BY JACK BARNES 
At the June 1991 Socialist Workers Party convention, where we assessed how communist workers had responded to the challenge of Washington's war against Iraq, we also began taking a closer look at another aspect of the accelerating political polarization in the United States and other imperialist countries.

In the opening political report to that convention, I pointed out that given the relative prosperity and social stability that had prevailed in most imperialist countries for almost four decades following World War II, it had become easy for most working people to think that the spectrum of politics runs from liberal to conservative, all within a normal bourgeois parliamentary framework. But as crisis conditions ripen under capitalism, the true political spectrum changes: it begins first to encompass incipient fascist organizations —with one foot in and one foot out of the spectrum of normal bourgeois politics — and then a developing fighting workers vanguard.

It is wrong to think of fascism as an extension of bourgeois conservatism. Fascist currents do originate, in part, within the right wing of existing bourgeois parties under crisis conditions, but they are not simply an extension of two-party politics as we have known it for the past few decades. They are radical movements that base themselves on the popular grievances of increasingly economically insecure and devastated small business people, other middle-class and professional layers, and sections of the working class. They are street action movements in their trajectories.  
 

American fascism

Sometime in 1990, Patrick Buchanan — a former speech writer and aide in the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan White Houses, and a newspaper columnist and talk-show host — had issued a second edition of his autobiographical political tract, Right from the Beginning. I had picked up a copy of the book and started reading it, and I brought a copy with me to the convention that year. That was very much on my mind as I took some time in the report to begin raising the connection between the deepening social crisis we had been living through, the opening guns of renewed interimperialist conflicts, and the inevitable emergence of incipient fascist currents and demagogues in the United States and other imperialist countries.

I had been struck in particular by a chapter in Buchanan's book entitled, "As We Remember Joe," a nostalgic account of why his father had held Senator Joseph McCarthy in such high esteem. Among the other family heroes, Buchanan explains, were General Francisco Franco, leader of the fascist forces during the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s, and right-wing U.S. general Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was the commander of U.S. forces in Korea who pressed for an invasion of China even after the U.S. rulers, despite their initial plans, concluded in their majority that this would be a fiasco. To understand why people such as his father admired these ultrarightist figures, Buchanan wrote, "is to begin to understand not only his generation but ours."

In the early 1950s, Buchanan said, America was "ready for Joe McCarthy's boisterous, bellowing call for the overthrow of its reigning establishment." The "war of legitimacy that Joe launched had undertones . . . of class warfare," Buchanan said. Behind the controversy around McCarthy "were warring concepts of morality, of legitimacy, of patriotism," he said. "Who is the legitimate moral authority in America? Who, by conviction, background, character, and belief, should rightly determine the destiny of the Republic, and which is the illegitimate usurper, incompetent to identify and protect America's true interests from her real enemies?" (Notice how "communists" are absent here as direct targets!)

In November 1991 Buchanan announced his intention to wrest the Republican nomination for president from George Bush. We immediately began campaigning to explain the true political significance of Buchanan's announcement. What most of the big-business media was initially treating as a sideshow inside the Republican Party, we said, was not at all funny. It was not idiosyncratic. Instead, it marked a revival for the first time since McCarthy of a demagogic ultrarightist strand in bourgeois politics in the United States — a strand that would eventually spill over into the streets, and that would not go away until the fate of humanity was decided in struggle in those same streets.

By early 1992 a few bourgeois commentators were beginning to take seriously what Buchanan was setting out to do. One example was an article by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer that had been run in the March 1 issue of the Washington Post and syndicated in daily papers throughout the United States. He had written that the central problem with Buchanan is not his anti-Semitism — which several other commentators had accurately pointed to — nor various other of his particular reactionary views. (Krauthammer cataloged some of these: Buchanan's exhortations against "a morally cancerous welfare state"; his racist alarm bells about the "flood tide of immigration"; his warning that "white Americans will be a minority by 2050"; his question, "Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?"; his hero-worship of Franco and the butcher of Chile, Gen. Augusto Pinochet; and his euphemistic reference to the apartheid regime in South Africa as "the Boer republic.")

"The real problem with Buchanan," Krauthammer wrote, is that his views are "in various and distinct ways, fascistic."

That bald characterization of the Buchanan campaign marked a new departure in the respectable daily press in the United States. Until then, the big-business media had been doing their best to slide over the fact that a fascist program was being advanced as a "legitimate" perspective within the two-party system by one of the leading contenders in the 1992 presidential primaries. But Krauthammer's characterization was correct, as far as it went. Buchanan's "America First" demagogy is indeed not only a variety of an incipient American fascism, but the most prominent organizing center for it today.

But fascism is a special kind of extreme nationalist movement, something that Krauthammer, as an apologist for capitalism, did not and could not explain. A fascist movement above all seeks to mobilize the emotional energies of masses of people who hate the liberal capitalist democracy that is failing so horribly but can find no way forward to replace it with something historically progressive.

We called this new development in U.S. politics "Buchananism." And we printed a special issue of the International Socialist Review supplement to the Militant, headlined, "Buchananism: What It Is and How to Fight It," that supporters of the Socialist Workers Party presidential ticket of James Warren and Estelle DeBates sold thousands of copies of last year as a central piece of campaign literature. We joined with others around the country in picketing events where Buchanan was proselytizing for his reactionary cause.

Incipient fascist movements, demagogic "popular" ultrarightist movements, are often identified with an individual: McCarthyism ("Nixonism" would have served as well at the time), Huey Longism, Father Coughlin-ism, and there are many more examples from the United States and other countries. It is useful to note this fact, to show the variety of forms rightist movements can take and where they come from. The individuals or "movements" such currents are named after are accidental. They have no scientific ideas, or materialist analysis of the crisis of capitalism. But they do have a real "solution" to offer desperate and resentful people.

While Buchanan keeps one foot firmly planted in "normal" bourgeois politics, he at the same time appeals to those who will increasingly seek to function outside that framework and to fight in the streets to impose radical solutions to stop the descent into a "new Sodom." In the Buchanan phenomenon, we could see a pincers movement: one flank came out of the "respectable" Republican Party, including the middle-class areas of Washington, D.C., where Buchanan himself was born and reared. It converged with the cowards trying to block the abortion clinics, with the thugs who simply put the white sheets aside for a while, with all those attracted to taking out their insecurity and hatred against sections of the working class.

Buchanan's hero, Joseph McCarthy, also set out to galvanize a fascist movement in the United States in the aftermath of World War II. And right-wing presidential campaigns were organized in 1964 by Republican candidate Barry Goldwater and in 1968 by Gov. George Wallace of Alabama. But none of these figures arose in conditions of an economic and social crisis that was bound to get worse. None arose in depression-like conditions under which the radical social demagogy and aggressive nationalism necessary to inspire a cadre would have enabled a mass fascist movement to get organized and grow.…

You'll sometimes see Buchanan referred to in the bourgeois press as an "isolationist," or "antiwar." He opposed U.S. government policy during the Gulf War and speaks out against committing U.S. troops to the United Nations military operation in Bosnia. But class-conscious workers could make no more deadly mistake than failing to recognize —and to act on — the political fact that Buchananism is part of the imperialist war drive today.

Buchanan will mobilize the rightist movement he is building to demand that Washington use all its military might to back "our boys." But he's determined to first win the war at home against the working class, to hamstring us, and he urges his followers to act in the image of his heroes, Franco, MacArthur, and McCarthy. That's a precondition to really do the job, Buchanan holds, but then America has to do it!…

The workers movement must explain that capitalism is the source of the crisis; it must organize the toilers in a revolutionary struggle to take power out of the hands of the exploiters and establish a workers and farmers government. It must present convincing answers, a working-class alternative, to the demagogy of the Buchanans and the others. Because if labor does not do so — if it offers those being crushed by the capitalist crisis no effective way to fight, and then seems to flub the chances we have to win — we will shove potential class allies into the hands of the rightists. And the working class will be divided and defeated in blood.  
 
 
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