The long march to neo-fascism in the United States

The Republican party has gone full fascist. The evidence has been mounting since the beginning of the Trump campaign. Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination and the election based on a fascist appeal centered on an unacknowledged program of ethnic cleansing—legal immigration down to as close to zero as possible, drastic reduction in refugee admissions, a border wall, massive deportation, denaturalization—and an aggressive nationalism (America First, Make America Great Again).

The 2016 election showed that, under the undemocratic rules of the Electoral College which, among other things, grossly over represents whites in conservative areas with tiny populations like Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, and southern states in which African Americans historically have been shut out of power, fascism had enough of a mass base to elect a president.

Things went downhill after that reaching a crescendo around the 2020 election and the January 6 fascist-style attack on the U.S. Capitol, a failed putsch aimed at reversing last November’s democratic election of Joe Biden to the presidency.

An air of menace surrounds the fascist turn of the GOP, including intra-party purges, threats of rebellion, violence and even death. Paul Gosar, one of the more reactionary Republican members of Congress, recently sent out an Instagram anime video that depicts the member of Congress murdering his Democratic colleague, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. As a bonus, Gosar’s Instagram goes on to proffer a death threat against President Joe Biden. The congressman later said it was a joke.

Some joke. I wonder if an academic somewhere has written a paper about the fascist sense of humor. That paper should have concluded that the intersection between fascism and humor—the place where the two meet—is an empty set.

The indicted Steve Bannon, the theorist of American neo-fascism, threatened that “all hell will break loose” when he surrenders himself to authorities this week. He was not joking.

There is nothing funny about fascism or political assassination. In the twentieth century, at least 100 million people were killed by fascism and its cousin, Nazism. Within recent memory, Arizona Democratic Representative Gabby Giffords survived an assassination attempt that almost killed her and ended her political career. The last assassination of a president, that of John F. Kennedy, still haunts the nation and generates more conspiracy theories than any other event, including 9-11 and the lunar landing. Is anyone finding this funny yet?

How did we get to this place? It was a process, not a single leap carried out by one man. Arguably, since Richard Nixon, and unquestionably since the sainted Ronald Regan, the United States, with the Republican party in the driver’s seat, has been accelerating away from the diluted form of welfare state capitalism ushered in by the New Deal and the Great Society and toward an extreme form of capitalism featuring the kind of barbaric cruelty and economic concentration that existed in the nineteenth century Great Britain that Charles Dickens wrote about.

It takes violence—personal and, especially, institutional—to carry out such a transition, a long discontinuous counterrevolution of those at the top against those in the middle and at the bottom, a New Deal in reverse, a massive redistribution from the many to the few. Trump, with his massive tax cuts for the rich, his relentless desire to destroy the only social reform in a generation, Obamacare, his aggressive rhetoric, and the atmosphere of threatened violence that emanated from his persona and performances, was both the culmination of ultra-capitalism and a giant leap toward American neo-fascism.

To defend a patently unjust distribution of wealth and income, fascism became functional for the Republicans. People are puzzled with the Republicans’ race toward fascism. They should not be. By the time Trump captured the scene, ultra-capitalism had lived up to its name. Ultra can be defined as “beyond due limit.”

For many reactionary and conservative white Americans, the welfare state is a mechanism to transfer money and privilege from them to the undeserving poor, namely African Americans.

When the limit of inequality had been reached and exceeded, those hurt grew in number, coalesced, and began to push back, and those who had feared a reversal, circled the wagons, and began to counterattack. The plutocratic status quo had become so unjust as to be unsustainable through institutional means despite the baked-in advantages of the right—unlimited campaign money and the undemocratic nature of key institutions such as the Senate, the Electoral College, and gerrymandered state legislatures.

What tipped the balance away from maintaining the status quo through the usual means was demographic change resulting from the great Third World immigration after the 1965 immigration reform that abolished racist quotas and, especially, the empowerment of African Americans via the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Act. Symbolic of this was the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, a president despised and vilified by white rightists, beginning with Donald Trump. All of this created a white panic on which Donald Trump capitalized to win the 2016 election while losing the popular vote as George W. Bush did in his first election. Undemocratic institutions such as the Electoral College tend to produce antidemocratic national leaders.

At this point, those on the right perceived that extra-institutional means, such as intimidation and violence as happened in the Capitol on January 6, were the only means to preserve all that had been gained over more than a generation of Republican counterrevolution against the mere possibility of a more tolerant, more diverse, more egalitarian, more European-like social democratic society.

Race was a key factor in the fierce resistance of most white Americans to such a trajectory. For many reactionary and conservative white Americans, the welfare state is a mechanism to transfer money and privilege from them to the undeserving poor, namely African Americans.

Today’s divisions, which make progress toward a better society agonizingly slow and difficult, reflect the long shadow of the American Civil War and are an echo of the abortive nineteenth century revolution known as Reconstruction that was crushed by Southern racists, and by the unfinished Civil Rights movement that triggered the election of Richard Nixon and the white backlash that we are still living through.