The Paul Street Report, 2.20.2023
Thinking about the problem of US-Amerikan fascisation, my mind often conjures the notion of an ailing person who finally goes to the doctor for a check-up long after cancer has spread across much of their body.
The fascist malignancy is already horribly present in the US body politic.
There are so many examples of this it’s hard to know where to start or stop.
“They Feared for Their Physical Safety”
Here’s a good one – an anecdote from the competent bourgeois journalist Robert Draper’s book Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. Draper writes the following after relating the former third-ranking U.S. House of Representatives Republican Liz Cheney’s failure to get more than 9 other House Republicans to join her in voting to impeach Donald Trump for sparking the fascist physical Attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021:
“Left unspoken by Cheney was …the role that fear played in the impeachment vote. Had it been a secret ballot, Cheney was confident that far more than ten Republicans would have voted to impeach the president. She knew this because several members had said so to her. Those same members feared their own constituents. They feared for their physical safety.”
The feared physical harm, as did hundreds of Congresspersons and their staffs, barricaded against a rampaging mob in the US Capitol on January 6th? As have untold numbers of public officials and workers facing the rage of Amerikaner maniacs furious over pandemic protections, books that tell the truth about slavery and sexism, and elections their party lost because nonwhite, female, and gay and transgender citizens they don’t consider “real Americans” voted for the other capitalist (but at least not fascist) party in recent years.
Stop and think about Draper’s report for a moment. Numerous members of the US Congress would have voted to impeach the fascist maniac Donald “Take Down the Magnetometers” Trump for, you know… trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law and to install himself as a de facto dictator on the basis of a brazenly Hitlerian Big Lie – the myth that Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 president election – but for their fear of physical harm from the armed Trump base.
We can be sure that the same fear was at play among Republican Senators who failed to convict Trump for his attempted putsch, thereby helping keep the malevolent, orange-tinted monster of Mar-a-Lago in play for a return to the White House in 2025.
The first thing the Republifascists did when they took back the House: they took down the metal detectors that had been installed to prevent the bringing of guns on to the body’s floor after January 6th. A number of Republican representatives have posed for photographs with assault rifles and left little effort to hide their violent contempt for the supposedly “radical Left” Democrats, especially for leftish female Congresspersons like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. As Draper notes, the fascist lunatic and Congressperson Marjorie Taylor-Greene (Rf-GA) has run campaign ads saying AOC “wants to plunge us into communism.” Frau Taylor-Greene even “posted [a] notorious ad…proclaiming herself as the ‘worst nightmare’ of AOC and her Squad while firing rounds from her AR-15” (Draper, Weapons of Mass Delusion, p. 170). A demented maniac influenced by such political madness invaded Nancy Pelosi’s and broke the skull of her husband last October.
It’s all pretty F’ng fascist if you don’t mind me saying so. One of fascism’s key components is the legitimization of political violence over and against previously normative elections, legislative deliberation, and rule of law.
(For what it’s worth, even I, a writer on the distant margins of the national political discourse, receive threats of violence and murder from the US right for years. The message is clear: shut up or face bloody punishment.)
Fear of Losing Voters and Viewers
Please note something else quite remarkable: every single one of the ten House Republicans who made the obviously indicated bourgeois-democratic, “small r” republican decision to vote for Trump’s second impeachment is no longer in the House. They were all either defeated by election-denier Republi-fascists in the 2022 Republican primary elections or chose not to run again because they knew principled vote for the orange malignancy’s second impeachment disqualified them with a Christian white nationalist Republikaner base that overwhelmingly believed (and still believes)Trump’s great Hitlerian election lie.
We recently learned that fear of losing that base’s approval to other far right-wing television networks lay behind the decision of Fatherland, I mean FOX News personalities like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity to run with Trump’s Big Lie even though they privately mocked the ex-president’s repeatedly disproven stolen election claim.
(For what it’s worth, Republican voters, the majority of whom combine the stolen election myth with the belief that America’s white “European values” must by defended at all costs, out-polled the dismal, dollar-drenched [but at least not fascist] Democrats by three million votes in the national popular vote for the US. House last November.)
“The Possibility of Another White House Term for Trump”
Here’s another example or symptom, from a CNN essay in which that network’s political analyst Steven Collinson reflects on Joe Biden’s recent balloon-bursting adventures:
“Fervent Republican criticism of Biden’s failure to shoot down a [supposed – P.S] Chinese surveillance balloon before it traversed the continent followed by claims that he’s trigger happy in downing subsequent unknown aerial objects, show that for many in the GOP – critical geopolitics are just another excuse for partisan score settling….the Republican Party’s abdication of the internationalist principles that won the Cold War against the Soviet Union, its splits over funding for Ukraine and the possibility of another White House term for Donald Trump who turned US foreign policy into a mirror of his own volatile temperament raise even more questions as the 2024 election looms.”
Forget most of the entire quote here. I’m not focusing on foreign policy politics in this commentary. Notice the passing and nonchalant way in which Collinson mentions what ought to be understood as a neofascist nightmare: “the possibility of another White House term for Donald Trump.”
This is not unusual these days. I regularly see and read reporters and pundits say without any visible sense of shock or horror that the malignant-narcissist national tumor and pandemo-fascist maniac Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the A-15s are “Not Here to Hurt Me” Trump is the most likely GOP presidential nominee in 2024 and could well return to the White House.
Never mind the release last December of the Final Report of the US House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol, which shows beyond any reasonable doubt that that Trump was the “the central cause” of the insurrection. “None of the events of Jan. 6,” the committee rightly found, “would have happened without him.” Across eight chapters and 845 pages, based on interviews with more than 1000 witnesses and the examination of many thousands of documents, the report recounts in detail the record of Trump’s attempt to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power before and after the 2020 election by:
· deciding in advance to claim victory no matter the outcome.
· trying to recruit and install fake state-level presidential Electors.
· trying to get state election officials to alter vote counts in his favor.
· calling for fascist mobs to assemble and “be wild” in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.
· delivering a January 6th address in which he told his frothing backers to “fight like Hell [or]… you won’t have a country anymore” and promising to join them in marching to the Capitol.
· trying to personally join the attack on the Capitol and trying to enable fascist paramilitaries to attack the Capitol with miliary assault rifles (take down the magnetometers”).
· enlisting Republican Congresspersons to oppose the certification of Joe Biden’s Electors.
· sitting in front of a White House television for two-plus hours during the riot, failing to promptly send in troops to protect the legislative branch, and refusing to release a statement telling the rioters to cease the bloody mayhem he sparked.
· Encouraging violence against his Vice President Mike Pence (for the sin of not blocking the constitutional certification of Biden’s duly elected Electors).
Hey, to quote Chris Farley, “remember that?”
And never mind the mind-boggling nonstop whack-a-mole record of narcissistic, ecocidal, pandemicist and fascistic transgression that is recorded at nearly nauseating length in the third chapter (titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-2021”) of my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and Trumping of America and (for a more concise and “entertaining” record through the mid-summer of 2020) the first chapter (titled “Is it the Fascist Apocalypse Yet?”) of my 2020 book Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement.
All of this…and we are looking at the very real “possibility of another White House term for Donald Trump.”
That’s some messed up shit.
Herr DeSantis and the War on Real History/Herstory
It gets worse, of course. The Mar-a-Lago reptile’s main rival to win the chance for an at least coin-flip shot against the bewildered balloon-blaster and imperial corporatist Joe Biden to take over (take back in Trump’s case) the world’s most dangerous and destructive office in 2025 is the arguably more dangerous Florida fascist Ron DeSantis. Herr Governor DeSantis stands in the self-righteous vanguard of a Christian white nationalist/neofasist red state war on teaching children and young adults real US-American history and social studies with racism, genocide, patriarchy/sexism, and gay-bashing properly included. With his jurisdiction (currently home to Trump family friend and fellow fash putschist Jair Bolsonaro) in the lead, 44 states have proposed bans on teaching the roles that racism, ethnic cleansing, genocide and sexism have played in US history and society past and present. Eighteen states have passed such white-nationalist and patriarchal laws, which seek to make nonwhite and female persons’ subordinate status in the US unintelligible as the result of anything more or other than personal and cultural failure.
“These laws,” philosopher Jason Stanley writes, “are meant to intimidate educators, to punish them for speaking freely by threatening their jobs, their teaching licenses, and more. The passing of these laws signals the dawn of a new authoritarian age in the United States, where the state uses laws restricting speech to intimidate, bully and punish educators, forcing them to submit to the ideology of the dominant majority or lose their livelihoods, and even their freedom. It is clear that the chief agenda of the GOP is to advance a set of speech laws that criminalize discussion in schools of anything but the white heterosexual majority’s perspective.”
This is white nationalist authoritarianism. Sadly, the media trivializes this horrifying legislation as just more of the same old “culture war” conflict that has long through US politics, ignoring their fundamentally fascist essence. Imagine how it would respond to regions of Germany banning teaching and books about the Nazi Holocaust.
(For what it’s worth, DeSantis could well end up as the Republikaner POTUS nominee depending on how Trump’s maddeningly unclear legal situation develops this year.)
The Christian Fascist Forced Motherhood Campaign
Just as horrifying and by no means just coincidental to all the above is the determined Republifascist campaign to fully reimpose the national female bondage of forced motherhood. In the eight-month wake of Following the Christian fascist Trump-and McConnell-made/Handmaid Supreme Court’s populace-defying June 2022 decision (Dobbs v. Jackson) ending women’s constitutional right to an abortion. Eleven states now ban abortion in all or nearly all cases: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Nine states have passed strict abortion laws that are under legal challenge and in judicial limbo: Arizona, Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, North Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Two states have passed pre-viability bans: Florida (15 weeks) and Georgia (6 weeks).
My fellow Substacker Jessica Valenti writes this:
“For over six months, Americans have been suffering under abortion bans that they didn’t vote for and don’t want. Women left bleeding for days. Cancer patients and raped children denied care. Burst ectopic pregnancies….[There are widespread] conservative efforts to ban abortion medication …twenty Attorneys General [have] threatened retail pharmacies to keep [abortion] medication out of their states, even though they’re standard treatment for miscarriages….doctors [are being] forced to choose between giving their patients adequate care or prison time….pregnant women [are being] kept in an Alabama jail in order to ‘protect’ their fetuses.”
As if all this (all in violation of longstanding majority pro-abortion rights U.S public opinion) isn’t sickening enough, a far-right federal district trial judge in Amarillo, Texas is about to issue a ruling that “would,” in Valenti’s words, “strip even pro-choice states of the right to offer [medical abortion] pills to patients.”
It’s never been just about “returning abortion policy to the states.” The stealthily mainstreamed far right wants to end abortion nationwide.
I am quoting, by the way, from a Valenti commentary in which she notes that the neoliberal imperialist patriarch (my words, not hers) Joe Biden gave the right-wing neofascist assault on women’s reproductive rights a mere 30 seconds in his 2023 State of the Union Address. Thirty seconds! Yes, that’s right: half a minute to abortion rights after a mid-term election campaign in which the Democrats relied heavily on pro-abortion backlash against Dobbs v. Jackson to limit their losses, with Biden even emptily pledging to sign a national bill codifying the right to an abortion as a national law if the Democrats kept Congress (the promise was empty because such a bill would have required support from sixty members of the essentially half-Republican US Senate). How insulting.
A previously non-Christian fascist Supreme Court would quickly shut down the “rogue” Trumpy Amarillo judge’s coming decision to ban mifepristone nationwide. Not the current High Handmaid Court brought to us by Trump, Mitch McConnell and their Christian white nationalist party of patriarchal neofascism.
Half or More of American Government is Infested
Look, the fascists, which is that the post-republican “Republicans” are now – as I have explained too many times by now (if you can’t handle the F-word then just say “Christian white nationalist” or “authoritarian”) – have basically half or more of the federal government now. They have the extremely powerful and absurdly lifetime-appointed federal judiciary at the top level and in much of the circuit and district system below. They have technically but effectively more than half the federal legislative branch since the Democrats can’t pass much of anything through Congress with the Republi-fascists (Taylor-Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar et al.) running the House and 60 votes required (under the longstanding reactionary filibuster rule) to pass most legislation in the Senate, where the rightmost party is absurdly overrepresented by the apportionment of two Senators to each state regardless of population size.
The Senate is slated to go Republi-fascist in 2025 given a Senatorial election line up in which Democrats are far more vulnerable than Republikaners. The Hill reports that the Dems are “defending more than twice as many seats as Republicans, and it’s already facing the possibility that some of its incumbents could retire, leaving open competitive seats.”
The preposterous, democracy-flunking Electoral College always favors the Republican presidential candidate. If that and Biden’s low approval ratings and unforeseen developments (including a potential recession or coming perceived foreign policy fiascos) aren’t enough to deep-six the blundering and unpopular octogenarian Biden in 2024, the revanchist red (try brown) states of the bitter white Amerikaner interior have been stepping up racist and anti-Democratic voter suppression measures since 2020 and the High Handmaid Court is currently considering a case (Moore v. Harper) that could permit red/brown state legislatures to literally nullify statewide popular presidential votes they don’t like. And the likely Republi-fascist challenger Trump or DeSantis will enjoy critical parliamentary support from probable Republican majorities in both houses of Congress if and when he feels compelled to challenge the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Meanwhile, there’s the darkly underestimated state level, where US federalist “states’ rights” permits highly significant policymaking in defiance of nationwide public opinion, just 16 of the nation’s 50 states qualify as blue (Democratic/bourgeois-democratic) and only 4 of those (California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Vermont) are bright blue. Nine states are evenly divided/“purple” (Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Maine, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania). The remaining half of the country’s states are red/brown/Christian white nationalist/neofascist.
It Can Happen Here; It Kinda Already Is Happening Here
Meanwhile on the ground, fascists menace gay and transgender people and public librarians while the country averages well more than one mass shooting per day, courtesy of the neofascist National Rifle Association’s success in creating a nation where guns significantly outnumber humans. The teeny bopper fascist Kye Rittenhouse is a folk hero on the right because he killed civil rights protesters with an illegally owned AR-15 two -plus years ago (By the way, Herr Trump made sure to stop in the town where Rittenhouse shot Black Lives protesters om the very last night of the 2020 presidential campaign. Think about that for a second or two.) Right-wing militias continue to thrive even as a minority of their leaders are sentenced to inadequate sentences for participating in a violent fascist attempt to overthrow the last presidential election. Murderous and racist police violence and mass incarceration, reinforced by the gun violence epidemic that police authorities pretend to hate (while knowing that it helps justify their bloated budgets and chilling domestic military capacities) has not abated in the wake of the George Floyd Rebellion.
As the revcom leader Bob Avakian says, “The unavoidable truth is that this country, the much-proclaimed ‘shining city on a hill,’ is full of fascists!”
Clueless, cynical and/or cowardly Democrats blather on foolishly about how it – the not-so semi-fascism that can be briefly mentioned and then forgotten after things like January 6th and Trump’s sloppy Bible-holding spectacle in Lafayette Park the previous summer – can’t and won’t happen here because the Christian white nationalist base represents an ever-smaller demographic minority. This leaves out at least three key things: the anti-democratic Minority Rule structure of US politics and policy; the fierce Afrikaner-like determination of the Christian white nationalist/neofascist right to enforce right-wing Amerikaner Minority Rule through that structure and by any means necessary beyond it, violence included (no small menace in this gun- and assault-weapon-soaked nation); the dismal, dollar-drenched neoliberal nothingness of the “inauthentic opposition” party of Hollow Resistance and fascism-denial/-enablement: the Blue Maga Dems, whose bewildered and decrepit leader orders the reckless and eco-cidal bombing of Baltic gas pipelines and the shooting down of mythical Chinese “spy balloons” while conducting a reckless cost-plus proxy war with imperialist Russia – a conflict that has so far put perhaps as many as 200,000 human beings in early graves and that could soon solve the capitalogenic global warming the war exacerbates with planetary Nuclear Winter.
You have to hand it to the January 6th maniacs on one score: a new and radical US-American Revolution is long overdue, just not the one they had in mind – a socialist one instead.
