Republicans are unhappy that a jury unanimously found their fascist leader guilty of 34 counts of fraud. Stephen Miller, who served as a senior policy and speechwriter during Trump’s presidency, hyperventilated,
“Is every House committee controlled by Republicans using its subpoena power in every way it needs to right now? Is every Republican D.A. starting every investigation they need to right now?”
Then Miller turned to a favorite tactic of fascists to claim that Democrats are something they are clearly not:
“Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat these Communists.”
Alberto Toscano in Terms of Disorder refers to this tactic as an “anti-communist without communism” distractive attack against any democratic and socially useful conditions of possibility.
In the heyday of the fascist organization Ku Klux Klan – the direct lineage to today’s Republican fascists – juries were rigged with White-sympathetic peers. The KKK made clear through intimidation and direct threats that any juror – or judge or sheriff or elected politician – who deviated from White supremacist nationalism would be duly terrorized in some form.
In the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, the Republican’s fascist beehive is swarming. The fascistic Republicans cry, How dare a jury chosen by both the prosecutor and Trump’s defense team find their supposedly untouchable fascist figurehead guilty. The only difference between the KKK in their unrestrained terrorism of the Jim Crow era and today’s Republican party and their Christian evangelical extremist base is that KKK members publicly concealed their identities whereas today’s fascists have shed their KKK sheep’s clothes.
Stephen Miller sought to elevate Trump to the status of an unquestioned supreme fascist leader within the first month of Trump’s presidency. In response to a 2017 judge’s objections to Trump’s national security authority to ban Muslims entering the U.S. from selected nations, Miller proceeded with a verbal rant that claimed,
“Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
Miller’s absolutism echoes Nazi Germany’s elevation of the “Führer’s Will” as the basis for all governmental activity. Miller holds unequivocal fascistic hopes as revealed in an investigation of his 900 pre-election private emails. Miller’s correspondence exposed a deep affinity and connection with White nationalist fringe organizations, far right media, and immigration laws from the 1930s eugenics era in the U.S. and Germany. With the relentless support of the billionaire class, the fascist Republican National Committee finds growing success to consolidate and centralize fascistic leadership through electoral politics and the judicial system.
With gloves off, Miller’s well-funded “America First Legal” is leading fascistic attacks. Three years ago Miller’s group filed at least 13 legal challenges against federal back payments to Black farmers. The purpose of the payments was to rectify a history of economic segregation and land dispossession under the White supremacist direction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “America First Legal” is also behind the lawsuits that claim the January 6, 2021, fascistic attackers on the U.S. Capitol have been falsely charged.
Miller’s approach fits with the Republican National Committee’s claim that the Capitol attack was somehow “legitimate political discourse.” Never mind that the fascist wannabees violently vandalized the Capitol to stop the affirmation of Biden’s electoral college win, an attack led to the deaths of five people.
Today Miller has the financial fire-power to direct and fund his fellow legislative fascist to engage in hyperbolic attacks on anyone who challenges Trump.
Yes, fascism can and is happening in the U.S., it just doesn’t smell and look exactly like the 1930s and 1940s fascism witnessed in Germany and Italy.
In the midst of the Great Depression and sensing the political winds of fascist sympathies in the United States, Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here captured the threatening zeitgeist of his day. He was writing in an era of wide-spread antisemitism with significant pockets of support for Nazi Germany and U.S. corporations investments in fascist Italy and Germany. Lewis’s novel presented a dystopian nation that had slipped into a homegrown version of fascism.
Lewis’s liberal journalist character finds himself self-censoring for fear of far-right reprisals and consoled his readers in the belief that after the election of a fascistic president “the hysteria can’t last.” Despite the outcome of ensuing fascist politics, the journalist remained in disbelief about the new president: “The one thing that most perplexed him was that there could be a dictator seemingly so different from the fervent Hitlers and gesticulating Fascists…, a dictator with something of the earthy American sense of humor.” The novel’s journalist continued to privately express his belief, “It can’t happen here.”
I’m left wondering if a worn-out electorate and a Tik-Tok distracted public of YouTube influencers will simply yawn their way into living in 21st century fascistic dystopia. Or will the Democratic Party find its financial backbone to align, not with Wall Street, but with concerned and progressive citizens to launch a civic counter-attack on the very real rise of fascism in 2025 and beyond?