By james art The rally held for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday night exposed the face of a political movement that is becoming increasingly openly fascist.
Media commentators have aptly used the term fascism to describe the movement Trump is building. But while they identify certain characteristics of fascism – including the subversion of traditional electoral methods to violence and intimidation, extreme nationalism and xenophobia – they exclude its most essential content, the capitalist counter-revolution.
Some commentators noted in response to the Madison Square Garden rally that it would likely cost him votes. There is no doubt that the New York exhibition will arouse disgust among wider segments of the population, not just those directly targeted by Trump’s fascist filth.
However, Trump’s plan for power is not based on formal election procedures, but on the methods of civil war. Trump and the Republicans are operating on a fascist game.
This is also evident from what was said on Sunday evening. In New York, the media capital of the world, Republican speakers blithely tossed out racist and anti-immigrant remarks. One speaker referred to Puerto Rico, the ancestral homeland of some 6 million Americans, including 1 million New Yorkers, as a “floating island of garbage.” Trump adviser Stephen Miller shouted that “America is for Americans and Americans alone,” a slogan that is a direct translation from the Nazi mantra, “Deutschland ist nur für Deutsche”, which was used to justify the mass murders of Jews during the Holocaust.
Trump, for his part, announced that with his victory, “the immigrant invasion of our country ends and the rebuilding of our country begins” and that Election Day will be “a day of liberation.” Tropes of “national rebirth,” overcoming “foreign pollution,” have long been a staple of fascist movements. The Republican platform includes a commitment to round up and deport 11 million men, women and children, a feat that can only be accomplished through a police state. Outlined in Madison Square Garden is a strategy of violent repression on an industrial scale. What Trump is promising must eventually lead to mass murder.
The violence will first be directed against political opponents, what Trump calls the “domestic enemy.” Under the watchful eye of the Republican leadership in Congress, Trump and his allies have once again sworn blood oaths of revenge against their enemies. Given that just under four years ago his supporters came within feet of publicly executing Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, these threats must be seen as deadly real. Speakers called Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil.” Another called all Democrats “a bunch of degenerate, lowlife, Jew-haters.”
Trump doubled down on his rhetoric, calling his opponents domestic enemies, saying “they’re smart and they’re mean and we have to defeat them,” adding, “they’ve done a lot of bad things to this country. They really are an enemy from within.”
This strategy will not be changed by next Tuesday’s vote. Trump and the Republicans are preparing to use illegal and unconstitutional methods to challenge any result that goes against them, using their control of state governments and police forces to challenge election results, as they did four years ago. The day after the rally, ballot boxes were marked for arson in Washington and Oregon, a small indication of what was to come.
Trump has behind him significant sections of the corporate and financial oligarchy who understand that the ultimate “enemy within” is the working class. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, appeared in Madison Square Garden wearing black, the traditional uniform of the movement created by Mussolini. Musk has donated $118 million to Trump’s campaign.
Other billionaires and CEOs, in the words of a The Washington Post article published on Monday “hedge their bets.” This includes Jeff Bezos, the second richest person in the world and owner of Publishwhich blocked the paper from endorsing Harris. Oligarchs declaring their election neutrality include Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett; Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle; Mark Zuckerberg of Meta; and Sundar Pichai of Google.
The five richest people in America control a combined $1 trillion in wealth. All of them have already either endorsed Trump or declared their indifference to the two candidates. American capitalists are as ready to make a deal with Trump in 2024 as their German counterparts were with Hitler in 1933.
The Democratic Party is not an obstacle to Trump’s conspiracies, but accomplices. The Democratic Party articulates the interests of the same financial elite as well as the wealthiest layers of the middle class and “wins” the battle for money from wealthy donors.
Judging by their public statements, Democrats have picked up on Trump’s fascism this past week, following reported statements by retired generals Mark Milley and John Kelly. Previously, they avoided using what is delicately called “the word is” in the media. They have long sought to promote, in Biden’s words, a “strong GOP” even after that same GOP staged a failed coup to overturn the 2020 election and then protected its key conspirators in Congress and the Supreme Court .
Four years after Biden’s speech, the Democratic Party is facing a fascist movement in the Republican Party. But even now, a central goal of Harris’ campaign is to “reach across the aisle” to supposedly reasonable Republicans. To the extent that they refer to the danger posed by Trump, they present him simply as an individual seeking power, not as the leader of one of the two parties of the capitalist ruling elite with significant support from the capitalist ruling elite.
The very conditions that breed fascism—endless war abroad, malignant levels of social inequality, and police state repression—are nurtured by the Democratic Party. That is why it has fought fiercely to eliminate all “third party” threats from the ballot, especially working class parties like the Socialist Equality Party, but has consistently “conceded” to the Republicans.
Fascism is not the wrong political choice of capitalist parties, much less of individuals. As Trotsky explained in a series of brilliant writings in the 1920s and 1930s, fascism resulted from the collapse of bourgeois democracy under the weight of the contradictions of capitalism. This becomes the choice of a ruling class that can no longer rule in the old way. Fascism supersedes bourgeois democracy in times of crisis because it is the crudest distillation of capitalism—the overtly violent domination of the working class at home and abroad for profit.
The American experience confirms it. There have been other fascist political formations in the past century, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the German American Bund, the First American Committee, and the John Birch Society. There are a number of prominent fascist politicians, including Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. And there have been many fascist-minded capitalists, including Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and William Randolph Hearst.
The rise of fascism in America is due to these notorious right-wing pioneers and the toxic anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant and racist policies they espoused. It owes at least as much to American liberalism and the union bureaucracy. All joined hands in the 20th century to erect anti-communism as the state religion in all but name. The result was the banishment from official American politics and culture of any understanding of the predominance of class in the construction of social reality. The extreme right has always been welcome in this world, even if the bourgeoisie did not feel the need to hand over power to it.
The main difference is that today American capitalism is rotting on its feet. The total bankruptcy of a political system is ultimately an expression of its financial bankruptcy. The evolution of the Democratic Party bears witness to this transformation. In the last half century it has abandoned all pretensions to social reformism. Instead of any class appeal to workers, the middle class and the youth, it substitutes identity politics, which it proclaims to be the true and only measure of progress. As Democrats’ hopes begin to crumble, their standard-bearers, Barack and Michelle Obama, have begun to blame men as a population for the rise of Trump.
Behind this fake progressive veneer praised by the American pseudo-left, the Democratic Party offers nothing but austerity and war – and indeed pays and arms fascists around the world who serve as the long, blood-soaked claw of American imperialism, including those of the battalions Azov in Ukraine and those Israeli forces who are carrying out the “final solution” of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Democrats’ main concern with Trump is that his victory could derail far-advanced plans for war with Russia. They fear the collapse of the two-party system, that the framework of the two-party capitalist state has been undermined. And they worry that exposing Trump to danger will lead to a mass movement from below. Indeed, in response to Trump’s rally in New York, the Democratic Party, including fake New York socialite Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, mustered no protest against it.
To speak of a “lesser evil” in this situation is politically meaningless. This confirms the analysis that World Socialist Web Site has done since 2000, when violent demonstrations halted vote counting in Florida, leaving the outcome of the disputed Bush-Gore election to the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, which gave the victory to the Republicans. This decision, as we have warned, revealed the absence of any real voters for democracy in the ruling class. Now, after nearly a quarter of a century, even the forms of democratic rule have been discarded.
Against the background of these political upheavals, one essential fact must be emphasized. The movement of ruling elites towards dictatorship is increasingly diametrically opposed to the movement of the working class. The past year has seen mass protests by youth and workers against the genocide in Gaza, facing brutal repression and slander. There is growing opposition within the working class to austerity, exploitation, poverty and social inequality, expressed only partially in a series of strikes across the country – including the ongoing strike at Boeing, where workers have rejected two union-backed contracts.
There is a strong objective basis for the development of a movement against the conspiracies of the capitalist oligarchs. Indeed, their plots are motivated precisely by the fear of such a movement.
The task is to provide this movement with a real program that articulates its interests. This must be found in the way of independent political and industrial mobilization based on the struggle for socialism, in the United States and internationally. The power of the working class must find its way forward through the building of a revolutionary leadership.