Populism, Fascism, Socialism

As populist of the right and left pull American political discourse away from a pragmatic center, we are hearing warnings from each side that many on the opposing side trade in ideas that are fundamentally un-American. Bernie Sanders nearly won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016 while proudly proclaiming himself a democratic socialist. He successfully tugged the base of the party to the left around issues such as taxes, health care and access to higher education. President Trump signaled in his State of the Union address that a creeping socialism is taking over the Democratic Party and that such ideological thinking is un-American. Already we see front-running Dems such as Elizabeth Warren proclaim that she is a capitalist, and Kamala Harris declare that she is not a democratic socialist.

From the left many journalists and activists have called President Trump a racist because of his vitriolic rhetoric toward Latinos and Muslims on immigration issues and his reference to Africa as “shithole countries.”  And recently two newly-elected Democratic congresswomen,  Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, boldly asserted that the president is a racist. No elected official has yet called Trump a fascist, but many voices, not all of them from the far left, have started to do so. According to conventional wisdom, one of the ways that America has been exceptional historically, is that we prefer pragmatism, believing in what works in the everyday world, to abstract and un-American ideologies like fascism and socialism. So hearing our president and leading contenders from the other party be described in such extreme ideological terms is distressing.

The United States is in a period of crisis that is one of the most serious in our history. The twin challenges of the browning of America and the hangover from the Great Recession have shaken the post-Cold War political consensus and severely wounded the establishment of both major parties who signed onto it.  The combined pressures of populist forces such as the Tea Party from the right and the Occupy Movement from left combined to make 2016 a year for shaking up the political establishment. Both sides felt the shock from the Recession and wanted to make corporate America more accountable to the people. The culturally conservative sections of the right were still also smarting from eight years of a Black president and fearful of the oncoming minority majority. The populist left, mobilized by massive pro-immigration rallies in 2006, the Black Lives Matter movement from 2014 and the Standing Rock anti-pipeline movement until 2016, included the imminent majority so feared on the right.

Both parties saw vigorous populist challenges to the status quo in the 2016 primaries. Bernie Sanders loudly proclaimed his socialism and nearly won the Democratic nomination. Donald Trump, who I will say is a fascist, did win the Republican nomination and the presidency. But what is socialism, and what is fascism? And how un-American and dangerous are these ideologies?

Socialism is a system in which the collective welfare is prioritized over the welfare and rights of individuals. It has a rich and wide-ranging history. At one extreme is the state socialism of the communist Soviet Union and Maoist China in which private enterprise is eradicated and the state owns and controls the economy toward the end of the redistribution of wealth. At the other is the social democracies that emerged in Western Europe that created cradle to grave welfare states featuring high levels of taxation, but what most Europeans would say is a higher quality of life than ours. Private enterprise still exists in these systems, but is much more highly regulated than in this country. Bernie Sanders’ version of socialism is parallel to the Western European model, not Soviet-styled communism.

Fascism is an extreme form of nationalism. For fascists, the nation is composed of a mythical “people” who are culturally homogeneous. Those who are not viewed as part of the nation are scapegoated and can be targets of violence. Fascism first appeared between the two world wars in places like Italy and Germany. In differing ways each country was humiliated during World War One and faced severe political crises thereafter. Mussolini and Hitler were able to harness that collective trauma and turn it into a sense of victimhood. Behind the charismatic leadership of those men political elites who were said to be corrupt were targeted and ultimately pushed from power (again in very different ways). Political institutions and established practices were also pushed aside and the only relationship that came to matter was that between “the leader” and “the people.” Fascism as a system of practices is made possible when the political status quo is in crisis. Donald Trump is a fascist and a racist, because he divides the American public between real Americans and the others. From the day he announced his candidacy it has been clear that the others were primarily people of color, though progressive white people are also not his Americans. He is also fascist, because he trashes any traditional institution, practice or politician that opposes him and he seeks to communicate directly, with his people, the real Americans. And he implores them to listen only to him.

So Trump is a fascist and America is in the midst of a political crisis. But unlike interwar Germany and Italy, the United States has a set of political institutions featuring checks and balances that have endured for over 200 years. They are democratic institutions. So Trump may be a fascist, but the system is not. The push back that he has received from the media, the courts and most recently, the mid-term elections are proof of that.

Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. America is also not a socialist system. Despite our penchant for pragmatism and what works, most students of intellectual history and political philosophy would say that our dominant ideology is liberalism: a set of ideas advancing individual rights and equality of individuals before the law. There are right and left versions of liberalism, which approximate the principles behind our Republican and Democratic parties. The left version of liberalism, or what philosophers call social liberalism, promotes the regulatory welfare state and favors high taxation very much like democratic socialism. In fact, in terms of real policy preferences the two are almost indistinguishable. Then there is the fact that we have had a state that regulates capitalism, offers minimum wages and the 40 hour work week and delivers socialized K-12 education. Most American conservatives as well as liberals support these policies today, but beginning in the 19^th century, socialist were some of the earliest proponents of these policies. So we have long had elements of socialism embedded in our socio-economic system.

So I ask my fellow Americans which ideology is most un-American, and which is most dangerous to the stability of the country?

Trump and Hitler: and Pelosi

Trump and Hitler: and Pelosi

In the recent government shutdown Donald Trump revealed himself to be a right-wing populist. Populists believe there’s a “people” out there that they alone cater to. And once in political power they try to govern as if only those they cater to matter. They are willing to side-step or usurp normal governmental practices, laws and the constitution itself to give those “people” what they want. In his lovely little book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder cautions us to “be calm when the unthinkable arrives.” He talks about how the fire at the German Parliament in 1933 became the cause for Hitler to declare a state of emergency that would last through World War Two, until 1945.

What Snyder means by being calm is to calmly and soberly assess the danger and to stand up and push back immediately and forcefully. In the parliamentary elections that where held less than a week after the fire the Nazis won a majority. Less than a year after those events Germany was effectively, a one-party state. Who set fire to the parliament was never determined. But Hitler declared that it was Germany’s internal enemies. Germany lacked the kind of robust but deliberate civil society in which people might openly say “well let’s investigate who set the fire,” or we don’t really know who set it. So let’s go to the street to oppose martial law.” Instead the German people, reeling from post-World War One malaise, the Great Depression and more than a decade of unstable governments rolled over before “Der Fuhrer.”

Populism is troubling for the political establishment. But populism on the right trends toward fascism. Fascist populist not only purport to despise big government and big capital. They also fear and scapegoat ”foreign” elements in the population: Jews and Gypsies in 1930s Germany; and people of color in contemporary America. They thus, also become white nationalists. Fascist in power are much more troubling than garden variety populists.

Donald Trump is a populist, a fascist and a white nationalist. The people he seeks to scapegoat are people of color; and especially immigrants. Snyder says be calm when the unthinkable occurs. He then describes the creation of a climate of crisis, which induces hysteria in the citizenry, and justifies a state of emergency. This is what Trump has done over the issue of the border wall. Those living along the border, including most Republican congress members would not describe the border situation as a crisis. Fewer undocumented people are coming across now than before 9-11. Many of those arriving at the border today are seeking asylum. They aren’t trying to enter illegally. And, many of those in the country illegally, are people who came legally and overstayed their visas. Incidentally, many of those people, if not most are white people from places like Canada and Ireland. So there is no crisis, except that manufactured in Trump’s head and sold to his base.

The real difference between Germany in the 1930s the United States today is the durability of our political institutions, specifically, our system of checks and balances. Heralded as some of the strongest institutions in the world, they are under supreme challenge from Trumpism and the long-frustrated white Americans who see the country they’ve known historically slipping away. Trump has been continually frustrated by the media, the courts, blue state attorney generals and local officials who won’t do his bidding. And then the American people sent a thunderous rebuke to his manner of governance in the 2018 federal elections. The government shutdown over a border wall that he couldn’t get when Republicans completely controlled Congress was Trump’s latest desperate attempt to side-step the normal processes of government and get his way in the name of his “American people.” The steadfast leadership of Nancy Pelosi and the decline of Trump’s strategy in the polls is the calm in the face of the unthinkable that Snyder talks about, and the determination to use our institutions to push back hard that I’m calling for here.

Round One goes to Pelosi and the Democrats in the House. But Trump may not be finished. He may declare a state of emergency if this three weeks of negotiations fail. He probably won’t shut down the government again, but if he does, average citizens must be prepared to take direct action in myriad ways to send him and his feckless Republican minions in Congress the message that we’re not going down without a fight. In fact, we have no intention of going down period!