Fascism and US Democracy
Democrats cling to their posts through fear of Trump, pretending to offer an milquetoast liberal alternative to an anti-democratic, fascist movement while themselves furnishing Zionist genocide, implementing Republican border policy1, and funding their “threats to democracy”2. The arguments which flourished after Biden’s disastrous debate performance pretend that the choice is between Democrats who support Zionism and Republicans who support Zionism and seek to overturn US democracy through the policies in Project 2025. The reality is that Trump and Project 2025 are crystallizations of a rightward trend in US political life which has existed and flourished in both Trump and Biden’s presidencies. Democrat senator John Fetterman’s brand of hoodie-wearing populism is just as much a product of this shift as Trump’s rhetorical style3. Furthermore, Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to wield the US Constitution’s anti-democratic structure to implement and curb policy even as a legislative minority4.
The fallacious nature of Democrat’s “threat to democracy” talking point stems not just from their own hypocrisy, but from the undemocratic nature of the state which Democrats claim Republicans to be acting against. When MAGA supporters specify that the US is a constitutional republic rather than a democracy5, they are more honestly interpreting the animosity towards “mob rule” expressed by the Constitution’s founders and outlined explicitly in Federalist No. 10:
“A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property … A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”6
What is really at risk from Democrats and Republicans alike is not the US state apparatus born to protect the rights of property-owners, but the democratic concessions wrested from the hands of the US bourgeoisie over the course of its near quarter millennium of existence. These are concessions born out of manifold factors, including the maintenance of Herrenvolk democracy in the case of Andrew Jackson’s reduction of property-requirements for white male voters, the militant action of subaltern classes in the case of slavery’s abolition and the Civil Rights Movement, and international pressures such as with the labor rights granted in fear of Soviet influence. All these factors have historically intermixed; with the Civil Rights Movement’s victories being partially motivated by the Cold War, as indicated by US Attorney General James P. McGranery’s comment: “Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills”7. When we speak of the democratic rights under threat of repeal by the US’s rightward trend, we’re speaking of a tangled knot of imperialist privileges and the genuine victories of oppressed classes within the US.
While it is clear that the Democrats offer no solution to this reduction in rights for the subaltern classes of the US, the question of whether progressive forces in the US should devote their resources to protecting these concessions often goes unaddressed. After all, the rightward shift in the US is not just a result of the global progress of LGBTQIA+ liberation, but an inherent result of an imperial decline which increases the economic strain of maintaining an affluent middle class. As a result, it’s easy to dismiss fear over US fascism as the selfish whining of privileged masses finally confronted by the same vulnerability exported by their country to every other corner of the globe. The partial truth of this statement is not identical with a plan of action, however, and it sometimes invites an unacceptably dismissive attitude towards the anxiety of those US citizens—especially transgender individuals—who have genuine reason to fear for their existence given the trends of US state law and political parlance.
We must work to untangle the knot of US democratic rights into tools of imperial compliance and genuine proletarian rights. In this effort, we can never shy away from highlighting the integral link between US empire and its people’s opulence. Doing so allows us to explain organized labor’s loss of power, the nature of which was best identified by Walter Rodney:
“In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counter-balanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to exercise any independent judgment on the great issues of war and peace, and therefore ended up by slaughtering not only colonial peoples but also themselves.”8
Pointing out this dependency elucidates the true vulnerability of US workers, but using the imperial origins of many US democratic rights to dismiss the validity of any defense of democratic rights creates a separate issue. Any communist party seeking its mandate from the subaltern classes of the US cannot rely on moral appeals to wed its vanguard with the people. Self-interest is necessarily the foundation of any moral duty which hopes to sustain a mass movement, per Hegel:
“The truth is rather that what the individual does for himself also contributes to the general good; the more he has made provision for himself, not only is there a greater possibility of his being of service to others, but his actual existence itself consists only in his being and living in contact with others. His individual enjoyment essentially has the meaning of putting what is his own at the disposal of others and of helping them to obtain their enjoyment. Therefore, in the fulfillment of duty to individuals and so to oneself, the duty to the universal is also fulfilled.”9
To have a decisive impact on the course of North American history, communists must seek to demonstrate that the self-interest of the US’s working masses coincides with a socialist destruction of the settler-colonial empire, and a communist party must accept that it may have to operate as a small sect until this alignment of interests ripens. The requirements of this goal vary depending on the nations imprisoned by the US within its borders, but cleaving local progressive forces from the Democrats is a goal common to all regions. Rather than passively lamenting issues of reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights, communists should be proving ourselves to be the only political force capable of defending and expanding these aspects of proletarian democracy. Yes, this means engaging with the electoral politics of the US, a necessary component of proving their deeply undemocratic nature, as outlined by Lenin:
“It has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution, and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism ‘politically obsolete’.”10
The time of US empire’s collapse is not yet here, but the time for the communists to start building independent political power is long overdue. Tailing the Democrats is a dead end, demonstrated most infamously by decades of CPUSA strategy, but absolving ourselves of political combat against fascism equally favors powerlessness. The best answer to fears over the election of Trump is not the election of Biden, nor is it even the election of any communist or otherwise genuinely anti-imperialist candidate. Such an outcome is impossible. However, fascists make their political calculations according to the balance of class forces, just as communists must do, so any accrual of organized and representative power on our end will necessarily allow us to assert the pressure which Democrats are fundamentally opposed to wielding. That pressure is key to rebuking fascism’s genocidal intentions towards transgender people and other North American populations. To benefit both local and international self-interest, we must use political power to divide and paralyze domestic fascism, while the rest of the world dismantles the empire which permits its survival.
Bibliography
Miroff, Nick. “Biden Border Restrictions Bring Sharp Drop in Illegal Crossings.” The Washington Post, June 26, 2024.
Linskey, Anne. “Democrats Spend Tens of Millions Amplifying Far-Right Candidates in Nine States.” The Washington Post, September 12, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/democrats-interfere-republican-primaries/.
Voght, Kara. “Do Democrats Finally Have Their Answer to Trumpism?” Rolling Stone, May 17, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/john-fetterman-pennsylvania-primary-conor-lamb-trump-1355064/.
"These Trump Supporters Say America Isn't a Democracy. And They're Okay with It.” CNN, June 13, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/politics/video/america-not-democracy-republic-trump-maga-digvid.
Madison, James. “Federalist No. 10.” In The Federalist Papers, 71-9. Edited by Clinton Rossiter. New York: Signet Classics, 2003. (p. 76)
Malone, Alice. “Concessions.” RedSails, January 8, 2023. https://redsails.org/concessions/.
Rodney, Walter. “Fascism at Home and Colonialism Abroad.” RedSails, July 23, 2022. https://redsails.org/fascism-at-home-and-colonialism-abroad/.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. (p. 392-3)
Lenin, V.I. “‘Left-Wing’ Communism—An Infantile Disorder.” In Lenin Collected Works vol. 31, 17-118. Edited by Julius Katzer. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966. (p. 60)