This following on reflections today I've been thinking/posting about all day. With the in-progress major realignment of the Democrats and Republicans the conditions for the emergence of a genuine American fascism are now possible save for the existence of an organized left. Arguably, this can be taken up by the existence of a "phantom" organized left in the form of AntiFa and Soros type conspiracy theorizing and scaremongering.
Essentially, the Republicans, as representing the factional interest of the provincial "national bourgeoisie" are, by some nightmarish convergence of factors, becoming the primary voice for genuine working-class interests. They are achieving this through appeals to several sentiments:
- Anti-Intellectualism
- Performative Anti-Elitism
- Anti-Cosmopolitanism
- Anti-Free Trade Protectionism and Autarky
- Single-Issue Cultural Grievances
- Ultra-nationalistic patriotism
- Appeal to "traditional values"
- The accelerating spread of conspiratorial thinking
Trump overperformed in non-white demographics. Arguably the single most important takeaway from this election is that identity is no longer a highly deterministic factor in partisan affiliation and voting behavior. Already-incoherent political beliefs of the average American is making individual non-white voters fixate on single issues and emotional impulses, and in the absence of a heavily class-based economic appeal to the working class (which the Democrats have now definitively and explicitly rejected to exploit), this is causing the non-college-educated to respond favorably to the sentimental appeals of the Republicans. Trump overperformed with African-Americans and Latinos by between 3-5 points. His share of the LGBT vote doubled from 2016. Clearly, these people care about something more than him being an obvious and overt racist and bigot. Clearly, they are gravitating to him because he is voicing their legitimate grievances that no other politician has been.
Trump's proto-fascism actually holds back the emergence of a genuine American fascism in two key aspects. Firstly, despite being a demagogue Trump is personally ideologically incoherent. He most just says what immediately comes to his mind or thinks will play well to the crowd. You can't imagine Trump writing a manifesto like Gentile or Hitler. Secondly, Trump's nativist populism is overly inward-looking. It is about closing off the frontier from invaders, not expanding them indefinitely. It lacks the inherent fascist drive toward self-annihilation.
But what does embody the fascist drive toward self-annihilation within the Republican Party? Bush-era neoconservatism, and the ideological paradigm that led us to invade Iraq. Trump's administration in practice degenerated into a bog-standard neoconservative administration, but without the overt drive to outright invade other countries and "spread democracy". He has largely continued to rely on Obama-style tactics centering air power, covert operations, and backing color revolutionaries. Again, this is in large part due to the personality of Trump himself. He is averse to actually starting wars he could possibly lose. He is anti-imperialist, at least purely at the rhetorical level. He is ideologically incoherent. His foreign policy has actually weakened empire abroad, despite laying the foundations for a new cold war with China, and the Democrats have laid the foundations to include Russia in that cold war.
The stage is now set for some post-Trump figure to emerge. Someone who synthesizes the populist appeals outlined above that derive from Trump, with Bush-era neoconservative ideology and foreign policy. Because the Republicans, in this realignment, are becoming an otherwise incoherent coalition of big business interests (chiefly in the fossil fuel and defense manufacturing sectors), petty bourgeoisie, rural reactionaries, and genuine working-class people who have had their lives destroyed by neoliberal free trade and are now turning to Trump and what he represents if they are not retreating from politics altogether. They are becoming a party of the class-collaborationism that is inherent to fascisms.
Woodrow Wilson was arguably the first fascist president and presented a model that was later copied by the likes of Mussolini and Hitler. There were other American presidents that also were affiliated with such things, but what made Wilson unique was the shear size of the second KKK. Something like 20 percent of eligible american men were members.
Should the proudboys and related grow into something comparable to that than fascism is a real concern, but fortunately we have a very long way to go to until the right wing is better organized like this. This past summer has showed the left is more organized than otherwise thought.
Okay I need to be blunt
"Woodrow Wilson was the first fascist president" is literally an argument by the reactionary crank Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism. It is not true.
HOWEVER
Woodrow Wilson being aligned with the capital-P Progressive movement, there are superficial similarities. Chief among being two central aspects of the Progressive Movement - an obsession with eugenics and social engineering, and explicit class-collaborationism. He is also associated with expansion of government to act as economic planner and mediator-manager of capital and labor in a wartime situation. These are aspects superficially in common with fascisms, but there the similarities really end.
Probably the most obvious rebuttal to this thesis is that Wilson was arguably the first liberal internationalist, very ahead of his time. He was the foremost advocate of building a managed, institutional world order along liberal lines. This is vehemently at odds with historical fascisms, which are intensely anti-internationalist and tend to be intensely hostile even to each other because their irredentist aims and drive to self-annihilation drive a wedge between them.
Of course not. George Washington was the first fascist president.
:che-smile:
:gold-communist:
Creating ruling institutions rather than relying on and solidifying one's personal ruling power is also very different from fascism.
What's your explanation for how the dude allowed the KKK to grow and how he leveraged them to advance some of his political goals?
I'm less familiar with the period in this specific regard (Tindall's The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1947 is deep in my backlog) but from my understanding the resurgence of the Klan at the time was a direct response to several factors, including but not limited to:
These were organic phenomena that emerged independent of and uncontrollable by Wilson's direct actions
This resurgence made the Klan an important faction within the Democratic Party, since it was still heavily tied to the Solid South and the Dixiecrats. For example, while I don't know the specifics I know the Klan and their opposition to Catholic NY Governor Al Smith played a central factional role in the infamous 1924 Democratic Convention. I'd argue in the absence of specific knowledge that their rise and abetment was less due to Wilson individual than structural forces in general and the Democratic Party as an institution.
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I'm talking about street organizing not electoral organizing fwiw
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