The Wrong Perspective

a silly rant from a silly leftist

One of the most effective barriers to progress in America is the widespread misunderstanding of where we are in the fight. While Republicans (and their goofy weed-smoking cousins, the conservative Libertarians) recognize that their prized White utopia is on the verge of collapsing in the face of intractable demographic evolution toward a more diverse population, there’s disagreement and disarray among their political opponents.

The national Democratic Party, being a controlled opposition to begin with, don’t offer much of a coherent rebuttal to the Fascist tendencies of the Right. Some hand-waving and sloganeering about “unity” or whatever is about the best they can muster on a national scale, and even that is never really nailed down to any actual positions.

Individual Democrats’ opinions range from hopey-changey stuff like “We can do better” to the essentially collaborative “maybe the GOP has a point”. Even in the face of an outright violent Fascist attempt to disrupt the last presidential election, Democrats just don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation.

But more importantly, to the left of the Democrat mainstream, there are some very misinformed ideas about just how bad the situation is. There are plenty of people out here in Socialist La La Land who know the enemy isn’t just a right-wing economic or social agenda threatening to push the country toward Fascism, but outright and flagrant Fascism itself. But mostly, the conversations are around “preventing” this Fascism from “taking root”, or protesting the worst abuses of various state or federal officials. Almost no one seems to recognize that we can’t prevent Fascism from coming to America, because America has been overtly Fascist since its inception.

And your knee-jerk reaction to that idea, your instinct to write me off as some internet crackpot who thinks the sky is falling, is exactly why we the Left keeps spinning its tires in America. We can’t organize to keep America on track while the far right tries to derail the country: the track we’re already on is safely inside their territory.

In 1935, Adolf Hitler praised America for having achieved some of the very things that he hoped to achieve with the Third Reich. He modeled the worst laws in his country after our race-based segregation and immigration laws because we did it first. Fascist government was developed and deployed here long before Adolf Hitler was even born.

America is the original Fascist state. From its inception, our country has run on a political and economic model of exploitation, subjugation, literal genocide, and slavery. When Fascist leaders came to power in the early 20th century, they did so with not with the hope of enacting some transcendent evil from another dimension, but of reproducing American success by reproducing our remorseless degradation of the human spirit through racial segregation, the murder of “undesirables”, and the elevation of private Capital to the status of a god.

But surely even if I’m not exaggerating the evils of America’s past, our morals have evolved since then, right? After all, slavery has been illegal (except for convicts) for over 150 years, we did away with that segregation (legally if not economically), we aren’t killing Native Americans anymore (or at least not with bullets), we have enshrined the right to vote for everyone (at least for now, at least where the Voting Rights Act hasn’t been effectively repealed). Heck, we even have a Martin Luther King, Jr. day! Our soul has been redeemed, you shout. “The long arc of history bends toward justice!” you tweet.

Well, tell that to the 30% of the country that celebrates Black men being summarily executed by police who don’t even have to be secret police. Tell it to the other 30% of the country that’s content so long as they don’t have to hear about it. Brag about America’s place among the honored saints to the however many millions of people on the other side of the planet who are dead because we needed to preserve our global economic hegemony. Tell it to both Democrats and Republicans who are always itching for the next war, and spending 800 billion dollars a year on military adventures when 20 billion could end homelessness.

The bottom line is that we aren’t going to get very far as a resistance movement if we think of ourselves as trying to keep America safe from Fascism. Every governmental and economic institution in this country was designed built to create and enforce Fascism, even if that word hadn’t been coined at the time. We can’t afford to defend this Evil Empire against anything - it has to be demolished.