Monday night, I attended a vigil for the victims of the terrorist attack in Buffalo that killed 10 people and injured 3 more (one seriously). The organizers felt that asking for justice for the victims was appropriate; even though they certainly weren’t wrong about that, it seems extremely unlikely that anything resembling justice can happen. What is justice in this context? Whatever it might be doesn’t seem like something a humane society can deliver, and there’s certainly no making up for the loss of those 10 human beings.
Several people, including me, attended the vigil with the primary purpose of preventing the next fascist from killing Black people and their allies at this vigil — because fascists see every place where their perceived enemies might congregate as an opportunity for murder, whether it be a vigil, funeral, protest, place of worship, grocery store, or school.
Fascists are at war with the rest of the country, but most of the rest of the country refuses to acknowledge it. In fact, at this vigil last night, a handful of the moms who demand action against civilian gun ownership showed up in their t-shirts — a display that was both cringey and nonsensical. Civilian disarmament is impossible in the US as long as it means disarming the fascists who make up at least one third of adults. America’s police forces are at least half fascists (the terrorist in Buffalo was excited to talk to them because he thinks they are on his side — and he may be right!), so even if civilian disarmament were possible, it would mean that fascists would control all the guns. If you would like to simply keep guns out of the hands of right-wing lunatics, well, I hate to break it to you, but these are exactly the people that Republicans want to be armed. We are at war, and the lunatics are the shock troops.
If there were no fascists, we could have a conversation about getting rid of the guns — the how, the who, the why — but until then, it’s an absurd topic.
It’s hard to say when this current war started. If we take a long view of history, this is a continuation of the Civil War which technically ended in 1865 but started up again a mere 8 years later when the white liberals of that time decided they were too cowardly and complacent to continue resisting the southern fascists’ pushback against democracy. You could point to Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign, but there were other points of acceleration, such as the Tea Party movement which started prior to 1990, but became truly invigorated in 2009 in response to Barack Obama’s election. The rhetoric of “socialism” and “replacement” date back to 1870 and have been around continuously; sure, the volume of the wailing varies as does the extent to which fascist arguments are shrouded in dog whistles, but these are the exact same ideas. Those ideas crossed the Atlantic to Nazi Germany, and then came back again, enhanced. Even the Red Scare was rooted in these same ideas from the Civil War era.
Here we are though, at war against fascists within our own country, but with most Americans either denying the war or enthusiastically supporting it. What does President Joe have to say about it? Reports in the media say that he called for “unity” and more gun control. I haven’t been able to find a transcript, but I did see that he condemned the idea of white supremacy during his speech. Is condemning the idea of fascism enough? There are specific people who are building fascism. They have names. For the time being, we can see who they are when they rail against “CRT” (teaching children accurate history), trans people, the immigration “crisis” (i.e., normal immigration), “socialism” (capitalism that isn’t controlled by white supremacists), “handouts” (programs to balance the needs of working class people against the tyranny of capitalism), and fuel efficiency standards (because creating less CO2 makes us weak, apparently). We are at war, and the President of the United States won’t even say who we are at war with. I can only hope that he will do that during his speech Tuesday night…
He called it terrorism and he called it white supremacy. That’s certainly good and accurate. He connected the terrorist attack in Buffalo to the tiki-torch nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 — that’s good and accurate as well. He says that we need to “keep assault weapons off our streets” — a common Democratic Party refrain that started out odd and has become more and more absurd. Mostly, he talked about rejecting hate, and he said that the white supremacist, insurrectionist, fascist psychos are a minority, which is technically correct — but it is still a third of US adults. It is a huge number of people and just “rejecting hate” isn’t going to cut it.
He didn’t admit that we’re at war and he didn’t explicitly identify who we are at war with. No surprise there.
The Democratic Party can’t really respond properly to fascism because it is a near-right institution that depends on the acceptance of a moderate amount of fascism to protect it from true democracy. The Democratic Party villainizes economic centrists like Bernie Sanders as “extreme” even while it pretends to work with them. It spends more money fighting against progressives than it does fighting against Republicans, and it is more willing to use any means necessary to win when fighting progressives. If electoral politics is the only lever of change that you feel comfortable touching, then I encourage you to not only vote out the Republicans (who are all but openly fascist at this point) but also vote out the Democratic Party’s old guard because they are the protectors of a kinder, gentler fascism and the obstacle that prevents electoral progress.
Biden claims he was inspired to run for President in 2020 because of the fascists at Charlottesville — as if he is somehow the only person who could meet this challenge. It’s laughable considering that his response is “reject hate and take away everyone’s guns”; it’s like just saying no to drugs, only more pathetic. Accepting that we are at war with fascism and accepting the responsibility to fight against it in those terms is literally the least we should allow from our elected representatives. There was exactly one candidate for President that said that they would go to “war with white nationalism and racism”. That person was not Joe Biden.