By Barry Sheppard
Donald Trump and his Republicans now hold majorities in the House and Senate. The ruling authority of the third branch of government, the judiciary, is the Supreme Court, which already has a six to three majority of right wing justices. The top court can overrule lower court decisions, and laws passed by Congress.
While Trump is not yet president, he is taking steps to prepare what he will do after his January 20 inauguration,
One of these is to continue Biden’s drive to increase production of fossil fuels. “Drill, baby drill!” Trump says climate change is a hoax, while his vice president J.D. Vance, thinks it is real. Biden also says he thinks it is real. But Vance and Biden agree with Trump to keep increasing fossil fuels, and to hell with the climate! Under capitalism it cannot be otherwise. Profits trump sanity! The same with endless imperialist wars!
Trump also announced that he will fire top generals in the army whom he says are “woke.” What he means by that is that they are proponents, in his view, of DEI — “diversity, equality and inclusiveness” of Blacks and other people of color and women in the armed forces. He wants generals who agree with his racism and misogyny, and who are loyal to him.
This is part of the Republicans’ drive against DEI in all aspects of society – in education, employment and other spheres. It includes affirmative action. Opposition to this reactionary offensive against previous gains made by mass struggle is dismissed as “reverse racism” against whites. Democrats agree by their silence, when not overtly.
The ruling capitalist elite in its majority want to move against these gains and other victories of past mass struggles and radicalization. This is part of the move to the right of both parties.
In the recent election the Democrats and Harris made clear that like the Republicans, they aim to go all out in “sealing the border” with Mexico against the mostly non-white immigrants seeking asylum from the ever-declining social conditions in Central America, the Caribbean and parts of South America. These are undoubtedly caused by U.S. imperialist exploitation, sanctions, wars, and the overthrow of governments that resist U.S. diminution.
Trump threatens mass deportation
Trump says he will also “on the first day” of his presidency order that all immigrants who don’t have documents be rounded up and deported. He refers to the mass deportations of Mexicans in the Eisenhower era of upwards of 1.3 million who were swept up by Immigration and Naturalization Service officers. The INS was a precursor of ICE, Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement. That was called by the racist name of “Operation Wetback” referring to Mexicans who swam across the border Rio Grand River.
Trump is preparing now to organize his mass deportation order. He says he will do this by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. He says, ‘You know 1798, that’s when they ran the country a little tougher than we run it today.”
Trump has also named three people who will head up his mass deportation after his January 20 inauguration. Stephen Miller has been tapped to serve as White House deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller helped orchestrate Trump’s Muslim ban, pushed for separation of families at the border, and backed the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that granted protection of undocumented people brought into the U.S. as children.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference last February, Miller said, “Seal the border, no illegals in, everyone goes out.” He said this would be accomplished “by a series of interlocking domestic and foreign policies” including with Mexico to send immigrants back to deeper into that country, not at the border. Miller would also impose “more muscular” travel bans, and “establish large-scale staging grounds” for immigrant to be placed on waiting planes.
Thomas Homan has been picked to be Trump’s “border czar.” Homan was acting director of ICE during Trump’s first term and was one of the intellectual authors of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that among other things separated children from their parents.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Norm will be Trump’s next Secretary of Homeland Security, another department that oversees immigration to prevent “enemies” from entering.
Undocumented immigrants are termed “illegal” by the government and media — but no person is “illegal.” No one says “illegal thieves” or “illegal murderers.”
Undocumented immigrants are three-quarters of U.S. agricultural workers today. They comprise more than a fifth of construction workers. They also play a large role in food processing, with about 30-50 percent of workers in meatpacking. Deporting these workers would have sharp impacts on the economy, but Trump doesn’t care about that — will big corporations in those industries care?
In discussing this on Democracy Now, Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project said the ACLU has been preparing for legal fights against Trump’s plans.
But he added, “One thing I would stress that this cannot be done solely through the courts…. It needs to be a national effort similar what happened to family separation [in Trump’s first term] where the public said ‘Wait. Enough Is Enough. That’s a red line, taking babies away,’ and went out to the streets to peacefully protest.”
We also saw demonstrations of over a million in 2006 for immigrant rights in the face of a proposed law to take them away.
What Does Trumpism Represent
During the election campaign many progressive and also some socialists claimed that Trump was a fascist and his election would mean fascism in the U.S. The way to stop this fascist threat, they spuriously argued, was to vote for Genocide Harris.
To garner a few votes toward the last weeks of the election, Harris claimed that Trump was indeed a fascist, but largely dropped the term soon after arguing that Trump was simply a threat to “democracy.” Regardless, she made sure to congratulate the “fascist” Trump when he was declared the victor. Such are the exigencies of capitalist politics!
Harris’s brief reference to Trump as a fascist at best revealed a complete lack on knowledge of what fascism really is. Or again, at best, she used the term as a last minute cheap shot to win a few “leftist” votes
Fascism: The real thing vs. Trump’s bluster
The world has witnessed fascism in action, in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain. The first two were analyzed by the Communist International in Lenin’s time, and by Trotsky in the 1930s.
These works laid the foundation of the Marxist analysis of fascism and how to fight it. In these historical experiences, fascism was seen to be an extreme form of capitalist rule that the ruling capitalist class sought to avoid except when the working class threatened to overthrow capitalism. When fascism arises it cannot be stopped by electing “democratic” capitalist parties, but only by a united working class mobilized in class combat in the streets in a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism.
The fascists are a mass movement of armed combat against working class mass organizations including socialist parties. This was seen in the uniformed battalions of “black shirts” and “brown shirts” in Italy and Germany. The police and army provided many of its combatants and came to support it as official organizations. In Spain, fascism had its origin in the army and also in dictator Francisco Franco’s ultra nationalist Falange party. Unless stopped by the working class under a conscious revolutionary leadership, which was lacking in Italy, Germany and Spain, fascism takes power in a civil war aimed at physically crushing the mass majority trade union organization of the working class, the socialist organizations and their allies among the oppressed. The leading and largely discredited “democratic” capitalist parties of Italy, Germany and Spain turned to mass fascist forces only when their very rule was threatened by mass workers’ mobilizations.
In the United States there is scarcely a hint of a shadow of a whiff of a threatened overthrow of capitalism, and no ruling class need of the extreme of fascism to prevent it.
Capitalism’s multiple forms of minority rule
There are many forms of capitalist class rule between bourgeois democracy and Fascism. One is military dictatorship. Authoritarian governments with a bourgeois-democratic veneer are an example, which we see today in Hungary and in Poland, both of which have one-party rule.
Another is what Marxists call Bonapartism, from Marx’s analysis of the overthrow of bourgeois democracy and establishment of one-man rule by Louis Bonaparte, the nephew Napoleon Bonaparte. Louis presented himself as the strongman who could “save” France from a period of political factional turmoil among and within the capitalist parties in parliament in mid-nineteenth France.
Louis Bonaparte was first elected president in 1848. In February of that year there was a revolution against the existing monarchy, supported by all classes. The proletariat initially thought its interests would be met, and even the establishment of a social republic was on the order of the day. When this turned out not to be true, a workers’ revolution erupted in Paris in July, the first such revolution in history, but it was defeated.
Subsequently, a period of political and social instability developed, before and especially after Louis was elected later that year. Louis began to project himself as the strongman who could lead the country out of the mess. He worked to win support in the army, and won support among the criminal elements. In December 1852, he led the overthrow of parliament, and declared himself Emperor, trying to establish himself like his famous uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, but was a weak reflection of that.
Of course the situation in the U.S. today is not like France in the mid-nineteenth century. Marxists however have used the lessons of 1852 to describe a situation where in a period of political and factional struggle among capitalist parties leading to paralysis, a strongman emerges who promises to “save” the nation from the mess, and takes power.
Trump has aspects of Bonapartism, in a period of factional struggle within and between the two capitalist parties. He projected in his losing campaign in 2020 and again even more loudly this year, that he was the strongman who could save the nation.
In the years following his defeat in the 2020 elections, which he claimed he had won and led a storming of the Capital in an unsuccessful bid to cast the election into doubt on January 6, 2021, Trump has succeeded in capturing the Republican Party and quelling the factional struggle within it.
The Republican Party is his party now, while the opposition Democratic Party remains in internal turmoil. In the period ahead, he will use his control of Congress to further his agenda. The Supreme Court is already behind him.
He will use the authority he will have as president, which was already in the Constitution, but which has been greatly augmented since the 1930s, to rule by presidential rulings as we have seen in both domestic and foreign policy before Trump. Anti-labor laws give him the right to intercede in any strike in the name of “national security.” We can expect him to assert even more power.
Already the president, as head of the executive branch, has increased its size and power to make rulings on very many key issues like the environment, immigration and much more. Trump says, and we should take him at his word, that he will restructure the executive branch and abolish many positive regulations won by mass actions. He threatens to diminish or abolish agencies that are charged with carrying them out. His move to weed out “woke” generals could be a precursor to putting more loyalists in charge of the military.
Needless to say, the Democrats are not now and have never been a vehicle to stop the likes of Donald Trump. Only mass actions and a broad united mass movement to oppose whatever reactionary policies Trump seeks to implement can stop him, or block whatever moves he makes in a Bonapartist [strongman] direction.
Capitalism in crisis
Today’s crisis-ridden U.S. capitalism is no longer the world hegemon, capable of freely imposing its will on its capitalist-imperialist competitors and increasingly on angry U.S. workers. Every attack on working people emanates from this crisis, from bellicose threats against immigrants, nationally oppressed minorities, women, the LGBTQI community, the environment and basic democratic rights. History repeatedly informs us that working people are fully capable of fighting back, of building independent, democratic, united mass movements to defend and advance our rights. Building this movement is the order of the day.
