Trump’s Attacks on Democracy Are Real and Immediate
The Resistance to Trump Must Mobilize to Defend Democracy Now — With All Its Strength
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I. Understanding our tasks
Defending America’s democracy urgently requires:
1. The Resistance must support Tom Steyer’s campaign to impeach Trump, convict Trump, and remove Donald Trump from office, using the only provision in the Constitution designed to protect the people against tyranny.
2. The Resistance must defend the Mueller investigation, which, in the face of a slavish and impotent Congress, has been the only process in our government actually presenting any struggle against Trump. Shutting down the Mueller investigation is Trump’s main plan to shut down impeachment. If the Resistance cannot defend Mueller, the impeachment process will be sabotaged and the likelihood of ever impeaching and removing Trump will approach zero.
3. The Resistance must recognize the extreme importance of the struggle over confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. If Trump is able to achieve the confirmation of Kavanaugh, he will have taken over the third branch of government and also guaranteed his ability to also shut down Mueller. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, the Mueller investigation is essentially dead, and the road to impeachment is sabotaged.
4. The Resistance needs to understand clearly that Trump and his movement have an ideology, a real program of political action for the United States of America. This is true despite Trump’s own evident stupidity and incompetence and the divisions and confusion in his movement. Its aim is to create an American government completely subservient to the interests of a section of America’s giant corporations and wealthiest individuals, without any meaningful constitutional or democratic restraints on the use of governmental power to serve their purposes, both domestically and in international policy. The view of these interests is that the preservation of their gargantuan wealth and power requires the conversion of the American political system into a form of government much more like that of America’s current rivals, Russia and China.
Domestically, this requires a suppression of traditional labor and workers’ rights and civil rights generally. Internationally, this requires a government committed, regardless of the immediate harm done to millions of American producers, to a policy of aggressive trade war, especially against China, intensified militarism, recognizing that any trade war must be backed up by the threat of actual military conflict, and the restructuring of an American system of alliances to favor relations with other authoritarian and despotic regimes with similar “state-capitalist” and authoritarian structures.
Over the course of the Trump presidential campaign, it became increasingly clear that Trump and his most conscious advisers and handlers were convinced that achieving the kind of regime his most fervent capitalist backers sought required, in a country like the United States, the creation of a mass movement supporting Trump that had somehow been convinced to support the suppression of their own democratic freedoms on behalf of a small number of capitalist corporations and plutocrats. Trump and his ideological entourage understood that, in American history, the way to do that is to appeal to racist and xenophobic paranoias.
In Trumpism, as with the European neo-fascist parties and movements, a domestic policy based on white-racist and ultra-nationalist demagogy, leads naturally, almost inevitably, to the international policy of an alliance with and support for the most important European power embodying an authoritarian and white-nationalist outlook: Russia under Putin. However illogical, irrational, and inconsistent the policy may appear to be, all these far-right, ultra-nationalist, white-racist parties and movements internationally, including Trump’s, share the image of a racialized foreign policy centered on an alliance with Putin, with an implied fantasy that only through such an alliance of white governments based on white people’s support can the “white” nations of the world prevent the rise to global domination of non-white nations—specifically China.
Some of Trump’s supporters call this domestic policy “anarcho capitalism.” Some view the creation of a racist and xenophobic mass movement as a secondary question, a necessity, even an unfortunate one, in order to achieve the central aim of an authoritarian government committed without limits to use all the means at its disposal to protect and enlarge capitalist wealth and power. Government by the people must be replaced with government for the rich and powerful, but to achieve this, a section of the people must be duped with racism into supporting an authoritarian regime. It is obvious that the great majority of Trump’s supporters, the overwhelming majority of Trump’s electoral base, are fanatically committed to him, not by his program of profoundly increasing the power of the rich and powerful, but by his sick, seductive promise of recreating an America in which white people rule and white-skin privilege defines American citizenship.
Whether this program is called “anarcho capitalism,” ultra-nationalism, white nationalism, anti-globalism, or any other of the more-or-less incomplete and misleading terms that are favored both by Trump’s supporters and his liberal political, journalistic, and academic critics, this perspective, taken as a whole, placed in the context of the growing number of organizations and leaders committed to essentially similar perspectives in countries across Europe, is essentially the twenty-first century form of fascism. This perspective plays the same role in history, is structured with the same dangerous logic, and is aimed at achieving essentially the same ends as the doctrines of Mussolini and Hitler in the first half of the twentieth century.
5. To rise to its own historic challenge, the Resistance needs to understand that its task is not merely to end the political career of one particularly gross and odious American politician. Its challenge is to block, with democratic, bold, and courageous methods, the confused but supremely arrogant, determined, and dangerous ambitions of a fascist movement to come to power in the United States and across Europe.
As before, such a movement can only come to power and hold power on the dead body of democratic rights and the actual bodies of millions of people.
6. The question of whether Donald Trump himself should be called a fascist, may still be open. The Resistance needs to understand that this is not the important question. The historical process we are going through is most truthfully and profoundly understood as a process of fascist transformation. Blocking that process requires the decisive defeat and removal of Trump from the American presidency, by whatever means are necessary, because the survival of the democratic character of the country and the world are at stake. For the Resistance, it is no time for denial, evasions, self-deception, timidity, cynicism, pettiness, or any form of “business as usual.”
The people of America are facing an historic crisis, and they will have to rise to an historic challenge in order to resolve it. The mass Resistance to Donald Trump is the means history has so far created to meet this challenge. To do so, this new movement first needs to recognize the character of the challenge, affirm its belief in its ability to meet that challenge, and then learn what that will mean in practice.