Photo by Guilherme Bustamante
With Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, many Americans are terrified that our country is becoming or has become a fascist state. Others are giddy with glee. Some news outlets, however, have doubted that Trump voters really voted for fascism the way members of the political left have claimed. Instead, Trump supporters are said to have voted in protest against political elites who have delivered little in the way of social or economic improvements that they want to see in their lives. Others have written that Americans elected Trump to “better manage our borders and curb left-wing wokeism.”
Nonetheless, politically knowledgeable people, such as former generals John Kelly and Mark Milley, both of whom had powerful roles in Trump’s previous administration, have described Trump as “fascist to the core.” This accusation of fascism must be taken seriously, examined, and verified or cast aside. A problem is that, other than knowing that Hitler was a fascist, many Americans, I believe, simply do not know what fascism is.
Many may not recognize it in our own politics and don’t know precisely why we should be terrified of it. As a retired teacher of both 18-year-old college freshmen and non-traditional adult students, all of whom I loved dearly, I know from experience how fuzzy even these intellectually motivated and educationally upward-bound peoples’ grasp of ideas can be.
One important role of a teacher is to prod students to think clearly, define their assertions of truth with precision, and argue their points of view with logical argumentation. Here, I would like to practice what I preach to students by offering first an extended definition of the word fascism and then apply that term to the present political landscape of the United States. You see, I believe the MAGA movement is fascistic, but its origin lies much earlier than today, with Reagan Democrats. More on that later.
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In a recorded interview with the New York Times, General John Kelly was quoted as defining fascism as “…a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” Having a dictatorial leader and an autocracy means that a government is led by one supreme individual with something close to absolute power.
While that leader — the people in whose name he or she is ruling — possess liberty, the lot of all others is obedience. It means opposition groups who advocate alternate ideas of how to run society are sniffed out and either snuffed out or silenced. When in the context of capitalism, as it always is, it means anyone or anything that challenges the class hierarchy of capitalism is purged.
In this way, finance capitalists in particular, the most supreme of all sectors of capitalism, rule without the slightest challenge. Their profits grow, but governing structures, political parties, religious institutions, labor unions, educational institutions, the press, non-profit agencies that rely on funding from the government or from individuals who have accumulated great wealth in bourgeois society, all these institutions come under the control of autocratic state authority.
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Moving from an abstract definition to this moment, and in particular to Trump’s presidency, Kelly concluded, “… in my experience, those are the kind of things that he [Trump] thinks would work better in running America.” General Kelly, as an authoritative leader in an American military that has fought fascist governments in a world war, should know. Yet Kelly omits a great deal about how fascism arises and triumphs. But since fascist political movements are dormant for long periods of history, and members of contemporary American society may not understand what causes a society to turn to fascist leaders, we should address these question of when and why it does arise, who leads the movement, who benefits from it, and why those of us committed to the idea of democracy fight it at all costs.
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From Classical Fascism to Today
The capitalist system which currently dominates the world took power in fits and starts, but generally through revolutions. Think the Glorious Revolution in Great Britain, the French Revolution, the European revolutions of 1848, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911. But once owners of the means of production established themselves as the new masters of social order, they came to naturally favor parliamentary democracy as a method of governing liberal bourgeois states.
Just as economic production is decentralized in societies based on private enterprise, so also do captains of industry prefer governance to be by decentralized political institutions. And just as capitalism may arise when enterprising individuals step forward to create new businesses, so also do liberal bourgeois states value the individualism of the innovator, human rights and the dignity of man, so that these men and women can build, create, and innovate.
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Fascist mass movements, which are far right by definition, arise at times when the equilibrium of a parliamentary bourgeois democracy becomes so severely threatened by opponents to capitalism that the usual police forces are unable to keep order. After World War I, for example, a defeated Germany was ruled by weak governments, was economically ravaged by hyper-inflation and threatened politically by unsuccessful left revolutions. Much of German society received no benefit from the existence of the republic, and lost confidence in it.
A fascist movement in favor of private enterprise but opposed to many of the values of representative democracy took root among the vast population of small businessmen, artisans, small farmers and privileged segments of the working class. Violent fascist bands such as Hitler’s Brownshirts — today’s Oath Keepers or Proud Boys follow in their footsteps — take to violence on the street to break up organizations of their progressive enemies and help the larger movement come to power. When this larger fascist movement does attain power, they consolidate it by methods mentioned previously: subordinating the institutions of the state, the news media, unions, organizations of religion and civil society and even, to some degree, big business to its demands.
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Now, flash forward to examine the state of the United States and its government of today to see how it compares to fascism of the past. Our new government is clearly fascistic in that in order to, as Trump says, “make America great again,” it seeks to abandon the idea that the United States is an open society with a functioning democracy, in which differing opinions are valued and different interest groups can organize and advocate freely their points of view.
Instead, our new government seeks to suppress racial, ethnic and gender diversity rights hard won through mass movements. It seeks to implement sexual repression, first by limiting women’s reproductive rights, next by attacking the transgender community. Soon it will move on against others. It seeks to throw out gains won by the environmentalist movement. It seeks to subordinate all branches of government, and elected representatives to its dominance. It seeks to abolish liberal policies already won and embedded in the daily functioning of government. And the racial, sexual, gender, worker repression and rolling back of victories of the environmental movement is being done for the benefit of those who are already the wealthiest people the world has known — billionaires who are creatures of venture capital, the most aggressive form of capital ever invented.
What fascism has to do with us — one of the questions in the title — is that we have a fascistic administration and our country is on the path to fascism, but the fascists have just begun to subordinate all of society to the state they run. They have yet to secure their fascist boot on the neck of all of civil society.
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Reagan Democrats Were the Beginning of MAGA
Capitalism in the United States is not an endangered species. So why did a fascist movement grow here now? Today’s movement, I maintain, is a more virulent form of the movement of Reagan Democrats, that became manifest in 1980. Here is the argument.
In the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan’s campaign convinced much of the nation that the combination of economic stagnation with inflation could be addressed with what he called supply-side economics. By investing in the wellbeing of corporations and the wealthy, new wealth would be created, prosperity could return, and it would trickle down the economic ladder to those of lesser means.
The policies of supply-side economics meant creating tax breaks that mainly benefited the upper classes, reducing or eliminating the economic regulations of the state that protects workers, consumers, and the environment to create fewer hurdles for big business to thrive. They allowed businesses more freedom to treat workers in business’s interests rather than in workers’ own interests, reducing social democratic programs that benefit working people and the poor, privatization of publicly owned enterprises, and freer trade. Today, we know this bundle of policies as neoliberalism.
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Yet very few of Reagan’s voters voted for him because of his promise of neoliberal reforms. Instead, they heard him begin his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and embrace states’ rights. They heard him talking of a fictitious “welfare queen,” and of strapping young bucks who bought steaks with food stamps. They heard him run against the 1960s and its progressive social movements and heard him call for a strong military at a time when the US was still smarting from its losses in Vietnam and Iran. The Reagan Democrat was born as millions of white working class and small business-owning Democrats — people whom the Marxist left sneeringly calls, the “petty” bourgeoisie — fell hook, line, and sinker for the new conservative message.
The reason for that political realignment is not hard to fathom. As previously stated, few of these voters in the 1980 election understood anything about supply-side economics, trickle-down economics, or neoliberalism. Yet they were presupposed to choose to be on the side of big business for at least two big reasons.
First, they supported the economic powers that be because when World War II was won, the United States emerged as the only industrialized country in the world. Big corporations could pay them handsomely with the enormous profits gained by buying cheap raw materials from the rest of the world and selling the expensive manufactured products in return. This privileged layer of working people gave the United States and its economy of big corporations their undying loyalty.
Second, enough white working people had successfully raised themselves from the working class to become owners of small businesses that they believed the American system did in fact offer upward mobility to those who worked at it. Thus, the white working class and the petty bourgeoisie became a single seamless block of voters and allied themselves with capital and not with other workers. Throughout the 1970s, they became increasingly conservative.
Third, this same group heard Reagan’s attack on big government spending not as an attack on labor but as an attack on black people and other minorities. They came to believe that their taxes paid for big government programs that mostly helped people of color. They sided with big money, and against the safety net and against other working people, while overlooking the role the union movement, the New Deal, the G.I Bill, the Great Society, and so on, had in turning them into America’s great middle class.
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A Disaster for the American People
Interest in freer trade on a global scale, however, only began during Reagan’s presidency. In the 1990’s Bill Clinton led Americans head-on into a global economy, signing the North American Free Trade Agreement into law, ushering the US into the newly created World Trade Organization and then easing the way for China to join. In a world economy with the United States as the dominant economy would, globalization was just another name for Americanization, some thought. The United States would continue to lead an increasingly interconnected world economically.
George W. Bush sold Americans on more upper-income tax cuts and on disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we won’t get into that here.
The result of all of these policies together has been a disaster for the American people. The Great Recession that began in 2008 laid bare for all to see the severe decline that neoliberal policies had wrought on the American middle class. The union movement had been broken. Salaries had declined. Families that had once been prosperous with one wage earner now needed two. Retirement pensions had become a thing of the past. College expenses had escalated dramatically while manufacturers closed operations in this country and opened new factories in other countries.
Consequently, well-paying jobs in the United States became scarce. The federal government that bailed out banks and automobile manufacturers left homeowners unable to pay their mortgages high and dry. For thirty years, the federal government had embraced supply side economics and especially tax cuts that benefited mostly the wealthy, but neither political party could deliver any policies that helped working people. The middle class fragmented, and inequality skyrocketed. Reagan Democrats had been betrayed.
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The Shift Toward Fascism
And here we are today, with the same social problems and with Donald J. Trump in the White House.
Some say they voted for him because he is anti-establishment. Others say they voted for Trump because of high grocery prices. Yet no one can plead innocence. We all heard him say he would be a dictator from day one. We heard him say he would not accept the results of the election if he lost. We heard him say he wanted generals like Hitler had. We heard some of his closest advisors say he is unfit to be president. We even saw him masturbate and fellate a mic stand. Everyone heard him talk about Haitian immigrants eating pets. We saw his Nazi-like rally in New York City and heard a Trump proxy call Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. We all witnessed all of these episodes in real-time. And the plurality of voters voted for this. This is the country we live in.
The question is, if not because of grocery prices or wokeness or immigrants, then “Why?” The answer can be found in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan campaigning on the issue of supply-side economics on the one hand, and against big government. Reagan Democrats would rather align themselves with their corporate overlords, united by their racial whiteness, than be grouped together with working class people of color, women, the LGBT+ community, and anti-war activists who had in the 60s and 70s come together in movements of revolutionary optimism.
Today, MAGA Republicans, in their unshakable alliance with the corrupt, criminal, serial rapist, have simply doubled down on their previous beliefs and exchanged conservatism for fascism in a sinister but farcical replay of the same Reagan Democrat song. We must oppose it with all our beings.