For eight years Democrats have hammered away on one central point — telling the world that Donald Trump is “dangerous” and has to be stopped at all costs.
Lacking any positive program to deal with the crisis conditions working people face, Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris and a broad swath of her supporters have taken to insisting Trump is a full-fledged “fascist.” This includes ex-Army General Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with basketball executive and Shark Tank performer Mark Cuban and John Wojcik, editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s People’s World.
Their hyperbolic alert is aimed at convincing working people we must subordinate our own class interests and back the Democrats, one of the U.S. capitalist rulers’ two main political parties.
The Republican candidate is “fascist to the core,” Milley declares in a new book by Bob Woodward published Oct. 15.
With the election days away, Harris tells people who plan to vote for Trump that doing so is politically and morally deplorable. The upper-middle-class meritocratic layers who dominate the Democratic Party view workers as the source of bigotry, racism and reaction.
The CP’s Wojcik showed his disdain for working people by writing Oct. 28 that Trump “does not want to offend hundreds or perhaps thousands of voters in swing states that actually do have Nazi sympathies.”
Along the same lines, Phillip Bump opined in the Washington Post Oct. 25 that “a bunch of the people who think Trump meets the definition of fascist plan to vote for him anyway.”
Trump has “empowered the worst among us,” bemoans New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. The truth about Trump’s alleged fascism is “now the only story worth telling,” Bouie says, and electing Harris is “the only guardrail left” that can stop him.
To drive home the point, MSNBC spliced their coverage of Trump’s Oct. 28 overflow rally at Madison Square Garden in New York with clips from a 1939 rally held there by the fascist German-American Bund, as if they were the same thing.
“We’ve got to lock him up,” President Joseph Biden told fellow Democratic Party officials to loud applause Oct. 22.
The Democrats’ last-minute focus on “Trump-is-a-fascist” comes on top of the concerted effort by Jack Smith, the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel, and others to use the courts to try to bankrupt, preoccupy and imprison Trump while they demonize him and his supporters. Some 91 indictments have been filed. This legal assault and related efforts to refurbish the FBI in the process is the main threat to constitutional protections today.
Many middle-class radicals, like the liberals, throw the epithet “fascist” around meaning “bad” or “really bad.” But for the working class, political clarity is decisive. When the crisis of capitalism deepens and a confident working-class movement grows the capitalist rulers will turn to Nazi-type demagogues and thugs, spewing Jew-hatred, to try and defend their rule. They will turn these forces loose on the unions in an effort to crush them.
What is fascism, how to fight it
The fight against a real fascist movement is a life-and-death question for the working class. It can’t be solved by electing a Democrat or anyone else, but only in a determined effort by the working class to lead millions to take political power.
The capitalist rulers have no need to turn to a fascist movement to maintain capitalist social relations today. Trump held the presidency for four years and did nothing resembling the course advanced by the German government under the Nazis.
He’s a mainstream capitalist politician, as is Harris. Each presents themselves in different ways. He poses as building a party for workers while she speaks for the upper-middle-class liberal meritocracy. But they share the same fundamental objectives — serving the capitalist ruling families and their class interests.
When the capitalists feel the need to turn to fascists — and they will, as the crisis of their system deepens — the labor movement, with revolutionary leadership, will need to take on the rightist thugs.
The Stalinist Communist Party and reformist Social Democrats in Germany refused to unite against the Nazis in the 1930s, despite their millions of members and strength in the unions. The CP slogan was, “After Hitler, us.” This deadly course allowed Hitler to take power, crush the unions and made the second imperialist world war and the Holocaust inevitable. The cost was the lives of millions of workers and millions of Jews.
Socialist Workers Party showed the way
When the depression deepened and the capitalist rulers prepared to enter the imperialist war in the late 1930s, fascist groups began to grow in the U.S. The SWP helped lead unionists to challenge them. In New York, at the German-American Bund’s Madison Square Garden rally in 1939, the SWP and its union cadres were key in organizing a mass protest rally of 50,000 against this group.
In Minneapolis, where SWP members were part of the leadership of the Teamsters union, a 600-member citywide union defense guard was organized that prepared to do battle against fascist provocations. The union announced publicly the guard’s function was “defense of the union’s picket lines, headquarters and members against anti-labor violence.”
When they were alerted by Rabbi Gordon that the Nazi-minded Silver Shirts were planning to organize there and mount a rally, the defense guard marched on the meeting.
Arrival of the union forces caused the audience to leave in a hurry, and the group’s leader, William Pelley, set to be the main speaker, never showed up.
These rich experiences are described in more detail in an Education for Socialists Bulletin, “The Fight Against Fascism in the USA,” available from Pathfinder Press.
The best thing workers can do on election day to begin to prepare for the deepening class struggles to come is to vote for the Socialist Workers Party’s 2024 presidential ticket, Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter.