Road To Fascism

When I write about America descending into something that closely resembles fascism under its current president, Donald Trump, there are often responses by people who seem to still have a soft spot for this ex game-show host and are unable or unwilling to recognize the way he emboldens and enables the neo-fascists and white nationalists that form much of the core of his supporters...

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So today I'll briefly focus on the fact that it isn't all Trump's fault, and it isn't just America; unfortunately the problem is much bigger because unfettered free market capitalism is the world's economy. From the 1980s onward we've seen almost all governments of the developed world embrace the ideologies of neoliberalism and neoconservatism; the communist superpower was on the decline, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and leftist parties adopted the "Third Way", initiating a gradual but constant move to the right; in all western countries, but most noticeably in America, this has caused there to be almost no difference at all between left and right wing political parties. This in turn has contributed to increasingly unsatisfied voters, who now have all but lost their faith in democracy: it doesn't seem to matter what party you vote for, nothing ever gets done for common people while GDP keeps on growing, the rich keep getting richer and foreign interventions, be they through tariffs, sanctions or military means, keep going on.

Politics, in short, has become the servant of the capitalist economy and the "movers and shakers" of that economy, the capitalists who make up the infamous 1%. Actually the top 1% of the top 1% to be perfectly honest. And this is not the doing of Trump in America or Boris Johnson in England; we're ALL responsible to a certain degree, as we've let it happen, we bought the lies of the "trickle-down" economy and that economic growth would result in a "rising tide that lifts all boats"... However, the capitalists who control the means of disseminating information are the primarily responsible because they've engaged in decades of relentless brainwashing to make most of us believe their blatant lies.

Now, this betrayal by our political and economical leaders can't remain unanswered of course; in America the self-proclaimed socialist democrat Bernie Sanders gained massive popularity starting in the 2016 Democratic primary elections. His movement of millions of followers was the American response to decades of being betrayed by the joint venture against the people. And Sanders was in turn betrayed by the establishment of his own party, not only in 2016, but in 2020 as well; without the last minute intervention of Barack Obama and other Democrat heavy-weights, we would now be anticipating a clash between Sanders and Trump instead of a scuffle between senile Biden and Trump... Now, this constant betraying of true leftist movements is indicative of rising fascism. The increasing blurring of the line between politics and the economy is indicative of rising fascism; what right wingers call crony-capitalism, the cooperation between big corporations, big industries and politics, is in fact fascism. This is not just Trump's fault. What Trump has done is to add a couple more traditional traits of fascist regimes; the charismatic authoritarian leader who promises a return to an heavily romanticized past, when the country was still ethnically pure, an exaggerated love of ones's own country and people, and the literal demonizing of leftist activism without regard for the cause of the rise of that activism. Trump isn't responsible for America's descent into fascism, he only accelerated it. But that still means he needs to go.

Fascism isn't an ideology in and of itself; I've explained just that many times before. It's a reactionary movement, reacting to leftist movements that are reaction to right wing economics. The world, not just America, has embraced the right wing economics and globalization as dictated by the capitalists on top of the world's economic food chain. I know it's hard to grasp, but the rise of xenophobia and hate towards immigrants in most western countries is all part of the world-wide reaction to the rise of leftist movements. I know I'm painting with an extremely broad brush right now, but such generalizations are often necessary to make such grand points. Watch the video, as Marxist professor Richard Wolff explains how fascism is in a large part explained as and characterized by the erasing of the line between economic and political leadership, and you may begin to understand that a businessman (a failed one at that) becoming the president is not a good thing. Not good at all...

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