Rethinking Antifascism in an Age of Constitutional Despotism
Image by Markus Spiske.
America is supposed to be the greatest democracy on earth, right? I know this because we have at least fifty goddamn holidays a year shouting it at us from the night sky in burning lights. Still, I feel compelled to ask, because it only took five unelected judges to declare our president to be infallible and his Executive Office to be above the law.
I speak of course about the first attempted criminal prosecution of an American president for his actions in office, in which the Supreme Court largely sided with one Donald J. Trump along partisan lines by declaring that the President of these great United States of America enjoys near absolute immunity for any crime which he or she deems to be an “official act.”
In the dissent to this absurd ruling, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor summed up the likely results of the decision quite succinctly. “When “the President” uses his official power in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
The conservative justices balked like braying gulls at high tide over the supposed hyperbole of this dissent but if anything, it doesn’t go far enough. While Trump V. United States certainly makes it frighteningly clear that the White House is essentially a despotic device, this can only be construed as a revelation to someone who spends two thirds of the year hibernating two miles up their own asshole.
In fact, it was actually under Donald Trump’s much-beloved predecessor, Barack Obama, that the Executive Office was first officially awarded the authority to murder American citizens by decree through a shadowy drone strike program which has already been used to kill thousands of innocent civilians across the globe.
And when this extrajudicial assembly line of despotic slaughter was finally brought before a federal judge in 2016 by the ACLU in a lawsuit on behalf of three slain Americans, one of them a 16-year-old boy, the judge openly admitted that Obama likely violated the due process of a child but threw out the case anyway, spouting off about the sanctity of national security and executive power.
This is an absurdly despicable opinion which Mrs. Sotomayor herself apparently shares as she chose to defend herself from charges of hyperbole by fellow lifetime members of her unelected judicial junta by protesting that Trump was not “doing it like President Obama… to protect the country from terrorism, he’s doing it for personal gain.”
This sick moral logic actually cuts right to the dark heart of liberal Trump hysteria. People like Sonya Sotomayor and her fellow dissenting judges aren’t really frightened at all by the gross power wielded by the Executive Office, a power they all know and acknowledge is a matter of life and death. They are simply offended that an oafish lout like Donald Trump doesn’t bother to shield his despotism with lofty peons to national security and the greater good.
This is because America has long been a fascist state that uses a scalped constitution like Buffalo Bill’s “woman suit” to conceal its nasty bits, and this ghastly practice is far from unusual. While America certainly tucks its despotism with all the poise and skill of a world class drag queen, it is far from the first fascist state to use liberal democracy to facilitate its rise to absolute power. It’s actually a pretty standard procedure in this trade and you can look no further than Nazi Germany for the blueprint.
After the November Revolution brought down the German Empire during the waning hours of the First World War, its military elites in the Freikorps and their bourgeoise industrialist patrons made a deal with the supposed liberal progressives in the Social Democratic Party to form a constitutional democracy provided that these Social Democrats sold out their more radical comrades and allowed the same elites they raged against to retain their status and power behind a more politically correct facade.
For a while it worked, with the so-called Weimar Republic enjoying what at least held all the trappings of a very socially tolerant secular society. But the seeds of the Third Reich were sown right into the Republic’s constitution which afforded its own executive office with the right to override the Reichstag through emergency decree with its infamous Article 48.
The nation’s first president, a Social Democrat named Friedrich Ebert, made regular use of this democratic device for despotism to keep the rabble in line, as did his predecessors, including Paul Von Hindenburg, whose presidency the SPD backed in the name of national unity and who paved the road to the Holocaust with democratic pavement by appointing Adolf Hitler as his chancellor. And how did young Hitler justify his proceeding attempted takeover of Europe? With a call for national security of course after the Reichstag burned down during his own little January 6.
None of this is coincidental nor anomalous. Nearly every fascist state is midwifed by a liberal democracy because both are little more than the playthings of the same greedy elites attempting to hoodwink the powerless while they rob them stupid.
The one thing that the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany all had in common was that they all shared the exact same nest of conniving oligarchs running the show behind the curtains. Monied creeps who simply shifted the excuses to maintain their grip on power with different parties and ideologies. In fact, many of these vermin even helped the United States to “rebuild” the Europe they blew to bits as part of the newly liberal government of West Germany.
All of this is part of a cyclical process of degenerative statism that often begins with some kind of divinely inspired monarchy, matures into a more secular republic, and then embraces an openly militant call to despotism as its public begins to catch on to the charade, often before simply repeating the cycle all over again.
The communists often refer to the fascistic stage of this process as “late capitalism” and their analysis of its liberal roots remains right on the money, but these Marxist historians also typically fail to recognize that state communism is merely another part of the same cruel process. After all, didn’t Czarist Russia become a social democracy before the Bolsheviks crashed in to preserve the order by declaring the Comintern to be the new aristocracy until it was time for Stalin to play Further?
This isn’t to say that fascism isn’t a problem. Fascism is an existential threat to basic human dignity, but it will never be stopped until we address the fact that it is merely the inevitable end result of the state itself, a system defined by giving a single sainted class a monopoly on the use of force. Once that precedent is set with standing armies and “national security,” fascism essentially becomes a forgone conclusion. Therefore, the only way to truly confront the fascist menace is to confront the state itself, specifically the police state, and the only thing that committed antifascists really need to do to achieve this goal is to maintain their tactics while shifting their focus.
Targeting hooligans like the Proud Boys or even just one single wannabe Further like Donald Trump is little more than an act of treating the symptoms of a much larger disease and it often actually only tends to provide that disease with more opportunities to justify its own existence by offering its aid in fighting its own symptoms. This is how you get a career white supremacist like Joe Biden running to save us all from Satan’s power while beefing up the same police state that Trump sicked on peaceful protestors, only this time in the name of preventing MAGA extremism.
Antifascists should be infiltrating, sabotaging, and doxing the police state itself along with its corporate sponsors and their role models should be post-modern cyber revolutionaries like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, who have risked their lives to expose the guts of the fascist machine, as well as hacktivist sets like Anonymous who have actively sabotaged it. This can even be taken a step further by taking a page from counter economic pioneers like Ross Albricht, who gave us a sample of a viable alternative to corporate state subsistence with the black markets of his new Silk Road.
Despotism at its most cerebral is a very creative beast that will require equally creative solutions to destroy it. Covert fascists like Justice Sotomayor are actually far smarter than their conservative counterparts to conceal their despotism behind a veneer of liberal democracy but the power will always belong to the people who are just creative enough to realize that they are only as powerless as they believe they are.
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