Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Independent 2024 Presidential Candidate Dr. Cornel West On The Grave Necessity of Always Properly Recognizing, Advocating, and Foregrounding the Intellectual, Social, Political, Cultural, Economic, Ideological, Moral, Ethical, and Creative Dynamics and Linkages of the Eternal Struggle For Human Liberation in Terms Of Freedom, Justice, and Self Determination

AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.

AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE

A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.

Cornel West on Trump Wins, Muslims, and the Democratic Party

Cornel West for President

November 9, 2024

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdJWQXkmryM

#TruthJusticeLove

"I deeply appreciated this probing dialogue about the disturbing election with my brother Peter Hager and sister Jen Perelman!”
--Dr. Cornel West

Prominent Journalist, Political Historian, and Social Critic Jamelle Bouie in Conversation with Adam Conover About What the 2024 Election says About the United States Today vis-a-vis Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement

How Trump Will Transform America Forever with Jamelle Bouie

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-FQLn9oRrU

Host: Adam Conover

Factually!

Guest: Jamelle Bouie

November 8, 2024

This week’s election was a decisive win for Donald Trump. While it was once reasonable to view this racist, sexist, plutocratic, transphobic, criminal as an outlier in American politics, it’s time to face the reality that he is American politics. In this special episode, Adam sits down with journalist Jamelle Bouie to discuss the sweeping changes a second Trump presidency will likely bring to the American political system—and how those changes will shape the rest of our lives.

Monday, November 11, 2024

From November 8, 2016 To November 5, 2024: Historian, Scholar, Public Intellectual, Activist, Teacher, Critic, and Author Robin D.G. Kelley On The Road to Fascism in the United States Via the Demagogic Rise of the MAGA Movement and its Deadly Avatar Donald Trump

https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back/

“What's Past is Prologue…”

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on November 16, 2016):

A response in our Forum: “After Trump”

Trump Says Go Back, We Say Fight Back

Economic anxieties are inseparable from whiteness and racism.

by Robin D. G. Kelley
November 15, 2016
Boston Review

"If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between antipoor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black people."

—Audre Lorde, “Learning from the '60s”

Donald J. Trump’s election was a national trauma, an epic catastrophe that has left millions in the United States and around the world in a state of utter shock, uncertainty, deep depression, and genuine fear. The fear is palpable and justified, especially for those Trump and his acolytes targeted—the undocumented, Muslims, anyone who “looks” undocumented or Muslim, people of color, Jews, the LGBTQ community, the disabled, women, activists of all kinds (especially Black Lives Matter and allied movements resisting state-sanctioned violence), trade unions. . . . the list is long. And the attacks have begun; as I write these words, reports of hate crimes and racist violence are flooding my inbox.

The common refrain is that no one expected this. (Of course, the truth is that many people did expect this, just not in the elite media.) At no point, this refrain goes, could “we” imagine Trump in the Oval office surrounded by a cabinet made up of some of the most idiotic, corrupt, and authoritarian characters in modern day politics—Rudolph Giuliani, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, John Bolton, Ben Carson, Jeff Sessions, David “Blue Lives Matter” Clarke, Joe Arpaio, to name a few. Meanwhile, paid professional pundits are scrambling to peddle their analyses and to normalize the results—on the same broadcast media that helped deliver Trump’s victory by making him their ratings-boosting spectacle rather than attending to issues, ideas, and other candidates (e.g., Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein). They deliver the same old platitudes: disaffected voters, angry white men who have suffered economically and feel forgotten, Trump’s populist message represented the nation’s deep-seated distrust of Washington, ad infinitum. Some liberal pundits have begun to speak of President-Elect Trump as thoughtful and conciliatory, and some even suggest that his unpredictability may prove to be an asset. The protests are premature or misplaced. All of this from the same folks who predicted a Clinton victory.

This election was a referendum on whether the United States will be a straight, white nation reminiscent of the mythic “old days” when armed white men ruled.

But the outcome should not have surprised us. This election was, among other things, a referendum on whether the United States will be a straight, white nation reminiscent of the mythic “old days” when armed white men ruled, owned their castle, boasted of unvanquished military power, and everyone else knew their place. Henry Giroux’s new book America at War With Itself made this point with clarity and foresight two months before the election. The easy claim that Trump appeals to legitimate working-class populism driven by class anger, Giroux argues, ignores both the historical link between whiteness, citizenship, and humanity, and the American dream of wealth accumulation built on private property. Trump’s followers are not trying to redistribute the wealth, nor are they all “working class”—their annual median income is about $72,000. On the contrary, they are attracted to Trump’s wealth as metonym of an American dream that they, too, can enjoy once America is “great” again—which is to say, once the country returns to being “a white MAN’s country.” What Giroux identifies as “civic illiteracy” keeps them convinced that the descendants of unfree labor or the colonized, or those who are currently unfree, are to blame for America’s decline and for blocking their path to Trump-style success.

For the white people who voted overwhelmingly for Trump, their candidate embodied the anti-Obama backlash. Pundits who say race was not a factor point to rural, predominantly white counties that went for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but now went for Trump, and to the low black and Latinx voter turnout. However, turnout was down overall, not just among African Americans. Post-election analysis shows that as a percentage of total votes the black vote dropped only 1 percent compared with the 2012 election, even while the number of black ballots counted decreased by nearly 11 percent. (Why this happened is beyond the scope of this essay, but one might begin with Greg Palast’s findings about voter suppression and the use of “crosscheck” to invalidate ballots.) Moreover, claims that nearly a third of Latinxs went for Trump have been disputed by the website Latino Decision, whose careful research puts the figure at 18 percent. The turnout does not contradict the fact that Trump drew the clear majority of white votes. This is not startling news.

If history is our guide, “whitelash” usually follows periods of expanded racial justice and democratic rights. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, there were many instances in which southern white men switched from the biracial, abolitionist Republicans to the “redeemers,” whether it be the Democrats or, in states like Texas, the “White Man’s Party.” (No ambiguity there.) Or in the 1880s and ’90s, when white Populists betrayed their Black Populist allies in a united struggle to redistribute railroad land grants to farmers, reduce debt by inflating currency, abolish private national banks, nationalize railroads and telegraphs, and impose a graduated income tax to shift the burden onto the wealthy, among other things. Many of these one-time white “allies” joined the Ku Klux Klan, defeated the Lodge Force Bill of 1890 which would have authorized federal supervision of elections to protect black voting rights, and led the efforts to disfranchise black voters. Or the late 1960s, when vibrant struggles for black, brown, American Indian, Asian American, gay and lesbian, and women’s liberation, the anti-war movement, and student demands for a democratic revolution were followed by white backlash and the election of Richard Nixon—whose rhetoric of “law and order” and the “silent majority” Trump shamelessly plagiarized.

“Whitelash” usually follows periods of expanded racial justice and democratic rights.

Of course, Hilary Clinton did win the popular vote, and some are restoring to the easy lament that, were it not for the arcane Electoral College (itself a relic of slave power), we would not be here. One might add, too, that had it not been for the gutting of the Voting Rights Act opening the door for expanded strategies of voter suppression, or the permanent disfranchisement of some or all convicted felons in ten states, or the fact that virtually all people currently in cages cannot vote at all, or the persistence of misogyny in our culture, we may have had a different outcome. This is all true. But we cannot ignore the fact that the vast majority of white men and a majority of white women, across class lines, voted for a platform and a message of white supremacy, Islamophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-science, anti-Earth, militarism, torture, and policies that blatantly maintain income inequality. The vast majority of people of color voted against Trump, with black women registering the highest voting percentage for Clinton of any other demographic (93 percent). It is an astounding number when we consider that her husband’s administration oversaw the virtual destruction of the social safety net by turning welfare into workfare, cutting food stamps, preventing undocumented workers from receiving benefits, and denying former drug felons and users access to public housing; a dramatic expansion of the border patrol, immigrant detention centers, and the fence on Mexico’s border; a crime bill that escalated the war on drugs and accelerated mass incarceration; as well as NAFTA and legislation deregulating financial institutions.

Still, had Trump received only a third of the votes he did and been defeated, we still would have had ample reason to worry about our future.

I am not suggesting that white racism alone explains Trump’s victory. Nor am I dismissing the white working class’s very real economic grievances. It is not a matter of disaffection versus racism or sexism versus fear. Rather, racism, class anxieties, and prevailing gender ideologies operate together, inseparably, or as Kimberlé Crenshaw would say, intersectionally. White working-class men understand their plight through a racial and gendered lens. For women and people of color to hold positions of privilege or power over them is simply unnatural and can only be explained by an act of unfairness—for example, affirmative action. White privilege is taken for granted to the point where it need not be named and can’t be named. So, as activist/scholar Bill Fletcher recently observed, even though Trump’s call to deport immigrants, close the borders, and reject free trade policies appealed to working-class whites’ discontent with the effects of globalization, Trump’s plans do not amount to a rejection of neoliberalism. Fletcher writes, “Trump focused on the symptoms inherent in neoliberal globalization, such as job loss, but his was not a critique of neoliberalism. He continues to advance deregulation, tax cuts, anti-unionism, etc. He was making no systemic critique at all, but the examples that he pointed to from wreckage resulting from economic and social dislocation, resonated for many whites who felt, for various reasons, that their world was collapsing.” Yet Fletcher is quick not to reduce white working-class support for Trump to class fears alone, adding, “This segment of the white population was looking in terror at the erosion of the American Dream, but they were looking at it through the prism of race.”

Racism, class anxieties, and prevailing gender ideologies operate together, inseparably, and intersectionally.

A New York Times poll shows that among people who ranked immigration and terrorism as the most important issues, an overwhelming majority voted for Trump. Immigration and terrorism are both about race—Mexicans and Muslims. That there are “illegal” immigrants from around the globe, including Canada, Israel, and all over Europe doesn’t matter: anti-immigrant movements target those who can be racially profiled. And while Trump’s America fears “terrorism,” it does not disavow homegrown terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, despite the fact that white nationalist movements are responsible for the majority of violent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. On the contrary, Trump was not only endorsed by white nationalists and U.S.-based fascists, but during the campaign he refused to renounce their support, and Trump’s leading candidate for attorney general, Rudy Giuliani, has openly called Black Lives Matter “terrorists.”

So where do we go from here? If we really care about the world, our country, and our future, we have no choice but to resist. We need to reject a thoroughly bankrupt Democratic Party leadership that is calling for conciliation and, in Obama’s words, “rooting for [Trump’s] success.” Pay attention: Trump’s success means mass deportation; massive military spending; the continuation and escalation of global war; a conservative Supreme Court poised to roll back Roe v. Wade, marriage equality, and too many rights to name here; a justice department and FBI dedicated to growing the Bush/Obama-era surveillance state and waging COINTELPRO-style war on activists; fiscal policies that will accelerate income inequality; massive cuts in social spending; the weakening or elimination of the Affordable Care Act; and the partial dismantling and corporatization of government.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Robin D. G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, a contributing editor at Boston Review, and the author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times Of An American Original, and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.

Some Final Reflections on the 2020 Presidential Election and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender within the American Electorate

AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2020/12/httpswww_31.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on December 31, 2020):

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Some Final Reflections on the 2020 Presidential Election and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender within the American Electorate
by Kofi Natambu
December 31, 2020
The Panopticon Review

Eight weeks ago on November 3, 2020 the national voting public of the United States—an alltime record of over 155 million citizens!—elected Democratic Party candidate Joseph R. Biden as the 46th president of the United States in what many observers and analysts have deemed the most important and consequential national election since 1860 on the cusp of the Civil War. The deeply alarming, even terrifying rise and emergence in just the past five years of ideologically malevolent forces both here and abroad rapidly metastasizing in the form of the wildly chaotic and authoritarian neofascist regime of Donald J. Trump had sent the entire political system and much of U.S. civil society itself into widespread turmoil, conflict, and panic. This stark reality only greatly increased deep seated anxieties and fears throughout the Republic over centuries long structural, institutional, and systemic fears, dislocations, corruption, and demagoguery regarding addressing the foundational public categories of race, class, and gender in the American body politic at the levels of both political economy and cultural identity.

As a result what ultimately distinguished the 2020 election from its historical predecessors was a tsunami of bizarre and deeply disturbing behavior and actions involving openly public confrontations, endless disinformation campaigns and venomous rhetorical assaults by President Trump on not only his Democratic Party opponent and challenger Joseph Biden but an ongoing series of unrelenting attacks on virtually any and everyone the president thought, felt, or simply imagined were opposing, slighting, or otherwise dismissing him and his bluster. This included not only many Democratic Party politicians and stalwarts like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer but also many others like progressive politician Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez and what was known as “the Squad” (fellow progressive Congressional representatives Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib) all of whom happen to be both women and people of color, two of Trump’s favorite punching bags, but many members of his own subservient enabling Party as well on the vary rare occasions when they didn’t openly kiss his ass and sing his praises. The impact on the general election outside of these machinations and ID-fueled rages by the president and the ugly destructive fallout from it was complicated and made even more sinister and disruptive given the extensive racist police violence against African Americans throughout 2020 (e.g. George Floyd, Armaud Arbrey, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake etc.). Meanwhile a massive deadly global pandemic ravaged the entire country making it virtually impossible for the Democratic nominees (Biden and Kamala Harris) to campaign in any traditional or conventional manner which involved appealing to large crowds live in realtime. However even this clear and present danger of spreading the virus via live events which led inevitably to the direct transmission and eventual infection of thousands of supporters didn’t stop the wild antic “super-spreader”events in which thousands of Trump’s supporters endangered themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.

Despite all the many distractions and the often patently cruel and simply braindead demonstrations of a national cult of fervent supporters of Trump’s despicable rightwing demagoguery and rank exploitation of not only the general public (most of whom were intensely opposed to the president on both a personal and political/ideological level) but of his most dedicated followers as well. Meanwhile the already very deep and persistent divisions of the country along racial. class, and gender lines and revealed once again (as they have for over 70 years now) just how dependent the two major political parties remain on the electoral and ideological domination of these divisions. Thus while Trump continued as he had in 2016 to garner a very substantial majority of white American voters (over 57% of all white voters—which collectively numbered over 100 million people this year!-- cast their ballot for Trump, with 58% of white males and an equally distressing 55% of all white female voters also voting for Trump’ despite his deeply white supremacist, corporate, and misogynist agenda.

As a deeply determined counterweight to this huge national surge of white American “vote of confidence” in a clearly fascist regime and its raging sociopathic leader nearly 80% of a huge number of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American voters voted against this same regime and leader with the national black vote as usual leading the way with 87% of its voters refusing a replay of the last four years despite widespread voter suppression. As a result, over 81 million American voters collectively voted for Biden while an astonishing 74 million still voted for Trump (a very ominous sign of just how "popular" FASCISM currently remains in American politics and culture). This gigantic turnout meant that the two candidates individually received the most votes of any two candidates in the history of the Republic. That the country is still reeling from an extremely deadly pandemic (over 350,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus as of this writing), a rapidly collapsing national economy, and a frankly maniacal and equally deadly national rightwing coalition led by the heinous Republican Party and the brazenly ruthless likes of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, as the rabidly criminal and fiercely antidemocratic antics of the now defeated president continues to assault the political system in general it’s clear that the 2020 election has merely delayed but is still nowhere close yet to firmly and decisively DEFEATING what is as of January 1, 2021 still a clear and present danger to not only this nation but the entire world. Stay tuned because the political, economic, cultural and ideological war that MUST be waged in this society and throughout the globe against the still gathering and rapidly expanding forces of fascism, whether we “win” an election or not and especially whether we “like it” or not is more imperative than ever …

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald J. Trump

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald J. Trump

The tragic reascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-donald-j-trump/

Image: Getty Images

by Peter E. Gordon
November 8, 2024
Boston Review

From 2016 to 2020 Donald J. Trump served as forty-fifth president of the United States; now, he has secured his reelection and will assume office once again as president number forty-seven. It was Marx who left us with the memorable claim that events in history occur twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But today this slogan, memorable as it is, surely doesn’t apply, since Trump’s first term was already a farce, distinguished most of all as a spectacle of bluster and boasting that, despite his many plans, left the basic institutions of American democracy more or less intact. He said that he would build a wall across the full two thousand miles of the United States’ southern border and Mexico would pay for it. (His sadistic family separation policy destroyed the lives of thousands, but his administration built only about five hundred miles of the wall, much of it reinforcements to existing barriers, and American taxpayers bore the cost.) He said that he would dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. (He didn’t, and the ACA remains among the most popular achievements of the Obama administration.) He said that he would impose a ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. (He tried, with fitful success, though the courts dogged his efforts.) These promises came to us wrapped in the vacuous slogan that he would “Make America Great Again.” (Great? Hardly. It would be more accurate to say that America became an object of great derision and concern. Especially among our European allies, the fear arose that democracy in America, technically among the oldest democracies in the world, was showing signs of backsliding into autocracy.)

Marx understood that powerful countercurrents in history can sweep away political gains like Noah’s flood.

The old Marxist slogan, then, must now be revised. If the first term was farce, Trump’s reelection points toward a tragedy from which we may never recover. Every critic will offer a different postmortem. Some will—convincingly—cast blame on the elitism and inertia of the Democratic party, which cleaved to its habits of liberal centrism and dismissed the grievances of the working class. Others will blame the Democrats for prioritizing issues of sexual or racial identity over the universalism of economic justice; still others will blame the brute misogyny and racism of the American public. Others will blame those groups who, moved by justified anger over the U.S. support for the devastation of Gaza, cast their lot with fringe candidates such as Jill Stein, motivated by a moralist’s belief that “sending a message” was more important than voting for somebody who might actually have won. All of these critics capture at least some share of the truth; social reality is infinitely complex, and our explanatory instruments always shed only a partial light on what we do. But we would be well advised to consider the most obvious fact: that the tragic ascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.

This was something that Marx understood. On December 2, 1851, Louis Bonaparte, a nephew of the long-dead Napoleon, seized the reins of the French state and declared himself emperor. The coup d’état should have been long anticipated, since it was hardly his first attempt. He had tried something similar in 1836. “I believe,” he wrote then, “that from time to time, men are created whom I call volunteers of providence, in whose hands are placed the destiny of their countries. I believe I am one of those men. If I am wrong, I can perish uselessly. If I am right, then providence will put me into a position to fulfill my mission.”

When his first effort failed, he fled first to the United States, then to London, where he lived among the wealthy for several years. But in 1840 he crossed the channel, again with the hope that “providence” would guide him to victory. This time, however, his failure was so swift and so spectacular that it provoked less fear than ridicule. “This surpasses comedy,” wrote one newspaper critic. “One doesn’t kill crazy people, one just locks them up.” After a trial, Louis Bonaparte was condemned to life in prison, where, unrepentant, he continued to nourish dreams of his supposed birthright, and even wrote a pamphlet with the utopian title, “The Extinction of Pauperism.” He did not give up. In 1846 he escaped in disguise and fled once again to London, where he remained until France’s 1848 revolution, when the abdication of King Louis Philippe gave way to the Second Republic, establishing universal male suffrage and giving Louis Bonaparte yet another chance to make his bid for power. In the democratic election of December 1848, Napoleon’s nephew finally fulfilled his ambitions: he won the presidency by a wide margin, gaining nearly 75 percent of the vote. But his highest ambition remained just out of reach. By the terms of the new constitution, the president was legally obliged to step down after four years in office, a rule Bonaparte sought to change but failed. Puffed up with dreams of his destiny, he saw no other choice. Like his uncle before him, he annulled the rules and claimed all power for himself.

Marx, living in London at the time, observed the events with fury and wrote an extended essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” its title meant as a mockery of the nephew for his ambition to reprise the events that had brought his more famous uncle to power a half-century before. According to the revolutionary calendar, the eighteenth of Brumaire was November 9, 1799, the date when Napoleon had annulled the Directory and declared himself First Consul, a prelude to his even more grandiose act five years later when he claimed the title of emperor. For Marx, the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte in 1851 was an absurd repetition, the nephew little more than a “grotesque mediocrity,” an “adventurer who hides his trivially repulsive features under the iron death mask of Napoleon.” The essay, which runs to nearly a hundred pages in length, was first published in New York in 1852 by Marx’s colleague Joseph Weydemeyer in a journal called Die Revolution. “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is widely esteemed among Marxists and non-Marxists alike as a masterpiece of rhetoric, known especially for its opening line that events in history occur twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But it also marks a shift in Marx’s mood, and a theoretical acknowledgment that democratic revolutions do not always turn out as one might expect.

Liberalism is an archive of principles that can be burst free of the system from which it was born.

Just three years before, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had expressed themselves with greater optimism, exhorting the working class to seize the moment for their freedom, while also assigning to “bourgeois ideologists” a supportive role as intellectuals who could furnish “fresh elements of enlightenment and progress” to the proletariat. Marx and Engels were alive to the principle of self-reflexivity: that a social theory must explain the conditions of its own emergence. The bourgeois ideologists had untethered themselves from their class; they had “raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” Marx and Engels were therefore confident—perhaps too confident—that the mass of the oppressed would fulfil its assignment. But the practical task of emancipation belonged to the proletariat itself, the class that needed only to recognize its exploitation and then break the chains that held it in submission.

In practice, however, things did not go as planned. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” just several pages in, Marx adopts a newly pessimistic tone:

Universal suffrage seems to have survived for only a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.

In this passage, Marx’s mood has grown so dark that he freely borrows the concluding sentence from Satan, or Mephistopheles, as he is called in Goethe’s Faust. Denn alles was entsteht, / Ist wert, daß es zu Grunde geht; nothing of value remains in the world, and everything might as well pass away. Marx still employs a dialectical argument, but he now uses it with bitter irony to describe a dialectic of destruction rather than forward motion. What in France was called the Party of Order had triumphed over the Party of Movement. The institution of democratic suffrage, a novelty at the time, seems to have come into being only to annul democracy itself.

In my battered old copy of The Marx-Engels Reader, edited long ago by the Princeton political scientist and historian Robert C. Tucker and still used throughout much of the Anglophone world in courses on Marxist theory, the brief excerpt from “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is introduced with an explanatory note: “Louis Bonaparte’s rise and rule have been seen as a forerunner of the phenomenon that was to become known in the twentieth century as fascism.” The Reader does not reprint the essay in its entirety, though the full text can be found in the Collected Works by Marx and Engels. When he first published his anthology in 1978, it was perhaps natural that Tucker would understand fascism as a phenomenon of the distant past, a mere excrescence of an interwar era in political and economic disarray. The stabilization of capitalist democracies after the Second World War made it all too easy for historians to declare that the fascist threat was long behind us and that communism, its totalitarian twin, now loomed as the greater menace. The collapse of brutal regimes in the eastern bloc, socialist in name if not in spirit, gave liberal ideologues in the West a brief moment of exultation to declare the “end of history,” until, as could have been predicted, history kept going as before. All too often, however, history seems to run in reverse, or it disgorges from the past old forms of rule that we might have thought were long gone. Thus Marx’s observation that “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”:

And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

What Marx understood—and what too many of us have today forgotten—is that there is always a powerful countercurrent in history that can sweep away like Noah’s flood whatever political gains that seem to have been made. In his fury and frustration Marx damned all the various forces in that flood as a lumpenproletariat with Louis Bonaparte as its charismatic leader:

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus [procurers or pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème.

This is, of course, Marx at his worst. His portrait of the lumpenproletariat is a mere caricature that does little to explain why three-quarters of French society voted for Louis Bonaparte in a popular election. When Marx turns to the peasantry (of which a great share also rallied to the Bonapartist cause) he seeks to draw a neat distinction: “The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate it.” In the countryside, Marx concludes, the Bonapartist wing “represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant, not his judgment, but his prejudice, not his future, but his past.”

But these distinctions offer more consolation than insight. The difficulty is that Marx does not really reckon with the most painful truth of a democratic regime: that by the logic of universal suffrage, a democracy is only as enlightened as its citizens, who, in exercising their right to popular sovereignty, may just as easily opt for prejudice in place of progress and for charismatic authority in place of enlightenment. Well before today’s long line of right-wing populists—the likes of Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Modi—and outright fascists such as Hitler and Mussolini, it was Marx’s true insight that democratic procedure alone brings no guarantee of progress. In France in early 1848 the bourgeois revolutionaries had introduced a species of universal suffrage (though it was limited only to men); on December 2, the gains of the previous year were, in Marx’s words, “conjured away by a card-sharper’s trick.” It was not the monarchy that was overthrown; instead, the French state was robbed of “the liberal concessions that were wrung from it by century-long struggles.”

Bonapartism was a movement born from the displacement of real interest by mere fantasies of interest.

In this assessment the term “liberal” stands out in bold relief. Today, that word too often appears in derisive polemics that are eager to dismiss all that liberalism has stood for throughout its long and varied career. That it has served as a cover for policies of racism and empire should strike any social critic as obvious; but the further argument that liberalism serves only as an ideological groundwork for neoliberalism has become such a commonplace that few critics ever pause to consider why Marx would have mourned the loss of the “liberal concessions” that had been won, slowly and fitfully, often by popular struggle, during the era of the bourgeois revolutions. The anger that courses through “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is intelligible only if we reckon with his dialectical belief that liberalism is not a mere tissue of falsehoods but an archive of principles that can be transformed and expanded until it bursts free of the system from which it was born. A society in which liberal values have lost all credibility or have never gained sufficient traction in the first place will be inclined toward atavism rather than progress, and it will deploy democracy against itself. This is the poisonous atmosphere in which authoritarianism gains an upper hand. Populism supplants liberalism, and the true face of economic suffering turns into a grimace of nativism and racial hatred.

“The Eighteenth Brumaire” is a puzzling text, poised in an awkward place between social reductionism and political insight. Marx struggled to retain an understanding of the Bonapartist movement that would confirm his sociological conviction that it was the expression of a distinctive class alliance between the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry. More discerning was his claim that in Bonapartism, a new species of modern politics had emerged in which charisma and democratic procedure were fused. Marx was aware, of course, that a great share of the wealthy bourgeoisie was frightened by the popular uprisings of 1848, and that they responded in panic, hoping a powerful leader would save them from the unruly masses. What he could not really explain was why such an overwhelming portion of the French population—not only the bourgeoisie, but also the “masses” themselves—would choose dictatorship over democracy. To evade the real complexity of the matter he resorted to name-calling:

This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.

Implicit in this charge, and long before the emergence of authoritarian movements of the twentieth century and our own recent time, Marx glimpsed something different, and far more unsettling. Bonapartism was not a political movement that expressed the interests of a particular class; it was a movement born from the dissolution of class, the displacement of real interest by mere fantasies of interest that grow ever more powerful as the realm of the symbolic takes on a life of its own.

Only this, I believe, can explain why modern forms of right-wing populism have such an uncanny and free-floating quality that they seem to survive with no other content than the fever dream of political solidarity itself. Democracy without content becomes a mere spectacle, a void organized around the two poles of “the leader” and “the people,” filled with nostalgic images of national and racial community. Marx could only have anticipated this political form but did not live long enough to see its efflorescence in the twentieth century. Some Marxists, to be sure, still cling to the consoling thought that even the most extreme forms of right-wing populism can be understood as an angry reflex of the working class. But this interpretation was never wholly convincing.

As Robin D. G. Kelley wrote in these pages back in 2017, not long after Trump’s first victory, the bottommost rungs of the working class are Black and brown, and Trump clearly did not speak for them. Instead, he brought to the surface a species of white nationalism that was violent and unabashed, courting the support of xenophobic movements that swelled with enthusiasm when he instructed them to “stand by.” That Trump apparently made some gains with nonwhite voters in the most recent election should not distract us from the central place of racism in his movement. He never moderated this racism, not during his four-year exile in Mar-a-Lago and not during the 2024 campaign. In language dragged into the light from the worst moments of history and the ugliest corners of the human psyche, he has made it clear that he sees immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Some may claim that all these terrible statements should be dismissed as mere rhetoric, that his promise to deport millions of residents should not alarm us because he doesn’t really mean what he says.

But we should consider more closely what is being implied, and excused, when apologists for Trumpism suggest that we should not take its racism seriously. The United States is in its racial and ethnoreligious composition one of the most diverse polities on the planet, and the very idea that it could be transformed back into a whites-only country club (something it never was) is so fantastical it would be a joke if only it didn’t carry such lethal implications. But the fantasy is the point. Racism offers the illusion of an in-group solidarity, built, like a castle in the air, upon nothing more than the idea of a homogeneous community that wishes to expel from its ranks all of those it defines as the enemy. The fantasy mobilizes, it motivates, and it kills, and it does so with all the more vehemence precisely because it is a fantasy that must be imposed, violently, upon a reality that will not comply.

Understanding extreme forms of right-wing populism as an angry reflex of the working class was never wholly convincing.

A democracy evacuated of its content becomes a mere container for this noxious idea, and it remains a democracy only as long as the appeal to “the people” nourishes the fantasy of belonging. In 1851, the result was a democracy without liberalism, opening the way not only to the Third Empire, with its broad boulevards for military display, but to a species of violent and illiberal populism that is now spreading everywhere across the globe. Louis Napoleon was in this respect the harbinger of things to come, an early sign of a political form that cloaks itself in the garments of “greatness” and tradition even while it takes advantage of democratic institutions, only to shut the doors and abolish democracy once it has seized the state.

Whether Trump will take that final step from illiberal democracy to outright fascism we cannot know. But he has made his aspirations altogether clear, and they should be familiar to anyone who has studied the course of history in the modern era. In this regard Trumpism is hardly exceptional, and none of us should find it surprising that American democracy now finds itself all but consumed by the general pathologies that have accompanied the ascent of popular government since its inception. Elevated once again to the Presidency, not by a lumpenproletariat but by the widest assortment of average Americans, Trump has gained a democratic mandate, now largely unchecked by the Supreme Court or Congress, to enact his own Eighteenth Brumaire and to sweep aside the constitutional constraints that inhibited him from realizing the dark vision he sought to pursue during his first term. Since his early rise to prominence on reality television, this unspeakable and incurious mediocrity has cloaked himself like Napoleon the Third in the nostalgic promise of past greatness while he has invented nothing that is truly great. He has only served as our farcical and unflattering mirror, and he has given voice to all of the worst sentiments of the American demos—its xenophobia and its distraction, its racism and its misogyny, and its bizarre myth of a God-given mission to expel the stranger and dominate the world. If he succeeds, now largely unchecked by congressional or judicial opponents, in implementing even the smallest handful of the measures he has announced with such vehemence during his recent campaign, we will only see a vivid illustration of the tragic lesson: democracy spawns its own demagogues just as the sleep of reason produces monsters. The lights are going out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Peter E. Gordon

Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History and Faculty Affiliate in Philosophy and German Languages and Literatures at Harvard. His latest book is A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity.

Elie Mystal On Why Donald Trump and America Are Synonymous And What That Means For Our Collective Future (Or Lack Thereof)

There’s No Denying It Anymore: Trump Is Not a Fluke—He’s America

The United States chose Donald Trump in all his ugliness and cruelty, and the country will get what it deserves.

by Elie Mystal
November 7, 2024
The Nation

IMAGE: Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Van Andel Arena on November 5, 2024, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

America deserves everything it is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid.

I could be more specific about the “we.” Roughly half of “us” didn’t vote for this travesty. I could be more specific about who did, and as people pore over exit polls, the only thing liberals will do liberally is dole out the blame. But the conversations about who is to blame, the hand-wringing about who showed up and who failed the moment are largely academic and pointless.

America did this. America, through the process of a free and fair election, demanded this. America, as an idea, concept, and institution, wanted this. And America, as a collective, deserves to get what it wants.

To be clear, no individual person “deserves” what Trump will do to them… not even the people who voted for him to do the things he’s going to do. Nobody deserves to die for their vote, even if they voted for other people to die.

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But we, as a country, absolutely deserve what’s about to happen to us. We, as a nation, have proven ourselves to be a fetid, violent people, and we deserve a leader who embodies the worst of us. We are not “better” than Trump. If anything, thinking that we are better than Trump, thinking there is some “silent majority” who opposes the unserious grotesqueries of the man, is the core conceit that has led the Democratic Party to such total ruin. America willed Trump into existence. He was created from our greed, our insecurities, and our selfishness. We have summoned him from the depths of our own bile and neediness, and he has answered.

And now that he is here, we deserve our fate, because the most fundamental truth about Trump’s reelection is that Trump was right about us. He will be president again because he, and perhaps he alone, saw us for how truly base, depraved, and uninformed we are as a country. Trump is not a root cause of our ills. He did not create the conditions that allowed him to rise. He is, and always has been, a mirror. He is how America sees itself.

If people would just look at him, they would see themselves as we’ve always been. He is rich, because we are rich or think we will be. He is crass because we are crass. He is self-interested because we are. He punks the media because the media are punks. He is unintelligent because we are uninformed. The president of the United States is the singular figure who is supposed to represent all Americans, and Trump reflects us more accurately than perhaps any president ever has.

That’s why the people who love him love him so passionately. He is them. And he tells them that being what they are is OK. He never for a second requires America to be better than it is. He never expects more of America than it is able to give. Trump tells America to be garbage. Garbage is easy.

That’s why the people who hate him hate him so intensely. He’s the monster we turn into after a few drinks. He’s the intrusive thought we have at work that we don’t act on and try to quickly forget. He’s the glimpse you catch of yourself in the mirror that makes you think, “Damn, I need to hit the gym.” He’s the ketchup stain you acquired at lunch that you try to hide under your tie until the end of the day. He is our embarrassments, our failures, and our regrets made flesh and come to haunt us.

We cannot rid ourselves of Trump because we cannot run away from ourselves. This is who we are, whether we’d like to be or not. We will never be better than we are if we do not first confront what we are. As any recovering alcoholic or drug user could tell you, admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. But that requires admitting you have a problem, not them, not somebody else, not the gods, not forces beyond your control.

Trump is America’s problem, but America is not ready to take responsibility for what we have become. And so, we will suffer. We’ve done this, and we deserve to face the consequences of our actions. Indeed, the utter lack of consequences is a huge reason why Trump is back: America could not bring itself to punish our avatar after he left office the last time, and so we must sit for our remedial lessons. The beatings, as it were, will continue until morale improves.

Everyone who hates Trump is asking how America can be “saved” from him, again. Nobody is asking the more relevant question: Is America worth saving? Like I said, Trump is the sum of our failures. A country that allows its environment to be ravaged, its children to be shot, its wealth to be hoarded, its workers to be exploited, its poor to starve, its cops to murder, and its minorities to be hunted doesn’t really deserve to be “saved.” It deserves to fail

Trump is not our “retribution.” He is our reckoning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Elie Mystal

Elie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and the host of its legal podcast, Contempt of Court. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. His first book is the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, published by The New Press. Elie can be followed @ElieNYC.