Fascism isn't a light switch
The move towards authoritarian rule in the US is a longstanding trend with bipartisan support.
One important lesson to learn is that fascism isn't some switch that you turn on and off, where it's 'democracy' (or the aspartame 'guided democracy' that we're allowed to have in the US) one day, and full-on Hitler the next. These are long-term shifts, with pieces moving in one direction or the other over a period of years or decades, and they rarely consistently move in the direction of fascism if there isn't a terribly nervous ruling class longing for someone to keep the lower orders in line.
Nowhere has fascism come into power where the political and social system had not been moving in that direction for quite some time.
In the US, the movement in that direction has been going on for decades, across administrations, with little meaningful distinction between parties (except for stylistic differences: The Republicans like to be flamboyant about it, whereas the Democrats prefer mostly to do it without drawing liberals' attention to it at all).
Since about 1973 (the year non-managerial wages began the long flatline from which they have never been revived), we've seen economic policy move into a mode of managed decline. Working-class gains in the area of wages, working conditions, social welfare benefits, and trade-union rights have been systematically chipped away since then, and working-class living standards went from first being maintained by unsustainable consumer debt, to going into frank decline, to the point where the WSJ tells us that three meals a day constitute a luxury we should reconsider if we ever want to be able to afford to rent a place.
The social safety net was decimated in the 1990s under Clinton, at the same time as the legal and physical infrastructure for mass deportations, mass incarceration, the widespread use of prison slave labour were created, and the wall - the one Democrats pretend not to be building and the Republicans pretend was their idea to build - on the southern border began being built.
9/11 provided an excuse for a wholesale attack on previously uncontroversial concepts of the rule of law and human rights. This marks the end of even a rhetorical commitment to the Geneva Conventions by the US. Forced disappearances by military goon squads and torture became openly acknowledged policies. The FBI shed the voluntary honour code in which they promised not to do COINTELPRO again, and an across-the-board mass surveillance system with the ambition to listen to and record every electronic communication anywhere in the United States was put into place. Ed Snowden conclusively proved that the head of the NSA had perjured himself about this, and was exiled to Russia for his trouble, one of a number of whistleblowers to be persecuted for revealing criminal activities at the highest levels of government.
Under Obama, we saw the Department of Justice take the position in the Supreme Court that pure political speech could be prosecuted as 'material support for terrorism' if it could be said to be somehow connected to a group banned without evidence by the Department of State as a 'foreign terrorist organisation'. They won, and Holder v. HLP was the first Supreme Court decision since the 1960s to say that pure political speech could be criminalised.
The deregulation of Wall Street led to a full-on meltdown, fuelled by outright scams. Wall Street was amply rewarded for this, whilst millions lost their homes, including on the basis of mortgage instruments that were demonstrably forgeries.
Many people never recovered from that financial meltdown. Occupy Wall Street - the beginning of a quantitatively and qualitatively escalating cycle of mass working-class mobilisations that continues to this day - was the response (Bernie Sanders acquired a measure of national name recognition by incorporating the slogans of the movement into his stump speeches). The Occupy encampments were evicted in a nationally coordinated assault that very nearly killed one protester. A national movement against racist police terror also began to take form, and showed significant militancy in some places. The response was continued militarisation of the police, who were allowed to commit murder on film with impunity.
After the Democrats threw the 2016 election by running a shitball candidate nobody liked and who has mercifully been forgotten by all, a new stage in fascist propaganda was reached. Encouraged by Trump, fascist paramilitaries began showing their faces in public, where they were regularly sent packing by local community defenders. In the political class, the traditional fascist line that all grassroots popular movements are actually the machinations of hostile foreign agents (Occupy, BLM, and the NoDAPL movement were specifically named) became a thing. Trump combined Clinton's mass deportation legislation with the massive ICE infrastructure Obama created, and introduced mass deportation as political spectacle. The popular fear and disgust at Trump's fascist provocations and the Democrats' refusal to be relevant for even a minute led popular militancy to escalate. Early on in this period, education workers staged multiple successful statewide wildcat strikes in defiance of state laws and their own union bureaucracies; their strike funds regularly exceeded their fundraising goals several times over thanks to widespread popular support.
In 2020, a lethal and debilitating airborne pandemic began that shined a floodlight on all the rot of the system. Everything that would have been needed to stop the virus was something that should have been done long ago - paid sick time and general paid time off for workers, clean air standards for buildings, a universal public health care system - and these things the ruling class resolutely refused to do, even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
The regime's overall crisis of legitimacy (evident from polling going back to the 1980s) came to a provisional climax with the 2020 uprising against racist police terror. The destruction of Minneapolis' Third Precinct in a community effort that is celebrated even today polled better than both presidential candidates that year.
This uprising shocked the Democrats into feeling the need to engage with their core voting constituencies, and this, combined with popular disgust at a disgusting racist piece of shit of a president who almost nobody liked to begin with, allowed another disgusting racist piece of shit of a president almost nobody liked to begin with to win the White House on a platform of doing the opposite of everything he'd built his interminably long political career on.
The task of the ruling class at the time was clear: Restore governability, stabilise the regime, make sure that no uprising like the 2020 uprising could or would happen again. This was achieved with a combination of co-opting rhetoric, a few symbolic prosecutions, and a massive investment in weapons and urban warfare training for police. Victory over the pandemic, which continues even today, was hastily declared, and the money that was meant to help protect the public was instead also given to cops to buy more weapons. The movement against Cop City saw some of the most intense police state repression in a generation, with the criminalisation of community bail funds and RICO indictments for basic social movement activity.
Meanwhile, the war on trans people was heating up, and the Biden administration, who was elected on a commitment to stand up for trans rights, opened the floodgates by eliminating the scarce federal legal protections trans people had against health care bans and the like. The onslaught quickly resulted in hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, whilst the leading national LGBT advocacy organisations kept a lid on popular outrage by praising the Biden administration every time they tweeted something vaguely supportive and pretending he hadn't opened the door to the health care bans.
The reactionary majority on the US Supreme Court overturned the only federal legal protection for abortion rights in the country, something that had been on the cards for decades, not that the Democrats ever felt compelled to use their various majorities in both houses to do anything about that, or, say, to provide statutory protection for LGBT rights. The Democrats had, after all, already begun distancing themselves from abortion rights - in the name of being a big tent - in the Clinton years.
The US empire was thrown into crisis mode internationally with the rapid Palestinian victory over Israel's hated Gaza Division. The IDF, whose 'deterrence capacity' was the linchpin of US rule over the Arab-Iranian region, shat the bed comprehensively, descended into utter chaos, killed hundreds of their own people rather than let them be captured, and lied about it. Within days, the Israeli leadership had announced a plan to exterminate the entire population of Gaza, and the US had assured them of their unwavering support. As images of the sheer extent, sadism, and depravity of the slaughter led millions to protest, a bipartisan coalition formed to smear the protesters and use the opportunity to impose draconian repression of student protest. The millions of protesters were repeatedly accused of being foreign agents by leading politicians, such as Nancy Pelosi, though there was some disagreement as to what official enemy they were meant to be in the pay of (China, Iran, and Russia being the main contenders).
Amidst the mass slaughter of Palestinians and the reign of terror unleashed on trans people at home, not forgetting the ongoing ravages of a pandemic that is claiming more victims now than in the days when it was officially acknowledged in the US, the Democrats decided that the theme of their national convention would be 'joyful politics', exemplified by a series of anti-choice Republicans and racist sheriffs on stage , a ban on any speaker of Palestinian descent, and the disappearance of support for trans people from the agenda. Republican campaign ads repeatedly attacked trans people, and leading Democrats responded by steadfastly refusing to come to their defence.
Against this background, the most unpopular man in modern US politics was able to win by default, coming in a distant second to abstention, and stands on the shoulders of his predecessors as he continues the ongoing move towards fascism.
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