Trump and American Fascism

Our take back in 2016-17

B Jerry Harris, Carl Davidson, Bill Fletcher Jr., & Paul Harris

International Critical Thought

Beijing, Dec 2017

ABSTRACT

The election of Donald Trump reflects the rise of a right-wing nationalist movement. Central to Trump's appeal has been his advocacy of anti-immigrant, racist, and misogynist ideas. At its core, his ruling power bloc consists of neo-liberal fundamentalist, the religious right, and white nationalist. There are similarities between the new power bloc and fascism, and there are many who see Trump's administration as such. Nevertheless, the new president's authoritarian power bloc is neither hegemonic nor fascist, but such a definition can send oppositional strategy in the wrong direction.

Keywords

hegemony, fascism, nationalism, neo-liberalism, racism

Is Donald Trump a fascist? Until recently it’s a question only debated in small circles on the Left. But now the topic is front and center in media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and a hot subject of discussion across the political class—Left, Center, and Right.

The question reflects a crisis in neoliberal hegemony, and it doesn’t have a simple answer. More important are questions about the social, political, and economic forces around Trump. Are they fascist as well? Much of the Left views Trump as a dangerous demagogue who may usher in a neo-fascist and racist regime. But the Left has frequently used fascism too loosely, labelling everyone from a cop swinging his billy club to reactionary politicians calling for law and order to right-wing militias parading their weapons fascists.

So what makes a particular hegemonic bloc fascist instead of just right-wing capitalism? To answer this question, a more analytical approach is needed, one that understands capitalism has always been racist, sexist, imperialist, and violent. It has also promoted bourgeois democracy, which includes important civil liberties and rights, and a social contract that provided workers with middle-class levels of consumption and living standards.

An incorrect assessment of fascism has often had negative consequences for the Left. Certainly the McCarthy period brought the US close to a fascist state. The Communist Party believed fascism was on the horizon and sent hundreds of their leading cadre underground. Yet the Communist Party (CP) in California and Michigan continued organising mass campaigns throughout this period. The loss of skilled open organisers and hardships suffered in the underground were major factors in the crisis faced by the CP in 1956-57 leading to the loss of thousands of members. In the late 1960s the Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) went underground, alongside a splinter group from the Black Panthers called the Black Liberation Army. Both believed the US faced fascist conditions under Nixon. Both groups proved ineffective, but with tragic results for their members.

The American ruling class has excelled at repressing leading revolutionary organisations with violence, jail, and political attacks. Yet democratic rights have been concurrently maintained for the majority of US citizens, even as democracy shrank to a fragile state for the Left. Those under the iron heel of repression see these conditions as a generalised state of fascism for the entire country, at times retreating from using civil liberties as their best defence. Additionally, cries of fascism did not rally the mass of people to resistance, nor create an effective united front outside relatively small circles of supporters. What often proved most effective, however, were organising efforts to defend the Bill of Rights and civil liberties.

An excellent example in the defence of civil liberties occurred when the Nixon administration used the FBI and the Justice Department to aggressively infiltrate, surveil, and prosecute the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, and Left groups. One famous case that went to the US Supreme Court was entitled U.S. versus District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972). This was a blatant attempt to set a precedent of restricting civil liberties in the name of national security.

Members of the White Panthers (centred in Detroit) were prosecuted for conspiracy to destroy government property, including the bombing of a CIA office in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The defence attorneys made a motion to discover any wiretaps. Previously, in political cases, the Justice Department would simply deny the existence of wiretaps and judges would accept the prosecutors’ word. But in this case, to everyone’s shock, the prosecutors admitted wiretaps and admitted there had been no warrants. Wanting to establish the government’s power in future cases they argued that under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act of 1968 they didn’t need a warrant when there was a clear and present danger to “domestic security.” In addition the government’s brief took the extreme position that the President had “the inherent power” to suspend any provision of the Constitution when he determined it was in the national interest. The brief written by Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist (later to become the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), concluded that pursuant to such power the government could disregard the Fourth Amendment’s protection against warrantless searches.

If the Supreme Court accepted the government’s argument, there would have been a legal basis for the President to carry out surveillance and prosecute any political opposition without the limitations of the Bill of Rights. The Court, in a unanimous decision, written by Nixon appointee and conservative Justice Lewis Powell, strongly rejected the government’s arguments. This is one of many examples of a conservative court protecting civil liberties during a period of powerful federal and state law-and-order attacks on Left political movements.

These periods are complex and intense. Among Marxist thinkers, Gramsci’s insights on the dialectic of coercion and consent under capitalist rule best explains times in which state power is employed to destroy Left influence, while maintaining a general democratic institutional structure for the rest of society. Enough so that both McCarthy and Nixon were disgraced and expelled from power, not by the Left, but by leading sectors of the capitalist class. Nixon and McCarthy were useful in creating reactionary conditions and using state power against radicals, but when they turned their attacks to sectors of the ruling class they were quickly done away with. In McCarthy’s case it was his intent to investigate communist influence in the military, and for Nixon it was the Watergate spying scandal with his private, extra-legal gang of ‘plumbers.’ Their political operatives and allies lost influence and some were even jailed.

If these periods posed the danger of a fascist hegemonic bloc, that political movement and their thrust for total power was defeated essentially by splits in the ruling class more so than mass action from below. Some of those splits were over fundamental ideological positions concerning democracy, while other divisions were in reaction to the social movements and how to incorporate their demands into the system. Today these same dynamics are at play over Trump’s presidential victory, and so history lays the groundwork for what is to come.

Historic Fascism and Today

It is important not to get lost in personalities. Is Trump a fascist, an accomplished opportunist, or just an ego-centric billionaire looking for personal power? That discussion may be interesting, but fascism as a historic hegemonic bloc features a radical, even revolutionary, break with bourgeois democracy. A comparison between historic fascism and today’s conditions is a good place to start. But it's also important to avoid an exact comparison with the German Nazis or Italian fascists. If those conditions have to be repeated in all their essentials, we will never see fascism again, since history rarely repeats in such exact patterns. Just as new revolutions can break the mould of those before it, so can counter-revolutions.

Historically fascism has grown out of deep capitalist economic and social crises, challenged from below by left and right revolutionary movements, leaving the ruling class unable to rule in the old way. This standoff creates a crack in the ceiling that leads to the open dictatorship of the most reactionary sections of the capitalist class.

Right-wing populism (and its variants) holds nationally-specific forms. There is no one-size-fits-all, though there are significant points in common. These include racism, sexism, xenophobia, and the obsession on an “origin myth,” i.e., a period in the nation or people’s history that was allegedly glorious.

Yet there is another aspect to right-wing populism, which certainly can work itself into fascism: irrationalism. When we use the term “irrationalism” we are discussing a framework which is specifically anti-science, anti-fact, deeply imbued with conspiracy theories and frequently laced with myth. Such movements have occurred periodically in the US. The current obsession with the problem of “fake news,” for instance, ignores the historical precedent of “yellow journalism” in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War. But irrationalism runs deeper than phony journalism. Embedded in the history of right-wing populism there is an appeal to the irrational, rooted in a fear of the unknown and a fear of the future.