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We Must Create a Broad Anti-Fascist Movement to Fight Back Against Trump 2.0
The struggle against neofascism in the U.S. must be taken by all those whose rights are being targeted under the second Trump administration.
Feb 02, 2025
A few years ago, Noam Chomsky warned about the return of fascism in contemporary capitalist societies. He pointed out that 40 years of neoliberal policies—a one-sided class war launched by the business class and its allies against the working people, the poor, the minorities, the young, and the old—had produced massive levels of inequality and increased social tension, “yielding a breeding ground for extremism, violence, hatred, search for scapegoats—and fertile terrain for authoritarian figures who can posture as the savior.” Thus, as he put it, “We’re on the road to a form of neofascism.”
However, it is specifically the economic and political repercussions of the financial crisis of 2007-08 that originated in the United States as a result of the collapse of the U.S. housing market and then spread to the rest of the Western world through linkages in the global financial system that became a catalyst for the revival of ultranationalism and the surge of authoritarianism and far-right parties and movements across advanced capitalist democracies. Parties that were either non-existent or struggling to gain political legitimacy and mass popularity were propelled into the political mainstream in record time. As has been pointed out, many of the most prominent far-right parties in Europe today, such as those in Germany and Italy, are “children of financial crises.” The financial crisis of 2008 is also the primary factor behind the transformation of Hungary under Victor Orban into the most far-right nation in Europe.
In the United States, it was the Obama administration with its big bailouts for financial institutions and broken promises that set the stage for the rise of Trumpism by breeding citizen disillusionment with the government. The pandemic and the subsequent economic disruption, combined with the widespread protests over the death of George Floyd and President Donald Trump’s own response to the crisis with threats to use the military against protesters, led to a Biden victory over Trump in 2020. Young voters and progressives helped former President Joe Biden win even though he campaigned with a centrist strategy and refused to back policies such as universal healthcare and a wealth tax, which were being advocated by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), respectively.
For the past 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has been hard at work in making people think not like citizens but rather like consumers.
Yet, Biden’s electoral victory in 2020 did not mean that Trumpism had been defeated. Trump had been spewing racism and hate from the moment he entered politics, and his promise to “drain the swamp” resonated with many voters who, like their counterparts across Europe, were fed up with politics as usual and were looking toward a public figure, a savior, who would confront the despicable elites. Unfortunately, citizens in contemporary capitalist democracies can be as easily duped, perhaps even more so, as those living under a dictatorship. But the Democrats lost the 2024 election not so much because of inflation but rather because of the disastrous Kamala Harris campaign in which she totally threw the working people under the bus. As a result, she helped Trump make gains among almost all demographic groups, including African American and Latino voters who have been traditional supporters of the Democratic party, and triumph in all the seven swing states. Her campaign confirmed the suspicions of many that the Democrats have become the party of the elites. Indeed, even voters who previously backed the Democrats see the party as unwilling to fight for people and “overly focused on diversity and the elites,” according to new research by the progressive group Navigator Research.
Fed up with politics as usual and deteriorating socioeconomic conditions, voters who have thrown their support behind far-right politicians appear not to be overly concerned with the drift of liberal democracies toward authoritarianism. For instance, polling shows that the majority of U.S. citizens support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. European countries have also been adopting deadly border policies as many of the continent’s citizens demand stronger border controls. In Germany, for instance, the conservatives even worked together with the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in passing a non-binding motion calling for drastic restrictions on migration. Thankfully enough, the German parliament rejected the immigration bill by 350 votes to 338, with five abstentions.
What the drift toward authoritarianism says about the state of liberal democracy in the Western world is hardly encouraging news. Neoliberal capitalism has weakened in enormous and profound ways both the institutions and the culture of a democratic polity. Under neoliberal capitalism, liberal democracy has lost its capacity to respond to the needs of the working people. Economic liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the dictatorship of finance capital (reinforced in the Anglo-Saxon context through the ideological prism of social Darwinism) have forced social democracy on the retreat across the Western world. In its turn, popular mainstream media reinforces the neoliberal ideology in multiple ways, such as by what Noam Chomsky calls “the strategy of distraction” and by “treating the public like children.”
For the past 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has been hard at work in making people think not like citizens but rather like consumers. A citizen is one who participates in the affairs of the polity and is concerned for the well-being of his or her community and the weak and most vulnerable among us. A consumer is one whose identity and values are with reference to the self and has surrendered power to the market and to those who make the ultimate decisions for his or her wants and needs. The first is active while the latter is passive. The nearly 90 million eligible U.S. voters who did not vote in the 2024 presidential election are consumers or what people in the classical city-state of Athens called idiotes—that is, the private individuals who did not hold office and did not participate in public affairs. Incidentally, it is from the Greek word ἰδιώτηςthat we get the contemporary English word “idiot.”
Indeed, one could credibly argue that the U.S. is now on track to having a full-fledged neofascist regime because nearly 90 million eligible voters opted to skip the 2024 presidential election, while millions who did vote for Trump did so out of pure ignorance as to what Trump represents. Acting like an emperor and engaging in colossal acts of cruelty toward the weak and the vulnerable surely gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction to those racists and bigots that make up such a huge part of the MAGA movement, but this fact alone also reveals the rather exceptional fragility of U.S. democracy, since it rests on a political culture that is obviously incapable of escaping its racists roots. Trump’s efforts to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are deeply rooted in racism and will only make U.S. society less tolerant toward the “Other” and thus even more racist.
Ultimately, the most critical question is how we fight back against neofascism in the U.S. right now. Fascism is not inevitable. It reared its ugly head in the past and was ultimately defeated everywhere by people who refused to subordinate themselves to a brutal and hateful form of politics. But the fact that it is still rearing its ugly head all over the Western world today is clear proof that neoliberal capitalism has failed to keep fascism at bay. Increased protectionism, chauvinism, jingoism, and repression are objectively necessary for a system that thrives on exploitation and by widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots, all the while engaging in a vicious assault on the public sector.
Trump 2.0 is an unmistakably neofascist administration that will be run by highly dangerous and unqualified cabinet appointees. A left resistance to Trump’s neofascist regime is vital but must be based on a political struggle that merges with every other struggle. The anti-fascist movement that must emerge against the tactics of the Trump 2.0 presidency should build strong alliances between workers, women, minorities, and environmentalists. The struggle for workers’ rights, women’s rights, minority rights, and LGBTQ rights are all part of the same struggle against 21st-century neofascism, a movement that wishes to turn back the clock.
Thus, creating an anti-fascist mass movement that merges different struggles is of the utmost importance. We should not forget that fascism in the past came to power after assuming the character of a mass movement. It is the same now. Trumpism is a reactionary social movement, and we may not be that far away from becoming a witness to the emergence of an army of modern blackshirts, especially since the pardoning of Capitol attackers has sent a clear message to white supremacists across this country that the current government is on their side.
As the renowned communist and feminist leader Clara Zetkin argued more than 100 years ago, fascism was “an expression of the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy…”
The same can be said today in reference to the rise of neofascism. It is an expression of the inherent political, economic, and social contradictions of capital accumulation under a neoliberal regime.
Zetkin saw “fascism as the strongest, most concentrated, and classic expression… of the world bourgeoisie’s general offensive.” Accordingly, she concluded that “the struggle against fascism must be taken up by the entire proletariat.”
The same goes today. The struggle against neofascism in the U.S. must be taken by all those whose rights are being targeted under the second Trump administration. And the strategy to do so is the united front, as Clara Zetkin would surely have advocated if she were alive today.
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Will Crypto’s Roaring 20s Lead to a Second Great Depression?
Crypto “bros” invested big-time in 2024’s presidential and congressional campaigns and want unrestricted access to the global banking system. What could possibly go wrong?
Jan 28, 2025
Life in the United States has never been better—if your personal fortune stretches well into the thousands of millions.
Our new year has dawned with 813 Americans cavorting in billionaire land. These deep pockets ended 2024, notes an Institute for Policy Studies analysis, with a combined wealth over $6.7 trillion. They averaged over $8.2 billion each.
Need some perspective on that $8.2 billion? The typical American worker, according to the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor stats, would have to work over 136,000 years to earn that much.
Growing linkages between crypto and the more traditional economy have expanded the economic peril.
Billionaires, of course, don’t have to actually do any labor to collect their billions. They just let their money do the heavy lifting.
That money, if invested in enterprises that provide us with useful goods and services, can add real value to an economy. But these days our billionaires and their billions don’t have to produce anything of value to climb up the wealth ladder. They can make big bucks manufacturing—at a heavy environmental cost—a product that has no real-life value whatsoever.
Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency.
Crypto emerged amid the turmoil of the Great Recession, an economic catastrophe that began late in 2007 with the bursting of a housing bubble that U.S. financial institutions had pumped up with subprime mortgages and assorted other exotic financing schemes.
Crypto’s early aficionados, notes the British economist Michael Roberts, claimed that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin would eliminate “the need for financial intermediaries like banks.” Cryptocurrencies existed only electronically, as elaborate computer code that takes huge amounts of energy to “mine.” No government guarantees backed their value, and no crypto champs sought those guarantees.
Within this frame, crypto values spent a dozen years bouncing mostly upward. By mid-2024, the crypto world had turned into a speculative colossus worth some $2.5 trillion. But crypto’s biggest players were doing little celebrating. The industry seemed to be losing its big-time momentum.
Just two years before, a spectacular crypto crash had cost the sector’s founders and investors a combined $116 billion. By the end of 2023, some 20 nations had banned banks from dealing with crypto exchanges, and critics were blasting the crypto industry for pumping ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere “to solve complex mathematical problems that have no productive purpose.”
Early in 2024, Pew Research polling found the American public exceedingly “skeptical” about cryptocurrency, with almost two-thirds of the nation’s adults having little to no confidence that cryptocurrencies rated as either reliable or safe. Only 19% of Americans who had actually invested in crypto, Pew found, deemed themselves “confident” with the industry’s “reliability and safety.”
Last June, one of the nation’s most influential financial market analysts, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, gave cause for even more public unease. In congressional testimony, Gensler described the crypto market as a “Wild West” that has investors putting “hard-earned assets at risk in a highly speculative asset class.”
“Many of those investments,” Gensler added, “have disappeared after a crypto platform or service went under due to fraud or mismanagement, leaving investors in line at bankruptcy court.”
In the battle for public opinion, crypto kings realized, they were losing. Their response? Crypto’s big guns moved to lock down as much political help they could buy. They spent last year flooding millions upon millions of dollars into primary and general election races against lawmakers who had dared to support meaningful moves to regulate crypto’s digital highways and byways.
“It’s time to take our country back,” roared one deep-pocketed crypto mover-and-shaker, Tyler Winklevoss. “It’s time for the crypto army to send a message to Washington. That attacking us is political suicide.”
In no time at all, the Lever’s Freddy Brewster notes, this new crypto offensive had lawmakers in Congress, from both sides of the aisle, signaling their openness to minimizing any serious attempts at crypto regulation. The November elections would go on to generate a substantial crypto-friendly majority in the House and a Senate almost as crypto-committed.
Helping to produce this smashing crypto triumph: over $250 million in campaign contributions from the three top cryptocurrency political action committees.
No one would ultimately jump on the 2024 crypto political bandwagon more dramatically than Donald Trump. Up until then, the former president had been a pronounced crypto skeptic.
“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” Trump announced on social media in 2019. “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”
But Trump would eventually come to see the potential in crypto campaign dollars and turn himself into the political world’s most visible crypto booster. In May 2024, Trump became the first major presidential candidate to accept donations in cryptocurrency. In July, he gave a fawning keynote address at one of the crypto world’s premiere annual conferences.
Trump saw something else in crypto as well. The industry, he ever so accurately perceived, could turbocharge his own personal wealth, to levels far outpacing his old-school investments in office towers and classic hotels—and all without engaging in any sort of real risk.
So Trump did that crypto engaging. By Inauguration Day, thanks to the release of his own “red-hot” crypto token, Trump had more than 90% of his personal net worth in crypto assets.
To protect that investment, Trump will undoubtedly put his signature on legislation—first introduced by Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis—designed to force the federal government to buy up a national stockpile of cryptocurrency as a reserve just like the gold in Fort Knox. Getting crypto reserve status, cheers billionaire MicroStrategy executive chair Michael Saylor, would rank as a truly noble 21st-century “Louisiana Purchase.”
But independent analysts see “no discernible logic” to any move in that direction.
“I get why the crypto investor would love it,” observes Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Other than the crypto investor, I don’t see the value, particularly if taxpayers have to ante up.”
Turning crypto into a reserve currency, explain other analysts, would “prop up” cryptocurrency prices. Reserve status, noteWall Street on Parade editors Pam and Russ Martens, would enable crypto billionaires to sell their crypto “without driving down” cryptocurrency prices—because these billionaires would have “a perpetual buyer on the other side of their trade.”
Having the government buy up crypto, as Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research recently toldThe Nation, has “literally no rationale other than to give money to Trump and Musk and their crypto buddies.”
Not surprisingly, conventional financial institutions—outfits ranging from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to BlackRock and other big asset manager funds—would like to share in that money harvest. They’ve all begun entering the crypto “fray,” points out the economist Ramaa Vasudevan, and institutional investors “are also banging at the door.”
Crypto, adds Vasudevan, is “turning on a spigot of financial fortune-hunting.”
That sort of hunting, historically, has almost always ended in crashes that left average people the hardest hit. In our new crypto age, that could easily happen again.
The various crypto crashes we’ve seen over recent years, as the Lever’s Freddy Brewster noted last month, have “mostly affected” people already invested in cryptocurrencies. But the growing linkages between crypto and the more traditional economy have expanded the economic peril.
“Potential victims of future crashes,” Brewster warns, “could balloon if the nascent industry is allowed to become more entrenched with traditional banks.”
And that entrenching is approaching overdrive.
“Crypto bros are heading into 2025 with great expectations,” notesBloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee.
These “bros” invested big-time in 2024’s presidential and congressional campaigns. Now they want, Mukherjee adds, “unhindered access to the global banking system.”
What could possibly go wrong?
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Trump’s Crypto Scam Threatens the Economy and His Own Power
For oligarchs, the rise of digital finance provides large moneymaking opportunities. But for the rest of us, it increases the risk of another financial crisis.
Jan 27, 2025
As of Friday, the Trumps’ cryptocurrency meme coins—the $TRUMP and $MELANIA cryptocurrency coins—had a combined market value of about $6 billion.
Days before taking the oath of office, now-U.S. President Donald Trump announced on his social media platform the creation of the $TRUMP coin, featuring Trump’s image from the July assassination attempt, and said: “Join the Trump Community. This is History in the Making!”
The $MELANIA coin soon followed.
Any wealthy person, corporation, or foreign leader wishing to curry favor with Trump now has a particularly easy means—just buy $TRUMP and $MELANIA cryptocurrency tokens.
Despite no details about the coin’s value, use, or risks, Trump supporters. gamblers, and those wishing to suck up to Trump bought it—sending the coin’s price into the stratosphere. On paper, the Trump family is now several billion dollars richer.
Trump once denounced crypto, but as the crypto industry poured tens of millions of dollars into 2024 campaigns, he changed his mind. Not only did he see the political power of the crypto industry; he saw an opportunity to make a pile of money.
He then promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.”
In September, the Trump family started World Liberty Financial, which they marketed as a platform to facilitate borrowing and lending in digital currencies. (Trump receives a cut of the sales of WLFI, the cryptocurrency associated with the platform.)
Now that he’s taken office, Trump plans to make billions off his presidency by implementing policies that favor crypto.
The Truth About Crypto
Cryptocurrencies serve no useful purpose other than the purchase of other crypto assets, money laundering, extortion, and scams. As economist Paul Krugman has said, their market value rests on nothing but “technobabble and libertarian derp.”
They also use huge amounts of energy.
And if they infiltrate Wall Street, they could destabilize the entire financial system.
The crypto industry has a dubious reputation. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges, was last year sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. Changpeng Zhao, founder of a rival exchange, has spent four months locked up for money-laundering.
But the richest people in America with huge power—the oligarchy, including Trump—support cryptocurrencies. Not only can they make a fortune, but crypto advances their long-term aim of shifting financial controls out of a democratically elected system of government and into their own hands.
Trump II and Crypto
Now that he’s president, Trump is actively promoting crypto—reversing former President Joe Biden’s attempts to prevent the crypto industry from infiltrating Wall Street.
Biden’s tight rules made it prohibitively expensive for banks to hold digital assets on behalf of clients, and stopped them from developing their own crypto products, such as stablecoins (tokens pegged to the dollar or other assets).
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), a watchdog, stopped dozens of such projects on the basis that it did not know how digital assets ought to be treated in regulatory filings.
With Trump, though, banks and the crypto industry are now pushing in the same direction, and face little resistance. New and enormously profitable forms of risk-taking are emerging—for a small group of people able to take such risks and able (like the Trump family) to profit of their own crypto products.
Trump is putting crypto-friendly people into place at key federal agencies, boosting its prospects. In December, he picked Washington lawyer Paul Atkins, a known crypto booster, to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main financial regulator.
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission altered its guidance so that financial institutions no longer have to account, on their own balance-sheets, for crypto assets held on behalf of customers. The SEC rolled back accounting guidance that had deterred banks from getting involved with crypto.
Trump has tapped the venture investor and digital currency enthusiast David Sacks to oversee administration policies on crypto (and artificial intelligence).
Then, this past Thursday, Trump issued an executive order committing the Trump administration to “protecting and promoting” the crypto industry:
The digital asset industry plays a crucial role in innovation and economic development in the United States, as well as our nation’s international leadership. It is therefore the policy of my administration to support the responsible growth and use of digital assets.
The order gives his administration authority to establish a national cryptocurrency stockpile—a stash of digital coins that the crypto industry has spent months lobbying the new administration for because it further legitimizes crypto and adds to the demand for it.
Trump’s order also prohibits the creation of a “central bank digital currency,” overseen by the government. And the order promises “fair and open access to banking services” for crypto (responding to complaints from crypto companies that banks have denied them accounts).
In effect, Trump is writing the rules for a business venture from which he and his family are personally profiting. It could earn them hundreds of billions of dollars.
If you’re outraged by this, fine. You’re probably outraged by a large number of things Trump has done since January 20.
The Larger Picture
The real significance of such blatant profiteering off the highest office in the land is what it reveals—not just about Trump but about the entire oligarchic enterprise he fronts for. It is likely to contribute to a vast wave of public alarm and disgust.
Just as Elon Musk is demonstrating how huge wealth can create enormous personal political power, Trump is demonstrating how enormous personal political power can create huge wealth.
Musk sank a quartet of a billion dollars into electing Trump, and was rewarded with a key spot as director of the so-called department of government efficiency, or DOGE (Dogecoin, itself a cypto token, has benefited from Musk’s vocal support)—creating vast conflicts of interest over crypto and Musk’s myriad businesses (X, SpaceX, and Tesla, which are regulated by federal agencies and also major government contractors).
As crypto and banking begin to merge, bank deposits will become more vulnerable to movements in the crypto market, and banks more vulnerable to runs.
This dynamic—great power creating huge wealth, and huge wealth creating great power—is central to the oligarchic takeover of America. And both are premised on the corruption of democracy.
Any wealthy person, corporation, or foreign leader wishing to curry favor with Trump now has a particularly easy means—just buy $TRUMP and $MELANIA cryptocurrency tokens.
The corruption will grow worse because neither Trump nor Musk has any sense of limits. Nor do any of the oligarchs surrounding them, such as David Sacks, who Trump picked to oversee his administration’s policies on crypto and artificial intelligence.
Like Musk, Sachs serves as a "special government employee,” which does not require Senate confirmation or full financial disclosure, and allows Sacks to maintain his business interests while influencing policy. Expect more conflicts of interest.
As crypto and banking begin to merge, bank deposits will become more vulnerable to movements in the crypto market, and banks more vulnerable to runs. That’s what happened at Silvergate and Signature, two crypto-focused banks which collapsed in 2023. Both were broken by a tumble in cryptocurrency prices that began in late 2021 and then reverberations from FTX’s collapse.
The biggest beneficiaries of all this are the highest rollers—the oligarchs who have been pushing crypto for years. And now Trump is in on it and stands to personally gain billions, as will those seeking to curry his favor by buying his coin.
The Endgame
The American public doesn’t abide flagrant self-dealing. We don’t want public officials personally profiting by decisions that are supposed to be made in the public’s interest.
You may be thinking: “But Trump has been profiteering for years off his presidency, as have members of his family. And they’ve gotten away with it.”
True, but what’s happening now is much bigger and far more visible. It involves an entire industry (crypto), and conspicuous members of the American oligarchy who are investing in it, including the president and officials around him.
And it’s inherently risky. For oligarchs, the rise of digital finance provides large moneymaking opportunities. But for the rest of us, it increases the risk of another financial crisis.
Unbound greed combined with unconstrained power is an explosive combination. When the blowup comes, it will take Trump, Musk, and the oligarchy with it.
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