The renowned twentieth century German philosopher Max Horkheimer famously remarked; “Those who do not wish to discuss capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.” He was simply admonishing those who ignored the fact that capitalism isn’t simply an economic but also a political system defined mostly by the imbalance of power between big capital and the rest of civil society. Therefore, capitalist crisis isn’t simply the inability of the economy to continue functioning at an optimal level but rather existential or potential threats to capital’s rate of profit and to its total, unfettered control of the means of production, investment decisions and all aspects of the capital/labor relationship. In this sense, crisis is defined purely according to the interests of big capital in accord with their political interests; it is a crisis of the ability to reproduce the existing relations of the system without the loss of any political control or need for deep compromise with labor. It is just such a crisis that US capitalism now faces. The ongoing shift to the extreme right over the past twenty years, culminating in the election of Donald Trump, isn’t merely about almost half a century of chronic stagnation but rather about the intensification of a class war resulting in the loss of power for capital. It therefore reveals the essentially political nature of class conflict under capitalism.
Let us begin by acknowledging the unprecedentedly authoritarian nature of Trump’s Administration. The illegal and unconstitutional calls for registering Muslims; the witch hunts taking place in federal agencies, such as the EPA, to uproot those who disagree with the president; the repression of the rights of and the public hate campaign against women and racial minorities; the attacks on and bullying of the mass media; and the current “gag order” issued by Trump to block any and all communications between federal agency personal and the US Congress all reveal the uniquely authoritarian nature of the current Trump regime. Ex-CIA official Evan McMullin, himself a conservative Republican, attacks Trump’s authoritarian tactics;
McMullin said [Trump], both before winning on Election Day and since, has relied regularly on authoritarian tactics to further empower himself at the expense of the American system of government. “He had questioned judicial independence, threatened the freedom of the press, called for violating Muslims’ equal protection under the law, promised the use of torture and attacked Americans based on their gender, race and religion...He had also undermined critical democratic norms including peaceful debate and transitions of power, commitment to truth, freedom from foreign interference and abstention from the use of executive power for political retribution.”
Authoritarian rulers typically use mass fear and doubt to control subject populations. They paint the existing reality in exaggerated, hyperbolic terms as “an utter catastrophe” and as “a looming danger” in order to instill fear and generate popular dependency upon the authoritarian rulers leadership which is characterized as “peerless” and “undaunted” in the face of any national crisis or threat real or imagined. The fanaticism of most Trump supporters engenders what Theodor Adorno referred to as “the Authoritarian Personality Complex” in which blind submission to a strong central leader is accepted. It is the authoritarian personality of the followers rather than the leader with which Adorno is preoccupied and he cites their utterly rigid polarized “black/white” concept of reality. This simplicity leads them to cling to authoritarian leadership out of sheer panic about a complex and changing reality that they are increasingly unable to understand.
In a brilliant op ed piece in the New York Times, Jason Stanley takes a quote from Hannah Arendt’s massive Tour de Force, The Origins of Totalitarianism which aptly describes the fear, paranoia, petty resentment and personal insecurities of today’s Trump supporters;
Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
The irrational fear Trump supporters had of an overly cosmopolitan and aloof “liberal elitist establishment” allegedly concealing the truth and threatening the interests of the simple good folk, believed to be the “true” Americans with their uncompromised moral righteousness and steadfast political loyalty to the nation, tells us much about the popular obsession with Hillary’s emails and the various conspiracy theories emanating from the Trump campaign that posited threats from countless nefarious elements. The more one challenged this world view, the more the masses held fast to their beliefs, paranoia and support for the new strongman. Stanley cites conclusions by Arendt about the authoritarian masses who seek comforting and simple answers from a protective leader who promises to solve all their problems as he continues to reassure them of both the righteousness of their national cause and the beauty of their popular “wisdom” which simplifies a complex reality. Stanley quotes Arendt who states that the whole problem with the authoritarian public appeal is that; “...authoritarian propaganda...cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.” Those who have been closely following the 2016 presidential campaign would certainly agree!
The abandoning of reason is a hallmark of fascism as a mass phenomenon. Individuals alienate their reasoning abilities to conform with “the crowd.” People vest all their political will, individuality, personal aspirations and beliefs in the supreme leader. Each individual ceases to think for him/herself and becomes part of a mass phenomenon abandoning individualism for conformity. Becoming part of “the crowd” and alienating ones own ability of individual self reflection to become part of the masses is essential to the success of fascism making it an essentially psychological phenomenon at the individual level. Trump supporters tend to rely on approval from others who readily confirm their views giving them a sense of belonging. Being on the “right side” is more important than authentic, independent thinking and value free investigation. Things merely become “true” through their being ceaselessly repeated publicly as facts. It is this that makes fascism-and all authoritarian movements-necessarily a mass phenomenon. Adorno concludes;
That people too often cannot see the workings of society or their own role within it is due not only to a social control that does not tell the truth but to a “blindness” that is rooted in their own psychology...there is ample evidence that people who have the greatest difficulty in facing themselves are the least able to see the way the world is made. Resistance to self insight and resistance to social facts are contrived most essentially of the same stuff.
All of this is extremely puzzling in a society that has always prized individualism and skepticism of power. It thereby also debunks the myth of American exceptionalism; under the appropriate strains the powers that be will abandon democracy, small government, freedom and individual rights for the authoritarianism that guarantees a victory for capital in the class war. Extremism becomes conceivable and real. What has historically made all this possible is capitalism’s deepening crisis and the threat the rich feel toward their dominance. Manipulating increasingly desperate people supplants democratic norms.
Donald Trump was always a fiscal conservative but the billionaire New York businessman didn’t become a pop culture icon and national celebrity by being an intolerant bigot that deals in hateful conspiracy theories and racist stereotypes. Trump become who he is today in order to run for high office in order to protect his wealth, and those of the richest one percent, by eviscerating the federal income tax system and beating back demands for greater social and economic equality. Since the early 1990s, popular cliches about the disappearing US middle class grew into a massively accepted fact all across the political spectrum. Bernie Sanders, an openly socialist candidate in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, who polled roughly 13.2 million votes, won 23 states and received 1,846 delegates to the Democratic convention all while running against a well established Democratic Party politician and spouse of a former, well loved president, did so while espousing an agenda of deep socioeconomic reform including many policies that would effectively result in a significant redistribution of income and wealth. This must have sent shivers down the spines of the very rich. That his appeal reached many in red and blue states alike was shocking to many in the economic elite.
Popular disgust and anger at the status quo had welled up in the populace by 2016. Policies such as health care reform, union rights, an increased federal minimum wage and progressive taxation were popular all across the political spectrum. Trump’s desperate bid to become president in order to stop such obvious threats to his wealth and income would explain his shift toward political extremism. His shifting of popular anger at inequality toward minorities, liberals, gays, women, foreigners and, most of all, the federal government (which is at its all time weakest and least intrusive in the affairs of big business) was an attempt to win the class war by dividing the declining middle class against itself. His correct claim that since 2001, average annual GDP growth has been anemic at under one percent (0.96 to be precise) is true yet this includes the Bush years and the resulting financial crash/recession-one of the worst in US history-which is a point he fails to stress. Instead he attempted to blame Obama for a mess that he actually cleaned up with health care reform and the creation of nearly 16 million net new jobs through stimulus spending and other measures. Rewriting history is always part of the fascist appeal.
Trump’s focus on trade agreements, like the TPP, is excessive and misleading. The TPP is miserable but is not a result of bad business dealings by government leaders as he falsely portrays. It is instead part of a two decades old global business model based entirely on the investment strategy of transnational corporations which Trump has no ability or intention of dismantling. Globalization is a stage of late capitalism, not a government policy, and it is not going to be undone by an ultra-conservative authoritarian capitalist politician who in any case benefits enormously from this very economic arrangement. The real path to restoring the middle class is not stopping immigration or scrapping “bad trade deals” that have cost jobs. The only way is to engage in a massive public investment campaign to create millions of green jobs, including in health care, alternative energy and education, raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, provide free public higher education to the middle class and fund a national mass passenger rail system to connect all our major cities. This would rebuild the middle class but threaten the profits of the rich, at least in the short term.
Trump predictably prefers to slash federal taxes mostly for the rich. His tax plan would eliminate the estate tax, the alternative minimum tax and drastically reduce federal corporate, personal income, non-corporate business “pass through” income and capital gains taxes. Estimates of the budget impact range from a loss of $600 billion to nearly a trillion a year for the first ten years. The rich will get the majority of the tax cuts, according to a report cited by Bill Moyers, with the top 1 percent receiving 47% of the total cuts in the Trump tax plan, while the bottom 60 percent will get a mere ten percent. Trump intends to massively slash all social programs and privatize many of the services that government now provides to the poor and middle class, especially in the field of health care and education. This will help pay for the tax cuts for the rich while giving private capital greater outlets for profitable investment in a era of chronic stagnation caused by low consumer income and spending. High fees for these privatized services will constitute an income shift from the middle class to the rich as formerly tax payer funded services become private businesses. The rate of profit will surely improve as a result.
It is no accident that over the past couple years the economy has slowed once again as many companies report profit declines. Trump knows that increased middle class pressures for greater social spending, income equality and improved social services will be hard to resist for many mainstream politicians. This is why he ran for president. He has no problem gutting what’s left of the US middle class all the while telling them that their demise is the fault of big government, foreign trade and supposedly “lazy people” who get government transfer payments. It’s called class war and Trump’s class is winning. It’s also the way fascism protects the rich from popular threats to the capitalist system and big capital’s rate of profit. It’s also the case that no alleged history of American exceptionalism can save us from a fascist onslaught with big capital in crisis. That can only be accomplished through the political struggles of the bottom ninety nine percent.