Know Your Enemy: Fascism in the US

By Jonathan Kay

Understanding the Far-Right Threat in Order to Fight It

The growth of the far right in the US has taken on troubling proportions. Stimulated by the success of Donald Trump’s far-right populism, small but nonetheless dangerous openly-fascist groups are mushrooming alongside the radicalizing right wing of the GOP. The neoliberal political system that has been dominant over the past half-century is deteriorating, increasingly marked by widespread anger and frustration with politics as usual.

This is driving a huge polarization in society, with many people searching for a way to win economic, racial and gender justice and developing left-wing ideas; meanwhile, other sections of society are increasingly turning to nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.   

While the far right has not shown an ability to win majority support in society, that has not stopped them from trying to enforce their views on society by building an active and organized political movement around far-right ideas and stirring up culture-war battles to drive wedges wherever they can (while still enlisting the help of billionaire backers at every opportunity). 

Fascism is not just right-wing authoritarianism; it is a reactionary movement unleashed in response to the rise of working-class challenges to capitalism.

It is this movement-based nature of the current far-right threat that makes it especially serious, with worrisome parallels to the early stages in the development of fascist movements in the 1920s and ’30s. Alongside white supremacy, today’s neo-fascist “traditionalists” often focus on gender and sexuality, placing the blame on forces such as the LGBTQ movement for the “degeneration” of society and seeking to squeeze trans and queer people out of existence. The urgency of this threat means we need to take seriously the task of studying the nature of these types of movements and how best to fight back against them.

What Is Fascism?

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, fascism has become a household term in the United States, though in a confused and often shallow way. Entities as disparate as Russia, Iran, supporters of Donald Trump, supporters of Joe Biden, and Barbie have been called fascist on large platforms by people with ideologies as diverse as their targets. Some Marxist traditions reject the dominant impressionistic usage of the term, in favor of more precise, scientific descriptions of fascism, but at times use definitions so restrictive that nothing besides the 20th century fascist movements of Germany and Italy could ever satisfy the criteria. 

To most effectively fight fascism, it’s necessary to differentiate it from other authoritarian trends, understand its historical development and significant parallels to current developments. This can help the socialist and labor movement today to identify what actions can be taken to defeat these threats.

An early attempt at a scientific definition of fascism was developed by the Marxist Leon Trotsky. In his 1932 work What Next? Vital Questions of the German Proletariat, he wrote:

At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. […] And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. […] When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed […] but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.

The more the capitalists’ normal methods and institutions start to seem inadequate for stemming the crisis and preventing workers from taking power, the more willing is the bourgeoisie to let fascism – the political embodiment of the impotent rage and terror of the socially frustrated middle strata – off the leash.

Why the Petty Bourgeoisie? 

Leon Trotsky correctly identified the class base of fascism as the petty bourgeoisie, spurred onward by finance capital in a useful but contradictory relationship.

The big bourgeoisie, and specifically finance capital, have the predominant influence over capitalist society, but in a period of critical instability their numbers are too small and their influence too diffuse to directly maintain the usual degree of control over society. The middle classes are significantly more numerous than large capitalists and, crucially, they are incapable of an independent role in class struggle. Being petty bourgeois is an unstable position in capitalist society: they are constantly in danger of being pushed down into the working class and the only lasting escape is either through a workers’ revolution or becoming bourgeois. They are a follower class, and will tend to support whichever class seems to offer the greatest hope of a stable future, with splits regularly developing between different layers who take on different allegiances.

When society is running relatively smoothly, capitalists maintain their rule over society with ideological dominance (such as through media, churches, and schools) and the repressive apparatus of the state. However, things are not running smoothly. Desperation over economic decline, wars driven by US imperialism trying to impose its rule on a disintegrating world, a collapse of the neoliberal order without any replacement in sight – all of that leads to an increasing search for an alternative. This has been expressed recently in many ways on the left: the Black Lives Matter movement, attempts to rebuild labor, the million-strong campaigns of Bernie Sanders for a “political revolution against the billionaire class,” and the growth of DSA. However, the reaction to capitalist decline has also been visible on the right, from the Tea Party movement to a radicalizing evangelical movement to Donald Trump’s populism.

In times like these, the repressive forces of the capitalist state are emboldened and authoritarianism becomes increasingly visible. 

Historically, we see that in the periods immediately before the rise of fascism, business as usual for the bourgeoisie has driven society to the brink of collapse. Capitalist authoritarianism is no longer enough to keep people in check. The middle classes feel this, and become increasingly agitated as they see no way out through their own power. If the working class does not offer a lead toward a socialist alternative to the capitalist crisis, the situation is ripe for the bourgeoisie to finance the most extreme elements of the middle classes, to train them, to arm them, and to direct them against the elements of society protesting the crisis.

Fascism is not just right-wing authoritarianism; it is a reactionary movement unleashed in response to the rise of working class challenges to capitalism, aiming to end the threat with the barrel of a gun. It is born of highly-decayed capitalist societies and exists only to extend the life of the decaying body.

Where Are They Now?

Many in the United States see Donald Trump and the most recent wave of extremist right-wing Republicans as evidence that we are living under fascism. Indeed, organic reactionary leaders are emerging out of or affiliating with right-wing paramilitary groups like the Three Percenters (Lauren Boebert) and Oathkeepers (Paul Gosar), which are fertile ground for developing the leadership of a future fascist movement. But it is important to our strategy to draw out two significant distinctions.

First, we should acknowledge the difference between fascism and other forms of authoritarianism. Fascism is a specific form of reaction, not an umbrella term. In most cases the degree of martial domination of society described in the Trotsky quote above is neither necessary nor desirable to the big bourgeoisie and the mass of the petty bourgeoisie. 

The second distinction important to our strategy is the difference between a fascist individual and a fascist movement. A fascist individual may personally like fascism, be inspired by it, or emulate its politics, but a fascist individual is meaningless without a fascist movement and the conditions that produce such a movement.

Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, is, despite her occasional protest, almost certainly an ideological fascist. She was the president of a fascist youth organization and loves to publicly praise Mussolini, but she rules like a fairly standard hard-right nationalist. That is, she is virulently anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant, and is in favor of restricting abortion rights, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and increasing protective tariffs. She has so far been content to use her bully pulpit and achieve mostly incremental parliamentary gains. There has been no crisis significant enough to require or enable more direct intervention and there is as yet no mass base to carry out fascist forms of direct action. In this way, despite being a fascist individual, her government has not made a fundamental break from other right-wing governments in Italy, such as that of Silvio Berlusconi or Giulio Andreotti.

Similarly, Donald Trump, despite adding fuel to the rising fires of all that is most socially repugnant in America, governed surprisingly similarly to previous Republican administrations in terms of most of the policies he enacted. Whether an individual is fascist or not can be an interesting or useful question, but it is impossible to see inside a person’s heart, and it is more essential to understand the conditions that individual operates within. For fascism, that means focusing on the movement and the potential for such.

The Kernel of Fascism

What we are witnessing today is the creation of a poisonous soil where future fascist movements can grow. Racist, nationalist, anti-worker, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic ideas are tested out, developed, and fine-tuned to arouse the rage of people who feel displaced and left out of society. A movement is being built, not necessarily to win a majority in society, but to force through a rollback of rights won over decades past.

Trump’s administration both emboldened the hard-core of a future fascist movement and temporarily marginalized them among broader layers of society. This marginalization in turn helps to solidify that conscious core of the far-right, sharpening their break from the standard capitalist political spectrum and expanding the potential base for future fascist projects. 

The most striking example of this is the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. Paramilitary organizations like the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers were the most coordinated elements of the riot, but they carried behind them a group mostly composed of small business owners and white-collar professionals. The lumpen and criminal elements that have historically accounted for the majority of right-wing extremists in the US were also present, but in this case they constituted less than a third of the participants.

These groups are the core that fascism is most likely to organize around, and it is extremely concerning to see them put into motion. But the ultimate effect of the fiasco of January 6 was a marked shift in public consciousness away from (an admittedly poorly-defined) “extremism,” towards a desire for the more mundane capitalist authoritarianism we are used to, and a temporary increase in state repression against these neo-fascist forces. 

How to Fight Them

Socialists and the labor movement cannot rely on the tools of bourgeois state repression to fight fascism, as those tools are under the direction of an enemy class and are indeed well-suited for fighting a workers’ movement. Today the capitalist state might express an interest in reducing the activities of pre-fascist forces. Tomorrow the capitalist class may be more interested in reducing the activities of working-class and socialist forces and the actions of the state will follow. 

The task of Marxists today is to help build a united front against fascism – banding together to propose initiatives and take joint action with broader workers’ organizations while still maintaining political and organizational independence from reformist and liberal groups. 

Fighting fascism and the far-right has two main tasks. On the one hand, it is about offering a way out of the crisis of capitalism through building a socialist movement with strong, independent working-class organizations. On the other hand, it is about building a united movement against the fascists and the far-right.

These two poles go together: while not shying away from coalitions to actively oppose the far right, the differences between socialist/working-class policies and other ideas in such coalitions need to be made visible. It will not work to fight the right if socialists and labor appear as an appendix of the pro-capitalist Democratic Party.

It is easier to win workers in red states away from Trumpian ideas and toward socialist ones than to convince them to support the corrupt Democratic Party. Bernie Sandersʼ campaign showed the deep potential for building support for socialist and working-class ideas – and also the limits of what can be realistically achieved within the Democratic Party.

The task is to build a socialist movement and a working-class party that can fight all far-right threats and offer an alternative to all capitalist policies, including liberal ones.

Unlike the ultraleft refusal to engage in negotiations or joint actions with the reformist organizations at all, such as that seen under the Comintern’s 1928-1934 “Third Period” policy (which considered even the reformists and liberals to be “social fascists”), a united-front approach recognizes the seriousness of the far-right threat and the need to direct the combined efforts of the widest possible sections of the workers’ movement against it.

And unlike tactics that do away with organized opposition to the dominant reformist organizations by accepting a joint program of action with liberal capitalist forces even in governments – such as the Comintern’s 1934-1939 “Popular Front” policy – a united-front approach stems from a recognition that forces such as the pro-capitalist center-left parties and trade-union bureaucracy are still ultimately enemies to be defeated, with any compromises or coordination with them being purely tactical and situational. 

Something akin to the Popular Front theory of antifascism is also widespread on both the anarcho-liberal and right-reformist wings of DSA, in which the need to defeat Republican fascists is so overwhelmingly dire that we cannot afford to take any action which harms their other ostensible opponents, the Democrats, who are more powerful than us and thus must be propped up until the fascist threat is over.

The Popular Front theory does not contend with the fact that fascism arises precisely out of the collapse of the society dominated by these liberal organizations, and that if they were not already hated and distrusted for that failure and instability there would not be fascism. Nor does it contend with the fact that these organizations are not particularly committed to fighting the rise of fascism. Democrats will condemn Republicans as fascists at the same time as they fetishize bipartisanship.

Most damning, the Popular Front does not propose a method by which we are to secure a base for ourselves among workers who are appalled by the far-right and by the Democrats, and who are desperately searching for a way forward.