1.17.2021, re-post from Counterpunch+ (subscription) on 10.24.2021.

Next December readers will be able to purchase my next book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberalism, and the Trumping of America, 2017-2021. Completed in June of this year, the volume ends on a somber note, quoting the centrist Atlantic editor Jeffrey Golbderg’s June 14 reflection (ominously titled “The Capitol Riot was Prologue”) on how the “dismal dollar Democrats” (that’s my language, not Goldberg’s) will likely cede full national power back to the neofascist Republicans in 2022 and 2024. “And then,” Goldberg writes, “the four horsemen will certainly ride.”

“The Foul Odor of Fascism”

Nothing in the four months since I completed the manuscript has eased the sense of dread that other observers and I feel about the United States’ ongoing rightward drift and perilous future during Joe Biden’s first year in the White House. A September 10, 2021, New York Times column by the right-wing National Review correspondent Kevin D. Williamson is aptly titled “The Trump Coup is Still Raging.” By Williamson’s account:

Jan. 6 was…half of a coup attempt — the less important half. The more important part… — like legal wrangling in states and the attempts to sabotage the House commission’s investigation of Jan. 6 — is still going strong. These are not separate and discrete episodes but parts of a unitary phenomenon that, in just about any other country, would be characterized as a failed coup d’état..As the Republican Party tries to make up its mind between wishing away the events of Jan. 6 or celebrating them, one thing should be clear to conservatives estranged from the party: We can’t go home again. The attempted coup’s foot soldiers have dug themselves in at state legislatures. For example, last week in Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini introduced a draft of legislation that would require an audit of the 2020 general election in the state’s largest (typically Democratic-heavy) counties, suggesting without basis that it may show that these areas cheated to inflate Joe Biden’s vote count. Florida’s secretary of state, a Republican, knows that an audit is nonsense and has said so. But the point of an audit would not be to change the outcome (Mr. Trump won the state). The point is not even really to conduct an audit…The obviously political object is to legitimize the 2020 coup attempt in order to soften the ground for the next one — and there will be a next one.

As the left writer David Mascioatra noted on Salon last September 4, “The foul odor of fascism has become inescapable in the American atmosphere. Republican officials across the country are working overtime to undermine the right to vote, leading right-wing pundits brazenly promulgate racist conspiracy theories and the Anti-Defamation League reports that 2020 saw a 45 percent increase in hate crimes throughout the Midwest.”

Nazi Skinhead Words Gone Mainstream

Last August Masciotra interviewed Christian Picciolini, a former leading working class neo-Nazi white supremacist turned effective anti-hate activist “Everything happening in America and the world right now and for the last decade (rise of neofascism, QAnon/conspiracists, Trumpism, ‘America First,’ white nationalism, polarization, etc.),” Piccioloni wrote on social media last summer, “is leading me to believe we will face a period of darkness like we’ve never seen before.” By Picciolini’s account, the main shift in American white supremacist neo-fascism over the last generation has been a change from recruiting marginalized white youth into explicitly fascist white power organizations to the steady stealth capture of mainstream Republican ideology voiced by elected politicians and media personalities. Due to the chilling advance of this transformation under Obama, Trump, and now Biden (with shockingly little recognition much less resistance from establishment institutions), Picciolini sees dark days ahead:

‘We are in for a period of darkness…We are seeing the institutions we depend on for safety — law enforcement, the military — becoming infiltrated with the same ideologies that affected me 30 years ago. It is becoming more and more part of the mainstream.

…Words I used to say as a neo-Nazi skinhead, the belief system that I had when I was an avowed white supremacist, are now part of the mainstream discussion. We are seeing people who are not neo-Nazis, or at least not claiming to be, spouting off the same beliefs — politicians, law enforcement officers, police unions. So we’re in for a very rude awakening…there is the more blatant conspiracy-oriented language, regarding the “others” controlling the power structure. That is starting to exist in the language of QAnon, in terms of talking about “globalism.” But also, more specifically, what’s penetrated the right is “replacement theory” or the “Great Replacement.” What I mean by that is white supremacists believe that the demographics of the country are changing rapidly, and that soon white people will lose agency and power, because they will be the minority. Whether that is happening statistically or not is a different story, because what white supremacists believe is that it is an intentional process being put forward by global cabals of, in most cases, Jewish people who are trying to upset the balance of white power. White supremacists claim that diversity is genocide for the white race. They believe that the promotion of multiculturalism is a tool of white genocide.

We’ve started to hear those ideas, and similar ideas, come out of Tucker Carlson, a Fox News host with millions of viewers. It isn’t just people like me when I was hanging out in dark alleys reading pamphlets from other conspiracy theorists. People are now getting this theory and hatred from Donald Trump, and various people in his orbit. They are getting it from Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona. These are people with suits and ties. They look like the mainstream, they sound like the mainstream and, in certain cases, they’ve been elected to powerful positions by the mainstream.

It is the whole notion that if white people don’t wake up now, that they will be overrun. If you watch Tucker Carlson, people like David Duke and Tom Metzger, in the old days, said almost the exact same thing…Whether it is Islam, refugees, crime, immigrants or even the way they talk about outsourcing of jobs, it is all rooted in that same idea that white people have to be afraid.’

Ali Wessel and Horst Rittenhouse

One does not have to be a member of the “radical Left” like the present writer to “smell the foul odor of fascism” more than lingering in the air of US politics in the summer and fall of 2021. The right-wing former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum took to the pages of the Atlantic in mid-July to inform readers that “There’s a Word for What Trumpism is Becoming.” The word Frum had in mind was, you guessed it, fascism. What did it for Frum was Trump’s (thoroughly predictable and in fact predicted) response to being removed from power, followed by Trump’s Amerikaner supporters’ acceptance of their Fearless Leader’s textbook Orwellian and Hitlerian claims that the election was stolen and that the January 6th Capital Riot was a legitimate protest. Frum was particularly shaken by the former president’s recent claim on Fatherland (FOX) News that the fatal shooting of the putschist Ashli Babbitt – described by Trump as “an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman” – was unjust and carried out by “the head of security for a certain high official – a Democrat.” Frum apparently knew enough classic fascist history to grasp the parallel here with the Nazis’ manufacturing of the martyrdom of Horst Wessel, a fascist thug allegedly killed by Communists in 1930. (Of course, Frum’s “discovery” that Trumpism was “becoming fascism” in the summer of 2021 was a bit like discovering this year that LeBron James is “becoming a basketball player.” Still, as with historian Robert Paxton’s belated decision that Trump was indeed a fascist after January 6, we can perhaps say “better late than never.”)

There’s another Horst Wessel redux candidate coming around the corner. Remember Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenybopper fascist who murdered two Black Lives Matter protesters with an illegally owned AR-15 in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020? Trump defended the adolescent MAGAt soon after the butchery and even made a special stop in Kenosha on the very last night of the 2020 presidential campaign. The junior Illinois Nazi will soon be back in the news, with Trump likely weighing in on his virtues and Glenn Greenwald (an old Illinois Nazi legal hand) perhaps rising to his defense. Kyle Wessel’s trial, with a bounteous brownshirt defense fund bankrolled by white supremacists across the nation, begins on November 1.

What Happens in the Red States

Much of This Happened Here was written in 91% white Iowa, where the Republican Trumpist governor and legislature have since Biden’s election passed bills suppressing minority voting rights, increasing criminal penalties for social justice protest, forbidding honest discussion of white systemic racism in public education (K-Ph.D.), and banning local governments and school districts from enforcing local vaccine and mask mandates. Iowa’s Nazi Lite chief executive “Covid Kim” Reynolds has cut pandemic-related unemployment benefits, made taxpayers fund the sending of Iowa state troopers to patrol the southern US border (in its neo-Confederate partner state of Texas), and rejected federal Medicaid dollars to help the poor receive health care. Thanks to the noxious right wing political culture of this “flyover” state (home of Steve “Somebody Else’s Babies” King), the University of Iowa is the only Big Ten school without a mask mandate.

Similar and other vicious policies are ongoing and underway in numerous other red states, menacing millions. A coronavirus incident map of the US reveals a de facto Covid Confederacy reflecting the obvious cause-and-effect relationship between low vaccination rates and the absence of common sense public health measures like mask mandates on one hand and high covid infection and hospitalization numbers on the other hand. The Delta Variant is lighting up the South, under the insidious control of the pandemo-fascistic Amerikaner Party of Trump (APoT). (Curiously enough, North Carolina and Virginia, both with Democratic governors, are exceptions.) Perhaps the former slave states would like to adopt Tanya Tucker’s hit country tune “Delta Dawn” as their new proto-national anthem.

An especially horrific jurisdiction is the leading “Covid Sanctuary State” of Texas, which has just followed up enacting a major racist voter suppression measure by passing a Christian fascist anti-abortion bill. This brutally exist and mercenary measure has direct parallels with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It deputizes anyone on the planet to get $10,000 by suing anyone in Texas who gets, carries out, or assists in any way an abortion. This wicked act of forced motherhood and female slavery makes no exceptions for rape and incest. And while Texas has moved to the front of the New Gilead line, abortion rights have been under right-wing legislative attack in numerous red states in recent years, directly menacing millions of women.

As has not been fully appreciated, the numerous red state laws passed this year against “critical Race theory” and against honest discussion of America’s past and ongoing problem of systemic white racism are fundamentally fascistic. (They check off each of Jason Stanley’s ten key characteristics of fascist political rhetoric, as I showed in a recent Counterpunch+ commentary.)

The virus of white supremacist, nativist, and sexist neofascism that burns so hot in the “heartland” states has a terrible and outsized impact on the whole nation. The nation’s disproportionately white, rural, and reactionary Republican states are absurdly overrepresented in the nation’s government and politics for reasons discussed at length in my forthcoming book’s final chapter. In another key example of how what happens in the red states at the state level doesn’t stay there, red state legislatures and governors are pushing national politics and policy ever more dangerously rightward bypassing state laws that suppress and even nullify Democratic votes and by gerrymandering (geopolitically manipulating) US House districts in ways that inflate Republikaner power (over-concentrating minority and Democratic votes in a small number of districts is a leading method)

It’s not for nothing that the nation’s rightmost corporate political funders and operatives – the Koch-backed “fifth column” culprits in historian Nancy MacLean’s haunting study Democracy in Chains – have long focused heavily and smartly on politics and policy at the state level. They know very well that what happens in the nation’s disproportionately white and Amerikaner “red states” doesn’t just stay in the red states. Covid infections transmitted in pandemicist red states easily and regularly cross into blue states that take public health and science more seriously. Right-wing Christian fascist advocates of forced motherhood and de facto female slavery have for years been pushing through state-level anti-abortion laws with the explicit purpose of forcing a federal high court decision making abortion illegal again on a national level. The red state right has a chance of reddening the whole nation with the blood of botched abortions. Texas may be the “New Gilead,” but make no mistake: the plan is to make the whole country the New Gilead and the nation’s absurdly powerful high court is on board. The Supreme Court (which hosts at least one accused right-wing rapist and a full-on Handmaid’s Tale jurist appointed by the Christian Right’s “Cyrus” Donald Trump) can be reasonably expected to abolish all US women’s right to control their own reproductive lives by repealing Rose v. Wade in response to a case brought to it by the bright red state of Mississippi in July. (And through its increasingly common use of the “shadow docket,” whereby quick decisions are rendered without serious legal argument, the current red high court has vetoed Joe Biden’s effort to extend the former federal Covid-19 eviction moratorium, ordered Biden to continue Trump’s vicious policy of bottling asylum seekers up in Mexico, and refused to intervene against the clearly unconstitutional Texas abortion law.)

As the right’s leading operatives understand very well, the states are the soft underbelly of what’s left of American bourgeois democracy and the giant petri dish for the creeping virus of Amerikaner fascism. State-level politics are both relevant to business and the right in and of themselves and to the national political and policy agenda of right-wing corporate and political actors. At the same time, as MacLean notes, “corporate and conservative interests can make their will felt most easily in state governments – and are more likely to be challenged successfully by the citizenry at the federal and local levels – partly because state affairs are less well monitored by the people and the press.”

Having used the big fascist lie that Obama stole the 2008 election to advance dozens of red state voter suppression laws in the 2010s, the right knows very well that red state politics and policies are full of sweeping national implications. With Biden’s victory in 2020, Trump and his party have doubled and tripled down on the Orwellian stolen election falsehood, the driving force behind 33 voter suppression laws that have been passed in 19 states so far this year. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the end of July, “These laws make mail voting and early voting more difficult, impose harsher voter ID requirements, and make faulty voter purges more likely, among other things. More than 400 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states in the 2021 legislative sessions.”

An especially egregious and racist voter restriction bill passed by the white nationalist governor and legislature of Texas in early September sparked a flight of the Texas Assembly’s Democratic delegation to Washington DC. The delegation futilely lobbied and begged the US Senate to pass historic voter protection legislation passed by the US House. The House-passed For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would – if not blocked by the absurdly malapportioned US Senate – have protected minority and poor voters by blocking the implementation of new and numerous past discriminatory laws. It’s dead in the water in an upper Congressional body where reactionary, disproportionately rural and white states with small populations have the same representational weight as liberal states with vast and diverse populations.

It’s not just about voter suppression, it’s also and more menacingly about election nullification, with red state Republifascist parties moving to take over the counting and certification of votes and Electoral College slates in ways meant to cancel popular tallies that don’t go their way. Election nullification and cancellation is the motive behind red state moves like shifting vote certifications from (Democratic) secretaries of state to (RepubliNazi) attorneys general and bills giving state legislatures control over local and county election boards. Along the authoritarian way, the Republican election audit obsession is less insane than it might seem on the surface. It is meant to cast doubt on all future elections not won by the Amerikaners.

While many blue zone liberal and “Trumpenleft” fascism-deniers and appeasers live in blissful ignorance and dismissal – and sometimes in faux-left/-populist approval – of what’s happening in the white nationalist “flyover” states, the hard right has been hard-wiring these jurisdictions to be instruments of a national fascist ascendancy with enviable Leninist discipline.

Still Trumped by the “Instinctively Fascist” Donald

Add in Biden’s declining popularity (a recent Emerson College poll has Trump beating Biden 47 to 46%) – itself partly a reflection of limits on covid protection (and thus on job creation) imposed by Republicans at the state level as well as Biden’s badly botched handling of the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan – and it’s easy to see why the orange-tinted white power authoritarian Donald “Robert E. Lee Would Have Won in Afghanistan” Trump is now licking his pandemiNazi chops for another run in 2024. A right-gerrymandered US House and a right-wing US Senate could well prove a critical APoT asset in a contested 2024 election, as could the absurdly right-wing Red Amerikaner composition of the Supreme Court, itself a reflection of the absurdly right-wing Red Amerikaner composition of the US Senate and the absurdly starboard tilt of the ridiculous Electoral College.

Removed from office and banned from the social media platforms from which he long poisoned US politics, the 45th president of the United States nonetheless continues to Trump America in at least five key ways:

+1. The creation of the Big Hitlerian Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, an epic falsehood that is believed by most Republicans and is fueling an historic racist and right-wing assault on minority voting rights and election integrity.

+2. The creation of a Supreme Court (with a 6-3 Republican majority created by three Trump appointments) far to the right of the US populace.

+3. The deadly personal and political politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic, a major drag on Biden and the Democrats’ popularity as well as a major threat to citizens’ health and safety. (Trump and Fatherland [FOX] News broadcasters are themselves fully vaccinated while having murdered untold tens of thousands of Americans by spreading pandemo-fascistic vaccine and mask skepticism.)

+4. The encouragement and expansion of far-right neofascistic politics within the Republican Party, elevating the electoral prospects of white nationalists who have moved onetime Nazi skinhead talking point like Fascist Replacement Theory (FRT) – the claim that a vicious global and Jewish elite is replacing virtuous white American workers and voters with sinister voters and workers of color – into the political mainstream.

+5. The activation and legitimization of racist, sexist, nativist, conspiratorial, authoritarian, anti-intellectual, politically violent, and frankly fascistic beliefs, rhetoric, and behavior on the part of millions of Americans.

Hollow Resistance

It’s a hard right rain that could well fall upon the nation in 2024 and 2025 as fascist enforcers within and beyond the big city police forces (the MAGA gendarmes in the heart of Blue America) violently suppress millions who refuse to live under a vengeful second fascist Trump administration or a possibly even more dangerous white-nationalist Ron DeSantis (or Greg Abbot or Josh Hawley) regime forced down their throats by federal and state election nullifiers and vote suppressors. Can/will the Democrats prevent the ever more rightward drift of the American capitalist state? The outlook is not good. The corporate Democratic Party would be better positioned for 2022 and 2024 if it was something remotely like the fighting “party of the people” it claims to be. It is no such thing. It remains a corporate-captive and militantly imperialist neoliberal organization of “inauthentic opposition” and mass demobilization. For all liberal and progressive pundits’ efforts to repackage Biden as some kind of fighting progressive (“not your grandpa’s Joes Biden”), Trump’s successor is a deeply conservative octogenarian never known for political skill, courage, and popularity on the national stage. He lacks the pluck and vision even to do very basic and popular, Democratic base-energizing things permitted under the slaveowners’ Constitution: compelling Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to a paltry $15 an hour, slashing student debt; fighting to end the racist Senate filibuster to thereby force the passage of essential voting rights and union organizing legislation already passed by the US House; reducing the absurd power of the right wing on the nation’s powerful high court by expanding (or threatening to expand) the size of that body. Biden and his party are what they are: Weimar-like junior partners in the ongoing fascitization of the United States. They are doggedly unwilling and probably anyway unable to inspire the sort of mass popular activism required to take on and defeat the ever more fascistic right because doing so would antagonize their big money bankrollers and backers and violate their own deeply internalized “pragmatic” neoliberal world view and deeply conservative sensibilities. Fighting neofascism is simply not who they are. They are a party of Hollow Resistance, the title of my 2020 book on the ex-presidency of Barack Obama.

One can occasionally hear legal CNN and MSNBC talking heads suggesting that Trump and his white nationalist allies like the despicable beast Steve “Camp of the Saints” Bannon might face serious legal punishment for their crimes against democracy, humanity, social justice, public health, and livable ecology? But who is kidding who? The Dems and their allies have no serious stomach for putting the big dog Amerikaner fascists in the cages they deserve. Just like when the Empire’s New Clothes Barack Obama gave George W. Bush and Dick Cheney “Get Out of Jail Free” cards for torture and the Imperial Crime of the New Millennium, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell that Trump will pay any serious price for January 6th or any other of his mind-boggling transgressions (see the third chapter of my next book for an attempted, soul-numbing catalogue). Trump being jailed is about as likely as the reptilian fossil fuel whore and oligarch Joe Manchin joining Extinction Rebellion.

Breathing Space for What?

Ballot marks “for” Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden were essential to remove a lethal Amerikaner president that the neoliberal Obama all-too-privately knew to be a fascist, but it was nothing more than a holding action to create some desperately needed breathing space. The presidential election of 2020 was no time for leftist Lesser Evil Vote-shaming. All too much like George Floyd on May 25, 2020, much of the Covid 19-ravaged nation couldn’t breathe in the summer and fall of 2020. Trump had to go. It would have been far better to have forced him and his butt-licking Christian Fascist Vice President Mike Pence (who wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act to crush the George Floyd Rebellion with federal troops) out through a mass upheaval on the model of how Puerto Ricans got rid of the rancid reptile Ricky Rossello in the summer of 2019, but Trump had to go.

But breathing is just the start. Using one’s breath, brains, and body to build alternatives to the ongoing and all-too sadly bipartisan if Republican-led fascitization of the United States and to the eco-cidal capitalist-imperialist, racist and sexist order that has produced this horrific trumping of democracy is the real task. We have seen brief episodic glimmers of the shift required in movements or moments like the Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999, the Wisconsin public worker uprising in late winter and early spring of 2011, the Occupy Wall Street rebellion in the late summer and fall of 2011, and the George Floyd Rebellion of 2021 (and perhaps a major outpouring in response to a high court reversal of Roe v. Wade in coming months?) A critical question hangs over the heads of the nation and indeed (given America’s continuing vast power) the world today: What on Earth would it take for activists to transcend such occasional and sporadic rebellions to push many millions of US Americans out of their workplaces, schools, homes, and delusions and put masses in motion in the streets and public squares to fight for a just, democratic, and sustainable society beneath and beyond the savagely time-staggered ruling class electoral extravaganzas that are falsely sold to them as democracy and the only politics that matters