Counterpunch | Clinton lost to Trump, not because millions of poor people were mobilized by a fascist message; but because millions of poor people didn’t turn out to vote;
they understood that Obama was a friend of war, a guardian of Wall
Street, and a keeper of the neoliberal status quo. They didn’t require
more of the same in Clinton. But the actual facts of Obama’s presidency
are increasingly drowned out by the howls of ‘fascist’ which are hurled
at Donald Trump week by week, month by month. This is nothing new,
incidentally. Every single thoroughly reactionary Republican president
of the past fifty years has had this charge levelled at them: Nixon,
Raegan, both Bushes and now Trump. They were all fascists in their day.
But in allocating to an administration the label fascist – even if it
is headed by a person with clear fascist ideological tendencies – we
run the risk of underestimating not only the everyday run-of-the-mill
racist and war mongering policies enacted by the ‘respectable’ parties
of the parliamentary mainstream; we also fail to comprehend the
symbiotic connection which opens up between the period of Obama and the
time of Trump. Trump’s regime is, for the most part, more reactionary,
and more overtly and rabidly racist than the Obama administration ever
was; this cannot be denied. Trump’s accession marks a truly awful
period in American politics.
But it reached its fruition precisely because the Obama
administration had exhausted its facile promises of hope and change in
the flames of international war and the unrelenting economic oppression
of the poorer layers of the domestic population. It is the continuation
of such politics by more extreme means, with the ideological veneer of
progressivism set aside, born from the thickening disillusionment of the
poorer layers in a decaying political system and their increasing lack
of interest in the ballot box (for very good reason). It has the
features of ineptitude and corruption which are the product of such a
development.
But is not a fascist administration. It does not mark a qualitative
break in what has come before. The latest farrago involving immigrant
children is unutterably awful, but its closest parallel in US history –
if not the immigration policies of Obama himself – might be something
like the locking up of the families of Japanese Americans in WW2. That
policy was carried out by the Democratic Party headed by Roosevelt. The
same party which, by the way, supported slavery, used nuclear weapons
against Japanese cities and escalated the war in Vietnam to a shrieking
crescendo.
In describing the Trump administration as fascist we subscribe to a
liberal logic which separates out the material realities of fascism from
its ideological expression. This helps whitewash the reality of the
Democratic Party as a party of war and the financial elite, and instead
recasts it in the type of morality play where the beleaguered and high
minded liberals like Obama and Clinton become the last bastions of
reason and humanity against an ever encroaching darkness – only their
tragic struggle against barbarism is doomed to founder on the rocks of
the prejudices and the whims of an easily excitable and unsophisticated
mob. It is a vision which combines hatred of the lower classes with a
drooling sycophancy toward the elite. As tragedy goes, it is more Vanity Fair then Shakespeare.
Don’t buy into it.
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