This Is Not a Drill. Fascism Is on the Ballot. But . . .
Mural by Michelle Sawyer in Ybor City (FL) commemorating the 1937 Antifascist Women’s March.
The conclusion that Donald Trump is a fascist has gone mainstream, gaining wide publicity and affirmation in recent weeks. Such understanding is a problem for Trump and his boosters. At the same time, potentially pivotal in this close election, a small proportion of people who consider themselves to be progressive still assert that any differences between Trump and Kamala Harris are not significant enough to vote for Harris in swing states.
Opposition to fascism has long been a guiding light in movements against racism and for social justice.
Speaking to a conference of the African National Congress in 1951, Nelson Mandela warned that “South African capitalism has developed [into] monopolism and is now reaching the final stage of monopoly capitalism gone mad, namely, fascism.”
Before Fred Hampton was murdered by local police officers colluding with the FBI in 1969, the visionary young Illinois Black Panther Party leader said: “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”
But now, for some who lay claim to being on the left, stopping fascism is not a priority. Disconnected from the magnitude of this fateful moment, the danger of a fascist president leading a fanatical movement becomes an abstraction.
One cogent critic of capitalism ended a column in mid-October this way: “Pick your poison. Destruction by corporate power or destruction by oligarchy. The end result is the same. That is what the two ruling parties offer in November. Nothing else.”
The difference between a woman’s right to an abortion vs. abortion being illegal is nothing?
“The end result is the same” — so it shouldn’t matter to us whether Trump becomes president after campaigning with a continuous barrage against immigrants, calling them “vermin,” “stone-cold killers,” and “animals,” while warning against the “bad genes” of immigrants who aren’t white, and raising bigoted alarms about immigration of “blood thirty criminals” who “prey upon innocent American citizens” and will “cut your throat”?
If “the end result is the same,” a mish-mash of ideology and fatalism can ignore the foreseeable results of a Republican Party gaining control of the federal government with a 2024 platform that pledges to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” Or getting a second Trump term after the first one allowed him to put three right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court.
Will the end result be the same if Trump fulfills his apparent threat to deploy the U.S. military against his political opponents, whom he describes as “radical left lunatics” and “the enemy from within”?
Capacities to protect civil liberties matter. So do savage Republican cuts in programs for minimal health care, nutrition and other vital aspects of a frayed social safety net. But those cuts are less likely to matter to the polemicists who will not experience the institutionalized cruelties firsthand.
Rather than being for personal absolution, voting is a tool in the political toolbox — if the goal is to avert the worst and improve the chances for constructing a future worthy of humanity.
Trump has pledged to be even more directly complicit in Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian people in Gaza than President Biden has been. No wonder, as the Washington Post reports, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has shown a clear preference for Trump in this election.” During a call this month, Trump told Netanyahu: “Do what you have to do.”
Palestinians, Muslim leaders and other activists in the swing state of Arizona issued an open letter days ago that makes a case for defeating Trump. “We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter says. “We understand this sentiment. Many of us have felt that way ourselves, even until very recently. Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones.”
The letter goes on:
As we consider the full situation carefully, however, we conclude that voting for Kamala Harris is the best option for the Palestinian cause and all of our communities. We know that some will strongly disagree. We only ask that you consider our case with an open mind and heart, respecting that we are doing what we believe is right in an awful situation where only flawed choices are available.
In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement. It would be an existential threat to our democracy and our whole planet.
Exercising conscience in the most humane sense isn’t about feeling personal virtue. It’s about concern for impacts on the well-being of other people. It’s about collective solidarity.
The consequences of declining to help stop fascism are not confined to the individual voter. In the process, vast numbers of people can pay the price for individuals’ self-focused concept of conscience.
Last week, the insightful article “7 Strategic Axioms for the Anxious Progressive Voter” offered a forward-looking way to put this presidential election in a future context: “Vote for the candidate you want to organize against!”
Do we want to be organizing against a fascistic militaristic President Trump, with no realistic hope of changing policies . . . or against a neoliberal militaristic President Harris, with the possibility of changing policies?
For progressives, the answer should be clear.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
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Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is an American journalist, author, media critic and activist. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director. Solomon's weekly column "Media Beat" was in national syndication from 1992 to 2009. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Since 2011, he has been the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of thirteen books including "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” (The New Press, 2023).
Letters From an American: A Newsletter About the History Behind Today’s Politics.
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
Notes:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=armytalks
War Department, “Army Talk 64: FASCISM!” March 24, 1945, at https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up
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Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian. She is a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Is This Any Way to Stop Fascism?
Image by BP Miller.
If Vice President Kamala Harris was hoping the New York Times’ interview with John Kelly, Trump’s former Chief of Staff and retired Marine Corps General, would be the “October surprise” that would shift prospective voters against Trump, it has not played out that way, so far.
Published on October 22, Kelly’s interview is a shocking read. Trump, according to Kelly, mused openly that “Hitler did some good things, too,” and that he would rule like a dictator. When asked to explain his definition of fascist, Kelly said:
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
When asked how he responded to Trump’s admiring comments about Hitler, Kelly told Trump:
“First of all, you should never say that. But if you knew what Hitler was all about from the beginning to the end, everything he did was in support of his racist, fascist life, you know, the, you know, philosophy, so that nothing he did, you could argue, was good — it was certainly not done for the right reason.”
Kelly’s interview along with Mark Milley’s, the former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, quotes from Bob Woodward’s new book War, who also described Trump “as a fascist to the core,” has allowed the Democrats and Harris to openly call Trump a fascist, where in the past they have avoided doing so.
It should be noted that however damning John Kelly’s interview was, it was qualified on some points. Kelly told the NYT: “In many cases, I would agree with some of his policies. But again, it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.” Once again, the Democrats in their campaign focus on Trump’s character, not the substance of his policies, which they are also complicit with, especially on immigration.
The Harris-Walz campaign has deployed Kelly’s most damning statements in thirty and sixty second ads nationwide. “An unprecedented warning” is how they begin. But, how unprecedented is it, really? Charges of fascism and authoritarianism have been thrown at Trump since he first made his first, notorious announcement that he was running for president in 2015.
One of Trump Republican rivals for the 2016 nomination, former Ohio Governor John Kasich, made a similar video using a retired Air Force colonel and Vietnam POW, Tom Moe, to draw attention to Trump’s fascist leanings. Moe paraphrased the late German pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem about the Nazi’s rise to power:
“You might not care if Donald Trump says Muslims must register with their government because you’re not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump says he’s going to round up all the Hispanic immigrants, because you’re not one … if he keeps going and he actually becomes president, he might just get around to you. And you better hope there’s someone left to help you.”
But, to no avail. Trump, despite such pleas, was elected president or more accurately selected by the ancient system of the Electoral College for the presidency, despite his Democratic rival Hilary Clinton winning three million more votes.
This was before the far right riots in Charlottesville, where Trump described the unsavory crew of Nazis and other assorted far right and armed fascists and white supremacists as “fine people,” before Trump called out the fascist Proud Boys during the 2020 Presidential debate to “stand back and stand by,” and before the January 6th insurrection organized by the Trump White House.
For a country that derived much of its moral authority that followed WWII by defeating the Nazis in the Second World War and the prosecution of war criminals at Nuremberg, this is quite a shift in mainstream politics. What happened? WWII nostalgia faded long ago following decades of less glorious and losing wars that were in many cases opposed by a significant section of the population for various reasons. The old guard rails keeping the far right out of mainstream politics began to fall in the 1990s.
It is also pretty clear from the growth of Christian Nationalism and good old fashioned, American racist and xenophobic politics, combined with a deepening and very visible social crisis for the broad working class and lower middle class, that a significant section of population is looking for someone who doesn’t come from the traditional political class, who even seems above normal politics to fix thing.
After all, nothing seems to work anymore, especially the political system. Writing for the U.K. New Statesman, Bruno Maçães reported recently from Michigan:
It may be difficult for Europeans to understand how dysfunctional much of America has become. Nothing works. Bathrooms in bus stations and fast-food joints have often been closed for months. Public facilities are invariably old. Streets are spectacularly dirty. Service workers may go on small, local strikes no one hears about. Supermarket shelves may be empty because of shoplifters. In Erie, Pennsylvania, two days before the Warren campaign event, I took a train in the middle of the night. Outside the station, the homeless begged to enter the waiting room, only to be denied by the station master, who promptly fell asleep on the floor. I was told that many people try to jump on moving freight trains as they have no money for tickets. Once the station master woke up from his drunken slumber, he told me a “bum” had been run over by a moving train while sleeping on the tracks just a few days before. Now he worries because no one is checking the tracks every night.
Of course, things still work very well in America if you have money, or if you have a lot of it.
While it may be overstating it to say there are people looking for a strongman, some tech billionaires, such Peter Theil and Elon Musk, clearly are, along with a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court whose ruling have immeasurably strengthened the presidency. Theil and Musk, who stand to rake in billions of dollars in federal government contracts on top of billions that they already loot from us.
Fear of a Trump restoration has led Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, publisher of the Washington Post, and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, to intervene to stop their respective editorial boards from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. This has led to resignations of editorial board members and staff at both newspapers. Emblazed across the Washington Post’s mast head is its official slogan, Democracy dies in the dark.
Kamala Harris’ tired, old playbook is paving the way for a Trump restoration. If there is some public, historical memory of fascism it is that defined by war and genocide. The Biden-Harris regime is neck deep in war and genocide and has no moral authority to wave the anti-fascist flag. Her campaign also is eerily reminiscent of Hilary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign. She has failed to distinguish herself from Biden on any major issue or generate any enthusiasm. It feels like 2016 all over again.
The Democrats may pull it off in the end in a very close race, but the prospect of far right violence and election challenges loom on the horizon.
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