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.
US imperialism has been weakening for years before Trump. I don't think many of you actually paid attention to all of Obama's foreign policy failures that made his critics scream at the top of their lungs about him. "Boots on the ground" was a common saying from conservatives and even some liberals regarding how he squandered the US's real chance at taking over Syria. He was heavily criticized back in 2014 for sitting there with NATO and doing nothing about Russia invading Ukraine and taking back the Crimea. Conservatives accused him of squandering Syria and long before Russiagate, it was actually the Republicans who used to say Obama was weak and wasn't tough enough on Russia when they started making moves with invasions.
On the other hand, we need to stop analyzing US imperialism like it's still 2004 and the war machine is at full strength. They've pretty much lost in Iraq to the point that the puppet government they tried to prop up failed and Iraq has become a failed state and the same goes for Afghanistan. All this talk about how Trump has supposedly weakened the empire; he increased drone strikes and also took out a law that made it how the military isn't required to disclose the numbers of civilian casualties. He removed some troops in Afghanistan but has continued the wars and if you've actually paid attention to news over there, the Taliban have been making considerable gains for the past 4 years to the point they've outright threatened the US to finally withdraw and leave.
I know, you guys like to fap yourselves to the idea of a China/US war and all this talk about a new cold war, but it's highly unlikely. Just because the liberal media runs anti-China stories really don't mean anything, cause they've been doing that for decades. Both parties have been accusing the other one of not being tough on China since the fucking 90s. You're about to witness Republicans yelling "Biden isn't tough on China!". It's the same tough language they throw around in terms of foreign policy just to sound pro-nationalist and then the other party accuses them of being a puppet for China and vice-versa. If you paid attention to any conservative media between 2008-2016 you would've seen this with how they painted Obama out to be weak, and a puppet to China and around 2011-2013 is when the Chinese economy began to surpass the US and conservatives were the only ones really talking about it then.