Fascism-Denialism Is as Dangerous — and Unscientific — as Climate Denialism: Part One

Updated April 29, 2020 | revcom.us

 

Donald Trump is not “self-destructing.” Nor does the fascist movement which he leads, and which currently dominates the executive and judicial branches of government, intend to give up, fumble away or gently concede the reins of power.  

They intend to go further, to seize on the crisis around the coronavirus as a means to take the offensive and further consolidate their grip.

The past two weeks have included:

• Trump rallying his followers to demonstrate at state houses and city halls around the country against measures to control the spread of the coronavirus. The demonstrations often included yahoos brandishing automatic weapons and Confederate flags (which, by this point, no mainstream or “left” political figure even demands that Trump denounce). “You need to look at all lives, not just COVID lives,” said one attendee at the Wisconsin protest—a racialized, dog-whistle play on “Black lives matter” with a subtext that the suburbs and rural areas were being “made to suffer” for the Black and Latino people of the core cities who have been hit the hardest.
• An unprecedented 60-day ban on immigration. Top administration officials Stephen Miller and Kenneth Cuccinelli assured fascist activists this was only a “first step” in “turn[ing] off the faucet of new immigrant labor,” as well as other new and ongoing assaults against immigrants, including refusing any relief aid to DACA students.    
• A ramped up MAGA-xenophobic offensive against China for supposedly having caused or spread the virus... now being echoed by the Democratic candidate Biden’s efforts to one-up Trump as being “tougher on China.”  
• Fascist majority leader Mitch McConnell saying that federal aid was a “blue-state bailout,” strongly implying that states which tended to vote Democratic were not worthy of aid and were not “real Americans.”
• Trump’s moronic—and extremely dangerous— “advice” to consider injecting household detergent and bleach into your veins, followed by his petulant tantrum that he was being distorted (he wasn’t) and “threats” to stop the daily briefings (which he did for two days, then resumed). Trump’s lunacy is both real and actually works for him in these kinds of cases: his aggrieved followers glory in his narcissism, in his claims to be on a par with (or actually giving orders to) “his” scientists, and then the way in which some then toe the line, refusing to call him out and trying meekly to change the subject.
• The week even included a warning from Joe Biden, made in private to donors, that Trump “is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.”

Far from “melting down” or otherwise retreating, this is fascism on the offensive.

Not “Proto,” “Neo” or “Sort of” ... But Straight-Up FASCISM

This is a lunatic, violent, fanatic fascism, that has been building for over 40 years. This fascism treats every other political force as illegitimate. In analyzing the ramifications of the coming to power of Trump and Pence through the 2016 election, Bob Avakian (BA) has said:

There is a direct line from the Confederacy to the fascists of today, and a direct connection between their white supremacy, their open disgust and hatred for LGBT people as well as women, their willful rejection of science and the scientific method, their raw “American First” jingoism and trumpeting of “the superiority of western civilization” and their bellicose wielding of military power, including their expressed willingness and blatant threats to use nuclear weapons, to destroy countries.

The truth—another terrible truth that must be faced—is that, in the context of profound and acute contradictions that are asserting, or re-asserting, themselves in ways that are tearing at the very fabric and deepening cracks in the foundation of this country, at the same time as the American empire is facing serious challenges internationally, fascism is one possible resolution of this, on the terms of this system and its ruling class, even as this is a horror for humanity.

While the Constitution does establish the separation of church and state—and the Christian fascists are wrong, or simply lying, when they insist that the founding documents of this country established it as a “Christian nation”—the reality is that Christianity has all along been the unofficial state religion of this country, and the country’s identity, throughout its history, has been as a “white Christian nation,” grounded in male supremacy as well as white supremacy and driven by a “manifest destiny” to dominate not only the continent of North America but ultimately the world as a whole. All this has been brought into question, and has become the focus of intense struggle, going back to the 1960s and, in some important ways, back to the Civil War. And while developments internationally, including the demise of the Soviet Union, have given further impetus to the globalization of the capitalist world economy, this very heightened globalization has propelled changes that have sharpened contradictions within the U.S. as well as on the world level, particularly with an emerging capitalist China mounting a challenge to U.S. global economic dominance, at the same time as this heightened globalization, under conditions of western imperialist domination, has wreaked havoc in countries throughout the Third World, including the Middle East (and other places where Islam is the prevailing religion), adding fuel to a virulent Islamic fundamentalism that has declared war on the “decadent west” and on “infidels” and others oriented toward the west and facilitating its imperial domination. [From  THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America, A Better World IS Possible, A Talk by Bob Avakian]

Refusing to Face the Truth

Yet, nearly three years on since that speech was given—and long after the course of events has further proven the truth of it—people refuse to face the reality of this. This “fascism-denialism” is as unscientific—and may prove as dangerous—as climate-denialism. And over the next several days we’re going to dig into and take apart some current examples of this.

Stay tuned.

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Watch this clip from The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!