BY JACK BARNES  
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 Coughlinism, and there are many more examples from the United States and other countries.¹ 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 [Patrick] 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.²  
 
The 'culture war'
In the 1990s, however, political polarization is deepening, and class tensions are increasing within that polarization. If the war Buchanan has declared--what he calls "the culture war"--is serious, then communists and, in fact, all those mindful of the democratic rights we have wrested from the rulers, ignore it at our peril.

As with other tribunes of incipient fascist movements in this century, Buchanan does not begin by taking on the working class directly. He begins by targeting other bourgeois politicians in both parties--those part of, or soft on, the "establishment elite"--both liberals and conservatives. He goes after the dominant ruling circles in the bourgeois parties, accusing them of letting America down; tolerating corruption in the hallways of power while failing to maintain law and order on Main Street; and living privileged lives while more and more "ordinary American working people" are pushed to the wall. He presents himself as the voice of those working men and women--"the folk."

Buchanan aggressively defines who "Americans" are--and (more venomously) who they are not. This is the aim of his obscene anti-immigrant demagogy. This is the content of his calculated and thinly veiled anti-Semitic forays, aimed especially against Jews on Wall Street or in top government posts. Buchanan is a master of the politics of resentment and the coarsening of civil discourse, often with a smile.

The polarization in the "culture war" declared by Buchanan and other ultrarightists takes many forms: chauvinist anti-foreigner agitation, racist assaults on affirmative action, vulgar attacks on women's social equality, half-hidden but virulent outbursts of Jew-hatred, fearful prejudice against homosexuals. These incipient fascist forces are vocal advocates of the cops, like those currently on trial in Los Angeles for brutally beating Rodney King; fascist movements always draw many of their cadres from the cops.³ There will be no limit to the pornographic overtones of their demagogy, as they claim to offer a road to bring a "decadent" society out of its crisis.

These reactionary positions have no logical evolution or rational content. They are a collection and recombination of refuse from the past, floating out from the backwaters of class history. It can be ancient religious ideas, pagan symbols, age-old prejudices, regional attitudes, beliefs about women born of economic and social conditions from millennia past. It does not make any difference; it is accidental. But these come together in various mixtures. They are patched together into partial truths from the myriad forms of exploitation and oppression and pressures under capital. They are invested with emotional energy and declared to be the banner of a movement.

These are not religious movements; it is not "the religious right," "the Christian right," "the fundamentalist right." These are not movements about art or culture; they are not movements about schools or education. Those just provide some of the words that emotional energy is invested in. It is a reactionary, demagogic, petty-bourgeois social and political movement, one that over time becomes increasingly brutal and murderous in its methods.

As the capitalist social crisis deepens, and the working class and labor movement begin to engage in battles to defend our living standards and our unions, growing numbers within the ruling class, often reluctantly, will begin to provide financial and political support to the fascists. They will unleash the energy of the ultraright in the streets, against striking workers, labor gatherings, social protests, and organizations of the oppressed. They will use whatever force and violence is necessary to deny enough democratic rights to the majority of working people, eventually, to preserve the privileges of the upper middle class and maintain capitalist rule.

Last year, some of you will remember, we underlined something in particular about Buchanan's speech at the Republican nominating convention in August. Everything else at the convention we had heard before--until Buchanan shoved Reagan aside for an hour during prime time and, not to put it more politely than it was, gave the finger to the entire respectable Republican bourgeoisie.

Think very carefully about one phrase in Buchanan's speech. As he had done throughout his campaign, he invoked religious expressions, railed against gay rights and "radical feminism," and called for "a religious war," a "culture war," a war "for the soul of America." Then he came to the wind-up of the talk. "We must take...back our culture and take back our country," Buchanan said, "block by block"--just as the called-up National Guardsmen had done in Los Angeles a few months earlier. (Buchanan's description of the L.A. events was a gross exaggeration, but that is not the point.)

Block by block--that was the banner Buchanan raised to bring to their feet his partisans watching him live on TV around the country. That was Buchanan's summation. That fight was his promise. And that day will come.

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!
 

1. As a young U.S. congressman from California, Richard Nixon was the most prominent other U.S. political figure in the leadership of the incipient fascist current associated with McCarthy. Father Charles Coughlin, the so-called radio priest, led the fascist "Social Justice" movement, which began to gain momentum in the United States during the renewed sharpening of the Great Depression in 1937–38. Huey Long, governor and later U.S. senator from Louisiana, built a base for his Bonapartist control of state politics in the late 1920s and early 1930s under the demagogic slogan, "Share the Wealth."

2. For a discussion of the 1964 Republican presidential campaign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, see "What Goldwater Represents" by Joseph Hansen in the July 31, 1964, issue of World Outlook magazine. Given the capitalist boom at the time, and the impact on U.S. politics of the Black rights struggle and colonial revolution, Hansen wrote, "America is not ripe for a fascist takeover. On the contrary, the ground is being prepared for an enormous push in the opposite direction." George Wallace gained national prominence as governor of Alabama in the early 1960s as a demagogic defender of Jim Crow segregation and "states' rights." In 1968 he ran for president on the American Independent Party (AIP) ticket on a platform aimed at rolling back the conquests of the mass civil rights movement. Wallace received 13 percent of the popular vote. The AIP disappeared shortly following the election.

3. Los Angeles policemen Theodore Briseno, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, and Timothy Wind were on trial in federal court for violating the civil rights of Rodney King, a Black worker whom they had been videotaped brutally beating in March 1991. Following an earlier acquittal of the cops by an all-white jury in state criminal court in April 1992, anticop riots broke out across much of Los Angeles for more than four days. On orders from the Bush administration, some 1,100 U.S. marines, 600 army infantry troops, and 1,000 Border Patrol and other federal cops joined 6,500 California National Guardsmen and thousands of Los Angeles police in occupying large areas of the city's Black and Latino communities. Fifty-eight people were killed over the four days, more than 80 percent of them Black or Latino; some 17,000 people were arrested; and immigration cops used the dragnet as an excuse to deport several hundred detainees.  
 
 
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