Image by Marco Zuppone.
The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is unsupported by history.
— Adam Gopnik, “Going There With Donald Trump,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2016
“It Can Happen Here”
In May of 2016, after the Monster of Mar a Lago secured the Republican presidential nomination for the first time, the liberal New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik published a brilliant and early essay on the nominee’s fascism. Titled “Going There with Donald Trump,” the essay began with well-deserved digs at the media’s “desperate efforts to normalize the aberrant” and ended with a warning that Americans should not act like “Hitler’s enablers in 1933…by telling each other, ‘Well, he’s not so bad, not as bad as they are. We can control him.’ (Or, on the opposite side, ‘I’d rather have a radical who will make the establishment miserable than a moderate who will make people think it can all be worked out.’)”
“Yes, we should go there,” Gopnik wrote. The worst sometimes happens. If people of good will fail to act, and soon, it can happen here” (emphasis added).
The “it” was fascism. As Gopnik explained,:
“There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ The sum may be crypto-fascist, neo-fascist, latent fascist, proto-fascist, or American-variety fascist[1]—one of that kind, all the same. Future political scientists will analyze (let us hope in amused retrospect, rather than in exile in New Zealand or Alberta) the precise elements…that compound in Trump’s ‘ideology.’ But his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government, whether Léon Blum’s or Barack Obama’s, is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’ It is always alike, and always leads inexorably to the same place: failure, met not by self-correction but by an inflation of the original program of grievances, and so then on to catastrophe. The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history” (emphasis added).
Gopnik elaborated on and against those who minimized the “dark strain” by portraying it as the economic populism of the working class:
“To associate such ideas too mechanically with the rise of some specific economic anxiety is to give the movement and its leader a dignity and sympathy that they do not deserve. In France, Jean Marie Le Pen’s voters are often ex-Communists, working people who also believe their national identity to have been disrupted by immigration. That does not alter, or make more sympathetic, the toxic nature of his program; the ideology that it resonates to is an ancient and persistent one, that thrives through good times and bad. … the notion that a class cure can be had for a nationalist disease was the persistent, tragic delusion of progressive politics throughout the twentieth century” (emphasis added).
How has Gopnik’s essay held up over the last eight and a half years?
From my revolutionary Marxist perspective, there are three things wrong with it and six things that have held up quite well.
Three Things Wrong
Missing Elements of the Disease
The first flaw was that Gopnik’s description of fascism omitted some of fascism’s critical components (all evident then as more clearly since) including racism/white supremacism, patriarchy/hyper-masculinism, “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” (the fervent aim of restoring lost national greatness), anti-intellectualism, virulent anti-socialism/anti-Marxism, attacks on the rule of law, and the endorsement of political violence. Also missing was Trump’s alignment with fundamentalist Christianity, a major ingredient in “American-variety fascism.”
Voting for the Dismal Weimar Dems as “Good People Acting”
The second problem was that Gopnik’s mistaken understanding of “good people fail[ing] to act” was decent folks failing to vote for the depressing Weimar Democrat[2] Hillary Clinton in the then upcoming 2016 presidential elections. This was an unfortunate understanding of the collective human agency required since Mrs. Clinton was the standard bearer of a party that can and will never struggle against fascism how it must be fought for it to be decisively defeated – that is, by mobilizing masses of people beyond the “normal” bourgeois electoral channels and ideology, in ways that the Democrats cannot capture and control.[3]
The organization Refuse Fascism (RF), formed after Trump’s first election with the explicit purpose of driving out the Trump-Pence regime through mass action in the streets, got it right during the initial Trump reign. “The Democratic Party,” RF said, “will not stop this nightmare. Trump, fascist Fox News, and the Republi-fascist Party have branded them as enemies and ‘traitors.’ Yet, the Democratic Party will consistently pull to try to work with, conciliate with and collaborate with them. There can be no reconciliation with fascism except on the terms of the fascists. Fascism must be resolutely opposed” – something the dismal Dems will never do.
RF is being richly borne out (yet again) by the pathetic capitulation of the nation’s not-so leftmost major party to its re-ascendant right-/Reich-most major party in the wake of Trump’s victory three weeks ago.
There’s a Class Cure
Gopnik’s third mistake was to claim that it is delusional to offer “a class cure” for the “nationalist disease” (for fascism). His argument was correct if by “class cure” he meant the endless invocations of the supposed moral superiority and special position and progressive historical mission of “the working class.” But there’s a correct “class cure” that has nothing to do with such outmoded worker fetishism and “class truth”[4]: a many-sided people’s (and yes, proletarian) socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist class and its imperial system of class rule – the system that has given rise to fascism again and again.
Six Things Right
Now on to what Gopnik got right.
It Can Happen Here
The first thing that has held up well is Gopnik’s rejection of the American Exceptionalist conceit that fascism can’t happen here in the USA. The fascist Trump was in fact elected much to his own surprise six months after Gopnik’s essay came out. Notwithstanding a horrific and, yes, fascist first presidency[5] that led the world’s leading intellectual Noam Chomsky to call him “the most dangerous criminal in human history,” Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump is about to resume executive branch power alongside Republicans who control all three branches of the federal government (as in 2017) much further down the path to full-on fascist consolidation. And this time he is doing so:
+ after openly channeling Hitler (“poisoning the blood of our country,” “clear out the Marxist vermin,” etc.) on the campaign trail.
+ with (unlike in 2016) a popular vote (as well as Electoral College) victory (horrifying enough even if nowhere near the “popular mandate” Trump claims to have received).
+ with much greater control over his own party and the executive branch than in 2017.
+ with a MAGA-tized Supreme Court shaped by three Christian fascist Trump appointments, which ended women’s constitutional right to an abortion, tore up affirmative action in college admissions and granted a stunning level of criminal immunity to US presidents (and made other horrificrulings) while the decrept and warmongering buffoon Joe Biden held “power.”
+ with a large number of “red” states moving ever further down the Christian fascist policy path.
+ with a vast Amerikaner policy network on board to implement “Project 2025, ” an elaborate plan for the Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of US government and society.
We are not at full fascist consolidation yet but we are now much farther down the road to the nightmare sought by Gopnik’s “dark strain of modern politics.”
It can happen here!
The Foolish Minimizers and Deniers
The second thing that Gopnik got right and that still holds relevance today was his critique of those who denied and downplayed the fascist Trump menace by arguing that the orange-brushed brute was too buffoonish, too venal, too anti-intellectual, too stupid, and too unserious to bring about genuine harm. I ended up dedicating an entire chapter (titled “The Anatomy of Fascism-Denial”) of my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America to exposing and dismantling this head-in-the-sand denialism and minimization – a remarkably widespread syndrome among liberal and left intellectuals (even Chomsky was caught up in the foolishness), pundits, and academics during the Trump presidency (even in many cases up to and past the January 6 putsch attempt). The problem is alive and well today, even after the Democrats briefly felt compelled to acknowledge the fascism of Trump (with three weeks to go in the 2024 campaign) – something that has not stopped them from bowing to kiss his ring and demonstrate their eagerness to enable a “peaceful transition”[6] to the next stage in the descent towards Gilead. People are out of their minds to deny and minimize the accelerated fascist creep taking place before our very eyes. It’s kinda happening here right now.
Some Accurate Descriptions
The third thing that has held up is Trump’s match with the fascist characteristics that Gopnik did succeed in mentioning, including “contempt for parliamentary government and procedures,” “insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…has been trying to undermine the nation,” “a hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization,” and “a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’” All of that and more has been validated by the election denialism, putsch-ism, paranoid-style “neoliberal fascism” (Henry Giroux and Anthony DiMaggio) of Trumpism-Muskism.
“…to Catastrophe” with “The Most Dangerous Criminal in Human History”
The fourth thing holding up well is Gopnik’s warning that Trump’s fascist victory would point us “to catastrophe.” Indeed it does. People who consider Trump an “isolationist” trying to advance world peace are caught up in a strange fantasy. During his first presidency, Trump outdid the criminal Obama in drone attacks, threatened nuclear war on Iran and North Korea, and tore up critical nuclear arms agreements with the Russia including the critical Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). The reckless militarist Trump wants to stand back from conflict with Russia not to advance global amity but to concentrate American fire on the more potent threat to US global dominance – China – in the pursuit of America’s mass murderous imperial ambitions. He’s likely to attack Iran and to otherwise further the carnage in the Middle East. He may also invade northern Mexico when he’s not too preoccupied with trying to deploy US armed forces to round up “illegals,” “end inner city crime,” and crush protest in “the homeland.”
But the biggest immediate apocalyptic threat he likely poses is environmental – his promise to dramatically escalate oil and gas drilling and fracking even as the world has been pushed into a potentially irreversible climate crisis by the excessive extraction and burning of fossils fuels. As Chomsky noted nearly five years ago: “Trump is indeed the most dangerous criminal in human history… Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen’ But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species). Trump is.”
Adding epidemiological terrorism to the mix, and consistent with the mass-murderous pandemo-fascism demonstrated during his insane “presidential” response to Covid-19 (described as “pandemicide” by one leading disease expert), Trump wants the anti-vaccine lunatic Robert F Kennedy, Jr to head the nation’s department of Health and Human Services and has nominated another such maniac (Dr. Jay Bhattacharya) to lead the National Institutes for Health.
No wonder some smart US-Americans I know are wondering if Trump is literally trying to kill off millions of his citizens.
(More reason for me to ask Obama yet again: “Hey Barry, is it the Apocalypse yet?”)
Naïve Faith in “Honest Conservatives” and “Constitutional Limits”
The fifth thing that has held up is this statement by Gopnik eight-plus years ago: “The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.”
I can already hear the objections. “Hold on, Street, wasn’t Trump45 constrained to a significant degree by more traditional Republicans in his Cabinet and the Pentagon? And didn’t he have to leave office, however begrudgingly, after losing the election to Joe Biden in 2020, albeit only after a failed rolling coup that culminated in an actual physical assault on the US Capitol”?
Yes, Trump45 was reigned in to some extent by Gopnik’s “honest conservatives” in the White House Cabinet. And yes, Trump45 was voted out and did in fact have to pack up and take off on January 20, 2021. But guess/so what? The more traditional and non-fascist guard rails are gone this time around. Trump47 and his fascist party have purged non-fascists from their movement and party. The formerly republican Republi-fascists atop the coming next US Senate and US House are united in fealty to their orange-brushed Dear Leader, buoyed by his “mandate.” The Trumpist Supreme Court has gone full batshit MAGA with its wildly authoritarian presidential immunity ruling in The United States v Trump, subject of a scathing dissent including this from the liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor:
“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”
And look, let’s be honest. “Sleepy Joe” Biden’s 2020 victory was a fluke, a product of two unpredictable chance events, contingencies that produced a tenuous four-year break in the Trump reign: the outbreak of Covid-19 (the response to which Trump badly bungled in pandemo-fascist ways) and the viral smart phone video of the graphic racist cop asphyxiation/murder/lynching of George Floyd (which combined with the pandemic to produce a mass rebellion that Trump responded to in politically counter-productive and fascistic ways). But for the pandemic and George Floyd, we would have been hearing for the last few years about Donald “Terminate the Constitution” Trump’s determination to stay in power beyond the constitutional two-term limit.
The Trump-fascist coup just kept rolling on through the doomed and dismal one-term presidency of jelly-brained “Genocide Joe,” whose inflationary warmongering presidency depressed his party’s base in ways that the equally imperialist and charisma-challenged Kamala Harris could not overcome after Biden’s shocking “debate” fiasco forced her dithering boss to bow out way, way past his use-by date.
Two very key early moments that should not be forgotten – most especially the second one – in writing the history of the transition from Trump45 to Trump47:
+ US House Republican Majority Leader and wannabe House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Rf-CA) running down to Mar a Lago with his tail between his legs to kiss Trump’s ass just three weeks after the attempted fascist insurrection on January 6, 2021, during which McCarthy had screamed at Trump, telling to call off his attack dogs.
+ The US Senate’s February 13, 2021 failure to convict Trump after the US House impeached him for inciting insurrection. Conviction by the upper body of Congress would have forbidden Trump from running for president (or any other federal public office) again. The vote was 57 guilty to 43 not guilty, ten short of the 67 required for conviction. It seems likely that the ten Senator deficit would have been overcome if the tally had taken place through a secret ballot. As then US Senator Mitt Romney has recalled from conversations with his high Congressional colleagues, numerous Republican Senators who knew Trump was guilty as charged refused to vote their conscience out of fear of physical violence directed at themselves and their families by Trump supporters.
Please read this again and say it aloud: numerous Republican Senators who knew Trump was guilty as charged refused to vote their conscience out of fear of physical violence directed at themselves and their families by Trump supporters.
How fascist is that?
Then came the Trump-appointed hack federal district judge Aileen Cannon and Trump’s Christian Fascist Supreme Court’s key roles in aiding and abetting the ongoing Trump coup by essentially shooting down the Special (Trump) Prosecutor Jack Smith’s noble but doomed and tardy efforts to prosecute the Orange Don for (a) stealing highly classified federal documents and then obstructing federal efforts to retrieve those documents and (b) trying to literally overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy in 2020-21.
Just this week we have been subjected to the sickening spectacle of Biden’s useless Attorney General Merrick Garland’s belatedly appointed Special Prosecutor (Smith) dutifully closing out his evidence-packed slam dunk cases against Trump because the US Constitution supposedly forbids the prosecution of sitting presidents. There is in fact no such command in the Constitution, just an opinion that became a “rule” by order of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.
So yes, score another point for the Adam Gopnik of May 2016: “The idea that it [fascism, that is] can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is” [in fact] “unsupported by [the last eight and a half years of US-American] history.”
The Economic Anxiety Excuse
The sixth thing surviving the test of time is Gopnik’s notion that people are wrong to make excuses for Trumpism-fascism by reducing mass support for “the nationalist disease” (to fascism) to working-class “economic anxiety.” See the prolific left political scientist Anthony DiMaggio’s empirical demolition of this class reductionist Trumpenelft and Republican narrative here (2016) and here (2020). DiMaggio showed that Trump’s voting base wasn’t particularly working-class and was driven by racist, sexist, nativist and authoritarian –- fascist –- values far more significantly than by economic woes and fears. As DiMaggio and the brilliant left scholar and social critic Henry Giroux point out in their recent book Fascism on Trial, with reference to rigorous social analyses of the 2016 and 2020 elections: “the thesis that support for Trump, white supremacy, and fascism are the result of mass economic and financial insecurity and desperation…is weak, and the evidence for it exaggerated, despite the GOP propaganda about Trumpism as a working-class phenomenon that permeates mass discourse.”
What about 2024? Is the Trump vote mainly about the price of eggs, rent, and gas for the beleaguered but intrinsically noble and decent working class, a common opinion on “the left” as well as the right? Not so much. To be sure, world-wide post-Covid inflation has been a boon for Trump and non-incumbent candidates around the planet. It certainly helped his electoral margins. Trump won voters who say that their family’s economic situation is worse than it was four years ago by 64 points — 81% to 17%. He won those who say that inflation has caused their households severe hardship by 50 points – 74% to 24%. He won those who said that “the economy” was their top issue by 61 points – 80% to 19%.
Still, we should be skeptical of exit poll data showing concerns about “the economy” on the part of Trump voters. Partisan politics has broken and polluted economic perceptions for many years: we have folks telling pollsters that “the economy” is terrible regardless of how “the economy” is actually performing when the party they dislike (and often even hate) holds the White House. Many a Trumpist who is making out great with his salary or business will say that “the economy” sucks and inflation is killing him as long as an Obama or a Biden is in the White House. If Trump gets in and “the economy” (including the Trumpists’s own economic situation) goes south while inflation rises (as seems likely if Trump’s wild tariff pledges are enacted), the Trumpist will tell a pollster that “the economy” is just peachy. (The same dynamic is in play for the famous polling question “how do you feel about the direction of the country right now? Is it on the right or the wrong track?”)
(This is not to argue that “the economy” doesn’t suck. The capitalist system is literally sucking the life out of livable ecology, oppressing billions of people, and even helping put us on a path to nuclear war among other terrible things. But my point is that populare responses to the standard polling questions on “the economy” are badly tainted by partisan identification when it comes to telling us why people voted Republi-fascist or Dem-imperialist.)
At the same time, the exit polls also show that the Trump vote was evenly split between those on both sides of standard measures of affluence vs. poverty (with cut offs at $50,000 and $100,000 in annual family income) but heavily weighted towards those who identified as follows: deniers of the fascist Trump’s “extremism” (94% for Trump), Republican (94% for Trump), believers in the centrist capitalist Kamala Harris’s supposedly “radical” left “extremism” (92% for Trump), opponents of abortion rights (91% for Trump), anti-immigration (90% for Trump), “conservative” (90%), pro-mass deportations (87%), fans of the Christian Fascist US Supreme Court (83%), white evangelical (82% for Trump), pro-US-Irael genocide in Gaza (82%), white evangelical Protestant (72%), white male without college degree (69%), white without college degree (66%), Protestant (63%), white male (60%), and Catholic (58%). By contrast, Trump beat Harris with those in voting households with total family incomes under $50,000 by just three points (50% to 47%) and with total family incomes under $100,000 by just four percentage points (50% to 46%). Harris beat Trump by five points with union households.
“No Defensiveness” About What This Is
Nine-plus years into the fascist poltiical phase of the Trump show, no sentient American voter has any excuse for not understanding that Trump is an ecocidal, fascist, and all-around existential menace to humanity, decency, and life itself — a danger far greater than rising living expenses in a nation where living standards are far higher even for poor folks than for billions of desperately oppressed people on the peripheries of the parasitic and imperialist world capitalist system. The white supremacism, related racist nativism, and ugly misogynist patriarchy at the heart of fascism in the Age of Donald “Haitans are Eating Dogs in Ohio” Trump is a multi-class phenomenon from and for which working-class status offers no special exemption or excuse. Here I must agree with the left-demonized revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian, who wrote this eleven days after Trump’s re-election:
“Fascism, as represented by Donald Trump, is a white supremacist, male supremacist, anti-LGBT, immigrant-hating, aggressively environment-destroying, anti-scientific, religious fundamentalist fanaticism, determined to use the power of the government to forcibly compel obedience to its dangerous and destructive lunacy, and to viciously persecute those who oppose or resist… in the face of this fascism and those who are its supporters, there should be no defensiveness, but instead a firm stand of defiantly opposing everything they are about, and everything they do in moving to carry out this fascism….As for people who voted for and back Trump: regardless of the reason, or rationalization, they give for doing this, the fact is that they are supporting fascism, with everything that means. And it is necessary and crucial to consistently and actively take the offensive against this.”
Class and Political “Truth” Do Not Trump Objective Truth
As I recently wrote in an online exchange:
“And you know even if it was proletarian votes mainly behind Trump, which it isn’t…there’s still no legitimate justification for voting for a transparently malignant hate-mongering fascist! There’s this childish fetish of ‘the working-class’ on the part of people who know very little about ‘the working class.’ They do their reified proletariat no favors by fetishizing and sentimentalizing it, dismissing white supremacism, nativism, and patriarchy in its ranks. With these clowns, a religious sort of fake-Marxist ‘class truth’ trumps objective scientific truth, which has no class or race or sexual or political or partisan identity[8]. Facts are facts.”
I can already hear certain “radicals” denouncing me for finding things to praise in an analysis presented (years ago) by an Obama-Clinton-Biden-voting liberal Democrat like Adam Gopnik. F-that. I don’t believe in political and partisan truth cancelling objective truth. One must always start with the objective situation and its actual facts and proceed from there. Political and partisan “truth” does not trump objective truth[9]. The fact that Gopnik does not join me in calling for a socialist revolution is besides the scientific point here when it comes to making the right “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” (Lenin).
Notes
1. While speaking to wealthy donors in Manhattan in 2022, Joe Biden added “semi-” to Gopnik’s list of hyphenated qualifications.
2. “Weimar” refers to the period of the weak, post-World War I bourgeois democracy that preceded and surrendered to the rise of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Third Reich during the early 1930s.
3. See my March 2016 CounterPunch essay “The Donald Can Happen Here: The Trumpenstein’s Neo-Weimar Creators,” also a critique of American Exceptionalist fascism-denial but one that placed much of the blame for Trump’s future victory on the cringing capitalism-imperialism (“neoliberalism” in my language at that time) and fascism-appeasement of the party and horrible candidate Gopnik instructed his readers to vote for in 2016. My refusal to follow Gopnik’s conservative, ballot-based notion of how “people of good will” should “act, and soon” had nothing to do with the bad ideas Gopnik linked to “Hitler’s enablers in 1933.” At the same time, Mrs. Clinton and her party lost the 2016 election on their own, with no help from radical left critics like me. Marxists, communists, and left anarchists who couldn’t stomach Hillary’s militant neoliberal corporatism and imperialism never instructed her to run a tone-deaf establishment campaignor to shun the critical battleground state of Wisconsin. We didn’t depress the Black vote in key battleground cities with empty identitarian symbolism that failed to cloak the decline of Black living standards between 2008 and 2016. Barack Obama and his Clintonite party did that on their own.
4. An essential study and polemic here is Ishak Baran and KJA, “Ajith – A Portrait of the Residue of the Past,” Demarcations (December 2014).
5. See the third chapter, titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21,” in Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York, 2021), for the dizzying barrage of terrible details of Trump’s fascism during his first presidency.
6. See Paul Street, “Capitulation: The Dismal Dems on Bended Knee,” CounterPunch, November 22, 2024, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/22/capitulation-the-weimar-dems-on-bended-knee/
7. The retired academic Robert Sapolsky (see source in link) writes this: “There are many reasons for regretting the resurrection of Donald Trump, but one overwhelming reason for welcoming it is that he is a peacemaker, not a war maker, and will actively leverage America’s power to pacify an increasingly dangerous world… With his isolationist instincts, the second coming of Trump” promises an end to US imperial war-making, Sapolsky thinks.
8. See Baran and KJA, “Ajith,” cited above.
9. Baran and KJA, “Ajith.”
An earlier version of this essay appeared on The Paul Street Report.
