In the run up to the 2024 presidential election, we are experiencing the revamp of the exhausted discourse around whether or not one should, or rather, whether or not one needs to vote for Joe Biden. It is a familiar discourse, one that has been rehashed every four years for at least the last three decades, each time presented as novel, critical, and the difference between life and death, fascism and democracy.
The argument for why one must support the Democratic Party takes various similar forms, one of the most popular being the argument for the “lesser evil.” You may commonly hear proponents of the “lesser evil” argument give the sympathetic appeal of “yes, this guy sucks, but the other guy is much worse.” This argument fails to contend with the question of how meaningfully different are the two major political parties from one another. It fails to understand in what ways the two parties are identical and in what ways every “Democratic” president has furthered if not championed the reactionary political objectives that “lesser evil”-ists claim are the main goals of the GOP.
An extremely popular variant of the “lesser evil” justification among left-liberals is the “vote against fascism” trend. They say we must vote for the Democrats because the Republicans are “literally” fascists who will curtail democratic rights, exact “totalitarian” control over the U.S. political sphere, and bring about a fascist state. In order to avoid this eventuality, we must vote for Gore/Clinton/Obama/Biden to save democracy from the scheming fascists.
This position is championed by left-liberals and so-called “socialist” organizations alike. While it accurately identifies the fascist nature of the Republican Party, it is purely coincidental due to the fact that it betrays a complete misunderstanding of fascism in the most basic sense.
It is merely a consequence of political circumstance and colonial/imperial rivalry that the U.S., the U.K., and the other allies fell on the opposite side of the battle lines from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930’s and 40’s. Look no further than the utter enchantment of the American bourgeoisie by Hitler in the run-up to WWII or the direct collaboration by U.S. firms such as IBM, JPMorgan Chase, the Associated Press, General Motors, or Ford, summed up so eloquently by General George S. Patton when he remarked that “we’ve been fighting the wrong enemy (the Germans)” and that the US should have been fighting the communists all along. As a result of this ideological and political alignment with Nazi Germany, in the wake of WWII and the near global acknowledgement of the inherent evil of fascism, it became necessary for the U.S. to wash its hands of Nazism, make clear its opposition to fascism, and obfuscate its alignment with the fascists by putting forward a rigid, superficial, and non-materialist definition of fascism. What we’ve been taught by our education system and our popular media is that the outward form of Nazism is the definition of fascism, and anything that does not look or sound exactly like Nazism cannot possibly be fascism.
This superficial definition is very convenient for the U.S. ruling class in a few key ways. First, it allows the propagation of the narrative that the U.S. and the Allies “defeated” fascism in 1945, that the good guys won, and that all is well and good in the world. Secondly, it allows the ruling class to conflate fascism and socialism by pointing to political purges or the persecution of counter-revolutionaries in socialist countries as equivalent to the repressive acts of the Nazis. And thirdly, it allows the U.S. to obfuscate its historical connection to fascism and to hide the machinations of global fascism since 1945 from the public eye. This simplistic analysis of fascism states that this one specific form of fascism is the extent of fascism, and it ignores the economic function of fascism and its use as a historical tool of class power to fight against revolutionary change.
When socialists legitimize this definition, they effectively whitewash the history of fascism and its current day expressions.
What is fascism?
Fascists first achieved political power in Italy in 1922 with the appointment of Benito Mussolini to the position of Prime Minister, but it achieved primary historical relevance in the form of the National Socialist German Workers Party, a.k.a. the Nazi Party, which took power in 1933 with the appointment of Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
In both Germany and Italy, the fascist political movement found its roots in the persecution of Communists, as it was utilized as an indispensable tool of the bourgeois state to combat rising class consciousness during post-WWI economic instability. The Nazi Party in particular found its roots in the Freikorps, a collection of paramilitary militias which consisted in a large part of German WWI veterans, that were utilized by the Weimar Republic government to put down the Communist revolutionary movement in 1919, led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht and their KPD.
History demonstrates the role of fascism as a tool to preserve capital in the face of political and economic unrest. Post-WWI Germany and Italy faced extreme economic hardship which naturally saw the formation of a strong socialist movement spurred on by the then-recent victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. The fascists were first utilized by the bourgeois state to put down the progressive anti-capitalist forces to protect the existing capitalist order from the calls for revolution. Upon taking power, the fascists in both Germany and Italy continued this trend, not only furthering the persecution of Communists, but utilizing their newfound political power to shore up the broken economies.
As Michael Parenti points out in his book Black Shirts and Reds:
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut…
But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable (sic) occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task, Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.
What this reveals is the economic essence of fascism. Fascism is an order of austerity, a plundering of the public sectors by the private, taking away the menial social concessions from the working classes and enforcing the dictatorship of capital.
In early 20th century Europe, this took the form of the Italian National Fascist Party, the German Nazi Party, and the Francoist Nationalist Faction in Spain.
The final paragraph in the above-quoted section describes how the fascists at this time imposed their economic order. Jack-booted thugs, extrajudicial assassinations, secret police, and Heil Hitler’s were the measures necessary to achieve the economic goals of fascism in Western Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. But they do not define fascism in their own right.
The Rise of Neoliberalism
In the 1960’s and 70’s the falling rate of profit and global economic downturn again threatened the rule of international capital. As a result, researchers at the University of Chicago devised a new economic order known today as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism saw its entrance into the global political and economic spheres with the administrations of Reagan in the U.S. and Thatcher in the U.K. in 1980.
What neoliberalism aimed to do was devise new methods for the generation of profit. To this end, the new neoliberal regimes gutted public funds and social services, smashed organized labor — epitomized by the brutal crushing of the Miners Strike by Thatcher in 1985 — and imposed a ruthless austerity regime.
There is a reason that the outwardly fascist Pinochet government in Chile served as the Chicago Boys’ laboratory for neoliberal economic policy. The economic aims of fascism and neoliberalism are identical. Neoliberalism is merely the perfected form of fascism, capable of disguising its austerity regime behind a veneer of liberal democratic reform.
As Parenti again puts it, neoliberalism was able to “achieve fascism’s class goals within the confines of quasi-democratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jack-booted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; convince the people that the government is the enemy — especially the public service sector — while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute income upward.”
Here we can see how the ruling class ingeniously achieved the implementation of fascism without the overt political structure that was necessary for fascist organization in early 20th century Europe. Here we can see how the essence of fascism, the economic arrangement of fascism, has been effectively operating in the U.S. for the last 44 years.
Fascism and Colonialism
If, perhaps, you are not convinced, and you believe that a definition of fascism must include the same overt repressive elements of its superstructure, let us turn to the definition from Aimé Césaire, who, in his essay “Discourse on Colonialism” argues that fascism is merely an extension of colonial policy. In essence, the barbaric and violent rule of European fascism in the form of Nazism is a reflection of the rule of the colonialists over their territories.
It is easy to see the merits of this argument. After all, the dictatorial “totalitarian” rule of the colonizers complete with extrajudicial killings, crushing of organized labor in the form of national rebellion, and the denial of democratic rights to the Indigenous is almost indistinguishable from the violent state practices of European fascism. Indeed, when we analyze the systematic genocide of those deemed “undesirable” during the Holocaust, we can directly trace the origins of those practices to the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in the German colonial territories in South West Africa (present day Namibia) between 1904 and 1908.
In the book Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman shows in great detail how Hitler pulled much of his inspiration for racist, genocidal practices in Germany from colonial practice in America. He argues that Lebensraum was directly inspired by the American settler ideology of Manifest Destiny, and notes that Hitler literally calls out practices of racial segregation in the U.S. in Mein Kampf as admirable practices that he wanted to, and did, impose in Germany.
When we acknowledge the colonial legacy of Nazism and fascist political policy, we can begin to analyze the curious case of settler colonialism. In a settler colonial society, the colonial practices are already turned inward from the outset. Genocide, extrajudicial murder, racial stratification of society, state violence used to curtail the democratic rights of “undesirables”, all of these are things that one may argue are characteristic of fascist political formation, and indeed, all of these things have been true about the United States since it declared independence in 1776. In this way, it can be argued that not only is the U.S. still fascist today, it has been quintessentially fascist since the day it was established, albeit in various stages of development.
Over the past several months, The Red Clarion has published a number of articles detailing the continuation of the colonial legacy and the overt fascist practices of the U.S. government: SCOTUS Vision: Debtors’ Prison, Abbott’s Stormtroopers Beat a Man to Death in Texas, Police Murder Reminds Us of Their True Purpose, Fascist Court Strips Right to Protest, No Free Speech About Palestine, Kansas Police Kill Newspaper Owner, SCOTUS Denies Navajo Nation Water, Haaland V. Brackeen, and many others.
Here we can see that those jack-booted thugs that liberals say must accompany any implementation of actually-existing fascism are already here. The CIA and the FBI have been committing extrajudicial assassinations and murder since their inception. Armed state military forces in the form of DHS round up non-white immigrants at the border and imprison them in concentration camps. Unmarked vans drive around in the middle of the night and disappear protestors off the street. Communist and anarchist actors are labeled domestic terrorists and political dissidents such as Kevin Rashid Johnson and Jalil Muntaqim and Assata Shakur are already prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
And all of this done under the careful direction of the political establishment, regardless of party affiliation.
A key element of the social expression of fascism is scapegoat-ism and the instigation of racial hostilities. Fascism is able to inspire collaboration of the various classes of capitalist society and orient them away from the state and the economic base by pinning the ills of society upon a “subhuman” class of undesirables, typically described as having some inherent criminal element. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people, the Roma people, and those deemed socially or politically deviant, such as LGBT people and Communists. In the U.S., it is easy to see this very same pattern, fomented by the political and media class, and not just elements of those we would typically consider “right wingers”. Never forget that Hillary Clinton justified the expansion of the prison system with her description of Black teens as “superpredators” in the 90’s or that the immigrant detention centers were largely established under the Obama administration.
Any way you want to spin it, there is no denying that fascism already exists in America, making the drive to fall in behind Joe Biden and vote out fascism in November completely nonsensical. Biden and Trump are both fascists of the same variety, one just has a greater degree of deniability.
Can You Vote Out Fascism?
Let us, for the sake of argument, ignore everything written in this essay up to this point. Let us say that the Democratic Party are not fascists, that fascism is not already here, and that the GOP does constitute the threat to democracy that “lesser evil”-ists are so concerned with. Can you beat fascism at the ballot?
In 1922, the Italian Blackshirts marched on Rome and occupied various government buildings to demand the resignation of the liberal Prime Minister Luigi Facta. When the king refused to enact martial law to quash the rebellion, Facta resigned and Mussolini was appointed prime minister, bringing the National Fascist Party into power. In 1932, a presidential election was held in Germany with the three front-running candidates consisting of independent Paul von Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party, and Ernst Thälman of the Communist Party. The election went overwhelmingly in the favor of Hindenburg, who was elected president with 53% of the vote. In 1933, after the failure of parliament to establish a majority government, Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the office of the chancellor, bringing the Nazi Party into power for the first time.
What do these historical examples show us? They show us that traditional fascist dictators do not need to rely on democratic processes to take power. When conditions are right for them to take power, they do so, with no regard to whatever elections established the current political order. In the case of Germany, the German populace literally did vote against fascism, choosing instead to elect Hindenburg as president, however, not only did it fail to stop fascism’s rise, the outcome of the election directly led to the appointment of Hitler as chancellor of the German state.
So often accompanying the “lesser evil” discourse is the attempt to guilt trip skeptics into voting for the Democrats through the assertion that not voting or, god forbid, voting third-party is tantamount to siding with the fascists. But this is as nonsensical as claiming that Thälman is in part responsible for the rise of the Nazis because he took votes away from Hindenburg.
What is most lacking from the drive to “vote out fascism” is a historical, class-based perspective. Ultimately, Hitler does not fascism make. Fascism is not a single individual, and preventing an individual from achieving a certain political status will do little to stem the rise of fascist power if such a political movement is truly in motion. Fascism is a historical force, and traditional Nazi-esque fascists are utterly unconcerned with democratic processes. They will take power whether you vote for them, against them, or not at all.
This question is explored further in the Red Clarion article, You Can’t Vote Against Fascism.
Presenting an Alternative
In the months leading up to this election, the Democratic Party has been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy due to the failures of the Biden administration to fight against reactionary policy and champion the progressive measures demanded by the people. Between the failure of the Biden administration to address the continued COVID-19 Pandemic, to enact critical environmental policy, to stop the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to stem the revocation of Trans rights nationwide, and most critically, to stop supporting the genocide in Palestine, people all over the country are beginning to see the bankruptcy of bourgeois electoralism. Following the presidential debate on June 27th, even the liberal media class has begun to publicly question the legitimacy of another Joe Biden presidency.
Crises such as this one are the opportunities for revolutionary alternatives to step into the void and make themselves known. Millions and millions of people are right now searching for an alternative to the naked bankruptcy of the U.S. political establishment. Now is the time for the socialist left to come together and present a political formation that clarifies its distinction from corrupt bourgeois electoralism and champions revolutionary change.
Instead, our “comrades” are asking us to support a Democratic presidential candidate that not even the talking heads on CNN are falling in behind, and justifying it with the nonsensical argument that our democracy is under threat and needs saving from fascism. This position betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of class politics. It serves only to hide the realities of existing American fascism and obfuscate to what extent our democratic rights have already been eroded (or were never granted in the first place). It refuses to ask the question of whose interests our “democracy” actually serves and fails to present a coherent strategy for change.
The insidiousness of the neoliberal form of fascism is its ability to disguise itself as bourgeois liberal democracy. When we fail to put forward a comprehensive analysis of fascism and acknowledge to what extent we are already embroiled in it, we aid the ruling class’ attempts to camouflage the machinations of the fascist regime. It is a thin veil and it is slipping. Let us not stand there and offer to fix it for them. We must tear it away and reveal the monstrous face of American fascism once and for all.
We must make clear to other Communists and disenfranchised and disaffected persons that fascism is already here and that participation in bourgeois elections is a distraction from revolutionary organizing. This is not to say that we must roll over for reactionaries or cape for the monsters in the GOP, but it is the starting point for the development and presentation of an alternative. It is the base upon which we can take up true, revolutionary, anti-fascist organizing and practical work. By understanding the connections between settler colonialism and fascism, fascism and neoliberalism, and nazism and Manifest Destiny, we can begin to develop a political position and a political formation capable of challenging each of these axes of oppression and changing the world for the better.
Let us internalize now the immortal words of Communist, Black Panther, and political prisoner George Jackson:
Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor, butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.
