POLITICS

The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism

Recent debates have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

ALBERTO TOSCANO

In the wake of the 2016 election, public intellectuals latched onto the new administration’s organic and ideological links with the alt- and far right. But a mass civic insurgency against racial terror—and the federal government’s authoritarian response—has pushed hitherto cloistered academic debates about fascism into the mainstream, with Peter E. Gordon, Samuel Moyn, and Sarah Churchwell taking to the pages of the New York Review of Books to hash out whether it is historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist. The F-word has also been making unusual forays into CNN, the New York Times, and mainstream discourse. The increasing prospect that any transfer of power will be fraught—Trump has hinted he will not accept the results if he loses—has further intensified the stakes, with even the dependable neoliberal cheerleader Thomas Friedman conjuring up specters of civil war.

Is it historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist? The long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance provides direction in this debate.

Notwithstanding the changing terrain, talk of fascism has generally stuck to the same groove, namely asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar from interwar European dictatorships. Sceptics of comparison underscore the way in which the analogy of fascism can either treat the present moment as exceptional, papering over the history of distinctly American forms of authoritarianism, or, alternatively, be so broad as to fail to define what is unique about our current predicament. Analogy’s advocates point to the need to detect family resemblances with past despotisms before it’s too late, often making their case by advancing some ideal-typical checklist, whether in terms of the elements of or the steps toward fascism. But what if our talk of fascism were not dominated by the question of analogy?

Attending to the long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance—to what Cedric Robinson called a “Black construction of fascism” alternative to the “historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist”—could serve to dislodge the debate about fascism from the deadlock of analogy, providing the resources to confront our volatile interregnum.

Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived of as beyond analogy, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left. They detailed how what could seem, from a European or white vantage point, to be a radically new form of ideology and violence was, in fact, continuous with the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery.

Black radical thinkers have long sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left, revealing fascism as a continuation of colonial dispossession and racial slavery. 

Pan-Africanist George Padmore, breaking with the Communist International over its failure to see the likenesses between “democratic” imperialism and fascism, would write in How Britain Rules Africa (1936) of settler-colonial racism as “the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today.” He would go on to see in South Africa “the world’s classic Fascist state,” grounded on the “unity of race as against class.” Padmore’s “Colonial Fascism” thus anticipated Aimé Césaire’s memorable description of fascism as the boomerang effect of European imperialist violence.

African American anti-fascists shared the anti-colonial analysis that the Atlantic world’s history of racial violence belied the novelty of intra-European fascism. Speaking in Paris at the Second International Writers Congress in 1937, Langston Hughes declared: “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” It was an insight that certainly would not have surprised any reader of W. E. B. Du Bois’s monumental reckoning with the history of U.S. racial capitalism, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). As Amiri Baraka would suggest much later, building on Du Bois’s passing mentions of fascism, the overthrow of Reconstruction enacted a “racial fascism” that long predated Hitlerism in its use of racial terror, conscription of poor whites, and manipulation of (to quote the famous definition of fascism by Georgi Dimitrov) “the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist sector of finance capital.”

In this view, a U.S. racial fascism could go unremarked because it operated on the other side of the color line, just as colonial fascism took place far from the imperial metropole. As Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials have suggested in their vital The US Antifascism Reader (2020):

For people of color at various historical moments, the experience of racialization within a liberal democracy could have the valence of fascism. That is to say, while a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of power, the experience of racialized rightlessness within a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience. For those racially cast aside outside of liberal democracy’s system of rights, the word ‘fascism’ does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order.

Or, as French writer Jean Genet observed on May 1, 1970, at a rally in New Haven for the liberation of Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale: “Another thing worries me: fascism. We often hear the Black Panther Party speak of fascism, and whites have difficulty accepting the word. That’s because whites have to make a great effort of imagination to understand that blacks live under an oppressive fascist regime.”

It was largely thanks to the Panthers that the term “fascism” returned to the forefront of radical discourse and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The United Front Against Fascism conference held in Oakland in 1969 brought together a wide swathe of the Old and New Lefts, as well as Asian American, Chicano, Puerto Rican (Young Lords), and white Appalachian (Young Patriots Organization) activists who had developed their own perspectives on U.S. fascism—for instance, by foregrounding the experience of Japanese internment during World War II. In a striking indication of the peculiarities and continuities of U.S. anti-fascist traditions, among the chief planks of the conference was the notionally reformist demand for community or decentralized policing—to remove racist white officers from Black neighborhoods and exert local checks on law enforcement.

Political prisoners close to the Panthers theorized specifically about what we could call “late fascism” (by analogy with “late capitalism”) in the United States. At the same time that debates about “new fascisms” were polarizing radical debate across Europe, the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson generated a theory of fascism from the lived experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism. Davis, the Black Marxist and feminist scholar, needs little introduction, her 1970 imprisonment on trumped-up conspiracy charges having rocketed her to the status of household name in the United States and an icon of solidarity worldwide. Fewer remember that the conspiracy charge against Davis arose from an armed courtroom attack by her seventeen-year-old bodyguard, Jonathan Jackson, with the goal of forcing the release of the Soledad Brothers, three African American prisoners facing the death penalty for the killing of a white prison guard. Among them was Jonathan’s older brother, the incarcerated Black revolutionary George Jackson, with whom Davis corresponded extensively. Jackson was killed by a prison sniper during an escape attempt on August, 21, 1971, a few days before the Soledad Brothers were to be tried.

In one of his prison letters on fascism, posthumously collected in Blood in My Eye (1972), Jackson offered the following reflection:

When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed.

Jackson encourages us to consider what happens to our conceptions of fascism if we take our bearings not from analogies with the European interwar scene, but instead from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the “concrete and steel,” from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression.

In their writing and correspondence, marked by interpretive differences alongside profound comradeship, Davis and Jackson identify the U.S. state as the site for a recombinant or even consummate form of fascism. Much of their writing is threaded through Marxist debates on the nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and capitalist crises, as well as, in Jackson’s case, an effort to revisit the classical historiography on fascism. On these grounds, Jackson and Davis stress the disanalogies between present forms of domination and European exemplars, but both assert the privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a prison-judicial system that could accurately be described as a racial state of terror.

Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson saw the U.S. state—the carceral state and racial capitalism—as the site of fascism. This fascism originated from liberal democracy itself. 

This both echoes and departs from the Black radical theories of fascism, such as Padmore’s or Césaire’s, which emerged from the experience of the colonized. The new, U.S. fascism that Jackson and Davis strive to delineate is not an unwanted return from the “other scene” of colonial violence, but originates from liberal democracy itself. Indeed, it was a sense of the disavowed bonds between liberal and fascist forms of the state which, for Davis, was one of the great lessons passed on by Herbert Marcuse, whose grasp of this nexus in 1930s Germany allowed him to discern the fascist tendencies in the United States of his exile.

Both Davis and Jackson also stress the necessity to grasp fascism not as a static form but as a process, inflected by its political and economic contexts and conjunctures. Checklists, analogies, or ideal-types cannot do justice to the concrete history of fascism. Jackson writes of “the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.” He remarks that fascism “developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s dilapidation.”

Where Jackson and Davis echo their European counterparts is in the idea that “new” fascisms cannot be understood without seeing them as responses to the insurgencies of the 1960s and early 1970s. For Jackson, fascism is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary form, as evidenced by the violence with which it represses any consequential threat to the state. But fascism does not react immediately against an ascendant revolutionary force; it is a kind of delayed counterrevolution, parasitic on the weakness or defeat of the anti-capitalist left, “the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried—a consciousness that was compromised.” Jackson argues that U.S.-style fascism is a kind of perfected form—all the more insidiously hegemonic because of the marriage of monopoly capital with the (racialized) trappings of liberal democracy. As he declared:

Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange.

In Davis’s concurrent theorizing, the carceral, liberationist perspective on fascism has a different inflection. For Davis, fascism in the United States takes a preventive and incipient form. The terminology is adapted from Marcuse, who remarked, in an interview from 1970, “In the last ten to twenty years we’ve experienced a preventative counterrevolution to defend us against a feared revolution, which, however, has not taken place and doesn’t stand on the agenda at the moment.” Some of the elements of Marcuse’s analysis still resonate (particularly poignant, in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder by police, is his mention of no-knock warrants):

The question is whether fascism is taking over in the United States. If by that we understand the gradual or rapid abolition of the remnants of the constitutional state, the organization of paramilitary troops such as the Minutemen, and granting the police extraordinary legal powers such as the notorious no-knock law which does away with the inviolability of the home; if one looks at the court decisions of recent years; if one knows that special troops—so-called counterinsurgency corps—are being trained in the United States for possible civil war; if one looks at the almost direct censorship of the press, television and radio: then, as far as I’m concerned, one can speak with complete justification of an incipient fascism. . . . American fascism will probably be the first which comes to power by democratic means and with democratic support.

Davis was drawn to Marcuse’s contention that “fascism is the preventive counter-revolution to the socialist transformation of society” because of how it resonated with racialized communities and activists. In the experience of many Black radicals, the aspect of their revolutionary politics that most threatened the state was not the endorsement of armed struggle, but rather the “survival programs,” those enclaves of autonomous social reproduction facilitated by the Panthers and more broadly practiced by Black movements. While nominally mobilized against the threat of armed insurrection, the ultimate target of counterinsurgency were these experiments with social life outside and against the racial state—especially when they edged toward what Huey P. Newton named “revolutionary intercommunalism.”

Race, gender, and class determine how fascist the country might seem to any given individual.

What can be gleaned from Davis’s account is the way that fascism and democracy can be experienced very differently by different segments of the population. In this regard, Davis is attuned to the ways in which race and gender, alongside class, can determine how fascist the country seems to any given individual. As Davis puts it, fascism is “primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even moderate democrats.” But the latter are unlikely to fully perceive this phenomenon because of the manufactured invisibility of the site of the state’s maximally fascist presentation, namely, prisons with their “totalitarian aspirations.”

The kind of fascism diagnosed by Davis is a “protracted social process,” whose “growth and development are cancerous in nature.” We thus have the correlation in Davis’s analysis between, on the one hand, the prison as a racialized enclave or laboratory and, on the other, the fascist strategy of counterrevolution, which flow through society at large but are not experienced equally by everyone everywhere. As Davis has written more recently:

The dangerous and indeed fascistic trend toward progressively greater numbers of hidden, incarcerated human populations is itself rendered invisible. All that matters is the elimination of crime—and you get rid of crime by getting rid of people who, according to the prevailing racial common sense, are the most likely people to whom criminal acts will be attributed.

CONTINUE READING HERE 

The Fascist Kernel of Ukrainian Genocidal Nationalism

 The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies, Number 2402. Pittsburgh: The Center for Russian and East European Studies 2015.

https://www.academia.edu/12951527/The_Fascist_Kernel_of_Ukrainian_Genocidal_Nationalism._The_Carl_Beck_Papers_in_Russian_and_East_European_Studies_Number_2402._Pittsburgh_The_Center_for_Russian_and_East_European_Studies_2015

G. Rossoliński-L... 

This study briefly presents the history of the radical form of Ukrainian nationalism, paying special attention to the geopolitical circumstances which formed this movement. Then, it analyzes some aspects of this phenomenon, such as its main ideologists, racism, antisemitism, religion, rituals, leaders, concepts of revolution, and the ethnic, political and mass violence conducted before, during, and after the Second World War. This short monograph argues that the extreme and genocidal form of Ukrainian nationalism did have a fascist kernel and should be considered a form of European or East-Central European fascism. Nevertheless, because of the specific cultural, social, and political Ukrainian circumstances the radical form of Ukrainian nationalism differed from better-known fascist movements such as German National Socialism or Italian Fascism, and thus it requires a careful and nuanced investigation.

Volume: 2402

Publisher: The Carl Beck Papers

Publication Date: 2015

Inter-Fascist Conflicts in East Central Europe: The Nazis, the “Austrofascists,” the Iron Guard, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

https://www.academia.edu/33274374/Inter-Fascist_Conflicts_in_East_Central_Europe_The_Nazis_the_Austrofascists_the_Iron_Guard_and_the_Organization_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists

Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 168-191.

G. Rossoliński-L...

The history of European fascism is characterized by both cooperation

and conflicts between movements, regimes, and individuals. Hypernationalism and racism, two intrinsic elements of fascism, simultaneously united and divided the leaders, members, and adherents of movements and regimes. The Italian Fascists, the German Nazis, and a number of other similar movements and regimes wanted to unite and create Europe on their terms. They usually called it “New Europe,” but they did not agree on which countries ought to be included as self-governing nationstates, and which ones should be subordinated to the major regimes. A huge problem for the creation of a fascist Europe and also of a fascist European community was the obsession with violence, including the belief that conflicts should be resolved by war. Nevertheless, it was neither violence nor the ultranationalist and racist nature of fascism that caused the most brutal conflicts between fascists. As this chapter will demonstrate, inter-fascist clashes frequently resulted from pragmatic subjects, the desire to keep “order” in particular parts of Europe, and sometimes also from cultural and political misunderstandings.

Publication Name: Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 168-191.

Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe, 1918–1945

https://www.academia.edu/33033369/Fascism_without_Borders_Transnational_Connections_and_Cooperation_between_Movements_and_Regimes_in_Europe_1918_1945

Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 1-38.

G. Rossoliński-L...

Fascist movements and regimes have usually been conceived as and

presented themselves as national political forces. In fact, contemporaries as well as scholars have highlighted hyper-nationalism as one of the most important features of fascism which separated fascist movements and regimes from each other. Not accidentally, all attempts to forge a “Fascist International” foundered between the two world wars. Many historians have therefore dismissed or failed to recognize crossborder cooperations between fascists. In fact, the hyper-nationalism of fascist movements and their social Darwinist doctrines, as well as the expansionist and racist policies of the Third Reich and Fascist Italy, have led most experts to argue that fascist internationalism or international fascism was merely a camouflage and a sham. The interpretation that “international fascism is unthinkable, a contradiction in terms” has received broad support from most historians. As a corollary, fascism has largely been investigated in the framework of national history. Beyond volumes that have collected national case studies, few systematic comparative studies have been published. In particular, cross-border interactions between fascist movements and regimes have largely been dismissed in historical scholarship.

Publication Name: Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 1-38.

INTERVIEWS

Domenico Moro: Fascism was the open and brute dictatorship of the elite of capital

Saturday, October 27, 2018

13 min read

foto: Domenico Moro’s private archive
Posted on Oct 27, 2018 by IL GRIDO DEL POPOLO

Domenico Moro (1964, Rome) is an Italian economist, sociologist and political researcher who for years has been analyzing and researching the European monetary system as well as large multinacional financial monopolies and groups such as Bilderberg and the Trilateral commission. So far, he has published several books: “Il gruppo Bilderberg” (2014), “Globalizzazione e decadenza industriale” (2015), “La terza guerra mundiale e il fundamentalismo islamico” (2016), “La gubbia dell’euro” (2018).

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First I would ask you if the European Union has a future in the form of a corporate project of the ruling elites?

I think we have to distinguish between Eu and single European currency. It is difficult that Euro can survive, in the same way as other previous monetary unions in the History, for example the Latin union. First of all, the Euro system is unfit for coping with the evolution of world economy, because makes impossible to the single countries to adapt themselves to economic cycles. Without any control on exchange and interest rates, and on money emission of the central bank is impossible for a single State making any industrial policy and contrasting the decrease of GDP and employment. Euro is broadening the differences between countries, producing millions of poor people and, more of all, makes difficult resisting to external shocks. Another crisis, like the 2008-2009 one (the worst one since 1929), would means likely the collapse of euro system. But for which reason the ruling classes in Europe are so determined to defend Euro? Euro is a political project.  From a class point of view, Euro is the tool to force the working class to accept the European rules, written in the Treaties. The target is removing the control of public budget and industrial policy from other classes and put it only into hands of the superior sector of capital, the biggest and more internationalized one. Above all Euro is the tool to accept limitations on popular and democratic sovereignty, as it was established during a century of struggles, and make the Parliaments more weak with no power in public budget and industrial policy decisions. In this way, Euro and treaties has made possible modify the balance of power between capital and labour that was defined in favour of working class after the fall of fascism and after the struggles in sixties and seventies. With regard to the Eu treaties, also the European targets that force the decrease of debt to 60% on GDP are impossible to be reached. Perhaps what could survive is another system of relationships among European countries, with agreements which establish some kind of trade rules among countries.

How do you look at Brussels latest pressures on fiscal monetary policy of Italy, in terms of her debt?

Italian government actually is not doing an expansionary policy. It would be exaggerated call it a Keynesian policy. A public deficit of 2.4% is just 0.1% above the deficit of the previous Pd government. Notwithstanding the European commission is attacking the government as if it was doing a policy of strong spending, which can destroy Europe. It is the demonstration that European Commission is far from reality. According to Junker and Moscovici, Italy should cut public expenses further after years of austerity in order to pass from 131% to 60% of debt on GDP just in a couple of decades of years. All this during a period of economic stagnation with an inflation between zero and one per cent and with 5 million of absolute poors. It is ridiculous.

Italian public debt has already reached 131% of the state GDP, which is more of 2340 billion euros, while economic growth is below the EU average, and the unemployment rate is 11%, which amongst the young population is unbelievable 32%. How can Italy deal with these problems and can it at all?

That’s for sure that Italy cannot cope with unemployment and its big debt if it follow the European rules and cut the public expenses. We need to increase investments, particularly in construction, in order to revitalize the domestic market. Only the state can do it. For this reason Italy has to go much further a 2.4% deficit. In this case, it should be inevitable to crash with European authorities.

Right-wing populist “5stelle” and Lega Nord government in Rome are opposed to austerity measures, but will they step in front of the Brussels bureaucrats, as did in Greece once?

Italy is not Greece. First of all for its dimensions. Without Italy euro can arrive to the end quickly. Secondly, Italian industrial structure is quite strong and quite competitive. Italy has been realizing strong trade surpluses (goods and services) for the last 7 years (53 billion of euros in 2017). Instead France and Uk continue to have trade deficit. Italy has been doing public primary surpluses for last 20 years (Germany for only 12 years), i.e. Italy State expenses are less than its revenues. Furthermore in Italy household savings are quite high. International investments funds know it, as JP Morgan said recently. For this reason they are investing in Italian debt even now. From the other side, we do not have to forget the euro is a strong cage. Exiting from this cage requires a strong political determination. The question is if M5S and Lega will be firm and concerned to it. I have some doubt about this. In my opinion the true government target is to negotiate better conditions with Eu. Lega and M5S are bourgeois parties. They represent some sectors of capital and middle and petty bourgeoisie damaged by austerity.  Do not forget that Italy has a biggest sector of little and middle firms than other European countries, like Germany and France. In any event the situation could fall if the Commission hardens its position, but it is difficult forecast what will happen.

We are witnesses today that the Italian left is at the lowest possible level of its existence and socio-political action. Which is the real reason for it?

The reasons of collapse of Italian left are many and have origin in the past twenty-thirty years of Italian history. When Italian communist party (Pci) broke up in 1991, it was divided in two parts. The majority organized  a party (called Pds and then Ds and Pd), which was rather liberal democratic than social democratic. It was the demonstration of how Pci was changed in the last decade, surrendering on the political and ideological field. This party become the spokesperson of big capital interests and in particular of European union and single currency. All of this was hidden by the opposition of Berlusconi, depicted as the most important danger for Italy. The minority of former Pci and some other far left little organizations and groups organized the Party of Rifondazione Comunista (Prc). This party was the assembly of many political and ideological currents in perpetual fight each against other rather than an organization composed by well-blended elements. Not much was done in this direction by the leadership, more interested in electoral tactics. Furthermore, in order to fight Berlusconi, considered the most (or the only) dangerous enemy, the sole political tactic of Prc was the centre-left coalition with Pds (later Ds) and leaded by Romano Prodi, a former State top manager, the person responsible for privatization of many State enterprises. The second Prodi government (2006-2008) was a disillusionment for many voters of Prc, PdCI (a 1998 secession from Prc) and Greens. At the elections in 2008 the votes of this parties decreased from 12% to 3% and they were expelled from Parliament. This result was destinate to do not change. For two reasons. Firstly, a part of far left electorate moved to abstention and a bigger part passed to Movimento cinque stelle, which will began the first Italian party in 2013 and go to the government in 2018. Secondly, because of the defeat, the political and ideological differences broke up inside Prc and the far left. Some people wanted go on with centre-left collation, some did not. Some people thought that was necessary get rid of communism and marxism, some did not. There were many secessions, which weakened Prc. The situation fell with the 2008-2009 crisis and European austerity, in particular during Monti government, a sort of Eu commissioner, supported by Pd and Berlusconi. The moderate left was the more sure supporter of European constrictions and payed the price for this at the last elections,  in the same way the as moderate left did in France, Greece, Spain, Germany. The far left was negative with austerity, but its position on Eu and the single currency was little clear, confusing defense of Eu with internationalism and the fight against Euro with nationalism. Summarizing, moderate left was the defender of big capital interests while far left was not able to understand the modification of the Italian and European society, in particular the impact of Euro on economy and policy. On the contrary, M5S and Lega were able to do it. It was remarkable the ability of Lega to transform from defender of North Italy interests into defender of “national” interests, building a social alliance (in the sense which Gramsci gave to the word) with some sectors of capitalist firms (which have the leadership), middle classes and working class. In a way, today we assist to a civil war inside the Italian (but also European) capitalist class, of which the birth of last Italian government is the evidence.

How do you see today on this growing rising climax of fascism in Europe and whether a modern left can even oppose this trend and how?

The rising of fascist groups depends on the European austerity and crisis, in the same way as nazism depended on the austerity policy with which was faced the 1929 crysis. They also depend on the tolerance towards them of moderate left and centre-right parties that underestimated antifascism and Resistance importance in the last decades. But the true question is: there is a danger of fascism regime in Europe? In order to answer we have to understand what was fascism and why took power. Fascism was the open and brute dictatorship of the élite of capital. This dictatorship was useful to remove popular and democratic sovereignty, eliminating Parliament and elections, as well as trade unions and working class parties. Furthermore fascism and its nationalistic soul was coherent with a capitalistic accumulation that was mainly domestic and with a territorial shape of imperialism. Fascism was the preparation to the second time of the world war for the defeated country (Germany) and the unsatisfied country (Italy) of the First World War. Today  – we have to ask ourselves – what has eliminate o reduced popular and democratic sovereignty? What has neutralized the universal suffrage, trade unions and popular parties? The answer is simple. European treaties and single currency. You can vote a policy after that the European constraints and Euro prevent to put into practice. Thanks to them, élite of capital do not need to abolish democracy or use direct brutality. Furthermore, the capitalist accumulation is much more global than in the thirties and imperialism is not territorial but managed by multinational enterprises. The most bizarre thing is that M5S and Lega – a centre and a far right party – seem the defender of the vote results (and of the democratic sovereignty) against the international market and European Commission influence on the political decision. Meanwhile, Pd, Berlusconi and President of Republic defend the European Commission and say “We have to respetct the rules, otherwise the markets will punish us”. The problem is that Italian workers and unemployed people has been punished for a decade by austerity, of which is impossible to see a end. You can imagine the consequences of Junker declarations on Italian electorate: Lega has increased its votes from 17,3% to 30%. This is the demonstration of the confusion existing in Italy (but also in many European countries) and of the difficulties of the left to fight the M5S and Lega positions. For this reason we have to be clear about European treaty and single currency. Exit from Euro or even from Eu do not resolve all the problems but is a necessary conditions, particularly if we want to be credible. It is true that the problem is the capital, but capitalism fights its class battle and do profits in different historical ways. Today European integration takes on a strategic role for European capital egemony and capital accumulation.

All this does not mean that does not exist any difference inside capital and between capitals of different nations and consequently that does not exit competition among capitals and among States. On the contrary, Euro, widening differences in economy and reducing domestic markets, increases the imperialistic tendency to expansion abroad and tensions among States, strengthening the role of the national State, as well as nationalism and xenophobia. Euro and Eu do not abolish or weaken national-States, but change them, redefining their parts and the relationship among these in order to put in a cage the subordinate classes.

Consider one of the best experts when it comes to organizations such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. Tell me how really these organizations really are capable of carrying the decision on the international political scene, and is there any cooperation between them and the NATO military alliance through an institution such as the Club of Rome?

Usually people connect Bilderberg to conspiracy theory. They think that there is a little group of people that decide about all what concern the events in the world. Actually Bilderberg and its sister organization, Trilateral Commission, are think tanks of a part of the superior sector of international capital of western countries, the majority member countries of Nato (Usa, Canada, Uk, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc.). Their target is discussing and defining policies useful to their interests. Even if there is no conspiracy, the strategical importance of Bilderberg and Trilateral is evident in connection with European integration. The proposal of a single currency in Europe was proposed in a meeting of Bilderberg in Buxton in 1958, in order to control the public budget and reduce the power of Parliaments. Particularly meaningful is The Crisis of democracy, a report for the Trilateral meeting at Tokyo in 1975, written by Huntigton and Crozier. The crisis of democracy, according to the two authors, was depending on an excess of democracy, which should have been reduced. The tool to reach this goal was European integration. The strength of Bilderberg and Trilateral depends on the connection between business élite (top managers and member of boards of multinationals, transnationals, and internationals banks), policy élite (prime ministers and heads of State, finance and foreign ministers, European Commission members, Nato council members), élite of European and national bureaucracy (International monetary fund, central banks and Bce members), and élite of University and mass media.  Many European prime ministers has attended the meeting, among them Blair, Merkel, Prodi, Monti. In this way the business élite can exercise an influence on politics. Summarizing, there is no conspiracy theory but hegemony building of transnational capital in western society.

This interview was taken by Gordan Stosevic.

Dictatorship Domenico Moro Fascism

Two Stupid Titles, a Deflating Anthology, and the Remarkable Persistence of Academic Fascism Denial

BY PAUL STREET

 APRIL 12, 2024
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Image by Jon Tyson.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America (New York: WW Norton, “2024”)

But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

+ Bob Dylan, 1965

Now that the Trump era has officially ended…it seems clear that there are still many social and psychological variable to map.

* Professor Moira Weigel, 2022

Never underestimate the lethal buffoonery of academics who can’t take the menace of Amerikan fascism seriously until it’s too late.

Here is a useful definition of “the F-word” from the website of Refuse Fascism, an organization that was formed in the immediate wake of Trump’s first election victory with the goal of forcing out the Trump-Pence regime through mass pressure in the streets and public squares:

“Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights…Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. All of this took dramatic leaps under the Trump Regime. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”

The first three chapters of my 2021 book This Happened Here: Neoliberals, Amerikaners, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2021) explained in detail how Donald “Vermin” Trump, Trumpism, and the first Trump presidency were fundamentally fascist. It wasn’t difficult to detect core fascist tendencies and the essential fascist goal – the elimination of democracy and rule of law –in the Trump phenomenon and presidency. The main challenge in This Happened Here was empirical: keeping up with and documenting the plentiful fascistic conduct of Trump and his allies and supporters.

Any doubts as to the fascist nature and ambitions of the Trump phenomenon and presidency should have ended with the Trump-sparked January 6th Capitol Riot, the bloody culmination of a long rolling Republifascist coup attempt dedicated to first subverting and then reversing the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. After the attack on the US Capitol, only an academic fool could have denied the obviously fascist nature of Trump and Trumpism.

Refusing to Acknowledge Fascism, 2019-2020

Speaking of ivory towered idiocy, the fourth chapter of This Happened Here was titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial,” a turn of phrase suggested by my fellow Refuse Fascism Editorial Board member Coco Das. This was a play on the title of historian Robert Paxton’s oft-cited book on 20^th Century European fascism The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton was a leading name among a roster of academics who went on record mistakenly denying the fascist nature of Trump and Trumpism as late as October 2020. Some if not most of these academics persisted in sticking their heads in the historical sand even after January 6. To his credit, Paxton changed his mind after Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump sent his frothing mob to “get wild” on Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence and try to block the Electoral College certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.

The “Anatomy of Fascism Denial” chapter presented a parade of elite professors who assured us that Trump, Trumpism and the Trump presidency didn’t really merit designation with “the F-word.” This pompous club included Eliah Bures, historian and Senior Fellow at the University of California-Berkely’s Center for Right Wing Studies, Bruce Neuborne, the Norman Dorsan Professor of Civil Liberties at NYU’s Law School (who prefaced his denialism with accurate reflections on Trump’s strong parallels with Adolph Hitler!), pre-January 6 Paxton, Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University, Stanley Payne, the Jaune Vicens Vives Hillsdale professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin, Oxford historian Roger Griffin, Columbia University political scientist Sheri Berman, University of Texas government professor Jason Brownlee, NYU political scientist Cory Robin, and Samuel Moyn, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and history professor at Yale University. Even the NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat (who knew very well that Trump and Trumpism were essentially fascist) stated (somewhat unconvincingly) a preference for not upsetting her fellow academics by using the “F-word” to describe the “authoritarian” Trump.

Below I summarize leading denialist narratives of the time in italics and mention in boldface the problems with each narrative:

The United States did not become a fully consolidated fascist regime with a rapid shutdown of democracy and political thugs in the streets when Trump became president, as if anybody was arguing that full fascist consolidation had taken place in the US. (Look at the RF statement above: “All of this [took] dramatic leaps under the Trump Regime. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.” There was and is no sense here that fascism consolidated power in the US under Trump; just that it advanced dramatically and must be halted before such consolidation occurs, with grave consequences. )

Trump rose to power through an election, not through violence, as if fascism can’t and hasn’t in the past risen through elections!

The clownish narcissist and grifter Trump did not exhibit have a strong intellectual grasp of classic fascist doctrine, as if that was required for him to channel fascist political ideas and stand atop a movement that checked off all the boxes defining fascist politics and ideology – and as if fascism is about intellectual rigor and coherence.

Trump didn’t wage a giant territorial war meant to kill and/or enslave masses of people deemed biologically unworthy and to organize the world on hierarchical racial lines, as if a politician, movement, and presidency can’t be fascist until a nation goes full Third Reich and launches a replica of World War II.

Trump didn’t show any desire to carry out state management and command of the economy, as if such command and control was a defining feature of fascist ideology and politics.

Trump’s rhetoric and clowning persona was loaded with self-admiring and bizarre performative theater…as if that somehow negated his fascist essence and the fascist nature of the politics and movement he represented.

Trump as president was just a pockets-lining wheeler and dealer… as if that’s all he was and as if fascism hasn’t always contained abundant space for financial corruption and deal-making.

Trump was a “populist,” not fascist, as if populism is about the attempt to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and establish capitalist rule with a boot on the peoples’ necks and in the name of racial purity, fierce patriarchy, and palingenetic ultra-nationalism.

Trump lost the election and his 2020-21 attempt failed to block the ascendancy of Joe Biden, as if fascism can’t be fascist unless it succeeds in its nefarious designs.

“The European fascism analogy does not work in the US-American historical context”…as if the United States does not have (as some writing in the Black radical tradition most especially remind us) its own rich fascist characteristics and traditions that provided critical inspiration for the classic European fascism and fascist regimes that academic Trumpism-as-fascism-deniers reserve for legitimate application of “the F-word” – and as if the United States did not undergo its own dry run of at least proto-fascism during and right after World War One, as Adam Hochschild shows in his remarkable book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.

Much of what the denialist narratives came down to was a stubborn refusal to see fascism without doctrinaire and mustachioed early-mid-20^th Century European dictators in full militarized state power readying and waging inter-imperialist war and exterminating masses deemed racially and otherwise biologically inferior and dangerous at home and abroad. The deniers believed that fascism was an in-the-books historical phenomenon, something that happened only in mid-20^th Century Western Europe and that therefore could not happen in the 21^st Century USA.

The fourth chapter of This Happened Here tore these narratives to shreds, showing that none of them remotely negated the obvious fact – well understood from the start by a number of astute thinkers of various liberal and radical orientations (including Henry Giroux, Robert Reich, Cornel West, Jason Stanley, Bob Avakian, Sunsara Taylor, Adam Gopnik, to name a handful) – that Trump and Trumpism and hence the first Trump presidency were fundamentally fascist.

Channeling Hitler, 2023-24

The denialism continues even now, three years and three months after the Capitol Riot, as we stare into the abyss of a distinctly possible second Trump administration. How pathetic. If Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump and Trumpism passed the “F-word” entrance exam during his first presidency (as I showed in exhausting detail in the third chapter of This Happened Here), he is now promising to earn his fascism degree with honors during his next stay in the White House. Ex-POTUS Trump has: called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution;” openly donned the symbols and language of the neo-Nazi QAnon cult; hosted Kyle Rittenhouse (the teenage fascist militia member who killed two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Back Lives march in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020) and the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago; advocated the extra-judicial execution of suspected shoplifters and suggested that former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley should be executed for reaching out to China’s military command (to reassure them that Trump would not start a nuclear war after losing the 2020 election). Trump is now openly channeling Hitler and otherwise revealing his fascist essence by: saying that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country;” promising to undertake a giant immigrant round-up, detention and deportation program; swearing to rid the country of Marxist “vermin;” pledging “retribution” against his political enemies; intimidating witnesses, prosecutors, and judges who dare to try to uphold the rule of law against him; threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act on the day of his 2025 inauguration; claiming that he will end urban crime “in one day” (a not-so veiled call for military executions in ghetto neighborhoods); announcing his desire to be a “dictator… “for one day;” portraying himself as a messianic figure who alone can save and redeem a once great nation ruined by “the left;” claiming to possess king-like immunity from prosecution for any and all crimes he has committed during and since his tine in the White House; posing as a victim of “radical left” persecution; calling his incarcerated January 6 putschist thugs “political hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” and promising to pardon them. Three weeks ago, Trump told one of his hate rallies in Ohio that nonwhite immigrants are “not people” and said that the US will descend into mass violence if he is not re-elected: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole country.”

All of which renders ridiculous the title of a recent widely read Andrew Marantz essay in The New Yorker: “Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Donald Trump is a Fascist,” by Andrew Marantz. The “we” in the title is liberal and “left” intellectuals whose “argument” is on with a debate about whether Mookie Betts is a baseball player.[1]

Did ..It Happen Here?

Meanwhile, the Republi-fascist cult leader and leading 2024 presidential contender Donald “Poisoning the Blood of Our Country” Trump continues with the Big Hitlerian Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, an openly preposterous and multiply and legally disproven claim that goes unchallenged by anyone who wants to stay afloat in a post-republican Republi-fascist Party that has bowed completely before its orange-hued Dear Leader. And this time, unlike in 2016, Herr Donald has a vast “mainstream” Republikan policy network on board. Led by the Heritage Foundation, this right-wing army of revanchist ideologues, hacks, and wonks has worked up Project 2025, a massive, detailed, detailed and ambitious program for the Christian white nationalist/neofascist takeover and makeover of American government and society. The Trump mission this time includes filling the executive branch from top to bottom with functionaries whose primary qualification for “serving” is loyalty to the Master in the Orange, I mean White House. The Supreme Court is in Republi-fascist hands and the lineup for the 2024 Senate elections strongly favor the nation’s right-/Reich-most major party.

Out across the country, Trumpist Republi-fascists rule half the country’s powerful state governments and are wreaking revanchist havoc both inside and outside of government. They have undertaken a literal physical-military nullificationist challenge to the federal government on the southern Texas border They harass and intimidate teachers, school boards, librarians, public health workers, election officials, election workers, voters. A recent report from Religion Dispatches details the lethal threat posed to voting rights, fair elections and social justice activism and public assembly by far-right white nationalist/Trumpist militias that are collaborating with county boards of supervisors and sheriffs. They stand ready to be activated for political violence by their tangerine-tinted Fuhrer, who is running well ahead of the hapless warmonger “Genocide Joe” Biden in the handful of contested states that absurdly determine presidential outcomes under the archaic slaveowners’ Electoral College. A spate of county resolutions seeking formal legal recognition of these paramilitary bodies “are part of a larger far-right plan to take control of county governments and put them on a war footing—as guerillas when Democrats are in control, and as pro-state paramilitaries when MAGA Republicans are in charge.”

A second Trump presidency – distinctly possible at the current Biden-burdened stage of bourgeois-democratic collapse – will significantly transcend the first one when it comes to making “dramatic leaps” (see the RF definition of fascism above) toward American fascist rule.

“It” vs. “This”

Which brings us to a second foolish title…With all this terrifying history as background, let us try to fathom the idiocy of the name of a new book of mostly academic essays edited by the historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America – the book reviewed in Marantz’s essay.

What is meant by the “It” in Did It Happen Here? The title is a play on Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here. Lewis portrayed the takeover of the United States by a fascist president who outlaws dissent, disembowels Congress, incarcerates political enemies in concentration camps, trains and arms a paramilitary force that terrorizes citizens, imposes regressive corporatist polices, and cancels women’s and minority rights. Political enemies are sent before kangaroo courts presided over by military judges.

Neither me nor anyone else among those commentator and activists who consider Trump, Trumpism, and the first Trump presidency to have been legitimately fascist ever argued that “it” – fully consolidated fascist power across US government – happened during the first Trump presidency. We think rather and only that, to quote Refuse Fascism (RF) again (see my third paragraph above) “all of this” – with “this” meaning fascist ideology, politics, movement, and to some degree policy – “took dramatic leaps under the Trump Regime. History,” RF adds “has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”

My 2021 book on the Trump phenomenon and presidency was titled This Happened Here, NOT It Happened Here. My “This” was the takeover of the White House (for four years) and the (post-republican) Republican (Republi-fascist) Party (this is ongoing and has in fact deepened under Biden) by a fascist leader atop a movement animated by fascist narratives, ideology, and politics. My fellow student of 21^st Century Amerikaner fascism and occasional past co-author Anthony DiMaggio’s book on the Trump years is titled Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here.

“Did”? – a Historiographical Debate About the Past?

And what’s with the past tense in Steinmetz-Jenkins’ title?! Did it? Did? Really? What, as if the country’s fascism problem is in the dead past? Seriously, as if it’s now all about a historiographical debate over a long-ago period and phenomenon across the Atlantic Ocean? Have Steinmetz-Jenkins, his editor, and his publisher been paying attention to current US events and politics?

Tellingly enough, all but one of the essays collected Did It Happen Here? were first published before 2023. More than twenty of the thirty essays included in the anthology originally came out between 2020 and 2022 and a handful were published long before Trump was first elected. I only found one solitary primary or secondary source dated after 2022 in the book’s endnotes. Even Steinmetz-Jenkins’ introduction to a “2024”anthology cites sources just from 2017 to 2021, with one exception (Bruce Kuklick’s condescending and denialist volume Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture.)

“Now That the Trump Era Has Ended”!

Here is a remarkable and sadly outdated statement from Mora Weigel, one of Steinmetz-Jenkins’ contributors, near the end of an essay whose endnotes contain no sources later than 2020: “Now that the Trump era has officially ended, and yet stochastic acts of racist violence and the macabre strangeness of [fascist] Q’Anon persist, it seems clear that there are still many social and psychological variable to map” (p. 269 in Did It Happen Here?)

What the F*#k (if I might use the original F-word)! “Map” away, professors, but here’s a news flash in 2024: the Trump era has NOT ended, officially or otherwise and academic denialism is party of why.

Leanings and Angles

Can “it” – consolidated across-the-broad fascism – happen here? We are about to find out, and to his credit Steinmetz-Jenkins includes a few essays (from liberal academics Paxton, Ben-Ghiat, Sarah Churchwell, and Jason Stanley) arguing with obvious accuracy that fascism is alive and well in America today. But Steinmetz-Jenkins and his favorite two contributors, the Trunmpenleftish Yale law professor/historian and high academic priest of “progressive” fascism-denial Samuel Moyn, and NYU political “scientist” Cory Robin (who has smart things to say about the right-leaning Minority Rule US constitutional governance order) prefer to help the petty-bourgeois professoriate stick its head in the sand and thereby avoid sticking its neck out on real dangers afoot. As Ben-Ghiat said in July of 2020, explaining to Salon’s Chauncy de Vega why she felt pressured to “use the word ‘fascistic’ instead of ‘fascist’ to describe Trump…one of the things that so many people are scared is that to admit the truth about Trump ….means they would have to do something about it. Many people do not want to take that leap.” It’s not too much of a leap to suggest that the primary “people” to which Ben-Ghiat was referring at the time were her fellow academics and, further, that their reluctance to “take that leap” was about the danger doing so would pose to their careers. (Look at the new McCarthyism terrorizing students and academics who dare to speak up for Palestine and the people of Gaza today.)

“Academics have their leanings,” writes Marantz, “and Steinmetz-Jenkins angles his volume so that it inclines away from alarmism and toward what can be called deflationism.” Marantz is right about “leanings” but wrong on “angle”: the correct formulation is “angles his volume so that it inclines away from the reality of the American fascist menace and toward what can be called denialism!

The lead, Yale-minted “deflationist” Moyn’s essay in Did it Happen Here? is based on a false dichotomy between (a) seeing the obviously fascist Trump and Trumpism as an “abnormal” departure (with what call the modern bourgeois-democratic record of major party US politics) and (b) seeing Trump and Trumpism as “quintessentially American, the expression of enduring indigenous syndromes” and the product of the pre-Trump “status quo ante.” Both (a) and (b) can be and are in fact true. Recent US sociopolitical history in the long Neoliberal era has brought the longstanding main racist/white supremacist, patriarchal, cultist, authoritarian, nativist, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist, violent, ultra-nationalist and fascist currents of US-American politics and society to open predominance atop one of the two viable US capitalist-imperialist political parties – a party that is deeply favored by the right-tilted structure of the archaic US governance order. This ugly process is both quintessentially American and a radical departure from what was previously normal in modern US politics.

Notice the subtitle of Steinmetz-Jenkins’ Moynian-“deflationist” anthology: Perspectives on Fascism and America, not Perspectives on American Fascism, a reflection of the denier-deflators’ refusal or inability to see fascism as meaningfully American.

The “Way Forward” is to Call Serious Analysts “Neurotic”

This is the actual conclusion of Steinmetz-Jenkins’ introduction to Did It Happen Here?:

“The way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest, even as we try to come to terms with the neurosis it revealed in us – a purpose that this anthology serves. ‘The past may live inside the present,’ observes the historian Matt Karp, ‘but it does not govern our growth.’ Instead of letting fear distort politics, the goal now should be to push forward with the hope of building a better society for a new age.”

Read that again. As Marantz observes, the “put the fascism debate to rest” line at end of an introduction to an anthology dedicated at the “fascism debate” is “a bit like welcoming guests to a dinner party by promising them it will be over soon.”

But that’s hardly the worst thing about Steinmetz-Jenkins’ wrap-up. Considerably more insulting and lethal are Steinmetz-Jenkins’ presumptions that fascism is essentially a thing of “the past,” that observing a real and present fascist danger in the contemporary US is a sign of a negative mental condition (“neurosis”!), and that our politics and hopes for a better world – how about a revolutionary socialist one in which the social and political conditions that give rise to fascism are overcome and overthrown? – are enhanced rather than undermined by sticking our heads in the sand (the metaphor bears repeating) about 21^st Century US-Amerikaner Trumpism-fascism.

Steinmetz-Jenkins might want to send notes of apology to the minority of his contributors who explicitly (Jason Stanley, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Geoff Mann, and Robert Paxton) or implicitly (Sarah Churchwell, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Kathleen Belew) take seriously the American fascist menace in 2024. After all, his introduction suggests that they are “neurotics” stuck in the past and unable to properly move forward in life! The contributors who push back on the denialist take could easily counter that it is Steinmetz-Jenkins and Moyn et al. who are stuck in the past when it6 comes to understanding fascism today.

“Plenty of Marxist Thinkers”

On a happier note, Marantz and Steinmetz-Jenkins deserve credit for shooting down a fatuous confusion advanced by many of the disproportionately old, white, and male Trumpenlefties I have encountered in the last eight years – the moronic notion that to identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist is necessarily to mark oneself as an ally, defender, and enabler of the capitalist-imperialist Democrats. “Like everything else,” Marantz notes, the “fascism debate” has “passed through the negative polarization filters of American politics…Once mainstream Democrats started talking about Trump as a unique threat to democracy…the question of whether Trumpism represented a democratic emergency got al mixed up with the question of whether you wanted to be the kind of person who agrees with mainstream Democrats.”

Steinmetz-Jenkins drills down deeper on this question, noting the tendency of some portside-aligned commentators and activists to “see the fascism debate as the continuation of the debate between those who supported Hillary Clinton being the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 versus those who preferred the socialist candidate Bernie Sanders [it should be “and those,” not “versus those” and “the social-democratish candidate Bernie Sanders,” not “the socialist candidate Bernie Sanders – Street].” Through this (distorted) lens, Steinmetz-Jenkins grasps, “those who invoke charges of fascism against Trump are viewed by their critics on the left as part of the political establishment that has dominated the Democratic Party for decades.” Steinmetz-Jenkins correctly notes that this “left” take on the matter “telescopes the fascism debate into a narrow political perspective that does not do justice to its diverse perspectives and concerns.” Further:

“It also doesn’t map onto key figures of the fascism debate when it presumably should. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a key figure of the fascism debate [really? – P.S] along with plenty of Marxist thinkers critical of liberalism, for instance, think that the United States has a real problem with fascism. At the same time, many liberal thinkers…and conservatives are equally critical of comparing the present to Europe’s fascist past.”

(Fun fact: AOC had to be shamed into calling Trump and the Republi-fascists fascist by RF activists back in the day)

But this raises a question for Steinmetz-Jenkins: where the F are any of those “plent[iful] Marxist thinkers” who take the Amerikaner Trumpist fascist menace seriously in his anthology?! I am talking about contemporary socialist and communist analysts of the US today, not the ancient essays by Leon Trotsky (1940) and Angela Davis (1971) that Steinmetz-Jenkins includes in Part 1 (titled “Classic Texts”) of his badly titled new book. Good grief, but did Steinmetz-Jenkins think to reach out to Henry Giroux, Anthony DiMaggio, me, John Bellamy Foster, the revolutionary communist leader and writer Bob Avakian, Carl Boggs, Refuse Fascism, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Socialist Equality Party (whose World Socialist Website has been strong in characterizing Trump and Trumpism as fascist)? How about the left presidential candidate Cornel West, an early backer of RF? None of these names or organizations (Refuse Fascism? Hello?) appear anywhere in Steinmetz-Jenkins’ index even when some of those names have published polished academic historical and social science monographs on precisely the topics covered in Steinmetz-Jenkins’ anthology. This omission is creepy but less than surprising in the self-protective bourgeois racket that is so-called higher education in the neoliberal era.

Notes

1. It’s a bit ironic to see Marantz’s denialist essay in The New Yorker. That journal was the venue for an early concise and on point (if less than comprehensive) Adam Gopnik essay breaking down some key aspects of Trump’s obviously fascist nature in May of 2016, six months before Trump defeated the dismal neoliberal imperialist Hillary Clinton. “There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump,” Gopnik wrote:

“add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist’ …his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end other than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’… The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.” (Adam Gopnik, “Going There with Donald Trump,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2016)

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).