American Fascism?

I don't even know why I bother to put a question-mark there. The question has been answered: yes, we're looking at a resurgence of American fascism. Maybe the question-mark is only there to soften the blow for those who are still in denial, are unaware of the fact that fascism was very much alive in America during the 1920s and 1930s, or have been blind to the sharp move to the far right of America's first right-wing party.

I say "first" because America has two right-wing political parties; the Democratic Party is just "Republican-light," and have taken over the position occupied by the GOP during the Reagan years. Barack Obama even said in an interview once that his positions were like those of the Republican Party just a few decades before: "The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican," were more or less his exact words responding to yet another accusation about him wanting to set up a socialist economic system. Republicans will call anyone and anything to their left socialist or communist; that's just how they roll...

Fascism is found at the extreme right-wing side of the political spectrum, and that's where the GOP has landed after decades of moving in that direction, helped by the unwillingness of Democrats to fight back; all Democrats do is hold the line every time the Republicans move further to the right. You see, Democrats aren't reactionaries, where Republicans are. They are willing to pull back on every little progressive victory by Democrats and true left-wing populist forces. One of the best tweets on this subject I've ever seen was this:

"It's weird how the Democrats aren't socialists, but Republicans say they are, and many Republicans are fascists, but Democrats won't say they are"
_{source: Max Berger on Twitter, June 7, 2021}

A year has passed since then, and the good news is that the F-word is more freely discussed now. Now let me dispel a couple of common misunderstandings about American fascism. First, this is not the first time fascism gains support among large parts of the American population. The Ku Klux Klan was (and still is) a fascist movement whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Catholics, and Native Americans as well as immigrants, leftists, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, abortion providers and atheists. Note the "leftists" in there; fascism is a right-wing conservative reactionary ideology opposed to all kinds of progressiveness. The Catholics are in there because of the KKK's exclusive appeal toward white Protestants; it opposed Jews, blacks, Catholics, and newly arriving Southern and Eastern European immigrants such as Italians, Russians, and Lithuanians, many of whom were Jewish or Catholic.

This is mainly about the Second KKK or the "Second Klan," founded in 1915. On Memorial Day in 1927, over a thousand Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members marched in a Queens parade to protest "Native-born Protestant Americans" being "assaulted by Roman Catholic police of New York City," and seven men were arrested that day. Guess who was among those arrested; a 21-year old Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump, although there is no evidence that he supported the organization. Yes, from the former president we only have to go back one generation to arrive at the previous period in American history when fascism was very much alive, and the KKK is but one of many far-right and fascist movements active in the country at that time.

The second common misunderstanding about all this is that not all supporters of fascist movements are fascists themselves. This is a very important point to fully understand; not all who vote Republican are fascists, in fact it's probably a very small minority. The same goes for Trump's supporters. Even the German soldiers in the Second World War weren't all fascists. But there comes a day when they all have to reckon with the fact that they unwittingly gave support to forces that are anti-democratic and, in the case of America and Trump, almost lost what little's left of that democracy. Here's what Sarah Churchwell says in the below linked video about observations she made during the Trump presidency:

We've had the military attacking peaceful protesters, a private army paid for by the leader's enablers, paramilitaries mobilized by the leader, separatist flags, not just the Confederate Flag and the Nazi flag but also the Thin Blue Line flag to support the leader, we've had the delegitimization of political opposition, we've had the demonization of political opposition, the refusal of a peaceful transfer of power, the attempt at overturning the election, the attempt to co-opt the military, the attacks on the free press, the concentration camps, the eugenicist nativist xenophobia, the fetishized masculine strong-man, the demagoguery, the cult of the leader, the nostalgic agrarianism, the cults of tradition, the demonization of critics and the free press, the hostility to intellectualism and modernism, the racialized sense of economic grievance, the exclusionary defenses against contamination, the counter-revolutionary corporatism, the stuffing the courts with unqualified ideologues, the Big Lie, the stab in the back, the seditious putsch, and now the embedding of the supporters of that putsch in democratic government.

Mind you, this was in 2021, before the overturning of Roe v.Wade, the January 6 Commission and the latest allegations against Trump and the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago. The participants in the discussion linked below reflect on the question: Fascism in America? And the answer is, like I said in the introduction, "yes!" It's about an hour long and is well worth anyone's time who still doubts the reality of the resurgence of fascism in the world's most powerful country.

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