Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century
 
Revolutionary
Socialism in the
21st Century
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Trump’s second term: fascism in the US?

Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson continues the discussion of what we can expect from Trump’s second term, highlighting the risks and the opportunities for resistance.

David Renton addresses the important question of whether Trump will rule as a fascist. The Trump administration will be hugely influential, and is part of an increasingly powerful global network of far-right politicians, from Modi in India to Meloni in Italy. Trump’s ally Elon Musk has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, tweeted in support of Tommy Robinson and is trying to whip up racist hysteria around child abuse. 

The ‘disaster nationalism’ which Richard Seymour describes in his recent book is, in his estimation, ‘not yet fascism. Yet there hasn’t been a better time to be a fascist since 1945.’ The direction of travel, in Seymour’s view, is clear – ‘we are, today, in the early days of a new fascism’. If the danger from the far right is clear, it is at an early stage of development when it remains possible for the left to defeat it. To do that, we need to avoid both panic and complacency, but to make a sober assessment of the risks we face. I want to highlight some issues specific to the United States which David didn’t touch on and which I think are important here.

We’re not seeing a repeat of the 1930s

The most unambiguous claims that Trump is a fascist were made during the presidential election campaign by the Democrats. Those claims were an opportunistic attempt to scare people into voting for Harris, not a serious analysis of Trump’s politics. Now that Trump has been elected, the Biden administration is preparing to hand power over to him in the normal way, without ever mentioning his supposed fascism. 

We’re not seeing, either, a repeat in the United States of the 1920s and 30s. Mussolini and then Hitler rose to power in particular circumstances, none of which apply today. First, the Russian revolution of October 1917 inspired workers around the world, and ruling classes looked to fascists to control the left. Fascists took power in Italy in 1922 after the ‘Biennio Rosso’ or ‘two red years’ of militant strikes in 1919-20. Hitler seized power in 1933, in a Germany where the Communist Party had won 14 per cent of the votes in elections the year before. No similar militancy exists among workers today. Second, fascist militarism in Germany and Italy was part of a strategy for ruling classes competing with countries like Britain and France which ruled colonial empires. The United States today is not a second-league imperialist trying to move into the first rank, but the world’s leading (if declining) imperialist power. And, third, Mussolini and Hitler both established dictatorships, with the support of their countries’ ruling classes – today’s far right, up to now at any rate, maintains its legitimacy through the ballot box.

Finally, the Trump/Musk/MAGA project is incoherent. Personalities don’t help. Trump can change his mind without even realising he’s done so, and isn’t constrained by normal ruling-class common sense – he has told the Danish government that he wants to buy Greenland. As I write, Musk is using his platform X to propose a US invasion of Britain. But there’s a wider issue, in that Trump’s supporters – for example, a cabinet appointed on the basis of personal loyalty to him – don’t share a coherent policy agenda. Beating Harris by sharing inflammatory social media posts is easier than creating a plan for government.

Trump’s big business supporters will welcome proposals to cut government spending and reduce taxes, while, in the words of a Washington Post headline, ‘After backing Trump, low-income voters hope he doesn’t slash their benefits’. The practicalities of running a business – Elon Musk wants to source staff wherever he likes, regardless of border regimes – run up against racist MAGA ideology. And it can be the most right-wing Republicans who cause problems for Trump – as when members of Congress opposed in December a federal budget which Trump supported, or tried to stop the re-election of Mike Jackson as House Speaker last week.

Democracy, race and the US

There is a common sense in Western Europe that bourgeois democracy – elections, parliaments – represents a default state for capitalism, a rule to which fascism is the alarming and unusual exception. A glance at the history of capitalism shows that this isn’t true. In Britain, some forty per cent of men had no vote until 1918, and five million women had no vote until 1928. No elections took place among the much larger numbers of people ruled by the British Empire – almost a quarter of the world’s population in 1925. Instead, the Empire depended on the use, when necessary, of high levels of racist state violence. In India, its most populous territory, those suspected of involvement in the Rebellion of 1857 were tied across the mouths of cannons and blown to pieces. Millions died in the Bengal famine of 1943 when Churchill refused to divert food supplies to the region.

If the British, and other European, empires depended on racist state violence in other parts of the world – associated with, and justified by, racist ideas back at home – the United States, from its beginnings, depended on racist state violence within its own borders. The genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of almost four million people of African heritage and the reconstitution of an unfree black workforce under Jim Crow were all essential to US for its rise to global dominance. Racist state violence continued in the state’s response to the Black Panthers, for example in the assassination by police and federal forces, in Chicago in 1969, of Panther leader Fred Hampton in his bed while he slept. And, as Black Lives Matter protests have highlighted, such violence remains a commonplace of American life to this day. Here in Britain, mainstream media such as the BBC typically suggest that the US is a society similar to our own. There is no denying the reality of British state racism – that of the police for example – but the fact remains that the history of the US as a colonial settler state means that state racism is both different from, and greater than, that which we see in Britain. Manning Marable puts it like this:

More than any other modern nation in the world, with the possible exception of South Africa, the United States developed from the beginning a unique socio-economic structure and a political apparatus which was simultaneously racist, stubbornly capitalist, and committed to a limited form of bourgeois democracy…

Racism of this kind has effects throughout American society. Implicit in the acceptance of widespread gun ownership, incomprehensible to those of us used to Western European social norms, is the idea that a black person with a gun is a terrifying anomaly – and that white people need guns, in the last resort, to defend themselves against blacks. When for example, three members of the Black Panther Party drove around Oakland in 1967 openly carrying firearms in accordance with the law, the cop who stopped them made it very clear why this could not be permitted:

As soon as [Huey] Newton pulled over, the officer stopped and burst out of his car, hollering, ‘What the goddam hell you n——s doing with them goddam guns? Who in the goddam hell you n——s think you are?’

Between 2015 and 2021, police officers, at least 75 per cent of them white, fatally shot at least 135 unarmed black men and women. As Alberto Toscano puts in Late Fascism, if a major element of fascism is racist state violence unconstrained by legal or democratic controls, that is frequently the experience of African Americans. This is not to say the US is fascist, but it does make a specifically American path to fascism easier for the right to travel.

The Unites States in crisis

Electoral victory for a racist and convicted criminal like Trump, promising mass deportations and attacks on LGBTQ+ people, is only possible in the context of social crisis. Health insurance companies regularly deny Americans healthcare which doctors say they need – and so, when Luigi Mangione shot United Healthcare boss Brian Thompson, tens of thousands responded on Facebook with the ‘laugh’ reaction. As many as 1 in 6 Americans do two jobs, and many only make ends meet by selling their blood. One in three high schools went through a gun-related lockdown in the year 2023-24, as did one in six elementary schools. Many voters who had supported Biden in 2020, or Obama in 2008 or 2012, could not bring themselves to vote for Harris in 2012 – and some were so desperate that they voted for Trump.

In the short term, many such people have been hit by recent rising costs for food and housing. But their current lives also contrast with the world of the 1950s and 60s when US was the most prosperous country in the history of the world – including for working-class Americans, or at least white workers. The stability, if also restrictions, of such a life are highlighted by Gabriel Winant with regard to workers in the Pittsburgh steel industry:

Working-class people were expected to form heterosexual nuclear families, have kids, hold down a factory job full-time and accumulate seniority if a man or marry a factory worker if a woman, buy a house and a car, go on strike during contractually specified episodes, go to the hospital when sick, and retire with a pension.

The MAGA track record

The response of Trump and other Republicans to this decline is to attack oppressed people. The United States in the 1950s had a largely white population – now only 60 per cent of Americans are white, and Trump blames immigrants for crime, including the importation of drugs, and proposes mass deportations. The 1950s was based around the suburban, heterosexual family – now same-sex couples can marry, and a growing, if small, number of people identify as trans. Trump has vowed to stop the ‘transgender lunacy’ on the first day of his presidency.

And, before that day arrives, we can get some idea of what is likely to happen based on Trump’s first term, and the Republicans’ politics under Biden. For example, almost 4,000 children were separated from their migrant parents between 2016 and 2020 – six months into the Biden administration, half of them had not been reunited. Healthcare for trans kids has been banned now in 26 states, and normally sober commentators are suggesting that, in three weeks’ time, we might see a ban on all trans healthcare, or a requirement for all federal agencies to recognise only sex assigned at birth.

Attacks on oppressed people are not, of course, characteristic only of fascism – they happen in bourgeois democracies, as with the ban in France on certain forms of Muslim dress in schools, or in Britain on puberty blockers for trans people. But the more such attacks become accepted, the more they can be used to undermine working-class solidarity between people of different genders and ethnicities, or between queer or straight, or trans or cis people. They create a norm of the white, cisgender heterosexual family with a mum and a dad, and endorse attacks on anyone else – again, here we are looking at a road which can lead to fascism.

Finally, as regards the track record of Trump’s first administration, we need to recall his endorsement of neo-fascist groups like the Proud Boys. One characteristic of both the Hitler and Mussolini regimes was that they relied on the support of street gangs or private armies. Most of the new far right leaders have nothing comparable. But Indian PM Modi is backed by the RSS, a nationalist paramilitary organisation with millions of members. Trump was happy to accept support from the Proud Boys and other fascists. Groups including the Ku Klux Klan and people carrying Nazi flags, for example, met in August 2017 at the Unite the Right rally in Virginia. During the rally James Alex Fields Jr, a white supremacist, rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing Heather Hayer and injuring many others. Fields was later convicted of murder and will spend the rest of his life in prison – but Trump’s response to these events was to state that there were ‘very fine people on both sides’. Trump met with Kyle Rittenhouse, a right-wing vigilante who was acquitted of murder after shooting dead two men involved in protests after cops shot and seriously injured a black man named Jacob Blake – Trump stated that Rittenhouse was ‘really a nice young man’. Once again, this is not in itself fascism, but it opens the way to fascism.

Where are we now?

Trump, for all his unpredictability, has learned from his first term and will not allow others to push him towards business as usual. His control of the Republican party is now assured. The forces which didn’t offer support to him in his first term, which implicitly regarded him as a short-lived aberration, are now bending the knee – the going rate for corporate donations to the inaugural fund is one million dollars, and Amazon, Meta, Ford and General Motors have all paid up. As the Guardian puts it, ‘Trump aides have indicated that the fundraising isn’t about the money but a symbolic means to exact an apology for any previous perceived lapse of loyalty.’

In stressing the dangers of the current situation, I’m not seeking to depict the United States as a uniformly racist and right-wing dystopia. 14 million Americans are members of unions, including just under 1 in 3 public sector workers. 74 per cent of people surveyed in 2024 felt that trans people ‘deserve to be treated with dignity and respect’ and 61 per cent agreed that ‘Republican candidates using anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric as part of their campaigns is sad and shameful’, while only 25 per cent disagreed. The largest protests in United States history happened not in the radical 1960s but in 2020, when between 15 and 26 million people took part in Black Lives Matter. The current situation in the United States is undoubtedly grim – the country is moving in a direction which can end in fascism – but Trump faces a host of problems and resistance to him is certainly possible as well as necessary. If we are to learn from both the risks and opportunities, and from the struggles against Trump which we can expect, we in Britain need to develop an understanding which takes account of the particular nature of US capitalism and society.

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