Last week the Federalist (a right-fascist magazine) published a new fascist manifesto. This boldness follows the capture of the United States Supreme Court by the similarly named Federalist Society and lays out the future these so-called “Federalists” imagine for their movement. The manifesto isn’t aimed at the left-fascist Democrats, but rather at other, recalcitrant members of their own right-fascist clique: the “Grand Old Party” (GOP). They stand ascendent in the most reactionary institution of a reactionary government and are poised to sweep the statehouses and legislatures of the country, to be followed by the United States Congress next month. The political content of their message is clear. To other Republicans, they say: Fall in line now with the right-fascist program, or you will be treated like more of the same left fascists that we despise.
Who are the Federalists?
More fully the “Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies,” this lawyer’s guild was founded in 1982 by a collection of students from Yale, Harvard, and University of Chicago Law. These were the dialectical opposite of the Students for a New Democratic Society, the reaction to the left-wing movements of the 1960s and 70s, and the self-professed vanguard of the right reaction. Although it began with the typical right-wing objectives of “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty, and interpreting the constitution to its original meaning,” these slogans have only ever been an obfuscation, kind sounding words to mask their real aims and interests. The Federalists are nothing more than the tip of a spear of counter-revolution that has been wielded against the working classes for decades.
Six of the nine sitting members of the Supreme Court are members or former members of the Federalist Society: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. Their presence is ubiquitous on the campus of every law school in the country. Their initial funding came from Olin Industries (an arms manufacturer and industrial chemical producer) and the Society is given donations by Google, Chevron, the Koch Brothers, the Scaifes and the Mercer family. It claims something in the order of $20 million in annual revenue. Federalist Society members have served in both the George W. Bush administration and the Trump administration.
This far-reaching organization is the sharpened spear tip of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois reactionary intelligentsia. They are the driving force behind the rightward lurch in the federal judiciary, and they have finally made their statements clear, open, and unambiguous: they are the violent and repressive wing of U.S. fascism, prepared to sweep the slate clean of their ineffectual forebears and ensure that the rising class-consciousness of the working people is defeated once and for all.
Although there are no official links between the Federalist Society and the Federalist, their membership has contributed writing to the Federalist (for instance, “I Thought I Could Be A Christian And Constitutionalist At Yale Law School. I Was Wrong”) and the magazine has been a loud supporter of Federalist judges and legal vision. They share a name, but more importantly, they share a movement between them.
The Fascist Vision
What kind of movement, asks fascist John Daniel Davidson, should the conservatives adopt? “For starters,” he answers, they must start thinking of themselves as “radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries.” Lest the message be missed, he is clear: “that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.”
Davidson rejects the small-government libertarianism of his movement as counter-productive. He argues that the right fascists must get “used to the idea of wielding power…. [b]ecause accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible.” He explicitly calls for counter-revolution, because “periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary.”
Along with the rejection of the libertarian right’s commitment to small government, Davidson rejects the “freedom of the market” and moans that it has allowed more popular but “anti-Western” ideas to flourish. This is the most troubling and dangerous part of the manifesto and comes close to being programmatic. The rough program he describes is one that:
- Uses anti-trust powers to break up Silicon Valley firms because they are petit-bourgeois strongholds, producing “woke” ideology;
- Cuts off all public funds to universities;
- Makes no-fault divorce illegal;
- Subsidizes families with children, with the clear fascist intent of “preserving the race”;
- Expands the criminal code to outlaw all abortion, everywhere, under every circumstance;
- Outlaws drag shows;
- Promises the arrest and prosecution of parents who take their children to drag shows;
- Outlaws gender-affirming care for both children and adults and makes it punishable by incarceration for the doctors performing it;
- Outlaws “teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material” — here, a coded whistle for the existence of gay and lesbian and gender-varient persons.
As the markets lurch from impending crisis to impending crisis and as the housing situation in the U.S. Empire becomes less and less tenable for more and more working people, voices like Davidson’s will only get louder. It is this very list of policies that differentiates left- and right-fascisms. Ultimately, it is the left fascists’ (like the Democrats) inability to hold an ever-vanishing center that has led and will continue to lead to the right fascist seizure of power. While Democrats and Republicans both agree on the continued liquidation and genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement and colonization of New Afrika, and support for the vast imperialist war-machine abroad, it is here where they, for the moment, diverge.
Until this point, fascism in the U.S. Empire has been content to ride quietly behind all politics, right or left, and suffuse all political decisions with its implications. It has been a secure fascism that has no need of intricate repressive machinery, because it has relied instead on an all-powerful control of the economy, on the renewing and regenerating powers of the settler-state to confront its crises by bringing new land under its control, by endless fascist war-mongering and the conquest of new markets, and so on. This has allowed the economic features of fascist organization to do most of the work and permitted the public face of the empire to wear any expression it desires. The publication of this manifesto is an important and dangerous step in the end of this self-delusion among right fascists. It represents a level of clarity and self-awareness so far lacking in modern U.S. politics; it sets out not only the fundamental ideological groundwork of fascism, exposing it to the public so it can be addressed and argued over, but also describes the basic methodology by which fascism will tighten its grip on the people of the U.S. Empire.
The day is soon coming when even the left-fascist Democratic Party will polarize and fracture into that vanishingly small group willing to stand for the liberties of the masses, and those who will ally with or become right fascists to preserve the dying order.
