Tag: donald-trump

MAGA’s Performative Fascism

Yes, the MAGA movement is a wrecking ball, taking down one previously sacrosanct norm and one institution after another.  Many of us have watched with horror as guardrails against autocracy—Congress, the Supreme Court, the Department of Health, universities, law firms, etc.—have failed to blunt MAGA’s momentum.  And yes, Trump himself is a kleptocrat, who loves power and money and cares nothing about the Constitution or democracy. And yes, MAGA deploys white Christian nationalism as its vision of America being great and is terrorizing anyone who is not white or Christian as a result. 

But this is not all that is required for MAGA to be a fascist movement. The most important ingredient, which I believe is missing, is this: fascists not only seek to destroy democracy; they create a new state and society based on fascist principles. And crucially, I will argue, Trump and his followers are incapable of doing this because MAGA is primarily a performance whose real purpose is to provide cover for Trump and his billionaire minions’ kleptocratic impulses and their bizarre psychological needs. 

Trump built a MAGA of toadies and yes-men and women to do his bidding. And for this reason, these people are utterly incompetent at their formal job titles, which require real governance experience and acumen. As a result, MAGA has little capacity (ICE being the major exception) to build new institutions and laws to replace the institutions and norms they are destroying. Their blatant incompetence (RFK?! Pete Hegseth?! Pam Bondi?!) doesn’t bother Trump at all. For as long as Trump can maintain his appearance as a powerful autocrat, he and his billionaire pals can trade on fear of his bullying to make a lot of money. 

Put another way, Trump is neither Hitler nor Mussolini. These real fascists were not in it for the money or to feed their narcissism; they were true ideologues with a vision of a new state and a new society. Trump is just an all-too recognizable American rip-off artist, a made-for-TV huckster performing as a fascist to get rich quick (and stay out of jail). 

In this sense, MAGA is a farce. It performs a white Christian nationalist, anti-democratic show, but it is really a get rich scheme for sociopathic billionaires.

This farce makes MAGA highly volatile. MAGA’s rapid dismantling of liberal democratic institutions guarantees that social and economic crises will certainly appear, and very soon. All it will take is for the AI-driven stock market bubble to burst or steep increases in health insurance premiums with millions losing access to health care (already happening), or a big spike in inflation coupled with job losses due to Trump’s tariffs, and the already widespread backlash against Trump and MAGA for their betrayal of American values will certainly snowball.

Unfortunately, there is one other element that gives MAGA staying power: the utterly shameful inability of the Democratic Party to oppose MAGA.  Sure, Democrats have become good at Trump-bashing and declaring their opposition to fascism. But the Democrats have not articulated a political vision of an alternative to MAGA, and without that, they are toothless and impotent. To effectively counter Trumpism, the Democrats would have to acknowledge the central fact of our time: the hyper inequality that has made the rich richer, the poor poorer and ripped the middle class apart.  But this would require the Democrats to directly repudiate the neo-liberal policies that were embraced by and enriched and empowered an entire generation of Democrats (especially the Clintons and Obama, but also Schumer).

I cannot help but think that the intransigence of the Democratic Party leadership is so severe that only a wrecking ball like MAGA has any chance of breaking their astoundingly stubborn adherence to neoliberal principles. It is a marvel to me that Zorhan Mamdani has brilliantly proven the success of a platform that calls for higher taxes on billionaires and vigorous regulatory and redistributive government programs (free busses, rent control, city-run food stores), yet even now, much of the Democratic Party leadership refuses to endorse him. Their belief that Mamdani’s platform ‘only works in New York City’ is beyond stupid. It might be that their real reason for not embracing Mamdani is his anti-Zionism (or him being Muslim). But read the room, people: most of the world, and most of the U.S., including the majority of American Jews, are now anti-Zionist, and any hesitation to embrace Muslims is simply a capitulation to MAGA’s Christian nationalism.

The only way to stop MAGA is to expose the marriage between their fascist message (white Christians must use any means necessary to retake the country) and the astonishing money grab Trump and his friends are now engineering at the expense of the whole country, indeed, the whole world. Truly, the only way to stop Trump is to expose his billionaire sycophants to be the traitors to America that they are. 

But the paralysis of the Democratic Party leadership has meant that the only way we have effectively opposed MAGA is in the streets. The outpouring of community-based opposition to ICE and the militarization of D.C., Chicago, Portland and LA is our greatest hope today. The enormous No Kings protests show the urgency tens of millions of Americans feel. 

But as important as direct action may be, the only way out of the destructive MAGA era will be through a new politics. We are still looking for the political party that will articulate a vision of the future that can unite most Americans to rebuild our country. So far, the Democrats are failing the test. But Mamdani’s success—and the enormous crowds at Bernie Sanders and AOC’s “Fight Oligarchy” rallies–has underscored the need for a new vision based on fierce opposition to growing inequality, a politics that directly demands the end of deregulated and under-taxed capitalism in the name of human decency.  As frustrating as it is, progressives must lean into the fight for the Democratic Party. It is still has the potential to rise to the challenge because it remains the political home of most working class and minority community organizations.

The fracturing of MAGA as Trump’s performance loses its hold on its followers is all but inevitable. But the birth of a new politics that challenges the hyper inequality that has gripped the capitalist world for the last forty years is not guaranteed.  History is never pre-ordained. It is up to us to make it happen! 

The Crisis of the Democratic Party

I gave myself this long to offer an analysis of the 2024 election because like everyone else,  I needed to absorb a lot, both intellectually and emotionally. To me, it’s clear: the Republicans won because a majority of voters have tied the Democratic Party to the elites on both coasts. For the first time since 1932, the Democratic Party has alienated itself from a real majority of Americans, including growing numbers of people from the Democrats’ core constituency:  workers, including many Black, brown people.

Anyone who thinks this is not what we learned from the 2024 elections is, frankly, living in a bubble and is out of touch with reality.

The reality is that this country, indeed the entire capitalist world, is in a crisis. This crisis is marked by hyper-inequality, rising housing prices, declining wages (as a percent of the total economy), cuts in private sector contributions to health care and retirement, and cuts in public sector protections for workers and for low-income people. A year and half of rapid inflation only threw salt on the wounds. And even more, the trauma of the pandemic threw an untold number of Americans into a dark place from which they have not recovered. The crisis is especially felt by young people, who are rapidly giving up on the American Dream.

The cause of this crisis, I have long argued, is one thing: the financialization of the capitalist system in the 1990s, a set of policy decisions that transformed capitalism from a system of profit made from the production of things into a system that rewards investors for speculation on anything that could be made to increase in price. The policies were called ‘neo-liberal’ because they claimed to enable the free flow of capital and labor across borders (i.e. globalization).

But in reality these policies deregulated banks so they could engage in predatory activities that had been illegal since the Great Depression. For nearly four decades, a handful of big banks destroyed thousands of productive businesses, drove up housing prices, destroyed or greatly weakened labor unions, and demanded “austerity” by government, meaning disinvestment in public education, public health and social services.

Most telling, deregulation of banking was chiefly championed by Democrats (especially Bill Clinton). While claiming to be the party of social entitlement programs and regulation of big business, the Democrats actively supported policies that produced hyper inequality, even while promoting important programs like the Affordable Care Act and civil rights protections for marginalized people. It is only fitting that the policies that created a world-wide social crisis should now have left the Democrats in a political crisis.

The Democratic defenders of neo-liberal policies are, of course, having none of this, and are instead blaming progressives for the 2024 debacle.  Centrists charge that the Democrats went wrong because they tied themselves to leftist “cultural issues” of college-educated elites (DEI initiatives, transgender rights).

Luckily, the Democratic Party is more diverse than the centrist apologists for neo-liberalism. God bless Elizabeth Warren for standing up to the neo-liberals and fighting to re-regulate the banks (remember the Dodd-Frank Act, now all but moribund?). And there was always Bernie Sanders, calling it what it was (however ineffectually). And in the House of Representatives, the Squad (Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Rashida Talib (MI), and later Cori Bush (MO), Jamal Bowman (NY), Summer Lee (PA), Delia Ramirez (IL) and Greg Casar (TX)) established a progressive caucus.

The Democratic Party coalition has been held together by support for women’s reproductive rights, diversity initiatives, environmental issues, and opposition to authoritarianism overseas (esp. Russia in Ukraine) and at home (Donald Trump and MAGA).  But this admirable commitment to diversity and international solidarity was continually undermined by the mainstream Democrats’ steadfast support for financialization, manifest by the ever-growing and yawning gaps between the rich and everyone else. To a lesser extent, progressives too often overreached, and made political demands that they had no capacity to back up with action. Worst of all, when Americans looked at the Democratic strongholds of New York and California, what they saw were progressive politicians committed to social policies of inclusion and economic policies of exclusion. The result was a growing hostility to the progressive agenda as a way for elites to feel good about themselves and to put down everyone else.

The critique of progressive ideas gradually gained political clout. Warren and Sanders were marginalized in the Senate, and in the House the Squad reps had to fight for their political lives in 2022 and 2024 against right-wing and Zionist efforts to unseat them (Bush and Bowman lost, Lee barely survived, and the rest, all from safe districts, had a real fight on their hands.)  Progressive DAs were routed, even in progressive strongholds like San Francisco and Oakland.

Ironically, Biden’s Presidency had the opposite problem as Clinton and Obama’s advocacy of progressive social policies and unabashed support for financial globalization. Biden promoted innovative economic policies that sharply broke with neo-liberalism and had the potential to restart the American Dream. But Biden was unable to explain his economic plan to the American people, let alone get any legislative traction for the most important initiatives. And worse, Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war ran directly counter to the Democrats’ progressive ideals, alienating the very people who might have supported his economic policies.

The 2024 election was clearly a disaster for Democrats (and all people of conscience). But with all such dramatic routs comes a real opportunity. In a moment of crisis, there is always the opportunity to reject the ideas that got us here, and to embrace new ones.

The first piece of good news is that many people who do not identify as progressives now understand that the Democrats have lost their way and are in danger of no longer being the party of the working class.

The problem facing progressive Democrats who want to right the ship, however, is quite daunting. To put it bluntly, progressives have very little power in the current moment. Luckily, some progressives have been quite clear-headed about this problem. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez recently stated, “we have to run from the bottom, not from the left.”  She argues that progressives need to focus on bottom-up organizing of labor and minority communities. She is undoubtably right. But in 2024 we must acknowledge that labor unions are mere shadows of their former selves, and that community organizing efforts around the country (and the Western world), have been difficult and have often failed to produce political results (Stacey Abrams’ failed gubernatorial runs in Georgia, for example). 

Indeed, since I believe that social justice is based on the quality of the relationships we build with one another (see this blog’s home page), this problem is a very big one. But there can be little doubt that the progressive power needed to reshape the Democratic Party depends on the revitalization of community-based and workplace-based organizations, i.e. civil society. There are many good ideas about how to do this, and some support for these efforts (such as the Center for Popular Democracy and some labor unions). 

What is needed more than anything else right now is for progressive-minded people to dedicate themselves to the small and painstaking tasks that bring about long-term and strong community- and workplace-based organizations. Doing this will mean that the era of progressives talking big ideas but having no power must be replaced by one in which walking the walk will be the measure of relevance.

I believe that small steps will yield big results as political conditions change. And the conditions will change because the right-wing nuts who now have complete control of government inevitably (and I think soon) will reveal themselves as the opportunists they are, with nothing but empty promises to offer the American people. In the next few years, I firmly believe progressives will have new opportunities to take the initiative. But doing so will take two things: a new generation of activists committed to community-building must show up to take on this challenge and the old party leaders must get out of their way. Will the Democrats be able to pull this off?  We will see.