Democrats Cave Because Trumpism Is In Fact What America Is

The United States has a long tradition of fascism.

If you were hoping that Democrats would provide consistent, principled resistance to Donald Trump’s openly racist and fascist regime, you have already been disappointed. In the House, 48 Democrats voted with Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act. The bill has garnered substantial Democratic support in the Senate too. This despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that it is a vicious anti-immigrant bill that would require mandatory detention of non-citizens who are accused even without conviction of crimes like robbery, theft, or shoplifting.

In plain language, this means that under the new law, anti-immigrant officials could detain any undocumented person indefinitely simply by lying and accusing them of a crime. It also means that employers engaging in abusive practices could accuse any worker complaining or resisting, and have them jailed. For that matter, it means that anyone in an abusive relationship with an undocumented immigrant could prevent them from leaving with the threat of accusing them of a crime.

Stripping the right to due process from immigrants (including possibly in some cases from legal immigrants) is designed to create a class of people with no protection under law, who have no recourse when targeted for violence by the state, corporations, or individuals. It will divert vast resources from investigation of actual crimes into a bureaucracy designed solely to stigmatize, torment, and warehouse immigrants. When the rabid MAGA Supreme Court cosigns it, it will be a green light for Trump and his minions to expand indefinite detention without charge to other marginalized groups—LGBT people for example.

The Laken Riley Act, in short, is core to Trump’s agenda of stripping rights from marginalized groups and establishing an authoritarian regime with no limitations or accountability. It is exactly the naked fascist power grab that Democrats have been warning about for the last two years. But instead of opposing it, a substantial number of Democrats are rushing to join the fascists.

This is depressing and disheartening. It’s not exactly surprising though. Fascism in the US has long had a bipartisan constituency. Trump has in the past called many Republicans to the worst traditions and the worst legacy of this country. Now he’s calling Democrats to that legacy as well.

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American fascism, before Hitler

We usually think of fascism as a 20^th century European phenomenon, which first took root in Mussolini’s Italy and achieved its fullest, bleakest expression in Nazi Germany. Democratic nations, including the US, defeated it in World War II.

Based on this historical and spatial conception of fascism, some scholars, like Daniel Bessner have (as I discussed here) claimed that Trump can’t and shouldn’t be considered fascist. The main evil in America, Bessner believes, is liberalism and neoliberalism; talk of “fascism” is just a distraction from the crisis of the American liberal consensus with its rapacious capitalism and hypocritical gestures at inadequate welfare programs.

Bessner presents his analysis as a clear-eyed, radical left critique. But there is in fact a long history of radical analysis which positions fascism as a home-grown American ideology. That history is discussed in Janelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen’s The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition, published last year by Haymarket Books.

Hope and Mullen reference a broad range of thinkers and analysts, from Walter Rodney to Mariame Kaba, who have argued that the core characteristics of fascism long preceded Mussolini, and long outlasted Hitler. They explain

Like many scholars of Fascism, we understand its political ideology and social formation to be broadly defined by a set of fundamental characteristics, including but not limited to the following: dual application of the law, far-right nationalism, the appeal of a charismatic or cultlike leader, an undergirding belief in racial purity and superiority, the bolstering of racial capitalism, extreme militarism and authoritarian governance, suppression of democracy, state-sanctioned white terrorism and violence (ethnic cleansing and genocide, in other words), and resolute misogyny/misogynoir.

This program of hyper nationalism, hyper capitalist extraction, extreme misogyny, policing of marginalized others, and genocidal violence was, Hope and Mullen argue, the blueprint for colonialism, indigenous extermination, slavery, and Jim Crow. They quote scholar Cedric Robinson:

From the perspective of many non-Western peoples . . . the occurrence of fascism…was no more an historical aberration than colonialism, the slave trade, and slavery. Fascism was and is a modern social discipline which much like its genetic predecessors, Christianity, imperialism, nationalism, sexism, and racism, provided the means for the ascent to and preservation of power for elitists. . . . It is, then, a mistake to posit fascism as an inherent national trait or to ascribe it to a particular culture or class.

From the perspective of Black and/or marginalized people, the fascist dynamics of Nazi Germany were foreshadowed, and echoed, in numerous policies throughout US history. Jim Crow and US policies of genocide of native people were inspirations for Hitler. So was the rabid antisemitism of Henry Ford. So were America’s vicious and racist anti-immigrant laws, which targeted Chinese people especially. Hitler, in fact, in Zweites Buch, his follow-up volume to Mein Kampf, “attributed America’s global ascendance to its strict immigration laws,” which he believed ensured the nation’s eugenic health and power. (America’s obsession with eugenics also inspired Hitler.)

Recent scholarship has highlighted these mutual borrowings between the US and the Nazis. But people—especially Black people—were very aware of the parallels at the time. The Black press in the US launched the “Double Victory” campaign, demanding that the country fight against fascism abroad and at home by fighting Jim Crow, segregation, and anti-Black racism with the same fervor with which it was fighting Hitler. As Langston Hughes wrote days after the US victory in World War II:

Fascism is Bilbo and Rankin and Eastland who don’t want Negroes or Jews or Italian-Americans to have job protection. Fascism is the President of Dartmouth College who doesn’t want minorities to have an equal chance at education. Fascism is our Red Cross that follows Hitler’s blood policy. Fascism is the force that would keep people ignorant and helpless in the face of economic greed, and that gathers its educational, economic, or military power to support its suppression of the people.

American fascism, after Hitler

Hughes hoped that the fight against fascism abroad would build impetus for a fight against fascism at home. That’s not what happened though. Instead, as the US ramped up the Cold War, it framed antifascism as un-American, and targeted those who were too enthusiastic in their anti-Hitlerism. The Red Scare in the US was also a Black scare, in which radicals, Black radicals, and Black spokespeople in general were singled out by the FBI and Congress for investigation and harassment. This persecution only increased as Black activists began to make connections between authoritarianism at home and colonial Cold War conflicts overseas. Civil rights leaders and critics of US imperialism like W.E.B. DuBois and Richard Wright were forced to flee the country and died in exile.

Nor did this harassment end with the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI targeted the Black Power movement in the 60s and 70s in much the same way as it had targeted civil rights agitators in the 50s and 60s, using state resources to enact authoritarian repression. Movement leaders like Fred Hampton were assassinated.

Others were imprisoned—and their experience behind bars was a major impetus behind the growing prison abolition movement, which identified the racist legal system and mass incarceration as a central bulwark of American fascist power at home, just as the Vietnam War and colonial aggression was a bulwark of American fascist power abroad. “No, there aren’t 6 million of us going to the gas chambers, YET,” Black Panther leader Bobby Seale said. “But there are millions of us in prisons.”

This was in 1969—before the real build-up of mass incarceration had even begun. If the prison system is a measure of fascist power, then the US has become significantly more fascist in the past 40 years, as the prison population has ballooned from 500,000 in 1980 to some 2 million today.

American fascism, today

From this perspective, America has a rich, diverse, living fascist tradition on which to draw for ideology, for tactics, and for precedent. When Trump demands that we detain marginalized people on bullshit charges, he draws on a history of criminalizing and terrorizing Black people. When Trump demonizes immigrants, he draws on a history of eugenic racist exclusions. When Trump signals that he is happy with ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, he is channeling a US tradition of racist colonial violence abroad.

Trump’s bigotry, hatred, and authoritarian enthusiasms are expressed more nakedly than has become the custom for US presidents in the past decades. That has prompted some Trump critics to declare that his vision of America is (as former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney put it) “not who we are as a nation.” President Biden expressed a similar idea more obliquely in his final Oval Office speech when he said in a letter ot the American public that, “The idea of America lies in your hands."

Biden was of course framing “the idea of America” as a positive thing—a light to be defended and preserved. The problem, though, is that there are multiple ideas of America, and a lot of them are perfectly consistent with Trumpism. Biden himself spent the last 15 months of his presidency supplying weapons to a genocidal Israeli regime which has so far killed more than 64,000 people, 59% of them women, children, and the elderly. Biden’s apparent indifference to the death of Palestinians and his willingness to cosign massive colonial violence is entirely congruent with fascism, that “blood relative of slavery and imperialism,” as Robin D. G. Kelley has called it.

Biden wasn’t alone; a majority of Democratic Congresspeople and Senators also backed Israel’s indiscriminate slaughter of civilians; so did large numbers of Democratic voters. This isn’t because (as Bessner might have it) the real enemy is neoliberalism, not fascism. It’s because—per Robin D.G. Kelley, Cedric Robinson, Langston Hughes, Angela Davis, and virtually the entire Black radical tradition—neoliberalism and fascism are interrelated.

Trump personally, and Trump’s policies in general, generate bipartisan support because fascism has deep roots in the US. Some Trump voters may have been swayed by disinformation, or may not believe that he will follow through on his worst threats. But all Trump voters cast their ballots for him in part because his fascist diatribes—his racism, his authoritarianism, his promise to harm the marginalized, his violent misogyny—seem familiar, comforting, and American. Similarly, Democratic Senators like John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego are cosponsoring the Laken Riley Act because racist authoritarianism—aka fascism—appeals to their American intuitions about what is good policy and what is good politics.

Fascist America is not the only America. On the contrary, Hope and Mullen’s book is specifically about America’s honorable, mostly Black, antifascist, tradition. But it’s important to understand that Trump’s fascism is dangerous not because it isn’t who we are, It’s dangerous because it’s one thing that America has in fact chosen to be over and over again.