The Danger of Fascist Bipartisanship

It’s bad when both parties agree to crush the marginalized

It’s been a shibboleth of punditry for decades that the main problem in America is divisiveness. Partisanship and tribal animosity, we’re told are the chief threats to a functioning democracy. If we’d all just stop ending friendships over politics, if liberal women would only agree to marry Trump supporters, if we could just all agree to lower the heat and rancor of political debate, we could come to friendly, pragmatic compromises which would make everyone happy and keep the union strong.

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These arguments have never been very convincing at the best of times. But they have never looked more clueless and tone deaf than right now. We are currently living under a fascist authoritarian president determined to shred the Constitution. Bipartisan compromise with Trump isn’t healthy pragmatism. It’s surrender at worst and active complicity at best.

More, the decades long bipartisan consensus on Zionism and support for Israel has provided Trump with critical attack lines,and is currently providing him with one of his most effective levers for destroying civil society. It’s past time we recognized that bipartisanship is very often not a path to common sense compromise but is instead the rhetoric of elite solidarity against the marginalized. When the two parties agree, they more often than not are agreeing on crushing those with little political voice.

White supremacist consensus

Anti-establishment populists love to rail against the “two party duopoly” and claim that there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Trump has, I think, shown this to be a ridiculous and dangerous falsehood. Biden did a lot of things I dislike, to put it mildly, but he did not rush to end foreign aid and murder 25 million people for the hell of it; nor did he claim the power to kidnap and imprison American citizens for life with no due process; nor did he attack cancer research or attempt to resegregate the federal government and the country. These are not, to me, cosmetic differences, and I think anyone who says they are just cosmetic differences is, at best, very confused.

It's important to point out these differences, I think, because if you can’t tell the difference between partisanship and bipartisanship, you can’t appreciate or highlight how dangerous that bipartisanship can be.

As I’ve mentioned before, the high point of bipartisanship in the US was not in fact an era of perfect amity and justice. It was the period after Reconstruction when Republicans abandoned all pretense of fighting for racial equality, and the two parties instead agreed to join together in embracing Jim Crow and Black disenfranchisement.

American unity, in that time, was an explicitly fascist and white supremacist unity, in which the parties compromised on white supremacy by both declaring themselves enthusiastically in favor of it. The result was 100 years of vicious oppression, in which Black people were arguably more politically voiceless than they had ever been even before the Civil War, when there was at least a committed, organized interracial movement opposed to slavery.

LBJ ended this ugly consensus by forcefully and courageously making Democrats the party of Civil Rights. But fascist bipartisanship wasn’t dead. LBJ himself, according to scholar Elizabeth Hinton, helped inaugurate the law-and-order, anti-crime, pro-policing rhetoric which Democrats and Republicans would for generations use to delegitimize urban protestors and target Black people for mass incarceration.

Republicans and Democrats have also broadly agreed in recent years that sex workers should be policed, stigmatized and shunned in the name of public order and “protecting” women; legislation forcing sex workers offline has led to greater precarity and almost certainly to more sex worker murders. And there’s been a growing consensus on targeting immigrants; the Obama administration deported massive numbers of people, while a substantial number of Democrats voted yes on the Laken Riley act, a viciously anti immigrant bill that allows the detention of immigrants if they are merely accused of a crime—an obvious violation of due process.

Bipartisan Zionism and the destruction of higher ed

The most obvious, and arguably most dangerous, example of fascist bipartisanship in the last few years is the dual party support for Israel’s horrific and ongoing genocide in Gaza. A majority of Democratic legislators have consistently approved military aid for Israel despite sweeping evidence that that aid has been used for war crimes and to murder tens of thousands of Palestinians, including some 17,500 children and a terrifying number of journalists.

More, Democrats at the federal and local level under Biden joined with Republicans in demonizing and criminalizing pro Palestinian protestors, claiming that anyone who spoke against Israel’s horrific violence was a terrorist and/or an antisemite (Congressman Ritchie Torres, for example, accused me of supporting Hamas when I suggested that he should maybe stop acting as if he spoke for all American Jews.) Mass police operations cleared protests at Columbia and other schools. Many colleges withheld degrees from student protestors.

This shitty bipartisan fascism laid the groundwork for more fascism—and specifically for Trump’s authoritarian assault on higher education. Trump has withheld huge funds from Columbia and other schools claiming that they have allowed “antisemitism” on campus because they didn’t sufficiently crush student protests. In at least one confusedly disavowed letter, he’s demanded sweeping control of university governance on the same grounds. Most horrifically, he's been arresting and attempting to deport students for writing pro Palestinian op-eds or for leading protests.

Democrats have protested against some of these excesses. But they’ve been hampered by their own bipartisan instincts. Minority Senate leader Chuck Schumer carefully removed his spine and replaced it with dog turds before shuffling out in public to say that while he was not in favor of the federal government destroying private universities in the name of fascist power, he nevertheless felt it was important to really make it clear that Columbia is rife with “Jew-hatred” and that it let protests go too far. This is not, to put it mildly, an effective pushback against fascism.

Peace among the powerful is not great for everyone else

There are a range of other examples—California Governor Gavin Newsom inviting white supremacists on his podcast so they can have a friendly convo about how much they all hate trans people; Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer doing photo ops with Trump to keep jobs in Michigan in return for normalizing his bullying and lawless depredations; Senate Democrats voting as a block to confirm Secretary of State Marco Rubio who then ran out to torch the first amendment by revoking visas of students who said stuff he didn’t like.

The details vary, but the general point is the same. When Democrats embrace bipartisanship with this administration, they are not working across the aisle on pragmatic ways to help all Americans. They are instead joining with Republicans to demonize and target those without much political influence in the name of white supremacy and/or naked careerism.

Again, there are issues where Democrats refuse bipartisanship, and advocate, with at least a fair bit of consistency, for policies Republicans reject. On abortion rights, on Medicare, on Social Security, on student loan forgiveness, on taxing the rich, on trying to reduce greenhouse emissions, the vast majority of Democrats generally oppose Republican policies. This is as it should be, because Republican policies are ugly at best and openly fascist at worst.

Which is why it’s time, and past time, for pundits to stop talking about bipartisanship as some sort of cure for our ills, or as synonymous with virtue. Bipartisanship for good things (like, say, aid to Ukraine) can be good, but bipartisan support for white supremacy, or for genocide in Gaza, or for a fascist attack on universities in the name of stopping “antisemitism”, is very, very bad. We need to recognize once and for all that our problem in this country is not partisanship. It is fascism. And if we don’t figure that out quickly, we will all soon experience the comforting bipartisanship of the grave.