American Fascism Isn't New

And it will take more than voting to end it

Dakota Pipeline protesters and water defenders attacked by President Obama troops|Stephanie Keith | Reuters

“He’s an idealist, they’ll say. Not at all; it’s the others who are the scumbags.” - Frantz Fanon

The option to reject fascism is not on the ballot, Tuesday. At least, not at the top of it.

Much of the “Crisis of Democracy” type literature and commentary of the past few years has either explicitly or implicitly framed fascism as exogenous to the United States. Decades after our boys successfully fought it off, we are told, fascism has finally invaded our shores and taken root.

Thanks a lot, Trump.

That view is ahistorical, however. If only Donald Trump were the progenitor of American fascism instead of a product of it.

When we examine more carefully the history and continuation of American fascism, we come to the sad conclusion that all we have at the top of our ballots this week is a choice between two different brands of it.

An American export

If we look beyond the actual Italian word of fascism, the record clearly shows us that so much of the politics and laws that would inspire early 20th century European despots were American. Fascistic politics and governance both have their earliest modern roots in the United States.

In 1928 Adolph Hitler openly admired how the U.S. was founded on the genocide of Indigenous peoples. In his memoir Mein Kampf, Hitler also highlighted the U.S. as the “one state” that was moving in the direction of the nation he wanted to remake Germany into.

The Nazi Party’s 1935 Handbook on Law and Legislation gave the United States credit for having achieved the “fundmental recognition” that a proper nation should be a race state. As James Q. Whitman’s book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law cites, Hitler also praised the U.S. in Mein Kampf for creating a concept of citizenship that was primarily based on race by “excluding certain races from naturalization.”

American fascism also stayed in place long after we helped the Russians defeat European fascism in World War Two, of course. After visiting India in 1959 and being identified as an American “Untouchable”, Martin Luther King Jr. came to the begrudging realization that America’s system was also truly one of racialized caste.

“Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable,” he said.

Jamelle Bouie provides a useful historical summary in his new opinion piece, Don’t fool yourself. Trump is not an aberration. “Trump is transgressive, yes,” he writes.

“But his transgressions are less a novel assault on American institutions than they are a stark recapitulation of past failure and catastrophe.”

Just as Jim Crow persisted long after the Brown v. Board decision, American fascism on the whole adapted and remained after formal racial segregation ended. Through the Law and Order mandate that fascism scholar Jason Stanley points out is crucial to fascistic politics, Jim Crow simply morphed into what civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander calls a “new racial caste system,” and “The New Jim Crow.”

We still haven’t kicked the fascism habit

Jim Crow and American fascism have lived on through our so-called War on Drugs, and Crime Bills, championed by Republicans and Democrats like Joe Biden and the Clintons alike as they used language as racist as anything Donald Trump has ever uttered.

Writing a few years before Trump’s ascent to the White House, Alexander highlights our nation’s willful ignorance of the ways in which we’d never left behind our fascistic roots. “President Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America,” she writes.

“This triumphant notion of post-racialism is, in my view, nothing more than fiction - a type of Orwellian doublespeak made no less sinister by virtue of the fact that the people saying it may actually believe it. Racial caste is not dead; it is alive and well in America. The mass incarceration of poor people of color in the United States amounts to a new caste system - one specifically tailored to the political, economic, and social challenges of our time. It is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow.”

It is also the creation of politicians like Joe Biden who rabidly latched onto the eugenics of academics like John Dilulio, and advanced policies to criminalize, lock up, and execute (and then profit from thanks to our prison systems becoming increasingly profit-based operations for companies who donate heavily to politicians) generations of Brown and Black people based on the racist myths of uniquely dangerous super predators, a subset of humanity incapable of empathy and tied to their class and race.

Donald Trump is a danger to us all, for certain. The most serious ways he threatens us, however, are the ways in which Trump simply builds on what the Bidens of the world created before him.

Thanks to politicians like Biden, who wrote what would become the U.S. Patriot Act, helped write and giddily push the 1994 Crime Bill, and advocated loudly and effectively for the Iraq War which has killed over one million innocent people so far, Jim Crow and American Fascism continue on with vigor to this day. Biden has overseen and approved of our prison population growing to becoming the largest on earth thanks to the racist carceral system he helped install, the cruel deportation of more immigrants than any presidential administration before or since he and Obama’s, the expansion of illegal domestic spying, of torture, of rendition, of holding citizens indefinitely without bringing charges against them, of the assasination of U.S. citizens without trial.

To paraphrase Chris Hedges, when you have more prisoners than any other country on earth and are the most surveilled population in the history of human civilization, you can’t use the word liberty to describe your society. This was our nation before Trump, and this is the mythical past, the “normal”, that the Biden campaign is promising to return us to.

Biden’s campaign promises us something better than Trump without actually promising an end to the abuses of executive authority under him that we’re all so offended by and scared of. Biden isn’t promising an end to the use of the child cages he and President Obama built, isn’t promising an end to mass deportations and illegal separations and kidnapping of refugee families.

The Biden campaign and the Democratic party aren’t loudly speaking out against and promising an end to federal troop occupation of American cities, or even the violation of the Posse Comitatus Act that they themselves violated before Trump did, deploying military troops on American soil. They’re not promising to end the disappearances and murder of American citizens by police departments that is happening right now - in fact Biden is using this exact moment to promise more funding for these criminal departments.

The Biden campaign and the Democratic party isn’t drawing attention to and promising to end Trump’s expansion of ICE to become a national police force that will be deployed to American cities on election day to do God knows what to dissidents. The Biden campaign and the Democratic party are not campaigning on ending an itemized list of fascistic practices being committed by the Trump administration, and that is telling.

There’s an old saying about executive power and how it’s like toothpaste. You can’t put it back in the tube.

American Presidents do not historically turn away power - no matter how despotic - that they’ve inherited. It’s also telling that in this time of particular crises, despite vague platitudes about how Trump is bad because he’s a fascist, the Biden campaign offers little in the way of promises that he won’t continue those abusive measures.

Perhaps it’s because he and President Obama used almost all of them when they were in office, long before Trump ever received a single vote. Leaving aside explicitly militarized manifestations of authoritarianism and the mirror image of one another in that regard that the Democratic and Republican parties offer us, there are of course other alarming ways in which the Biden campaign refuses to distinguish itself from Trump, even in this scary time.

Neither the Biden nor Trump campaign is calling for universal healthcare, despite the fact that we’re in a pandemic, that the rest of the industrialized world has it, and that we’re the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Neither campaign is calling for a federal jobs program, the type of which helped us get out of the last time we had an economic depression as severe as the one we’re currently in.

Neither campaign is in favor of tax-funded university education available for all citizens, and neither campaign has proposed doing what climate scientists say is needed to avoid catastrophe.

America gave fascism to the world, and it only changed its vocabulary and methods in the decades leading up to Donald Trump’s presidency. In and of itself, taking the reigns of this blood-fueled machine away from Trump is a good thing.

Recognizing that merely giving it back to its previous administrators will not slow its warpath in any significant way is also important, if depressing. That the best Presidential voters can do this year is symbolically (because, on account of our Electoral College, individual citizens’ votes do not have legal weight) choose between stewards of older or newer forms of fascism does not mean that one cannot make tactical decisions at the polls.

Some of our finest minds and most courageous activists, like Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky, argue that we vote for Biden for those reasons. These types of folk don’t just pop up every four years to encourage us to vote for one version of fascistic empire or another, however, so they have credibility.

People like Davis and Chomsky have spent their entire careers criticizing the crimes of American authoritarianism, our empire abroad as well as our internal colonies. Their attention has been sustained, and the bulk of their remedial suggestions have nothing at all to do with voting.

So, they can be trusted as good-faith actors whether or not you agree with their tactical recommendations during election years. They know exactly what our nation is, and have called it out at every possible turn.

On the other hand, there is no need to take seriously the newer, liberal and self-appointed freedom fighters who try to guilt marginalized peoples into voting for someone in this theatrical sham we call a presidential election in order to fight the American fascism that they only recently began caring about. If someone shaming you to vote for this or that candidate wasn’t talking about American fascism before Donald Trump, I’m willing to bet they’ll pick up their silence once he’s gone while it yet remains.

Liberal Democrats would like us to believe that they’ll pressure a President Biden to suddenly become progressive. The next time you read someone promising that, ask for receipts.

Did they speak out or were they silent as Biden opposed racial school integration in the 80’s, and helped create a New Jim Crow in the 90’s? Did they write articles criticizing him for writing what would become the Patriot Act and helping lie us into the Iraq War?

Did they push-back against the Obama/Biden administration as it committed widespread and illegal detainment and assasination of U.S. citizens or when it deported record levels of families at our Southern border, building and filling cages with children? Those who haven’t pushed Biden to the correct side of morality or history over the past fifty years are unlikely to do anything different if he gets back into The White House.

If people weren’t my allies before, I’m not counting on them changing their stripes, now. Far too many simply want a return to a normal that they’re comfortable with, but which was of no comfort to millions upon millions of people marginalized or murdered by their liberal heroes and conservative enemies alike.

Voting is nice to do if you’re able to - if the police departments that Joe Biden and Donald Trump want to increase funding to don’t gas you on your way to the polls, or if ICE and Border Patrol agents who Democrats and Republicans alike have given more cash and power to these past four years don’t kidnap you for using your First Amendment rights before you can cast your vote - but it is by far the least impactful component of civic engagement. So, vote for whoever you want to, but don’t believe that your vote will do things it cannot.

Don’t think that anything will get better November 4th or January 20 just because you voted or because the election went one way or another. American fascism was here long before 2016, and without continued direct action it will stay here long after 2020 regardless of who next wins the Presidency.