A RESPONSE TO THE NEW REPUBLIC
Art by Ben Stahnke
Gerald Horne & Anthony Ballas [1]
Let’s begin with the speculative title of The New Republic’s May-June 2024 series, “What American Fascism Would Look Like,” as well as the portentous subtitle: “It can happen here. And if it does, here is what might become of the country” [2]. The “it” in question is in reference to the possible future that Donald J. Trump may usher in this November 2024: in a word, so the series says, fascism. By casting the problem in the future conditional tense, The New Republic commits to a doubly flawed presentation of our current plight: far too much emphasis is placed on the election itself and its potential aftermath, informed by a severe misinterpretation of the historical and ideological forces which have delivered us to the brink of neo-fascism.
We should not diminish the threat that Donald Trump and his neo-fascist coterie currently pose to the already fragile moorings of U.S. democracy, but still, there is a clear mismatch between the analyses presented in The New Republic’s series and the sort of serious historical and ideological analysis required to understand the very real threat of U.S. fascism in our present moment. It should raise significant concern, for example, that there is hardly any reference in the series, even minimally, to the history of slavery in the United States, nor to the brutal legacies of Jim Crow and white supremacy, while the history of Native American dispossession and Mexican dispossession receive no mention altogether.
Likewise, very little attention is paid to what should be the commonly understood fact that Trump has garnered a mass base of support, indicative, not least, by the fact of his having received almost 75,000,000 votes in the 2020 election, with a number of those voters having also feverishly participated in the infamous coup attempt of January 6, 2021. We can’t begin to understand the present threat of neo-fascism without acknowledging this mass base along with the historical and ideological forces which have lubricated the path for the MAGA movement to come into existence in the first place [3].
Taken piecemeal, these omissions and shortcomings may not seem particularly consequential; after all, shouldn’t we be laser-focused on this dictator-cum-convicted felon running for the highest office in the land for a second term? When we consider the Trump phenomenon as part of a continuum with the historical and ideological roots of U.S. fascism, however, The New Republic’s narrow focus on the “orange man” himself, i.e. Trump’s personality, his individual psychology, his education, as well as the overused comparisons between Trump and Hitler and Trump and Mussolini, begins to look like a glaring myopia, a liberal solipsism of the highest order [4].
As The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky puts it in his introduction to the series, drawing a comparison between those who downplayed the threat posed by Hitler in 1932 to the way many on the right and left in the United States downplay the “hysteria” over the “invocation of the F-word”: “Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight’” [5]. All well and good. However, by framing the question around comparisons between Trump and the Berlin and Rome of the 1930s while papering over the settler colonial, class collaborationist, white supremacist, and Jim Crow roots of U.S. style fascism, the series reveals that Tomasky and others actually underestimate the threat that U.S. fascism poses in our present moment. Sure, he may be “close enough,” but neo-fascism Trump-style did not come into existence in a historical and ideological vacuum, and it is precisely the gaps within The New Republic’s analysis that should raise alarm.
At least part of this underestimation has to do with the fact that the series itself is quite monochromatic in terms of its authorship, and, relatedly, the series’s perspective comes off as rather eurocentric. In other words, only a couple scholars “of color” were likely invited to contribute to the series, and only two made it in. This is why the overuse of comparisons with Mussolini and Hitler in the early 20th century, while not necessarily incorrect, comes off as rather incomplete when we consider the history of racialized terror in the United States. It is rather curious, to say the least, that while the comparisons to U.S. fascism are exported abroad to Rome and Berlin in the 1930s, there is virtually no mention of the system of U.S. apartheid, aka Jim Crow, or the legacy of anti-Black terror perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan, nor to innumerable other examples from the history of white supremacy in the United States, the specter of which still looms large today, evinced, most palpably, in the Trump-MAGA movement.
Although credit is due to Jason Stanley for broaching, albeit briefly, the history of colonial Virginia, resistance to slavery in the U.S. and even the Haitian Revolution, the series’s shortsighted vision of history misses key conjunctures which can help inform our understanding of our predicament as we fight back the tides of right wing extremism and neo-fascism [6].
Trump’s Hundred
At the center of the analysis is an ideological focus on the individual subject. Although there is brief mention of some of Trump’s comrades, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Michael Flynn, and also Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s commentary on how “Project 2025 is readying a civilian army of bureaucrats to transform U.S. government,” astutely arguing that “every counterrevolution needs disciplined cadres,” without an informed understanding of the historical and ideological precursors mentioned above, the series seems to suggest that Trump and his hundred or so comrades are going to engineer fascism out of thin air; as though Trump could wave a wand and fascism would descend upon the United States of America [7].
Maureen Corrigan, for example, focuses on how “Trump doesn’t care about culture—as opposed to celebrity,” in her contribution, which unfortunately does more to mythologize the Trump phenomenon than to theorize or historicize what laid the groundwork for the MAGA movement and his mass base to come into being in the first place [8]. To draw on a literary example, this focus on Trump-the-individual tends to frame the former president and his hundred or so comrades in a way comparable to “Sutpen’s Hundred” from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, in which the hazy, mythological origins of Thomas Sutpen, the novel’s infamous plantation-owning, slave-driving paterfamilias, forges his disturbing legacy out of nothing but his own will [9]. The New Republic echoes this kind of mythic individualism—in well-trodden “great man of history” fashion—through its understanding of Trump and “Trump’s Hundred,” the series manufactures a sort of fascism localized entirely within the last five or six years of U.S. history.
Settler Colonialism and Class Collaboration
But there is more to Trumpism than “Trump’s Hundred”—we must not lose sight of Trump’s mass base. This presents difficulties for the fundamentally liberal frame at work in The New Republic, but it may prove equally difficult for our friends on the left to grapple with, as it may force them to reconsider the historical trajectory of the United States of America; it might cause them, in other words, to embrace the idea of class collaboration inhering in settler colonialism.
The link to settler colonialism is readymade. It was not by happenstance that Trump cited Andrew Jackson as being his favorite U.S. president [10]. Jackson, a notorious slave-owner and “Indian Killer,” as he was described by the Cherokee who were forced to endure his genocidal wrath, was one of the most vicious and violent perpetrators of the settler project in U.S. history [11]. Settler colonialism, and class collaboration more generally, have been the motor of the roots of fascism in the United States; once a culture based upon genocide against the Indigenous was established alongside a culture of slavery based upon expropriation of certain “racialized” groups, then it could, and does, continue to serve as a kind of political precondition; it serves as an exemplar of what can be done with full-throated, full-blooded fascism.
We cannot begin to understand how Trump formed a mass base of support without understanding the role of class collaboration, which is to say, the grassroots, middle class, and Euro-American working class support for fascist politics in the U.S. historically as today. We should not be indifferent, then, to the point that U.S. fascism Trump-style will, inter alia, also involve white supremacy and anti-Blackness as a continuation of the settler project, in lock-step with the class collaborationist and white supremacist MAGA movement which has inherited these revolting legacies—not from Berlin or Rome, mind you, but from seeds planted and nurtured on U.S. soil. We have to therefore contend with these forces, as well as form an analysis of their rootedness in U.S. history, if we're really serious about combating the fascist pestilence.
Take the Texas Counterrevolution of 1836 for instance [12]. In part a move to preserve the slave system (doing so, not insignificantly, on stolen Indigenous lands) which was facing mounting pressure internationally from Mexico, Haiti, and Britain, as well as from a wave of slave rebellions and abolitionism in the United States [13]. Texas in the 1830s offers a prime example of the multi-class nature of the emerging U.S. fascism: these counterrevolutionary forces were not part of the so-called 1% but bubbled up from the grassroots of the settler class.
Going even further back, we can look to Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, which was a prelude to the counterrevolution of 1776, as an example of the multi-class nature of settler colonialism [14]. Or we might look even further back to the 1580s, when London first invaded the area now called North Carolina [15]. The settler project was a multi-class grouping funded by the Crown, i.e. the 1% back in London. Fast forward to January 6, 2021, where real and imagined billionaires sat at the top of the insurrectionary movement, while working class, middle class, military veterans, declassed elements, and, of course, certain CEOs jetting in on private planes provided the foot soldiers.
When we talk about fascism in the United States without having an acute analysis of the forces that deliver it beyond Trump and his close comrades and the think-tankers at the Heritage Foundation, for example, we too often neglect the class collaborationist ethos motivating this tendency historically, even though it remains fully apparent in our present time, particularly in the construction of whiteness as a militarized identity politics [16]. In the 16th century struggle between the Catholics and the Protestants, the latter were the scrappy underdogs headquartered in London who wrong-foot the Catholics, particularly as you see it play out in Florida, which was settled by the Spanish circa 1565. But the scrappy underdogs eventually take over Florida, not least because they were able to expand the bounds of those capable of being admitted into the “hallowed halls of settlerdom,” which is coterminous with the “hallowed halls of whiteness.” Whereas the Spaniards, for example, mandated that one had to be Catholic to take part in their colonial projects, the Protestants, who did not have the numbers in any case, made no such demand with regard to their own colonial endeavors, be it in North Carolina 1580s or Virginia in the early 1600s. In fact, if one looks at the history of Maryland, which arises in the 1600s, many of the settlers in what was a nominally Protestant project were indeed Catholic. It's difficult to find that sort of ecumenical attitude from his Catholic Majesty in Spain [17].
Slavery, White Supremacy, Anti-Communism, and the Class Question
It is clear, however, with regard to republicanism as an anti-monarchical politics, that one essentially moves from the divine right of monarchs to the divine right of those who are defined as “white,” particularly property owners. This failure to reckon with the actual historical movement of U.S. republicanism has obfuscated the fact that, structurally, it's been well-nigh impossible to admit those of us into the “hallowed halls of whiteness”—still necessary for the guarantee of some semblance of equal rights—who were previously excluded.
It's no accident that it required the slaughter of 700,000 people in a bloody war to liberate the enslaved Africans from 1861-1865 in the United States. It's not accidental that it required a change in the international situation in the 20th century with the rise of Socialist projects and National Liberation movements to move the needle on the agonizing retreat of some of the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow [18]. It has oftentimes required—particularly with regard to the abolition of slavery—external forces like the Haitian revolution (1791 to 1804), which ignited a general crisis of the entire slave system which could only be resolved by its collapse [19]. Historically, external forces have largely been the catalyst for social change within the U.S. Many of our friends on the left, however, often ignore these external factors, and thus wind up giving too much credit to domestic factors, which then leads to an inadequate or misleading diagnosis, which leads to an inadequate or misleading prescription, which means that the underlying malady remains unaffected.
The New Republic series in question is symptomatic of all of the above.
We see the same misleading approach when it comes to analyses of slavery, the class question of which is often ignored. That is, pundits generally fail to see the enslaved as the unpaid sector of the working class, for example. Even those people who proudly call themselves “class reductionists” often fail to look at slavery as a class question—which is quite stunning—and they have therefore been unable to ascertain that there might perhaps be differences in approach and in strategy between the wage sector of the working class, which was defined by whiteness pre-1865, and the unpaid sector of the working class, defined by being non-white. It is laughable, then, that when speaking about 1776, those of us who engage in the indignity of pointing out the fact that Britain was moving toward abolition at a much faster pace than the United States—even arming Africans and Indigenes, the former even participating in the sacking of the White House in 1814—are denounced as being apologists for King George [20].
In his contribution, Stanley describes certain “[c]anaries in the fascist coal-mine,” such as the attack on education, critical race theory (CRT), and the allegations of “Marxist indoctrination” in higher education institutions in Florida and elsewhere [21]. Stanley also describes Trump’s “tactic of painting one’s political opponents as Marxists and Communists, and claiming they dominate the institutions,” as a “hallmark of the classic European fascist regimes of the mid-Twentieth Century.” Since we are speaking of U.S. style fascism, would it not also be useful and pertinent to point out that this very same tactic was also a hallmark of the United States during the mid-20th century, contemporaneous with the rise and fall of European fascism? As Charisse Burden-Stelly has elucidated in her recent book Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the Twentieth Century, the intersection of anti-Communism and anti-Blackness was baked into 20th century U.S. jurisprudence, as well as the ideological apparatuses that fomented anti-labor, anti-Marxism, and anti-Black radicalism in the same era [22]. We need only examine the way West Indians like Marcus Garvey, the founder of the United Negro Improvement Association, were cast or “troped” as Bolsheviks and outside agitators; or the brutal attacks on the trade unionism and anti-war efforts of the IWW; or, after World War II, anti-Communist and anti-Labor legislation like the infamous Smith Act, Taft-Hartley, and others which culminated in the deportation of anti-fascist crusaders like Claudia Jones; or the indictments and the revocation of passports belonging to W.E.B. Du Bois for his peace activism, and Paul Robeson for his apparent sympathies with Moscow. Or, we need only turn to the attack on trade unionism in Hollywood in the mid 1940s, which featured all of the hallmarks mentioned by Stanley: the charge that Hollywood as a cultural institution was dominated by Communists and fellow travelers, indoctrinating the masses, which led to the trial and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten [23].
Hollywood was also where the young Ronald Reagan cut his teeth as a union busting, anti-Communist politician, lubricating the path for his authorization of the 1981 lockout of the PATCO workers and undermining of the Soviet Union during his tenure in the White House [24]. It is no accident that Trump often cites the alleged greatness of figures like Ronald Reagan, not only because of his adoption of the latter’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” but also because of his historical legacy of union busting and red baiting [25].
The right wing’s exaggeration of the strength of Marxism in the United States of America is essentially a false flag operation. Anybody who consorts with academics knows that they so often bend over backwards to try to show that they're not Marxists or that they're not socialists, and they often do cartwheels to denounce the Socialist project more generally. It is anti-communism, not communism or marxism, that is prevalent in the U.S. academy, as the work No Ivory Tower by Ellen W. Schrecker indicates [26].
To better understand the profundity of anti-Communism in the United States, we need to connect it with the fact that in 1865, the United States had one of the most historically significant expropriations of private property without compensation: the expropriation of the slave-holding class from their human property. This, of course, left the slaveholders furious, which led to a decades long reign of terror (most infamously exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan), while, at the same time, preparing the ground for at least an attempted ideological linkage between Socialist projects of the 20th century which also featured the uncompensated expropriation of private property, particularly the Bolshevik Revolution post-1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, and the Cuban Revolution of 1959. We can see, then, a kind of historical continuum with regard to this expropriation of private property in the United States and how that might have helped to generate the profundity of the Red Scare in, for instance, the film industry and the academy post-1945, and elsewhere. In other words, the fear of expropriation helps to explain the virility of U.S. style anti-Communism and anti-Socialism; if we consider our neighbor to the north, Canada, as a sort of control group, we should ask ourselves why so many self-liberated slaves sought refuge across the border to Canada (as well as abolitionist Mexico under Vincente Guererro, and Haiti under Dessaline, and especially Jean Boyer during his migration efforts). Canada did not experience a mass expropriation of private property, for instance, and which currently has single payer health care system.
From “Race” Back to Religion?
And that brings us back to the present moment, where the history of settler colonialism, class collaboration, racial terror, white supremacy, and anti-Communism all congeal into current iteration of U.S. fascism, Trump style. It may be revealing to probe the curious way in which race and ethnicity function in U.S. fascism in the present moment in concert with efforts of Trump and his MAGA comrades. Figures like Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys, Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, and Ali Alexander, one of the early proponents of the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy, who were some of the most prominent engineers behind the coup of January 6, 2021, happen to have (or, in the case of Rhodes, happen to claim) non-white ancestry [27]. Tarrio is of Cuban heritage, while Rhodes claims Hispanic and Native American ancestry, while Alexander is of Arab and Black roots. It might also be instructive to point out that one of the loudest self-professed neo-nazi figures operating in the U.S. today, speaking of Nick Fuentes—fellow traveler with Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West)—is of Mexican heritage. Consider as well the case of Lawrence Dennis, for example, the so-called “brains behind U.S. fascism,” who was a Black man who passed for white [28]. We cannot begin to unpack these contemporary racial and political dynamics without an understanding of the history of racialization, dispossession, and white supremacy that have functioned historically in the United States.
What these racial dynamics perhaps indicate is that we may be at the incipient stage of another shift as momentous and portentous as 1492: a shift back to religion as the dominant identity marker of difference. We need only cite the contemporary rise of Christian nationalism and the evangelical support for Donald Trump among other phenomena as signs pointing in this direction. We also see this kind of shift occurring at the legislative levels, most recently in states like Oklahoma, where a directive was issued from the state superintendent mandating all teachers to provide students instruction from the Bible, while in Louisiana, a law was passed mandating that the 10 Commandments must be posted in public schools [29]. The specter of Christian Nationalism ought to be front and center in our analysis of the present threat of U.S. fascism. Consider the recent remarks of Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson, who delivered a chilling warning, to a mostly white congregation of church-goers, that “some folks need killing” [30].
Bi-Partisan Fascism
While the authors of this essay are sympathetic with the analysis that looming threat of a fascist attack on education indicates a serious threat to educational institutions in the United States, we must also acknowledge the most recent fascist crackdown against students and faculty protesting Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza at UCLA, NYU, and Columbia and others too numerous too mention [31]. It is not to be overlooked, despite The New Republic’s myopic vantage, that it was Joe Biden who approved of the militarized onslaught against college students, which included right wing forces descending on peaceful protestors with bats, sticks, and other weapons including chemical agents, and even mice, funded, incidentally, by Bill Ackman and Jessica Seinfeld (spouse of Jerry Seinfeld, who himself recently launched his own crusade decrying “wokeness” in comedy after the monumental failure of his Netflix film about Pop Tarts) [32].
On a similar policy question between Trump and Biden, Francisco Goldman writes that “as president, Trump spoke admiringly of Israel’s separation walls and proposed that U.S. troops shoot migrants in the legs ‘to slow them down.’ Perhaps now courts will bow to his wishes” [33]. Without downplaying Trump's fascist border policies, we should be willing to ask if Biden’s policies have been any better? Recall Biden’s move to keep Trump’s Title 42 intact, which led to the expulsion of over two million migrants from January 2021 to March 2023 [34]. And, certainly, with respect to admiration for Israel’s separation walls, Biden has clearly indicated his full-fledged allegiance to the Zionist project, supplying an unceasing stream of munitions and other material support for the Netanyahu regime to commit its genocidal campaign against the people of historic Palestine. On the latter point, we don’t need to confine our analysis of imperialism and fascism to right wing Christian nationalism alone. Liberal support of Zionism is as rampant materially and ideologically as the former, which makes The New Republic’s failure to broach this question all the more glaring.
Brian Stelter, in his contribution about how Trump might engineer a takeover of the media, describes similar maneuvers in Turkey and Hungary as potential models for how Trump might accomplish the same should he be reelected this November [35]. We should also pay close attention to the way Biden has offered his undying ideological support for Israel’s genocidal campaign. For instance, when he blatantly lied about having seen evidence of the now-debunked atrocity and mass rape narratives forwarded by The New York Times, as reported by The Grayzone and The Intercept, and more recently in The Times of London [36]. Readers of the so-called “paper of record” should also ask why NYT journalists were censored from using words like “Palestine,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing” in their reporting in the midst of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza [37]. The rampant denialism of Israel’s genocide of the people of Gaza on full display by the White House Press Secretary and numerous other spokespeople must also be considered as a similar phenomenon of shaping the media narrative [38].
Fortunately our student leaders and comrades have forced the concept of settler colonialism into contemporary vocabulary as they put a microscope to what we see unfolding in historic Palestine. However, unfortunately, their elders have done a disservice by not acknowledging and recognizing that you have a history and present iteration of settler colonialism here in North America as well. When Federico Finchelstein and Emmanuel Guerisoli claim, rightfully, that “Nazi dictatorship was founded on invalid laws,” they neglected to mention the fact that when fascism was surging in the 1920s and the 1930s the Nazi lawyers in Berlin pointed across the Atlantic to the United States, borrowing from the latter the normalization of Indigenous dispossession, genocide, Jim Crow, and other race laws (particularly anti-miscegenation laws) from the U.S. context, as James Q. Whitman details in his book Hitler’s American Model [39]. U.S. race law inspired the Nazi drafters of the Nuremberg laws and gave them incentive to think that the United States would not necessarily view their plans to uproot people willy-nilly in Poland, Russia, and Eastern and Central Europe with skepticism.
Conclusion: The Historical Continuum of U.S. Fascism
Certain parallels from U.S. history may offer a way to navigate the complexity of our current conjuncture: Trump’s Mar-a-lago compound was raided the same week as the African People’s Socialist Party headquarters was raided in Florida [40]. Trump’s federal election interference case in Fulton County, which is now postponed indefinitely by the Georgia Court of Appeals, is also the same court house which has brought federal RICO charges against the Stop Cop City protestors [41]. The Fulton County Courthouse was also the historic site of the case against Angelo Herndon, the Black Communist labor activist who was charged with attempting to incite an insurrection in 1932 under a revised version of a 19th century slave insurrection law which was originally passed to ward off insurrection after the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831 in Southampton, Virginia. Turner, we must remember, was inspired by events that had taken place in revolutionary Haiti between 1791 and 1804, which, as Leslie Alexander has argued, spurred the formation of Black Internationalism, as evinced by other revolts, such as Denmark Vesey’s in 1822, Gabriel's Rebellion in 1800, and numerous others [42].
What these parallels ought to bring to mind is the historical continuum through which U.S. politics moves through the decades and centuries. While Trump has thus far evaded the vast majority of legal issues he has been confronted with—save for the 34 felony counts—the white supremacist frameworks binding U.S. institutions structurally, ideologically, and legally continue to punish and scapegoat Black and Red political formations in the United States (or, as Charisse Burden-Stelly might put it, Black Red or Red Black). In other words, we ought to seek to understand the direct line between the case of Angelo Herndon, the Scottsboro Boys, the Smith Act Trials, and Trump’s support for the death penalty for the now-exonerated Central Park 5, all while Trump himself, for the most part, evades the gavel [43].
We cannot begin to understand the persistence of right wing extremism which has the U.S. moonwalking into fascism lest we situate it within the inherited legacies of settler colonialism, class collaboration, slavery, and white supremacy which have spawned some of the most egregious aspects of U.S. politics yesterday as today. The Trump phenomenon, the formation of his mass base of support, and the contemporary rise of right wing extremism, exemplified by the MAGA movement and Christian nationalism, the Unite the Right Rally of 2017, proponents of the so-called “great replacement theory,” the terror attacks committed by white supremacist gunman, right wing gun culture more generally, and, of course, what we ought to consider as the counterrevolution of January 6, 2021, are not isolated phenomena confined to the last few years of the timeline of U.S. history. They are embedded in the longue durée of U.S. fascism [44].
It is not by accident that many state legislatures, from Florida to Ohio and Arkansas, want these intersections excised from the historical record [45]. Let us not capitulate to these maneuvers by casting a myopic, liberal vision of the very history that has catapulted us to the present threat of neo-fascism. We must therefore be willing to train our attention on the forces of settler colonialism, class collaboration, and the militarized identity politics of whiteness, which account for the root causes which not only animated U.S. fascism historically, but continue to do so in our present era.
By situating Trump and the MAGA movement within a historical continuum, rather than a series of isolated occurrences comparable only to Berlin and Rome of the 1930s, we can better understand that the U.S. fascism to come—what it would look like, as The New Republic argues—is indeed deeply and empirically rooted in what it has already looked like. The easy parallels between Trump and Mussolini and Trump and Hitler, despite the sensationalist cover of The New Republic’s May-June issue, are not robust enough to understand the perilous moment we currently find ourselves in. Without an acute analysis of the historical and ideological underpinnings of modern day extremist political formations espoused by Trump and the MAGA movement, as well as the bi-partisan front, we will continue to goose step down the path of neo-fascism. This is why it's incumbent on all of us to ask more of our publications and to ask more of our intellectuals in turn because it's not an exaggeration to suggest what's at issue is life and death itself.
GERALD HORNE is the John J. and Rebecca Moors Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He is the author of over 40 books, including The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States (NYU Press, 2009), The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism (International Publishers, 2022), and, most recently, Armed Struggle?: Panthers and Communists; Black Nationalists and Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies (International Publishers, 2024).
ANTHONY BALLAS is an organizer with NFEE Local 4935. He is a Ph.D. student in Literature at Duke and currently teaches philosophy and social sciences at Northern New Mexico College. His work appears in numerous publications such as Protean Magazine, Truthout, Caribbean Quarterly, Monthly Review, 3:AM Magazine, and elswhere. He is currently co-authoring a volume on the rise of neo-fascism with Gerald Horne. Ballas hosts the De Facto Podcast and co-hosts Cold War Cinema. Find him on Twitter @tonyjballas.
Endnotes
[1] The authors of this essay would like to give a special thanks to Jake Romm for his editorial work, as well as express our appreciation of both James Hansen and Tyler Holter for their assistance.
[2] Tomasky, Michael et al., “What American Fascism Would Look Like,” The New Republic, May 16, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/series/37/trump-2024-american-fascism-series.
[3] Horne, Gerald, “A Deeper History of an Insurrection: When Past Meets Present on 1/6/21,” Cultural Studies at GMU, March 4, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=1486921771645406&ref=watch_permalink; Ballas, Anthony, “The Poisonous Fruits of White Supremacy,” Monthly Review, May, 2022. https://monthlyreview.org/press/the-poisonous-fruits-of-white-supremacy-the-rise-of-the-right-horne-on-the-de-facto-podcast/; Baradaran, Kamran, “We need to combat the rise of fascism at the legal and legislative levels; Anthony Ballas tells ILNA,” Iranian Labour News Agency, https://www.ilna.ir/en/tiny/news-1355804.
[4] Toscano, Alberto, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis, (Verso, 2023). See also, Romm, Jake, “Late Fascism: An Interview with Alberto Toscano, Part 1,” Protean, Nov. 24, 2023. https://proteanmag.com/2023/11/24/late-fascism-an-interview-with-alberto-toscano/; and Romm, “Late Fascism: An Interview with Alberto Toscano, Part 2,” Protean, Nov. 29, 2023. https://proteanmag.com/2023/11/29/late-fascism-an-interview-with-alberto-toscano-part-2/.
[5] Tomasky, “Yes, That’s Right: American Fascism,” The New Republic, May 16, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/article/181258/american-fascism-look-like.
[6] Stanley, Jason, “The End of Civic Compassion,” The New Republic, May 16, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/article/181274/end-civic-compassion.
[7] Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, “The Permanent Counterrevolution,” The New Republic, May 16, 2014. https://newrepublic.com/article/181265/permanent-counterrevolution.
[8] Corrigan, Maureen, “A Right-Wing Counter-Hegemony,” The New Republic, May 16, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/article/181271/right-wing-counter-hegemony.
[9] Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom!, (W.W. Norton & Co., 2023 [1936]). See also: Spoth, Daniel. “Totalitarian Faulkner: The Nazi Interpretation of ‘Light in August’ and ‘Absalom, Absalom!’” ELH, vol. 78, no. 1, 2011, pp. 239–57. JSTOR, http://www.Jstor.Org/stable/41236541; Atkinson, Ted. Faulkner And the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, And Cultural Politics (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2005); Follansbee, Jeanne A. “‘Sweet Fascism in the Piney Woods’: Absalom, Absalom! as Fascist Fable,” Modernism/modernity, Volume 18, Number 1, January 2011, pp. 67-94.
[10] Rozsa, Matthew, “Donald Trump's favorite president: Andrew Jackson as father of the ‘white republic,’” Salon.com, Oct. 2, 2019. https://www.salon.com/2019/10/02/donald-trumps-favorite-president-andrew-jackson-as-father-of-the-white-republic/. See also: Clavin, Matthew, The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, (NYU Press, 2019).
[11] Rosenberg, Eli, “Andrew Jackson was called ‘Indian killer.’ Trump honored Navajos in front of his portrait,” The Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/28/andrew-jackson-was-called-indian-killer-trump-honored-navajos-in-front-of-his-portrait/.
[12] Horne, Gerald, The Counterrevolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism, (International, 2022).
[13] Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic, (NYU Press, 2015); Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation, (NYU Press, 2012).
[14] Steele, Chris, “Fighting Fascism and White Supremacy by Understanding History,” Truthout, Sep. 1, 2018. https://truthout.org/audio/fighting-fascism-and-white-supremacy-by-understanding-history/; Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, (NYU Press, 2014).
[15] Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, (Monthly Review Press, 2020).
[16] Horne, “‘Against Left-Wing White Nationalism’: Gerald Horne’s Response to ‘The White Republic and the Struggle for Racial Justice,’” Toward Freedom, July 5, 2021. https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/against-left-wing-white-nationalism-gerald-hornes-response-to-the-white-republic-and-the-struggle-for-racial-justice/.
[17] Many pundits in the United States bend over backwards, seemingly, to give credit to the settler project, asserting along the way that what supposedly makes small “r” republicanism in the United States revolutionary is that it's anti-monarchy. It’s curious as well that many of these same pundits on the left are often so unsparing in their critiques of the Socialist projects of various stripes from the 20th century. They give no credit, for example, if internationalist pressure from socialist-aligned forces helped to liberate Southern Africa. See: Horne, White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela, (International, 2019).
[18] Horne, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett’s Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox, (U of Illinois Press, 2017).
[19] Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins.
[20] Horne, Negro Comrades. When Washington aligned with the British Empire 1941 to 1945, we rarely heard anyone complain about it. In other words, the ruling class has a lot of latitude in terms of their alliances while the unpaid sector of the working class, and their descendents, are not afforded the luxury of that kind of latitude. Have we ever heard anybody complain about the fact that the Head of State in London is a role that's transmitted genetically, as former South African president Thabo Mbeki pointed out? It doesn't even register. Even in terms of the alliance with the Soviet Union, for example, the only people who objected to the 1941-1945 alliance with the Soviet Union were Pat Buchanan and Herbert Hoover, who flaunt their proud anti-Stalinism as part of their self-definition. But they don't have a peep to say about the United States in alliance with the British Monarchy. If you're not Black, if you're not a descendant of the unpaid sector of the working class, then you get a lot of latitude from many of our so-called friends on the left.
[21] Stanley, Jason, “The End of Civic Compassion,” The New Republic, May 16, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/article/181274/end-civic-compassion.
[22] Burden-Stelly, Charisse, Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, (U of Chicago Press, 2023). See also: Horne, Red Scare / Black Liberation: Ben Davis and the Communist Party, (U of Delaware Press, 1994).
[23] Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists, (U of Texas Press, 2001); Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten, (U of California Press, 2006); Prime, Rebecca, Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture, (Rutgers UP, 2014).
[24] Horne, Gerald & Ballas, Anthony, “How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America,” Zócalo Public Square, Nov. 9, 2023. https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2023/11/09/hollywood-black-friday-strike-changed-labor-across-america/ideas/essay/.
[25] Parallels between the Red Scare political front in the U.S. of the mid-20th century and the right wing formations of our present era are so numerous that they verge on the absurd. As of 2024 we have seen so-called “MAGA Communism” and “patriotic socialism” crop up online as bizarre ideological fronts Donald Trump calling for Sean Fain to be fired while a federal monitor investigates the latter for corruption after advising him not to signal his support for Gaza. Meanwhile, Shawn O’Brian of the Teamsters took to the stage at the 2024 Republican National Convention to give a masterclass on class collaboration—a speach which was endorsed by notorious January 6 “running man” Sen. Josh Hawley. We should also mention the federal charges foisted upon the Uhuru 3, speaking of Chairman Omali Yeshitali and two other members of the African People’s Socialist Party after violent raids to their headquarters in late 2021. Echoing the Red Scare / Black Scare tactics of the 1940s and 1950s in the United States; the Smith Act Trials which led to the deportation of Claudia Jones, the siezure of Paul Robeson’s and W.E.B. DuBois’s passports, the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and the blacklisting of 100s of others in Hollywood, including the deportation of Rosaura Revueltas of Salt of the Earth [1954] fame, the jailings of Harlem Councilman Ben Davis Jr. and Henry Winston; the passage of Taft-Hartley which required union leaders to sign anti-communist affidavits; and more. Lastly, with the recent spate of SCOTUS decisions from the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Chevron, and against NLRB in favor of Starbucks, we are seeing the kind of legal fascism crop up in the attempt to sideline labor, curtail women’s reproductive rights, and ensure corporations retain immense power over unions and workers. We should not be surprised if Taft-Hartley style legislation is on the horizon.
[26] Schrecker, Ellen W., No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, (Cambridge UP, 1986).
[27] Ballas, Anthony & Horne, Gerald, “Ep. 4: Gerald Horne on Fascism, Racial Passing, Christian Nationalism, January 6, & Ye (Kanye West),” De Facto Podcast, Dec. 10, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZr_isb69hw.
[28] Horne, The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States, (NYU Press, 2009).
[29] Mervosh, Sarah & Dias, Elizabeth,"Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Requires Public Schools to Teach the Bible," New York Times, June 27, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/us/oklahoma-public-schools-bible.html; “What is Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law and why is it controversial,” Aljazeera, June 28, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/28/what-is-louisianas-ten-commandments-law-and-why-is-it-controversial.
[30] Marcotte, Amanda, "'Some folks need killing!': It's time to take MAGA threats of violence literally and seriously," Salon.com, July 8, 2024. https://www.salon.com/2024/07/08/some-folks-need-killing-people-must-take-maga-of-violence-literally-and-seriously/; Liu, Nicholas, "Head of group responsible for Project 2025 threatens violence if people challenge their 'revolution,'" Salon.com, July 3, 2024. salon.com/2024/07/03/head-of-group-responsible-for-project-2025-threatens-violence-if-people-challenge-their-revolution/.
[31] Ballas, Anthony & White, Donalyn,“Future Generations Will See Students Backed Palestine as Admins Attacked Protest,” Truthout, June 11, 2024. https://truthout.org/articles/future-generations-will-see-students-backed-palestine-as-admins-attacked-protest/.
[32] Kestler-D'Amours, Jillian and Harb, Ali, "‘No surprise’: US students slam Biden’s comments on Gaza encampments," Aljazeera, May 2, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/2/no-surprise-us-students-slam-bidens-comments-on-gaza-encampments; Nazzal, Safi, Watanabe, Teresa, Ahn, Ashley, Fry, Hannah & Winton, Richard, "After violent night at UCLA, classes canceled, UC president launches investigation into response," Los Angeles Times, Apr. 30, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-30/ucla-moves-to-shut-down-pro-palestinian-encampment-as-unlawful; Work, Molly Castle & Kelman, Brett, "Medics Say Police Weapons Drew Blood and Cracked Bones at UCLA Protest," Truthout, May 16, 2024. https://truthout.org/articles/medics-say-police-weapons-drew-blood-and-cracked-bones-at-ucla-protest/; Ballas & White, Ibid.; Muir, Ellie, "Jerry Seinfeld’s ‘Unfrosted’ has worst debut of any Netflix No 1 this year," AOL.com, May 9, 2024, https://www.aol.com/jerry-seinfeld-unfrosted-worst-debut-133152791.html. We are also seeing the ousting of college presidents such as Claudine Gay, for example, spearheaded by none other than Ackman (whose spouse, Neri Oxman, had plagiarized passages from her 2010 doctoral dissertation (Lenthang, Marlene, "Neri Oxman, billionaire investor Bill Ackman’s wife, accused of plagiarism in MIT dissertation," NBC News, Jan. 5, 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/neri-oxman-billionaire-investor-bill-ackmans-wife-accused-plagiarism-m-rcna132436). As well, we’ve seen the firing of journalists like Briahna Joy Gray and Kaitie Halper from The Hill over their criticisms of Israel, while in academia, professors Jodi Dean, Mohamed Abdou, Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, and others have faced similar backlash.
[33] Goldman, Francisco, “From Texas to Massachusetts On the border in a fascist America,” The New Republic, May 16, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/article/181225/texas-massachusetts-border.
[34] Debusmann Jr., Bernd, “How Joe Biden and Donald Trump's border policies compare,” BBC.com, June 4, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65574725.
[35] Stetler, Brian, “Revenge and Freedom From Fact On the media in a fascist America,” The New Republic, May 16, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/article/181244/revenge-freedom-fact.
[36] Blumenthal, Max & Maté, Aaron, “Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report,” Jan. 10, 2024. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/; Gupta, Arun, "American Media Keep Citing ZAKA—Though its October 7 Atrocity Stories are Discredited in Israel," The Intercept, Feb. 27, 2024. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/27/zaka-october-7-israel-hamas-new-york-times/; Philip, Catherine & Weiniger, Gabrielle, “Israel says Hamas weaponised rape. Does the evidence add up?” The Times, June 07 2024. https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-times-magazine/article/israel-hamas-rape-investigation-evidence-october-7-6kzphszsj.
[37] Scahill, Jeremy & Grim Ryan, “Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words ‘Genocide,’ ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’ and ‘Occupied Territory,’” April 15, 2024. https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/.
[38] See also, Ballas & White, “Future Generations Will See Students Backed Palestine as Admins Attacked Protest,” Truthout, June 11, 2024: “We should also keep in mind that the NYT was just awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for International Journalism, adding insult to injury: it is a curious fact that Columbia University president, Minouche Shafik, currently sits on the Pulitzer Prize Board. Given that Shafik’s recent authorization for the NYPD to clear the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University involved police attacking, arresting, and otherwise blocking student journalists from covering the violent police raids on campus, would not her presence on this apparently esteemed prize board constitute, at the very least, a serious conflict of interest, and, at worst, an ethical breach in line with the NYT’s frequent normalization of colonial, imperial, and genocidal violence?”
[39] Finchelstein, Federico & Guerisoli, Emmanuel, “The “Day One” Dictatorship,” The New Republic May 16, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/article/181224/day-one-dictatorship. See also, Whitman, James Q., Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, (Princeton UP, 2017).
[40] Bekele, Solyana, “FBI Storms African Liberation Movement with Fabricated Charges: U.S. Government Escalates Brutal Assault,” Black Agenda Report, Mar. 6, 2024. https://www.blackagendareport.com/fbi-storms-african-liberation-movement-fabricated-charges-us-government-escalates-brutal-assault.
[41] Pratt, Timothy, "Petition aims to dismiss Atlanta’s bid to use Rico law against ‘Cop City’ activists," The Guardian, June 26, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/26/cop-city-protesters-atlanta.
[42] Alexander, Leslie, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States, (U of Illinois Press, 2022). See also, Clavin, Matthew, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution, (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Daut, Marlene L., Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, (U of North Carolina Press, 2023); Aptheker, Herbert, American Negro Slave Revolts, (International, 2021); Sepinwall, Alyssa, Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games, (UP of Mississippi, 2021); Kytle, Ethan J. & Roberts, Blain, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, (The New Press, 2021); Scott, Julius S., The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, (Verso, 2018); Horne, Ibid., 2015; Ballas, Anthony, “Haiti: Past, Present, and Future,” Monthly Review, https://monthlyreview.org/press/haiti-past-present-and-future-gerald-horne-on/; Ballas, “Colonialism, Cinema and Revolution: Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games,” Caribbean Quarterly, 2022, 68(4), 606–615. https://doi.org/10.1080/00086495.2022.2139550.
[43] Bustillo, Ximena & Fung, Hilary, "Trump is found guilty on 34 felony counts. Read the counts here," NPR, May 30, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/30/g-s1-1848/trump-hush-money-trial-34-counts; Burden-Stelly, Ibid.; Morrison, Aaron & Brown, Matt, "Black leaders call out Trump’s criminal justice contradictions as he rails against guilty verdict," Associated Press, June 1, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/trump-guilty-verdict-central-park-five-b59498a04d148a65ef33df36a61aa668.
[44] "Buffalo shooter who killed 10 at Tops supermarket to face death penalty in federal case," CBS News, Jan. 12, 2024. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/buffalo-shooting-tops-supermarket-payton-gendron-death-penalty/; Kautzer, Chad, "American as Right Wing Gun Culture," Boston Review, Dec. 17, 2021. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/america-as-a-tactical-gun-culture/. See also, Anderson, Carol, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, (Bloomsnury, 2021); McKevitt, Andrew C., Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America, (U of North Carolina Press, 2023); and finally, for a different approach to the notion of armed struggle in the U.S. context historically, Horne, Armed Struggle?: Panthers & Communists; Black Nationalists and Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies, (International, 2024).
[45] Ballas, Anthony, “As Universities Submit to Neoliberalism and Fascism, Workers Must Fight Back,” Truthout, Feb. 1, 2023. https://truthout.org/articles/as-universities-submit-to-neoliberalism-and-fascism-workers-must-fight-back/.
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