Fascism
is capitalism in decay.
Lenin
Donald Trump
has made history again. He is the first president of the
United States charged with attempting to overturn a presidential
election, violating the rights of citizens to have their
votes counted, tampering with a witness and obstructing
an official proceeding, among other criminal offences.
He’s
also the first president to be indicted. And this is his
third indictment in four months — and all of this
is playing out amid his campaign for re-election in 2024.
None of the
charges brought against Trump are surprising. His legacy
as an accused serial liar, self-serving crook, sexual predator
and white nationalist — coupled with his assaults
on the courts and supporter of authoritarians globally —
are well known.
In effect,
he has become the chief annihilator of democracy.
RACISM-XENOPHOBIA
As Washington
Post political columnist Max Boot has observed, Trump
has made a mockery out of political leadership, embraced
widespread corruption and provided a model for being one
of the worst presidents in American history. Boot writes:
Put differently,
Trump has criminalized both social problems and politics
itself.
Trump and his
allies have long created a culture of lies, illusions, cruelty
and misrepresentation. He has waged an incessant attack
on reason, critical thinking, informed judgment and social
responsibility. His distaste for Black people, migrants
and others he considers disposable is matched by his support
for the financial and corporate elite.
His populist
pose is not only at odds with his policies, such as reducing
taxes for the rich and hollowing out the social safety net,
but has also pushed American society closer to an upgraded
form of white supremacy and fascism.
Yet, despite
the damage Trump has done to democracy, he has almost complete
support of the Republican Party and a majority of Republican
voters — slightly more than 58 per cent say they still
plan to vote for him in the 2024 presidential election if
he wins the Republican nomination. He appears poised to
clinch that nomination.
Even more troubling
are recent polls indicating he’s in a dead heat with
U.S. President Joe Biden if they’re the presidential
nominees in 2024.
WHAT EXPLAINS
TRUMP’S APPEAL?
Most of media
is focused on Trump’s legal troubles. But too little
has been written about the conditions that have given rise
to his authoritarian politics or why Trump is a national
disgrace still backed by millions of Americans.
Trump’s
grip on power is a collective nightmare that can only be
understood in terms of the historical, economic, political
and cultural conditions of which he is the endpoint.
As American
anthropologist Wade Davis has observed:
Trump embodies
a society that has been in crisis for decades, but especially
since the 1980s. This was a period when the right-wing counter-revolution
emerged with the election of Ronald Reagan.
Since that
time, the democratic values that informed the social contract
and common good have been increasingly displaced by market
values that stress self-interest, privatization, commodification,
deregulation and the accumulation of profit and celebration
of greed. Civic culture came under attack along with the
erosion of the values of shared citizenship.
The market
became a template for controlling not just the economy,
but all of society. The language of rabid individualism
replaced the notion of the common good and gave way to a
disdain for community.
SNUBBING SOCIAL
RESPONSIBILITY
Under the regime
of neoliberalism, social responsibility is now viewed as
a liability.
Government
was discredited as a force for good, its public infrastructure
was eroded and replaced by a culture of cruelty in which
matters of compassion, care, and ethical responsibility
began to disappear.
What emerged
was society marked by precarity, loneliness and mass anxiety.
The rising cult of individualism made it difficult for the
public to translate private troubles into systemic considerations,
weakening the public imagination. The rise of a media environment
where politics becomes a form of entertainment helped silence
any resistance to a growing culture of lies and greed.
Staggering
levels of economic inequality also emerged, setting the
ground for dark money shaping politics. This neoliberal
poison helped to create a society of political monsters,
immune to the virtues and conditions of democracy.
Democratic
freedoms rooted in equality, freedom from fear, poverty
and precarity gave way to what are known as ugly freedoms
used to mine depths of hatred and selfishness, and redefine
citizenship as the exclusive privilege of white Christian
nationalists and radical evangelicals.
Harnessed to
exclusion and bigotry, the language of freedom was invoked
eventually by Trump and other Republican Party politicians
to produce policies that have banned books, crushed dissent,
limited classroom and workplace discussions about race,
whitewashed African American history and justified a virulent
anti-democratic politics that echo the ghosts of a fascist
past.
AMERICA AT
THE CROSSROADS
The most important
issues Americans face today are not solely about Trump’s
corruption, lawlessness or open authoritarianism —
it’s about learning from history.
We must rethink
the lies that neoliberal capitalism have told us about how
American society defines itself while rethinking what it
will take to challenge and overcome the anti-democratic
forces that gave rise to Trump.
The 2024 election
should be about more than Trump’s ongoing legal travails.
It should be a directive for what kind of society Americans
want and what kind of future they desire for their children.
They should regard the election as a choice between democracy
and the further criminalization of American politics.
