The Paul Street Report, 4.4.2023
The Capitalist Democrats…
The Democratic Party is a militantly capitalist entity and always has been – and not just in the neoliberal era. The much beloved New Deal Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, himself a wealthy member of the capitalist establishment, boasted that he had saved the US American profits system by overseeing reforms that helped deradicalize the populace in the wake of the great capitalist failure known as the Great Depression.
The leading post- New Deal neoliberal Democratic politicians and policymakers of my adulthood, from Jimmy Carter through Joe Biden have all sworn and demonstrated their fealty to the capitalist order in numerous ways that I (along with many others) have written about and documented at length elsewhere and won’t take the time or space to recapitulate here.
Nancy Pelosi meant it when she was asked by a young Bernie Sanders fan to comment on the high popularity of the word “socialism” among US youth: “we’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is.”
With a net worth well over $100 million thanks largely to the parasitic accumulation of her investor husband, Pelosi had some very selfish reasons to cancel discussion of alternatives to the system that had given the top tenth of the nation’s upper One Percent as much wealth as its bottom 90 percent.
“We’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is” has been the shared consensus opinion of all but a tiny share of the Democratic Party’s candidates, operatives, officeholders, policy wonks, ideologists and, of course funders for all of my six decades-plus on this stolen continent.
…Considered “Socialist,” “Radical Left,” and Even “Marxist” by the Republicans
All of the above is meant to introduce a question that has been rolling around in my mind since the time of the “Tea Party” rebellion against the supposed “Marxist-Leninist Black nationalist” Barack Trans-Pacific Partnership Obama, who was in fact a “deeply conservative” servant of the wealthy Few and their vast corporate and financial holdings:
Why this recurrent wild-eyed Republican Party and FOX News denunciation of the dismal, dollar-drenched neoliberal capitalist-imperialist Democrats as “radical Left,” “Marxist,” “socialist,” “communist,” and the like?
The charge has gone ballistic in the Trump era, of course, with the false neo-McCarthyite, paranoid-style accusation of supposed socialist radicalism now routinely hurled at the thoroughly bourgeois and (since the mid-1970s) predominantly neoliberal Democratic Party. Many readers here have probably heard or read about numerous Republicans from Trump on down absurdly calling the recent indictment of Trump a politically vindictive “weaponization of the legal system” by “the radical” and “socialist left,” as if the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the 24 grand jurors who voted to indict the arch-criminal Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump are members of a communist organization.
Fascist Ideology Requires It
Forget for a moment, if you can – and I can’t – that this country and the world are in dire existential need of real socialist revolutions to replace and transcend a capitalist-order that is quite literally destroying life on Earth. (That’s why I put the word “smear” in quote marks in this essay’s title: to me, being called a Marxist. Socialist, and/or communist is far from shaming; it is both flattering and accurate.) That rather momentous matter aside, what is behind this preposterous but pervasive right-wing and Republican claim/charge that the plutocratic Dems are Marxists, socialists, and communists?
The answer, I suspect, is quite simply that the Republican Party over the last fifteen years and with particular intensity since the rise of Trump has gone fascist and that anti-Marxism and anti-socialism are critical ingredients of the political and ideological virus that is fascism. The very logic of the fascist world view requires a big menacing socialist enemy even when no such enemy objectively exists.
Why Look for Evidence and Reality in Anything the Republi-fascists Say?
This, I think, is one of two missing pieces in the brilliant Yale philosopher Jason Stanley’s ten-point analysis of fascist politics. The first thing missing (if implicit) in his widely read book How Fascism Works is fascism’s explicit rejection of parliamentary bourgeois democracy and determination to introduce a new political superstructure with one party rule under a maximal leader with no checks and balances on his power. The second thing missing (though also implicit and hinted at in Stanley’s book) is obsessive anti-socialism and anti-Marxism.
Then there’s the many-sided falsity and madness of most of what the Republi-fascists say. Yes, it’s silly that the Republi-fascists rail on and on about the “socialist” and even “Marxist” menace supposedly represented by a party that bends over backwards to demonstrate its fealty to the Lords of Capital – and this in a country where Marxist and socialist forces are (dangerously and depressingly) marginalized. Okay, but why look for rationality and empirical evidence in anything that the nation’s rightmost major party and its adherents think and say? Three of Stanley’s ten fascism-defining points are critical here: constant political propagandization, anti-intellectualism, and “unreality,” seen in the Republi-fascists’ attachment to wild conspiracy theories. Look, folks (to steal a line from Biden), this is a party that:
· preposterously clings to the massively false claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
· ridiculously claims that the January 6 Capitol Riot was a minor and mostly friendly affair – a curious description of a bloody physical assault on the US legislative branch meant to provoke a crisis cancelling Joe Biden’s election.
· lethally denies decades of scientific research on the deepening climate catastrophe. It purveys thoroughly mythical narratives of voter fraud.
· passes state laws criminalizing the accurate teaching of any history that does not match its white nationalist myths about of when “America was great.”
· is full of anti-vaxxers and book banners and people who ludicrously believe that American grade school children are being taught graduate and law school-level critical race theory (CRT) by “socialist” elementary teachers and that CRT is “Marxist.”
· thinks there’s a giant “radical Left” organization called Antifa exercising vast power in connection with “deep state” forces who want to collapse America’s fossil fuel industry in service to supposedly communist China.
· contains and elevates people who think that the Democrats are party of a child-eating globalist conspiracy funded by George Soros.
· believes that small fetal cell clusters are living human beings with as much claim to civil and legal rights life as fully grown women.
· is loaded with fundamentalist Christians who take the endless wild, bloody, and vindictive stories in The Holy Bible as revealed truth and who believe that Armageddon is at hand. (Many of the more unhinged Bible-thumpers in the party believe that the slithering sociopath Trump is God’s Chosen One sent to Earth to lead the select to heaven.)
I could go on and on listing the ludicrous and even psychotic things today’s Republi-fascists believe. Seen against the backdrop of their overall madness, the Republi-fascists’ idea that the Democrats are “Marxists” and “socialists” and that the nation is haunted by “the radical Left” seems par for the course and relatively mild.
Hints of Plausibility
At the same time, there are just enough tiny hints of the seeming truth of the at once neofascist and neo-McCarthyite narrative to give Republi-fascist anti-socialism/-Marxism a slight scent of plausibility. Democratic voters and Democratic-affiliated organizations do stand to the comparatively social-democratic, environmentalist, anti-racist and feminist left of the ever more right-wing Republicans (this is not very hard to do, of course). This reflects the Democrats’ base in deeply impoverished and racially and culturally heterogenous metropolitan areas with a good number of highly educated professionals and a decent smattering of liberal and leftish intellectuals and colleges and universities – polyglot cities that are viewed with classically fascist fear and loathing (see this book’s ninth chapter) by “red” (try brown) state Republicans.
There is a handful of national Democratic Congresspersons who identify as “democratic socialists,” including a senior US Senator who made serious runs for the Democratic presidential nomination in the last two election cycles – Bernie Sanders.
The nation’s rampant identity politics and ideological confusion has helped identify “the left” with racial minority and female and gay representation, not proletarian revolution. And the “woke imperialist” Democrats regularlt splash a fake-progressive multi-cultural and cross-gender veneer on their capitalist and imperialist politics by putting Black, Latino, female, and gay faces in high places.
There was in fact a Left-led Occupy Movement against class inequality or at least plutocracy that spread across the nation’s cities and town like wildfire in the fall of 2011. And there have been major and often remarkably cross-racial rebellions against racist police brutality and the US
police state in major, medium-sized and even some small US cities and towns since the murder of Trayvon Martin in February of 2012. The George Floyd Rebellion was the biggest protest wave in American history. It sparked no small white-Amerikaner neofascist reaction, from Trump on down.
Alt-Fact Fascist Media
Meanwhile, the right possesses a vast communications “alt-fact” network that permits it to circulate and reinforce its malicious and fantastic narratives free of empirical challenge and reasoned debate. From FOX News and its further right competitors One America Network and Newsmax to the vast right-wing talk radio and Internet outposts to the dark web chat rooms where fascists plot armed attacks on “the radical Left,” the ever more mainstreamed far right creates its own alternative un-reality, where Donald Rumsfeld’s Orwellian statement holds “true”: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Say and (today) post false and malevolent things repeatedly across the bias-confirming and self-reinforcing echo chamber and millions come to believe the horrific “Orwellian” nonsense.
The Third Reich’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would have appreciated this neofascist communications system. It’s not for nothing that he ordered the mass production and distribution of the Volksempfänger, the single-channel “people’s radio,” to broadcast Adolph Hitler’s vicious racist and expansionist, evidence free propaganda directly into everyday Germans’ homes, hearts, and minds. “By 1941,” historian Allison Marsh notes, “nearly two-thirds of German households owned a Volksempfänger, and Goebbels had succeeded in giving Hitler a direct conduit into people’s homes via the airwaves.”
Our modern-day Goebbels, Tucker Carlson, has used Fatherland/FOX to poison millions of Amerikaner minds with false election theft and January 6 narratives he does not privately believe – and with a constant drumbeat of propaganda meant to convince masses that the neoliberal capitalist-imperialist Democrats are “radical Left Marxists” and that the nation is in danger of socialist takeover.
Of course, nothing would be better for this country, continent, hemisphere, and world than an actual socialist revolution in the United States of America – the last thing the Democrats ever want to see, even if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did once properly call capitalism an “irredeemable” system.
A Telling Irony
By way of conclusion let me briefly note a telling irony. Even as the Republi-fascist party gets away with routinely, absurdly, and inaccurately excoriating the Democrats as socialists and even as Marxists (supposedly terrible things to be), the Democrats, with very few occasional exceptions, can barely if ever bring themselves to honestly, publicly, and accurately call the Republican Party fascist. Adding to the irony, the Republikaners’ constant absurd demonization of the Dems as supposed socialists and Marxists is a significant part of what helps us identify the Republican Party today as a fascist organization.