Fascism: Donald Trump: Big Little Man

For a long time, socialist sociologists and politicians in and outside the United States have warned not only of the “power elite” (CW Mills) that cannot be controlled by parliament, but also of a specifically American “fascism.” We have known what it looks like since January 6, 2021: When Donald Trump’s supporters tried to storm the Capitol.

Since the beginning of his political career, the Republican President Trump, who ruled from January 2017 to January 2021, turned to the social media that favored him – Twitter, then controlled by Jack Dorsey, Facebook, controlled by Mark Zuckerberg, and the television channel Fox News, controlled by Rupert Murdoch – directly to the humiliated and insulted among the white voters, to whom he (a billionaire real estate agent and TV entertainer) successfully managed to present himself as “one of their own.” As an ignorant, linguistically poor brawler and sexist ruffian with rigid facial expressions and a few rehearsed, constantly repeated “imperial” gestures, who was swept into the White House to the delight of 63 million voters and rhetorically took a front against “elites” and the “lying press.”

This was a man of her heart who was on a first-name basis with other powerful people on earth, conducted foreign policy like a bull in a china shop, surrounded himself with yes-men and would always throw people who didn’t “spurt” their chair in front of the door. Trump appeared to his supporters as a “complete guy” who fantasized about the world as he saw fit, someone who promised the “restoration” of glorious times to the privileged white bourgeoisie as well as to the deported, uninsured and unemployed working class people. And thereby assured the preservation of the old inequality between white and non-white and between male and female – between those who have and those who have nothing.

This “small” but wealthy man, an uncouth lump with limited horizons, was “great” because he commanded the strongest army in the world and could order the use of nuclear weapons of destruction. Towards the end of his term in office in 2021, there were still a good 74 million potential voters (from all social classes) behind him, a large proportion of whom were armed and whose “hard” core were organized fascist groups (such as the “Proud Boys” and the “White Supremacists”). formed. This president, a “lateral thinker” and QAnon sympathizer, broke the rules of a parliamentary democracy by announcing in the run-up to the 2020 elections that he would not recognize defeat.

Like all paranoid characters, Trump suffers from “pathic projection,” which means that, as a notorious liar, he is unable to believe his dreams and nightmares are reality. This is precisely the basis of the fascination that such people – as “charismatics” – exert on their (also vividly daydreaming) followers. They still believe in the “final victory,” be it in war or in the election campaign, when everything has long been lost.

On January 6, 2021, on the one hand, it was about the runoff elections in Georgia and thus about the majority in the future Senate, and on the other hand, it was about the “certification” of the electoral votes, i.e. the determination of the majority-minority ratio in the November 2020 presidential election , he mobilized his supporters to prevent (evangelical) Vice President Mike Pence from dutifully announcing Biden’s victory. From the White House, he led a protest march on the Capitol to put pressure on Pence and the MPs. A raiding party of violent rioters in adventurous costumes and equipped with cutting, stabbing and firearms, cable ties and pipe bombs broke into the building and began a hunt for deputies and police officers. Five deaths were lost. Trump, the instigator, observed this turn of events on television in the White House and told the rioters that he “loved” them because they were “very special” people. Late, but eventually, his remaining advisors pushed him to make a dubious statement in which he confirmed his legend of the “Stolen Election” (undefeated at the ballot box!), but called on his supporters to withdraw peacefully.

In Parliament, everything depended on one person, Vice President Pence, who had been Trump’s accomplice for four years and was now swaying like a reed in the wind, first interrupting the certification process, but then, after the evacuated MPs had gathered back in (and two Trumpist MPs had theirs Withdrew objections), brought the formality to an end and was now seen as a “wimp” and “traitor” in Trump’s eyes. In these night hours, the fate of US democracy was decided this time. And that is a lesson to all those who rely on the supposed “stability of the institutions”.

As Ferdinand Lassalle knew, constitutional questions are questions of power, and what becomes of democratic institutions depends on the people who defend them and on the assertiveness – i.e. the power or powerlessness – of the social classes they represent. If the occupation of the Capitol had continued and Pence had aborted the ongoing proceedings instead of continuing them, an interregnum would have arisen into which the waiting Trump (with or without Pence’s support) would have advanced to (with the help of the National Guard and the Army) the » “To restore order”, to annul the election and to “simply” continue to govern.

But what are the consequences for the opposition to Trump from his four-year presidency and the fact that he still has the support of more than 74 million potential voters? The left in the United States has traditionally been weak and, as is currently the case in many countries, limited to small groups active in agitation and propaganda. Their chance of survival lies in finding allies (on the left wing of the Democrats, in the union apparatus, in the student body, the women’s and minority movements, among the “Black Life Matters” demonstrators, the Hispanic Americans and in the “Fridays for Future” – youth) that might one day enable them to form a third, socialist party.

The United States has been the most important economic-military-cultural bastion of world capitalism since the First World War. The American democracy – like the French one – emerged in the last quarter of the 18th century, and for a long time – like the oldest, the Athenian one – it was a slave-owning democracy. Its prerequisite was the successful seizure of land by European religious and economic refugees who, in a long series of “Indian wars,” expelled and decimated the indigenous population and then replaced them with African slaves. After the civil war of the 1960s and in the wake of the student and “race unrest” of the 20th century (during the “Cold War”), the open apartheid society became a covert one. Their continued existence only came back into collective consciousness nationally and internationally after the murder of the black George Floyd by three white police officers on the street (in Minneapolis in spring 2020).

In all states described as “democratic” – there are currently fewer and fewer of them worldwide – the “democratic” structures only figure as an island in the middle of pre-democratic economic and living conditions, an island that is always in danger from the pre-democratic sea from which it emerges appeared, to be swallowed up again, that is, to transform into a more or less “authoritarian” regime. On the downhill path there, the parties and governments, which only manage scarcity and inequality along with the fermenting fascist underground, present the status quo (from which they themselves live) as “no alternative”. In fact, the success of the so-called “populist” demagogues and parties and the fascination that emanates from fascist, “evangelical” or “Islamist” sects is based on the fact that the development of the most highly developed societies increasingly amounts to “one-dimensionality” (Herbert Marcuse). . Where plausible alternatives to the status quo and the development determined by it can no longer be thought of, let alone introduced into public discussion and election campaigns, unscrupulous demagogues fill the vacuum with global pseudo-declarations and fantastic, violent promises of salvation.

Helmut Dahmer is a social philosopher and lives in Vienna. From 1974 to 2002 he was professor of sociology in Darmstadt.