Wow. This really impacts and moves me deeply, both the words of Henry Giroux below and this excellent article by John Bellamy Foster. It took me a while to read and begin to absorb everything here. There is so much. And like many have said, it is painful to be conscious in these times. I also affirm my fierce commitment to truth and to staying with the ongoing struggle to emerge from the fog we are immersed in here in American culture. While it is painful to see more and more of these hard truths, I am also profoundly grateful for each new veil that is lifted and each new and more expansive vista to see and experience. Yes, my heart feels so sad. And I also feel deeply blessed by each opportunity to more fully absorb the truths that are so vital to know. Our children, and all the children everywhere, are counting on us to be brave, to know, and to act in protection of them here, now, today and for their future that is yet to come. Another world is possible. - Molly
************
On occasion two pieces of work appear dealing with
the same subject in ways that are so at odds with each other that the
shortcomings of one are glaringly obvious next to the strengths of the other.
John Bellamy Foster has written a piece on neofascism in the Trump
administration that is as insightful as it is brilliant. See https://monthlyreview.org/…/…/neofascism-in-the-white-house/
On the other hand, Neal Gabler has written a
piece stating that instead of neofascism, the Trump regime is one of
unremitting incompetence exercising a kind of political anarchism in its
blundering efforts to dismantle big government. This piece is so wrong in so
many places that it is hard to address them all.
For instance, check out this paragraph:
"And then, last Friday, with the demise of the Republican attempt to
repeal Obamacare and replace it with… well, with a massive tax giveaway to the
rich, we discovered — I discovered — that I was fearing the wrong thing. It’s
not Trump’s ability to marshal the forces of repression that should terrify us.
It’s his inability to marshal forces to conduct even the most basic governance.
Trump really is a presidential Joker. He knows how to wreak havoc, but he
doesn’t seem to know how to do, or seem to want to do, much else."
Really! Is Trump only wrecking havoc. Tell that to the immigrant families being
split up, terrorized by the police; tell that to those who will suffer from the
roll back in environmental protections; tell that to poor minorities who are
terrified by Swat teams--the new robocops; tell that to people whose rights to
privacy has just been sold to corporations. And, of course, should we ignore
the white supremacists in power, the increased militarization of the state, the
growing Antisemitism, the wrath being waged against the elderly and young
people, the increase in attacks on those deemed un-American by fascist street
thugs, and the dismantling of public goods and schools. This is far from a
regime of incompetence simply wrecking havoc. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out,
Trump's appointments and policies are too systematic and point to a merging of
neoliberal, religious, and educational fundamentalisms that constitute a
neo-fascist project.Most importantly, this neo-fascist fundamentalist project
will condemn coming generations of young people to an age of environmental
destruction and a survival of the fittest ethos that will most certainly
destroy any hope they have for the future. Trump represents a form of
neo-fascism on steroids and the damage is systemic and ongoing. Gabler is a
liberal in search of a story line that leads him to think that attributing
incompetence and a skewed notion of anarchy to Trump somehow mitigates the
charge and effects of a neofascist regime. Pathetic. See: http://billmoyers.com/…/forget-fascism-anarchy-we-have-to-…/
There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position.
- Jack London, The Iron Heel
Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken
up residence at the White House: neofascism. It resembles in certain ways the
classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with
historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of
the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. This
neofascism characterizes, in my assessment, the president and his closest
advisers, and some of the key figures in his cabinet.2 From a
broader sociological perspective, it reflects the electoral bases, class
constituencies and alignments, and racist, xenophobic nationalism that brought
Donald Trump into office. Neofascist discourse and political practice are now
evident every day in virulent attacks on the racially oppressed, immigrants,
women, LBGTQ people, environmentalists, and workers. These have been
accompanied by a sustained campaign to bring the judiciary, governmental
employees, the military and intelligence agencies, and the press into line with
this new ideology and political reality.
Who forms the social base
of the neofascist phenomenon? As a Gallup analysis and CNN exit polls have
demonstrated, Trump’s electoral support came mainly from the intermediate
strata of the population, i.e., from the lower middle class and privileged
sections of the working class, primarily those with annual household incomes
above the median level of around $56,000. Trump received a plurality of votes
among those with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, especially in the
$50,000 to $99,999 range, and among those without college degrees. Of those who
reported that their financial situation was worse than four years earlier,
Trump won fully 77 percent of the vote.3 An
analysis by Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell of Gallup, updated just
days before the election, indicated that in contrast to standard Republican
voters, much of Trump’s strongest support came from relatively privileged white
male workers within “skilled blue collar industries”—including “production,
construction, installation, maintenance, and repair, and
transportation”—earning more than the median income, and over the age of forty.4 In the
so-called Rust Belt 5 states (Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin) that swung the election to Trump, the Republican vote increased by
over 300,000 among voters earning $50,000 or less, as compared with 2012.
Meanwhile, among the same demographic group, Democrats lost more than three
times as many voters as the number Republicans gained.5 None of
this was enough to win Trump the national popular vote, which he lost by almost
3 million, but it gave him the edge he needed in the electoral college.
Nationally, Trump won the
white vote and the male vote by decisive margins, and had his strongest support
among rural voters. Both religious Protestants and Catholics favored the
Republican presidential candidate, but his greatest support of all (80 percent)
came from white evangelical Christians. Veterans also went disproportionately
for Trump. Among those who considered immigration the nation’s most pressing
issue, Trump, according to CNN exit polls, received 64 percent of the vote;
among those who ranked terrorism as the number-one issue, 57 percent.6 Much of
the election was dominated by both overt and indirect expressions of racism,
emanating not only from the Republican nominee but also from his close
associates and family (and hardly nonexistent among the Democrats themselves).
Donald Trump, Jr., in what was clearly a political ploy, repeatedly tweeted
Nazi-style white supremacist slogans aimed at the far right. Trump’s only
slightly more veiled statements against Muslims and Mexicans, and his alliance
with Breitbart, pointed in the same direction.7
As
the Gallup report pointedly observed:
In a
study [Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler?] of perhaps
the most infamous [nationalist] party, the geography of voting patterns reveal
that the political supporters of Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist party were
disproportionately Protestants, if living in a rural area, and those in
lower-middle administrative occupations and owners of small businesses, if
living in an urban area. Thus, neither the rich nor poor were especially
inclined to support the Nazi Party, and even among Christians, religious
identity mattered greatly.8
The clear implication was
that Trump’s supporters conformed to the same general pattern. According to the
Hamilton study, it is generally believed that “the lower middle class (or petty
bourgeoisie) provided the decisive support for Hitler and his party.”9 Hitler
also drew on a minority of the working class, disproportionately represented by
more privileged blue-collar workers. But the great bulk of his support came
from the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie, representing a staunchly
anti-working class, racist, and anti-establishment outlook—which nevertheless
aligned itself with capital. Hitler also received backing from devout
Protestants, rural voters, disabled veterans, and older voters or pensioners.10
The parallels with the
Trump phenomenon in the United States are thus sufficiently clear. Trump’s
backing comes primarily neither from the working-class majority nor the
capitalist class—though the latter have mostly reconciled themselves to
Trumpism, given that they are its principal beneficiaries. Once in power,
fascist movements have historically cleansed themselves rapidly of the more
radical lower-middle-class links that helped bring them to power, and soon ally
themselves firmly with big business—a pattern already manifesting itself in the
Trump administration.11
Yet despite these very
broad similarities, key features distinguish neofascism in the contemporary
United States from its precursors in early twentieth-century Europe. It is in
many ways a unique form, sui generis. There is no
paramilitary violence in the streets. There are no black shirts or brown
shirts, no Nazi Stormtroopers. There is, indeed, no separate fascist party.12 Today the
world economy is dominated not by nation-based monopoly capitalism, as in
classical fascism, but a more globalized monopoly-finance capitalism.
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