Our Context: 2022

In November of 2020, a freelance journalist named Derek Robertson predicted that Joe Biden’s ongoing return to “normalcy” would put an end to the culture-war rhetoric on the far right. That was pretty dumb, and he’s written a lengthy description of all the ways he was wrong.

Robertson might not be the only person who has been painfully wrong about what’s going on in America, so let me break it down for you. The United States was founded by far-right communities, and those communities engaged in the extermination of native people and used the labor of enslaved Africans to build the new nation. While things have happened over time that have sometimes encouraged those kinds of people to talk less – or perhaps just more privately – they’ve never gone away. We had to fight a whole war to end slavery, but those far-right communities continued to exist afterward – they were even allowed to re-assert a modicum of control over national politics 8 years after the end of the Civil War.

There’s this odd narrative that keeps recurring in the US – that everything was fine and then The Thing happened. Before the Civil War, everything was fine, but then The Thing (slavers refusing to free enslaved people) happened. Before Obama, everything was fine, but then The Thing (racists magically appearing from nowhere) happened. Before Trump, everything was fine, but then The Thing (Trump somehow, magically converting well over 30% of Americans to fascism) happened.

What is a more accurate narrative? It seems like the majority of Americans have always been amenable to a sadistic authoritarianism fueled by active hallucination, and quite a few more have always been willing to tolerate cruelty and injustice out of complacency and cowardice. Things might be getting better (e.g., perhaps only 30% of Americans are fascists now instead of 60%), but there’s a clear continuity. Even some of the fairly specific and particularly unhinged details of today’s far-right extremist ideas share a thread that goes back to before this nation existed. The best example of this would be their obsession with Satanists. We saw this during the Salem witch trials, the Red Scare (communists were portrayed as Satanic), the Satanic panic of the 1980’s, and again (i.e., still) now (the Biden administration are secretly Satanists, they say).

While modern America does have both witches (e.g., Gardnerian Wicca, established around 1954) and Satanists (e.g., LaVeyan Satanism, established around 1966), those people aren’t in charge of anything. I’ve met a few of them. They’re fine; they’re working-class people without much money and absolutely no power whatsoever. Witches are so varied in their ideology that you can’t really generalize about them; I disagree with Satanists ideologically, but they are fairly harmless. Again: Neither group is in charge of anything.

Today in America, we have two cabals of wealthy people who control politics. They pre-approve candidates for office – especially at the national level – and then most (but not all) citizens are allowed to vote between the two pre-approved options for each office. They also control all of our media. As Marx pointed out, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, and most Americans have chosen to adopt the public ideology of one of those two ruling groups. Part of the propaganda of today’s politics is to portray these two groups as “sides” that are somehow naturally opposed to one another; that is highly inaccurate – they mostly cooperate.

On one “side”, we have the fascists, represented by the Republican party. They represent the ideological descendants of those first far-right communities that came to the US from Europe. Like all fascists, they’re always trying to make a sadistic, authoritarian past sound idyllic through a process that is half ignorance and half active hallucination. Ironically, the Republican party is slightly more democratic in terms of its relationship to its constituents compared to the Democrats, but the far right has nevertheless been seething for years over the Republican party’s failure to embrace open fascism. When Republicans say that US politics don’t represent their views, most of them are talking about this failure to embrace fascism; they describe fascism as “freedom” just like the original far-right Americans came to this continent in pursuit of “freedom” – freedom to do fascism. Donald Trump didn’t lead those Americans to fascism so much as he simply acknowledged and facilitated their fascism.

On the other “side”, we have the neoliberals, represented by the Democratic party. They represent a deeply held religious belief that capitalism can be the final, most advanced stage of human civilization, if only it can be rationalized through quantifying every aspect of life and eliminating irrational hierarchies (i.e., those hierarchies that are beloved by fascists). Neoliberals see the hierarchy of money to be completely rational and, therefore, good (in truth, it is neither). Neoliberal arguments against fascism tend to have an odd taint in that they don’t argue against cruelty or inequity but rather argue that it should be distributed fairly to all kinds of people. They won’t argue against prisons, for example, but they will argue that prison guards need to be more diverse and representative of marginalized groups. In perfect neoliberal form, Joe Biden keeps saying that capitalism requires fair competition, which is ludicrous; capitalism only requires that capitalists own capital and that the state doesn’t oppose their power. The assumption of “fair competition” is a religious one and the Democrats try to reify it through things like regulation and the welfare state.

Both “sides” are to the right, but one is far, far better for the average person: The Democrats. This puts both the true left and the true center in the awkward position of providing begrudging support to the machine of neoliberalism, particularly during elections. The Democratic party pretends to be “progressive” but only ever intends to progress toward perfecting capitalism. They pretend to support the left, and even allow leftist ideas to be included in their official platform, but it’s always with a wink that says, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll pretend you aren’t crazy, but we’re not going to actually do any of that.” See, for example, climate change, where the science says it is a crisis requiring us to change everything about our lifestyles or die as a species, and the Democratic party responds with subtle tweaks to how the machine of capitalism functions (e.g., increasing the percentage of energy that is renewable, while still increasing the absolute amount of fossil fuel energy used).

Based on a recent poll, we will be facing another Trump versus Biden election in 2024 (unless nature intervenes). Trump’s fascism will be four years in the rearview mirror, and the Democrats will have failed to do anything substantive about it, making it seem like Trump did nothing wrong. Meanwhile, Biden will have continued to frustrate working class Americans as well as the American left. Moreover, Biden appears noticeably more frail in comparison to Trump, which will hurt him dramatically with the uninformed idiot vote. Under these circumstances, it seems very likely that the Republican’s anti-democracy machinations will prevail and Trump will be crowned President in 2025.

I say Trump will be “crowned” because American fascists learned a lot from the previous Trump administration and the 2020 election. It would be quite surprising if they failed to completely take control of federal and state government to the extent that they are likely to be able to maintain control of the federal government beyond the foreseeable future (this is significantly worse than our current two-party anocracy). Sure, he will die at some point, but that doesn’t really change anything. Trump is the facilitator, not the cause. While he is an excellent tool, the more power Republicans have, the less the ideological focus matters. But let’s get into a little more detail about that.

The first concept that we all need to accept is that Republicans hate democracy. They believe that democracy means that “the mob” (people who are not superior like they are) will steal all the wealth and power from superior, authentic Americans and that the only way to guarantee freedom is to prevent “the mob” from having meaningful power. To them, infringing the voting rights of their enemies is a moral imperative, and the original intent of the founding fathers is consistent with limiting the electoral power of the common people.

The second thing to understand is that Trump’s insurrection plan could have worked. I very much appreciate the fact that, for example, the Vice President does not have the right to decide which electoral votes are valid. Fascists understand that there’s nothing stopping them from violating any of the rules, and that once they have power, it doesn’t matter what the rules are. Had Pence been willing to violate the rules, Trump would be President today – that’s why some of the January 6 protesters were so angry with Pence (remember, they were trying to find him so they could execute him).

The third issue is that these fascists have dramatically advanced changes to the rules that will allow them to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans in a completely legal and nonviolent way. They’ve based these changes on things that were a problem in 2020. For example, Republicans at the state level are changing state laws regarding how ballots are validated and even how election results are certified to allow them to legally steal elections. I say “steal” but if it is legal, is it really stealing? I’m sure they would say it is not. Of course, the electoral college itself – which was used to legally steal the election from Hillary Clinton – remains and continues to favor the far-right.

The final thing to understand is that although most Republicans support Trump, Trump isn’t really leading them. Rather, he is facilitating them. They support him because he is facilitating the manifestation of their previously-repressed fascist desires, not because he, himself has cast some kind of spell on them, tricking them into becoming fascists.

In summary:

• Republicans hate democracy.
• Trump’s insurrection was a viable plan.
• Republicans are building structures for stealing the next election legally.
• Trump is facilitating fascism, not creating it.

The Democratic party will react to the next insurrection in a predictable way: They will vote to pass a motion to investigate whether to declare Donald Trump (or whoever it ends up being) a Very Naughty Boy. Republicans will use their political power and anti-democratic systems to subvert the Democrats. It’s like a gumball machine at this point, it is so predictable.

Democratic constituents will do what they do best: A colorful combination of demanding and begging, backed up with nothing. They might wear sassy hats. If they ever decide to do something substantive, it will be too late. Their first line of defense, however, will be their signature move: Pretending everything is fine, which is what they are doing right now.

There’s an article in the Guardian today by Stephen Marche entitled, “The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it” which is a funny title for a couple of reasons. First, because the binary of “civil war or not” is severely naïve in the context of the United States, and second, because of the very specific “we” (clearly, Democrats). Everyone who isn’t a Democrat has been seeing it just fine for a long time.

Marche’s article includes the same kind of insane pining for bipartisanship that preceded the first Civil War. It was this toxic desire for peace under any circumstances that made the United States one of the last western nations to rid itself of the evil of slavery. Though his perspective is clearly biased toward the neoliberal near-right (which he erroneously calls “the left”), most of his analysis is quite good and lacking the bullshit “both sides” narrative we see so often that villainizes the true (and blameless) left. He seems like a Democrat that almost gets it; he even says, “…if it is to survive, the United States will have to recover its revolutionary spirit.”

The problem, of course, is that when neoliberals (here meaning people who believe capitalism can become a valid system) start talking about “the revolution” they invariably start fighting over which identity group is most marginalized by the current, imperfect manifestation of capitalism. Marche says, “The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport.” but he probably isn’t even talking about that. I suspect instead that he’s talking about people like Republican double agent Joe Manchin; it’s idiocy to think he has anything to do with “the left”.

I do not know how to proceed. It seems more and more clear that there’s no possibility other than the US collapsing under the weight of its own hate, ignorance, selfishness, and complacency. This has been the default plan for a long time, but the possibilities that might allow us to escape that kind of destruction are becoming more unlikely every day. Even more concerning is that the scale of this collapse may make it unsurvivable.