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fascism
For Trump, There Is No Rock Bottom
The regime’s depravity will continue to shock the world until it is removed.
Nov 04, 2025
“For anyone holding their breath,” someone said online a couple weeks ago, “waiting for this fascist Trump regime to hit rock bottom: There is no rock bottom. Their depravity will continue to shock the world, week after week, for as long as they hold power.”
It is a good time to reflect on how true this statement is as we approach the one-year anniversary of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s second presidential election.
Mad “king” Trump is now blowing up random boats, slaughtering innocents in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, claiming without a hint of a wisp of a scent of evidence that the people he is massacring in cold violation of international and national law and basic decency are “enemy combatant” narco traffickers “at war with the United States.”
Trump is gathering major military forces off the coast of Venezuela in preparation for a likely regime-change war on that nation. He may also attack Colombia, whose president has angered him by criticizing his extrajudicial executions in international waters.
Trump and the key people around him... are dedicated sociopathic fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency, deliberation, and rule of law by any and all means “necessary.”
He is sending $20 billion to Argentina to back his fellow far-right president there as 42 million US Americans face hunger because he is cutting off their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Former SNAP recipients will join masses of federal workers Trump has thrown out of work on food lines as Trump demands $230 million from his Department of Justice as “compensation” for its (badly belated) indictment (under former President Joe Biden) of Trump for… you know, trying to overthrow electoral democracy and the rule of law at the end of his first horrific administration (and for absconding with classified documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them).
Trump has just maniacally torn down the East Wing of the White House, planning to replace that former historic landmark with a gargantuan, gaudy ballroom funded by some of his favorite capitulating corporations, including the tech giants Google, Meta, and Palantir and the leading “defense” firm Lockheed Martin.
The Congress has been essentially dissolved by Trump through his command over the Speaker of the US House, the obsequious Mike Johnson (R-La.). This makes legislative branch oversight of Trump’s war moves and plans impossible. It also prevents the release of the Epstein Files, which contain information on his close relationship with a disgraced pedophile, and congressional action to restore SNAP benefits (food stamps). (Johnson is meanwhile refusing to seat a duly elected congresswoman from Arizona since, according to media reports, she would tilt the US House majority to the side of the files’ release.)
Trump has slapped 50% tariffs on Brazil to punish it for properly prosecuting and convicting his fascist comrade Jair Bolsonaro (the onetime “Trump of the Tropics”) for sparking an attempted insurrectionist coup (Brazil’s January 6) in that nation’s capital on January 8, 2023.
Among the many ways in which Trump is mimicking his role model Adolph Hitler is his attempt to rule through executive order and memorandum.
A recent Trump memo–NPSM-7–absurdly attributes recent domestic US political violence to a supposedly top-down movement of left-wing terrorism and tells federal law enforcement to investigate and potentially prosecute any group or individual who advances “anti-fascist" ideas, including even criticism of “Christianity” and “traditional” family and gender relations.
Trump has unleashed his Department of Justice on a transparently political campaign of prosecutorial retribution against his enemies and critics. He has even directed his fascist attorney general to investigate people Joe Biden pardoned.
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The deranged, orange-sprayed POTUS responded to the remarkable outpouring of 7 million Americans in the No Kings Day protests held in more than 2,500 cities and towns two weeks ago by posting an AI video showing “King Trump” wearing a crown while piloting an Air Force bomber that dumped liquid shit on protesters in New York, Chicago, and other US cities.
There’s far more than online fantasy in the menace Trump poses to the US cities. Herr Donald’s 21st-century Gestapo, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and its junior partner Border Patrol, are many months into a reign of racist, xenophobic-nationalist, and militarized police state terror across urban America. Among its many outrages, this assault has included the disgraceful deployment of Black Hawk attack helicopters and hundreds of heavily armed storm troopers against the residents of a large apartment complex in the Black Chicago neighborhood of South Shore. Small children of color were thrown on the street, zip-tied, and tossed into vans.
The Trump regime is recruiting ICE agents from the ranks of the Proud Boys and other paramilitary fascist groups. It is building mass detention camps from coast to coast with taxpayer funding that makes ICE more well-funded than the militaries of every nation except the US and China.
But what did we expect? Is any of this surprising? Trump45 led an insurrectionist coup attempt on January 6. 2021. He campaigned on political “retribution” and a promise of racist mass deportations animated by his Hitlerian claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning our blood.”
Trump’s sadistic puppy-killing Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, aptly nicknamed “Gestapo Barbie,” coldly rejected Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's request that she suspend the terror in Chicago for Halloween weekend so that Chicago-area children could go out trick-or-treating without fear of being tear-gassed and zip-tied by Trump’s gendarmes.
Mein Trumpf47 has invaded Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Memphis with the National Guard. He sent the US Marines into Los Angeles. He is pressing to militarily invade Portland, Oregon on the basis of the utterly absurd claim that “radical left terrorists” are “burning” that city “to the ground.” In a nod to the Slaveowners’ Confederacy, whose virulent racist legacy he and his openly Christian white nationalist (neofascist) “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth uphold, Trump has asked his Supreme Court to summarily reverse lower court rulings that have so far blocked his bid to put Texas National Guard troops in Chicago.
Trump has said that Illinois Gov. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” since they have not ordered state and city police to join ICE and Border Patrol’s racist kidnapping operations.
Three weeks ago, the depraved fascist-in-chief Trump and Hegseth ordered 800-plus generals and admirals to Quantico, Virginia from across the vast American global empire to hear them say that America’s real adversary is “the enemy within,” meaning the residents of the nation’s majority nonwhite and “radical left” cities. Trump told the stone-faced brass that American cities need to become “training grounds” for the US military.
In his emergency request for a Supreme Court shadow docket ruling that will green-light the military takeover of Chicago and other cities, Trump has dispensed with his past invocations of federal statutes that supposedly permit him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution and argued instead that the judicial branch has no constitutional right to opine on his power to deploy the military anywhere he wants for whatever reason.
If he doesn’t get what he wants from the Christian fascist court he molded during his first term he will likely invoke the ancient slaveowners’ Insurrection Act to put troops in Democratic Party-run majority nonwhite cities.
The Trump regime is moving in numerous ways to rig the 2026 midterms, which may well take place in the intimidating, vote-suppressing presence of occupying troops in US cities.
Even without National Guard or regular duty troops deployed, the direct federal gendarmes of ICE and its junior partner Border Patrol–unencumbered by the 10th Amendment and Posse Comitatus law and filled in its ranks with the most racist and reactionary thugs in the federal state–have already this year undertaken a federal military attack on US cities, replete with advanced weaponry and Black Hawk attack helicopters. The nation’s cities, and most especially those cities’ Latino sections, are already under de facto military occupation.
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But what did we expect? Is any of this surprising? Trump45 led an insurrectionist coup attempt on January 6. 2021. He campaigned on political “retribution” and a promise of racist mass deportations animated by his Hitlerian claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning our blood.” On his first day in office, he pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 putschists and criminals, commuted the long prison sentences handed down to the nation’s top two paramilitary fascist leaders for their roles in the Capitol Riot, and signed an executive order purporting to end the explicit constitutional right of birthright citizenship.
On July 1, 2024, Trump’s Christian fascist Supreme Court granted him forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he committed past or future under the rubric of “official presidential duties.”
Trump and the key people around him, including above all Stephen “We Are the Storm!” Miller, are dedicated sociopathic fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency, deliberation, and rule of law by any and all means “necessary.” The Trump regime and the Trump party’s wild denunciation of the second No Kings Day protests as “radical left,” “Marxist” (I’m one), and “terrorist” rallies dedicated to “hating America” is symptomatic of their fascist ideology, which requires socialist, Marxist, and communist enemies even when such enemies do not exist to any significant degree, as in the US today (unlike in Germany in the early 1930s).
The Trump regime’s obsessive hatred of “the left” more than merely echoes Hitler and Goebbels’ fanatical calls and pledges to “restore German greatness” by saving it in from dreaded Marxists and “Judeo Bolsheviks” who had supposedly “stabbed the nation in the back” during and after World War I.
The former Fatherland News co-host and current “Secretary of War” Pete “I’ll Stop Drinking if You put Me Atop the Pentagon” Hegseth (member of a far-right church whose pastor says that the best period in American race relations was the era of Black chattel slavery) is a “Christian” white nationalist zealot who salivates over the prospect of unleashing the US military on US cities. He holds his position despite his monumental incompetence in great part because Trump47 is counting on him to do what Trump45’s military chiefs wouldn’t do: Use bloody force against US citizens and residents on US soil. A recently leaked Signal chat shows that Hegseth has been thinking about sending the elite US Army 82nd Airborne to crush anti-ICE protests in Portland.
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In a sign of how insane and depraved things have gotten atop the US government (and how lame and Weimar-like some top Dems are), I recently put up this Onion-style spoof online:
Unnamed sources report that Donald Trump has ordered the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to present a plan next week for the nuclear annihilation of every US city with a population of 500,000 or more. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that "any such plans would be contrary to the national interest and inconsistent with the Democrats signing on to a budget agreement to end the government shutdown." Asked for comment, former President Barack Obama said that "the nuking of our major cities by our own military would be a major setback for our great nation." Obama cautioned that "Democrats should seek bipartisan support for a congressional resolution questioning the legality of a US nuclear attack on major US cities. I know it can sometimes be difficult to win votes on the other side of the aisle," Obama added, "but the genius of America is that at the end of the day we’re all on the same team. It would be terrible to lose Chicago or St. Louis, of course, but we’re still all Americans at the end of life on Earth."
Crazy, right? And yet serious, intelligent people understandably felt the need to make sure it wasn’t for real. As one of my brilliant readers commented: “My first thought was to laugh, my second thought was ‘Let me Google this and make sure it’s a joke.’ I was relieved to discover it was not a real story but disturbed that I felt the need to check because it sounded like something he might consider."
That’s because there really are no limits to the depravity of this fascist regime. There is no rock bottom.
After understanding this, the next and obvious question is what to do about it?
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Can Mamdani and Friends Revive Socialism in America? Our Future Depends on It
To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few.
Nov 02, 2025
More than a century ago, from a Berlin prison cell where she was confined for her uncompromising opposition to the slaughter of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg warned, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Her diagnosis remains no less salient today.
In the United States, we long ago chose the path of barbarism. President Donald Trump and his enablers have proven major catalysts in hastening our descent, but they are symptoms as well as causes. The more thacompounding crises of our time, from ecological collapse to immense inequality to endless war, were hardly unforeseeable aberrations. They are the logical outgrowths of a capitalist system built on violent exploitation and rooted in the relentless pursuit of profits over people.
The unsustainable economic order that has defined our national life has corroded our democracy, eroded our shared sense of humanity, and propelled our institutions and our planet toward collapse. Today, we find ourselves perilously far down the highway leading to collective suicide. What the final autopsy will include—be it nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, AI-driven apocalypse, or all of the above—no one can yet be certain.
Yet fatalism is not a viable option. A different direction for the country and world remains possible, and Americans still can meet this moment and avert catastrophe. If we are to do so, Luxemburg’s prescription, socialism, remains our last, best hope.
Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics.
That conviction animates the democratic socialist campaign of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. In a bleak political climate, he offers a rare spark of genuine hope. Yet his mass appeal has provoked a remarkable, if predictable, elite backlash. He’s faced Islamophobic smears, oligarch money, and backroom deals (efforts that, Mamdani observed, cost far more than the taxes he plans to impose to improve life in New York). Trump has unsurprisingly joined these efforts wholeheartedly, while the Democratic establishment has chosen the path of cowardice and silence, or at least equivocation.
The outrage over Mamdani is not only about the label “socialist.” Every American has heard the refrain: Socialism looks good on paper but doesn’t work in practice. The subtext, of course, is that capitalism does. And in a sense, it has. It has worked exactly as designed by concentrating obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a ruling class that deploys its fortune to further entrench its power. Especially since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, private capital has wielded untold influence over elections, drowning out ordinary voices in a flood of corporate money.
What makes Mamdani’s campaign so unsettling to those (all too literally) invested in this status quo is not merely his critique of capitalism but his insistence on genuine democracy. His platform rests on the simple assertion that, in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the world (as should be true everywhere across this nation), every person deserves basic dignity. And what undoubtedly unnerves the political establishment isn’t so much his “radical” agenda but the notion that politics should serve the many, not the privileged few, and that the promise of democracy could be transformed from mere rhetoric to reality.
Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics. Reviving socialism in this country also requires reviving its history, recovering it from the hysteria of the Red Scare and the Cold War mentality of “better dead than red.” Socialism has long been a part of our national experience and democratic experiment. And if democracy is to survive in the 21st century, democratic socialism must be part of its future.
The Roots of American Socialism
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of immigration brought millions of workers to the United States, many carrying the radical ideas then germinating in Europe. Yet such beliefs were hardly alien to this country.
The growth of labor unions and the rise of leftist politics were not foreign imports but emerged as a byproduct of the dire material circumstances of life under industrial capitalism in America.
By 1900, the US had become the world’s leading industrial power, surpassing its European rivals in manufacturing and, by 1913, producing nearly one-third of global industrial output, more than Britain, France, and Germany combined. That share would climb to nearly half of the global gross domestic product by the end of World War II. However, the immense accumulation of wealth was not shared with those whose labor made it possible. American workers endured intense poverty and precarity, while being subjected to grueling hours for meager pay. They saw few meaningful protections, and suffered the highest rate of industrial accidents in the world.
When workers rose in collective opposition to those conditions, they faced not only the monopolistic corporations of the Gilded Age, but an entire political economy structured to preserve that system of inequality. Anti-competitive practices concentrated wealth to an extraordinary degree. The richest 10% of Americans then owned some 90% percent of national assets, with such wealth used to buy power through the co-optation of a state apparatus whose monopoly on violence was wielded against labor and in defense of capital. As Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease described the situation in 1900: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”
That was evident as early as 1877, when railroad workers launched a nationwide strike and federal troops spent weeks brutally suppressing it, killing more than 100 workers. Such violence ignited a surge of labor organizing, thanks particularly to the radically egalitarian Knights of Labor. Yet the Haymarket Affair of 1886—when a bomb set off at a May Day rally in Chicago provided a pretext for a bloody government crackdown—enabled the state to deepen its repression and stigmatize the labor movement by associating it with anarchism and extremism.
Still, the socialist left was able to reconstitute itself in the decades that followed under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. He was drawn to socialism not through abstract theory but lived experience in the American Railway Union. There, as he recalled: “in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. This was my first practical lesson in socialism, though wholly unaware that it was called by that name.”
In 1901, Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America. Over the next two decades, socialist candidates became mayors and congressional representatives, winning elections to local offices across the country. At its peak in 1912, Debs captured nearly a million votes, some 6% of the national total, while running as a third-party candidate for president (and again from prison in 1920). For a time, socialism became a visible, established part of American democracy.
“This War Is Not Our War”
Yet socialism faced its most formidable test during the First World War. Across Europe and the United States, many socialists opposed the conflict, arguing that it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” a framing that resonated with broad segments of the American public.
The socialist critique went deeper than class resentment. For decades, socialists were drawing a direct connection between capitalism’s parasitic exploitation of labor at home and its predatory expansion abroad. Writing during the late 19th-century era of high imperialism, as European powers carved up the globe in the name of national glory while showing brutal disregard for the lives of those they subjugated, progressive and socialist thinkers contended that imperialism was anything but a betrayal of capitalism’s logic.
Russian communist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin called that moment “the monopoly stage of capitalism.” (Capitalists labeled it the cause of “civilization.”) While British economist John Hobson similarly maintained that empire served not the interests of the nation but of its elites who used the power of the state to secure the raw materials and new markets they needed for further economic expansion. “The governing purpose of modern imperialism,” he explained, “is not the diffusion of civilization, but the subjugation of peoples for the material gain of dominant interests.” That was “the economic taproot of imperialism.”
The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.
Similarly in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading civil rights advocate, situated the war in the longer history of racial and colonial domination. He traced its origins to the “sinister traffic” in human beings that had left whole continents in a “state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation,” making the “rape of Africa” imaginable and therefore possible. War, he argued, was the continuation of empire by other means. “What do nations care about the cost of war,” he wrote, “if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”
Others, like disability activist and socialist Helen Keller, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed such critiques. In 1916, she wrote: “Every modern war has had its root in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines.” Of the First World War, she concluded, “the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.”
Once Washington entered the war, it criminalized dissent through the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the same “emergency measure” that would be used, during future wars, to charge whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale. Socialists were among its first targets.
After a 1918 speech condemning the war, Debs himself would be imprisoned. “Let the wealth of a nation belong to all the people, and not just the millionaires,” he declared. “The ruling class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and have yourself slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war.” The call for a world “in which we produce for all and not for the profit of the few” remains as relevant as ever.
Socialism After the Scare
The Red Scare of 1919, followed by McCarthyism in the 1950s and the broader Cold War climate of hysteria and repression, effectively criminalized socialism, transforming it into a political taboo in the United States and driving it from mainstream American discourse. Yet, despite the ferocity of the anticommunist crusade, a number of prominent voices continued to defend socialism.
In 1949, reflecting on a war that had claimed more than 60 million lives and brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Albert Einstein argued that “the real source of evil” was capitalism itself. Humanity, he insisted, “is not condemned, because of its biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.” The alternative, he wrote, lay in “the establishment of a socialist economy,” with an education system meant to cultivate “a sense of responsibility for one’s fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success.”
Martin Luther King Jr. carried that struggle against capitalism, racism, and war forward. Building on the legacy of the Double-V campaign, he called for confronting the evils of white supremacy at home and imperialism abroad. In grappling with those intertwined injustices, he increasingly adopted a socialist analysis, even if he didn’t publicly claim the label. For King, there could be no half freedom or partial liberation: Political rights were hollow without economic justice and racial equality was impossible without class equality.
As he put it, you can “call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” Rejecting the pernicious myth of capitalist self-reliance with biting clarity, he pointed out that “it’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
In his 1967 Riverside Church speech denouncing the American war in Vietnam, King made the connection clear. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he warned, “is approaching spiritual death.” America, he added, needed a revolution of values, a shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” one. As long as “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights [are] considered more important than people,” he concluded, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
A Better Country and World is Possible
The effort to discredit Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, who challenge entrenched power, is, of course, anything but new. It reflects an ongoing struggle over the meaning of democracy. To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few. Mamdani and crew can’t be exceptions to the rule, if such a vision is ever to take root in this country.
In Donald Trump’s grim vision for and version of America, democratic institutions are decaying at a rapid pace, the military is being used to occupy cities with Democratic mayors, and tyranny is replacing the rule of law. Fascism has never triumphed without the assent of elites who fear the rise of the left more than dictatorship. Mussolini and Hitler did not take power in a vacuum; they were elevated by an elite democratic establishment that preferred an authoritarian order to the uncertainties of popular democracy.
The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it.
Meeting today’s crises requires more than piecemeal reform. It demands a reimagining of political life. The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.
This country once again stands at a crossroads. Capitalism has brought us to the edge of ecological, economic, and moral catastrophe. Today, the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 93% of Americans combined, a trajectory that is simply unsustainable. The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it. The question is no longer whether socialism can work in America, but whether American democracy can survive without it.
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As SNAP Ends, No Kings Protesters Must Unite With the Abandoned Poor
Do members of the educated professional class remain faithful to the corporate Democratic Party, or do they form a new connection with the starving victims of US fascism?
Nov 01, 2025
We have two colliding forces—“end-of-the-world fascism”, or EWF, and mass civil disobedience. Clearly, one will defeat the other. Right now the odds favor EWF—the fascist home team has a superior gerrymandering game; oil industry, tech, and armaments cash piled up to the peak of Mount Everest and beyond; control of the means of incarceration; and a huge project of global concentration camps. The EWF also has control of the federal budget which they have resolutely employed to assemble a Gestapo-like army to terrorize state enemies on a whim and shape the ethnic character of the entire nation to match the paranoid nightmares of President Donald Trump’s MAGA base.
EWF has a fetish for violence, both as a means to terrorize scapegoats and political opponents, and as the cornerstone for theatrical entertainment. The MAGA base has a craving for vicarious blood and guts.
The EWF also has the devotion of corporate CEOs, who might, in exceedingly rare instances, still possess vestigial aspects of moral conscience, but seldom at levels capable of altering predatory habits. Some corporations might object to the mass arrest of their exploited “undocumented” workforce, but not with the passionate joy they express toward federal subsidies and tax breaks. There may also be a huge corporate windfall coming as mass detention creates a growing pool of slave laborers.
The EWF also has a deep, perhaps mystical connection to the US psyche—the beaten masses of America contribute a limitless market of dislocated, broken people with a huge appetite for bread and circus distractions. Some people can be overworked, underpaid, and barely sustained on “free market” crumbs, yet howl with delight at the spectacle of those even less fortunate being ground beneath fascist jackboots. The EWF has secret access to the neural undercurrents of our shared circuitry.
Hungry people will be in the streets in a few days; how do those of us who currently have been consigned to be bystanders respond?
The forces of US resistance have historically ebbed and flowed. Movements have been co-opted by seductive schemes. US resistance now drags the half dead corpse of the Democratic Party on our backs. Protesters have a collective mindset burdened with the habits of denial, and a lingering delusion that we live in a nation with a noble history of justice and progress. The protesters also suffer from a nearly unbreakable condition of self-imposed isolation that makes us unaware of the key to victory. The EWF fascist support base is comparatively small compared with the alienated, impoverished masses: 35% of eligible US voters don’t vote, and this includes most poor people who inhabit section eight and public housing, or who double up with family or peers in overcrowded apartments with the omnipresent likelihood of harassment from public bureaucracies and landlords that enforce lease violations. Most protesters have little sense that an ocean of allies exists just beyond the horizon of social stratification. A connection between the educated Democratic Party base and the poorest US citizens would create a cosmic political shift, but we have long been blind to that possibility.
Karl Marx saw the class structure as being comprised of three distinct categories: the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production), the proletariat (wage slaves whose labor creates profits for the bourgeoisie), and land owners who amass wealth via rent. Subsequent models of class structure have created additional categories such as upper-middle class and lower-middle class, based largely on arbitrary gradations of income, but my interest here focuses on “cross class alliances” that define our current political predicament. Therefore, I will divide US classes into four categories: 1) the corporate Class, 2) the educated, professional class, 3) the deceived portion of the working class, 4) the abandoned working class (or the “poverty class”). This is obviously reductive, but helps define the way that social class defines the structure of the two US parties. Social classes do more than describe wage status—such categories ought to also explain our distorted and confused class consciousness. A working-class person who identifies as MAGA cannot be meaningfully described without additional narrative detail.
Social classes are mediated by many contingencies, notably race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, education, and media exposure. Our two political parties have been divided along a sort of bastardized class identity in which all social classes have been co-opted into one or the other version of capitalist-friendly ideology. The Republican Party has been crafted from a curious quid pro quo binding the mostly white “deceived working class” to the interests of the wealthiest corporations. The Republican Party masses trade allegiance to corporate aspirations in exchange for theatrical cruelty. There is little in the Republican policy agenda that provides a better life for working-class people—quite the contrary, members of Trump’s base will lose medical care, school funding, housing options, and employee benefits in exchange for the opportunity to witness mass deportations and military assaults against residents in blue cities. Working people are paid off with cheap entertainment.
The educated, professional class also engages in a similar, if inverted quid pro quo—this particular class trades support for corporate aspirations in exchange for performative kindness, the gestures of inclusivity scrubbed of any tinge of real class issues. Democratic voters, for example, enjoy a feel good sense of their party’s devotion to social justice issues so long as we do not question the ideals of capitalism. This class undergoes the most intensive brain washing of any—the legacy media, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc. all promote a particular vision of social progress without ever threatening the structures of profit. The manner in which the liberal media curates a popular narrative for the educated class assures that most members of the Democratic Party base lean toward the center.
The Atlantic, for example, will almost never publish pieces that unequivocally condemn US and Israeli militarism, but will happily post piece after piece decrying the gutting of abortion rights. Powerful lobbyists and military contractors have financial interests in shaping military narratives, but the so called pro-life movement is little more than a convenience for opportunistic right-wing politicians. While anti-abortion pregnancy centers may have revenues well over a billion annually, this money pales in comparison with the US trillion dollar plus military spending. If you want to understand the positions promoted for the Democratic Party base, follow the money.
While the ruling class has buried their tentacles deeply into the psychological sediments of Republican and Democratic Party faithful, there is one social class that remains nearly invisible to the ruling class—the “abandoned working class.” The very poor do not generally vote, do not typically organize, nor do they engage in political activism, and their well-being barely registers in the priorities of elected officials. Issues like low-cost childcare, low-income housing, and the nature of the “social safety net” have little resonance in our political dialogue.
That is not to say that the poorest people exist as an island apart from other social classes—people from every social niche lose their toeholds and tumble to the bottom. As one who worked for decades as an outreach worker in decaying Western Massachusetts mill towns, I have seen children of doctors, lawyers, and business executives struggling with poverty. A significant and gaining trickle, falling from above, join the floodwaters of poverty. But the very poor have not, as a political entity, formed alliances across class boundaries. The ruling class does not even attempt to co-opt and confuse the very poor. Pure despair and collective depression immobilize this potentially transformative class.
The abandoned working class members often work “under the table” providing childcare, cleaning services, and general labor for small businesses for lower than minimum wage. These workers get no benefits, and often attempt to supplement meager Supplemental Security Income benefits with unreported wages. Life at the lowest levels of the US class system is essentially unsustainable without straying outside of strict legal constraints.
The “abandoned working class” has only latent power—the strength of enormous numbers that threaten the privilege of the wealthiest class if the poorest people mobilize and become politically active. The abandoned working class is a sleeping giant.
This may change in an eyeblink as Trump escalates his war against the poor. The very few remaining tatters of the US social safety net will be obliterated regardless of the government shutdown, but the end of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on the first of November puts 42 million US residents in immediate risk of starvation. This Great Depression reprise creates a catastrophic situation for poor victims, but also reverberates throughout the remnants of the Democratic Party-aligned coalition. Do the relatively safe members of the educated, professional class respond to the sight of starving US residents with a sense of urgency or denial? We have three electoral factions, each approximately comprising a third of the population of eligible voters—Democratic voters, Republican voters, and nonvoters. The nonvoters are disproportionately comprised of the very poor. Republicans do not want poor voters to become a factor, and the bureaucratic roadblocks to voting—voter ID and various local rules on passports and driver's licenses—specifically attack poor people’s voting rights.
However, at this moment the most urgent issue is not voter registration but mass protest and civil disobedience. Do members of the educated professional class remain faithful to the corporate Democratic Party, or do they form a new connection with the starving victims of US fascism? That is how I believe we should understand the looming end to food assistance—this is an audition for those formerly complacent rank-and-file Democrats to understand their newly apparent historical role. Do the 7 million No Kings Day protesters lock arms with the 42 million victims of US fascist cruelty? Hungry people will be in the streets in a few days; how do those of us who currently have been consigned to be bystanders respond?
No Kings Day was a party, but now the stakes are raised. Do those casual protesters have the inner resolve to take the next steps? When SNAP ends do the No Kings Day protesters see their unique chance to cut ties with corporate puppet masters and align their fate with the abandoned victims of corporatism? We need voices on the left to make this narrative clear.
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