Is ‘fascism’ coming on January 20?

Editorial
January 13, 2025

As 2024 came to a close, Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman insisted President-elect Donald Trump is “reviving aspects of the fascist tradition.”

He also claims that Democrats lost the 2024 election because they “overestimated the depth of the average voter’s historical knowledge” when they called Trump a fascist. These views are common among liberal media and the middle-class left. They see working people as ignorant and the source of all prejudice and reaction, and to blame for the election outcome.

But the simple fact is, Trump is far from being a modern-day Hitler. The U.S. capitalist rulers have no need to unleash fascist gangs to crush revolutionary struggles today. Nothing in Trump’s first term suggests he’s anything other than a defender of “democratic” U.S. imperialism.

Falsely claiming Trump is a “fascist” today will make it harder to recognize real fascist forces when the rulers organize them, as they will, when the crisis of their capitalist system deepens. Such claims obscure the fact that the source of the problems workers confront is the ruling capitalist families and the political parties that serve them.

The bosses’ unquenchable thirst for profit drives them to slash jobs, impose speedup and cut wages, and Democrats and Republicans alike will back them, whatever tactical differences they have. Workers need to use our unions and union solidarity to build on the gains won in recent labor struggles.

With its tentacles spread worldwide, U.S. imperialism will drive to dominate its competitors, shore up its declining “world order” and strike blows at new revolutionary struggles, as shown by Washington’s decadeslong drive to overturn Cuba’s socialist revolution.

Washington, like all its rivals, is rushing to expand its military arsenal. Today’s sharpening trade and other inter-imperialist conflicts will inevitably lead to new shooting wars, including the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Our class has an opposite starting point to theirs — solidarity with all fights against exploitation and national oppression, including defense of Israel as a refuge for Jews and support for Ukrainian sovereignty in the face of Moscow’s invasion.

As long as the U.S. capitalists hold power, there will be no solution to imperialism’s march toward fascism and a third world war.

That reality underscores the decisive place of the fight to build a party of labor, based on the unions, to lead millions to replace the world’s final empire in the U.S. with the workers in power. Organizing independently of the bosses and their parties on all questions is key to advancing along that road. A victory here will unleash the immense potential power of working people, as an inseparable part of the fight for a socialist world.