This Happened Here

Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America

Paul Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000516265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Nazionalismo e patriottismo

This book examines the Trump phenomenon and presidency as fascist. Fascism here connotes not generically "bad" politics or a consolidated political-economic regime (Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany) but a set of political, movement, and ideological traits understood within the context of the neoliberal-capitalist era. While Trump's election defeat is a respite, the nation is far from out of the neofascist woods. Defeating the menace will require political and societal restructuring far beyond what is imagined by Democrats. This argument is developed across seven chapters that recount Trump's assault on the 2020 election, specifically define the meaning of fascism as it is used in this book, demonstrate the neofascist nature of the Trump presidency, engage intellectual class Trumpism-fascism-denial, analyze the Trump base, root Trumpism in a longstanding and indeed founding American white nationalism, examine why Trump rose to power when he did, and suggest paths for fascism-proofing the USA.

Chapter 1 One Night of Dancing, 77 Days of Fear and Death

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242338-1

We have a Nazi problem in this country. Some 73 million people voted for it. Their leader is still in power and waging a battle to delegitimize the election he clearly lost. His followers maraud through the streets and raise $2 million for a teenage killer’s bail and destroy Black Lives Matter murals and chant “Say his name, Donald Trump,” spitting on the anguished cries of Black people whose lives are so routinely cut down by police. They don’t, for the most part, wave swastikas and salute Hitler, but we have a Nazi problem in this country…Their minds waterlogged with conspiracy theories, they take lies as truth, spread hate and bigotry, wrap themselves in several flags – American, Confederate, Blue Lives Matter – and use the Bible as a weapon of violence and repression. They are a grotesque expression of the worst of this country, of its ugly narcissism, its thuggish militarism, its ignorance and refusal to give a shit about the rest of the world. They carry the torch of slavery, genocide, and Jim Crow terror. Gunned up and mask-less, they exalt above all the right to kill…they will not go away quietly into the night.

– Coco Das, December 10, 2020

I saw this crowd of people banging on that glass screaming. Looking at their faces, it occurred to me [that] these aren’t protesters. These are people who want to do harm. What I saw in front of me, was home-grown fascism that was out of control.

– U.S. Rep. James McGovern (D-MA), January 8, 2021

The Celebration Four Years Later

The 2020 presidential election and its aftermath was an emotional roller coaster for the many tens of millions of American liberals, moderates, and progressives who wished fervently to see their nation rid of Donald Trump. That’s how I experienced it. It was strange, surreal even, to watch Election Night (November 3, 2020) on the American Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Much if not most of what mattered about the event being covered was off the table of serious discussion. Council of Foreign Relations member and PBS “NewsHour” host Judy Woodruff and her team of exceedingly polite and respectful, nonpartisan “experts” couldn’t mention that Trump had promised in advance to steal the election by declaring victory before all the mail-in ballots required by the COVID-19 pandemic he had helped fan across the nation were counted – and then by challenging those ballots in court. The talking heads carried on as if it were a completely normal election, no different than any other, calling one state after another without the slightest reference to the coup Trump had essentially pledged to undertake. So what, if as the political scientist Laura K. Field noted three days before the election, in an article titled “The Trouble with the ‘It’s Not Real Fascism’ Argument”, Trump had “in recent weeks, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, repeatedly claimed that the election outcome will be illegitimate because of massive voter fraud, and encouraged his supporters to ‘go into the polls and watch very carefully’”? “By a wide margin”, Field added, “most voters expect there will be intimidation at the polls – and indeed, it is already happening”.¹

It’s not as if these were problems raised only by officially marginalized voices on the radical Left. Eleven days before the election, the mainstream liberal political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblat issued a stirring warning in The New York Times:

The president has encouraged violent extremists; deployed law enforcement and other public institutions as weapons against rivals; and undermined the integrity of elections through false claims of fraud, attacks on mail-in voting and an apparent unwillingness to accept defeat…In this, he has been aided and abetted by a Republican Party that has fallen into the grips of white nationalism. The Republican base and its white Christian core, facing a loss of its dominant status in society, has radicalized, encouraging party leaders to engage in voter suppression, steal a Supreme Court seat in 2016 and tolerate the president’s lawless behavior. As a result, Americans today confront the prospect of a crisis-ridden election, in which they are unsure whether they will be able to cast a ballot fairly, whether their ballots will be counted, whether the candidate favored by voters will emerge victorious and whether the vote will throw the country into violence.²

None of this was evident from the reporting, commentary, facial expressions, or body language of Woodruff and her panelists. The PBS talking heads had nothing to say about the distorting effect of the racist and partisan voter suppression, both legal and extra-legal, underway across the nation. There was no reference to Trump’s clear intention of proclaiming victory before all the mail-in ballots were tabulated as the PBS “experts” boasted about the greatness of our “democratic elections”. The commentators stayed silent about the open absurdity of the 18th Century Electoral College, under whose right-leaning reign Americans still don’t elect their nation’s president by a popular vote. There was no reference to the racist, sexist, eco-cidal, literally pathogenic, and even (as I shall argue in the next three chapters) fascist dreadfulness of the Trump-Pence regime, which was on pace to kill half a million Americans by the widely hoped-for end of its terrible reign. The talking heads proceeded as if the Trump presidency was just another “conservative” Republican administration, Trump was just another Republican president, and November 3, 2020, was just another presidential election day.

Even though the final outcome was unclear at the end of the night, thanks as expected to the large number of uncounted mail-in ballots, it was evident already that Biden would not score the landslide victory many liberals and progressives had hoped for and in some cases expected. A second Trump electoral triumph seemed possible. And, sure enough, two and a half hours after “PBS” closed-up shop for the night, Trump proclaimed himself the winner and absurdly announced his determination to shut down the tally after Election Day. Along with millions of others who dreaded the menace of a second Trump term, I went to bed with a pit in my stomach.

Things got better the next day. Politically engaged Americans arose to learn that Biden could well win the constitutionally decisive Electoral College (EC) as well as the popular vote. By the end of Wednesday, November 4th, Biden was just six EC votes short of victory and many of the states still being counted were leaning his way. For many Americans, the election was playing out like the emotional inverse of Trump’s October 2020 COVID-19 infection. When Trump came down with the disease, millions quietly dreamed of the president being removed from office (and indeed from existence) only to see that he would survive (with the help of treatment available only to the privileged) and stay in office to continue his maddening war on truth, democracy, social justice, and election integrity. By contrast, millions went to sleep on election night 2020 afraid that the nation’s malignant president was going to come back stronger than ever and woke up the next day to learn that he might well be defeated and headed out the door in 77 days.

It took four more days for the Associated Press and other media outlets to call the election for Joe Biden. The news, broken late on the morning of Saturday, November 7th, elicited joyful mass outbursts across the nation. I arrived in Chicago around 8 pm that night, returning from Iowa City, where I had voted not so much “for” the corporate Democrat Joe Biden as for the removal of a cancerous tumor from the world’s most powerful office. I headed for the city’s downtown Trump Tower, walking down the middle of Michigan Avenue as cars filled mostly with young LatinX and Black people honked their horns in relief and celebration. Young people of all colors partied in the streets, “flipping the bird” at the building that bore the hated president’s name. Contrary to local radio news reports, who called the revelers “Biden supporters”, few Biden-Harris banners were in evidence. There were dozens of American flags, Mexican national flags, and Black Lives Matter banners and flags on display. I didn’t hear one person say “Joe Biden” but I heard hundreds say “Fuck Trump”, “good riddance Trump”, and the like. An older white man in tears gave passers-by the victory sign, pounding his steering wheel and horn. It was a wild and joyous public exhibition of relief and release.

Similar scenes occurred across the country. Masses of masked and multiracial young people in the nation’s cities sang and danced in the streets. The carnival-like response was understandable. The first Trump term had been a seemingly nonstop, trauma-inducing, and Orwellian nightmare of racist, sexist, eco-cidal, and disease-spreading cruelty – a rolling fascistic festival of death, madness, and despair. A second sadistic and psychotic Trump term would have been a potentially terminal tragedy for humanity, possibly something from which the nation and world could never have recovered. We seemed to have dodged a bullet aimed at decency, truth, science, humanity, public health, the common good, and the last embers of American democracy. It was an exhilarating celebration, a moment and memory that I will cherish for the rest of my life – a stark contrast, to say the least, with the scene north of Iowa City four years before, when I had stood on Interstate-80 with a mass of frightened and angry young people dreading the next few years.

The Big Chill

Then came the hangover, the big chill, as grim reminders set in. Trump and his team and Republican allies and demented hacks refused, as promised, to concede and mounted a sickening authoritarian challenge to the election’s outcome, claiming without the slightest hint of serious evidence to have been cheated out of re-election by “massive voter fraud”. Could Trump survive again, adding an election loss to COVID-19, an impeachment, a major Justice Department inquiry, and countless political fiascos to the long list of trials that had failed to knock him off his throne?

Mass Death and Depression in “Neoliberalism's Showcase”

The party was over. There were at least seven reasons to stay off the dance floor and remain vigilant and determined as the nation slouched towards the hoped-for inauguration of the nearly octogenarian corporate Democrat Joe Biden. The first and most obvious blast of cold water was the relentless and growing terror of the deadly pandemic that Trump had done so much to fuel and fan. With COVID-19 deaths topping 2,000 per day and millions relying on food pantries and soup kitchens, government failing to adequately protect masses against joblessness, sickness, and homelessness, and families unable to gather during the holidays, it was hard to stay in celebration mode. I walked through Chicago’s downtown on Thanksgiving Eve to witness police cars stationed with flashing lights every two blocks to warn off potential “looters” from the city’s impoverished, pandemic-ravaged South and West Sides. Homeless people wrapped in plastic bags slept in doorways and bus stops, surrounded by boarded-up storefronts. It felt distinctly noir and dystopian, a sentiment underscored by knowledge that suburban white-nationalist activists were planning a march to celebrate Trump’s “victory” (and to claim that the rampaging COVID-19 virus was “a hoax”) in downtown Chicago the next morning.

Reflecting on my notion that the USA was being revealed as a “failed state”, the left historian and journalist Terry Thomas reminded me that “We are living in neoliberalism’s showcase: the state of unvarnished capitalism, the winners win, and the losers lose, and the winners decide if they want to take pity on the losers. They promised us this forty years ago, and they delivered”. The proof of this harsh reality was clear as day in the spectacularly unequal and race- and class-divided³ city of Chicago.

America's “Nazi Problem”

The second and arguably biggest reason to put away the party hats was what the left writer Coco Das rightly called America’s living “Nazi problem”. Between 2016 and 2020, after four years of turning the world’s most powerful office into a breeding ground of white nationalist proto-fascism, the vicious and demented oligarch Trump had added 11 million votes. Trump expanded his base despite his nightmarish and mass-murderous, pandemic-spreading “presidential” performance (to be depicted in ugly detail in Chapter 3). This was no small matter, as the Black, Philadelphia-based civil and human rights lawyer Michael Coard reflected last December 8th:

Those 74 million [Trump voters] are absolutely frightening. They want a moron to be a permanent dictator. That’s what they want. They want to go back to the Jim Crow era. They want to disenfranchise Americans. They want to go back to the anti-science era of the Dark Ages. They want to go back to or create the Handmaid’s Tale.

This is not hyperbole. Now when I stay stuff like that, people should think I’m exaggerating, but it’s real.⁴

It was a depressingly cold fact that 74 million Americans voted to give a second apocalyptic presidential term to a man Noam Chomsky identified as “the most dangerous criminal in human history”⁵ even before Trump was clearly spreading the killer coronavirus whose lethality he privately understood in January 2020⁶ but publicly denied for months afterward.

Worse, many of those 74 million Americans had been led by Trump, most of the Republican Party, right-wing media (FOX News, the One America Network, Newsmax, right-wing talk radio, and more) to falsely believe that the election has been stolen. Fully 70 percent of Trump voter...