The Second Coming Finale: Trump4Ever.
American fascism has, like it or not, been a mainstay of government at home & abroad since the declaration of independence. Will a returning Donald Trump indulge his worst instincts, & give in to the rising tide of fascism & authoritarianism that is sweeping across the globe?
‘We reject the American Dream as defined by white people and must work to construct an American reality defined by Afro-Americans.’
Discussion paper about race and the movement, the SNCC, Vine City Project, Atlanta, April 1966
American fascism; finally, out in the open…
Marx informs us all too well in his ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ things can happen again; things do recur, and people, or their caricatures at least, do reappear, and it often augurs dark when they do (1). And Trump 2.0 would seem to fit that dark premonition perfectly.
And it was the return of Biden’s genocidal insanity to Pennsylvania Avenue that in a not insignificant way helped to usher in the return of Trump, and what might be called the more open, honest face of America imperialistic tyranny.
Trump’s disinhibition, as I discussed in a recent post, at least means he is not hiding what he is. We can all see it coming. The biggest unknown is only a matter of how far he will go.
But are all discussions of Trump’s alleged, or possible fascist sympathies redundant? Could it be that American fascism has been there all the time, hiding in the dark places that Trump and his advisers inhabit as a matter of course?
This is where fascism, and defining or categorising particular fascisms, often becomes bogged down in unnecessary or overly wrought comparisons with, as Cass Sunstein wrote in the NYB, the horrors and barbarisms of the Nazis, and as such, become trivialised and dismissed. And so it is with Trump, but also very much so, in respect of the American state too.
Professor Sarah Churchill wrote in an article rather aptly named, ‘It has happened here,’ that, ‘Historically, fascist movements were also marked by opportunism, a willingness to say almost anything to get into power, rendering definitions even murkier. Trying to identify its core, the unsplittable fascist atom, has proved impossible; we are left with what Umberto Eco called fascism’s “fuzziness,” others its “hazy and synthetic doctrines.” There are good arguments against attempting through taxonomies to establish what’s become known as a “fascist minimum,” as if a checklist could qualitatively differentiate fascism from other authoritarian dictatorships. Some think anti-Semitism is a litmus test; others genocide. Does colonialism count? Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, and Hannah Arendt, among many other notable thinkers who lived through the first fascisms, certainly thought it did, arguing that European fascism visited upon white bodies what colonial and slave systems had perfected in visiting upon black and brown bodies.’
So, does colonialism count? I believe it does, and I believe so with the life-force of every victim of colonialism that there has ever been. I have written before how some imperial subjects, exemplary’s such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among others, called out Nazism as being none other than the radical ‘twin’ of imperialism, and as such, was known to the post-colonial subjects of the non-European world all too well.
Césaire insisted that the reason the Shoah was, and remains so unprecedented, was because it was committed by white men against other white men. His scathing denunciation of white colonial hypocrisy tells you all you ever need to know about why the global South sees the Palestinian genocide so differently from our closeted colonial Western leaders today.
Césaire wrote that every European, every Christian has ‘without his being aware of it, (he) has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which, until then, had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “niggers” of Africa (2).’
Professor Dylan Rodriguez asks pointedly (3): ‘How might our political understanding of the United States be altered or dismantled if we were to conceptualize fascism as the restoration of a liberal hegemony, a way out of crisis, rather than as the symptom of crisis or breakdown of democracy and civil society?’
Well, now you’re really asking! As Alberto Toscano (4) points out, by rearticulating the question and the putative aetiology of fascism, Rodriguez’ question has the effect of inflecting the strategic imaginary of anti-fascism.
Rodriguez again: ‘The dynamic, strategic relations of violence condensing within the American social formation at different times and in different places are neither accidental nor excessive, and the challenge of this nonconceptualized fascism problematic is to comprehend the socially reproductive capacities of coercive technologies and (proto) genocidal practice within the current order.’
W.E.B Du Bois wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1925 that the ‘Color Line,’ was the great problem of the twentieth century. Yet the problem lingers, and is very possibly becoming the great problem of the twenty-first century too.
Today, we might see the two sides of the ‘Color Line’ as the West and the Global South, or perhaps more pertinently, more accurately, as the nations of the post-colonial South; the ‘dark nations,’ and those of the post-Colonial powers themselves; the ‘white nations.’
Thus, the ‘darker peoples’ — so called by Pankaj Mishra in his biting critique of imperialism in the LRB — have always been at pains to understand why the Palestinians, by way of poignant and pertinent example today, ceasefire agreements aside — should be punished for a crime that was wholly European, wholly ‘white’ in its commission. The white, Christian, European guilt over the Shoah has never been a part of the psyche of the non-European world, an unrecognised, unacknowledged legacy of colonialism that has been ignored and trampled over by generations of Western and U.S. politicians, culminating in the Islamophobic racisms of Joe Biden and Binjamin Netanyahu.
And just as we might get bogged down in the minutiae of the detail, and the laughable invalidity of comparing Trump with Hitler, the same rings true of the Shoah.
Yes, the Shoah is unprecedented, and we all hope and pray that it will never be repeated.
But regardless; for me, genocide is genocide is genocide!
The fact remains that each genocide is unique and equally unprecedented in spite of what some Israeli politicians might have us believe. And, as Paxton points out (5), each fascism was, and also remains unique. Each genocide, like each fascism, is unprecedented in the time, location and space in which it occurs. And legally, and morally, each should be weighed as such, and not fail, or fall flat just because one unprecedented act pales next to the unprecedented nature of the Shoah or the totality of the Nazi horrors.
But such a simple equation is plainly beyond today’s grandiose, morally bankrupt, utterly hypocritical American administration who have, this past week, had the unbelievable temerity and gall to call out, and with a straight face I might add, the Sudanese RSF (Rapid Support Force) rebels as having committed genocide in the ongoing Sudanese war, for the very same sort of acts that it gives bombs and arms to Israel to commit against the Palestinians.
If ever there was a more blatant, more self-defeating, self-destructive act by any government, let alone by that of the most powerful nation on the planet, then I don’t know of it. America, as it stands today, is every bit as much of a rogue state as its brother in genocide, Israel.
America deserves nothing more than the contempt of the rest of the planet; the fact of the ceasefire is irrelevant to what has past, and America’s involvement in the many crimes against humanity committed in Palestine.
In 1940 the amazing Dorothy Thompson wrote, ‘Every one of Hitler’s ideas of the ‘master race’ is in Nietzsche, who, like Dostoevski, prophesied what has happened. ‘The democratization of Europe is an involuntary preparation for the rearing of tyrants.’ ‘A daring ruler race is building itself up on the foundation of the intelligent mass.’
‘Man’s fate depends on the success of its highest types.’ ‘The twentieth century will be a classical era of great wars and revolutions.’ “There is no moral code for the generality of men. I am a law only for my own.”’
Wow! Okay, and that rearing of Western democratic fascistic tyrants isn’t, as we now know, limited to Europe alone. The lack of any moral code, wrapped up in the amorphous, elusive entity known as the liberal international order, is the hypocritical basis on which America and American might has been built globally, while at home, the same myth of civilising morality has been perpetuated in the name of democratic constitutionalism.
When the truth is that American racial fascism is as old as America itself.
Indeed, as Toscano wrote in e-flux: ‘Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived as beyond comparison, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left by detailing how what could be perceived from a European or white vantage point as a radically new form of ideology and violence was in effect continuous with the history of (settler-)colonial dispossession and racial slavery.’
Speaking in Paris at the anti-fascist International Writer’s Congress in 1937, the poet Langston Hughes would declare: ‘In America, Negroes 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.’
W.E.B. Du Bois too memorably broke down the machinations of American racial capitalism in his monumental work, ‘Black Reconstruction in America (1935)(6),’ as America lost the fight for racial and economic equality in the wake of the Civil War. Amira Baraka called out the overthrow of Reconstruction as an enactment of ‘racial fascism’ that long predated Hitlerism in its use of racial terror, co-optation of poor whites, and passionate investments in white supremacy among the ample sectors of the capitalist class, financial as well as industrial.
Perhaps the reason many will find this assertion of a long standing, pre-existing state of American racial fascism so distasteful, and perhaps even false, is because ‘it operated on the other side of (Du Bois’) color line, just as colonial fascism took place at a spatial and epistemic remove from the imperial metropole. As 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.”’
Yes, exactly so! And yet, the simple, but wholly shocking facts are that when a newly empowered Nazi Germany was searching in 1933 for ways to practically and legally enforce a racialised system upon German Jews, it looked to America, and American laws for inspiration. And whilst this outcome may seem implausible, outlandish and, even down right malicious to some who may be reading my words, the unedifying facts are that America had had its’ own system of legalised racism for centuries before the Nazis appeared.
James Q. Whitman tells us (7) that 1930’s Nazi Germany and the American South had the look, in the words of two Southern historians, of a ‘mirror image: these two were unapologetically racist regimes, unmatched in their pitilessness. In the early 1930’s the Jews of Germany were hounded, beaten, and sometimes murdered, by mobs and the state alike. In the same years the blacks of the American South were hounded, beaten, and sometimes murdered as well.’
Sarah Churchill relates one specific incident, notorious for the gruesome, blood thirsty mob violence that ensued, that was picked up on by the German press at the time: ‘One of the last, and most horrific, public lynchings in America took place in October 1934, in the Florida Panhandle, where a crowd of as many as 5,000 gathered to watch what had been advertised hours earlier in the local press. Claude Neal was burned and castrated, had his genitals stuffed into his mouth, and was forced to tell his torturers that he enjoyed their taste. After he was finally dragged to his death behind a car, his mutilated corpse was urinated upon by the crowds, and then hung from the Marianna Courthouse. The German press, quick to capitalize on reports of American lynching, circulated photographs of Neal, whose horrific death they described with “sharp editorial comments to the effect that America should clean its own house” before it censured other governments’ treatment of their citizens. “Stop Lynching Negroes is Nazi Retort to American Critics,” read the Pittsburgh Courier headline reporting German accounts of American racial violence.’
And this in 1934! My Dad was a kid then, growing up to fight in the last months of the war against Hitler! Think on the details of this act that is within living memory…
Benito Mussolini famously said that ‘fascism cannot be imported,’ but must be ‘particularly suited to our national life.’ Thus, Jews in Germany, Arabs in Palestine, and blacks in America fit perfectly in each case. Indeed, if anything Mussolini’s Italy stands out as singling out political enemies first and foremost, rather than a racial grouping, though it would be true to say in its latter years, and under Hitler’s specific direction, the Italian’s did carry out some Jewish pograms.
As if to rubber stamp the point, in Israel today — an increasingly fascist regime itself — Netanyahu’s anti-democratic judicial overhaul that has, despite the genocidal war, seen the continued passage of the 2018 Nation State Law, that would effectively enshrine Israel as a racially legalised apartheid state and end any hope of a two state solution altogether.
Indeed, the late great Tony Judt wrote back in 2003, that ‘the very idea of a “Jewish state” — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.’
Former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, put it thus; ‘The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice…/…There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.’ And then summing it up, says, ‘A state lacking justice cannot survive.’
On that last point, the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. I digress…
The tragic irony is that this legislation, that has been compared in substance to Hitler’s 1933 Nuremberg Laws that legally side-lined German Jews and paved the way for the Shoah, is now being taken up by the very victims of the Shoah themselves.
You can’t make this stuff up, I tell you!
And don’t even get me started on Trump’s laughably ludicrous assertion that immigrants at the Southern border are likely to pollute the blood of a nation of immigrants!
One wonders if his advisers deliberately set Trump up to look as dumb as a bag of spanners or whether he really does take the status of prime idiot upon himself? Either way, he succeeds…
The Nuremberg laws, which no-one doubts are fascistic in character and nature, are based on and inspired by events and legalised models that had been in force in the U.S. for decades prior to the rise of Hitler (7). One might reasonably ask, why the controversy in wrapping America up in the same fascist jacket as the Nazis? Is it not apt?
So, when the notorious Nazi jurist Roland Freisler looked across the Atlantic, and eyed the American system jealously, he knew the Americans were centuries ahead of the Nazis in their creation of a racist state, and had in place miscegenation laws and harsh race-based immigration bans that Hitler himself had openly admired, seeing them as ‘a model for his programme of racial purification (see references in Wilkerson (8)).
Hitler had of course already made his feelings abundantly clear when he wrote of his admiration for the America’s treatment of its undesirables in ‘Mein Kampf.’ It was, he said, the ‘one state’ that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order, of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were to subsequently establish in Germany (7).
‘For us Germans, it is especially important to know and see how one of the biggest states in the world with Nordic stock already has race legislation that is quite comparable to that of the German Reich,’ said the German Press Agency enthusiastically in the early 1930’s (7).
Indeed, the scientific approach taken by America in dealing with the problems of racial purity using the new science of eugenics, and the way this base of theoretical research was put to use in building a caste system that worked towards the dual aims of elimination and segregation of the subordinate dark caste, became a major source of inspiration for the Nazis.
A committee of Nazis that included Friesler, set up with the express purpose of creating racial separation laws, noted with relish how the U.S. had divided up the population using ‘artificial line-drawing;’ blacks on one side, whites on the other — just like Du Bois’ Color Line, and how those lines had been judicially enforced, even down to separating out those individuals who elicited even a hint of negroid features.
Prosecution of those involved in miscegenation was a topic of particular interest for the Germans, with the committee noting how different states adapted the laws to suit their particular populations and the proportion the ‘lower’ races present. Though they (the Germans) struggled to grasp how, with such an enlightened, scientific approach, the Americans had not lumped the Jews in with the Negroes.
Nevertheless, they were impressed enough by the results of the states legislative gymnastics on the separation of the races for Friesler to opine that, ‘this jurisprudence would suit us perfectly. I am of the opinion that we need to proceed with the same primitivity that is used by these American states,’ before concluding bluntly, and with typical German efficaciousness, ‘…such a procedure would be crude but it would suffice (7).’
Little more than a year later, in September 1935, at the annual Nazi rally in Nuremberg, Hitler made the first announcements and notification of the legislation that would become the Nuremberg Laws, and came to be known as the ‘Blood Laws’ (8).
Yet, as destructive the Blood Laws were, Whitman notes (7) with a certain resigned irony, that ‘scholars who see parallels between the American and Nazi racial classification schemes are to that extent wrong, but only because they understate the relative severity of American law.’
The simple fact was that while the Nazi bureaucrats openly admired and praised ‘the American commitment to legislating racial purity,’ they could not sanction such severe and punitive legislation in Germany. The ‘unforgiving hardness’ under which ‘an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins counted as blacks,’ was a step too far even for the Nazis. ‘The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis,’ wrote Whitman (8) with surprising frankness.
Isabel Wilkerson (8) illustrates in too many ways to count how the American racial caste system had always reinvented itself following challenges to its white supremacist hegemony to ensure the racial hierarchy remained intact. The latest iteration of this racialised hegemonic system, that Michelle Alexander calls ‘The New Jim Crow (9),’ is manifested in the mass incarceration of blacks, that the incarcerated Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson both identified as the U.S. state’s attempts as the ‘reemergence, or indeed, a perfecting of certain aspects of (European) historical fascisms.’
Indeed, the white, social acceptance of this carceral system of racialised terror, begun in the Reagan era, originated in the governmental legalisations of a so-called liberal democracy that was the leader of the ‘free’ world.
Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials (see 4. Toscano for full reference) tell us that, ‘…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.’
The insidious, hidden nature of fascism in the United States was perfected for George Jackson through the marriage of monopoly capitalism with the racialised trappings of liberal democracy, agreeing with Césaire who said that at the end of capitalism, there was only ever fascism (2).
Jackson said bluntly in his autobiographical story, ‘Blood in my eye (10),’: ‘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 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.’
To my mind, ideas and thoughts such as these, raise the spectre of Trump’s promised mass deportations and the racial violence that will inevitably ensue.
Jackson was a dark, foreboding character in the imaginings of white Americans in the 1970’s, made into the black bogeyman by the media and government because of his actions and activism on behalf of the victimised.
A tragic victim himself of the state system of carceral racism, he was locked away at eighteen years old for a shockingly, open-ended prescriptive sentence of ‘one year to life,’ for being present in a car when a loose acquaintance of his stole $70 from a gas station. Jackson was shot dead 10 years later by a prison guard in the exercise yard of San Quentin whilst allegedly making an escape attempt.
Jackson’s writings, teachings and thoughts live on though in the power of his words, and whilst much of his work has gone largely unnoticed and unacknowledged by academics and commentators alike, his prodigious output strikes a resonant chord now as America gears up for the next years under Trump, and should be reread and analysed anew in the context of Trump’s imminent return.
Trump can longer be seen as an individual product of the social and political ills that are plaguing America and much of the ‘liberal democratic’ West. And I use the inverted commas and italics there with a certain irony in the wake of the West’s blatant turn away from the legal and humanitarian precepts that underpin the universalist, egalitarian principles upon which the U.S. led West built the so-called liberal international order.
America and the West can longer hide behind the notion that the right-wing extremist rhetoric spouted by Trump, his many political acolytes in America, and the many increasingly fascistic parties rising to prominence in Europe and elsewhere, are aberrations. They are not. They are now mainstream and, if solutions are to be found to the problems and woes that are afflicting the West then the collective myopia that produced our capitalist culture, with its hard emphasis on individualistic struggles and benefits, that works in part to hide and smear any collective solutions to those ills, needs to be rethought and reexamined.
In this analysis, the work of people like George Jackson needs to be looked at with fresh, young eyes, and be used to generate new discussion, new solutions to long existing problems in an attempt to bring about collective solutions that work from the bottom-up, for the proletarian masses, and not just for the elite few at the top. Jackson’s work, like that of many radical black activists, becomes wholly relevant to this struggle because, as Colin Jenkins emphasises:
‘First, it comes from a genuine working-class view, unadulterated and immune from the confines of academia. In other words, Jackson’s insight was formed purely from a place of organic class-consciousness and subsequently refined and confirmed through self-study. Second, it comes from the view of a hyper-marginalized member of the working class from within the epicenter of imperialism. As a Black man in America, and thus a subject of America’s internal colonization, Jackson could not ignore the powerful, underlying effects of white supremacy on the class nature of systemic fascism. The unique history of American slaves and descendants of slaves makes this inclusion an absolute necessity for any analysis of American fascism.’
But such a collective project would be the work of years, if not decades, and in the meantime Trump’s reign will begin anew in just a few days time. This work should be focused on the things the collective ‘we’ can bring to the table to neutralise and de-fang the growing fascisms in our midst. And that work must start in America…and must begin with an honest assessment of the threat posed by Trump, and those who might potentially follow him.
Wild accusations and overblown denunciations should be avoided at all costs. They only hinder, and do not help. Honest reflections, the re-establishment of the value of facts, of education, of belief in science, of true equality and egalitarianism, need to form the foundation of any fight; without a solid base any anti-fascist superstructure will surely fall in on itself.
Harvard history professor, Peter E. Gordon, has this to say: ‘To be sure,’ he writes, ‘no historical comparison is perfect. The differences between Trumpism and fascism are legion: the GOP has no paramilitary wing, and its party loyalists have not managed to capture the media or purge the political opposition. Most important of all, the White House has so far failed to promulgate a consistent ideology.’
Comparing Trump to Hitler in personal or ideological terms is always going to be a redundant exercise, and would quite rightly, merely solicit derision and scorn from Trump supporters because there is no comparison to be made.
Indeed, I have said many times in posts here, that I do not believe Trump is an out and out fascist in the traditional sense, in the sense that Hitler was a fascist. But that doesn’t mean that discussing their glaring similarities in full understanding of the span of their differences is not a valid tool for understanding who Trump is, and what he might be about.
As Orwell said, ‘fascism is not defined by its clothing,’ so don’t expect Trump to start growing a moustache or fascist saluting any time soon just to make our job of comparative analysis any easier.
Where classical fascisms of the types analysed with such intricate, erudite precision by Paxton (5) held a distinctly nationalistic flavour, such that Italian and German fascism were recognisable by their underlying actions and methods. Whilst, as Orwell said, the outer clothing was unique to each fascism, today, each fascist party, organisation and/or nation copies and pastes what works with relative ease from their right-wing brethren wherever they are.
Today’s fascisms have been globalised and internationalised; they cross borders, reaching right into your lounge, right into the echo chambers of right-wing groups everywhere, moving as easily from one to another as any other deadly contagion.
‘Classical fascism emerged before capital had been globalized,’ writes economist Prabhat Pratnaik, ‘in the sense that it more clearly bore the stamp of its national origin: it was engaged in intense inter-imperialist rivalry with capital from other advanced countries, a rivalry in which it enlisted the support of its own state. The fascist goal was to re-partition a world already partitioned into economic territories. The neofascism of today, by contrast, occupies a regime of globalized finance where inter-imperialist rivalry is muted by the phenomenon of the free flow of capital. Since globalized capital is intent on keeping the entire world open for its free movement, it discourages inter-imperialist rivalry and the fragmentation of the world into rival economic zones.’
Thus, while Trump may be the mouthpiece of today’s extremists, and to my way of thinking, a particularly odious one at that, he alone is not the problem. If he holds monarchical or dictatorial ambitions, it is in some way irrelevant because of this. It is not Trump himself, but Trump’s movement, the actions and hereditary legacies he and his movement spawn, that present the major threat not only to democracy, but to the furtherance of true equality, true egalitarianism, and true freedom. Trump sits at the head of an extremist movement that would remove the possibility of any, or all of those from the majority, and would do under the false premise of promoting freedoms, of protecting American interests, and bolstering democracy.
Marx tells us the ‘unexpected stroke’ of Louis was his 1848 electoral win, which spurred the end of Louis-Philippe I’s July Monarchy. The King fled into exile in England — his fall from grace unforeseen, his ignominy complete — only to die before Louis Bonaparte completed his coup in 1851 (1).
And as for France; well, it was…
‘A whole nation, which thought it had acquired an accelerated power of motion by means of a revolution, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch, and to remove any doubt about the relapse, the old dates arise again — the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, which had long since become a subject of antiquarian scholarship, and the old minions of the law who had seemed long dead.’
Long dead, but France could not shake the name; Napoleon, in the form of Louis Bonaparte, was back, albeit as a caricature of past glories, a grasping ‘grotesque mediocrity’ destined to fall short of the name. The rise of Louis, and the return of a Bonaparte led to the ‘retreat of (French proletarian) society’ back to ‘the revolutionary point of departure.’
Trump too, has returned in what many saw as an unexpected stroke, and may well bring about the fall of American democracy and many of its so-called freedoms as a consequence.
And once again, we see the tale of Louis Bonaparte, as related by Marx, inverted in part in the persona of Trump. As Marx says, ‘The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic.’
For all Trump’s appeal to the working people, his policies are just as likely to make things far tougher for the majority. At the end of the day Trump has more in common with both Louis-Philippe and Louis Bonaparte than he has with the working people of America. He was born into the American capitalist aristocracy with a Park Avenue golden spoon in his mouth, even if his venal coarseness comes straight from the gutter. He was born a member of the American elite; he was born bourgeois.
And Trump, with his loyalist appointees thus far; Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Matt Gaetz (now fallen — so sad!), Tulsi Gubbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Elon Musk and many more. Trump die-hards all, and having been elevated to the bourgeoise, they will now rule in the name of the people. Trump’s bourgeois republic begins to come alive. But for how long?
Marx says such bourgeois revolutions are destined to reach their zenith quickly, and be short-lived. Though a four year term would seem to me to be anything but short lived. The question is, during the course of Trump’s bourgeois republic will we see the proletariat, just like the French before, be tempted to rebel? Or will Trump’s attempts at creating a new American class system result in the despotic, fascistic rule of one class over another? On verra! On verra!
Protestations against Trump’s rule are, I expect, highly likely, especially from those who he may deliberately set himself against; religious or racial minorities, refugees, the poor, etc. He would of course, have all the power of the state behind him, and has already indicated his willingness to use the armed forces and national guard on the streets if need be. Invoking the Insurrection Act and the imposition of the martial law is a real possibility, as would be major loss of American life and limb.
Should things degenerate to this charnel house eventuality, such carnage would not have been seen on American streets since the Civil War. And yet the outcome of such a contest would not be in doubt. Like Louis-Philippe and Louis Bonaparte before, the power to crush any rebellion would be his, should he decide to use such force against his own people.
The basis for Hitler’s dictatorship was the Reichstag Fire Decree (11).
Would it be reasonable to assume that early in Trump’s reign some impending threat or disaster, real or imagined, could open the way for Trump to impose martial law; to enact the Insurrection Act, and under the guise of protecting and ensuring continued American ‘freedoms,’ avail himself of the powers of a would-be dictator, just like Hitler before?
Perhaps, the mass deportation of the ‘illegal immigrants’ and any associated violence might just fit the bill…
The ability to lock up dissenters, protesters, unwilling adherents, political opponents and enemies, to silence the media and bring it under state control; all in the name of protecting democracy, ensuring freedom and safety for all against the vile radicalisms of those who exhibit anti-American tendencies, behaviours and actions.
All this I can see as easily achievable should Trump wish to go there. Would he be tempted, and if so, just how far would he go? Would he — could he even — induct the ‘pardoned’ Proud Boys for example, to act as his own personal guard, just as Hitler had the Schutzstaffel (the SS)? Could he use Kash Patel, his pick for the head of the FBI, to purge both the ‘dissenting media’ and political opponents alike?
We will know soon enough, but having just watched the film, ‘Civil War,’ a few weeks ago, in which California and Texas broke away and succeeded from the union, it seems the idea of American rebellion is not limited to my imagination alone. Indeed, as I write Los Angeles burns, and Trumpites seem bizarrely intent on turning the rapidly spreading wildfires into a problem of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion and wokeness,’ allegedly, in an attempt to help! Really…ignorance, hate and stupidity know no bounds!
It might be reasonable to assume then, that should Trump open Pandora’s political box that a second American civil conflict could well be in the offing?
Should such delusions of dictatorial or monarchical grandeur entice Trump, one would think it would have to be before the mid-terms, whilst he has full control of both Houses, and could effectively annul the filibuster and allow such changes to be made by simple majority, presuming of course that he would try to formalise such a takeover, rather than just bludgeoning his way through and over the constitution.
Marx compares Louis Bonaparte’s revolutionary audacity in declaring himself Emperor almost 3 years to the day after his election to President by plebiscite to a ‘cardsharp’s trick,’ when ‘what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that had been wrung from it
through centuries of struggle,’ when society, instead of ‘having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state has only returned to its oldest form, to a shamelessly simple rule by the sword and the monk‘s cowl.’
If indeed such grandiose ideas lurk in the dark recesses of Trump’s subconscious, it would, like Louis’ ‘trick’ before, restore the United States to a far older political form. This putative, autocratically induced return to a sort of pre-embryonic world of early American political development, where spectres long past of the Founders would surely be turning in their graves, and all thoughts of liberal constitutionalism, of liberty, of true freedom, would be laid to rest beside the rotting corpse of American democracy, where Trump’s ‘trick’ would at last be revealed in all its chimerical, domineering glory.
With a biting satirical edge, Marx strips Louis Bonaparte’s ambitions bare: ‘This is the answer to the coup de main (the unexpected stroke) of February, 1848, given by the coup de tête (the rash act) of December, 1851. Easy come, easy go.’
And so, would such a rash turn of events in Trump’s world be viewed by his fellows thus; democracy? ‘Easy come, easy go!’
And whilst such fanciful ideas are, as yet, just that — they should not be dismissed out of hand. The direction and intent of Trump’s government is not yet known, but who is to say that a ‘Project 2027’ that would overturn the constitution isn’t lurking alongside boxes of dusty state secrets somewhere in the darkened crypts of Mar-a-Lago?
On the back of the putative success of Project 2025, does not this fanciful, dictatorial eventuality linger in the minds of his brown-nosing acolytes, just waiting to be given the breath of life?
However, should monarchical ambitions ensnare Trump then his bourgeois republic would end and the bourgeois monarchy would begin. The power to rule the people would fall to ‘a limited section of the bourgeoisie (to rule) in the name of the king’ completing the inversion of Marx’s initial observation (1); ‘…that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice…/… the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’
The bourgeois monarchy of the United States would begin then, one might safely assume, with no visible end in sight. A very scary thought indeed…
Thanks for enduring this latest saga! I wish you all a Happy and Hopeful New Year.
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; Karl Marx, 1852, Published in ‘Die Revolution,’ 1852. Available as pdf download.
- Discourse on Colonialism; Aimé Césaire, translated by Joan Pinkham, 1972.
- Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime; Dylan Rodriguez, 2006.
- Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis; Alberto Toscano, 2023.
- The Five Stages of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, no.1. (Mar., 1998), pp. 1–23.
- Black Reconstruction in America; W.E.B. Du Bois, 1935, In The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (2014).
- Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law; James Q. Whitman, 2017.
- Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents; Isabel Wilkerson, 2020.
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; Michelle Alexander, 2010.
- Blood in my Eye; George L. Jackson, 1972 (2015 version).
- The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany; Richard J. Evans, 2003.
