not only did he launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign democratic nation, but he has also disparaged LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, and immigration, and claimed that “the liberal idea” has “outlived its purpose.” Zelensky, in contrast, has built bridges with the global left. He addressed the Glastonbury music festival, in the U.K., where the revelers chanted his name to the tune of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” In Germany, the Green Party led the charge to supply weapons to Kyiv, overturning decades of German wariness about intervening in foreign wars. LGBTQ protesters in Berlin also demanded that Germany step up arms shipments to Ukraine, so that a Pride parade can, one day, be held in the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol. Ukrainian liberals—artists, translators, teachers, filmmakers—have joined the struggle. As one writer put it: “All our hipsters in Ukraine fight.”

To be sure, there’s a leftist fringe in the United States that still considers America the world’s evil empire and remains deeply hostile to its military power. That fringe includes the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, who praised Trump as a model statesman for pushing for a negotiated peace in Ukraine. But the bulk of the left has shown remarkable solidarity with the Ukrainian cause. Liberals who once protested the Iraq War now urge Washington to dispatch more rocket launchers to defeat Russian imperialism. Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a member of the progressive caucus, tweeted: “We unequivocally stand with the global Ukrainian community in the wake of Putin’s attack.”

The main opposition to helping Ukraine has come from the right. Trump, who has long praised Putin as a “genius,” questioned why Americans were sending so much money to Ukraine. Most congressional Republicans backed the aid package to Kyiv in May, but 11 Republican senators and 57 House Republicans opposed it. Republican Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted that if the GOP takes the House in the upcoming midterms, support for Ukraine will end. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that Ukraine is an American puppet state, and that his real enemies are not in Moscow but on the American left: “Has Putin ever called me a racist?”

In March, Democrats were 10 points more likely than Republicans to say that Washington “has a responsibility to protect and defend Ukraine from Russia.” By July, this gap had grown to 22 points. Another recent survey found that Democrats were more supportive than Republicans of sending weapons to Ukraine as well as of accepting Ukrainian refugees in the United States. A remarkable 42 percent of Democrats favored deploying American troops to Ukraine, versus 34 percent of Republicans.

Progressives have always viewed foreign conflicts and domestic struggles as connected—with war being either a dangerous contagion or a righteous crusade. A poster from the Spanish Civil War showed the image of a dead child: “If you tolerate this, your children will be next.” A generation later, the pendulum swung, and King saw intervention in Vietnam as a threat to civil rights in America. Today, the pendulum has swung back, and the left sees the march for freedom in America and the battle to defend Ukraine as part of the same global fight for democracy. After all, the aggressor in Ukraine—Putin—also meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump.

Will the alliance between the left and the military last? Progressives may grow nervous about escalation in Ukraine or lose interest in the war. The economy remains the most pressing issue for most Americans. Perhaps, like Orwell in Catalonia, some American volunteers in Ukraine may decide that the struggle is not as pure as they thought. The left’s underlying concerns about the U.S. military have hardly disappeared. Republicans may one day shove Trump offstage and try to get the ’80s band back together—defense hawks, social conservatives, and fiscal conservatives.

But for now, Trump remains the dominant force in the Republican Party. The Ukrainian cause remains resonant. And the left may worry about another authoritarian great power that threatens a smaller democracy: China mobilizing against Taiwan.

An era of liberal hawkishness should not mean an unthinking embrace of the military. America needs a strong progressive voice to check the rampant waste in the military-industrial complex (which ran to hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan). The military has very real problems, like the crisis of sexual assault. It doesn’t benefit from the sort of soft-focus “Thank you for your service” reverence that has prevented people from asking tough questions about America’s disastrous wars in the past. On Ukraine, liberals can channel Washington’s policy in a more progressive direction, stressing human rights, pressing for investment in green technology to reduce reliance on Russian energy, and going after Moscow’s dirty money.

In the end, the U.S. military is the world’s anti-fascist insurance policy. The insurance premiums may be outlandish. And most of the time we don’t need the policy. Until one day we do. If you need to ship M777 howitzers to Ukraine, the military-industrial complex has its uses.

In 1967, King was right to see Vietnam as a catastrophe for America, at home and abroad. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.” But today we face a different world, and a stark choice. Zelensky, Ukrainian progressives, and the European Union? Or Putin, Trump, and Tucker Carlson? The left picked the right side.

Following torrential downpours last week, Jackson, Mississippi—the state’s capital and largest city—is still without safe water for drinking, bathing, or brushing teeth. The city is home to 180,000 people, more than 80 percent of whom are Black and a quarter of whom fall below the poverty line. The immediate crisis was triggered by flooding in the Pearl River and Ross R. Barnett Reservoir that overwhelmed the city’s long-neglected water treatment infrastructure.

Jackson’s water issues, though, are long-running and well known to residents; they were first told to boil their water in July. Many haven’t sipped tap water for years. This isn’t the first time Jackson has gone without clean water, either. The city suffered through a similar ordeal last winter, when cold weather froze the pipes and residents were told to boil their water for a month.

It’s hard to imagine that a similarly sized, richer, and less Black city—say Fort Lauderdale, Florida, or Providence, Rhode Island—facing a crisis of this magnitude would have received this little national attention for so long. It’s hard to know exactly where to trace the origins of what’s been happening in Jackson: to a Republican state government that has routinely dismissed years of warnings from the left-leaning city? A botched private contract that only worsened the city’s already struggling water systems? Or decades of white flight—sparked by Brown v. Board of Education—that decimated the city’s tax base and ability to furnish basic services? A broader explanation could stretch back further still, to the white insurgency that sought to defeat multiracial democracy with organized terrorism after the Civil War, and to slavery. Climate change only promises to send more floods—and storms, droughts, and fires—crashing into more history and the infrastructure that history has built, or rather dismantled.

The story of Jackson’s water crisis, that is—exhaustively detailed by in-state reporters and organizers—is an all-American one. And it offers a preview for how climate change will play out here. That the issues involved are so ordinary doesn’t make them any less horrific.

Many were reportedly optimistic this Thursday as the state moved to install a rented water pump. But overhauling the city’s water system is expected to cost at least $1 billion, and it’ll cost much more to future-proof it against ever-worsening weather. The entire state received $75 million to upgrade its water systems from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.

In attempting to do that, residents of Jackson face an uphill battle in the face of both the limited federal funds on offer and a state government with limited interest in helping them out. Jackson is not the only city facing that problem. The GOP—whose party line is that Democrats should not be allowed to govern—enjoys trifecta control over 23 states. So long as that’s true, those states will not pass climate policy. But they may well also block whatever federal climate funds they can from being rolled out within their borders, blunting the impact of the limited national policy that does exist via the Inflation Reduction Act.

Here’s one example of how that may play out. State officials and energy offices are charged with administering a $4.3 billion rebate program for energy efficiency upgrades and another $4.3 billion in electrification rebates for installing heat pumps, electric stoves, and other appliances. In some red states, renewable energy and its associated devices have proliferated despite political leaders’ opposition to climate policies, and many utility companies are writing their own plans for ditching fossil fuels, eventually, eager to cash in on the declining cost of wind and solar. But several states are erecting barriers to these market dynamics. Ohio and West Virginia have each passed massive bailouts for coal, and the Texas legislature is moving ahead with a proposal that would erroneously penalize the state’s enormous amount of wind and solar power as a scapegoat for power outages in recent years. Furthermore, as I wrote this week, a growing number of state financial officers are trying to keep financial institutions from even considering climate risks.

It’s also hard to overstate the sheer level of contempt Republican state governors and legislatures have for the Democratic cities within their borders—especially if those cities happen to be majority Black. When the city government of Jackson requested $47 million to repair its water systems after last winter’s crisis, it got just $3 million. “The city of Jackson is grateful for the support that we are now receiving from the state,” Mayor Chokwe Lumumba told reporters this week. “We’ve been going it alone for the better part of two years when it comes to the Jackson water crisis.” Biden has put the ball in the court of Republican Governor Tate Reeves, saying he’s given the state government “everything there is to offer.” Reeves, a Conservative Political Action Conference regular, denied funds for Jackson to make upgrades in the past and blamed city officials for their water troubles.

In advance of a “Stop the Steal Rally” in Jackson last November, Republican State Representative Steve Hopkins dubbed the city “Mordor on the Pearl”—Mordor being the city where evil goblin hybrids and their power-hungry dictator live in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, and the Pearl being the river that runs through Jackson. (Hopkins later apologized.) State-level officials like Hopkins, it’s important to understand, have the ability to ration Jackson’s access to state and federal resources. They also determine what powers cities have to raise revenue—a major issue for Jackson as it’s tried to repair its water system in recent years. Limited funds were part of what led the city to seek out a $90 million contract with the German electronics firm Siemens to upgrade its payment systems.

Hostile state-city relationships are already hobbling the latter’s ability to prepare for rising temperatures. Louisiana’s State Bond Commission has voted repeatedly to deny New Orleans a line of credit to finance power stations for drainage pipes that would protect the city from flooding. Their rationale? City officials’ opposition to the state’s near-total ban on abortion, including pledges from the sheriffs’ office, district attorney, and City Council not to enforce it. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry—who urged the bond commission to reject NOLA’s request—said the state should “use the tools at our disposal to bring them [meaning the city of New Orleans] to heel, quite frankly.”

Liberals have touted states and cities as engines of climate policy if Republicans retake Congress or the White House in the coming years. But clearly, these polities could also be the site of the country’s most dystopian resistance to such policies, and response to rising temperatures. Many are arguably already laboratories for eco-apartheid. States that stand to face a steady drumbeat of climate disasters—and are already dealing with several—are rapidly passing laws to proliferate guns, restrict voting rights, and further criminalize immigrants, taking away access to health care and education. What, to these state officials, will count as an emergency? And how will they respond?

Easy as it is to cast blame on Republican politicians for ignoring suffering, self-described champions of a liberal world order have been more than willing to do the same. Flooding in Pakistan has now submerged a third of the country, displacing some 35 million people, wiping out agricultural lands, and killing at least 1,200. For years at U.N. climate talks, U.S. negotiators on both sides of the aisle have routinely fought back against the idea that rich countries responsible for the vast majority of historical emissions should help other countries adapt to and recover from the mess they’ve played an outsize role creating. While home to just 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States is responsible for 21.5 percent of the carbon emitted since 1959; rich countries are responsible for 90 percent of historical emissions. Pakistan accounts for just 0.4 percent. With climate finance from wealthy governments still sparse, Pakistan and other climate-vulnerable countries—many of which now face urgent and worsening debt crises—will be forced to seek additional loans from the International Monetary Fund as they rebuild and brace for the next storm. Rich countries have failed to deliver even on their own modest pledge of $100 billion per year in climate finance, mustering just $79.8 billion in 2019. Roughly 80 percent of that is loans.

There’s plenty the U.S. could do to help remedy that and other situations, short of paying its climate debt: redistributing its unused, IMF-issued Special Drawing Rights; backing another dispersal of those funds at the IMF; and calling for debt-for-climate swaps as well as more widespread debt forgiveness, so that Pakistan and other climate-vulnerable places can rebuild infrastructure, adapt to more volatile weather, and embark on an energy transition. And the U.S. could enthusiastically support a well-funded loss and damage financing mechanism later this year at the COP 27 climate conference. The question is whether the U.S. is willing to offer the rest of the world any more support than Mississippi Republicans have offered Jackson. Without a concerted national plan to do more, and do better—and take demands for reparations seriously—crises like Jackson’s will be more common than not.

In a primetime address Thursday, President Biden warned Donald Trump and his radical supporters are threatening the foundations of the republic. Biden said, “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal,” and that MAGA Republicans present a “clear and present danger to our democracy,” referring to Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again.” We speak with Nancy MacLean, author and Duke University historian, who says Biden’s speech was a “wake-up call” for the nation and mainstream media. “He was absolutely right, in my opinion, that the Trump wing of the party and the MAGA Republicans have jumped the rails of constitutional democracy, of the factual universe and of representative democracy.”

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MAGA Republicans have been attacking Robert Reich as a “coastal elitist” in response to an August 23 tweet in which the liberal economist, UC Berkeley professor and former secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration described far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a “fascist.” Reich’s MAGA critics have been arguing that his condemnation of DeSantis, former President Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans is painfully out of touch with Main Street America — and that Reich and other liberals and progressives simply don’t understand conservative values.

But Reich’s MAGA critics are ignoring or overlooking the fact that anti-MAGA arguments are hardly confined to the left. A long list of right-wing Never Trump conservatives, from attorney George Conway to The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes to Washington Post columnist Max Boot to former Nancy Reagan speechwriter Mona Charen to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (a former GOP congressman), have been attacking MAGA as a movement that favors far-right authoritarianism rather than traditional Reagan/Goldwater/McCain conservatism. And William Saletan, a writer for the conservative website The Bulwark, defends President Joe Biden’s anti-MAGA use of the term “semi-fascism” in an article published on September 1.

“Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to ‘semi-fascism,’” Saletan writes. “For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of fascism.”

Saletan stresses that refusing to accept democratic election results, which is what Trump and his followers did after the 2020 election, is an “authoritarian” act.

“A stickler might say that an attempt to overturn an election isn’t really fascist unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence, but Trump and his allies tried to use both,” Saletan explains. “Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like ‘a damned dictatorship.’ But in December 2020, after the Electoral College had certified Biden’s election, Giuliani — at Trump’s direction — phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize voting machines from states. Then, at Trump’s January 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: ‘Let’s have trial by combat!’”

Saletan adds, “Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators.”

The Bulwark writer cites other examples of “authoritarian” behavior from MAGA Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wondering how long it would be before “we get to hang” former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be executed for treason.

“The dictionary definition of fascism doesn’t just talk about autocracy,” Saletan notes. “It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-fascist. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to fascism a baseless ‘message of hatred.’ But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican presidential nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because ‘he’s a Mexican.’ And McEnany defended this attack…. You could argue that an out-and-out fascist would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a ‘complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’”

According to Saletan, “Trump’s cult” contains many “components” of fascism, including “paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state.” Another is “invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.”

“But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into fascism might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán,” Saletan writes. “As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, ‘There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.’ Orbán called this a ‘mixed-race world’ and concluded, ‘We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.’”

Saletan continues, “Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech ‘a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.’ But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded. This past Monday, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán.”

A Texas law requiring public schools “to assert the country’s collective trust in God” by…

“Should Fascism achieve power it will ride over your skulls and spines like a frightful tank”, wrote Leon Trotksy in a letter to a German communist in December 1931. “Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only unity in struggle with the social democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-communists, you have very little time left.”

To a modern audience aware of the Nazis’ horrific crimes, Trotsky’s words are painfully prescient. But he was something of a lone voice in his own time. Many among the rich and powerful openly collaborated with Hitler. Winston Churchill sang Mussolini’s praises. Liberal capitalist parties across Europe formed coalition governments with fascists, while social democrats reassured themselves that constitutions would protect democracy against a fascist seizure of power. The Stalinist Communist parties argued that the fascists were no worse than the usual rulers of capitalism, and barely lifted a finger to stop their rise to power.

A theory of fascism emerges from Trotsky’s scattered writings on Italy, Germany, France and Spain, published together as the pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it.

Fascism represents the counter-revolutionary revenge of the ruling class against workers. It arose as a political phenomenon during the 1920s and 1930s, immediately following the workers’ revolutions that engulfed Europe after the First World War. The ruling classes, terrified of revolution, sought comfort in a reactionary movement that would violently repress the working class. “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery”, Trotsky wrote in a 1934 piece, “Whither France?”

But fascism is not just a concoction of the bosses. “The fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie [middle classes]”, Trotsky wrote. Subsequent analyses of fascist voting patterns, including Richard F. Hamilton’s Who Voted for Hitler, confirm Trotsky’s statement. In terms of membership and voting base, the fascist parties drew most of their support from the middle classes, including small shopkeepers, artisans, managers, lawyers, bureaucrats and peasants. Workers, who made up 50 percent of the German population, were only about 25 percent of the Nazis’ membership, and fewer than 5 percent of Nazi members were in trade unions.

Why were the middle classes the social base of fascism? In the 1920s and 1930s, they were “entirely ruined by big capital”, according to Trotsky. They were ruined by the war, which had sent millions to fight and die, and by the Great Depression, which began in 1928. The fascists seemed to offer solutions to these problems, and they diverted the “dissatisfaction, indignation and despair” of the middle classes “away from big capital and against the workers”.

The fascists directly appealed to the middle classes. Nazi leader Adolph Hitler highlighted the social position and grievances of these “self-made men” in Mein Kampf, declaring that “for people of modest situation who have once risen above that social level, it is unendurable to fall back into it, even momentarily”. It was this fear of social regression that drove the middle classes into the arms of the fascists, who promised political stability, social cohesion and economic salvation for small proprietors. In the years before they came to power, the Nazis campaigned against the large businesses that put economic pressure on small shopkeepers, often using anti-Semitic tropes.

Fascists also recruited from the completely destitute: the long-term unemployed, ex-soldiers and those driven to petty crime. Fascism gave these men hot soup, a place to sleep and a gun with which to menace the left and Jews, whom they could blame for all their problems.

It was not inevitable, however, that the middle classes would be drawn into the fascist camp. Much of the petty bourgeoisie had been drawn along by the worker-led revolutions and uprisings at the end of the war; this fusion was the most successful during the 1917 Russian Revolution, which was supported by millions of peasants.

But without sufficient leadership, the revolutions in the rest of Europe didn’t fare as well, and by the early 1920s, the revolutionary wave had ebbed. The various left-wing parties seemed incapable of solving the ongoing capitalist crisis, and so the petty-bourgeois masses turned towards the fascists. Workers largely remained loyal to the socialist parties, but some were dragged towards fascism. As Trotsky put it, “Fascism is a form of despair in the petty-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the working class as well”.

While fascism gained its foot soldiers and numerical strength from the middle classes, it could come to power only at the behest of the real kingmakers of politics: the big capitalists, the military generals and the state bureaucrats.

The ruling class will bring to power a fascist party with a rabid, plebeian base only when three conditions are met. First, when capitalism cannot continue as before—with unstable political regimes and a large and menacing workers’ movement. Second, the usual methods for keeping the workers’ organisations in check (legal repression or cooption) are inadequate to the task. Third, when bringing the fascists to power will not provoke a revolution in response.

After taking power, the fascists acted as the strong arm of the capitalists, including against their own middle-class supporters. “After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vice of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty”, Trotsky wrote. It was the big capitalists, not the petty bourgeoisie, who enriched themselves under the Nazi regime: between 1933 and 1936, corporate profits rose by 433 percent while workers’ wages fell, and half of small businesses went bankrupt.

The fascists’ rise to power wasn’t inevitable. The political errors of the two main forces on the European left—the reformist Social Democrats and the Communist parties loyal to the USSR—made it possible.

The stance of the reformists amounted to a servile trust in the institutions of the capitalist state and the capitalist class. They thought that the police could be used to disarm the fascist gangs, despite all evidence that the police were extremely sympathetic to the fascists and that, as Trotsky wrote, the “comedy of disarmament by the police” would “only have caused the authority of the fascists to increase as fighters against the capitalist state”.

They also believed that the capitalists’ commitment to democracy would halt the fascist march to power. In Germany, the Social Democrats (SPD) formed an “Iron Front” with the capitalist parties, supposedly to counter the rise of the Nazis. Later, the Socialists in France and Spain insisted on the participation of bourgeois parties in their “Popular Front” coalitions against fascism. In this way, they openly cooperated with the class of exploiters. The strategy failed precisely because the bourgeoisie holds no such commitment to democracy.

There was another fatal flaw in the reformists’ attitude to fascism—they were terrified of unleashing the revolutionary potential of workers’ struggle lest things “go too far”. Trotsky ruthlessly mimicked the SPD leaders begging the government: “Please don’t force us to defend ourselves with the might of workers’ organisations, for this will only arouse the entire working class; and then the movement will rise above the bald pates of our party leadership: beginning as anti-fascist, it will end communist”.

For Trotsky, the reformist leaders were politically irredeemable in their unswerving loyalty to capitalism, but the millions of workers who supported them were key to blocking the fascists’ road to power. Along with Communist workers, they could drive back the armed fascist gangs that were now rampaging through working-class districts. Together, they had the power to overthrow capitalism, thereby resolving the economic and social problems that allowed fascism to fester and grow.

Trotsky held particular contempt for Joseph Stalin’s theory of fascism. “Fascism is the military organisation of the bourgeoisie which leans upon the Social Democracy for active support”, Stalin claimed. “The Social Democracy, objectively speaking, is the moderate wing of fascism.” While it’s true that the capitalist class, in a crisis, leans on both fascism for its violent attacks on the working class, and on Social Democracy for its ability to restrain working-class militancy, it does not follow that Social Democracy is just the “moderate wing of fascism”.

This stupidity formed the basis of the Stalinist theory that fascism is just another face of capitalism, no better or worse than a democratic parliament led by Social Democrats. Therefore, the Communists should not lift a finger to stop the fascists, and would never work with the Social Democrats, whom they branded “social fascists”. Trotsky replied in 1932, just months before Hitler took power in Germany: “The know-alls who boast that they do not recognise any difference between [German Chancellor] Brüning and Hitler are saying in reality: it makes no difference whether our organisations exist, or whether they are already destroyed”.

The actions of the German Communist Party (KPD) during the rise of the Nazis provide an example of Stalin’s theory in practice. It made a series of terrible tactical decisions that did nothing to stop the Nazis’ rise. But its worst crime was passivity. As the Nazis prepared to destroy every vestige of working-class power and democracy, the KPD leaders smugly sat by, claiming that Hitler’s victory would only hasten the crisis that would bring the Communists to power. They had an idiotic slogan for this attitude too: “First Hitler, then our turn”.

Trotsky could only watch in horror from afar as his predictions came true; fascism ran roughshod over the most powerful workers’ movements in Europe, from Italy to Germany and Spain. But he preserved in his writing the lessons of those terrible failures for future generations.

It is worth returning to Trotsky’s arguments as far-right and even fascist organisations continue to gain influence. Contemporary politics is not a mirror image of the 1930s, so Trotsky’s arguments are not a simple blueprint for analysing fascism today. The workers’ movement is comparatively weak, there are no mass socialist organisations, and the crisis of capitalism is not yet on the same scale. Because of this, the capitalists feel less need to totally dispense with democracy.

But Trotsky’s writings on the class base of fascism and the economic and social conditions that allow it to take power should serve as a warning for what the future may hold. His arguments about the need for mass working-class resistance to stop fascism in its tracks are based on an analysis of the same class forces that rule the world today.

And Trotsky’s anger at the criminal negligence of the two dominant wings of the workers’ movement, reformism and Stalinism, should serve as fuel in the fight for revolutionary Marxist politics today.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

I’ve long resisted using the word fascism to describe Donald Trump and his Republican followers, but we have to overcome our reluctance to use strong language and admit that America is now beset by a dangerous antidemocratic movement masquerading as a party.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

A Pre-fascist Interlude

President Joe Biden has been getting a lot of static for referring to the ideology of Donald Trump and his followers as “semi-fascism.” It isn’t surprising that right-wing pundits, such as the Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway, are practically having to take out loans to buy extra strings of pearls to clutch. But even John Avlon at CNN and Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast are trying to warn Biden off from insulting millions of voters.

It’s risky politics for the president to use words like semi-fascism, much as it was a needless fumble back in 2016 for Hillary Clinton to call people “deplorables.” For the rest of us, even to consider the word fascism feels like failure. It is a Rubicon we fear to cross, because it makes our fellow Americans into our civic enemies and implies that there is no road back for them, or for us.

We cannot, however, let our understandable fear of words such as fascism scare us out of talking about the reality staring us in the face. The GOP itself might not meet the full definition of a “fascist” party—not yet, anyway—but it’s not a normal party, and its base is not an ordinary political movement. It is, instead, a melding of the remnants of a once-great party with an authoritarian, violent, seditionist personality cult bent on capturing and exercising power solely to benefit its own members and punish its imagined enemies among other Americans.

Is that fascism? For most people, it’s close enough. A would-be strongman and a party of followers enveloped in racism, seized with nostalgia for an imagined glorious past, and drunk on mindless blood-and-soil nationalism all stinks of fascism. There’s a reason, however, that I still counsel against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.

Fascism is more than a romance with a forceful right-wing leader. (And let’s remember: Trump is not a “strongman” in any way—he is one of the weakest and most cowardly men ever to serve as president.) A fascist takeover relies on a disciplined and organized mass party led by dedicated people who, once they gain the levers of government, will zero in on destroying the mechanisms—laws, courts, competing parties—that could dislodge them from power.

Violent, tiki-torch-wielding nincompoops are dangerous, but a rabble is not a disciplined party. Ivy League Republicans stumbling around and losing to Democrats in a 50–50 Senate are not the iron ladies and men of steel who can build a fascist state. Faux intellectuals such as Steve Bannon blathering about Leninism are not capable of inspiring the masses. And real fascist street fighters do not start blubbering and shedding tears when they’re arrested. (To paraphrase Jimmy Dugan, there’s no crying in fascism.)

This is why it’s a mistake to assume that every group of howling weirdos wearing “Trump 2024” capes and carrying bear spray is composed of “fascists.” Some of these people are deluded, some are bored, and some are just idiots. If we build them into something more, we’re not only missing the chance to pull some of those people back into American democracy; we’re going to fail to spot the real fascists hiding among them. Glaring drivers jacked up on Fox News and talk radio flying “Fuck Joe Biden” flags on their cars aren’t fascists; they’re the raw material of fascism, the battering rams that actual fascists—cleverer and nimbler than the hapless overgrown adolescents who will end up in front of a judge—will use to knock down our institutions by goading them into violence.

This might seem like a distinction without a difference. And I suppose, like so many people, I am prone to “normalcy bias”—a kind of innate denial that life could ever change dramatically. For those of us who remember the Cold War, it is a special humiliation to think that we defeated the Soviet Union only to find Americans in Budapest cheering on the likes of Viktor Orbán.

But something has changed in American life. Trumpism, which has captured the base of the Republican Party, is authoritarian, antidemocratic, anti-constitutional, and anti-American. For now, Trump and the GOP activists are capable only of igniting scramble-brained jacqueries. But Trump’s most faithful followers are headed for fascism, and they will use the GOP as the vehicle to get there unless the rest of us remain true to a pro-democracy coalition.

It is also important not to be overly distracted by Trump himself. We are in a prefascist interlude, but Trump himself is too incompetent, too lazy and selfish, to lead an actual fascist movement. But avoiding the word won’t prevent it from happening. What should really scare us is realizing that smarter and tougher American fascist leaders are out there, waiting. Trump has paved the way for them by corroding the guardrails of the American system, normalizing the kinds of rhetoric and attacks on opponents used by actual fascists, and convincing ordinary American voters that mass violence is an alternative to the ballot box.

We can prove him wrong and stop this threat in its tracks. But time is growing short.

Related:

Today’s News

Fighting in Baghdad broke out after the populist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced his resignation from politics. Dozens of people have been killed in a violent escalation of Iraq’s political crisis.
Mississippi has declared an emergency in Jackson; the main water-treatment facility is failing, and the water is not safe to drink. The city does not have enough water pressure for flushing toilets, firefighting, and other necessities.
Donald Trump hired Christopher M. Kise, a former solicitor general for Florida, to join his legal team in the case about his handling of classified government materials.

Dispatches

Brooklyn, Everywhere: Xochitl Gonzalez put together an end-of-summer reading list that celebrates the spirit of Brooklyn—real Brooklyn, not Brooklyn (™), as she puts it.

Evening Read

Scenes From Ukrainian Summer Camp

By Andrea Stanley

Collage of photos from Strokatienoty, a summer camp in Ukraine
Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic; Strokatienoty Camp

Summer camp, at its purest, is like Never-Never-Land—a place that exists only in childhood or in memories of it: lake swimming, tree climbing, secret telling, frog catching, and youth everlasting. When I found myself recently on a train platform in Lviv, Ukraine, surrounded by teenagers heading to summer camp in the Carpathian Mountains, such wholesome pleasures seemed almost ridiculously out of reach.

The train was running late, for one thing. And shortly after we’d learned of the delay, an air-raid siren began to howl, starting an uncomfortable countdown that the locals knew too well.

Read the full article.

Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

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