By Carl Davidson

Feb. 27, 2022

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.”

 –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Successful strategic thinking starts with gaining knowledge, in particular gaining adequate knowledge of the big picture, of all the political and economic forces involved (Sun Tzu’s Earth) and what they are thinking, about themselves and others, at any given time. (Sun Tzu’s Heaven). It’s not a one-shot deal. Since both Heaven and Earth are always changing, strategic thinking must always be kept up to date, reassessed and revised.

This statement above was part of the opening to a widely circulated article I wrote four times now, about two, four, six, and eight years ago. With the upcoming November 2022 elections, it’s time to take my own advice again and do another update. The electoral strategic terrain is constantly changing, and we don’t want to be stuck with old maps and faulty models.

In the earlier versions, I suggested setting aside the traditional ‘two-party system’ frame, which obscures far more than it reveals, and making use of a ‘six-party’ model instead. I suggested that the new hypothesis had far more explanatory power regarding the events unfolding before us. I still like this hypothesis.

Some critics have objected to my use of the term ‘party’ for factional or interest group clusters. The point is taken, but I would also argue that U.S. major parties, in general, are not ideological parties in the European sense. Instead, they are constantly changing coalitions of these clusters with no firm commitment to program or discipline. So I will continue to use ‘parties,’ but with the objection noted. You can substitute ‘factions’ if you like. Or find us a better term.

For the most part, the strategic picture still holds. The ‘six parties’, under two tents, were first labeled as the Tea Party and the Multinationalists under the GOP tent, and the Blue Dogs, the Third Way New Democrats, the Old New Dealers, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, under the Democratic tent. We had three ‘parties’ under each tent in the second and following versions.

There are still a few minor players outside of either tent—the Green Party campaigns in California, Kshama Sawant’s ongoing battles in the Seattle City Council, the local independent candidates of the Richmond Alliance, and a few more. They might be pretty important in local areas, but still lack the weight to be featured in this analysis.

But let’s move to the central terrain.

First and most essential for us on the left now is Biden’s victory over Trump alongside the persistent clout of Senator Bernie Sanders, who keeps showing far more strength than imagined. Today we would also certainly add the gains made by Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and the growth of ‘the Squad.’ Other progressives wins in Congress and DSA gains in several state legislatures are also noteworthy.

But here’s the danger. Biden’s won by a clear margin, but Trump also gained in total votes over his past numbers. This is dangerous and too close for comfort. Given a 50/50 Senate and a narrow margin in the House, Biden has to govern, as best as he can, alongside the continuing power of Trump and rightwing populism. Moreover, the right includes the full integration of Trump’s forces into the GOP national and state apparatus and Trump’s now overt alliances with growing fascist militias and related groups

Trump’s still refuses to accept his defeat by more than 7 million votes. Acceptance of this ‘Big Steal,’ transformed into a ‘Big Lie,’ is now a loyalty test throughout the Republican party, from top to bottom. Moreover, we all witnessed Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, complete with an insurrectionary assault on the Capitol. Hundreds are now sitting in jail and their trials are underway. . The number of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys on trial is a case in point. More importantly, the House Committee on Jan. 6 is starting its public hearings, which promises to be a powerful media exposure.

Therefore, what has moved from the margins to the center of political discourse is the question of a clear and present danger of fascism. Far from an ongoing abstract debate, we are now watching its hidden elements come to light every day in the media. We also see the ongoing machinations in the GOP hierarchy and in state legislatures reshaping election laws in their favor. Now, the question is not whether a fascist danger exists, but how to fight and defeat it.

The outcomes for Biden and Trump, then, challenge, narrow, and weaken the old dominant neoliberal hegemony from different directions. For decades, the ruling bloc had spanned both the GOP transnationals and those transnational globalists in the Third Way Democrats. Now neoliberalism is largely exhausted. This is a major change, opening the terrain for new bids for policy dominance. Team Biden is groping for a yet-to-be-fully -defined LBJ 2.0, largely making major investments in physical and social infrastructure, like universal child care or free community college. Weirdly, the GOP claims to stand for nothing, save fealty, Mafia-style, to Trump. Behind that smokescreen are the politics of fascism and a neo-confederacy.

But the GOP still has three parties. Back in 2016, Politico had characterized them this way: “After the Iowa caucuses” the GOP emerged “with three front-runners who are, respectively, a proto-fascist, [Trump] a Christian theocrat [Cruz] and an Ayn Rand neoliberal [Rubio] who wants to privatize all aspects of public life while simultaneously waging war on the poor and working classes.”

So here’s the new snapshot of the range of forces for today (including a graphic map above).

Under the Dem tent, the three main groups remain as the Blue Dogs, the Third Way Centrists and the Rainbow Social Democrats. Although small, the Blue Dogs persist, especially given their partnership with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin in the Senate. With Biden in the White House, the Third Way group keeps and grows its major clout and keeps most of its African American, feminist and labor allies. The Sanders Social Democratic bloc has gained strength, especially with the growing popularity of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the growth of ‘The Squad. ‘Sanders has also formed and kept a progressive-center unity against Trump and has helped define ‘Build Back Better’ and other Biden reform packages.

The changes under the GOP tent have been radical, although keeping its three parties. The ‘Never Trumpers’, despite voting for Biden, have yet to split off entirely. In fact, despite the efforts to purge her, Liz Cheney of Wyoming continues fighting fiercely against Trump and his fascist measures and minions. The Jan. 6 insurrection also brought to the surface the tensions between the Christian nationalists headed by former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s rightwing populists. Apart from tactics, a key difference between the two is Koch money and its institutional power. The Koch brothers never liked or trusted Trump, and never funded him directly, pouring their millions into the Christian Nationalist bloc instead.

Trump still has a tight grip on the entire party, but without his White House power, the number of his GOP critics is on the rise. Daily. Trump has denounced all rivals from these two groupings, and is building his alliances with the Jan. 6 insurrectionist supporters in state legislatures. The goal is new anti-voter laws to control those counting the votes and defining the districts in the years ahead.

Let’s now look closer, starting from the left upper corner of the map:

The Rightwing Populists

This ‘party’, as mentioned, has taken over the GOP and is now tightening its grip. Trump was originally an ‘outlier elite’ with his own bankroll but now supplemented with funds from Russian oligarchs and Arab oil fortunes (See ‘Proof of Conspiracy ‘by Seth Abhramson). He is also still directly connected to the Robert Mercer family fortune, the 4th ranking billionaire funding rightwing causes. For example, the Mercers keep Breitbart News afloat and funded the career of Steve Bannon, former Trump ‘strategist’ that took him to victory in the last stretch. Along with Breitbart, Fox News is the main hourly mouthpiece for Trump’s war against the mainstream ‘fake news’ mass media. There are dozens of smaller outfits, but with millons of followers

Trump is also pulling in some new wealth. One example is Julia Jenkins Fancelli, an heiress to the fortune of the popular Publix supermarket chain. Alternet reports others: “One example is Dan and Farris Wilks, two billionaire siblings who have worked in the fracking industry in Texas and have “given a combined $100,000 toward the president’s reelection.” The Wilkes Brothers supported Sen. Ted Cruz over Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary but are supporting Trump in 2020.”

But major events reveal some fault lines. The House has now impeached Trump twice, once following the Jan. 6 events and earlier in 2019. The Senate followed up by acquitting him in both cases. In Trump’s second impeachment, 10 GOPers in the House and seven in the Senate votes against him. This is as good of an indictor as any of the remaining small but persistent strength of ‘regular’ Republicans in their own party.

The impeachment efforts, worthy in their own right, were also a major result of Trump’s fierce ongoing political warfare against the ‘Deep State.’ The battle is actually a contest for a new ‘America First’ white nationalist hegemony against the old neoliberal globalists under both tents. The ‘Deep State’ is the federal civil service and includes the ‘Intelligence Community,’ with a long list of Trump-targeted CIA and FBI leaders, supposedly corrupt, of which FBI director James Comey was the first to be purged. The real ‘corruption’ was their refusal to pledge loyalty to Trump personally, again like an old-style Mafia boss.

In the first impeachment vote in Feb. 2020, the sole breakaway vote was Mitt Romney on Article One. Romney, with considerable wealth himself, is also a Mormon bishop, and his LDS church recently listed holdings of over $37 billion with the SEC. This is a factor in Romney’s ability to stand alone. At the moment, however, the much-weakened GOP’s old Establishment is left with the choice of surrender, or crossing over to the Third Way bloc under the Dem tent. A good number already did so to vote for Biden in the Dem 2020 primary and general, expanding the Dem electorate to the right.

Trump now needs even more to shore up an alliance with the Blue Dogs. But it remains tactical, stemming from his appeals to ‘Rust Belt’ Democrats and some unions on trade and tariff issues, plus white identity resentment politics. The economic core of rightwing populism remains anti-global ‘producerism’ vs ‘parasitism’. Employed workers, business owners, real estate developers, small bankers are all ‘producers’. They oppose ‘parasite’ groups above and below, but mainly those below them—the unemployed (Get a Job! as an epithet), the immigrants, poor people of color, Muslims, and ‘the Other’ generally. When they attack those above, the target is usually George Soros, a Jew.

Recall that Trump entered politics by declaring Obama to be an illegal alien and an illegitimate officeholder (a parasite above), but quickly shifted to Mexicans and Muslims and anyone associated with ‘Black Lives Matter.’ This aimed to pull out the fascist and white supremacist groups of the ‘Alt Right’–using Breitbart and worse to widen their circles, bringing them closer to Trump’s core. With these fascists as ready reserves, Trump reached farther into Blue Dog territory, and its better-off workers, retirees, and business owners conflicted with white identity issues—immigration, Islamophobia, misogyny, and more. Today they still largely make up the audience at his mass rallies.

Trump’s outlook is not new. It has deep roots in American history, from the anti-Indian ethnic cleansing of President Andrew Jackson to the nativism of the Know-Nothings, to the nullification theories of Joh C. Calhoun, to the lynch terror of the KKK, to the anti-elitism and segregation of George Wallace and the Dixiecrats. Internationally, Trump combines aggressive jingoism, threats of trade wars, and an isolationist ‘economic nationalism’ aimed at getting others abroad to fight your battles for you. At the same time, your team picks up the loot (‘we should have seized and kept the oil!’).

Trump’s GOP still contains his internal weaknesses: the volatile support of distressed white workers and small producers. At present, they are still forming a key social base. But the problem is that Trump did not implement any substantive programs apart from tax cuts. These mainly benefited the top 10% and created an unstable class contradiction in his operation. Moreover, apart from supporting heavy vaccine research, his inability to deal adequately with the coronavirus emergency– over 900,000 dead—is is still undermining the confidence of some of his base. Most of what Trump has paid out is what WEB Dubois called the ‘psychological wage’ of ‘whiteness’, a dubious status position. Thus white supremacist demagogy and misogyny will also continue to unite a wide array of all nationalities of color and many women and youth against him.

Trump’s religious ignorance, sexual assaults and a porn star scandal always pained his alliance with the Christian Nationalist faction: (Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, et. al.), and the DeVos family (Amway fortune). They were willing to go along with it for the sake of judicial appointments, with the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling against Black voters in Alabama only one major achievement. The alliance, nonetheless, has become more frayed since Jan. 6 and the ‘Hang Mike Pence’ spectacle.  But some stalwarts stood fast. The billionaire donor to the GOP right, Devos’s brother Erik Prince is a case in point. He amassed billions from his Blackwater/Xe firms that train thousands of mercenaries, These forces serve as ‘private contractors’ for U.S. armed intervention anywhere. Prinz is now reportedly preparing to spend a few million sending spies and other disruptors into ‘liberal groups’ to do dirty work in Trump’s favor.

The Christian Nationalists

This ‘party’ grew from a subset of the former Tea Party bloc. It’s made up of several Christian rightist trends developed over decades, which gained more coherence under Vice President Mike Pence. It includes conservative evangelicals seeking to recast a patriarchal and racist John Wayne into a new warrior version of Jesus. It was strengthened for a period by the  addition of William Barr as the Attorney General, He brought Opus Dei and the Catholic far-right, a minority with the American Catholic Church, closer to the White house. But seeing that Trump was about to go beyond the law in trying to overturn the 2020 election, Barr jumped ship and resigned just in time

A good number of Christian nationalists, however, are the Protestant theocracy-minded fundamentalists, especially the ‘Dominionist’ sects in which Ted Cruz’s father was active. They present themselves as the only true, ‘values-centered’ (Biblical) conservatives. They argue against any kind of compromise with the globalist ‘liberal-socialist bloc’, which ranges, in their view, from the GOP’s Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders. They are more akin to classical liberalism than neoliberalism in economic policy. This means abandoning nearly all regulations, much of the safety net, overturning Roe v. Wade, getting rid of marriage equality (in the name of ‘religious liberty’) and abolishing the IRS and any progressive taxation in favor of a single flat tax. Salon in April 2018 reported:

“This rightwing Christian movement is fundamentally anti-democratic. Their ‘prayer warriors’ do not believe that secular laws apply to them, thus making it acceptable, if not honorable, to deceive non-believers in order to do God’s work. Many evangelicals in the Christian nationalist or ‘dominionist’ wing of the movement want the United States to be a theocracy. In some ways, this subset of the evangelical population resembles an American-style Taliban or ISIS, restrained (so far) only by the Constitution.”

The classic liberalism of most Christian Nationalist is also a key reason they attract money from the Koch Brothers networks. While the Koch’s hold Trump and his populists in some contempt, as mentioned above, the Christian Nationalist faction has access to Koch funds and its ALEC legislative projects, along with access to the DeVos fortunes. Effectively, Christian nationalist’ prosperity economics’ amounts to affirmative action for the better off, where the rise of the rich is supposed to pull everyone else upwards. Those below must also pay their tithes and pull upward with their ‘bootstraps.’ They argue for neo-isolationism on some matters of foreign policy. But as ‘Christian Zionists’ they favor an all-out holy war on ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ to the point of ‘making the sand glow’ with the use of nuclear weapons. They pushed for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and ripping up the Iran nuclear deal. All this is aimed at greasing the skids for the ‘End Times,’ the ‘Rapture, ‘and the ‘Second Coming.’ With Cruz, Pence and Devos as leaders, they have become the second most powerful grouping under the GOP tent, and the one with the most reactionary platform and outlook, even more so than Trump himself in some ways.

 The Establishment Neoliberal ‘RINOs’

This is the name now widely used in the media for what we previously labeled the Multinationalists. It’s mainly the upper crust and neoliberal business elites that have owned and run the GOP for years, but are now largely out in the cold. It included the quasi-libertarian House’ Freedom Caucus,’ the smaller group of NeoCons on foreign policy (John Bolton and John McCain), and the shrinking number of RINO (Republican In Name Only) moderates in The Lincoln Project. The Establishment also favors a globalist, U.S. hegemonist and even, at times, unilateralist approach abroad, with some still defending the Bush-Cheney disaster in Iraq. Their prominent voice today is Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

We also need to keep in mind the global backdrop to these shifts. The worldwide process of technology-driven financialization has divided the ruling class of late capitalism in every major country into three—a local sector of the transnational capitalist class, the nation-based multinationals, and an anti-globalist national sector. Thus among traditional U.S. neoliberals, some are U.S. hegemonists, but many have a transnational globalist understanding of the world with vast amounts of their money in foreign stock. China and global value chains integrate them with other global capitalists. This is why Trump’s trade policy is so controversial with Wall Street elites of both Republican and Democratic leanings. U.S. economic hegemony makes no sense at this financial and productive integration level. The global three way division also serves to explain why Trump’s rightwing populism, despite its American characteristics, is connected to the rightwing nationalist-populist rise in all European countries. He is not ‘explainable’ in American terns alone.

This subordination is a big change for the traditional GOP top dogs. They would like to purge a weakened Trump from the party and rebuild, but so far lack the ability. They could try to form a new party with neoliberal Dems. Or, more likely, they could join the Dems and try to push out or smother those to the left of the Third Way grouping.

Now let’s turn to the Dem tent, starting at the top right of the graphic.

The Blue Dogs

The Blue Dogs, according to the online newsletter Sludge, “operates a political action committee, Blue Dog PAC, that raises millions of dollars each election cycle, mainly from corporate PACs, and spends money to help elect more conservative Democrats. Corporate PACs that donated to Blue Dog PAC in the 2018 election cycle include those affiliated with drug company Pfizer, defense contractor Northrop Grumman, oil company ExxonMobil, and Wall Street bank Citigroup.”

This small ‘party’ has persisted and gained some energy. The recent effort of West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin to bloc or gut Biden’s reforms is a case in point. One earlier reason was that the United Steel Workers and a few craft unions had decided ‘to work with Trump’ on tariffs and trade. The USW also got firmly behind Connor Lamb (D-PA) for Congress. Lamb won a narrow victory in a Western PA CD in a rural and conservative area, but with many USW miner’s votes. He was endorsed by the Blue Dog PAC, although he is not yet a formal member of the caucus. Getting into a nearly physical floor fight with the GOP over Jan. 6 ‘radicalized’ Lamb a bit, moving him leftward.

But the small Blue Dog resurgence may not last. On the one hand, the DNC Third Way gang currently loves people like Lamb, and wants to see more candidates leaning to the center and even the right. On the other hand, an unstableTrump out of office has little to offer on major infrastructure plans save for ‘Build The Wall’ chanting at rallies. His potential votes among USW and other union members may shrink.

The Third Way New Democrats

First formed by the Clintons, with international assistance from Tony Blair and others, this dominant ‘party’ was funded by Wall Street finance capitalists. The founding idea was to move toward neoliberalism by ‘creating distance’ between themselves and the traditional Left-Labor-Liberal bloc, i.e., the traditional unions and civil rights groups still connected to the New Deal legacy. Another part of ‘Third Way’ thinking was to shift the key social base away from the core of the working class toward college-educated suburban voters, but keeping alliances with Black and women’s groups still functional.

Thus the Third Way had tried to temper the harsher neoliberalism of the GOP by ‘triangulating’ with neo-Keynesian and left-Keynesian policies. But the overall effect is to move Democrats and their platform generally rightward. With Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat, the Third Way’s power in the party has diminished somewhat but gained clout with the victory of Biden. As mentioned above, its labor alliances have weakened, with unions now going in three directions. Most of labor has remained with the Third Way. Some moved rightward to the Blue Dogs while others—Communications Workers, National Nurses United, and the U.E.—are part of the Sanders bloc. Regarding the current relation of forces in the party apparatus, the Third Way has about 60% of the positions and still controls the major money. In California in 2018, for example, the Regulars kept control of the state party committee only with extremely narrow margins over Bernie supporters.

The key test was the November battle with Trump: Who inspired and mobilized the much-needed ‘Blue Wave’, gave it focus and put the right numbers in the right places? The measured Third Way moderates? Or the Social Democrat insurgents? This question brings us to the last of the six’ parties.’

The Rainbow Social Democrats

This description is better than simply calling it the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), as this article’s first version did. I’ve kept the ‘Rainbow’ designation because of the dynamic energy of AOC and the Squad. The Third Way, which has kept the older and more pragmatic voters of the rainbow groupings under its centrist influence, can still share it as well.

As explained before, the ‘Social Democrat’ title doesn’t mean each leader or activist here is in a social-democrat or democratic socialist group like DSA. It means the core groups–the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), Working Families Party (WFP), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Justice Democrats and Our Revolution and Indivisible—all have platforms are roughly similar to the left social democrat groupings in Europe. This is made even more evident with AOC’s and Bernie’s self-description as ‘democratic socialists’ in the primaries and the general, where it only seemed to help. The platform, however, is not socialist itself, but best described as a common front vs finance capital, war, and the white supremacist and fascist right. This is true of groups like Die Linke (‘The Left’) in Germany as well, which met recently with PDA and CPC members. In that sense, the ‘Third Reconstruction,’ promoted by Rev William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign, might also serves as a good designation and goal.

Finally, there is the ongoing dramatic growth of the DSA due to their wise tactics in the 2016 Bernie campaign. They went all in for Bernie but also lost no opening to make themselves visible. Prominent Justice Democrat and DSAer Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, who has been a firebrand in the House, has made the ‘Green New Deal’ a household term, and joined Sanders in his efforts to shape Biden’s agenda. Now with nearly 100.000 members with chapters in every state, DSA has already won a few local and statehouse races the first time out. They are now an important player in their own right within these local clusters. But their growth may have peaked for a while. Their surfacing weaknesses reside in sorting out their own internal differences with sectarianism and even chauvinism against Black candidates.

This overall growth of this ‘party’ is all to the good. The common front approach of the Social Democratic bloc can unite more than a militant minority of actual socialists. Instead, it has a platform that can also unite a progressive majority around both immediate needs and structural reforms, including both socialists and non-socialists, the ‘Third Reconstruction.’ Apart from winning 46% of the 2016 Dem convention delegates and a good number of statehous seats, this ‘party’ is now noted for two things. First is the huge, elemental outpourings of young people–mainly women, students and the young workers of the distressed ‘precariat’ sector of the class–in the elemental risings of millions after Trump took office. Second was the enormous risings following the murder of George Floyd by the police—over 20 million, the largest in U.S history. With other mass groups like Our Revolution and Indivisible, they all added a higher degree of organization at the base to this dynamic and growing cluster.

What does it all mean?

With this brief descriptive and analytical mapping of the upper crust of American politics, many things are falling into place. The formerly subaltern rightist groupings in the GOP have risen in revolt against the Neoliberal Establishment of the Cheneys, Romneys and the Bushes. Now they have rightwing populist and white nationalist hegemony. The GOP, then, can be accurately called the party of the neo-Confederates and the main target of a popular, anti-fascist front. Under the other tent, the Third Way is seeking a new post-neoliberal platform, through President Joe Biden’s reforms. The progressive-center unity of the earlier Obama coalition, with all its constituency alliances, is still in place. At the same time, the Third Way still wants to co-opt and control the Social Democrats as an energetic but critical secondary ally. The Sanders’ forces have few illusions about this pressure on them, and don’t want to be anyone’s subaltern without a fight. So we are continuing to press all our issues, but adapting some policies to the common front vs. the fascist right. If we work well, we will build more base organizations, more alliances, and more clout as we go.

This ‘big picture’ also reveals much about the current budget debates. All three parties under the GOP tent still advocate neoliberal austerity. The Third Way-dominated Senate Democrats and Blue Dogs push for an ‘austerity lite’ budget and some Keynesian infrastructure programs. Team Biden, the Social Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus are working on ‘Build Back Better’ programs and ‘Green New Deal’ projects that might expand advanced manufacturing jobs.

However, we must keep in mind that favorably ‘shifting the balance of forces’ in election campaigns is often an indirect and somewhat ephemeral gain. It does ‘open up space’, but for what? Progressive initiatives matter for sure, but much more is required strategically. Strategically, we are in a war of position, with periodic tactical ‘war of movement’ elemental risings. In that framework, we are interested in pushing the popular front vs. finance capital to its limits and developing a 21st-century socialist bloc. If that comes to scale in the context of a defeat of the pro-Trump right bloc, the Democratic tent is also going to be stretched and strained. It could even collapse and implode, given the sharper class contradictions and other fault lines that lie within it, much as the Whigs split four ways in the 19th Century. This ‘Whig option’ tactic would demand an ability on the part of the left to regroup all the progressive forces, inside and outside, into a new ‘First Party’ alliance or counter-hegemonic bloc. Such a formation also includes a militant minority of socialists, which will then be able to contend for governing power. The tricky part is to do this in a way that keeps the right at bay.

An old classic formula summing up the strategic thinking of the united front is appropriate here: ‘Unite and develop the progressive forces, win over the middle forces, isolate and divide the backward forces, then crush our adversaries one by one.’ In short, we must have a policy and set of tactics for each one of these elements, as well as a strategy for dealing with them overall. Moreover, take note of a warning from the futurist Alvin Toffler: ‘If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.’ Then finally, as to tactics, ‘wage struggle on just grounds, to our advantage and with restraint.’

To conclude, we still need to start with a realistic view of ourselves as an organized socialist left. Save for DSA, we are mostly quite small as organizations, but now we can see we are swimming in a sea of millions open to socialism. What can we do now? If you can see yourself or your group honestly working to achieve DSA’s stated program, by all means, join them and make them even larger. Or set up Jacobin / In These Times Reading Groups in your living rooms and unite socialists and close friends with them. The same goes with the new Convergence project growing out of Organizing Upgrade. Or join CCDS, CPUSA, Left Roots, or Liberation Road—socialist groups which largely share some or most of the perspective here. Join or start PDA or WFP chapters everywhere, use organizations and broad ‘Third Reconstruction’ and ‘Modern Tecumseh’ alliances and popular rainbow assemblies to build mass mobilizations, register new voters and defeat the GOP in November 2022 and 2024.

With both socialists and rainbow progressives, start at the base, focus on city and state governments, and expand the Congressional Progressive Caucus. We rarely gain victories at the top that have not been won and consolidated earlier at the base. Most of all, in order to form broader and winning coalitions, you need base organizations of your own to form partnerships and alliances WITH! Seize the time and Git ‘er done!

By William I. Robinson
Truthout

Oct 25, 2020 – Few would disagree in light of recent events that the Trump regime, its most diehard extreme-right, white supremacist supporters, and elements of the Republican Party are bidding for a fascist putsch. Whether this putsch remains insurgent or is beaten back will depend on how events unfold in the November 3 election and its aftermath, and especially on the ability of left and progressive forces to mobilize to defend democracy and to push forward a social justice agenda as a counterweight to the fascist project.

This fight can benefit from analytical clarity as to what we are up against — in particular, analysis that links the threat of fascism to capitalism and its crisis. I have been writing about the rise of 21st-century fascist projects around the world since 2008. While such a project has been brewing in the United States since the early 21st century, it entered a qualitatively new stage with the rise of Trumpism in 2016 and appears to be fast-tracked now as the election draws near.

In the broader picture, fascism, whether in its 20th- or 21st-century variant, is a particular, far right response to capitalist crisis, such as that of the 1930s and the one that began with the financial meltdown of 2008 and has now been greatly intensified by the pandemic. Trumpism in the United States; Brexit in the United Kingdom; the increasing influence of neo-fascist and authoritarian parties and movements throughout Europe (including Poland, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Belgium and Greece), and around the world (such as in Israel, Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil and India), represent just such a far-right response to the crisis.

Trumpism and Fascism

The telltale signs of the fascist threat in the United States are in plain sight. Fascist movements expanded rapidly since the turn of the century in civil society and in the political system through the right wing of the Republican Party. Trump proved to be a charismatic figure able to galvanize and embolden disparate neo-fascist forces, from white supremacists, white nationalists, militia, neo-Nazis and Klansmen, to the Oath Keepers, the Patriot Movement, Christian fundamentalists, and anti-immigrant vigilante groups. Since 2016, numerous other groups have emerged, from the Proud Boys and QAnon to the Boogaloo movement (whose explicit goal is to spark a civil war) and the terrorist Michigan group known as Wolverine Watchmen. They are heavily armed and mobilizing for confrontation in near-perfect consort with the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, which long since has captured that party and turned it into one of utter reaction.

Encouraged by Trump’s imperial bravado, his populist and nationalist rhetoric, and his openly racist discourse, predicated in part on whipping up anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-Black sentiment, they began to cross-pollinate to a degree not seen in decades as they gained a toehold in the Trump White House and in state and local governments around the country. Paramilitarism spread within many of these organizations and overlapped with state repressive agencies. Racist, far right and fascist militia, identified by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security as the most lethal domestic terrorist threat, operate inside law enforcement agencies. As far back as 2006, a government intelligence assessment had warned of “white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement by organized groups and by self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes.”

Fascism seeks to violently restore capital accumulation, establish new forms of state legitimacy and suppress threats from below unencumbered by democratic constraints.

The fascist insurgency reached a feverish pitch in the wake of the mass protests sparked by the police-perpetrated murder of George Floyd in May. Among recent incidents too numerous to list, fascist militia members have routinely showed up heavily armed at anti-racist rallies to threaten protesters, and in several instances, have carried out assassinations. Trump has refused to condemn the armed right-wing insurgency. To the contrary, he defended a self-described vigilante and “Blue Lives Matter” enthusiast who shot to death two unarmed protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25. On September 3, federal marshals carried out an extra-judicial execution of Michael Reinoehl, who admitted to shooting a few days earlier a member of the white supremacist group Patriot Prayer during a confrontation between Trump supporters and counterprotesters in Portland, Oregon. “There has to be retribution,” declared Trump in a chilling interview in which he seemed to take credit for what amounted to a death squad execution.

Particularly ominous was the plot by a domestic terrorist militia group, broken up on October 8, to storm the Michigan state capitol to kidnap and possibly kill the Democratic governor of Michigan and other officials, a conspiracy that the White House refused to condemn. While there are great differences between 20th- and 21st-century fascism and any parallels should not be exaggerated, we would do well to recall the 1923 “beer hall putsch” in Bavaria, Germany, which marked a turning point in the Nazis’ rise to power. In that incident, Hitler and a heavily armed group of his followers hatched a plot to kidnap leaders of the Bavarian government. Loyal government officials put down the putsch and jailed Hitler but the fascist insurgency expanded in its aftermath.

The fascist putsch now hinges on the November election. The rule of law is breaking down. Trump has claimed, without any credible evidence, that the vote will be fraudulent, has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose, and has all but called on his supporters to be prepared for an insurrection. Himself a transnational capitalist, a racist and a fascist, Trump took advantage of the protests over the murder of George Floyd to bring the project to a new level, inciting from the White House itself the fascist mobilization in U.S. civil society, manipulating fear and a racist backlash with his “law and order” discourse, and threatening a qualitative escalation of the police state. Widespread and systematic voter suppression, especially of those from marginalized communities, has already disenfranchised millions. Donald Trump Jr. called in September for “every able-bodied man and woman to join an army for Trump’s election security operation.”

Morphology of the Fascist Project

The escalation of veiled and also openly racist discourse from above is aimed at ushering the members of this white working-class sector into a racist and a neo-fascist understanding of their condition.
The current crisis of global capitalism is both structural and political. Politically, capitalist states face spiraling crises of legitimacy after decades of hardship and social decay wrought by neoliberalism, aggravated now by these states’ inability to manage the health emergency and the economic collapse. The level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented. The richest 1 percent of humanity control more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 5 percent of this wealth. Such extreme inequalities can only be sustained by extreme levels of state and private violence that lend themselves to fascist political projects.

Structurally, the global economy is mired in a crisis of overaccumulation, or chronic stagnation, made much worse by the pandemic. As inequalities escalate, the system churns out more and more wealth that the mass of working people cannot actually consume. As a result, the global market cannot absorb the output of the global economy. The transnational capitalist class cannot find outlets to “unload” the trillions of dollars it has accumulated. In recent years, it has turned to mind-boggling levels of financial speculation, to the raiding and sacking of public budgets, and to militarized accumulation or accumulation by repression. This refers to how accumulation of capital comes increasingly to rely on transnational systems of social control, repression and warfare, as the global police state expands to defend the global war economy from rebellions from below.

Fascism seeks to rescue capitalism from this organic crisis; that is, to violently restore capital accumulation, establish new forms of state legitimacy and suppress threats from below unencumbered by democratic constraints. The project involves a fusion of repressive and reactionary state power with a fascist mobilization in civil society. Twenty-first-century fascism, like its 20th-century predecessor, is a violently toxic mix of reactionary nationalism and racism. Its discursive and ideological repertoire involves extreme nationalism and the promise of national regeneration, xenophobia, doctrines of race/culture supremacy alongside a violent racist mobilization, martial masculinity, militarization of civic and political life, and the normalization — even glorification — of war, social violence and domination.

As with its 20th-century predecessor, the 21st-century fascist project hinges on the psychosocial mechanism of dispersing mass fear and anxiety at a time of acute capitalist crisis toward scapegoated communities, whether Jews in Nazi Germany, immigrants in the United States, or Muslims and lower castes in India, and also on to an external enemy, such as communism during the Cold War, or China and Russia currently. It seeks to organize a mass social base with the promise to restore stability and security to those destabilized by capitalist crises. Fascist organizers appeal to the same social base of those millions who have been devastated by neoliberal austerity, impoverishment, precarious employment and relegation to the ranks of surplus labor, all greatly aggravated by the pandemic. As popular discontent has spread, far right and neo-fascist mobilization play a critical role in the effort by dominant groups to channel this discontent away from a critique of global capitalism and toward support for the transnational capitalist class agenda dressed in populist rhetoric.

The ideology of 21st-century fascism rests on irrationality — a promise to deliver security and restore stability that is emotive, not rational. It is a project that does not distinguish between the truth and the lie.

The fascist appeal is directed in particular to historically privileged sectors of the global working class, such as white workers in the Global North and urban middle layers in the Global South, that are experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility and socioeconomic destabilization. The flip side of targeting certain disaffected sectors is the violent control and suppression of other sectors — which, in the United States, come disproportionately from the ranks of surplus labor, communities that face racial and ethnic oppression, or religious and other forms of persecution.

The mechanisms of coercive exclusion include mass incarceration and the spread of prison-industrial complexes; anti-immigrant legislation and deportation regimes; the manipulation of space in new ways so that both gated communities and ghettos are controlled by armies of private security guards and technologically advanced surveillance systems; ubiquitous, often paramilitarized policing; “non-lethal” crowd control methods; and mobilization of the culture industries and state ideological apparatuses to dehumanize victims of global capitalism as dangerous, depraved and culturally degenerate.

Racism and Competing Interpretations of the Crisis

We cannot under-emphasize the role of racism for the fascist mobilization in the United States. But we need to deepen our analysis of it. The U.S. political system and the dominant groups face a crisis of hegemony and legitimacy. This has involved the breakdown of the white racist historic bloc that to one extent or another reigned supreme from the end of post-Civil War reconstruction to the late 20th century but has become destabilized through capitalist globalization. The far right and neo-fascists are attempting to reconstruct such a bloc, in which “national” identity becomes “white identity” as a stand-in (that is, a code) for a racist mobilization against perceived sources of anxiety and insecurity.

Yet many white members of the working class have been experiencing social and economic destabilization, downward mobility, heightened insecurity, an uncertain future and accelerated precariatization — that is, ever more precarious work and life conditions. This sector has historically enjoyed the ethnic-racial privileges that come from white supremacy vis-à-vis other sectors of the working class, but it has been losing these privileges in the face of capitalist globalization. The escalation of veiled and also openly racist discourse from above is aimed at ushering the members of this white working-class sector into a racist and a neo-fascist understanding of their condition.

To beat back the threat of fascism, popular resistance forces must put forward an alternative interpretation of the crisis, involving a social justice agenda founded on a working-class politics.

Racism and the appeal to fascism offer workers from the dominant racial or ethnic group an imaginary solution to real contradictions; recognition of the existence of suffering and oppression, even though its solution is a false one. The parties and movements associated with such projects have put forth a racist discourse, less coded and less mediated than that of mainstream politicians, targeting the racially oppressed, ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants and refugees in particular as scapegoats. Yet in this age of globalized capitalism, there is little possibility in the United States or elsewhere of providing such benefits, so that the “wages of fascism” now appear to be entirely psychological. The ideology of 21st-century fascism rests on irrationality — a promise to deliver security and restore stability that is emotive, not rational. It is a project that does not and need not distinguish between the truth and the lie.

The Trump regime’s public discourse of populism and nationalism, for example, bears no relation to its actual policies. Trumponomics involves a sweeping deregulation of capital, slashing social spending, dismantling what remains of the welfare state, privatization, tax breaks to corporations and the rich, anti-worker laws, and an expansion of state subsidies to capital — in short, radical neoliberalism. Trump’s populism has no policy substance. It is almost entirely symbolic — hence the significance of his fanatical “build the wall” and similar rhetoric, symbolically essential to sustain a social base for which the state can provide little or no material bribe. This also helps to explain the increasing desperation in Trump’s bravado as the election approaches.

But here is the clincher: Deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and rising insecurity do not automatically lead to racist or fascist backlash. A racist/fascist interpretation of these conditions must be mediated by political agents and state agencies. Trumpism represents just such a mediation.

To beat back the threat of fascism, popular resistance forces must put forward an alternative interpretation of the crisis, involving a social justice agenda founded on a working-class politics that can win over the would-be social base of fascism. This would-be base is made up of a majority of workers who are experiencing the same deleterious effects of global capitalism in crisis as the entire working class. We need a social justice and working-class agenda to respond to its increasingly immiserated condition, lest we leave it susceptible to a far right populist manipulation of this condition. Joe Biden may well win the election. Yet even if he does so and manages to take office, the crisis of global capitalism and the fascist project it is stoking will continue. A united front against fascism must be based on a social justice agenda that targets capitalism and its crisis.

William I. Robinson is distinguished professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent book is The Global Police State. His Facebook blog page is WilliamIRobinsonSociologist.

Police officers line up by the AFL-CIO building during a stand-off between law enforcement officers and protesters at the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC, on June 23. Astrid Riecken/Washington Post/Getty Images

Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence

By Zack Beauchamp
Vox.com

July 7, 2020 – Arthur Rizer is a former police officer and 21-year veteran of the US Army, where he served as a military policeman. Today, he heads the criminal justice program at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank in DC. And he wants you to know that American policing is even more broken than you think.

“That whole thing about the bad apple? I hate when people say that,” Rizer tells me. “The bad apple rots the barrel. And until we do something about the rotten barrel, it doesn’t matter how many good fucking apples you put in.”

To illustrate the problem, Rizer tells a story about a time he observed a patrol by some officers in Montgomery, Alabama. They were called in to deal with a woman they knew had mental illness; she was flailing around and had cut someone with a broken plant pick. To subdue her, one of the officers body-slammed her against a door. Hard.

Rizer recalls that Montgomery officers were nervous about being watched during such a violent arrest — until they found out he had once been a cop. They didn’t actually have any problem with what one of them had just done to the woman; in fact, they started laughing about it.

“It’s one thing to use force and violence to affect an arrest. It’s another thing to find it funny,” he tells me. “It’s just pervasive throughout policing. When I was a police officer and doing these kind of ride-alongs [as a researcher], you see the underbelly of it. And it’s … gross.”

America’s epidemic of police violence is not limited to what’s on the news. For every high-profile story of a police officer killing an unarmed Black person or tear-gassing peaceful protesters, there are many, many allegations of police misconduct you don’t hear about — abuses ranging from excessive use of force to mistreatment of prisoners to planting evidence. African Americans are arrested and roughed up by cops at wildly disproportionate rates, relative to both their overall share of the population and the percentage of crimes they commit.

Something about the way police relate to the communities they’re tasked with protecting has gone wrong. Officers aren’t just regularly treating people badly; a deep dive into the motivations and beliefs of police reveals that too many believe they are justified in doing so.

To understand how the police think about themselves and their job, I interviewed more than a dozen former officers and experts on policing. These sources, ranging from conservatives to police abolitionists, painted a deeply disturbing picture of the internal c

Police officers confront protesters in front of City Hall in New York City on July 1. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Police officers across America have adopted a set of beliefs about their work and its role in our society. The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down, but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country.

The ideology holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place: Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they’re supposed to protect. The police believe they’re alone in this fight; police ideology holds that officers are under siege by criminals and are not understood or respected by the broader citizenry. These beliefs, combined with widely held racial stereotypes, push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions.

In that sense, police ideology can help us understand the persistence of officer-involved shootings and the recent brutal suppression of peaceful protests. In a culture where Black people are stereotyped as more threatening, Black communities are terrorized by aggressive policing, with officers acting less like community protectors and more like an occupying army.

The beliefs that define police ideology are neither universally shared among officers nor evenly distributed across departments. There are more than 600,000 local police officers across the country and more than 12,000 local police agencies. The officer corps has gotten more diverse over the years, with women, people of color, and LGBTQ officers making up a growing share of the profession. Speaking about such a group in blanket terms would do a disservice to the many officers who try to serve with care and kindness.

However, the officer corps remains overwhelmingly white, male, and straight. Federal Election Commission data from the 2020 cycle suggests that police heavily favor Republicans. And it is indisputable that there are commonly held beliefs among officers.

“The fact that not every department is the same doesn’t undermine the point that there are common factors that people can reasonably identify as a police culture,” says Tracey Meares, the founding director of Yale University’s Justice Collaboratory.

The danger imperative

In 1998, Georgia sheriff’s deputy Kyle Dinkheller pulled over a middle-aged white man named Andrew Howard Brannan for speeding. Brannan, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, refused to comply with Dinkheller’s instructions. He got out of the car and started dancing in the middle of the road, singing “Here I am, shoot me” over and over again.

In the encounter, recorded by the deputy’s dashcam, things then escalate: Brannan charges at Dinkheller; Dinkheller tells him to “get back.” Brannan heads back to the car — only to reemerge with a rifle pointed at Dinkheller. The officer fires first, and misses; Brannan shoots back. In the ensuing firefight, both men are wounded, but Dinkheller far more severely. It ends with Brannan standing over Dinkheller, pointing the rifle at the deputy’s eye. He yells — “Die, fucker!” — and pulls the trigger.

The dashcam footage of Dinkheller’s killing, widely known among cops as the “Dinkheller video,” is burned into the minds of many American police officers. It is screened in police academies around the country; one training turns it into a video game-style simulation in which officers can change the ending by killing Brannan. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando Castile during a 2016 traffic stop, was shown the Dinkheller video during his training.

“Every cop knows the name ‘Dinkheller’ — and no one else does,” says Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who currently teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The purpose of the Dinkheller video, and many others like it shown at police academies, is to teach officers that any situation could escalate to violence. Cop killers lurk around every corner.

It’s true that policing is a relatively dangerous job. But contrary to the impression the Dinkheller video might give trainees, murders of police are not the omnipresent threat they are made out to be. The number of police killings across the country has been falling for decades; there’s been a 90 percent drop in ambush killings of officers since 1970. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, about 13 per 100,000 police officers died on the job in 2017. Compare that to farmers (24 deaths per 100,000), truck drivers (26.9 per 100,000), and trash collectors (34.9 per 100,000). But police academies and field training officers hammer home the risk of violent death to officers again and again.

It’s not just training and socialization, though: The very nature of the job reinforces the sense of fear and threat. Law enforcement isn’t called to people’s homes and streets when things are going well. Officers constantly find themselves thrown into situations where a seemingly normal interaction has gone haywire — a marital argument devolving into domestic violence, for example.

“For them, any scene can turn into a potential danger,” says Eugene Paoline III, a criminologist at the University of Central Florida. “They’re taught, through their experiences, that very routine events can go bad.”

Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a professor at UT-Austin, calls the police obsession with violent death “the danger imperative.” After conducting 1,000 hours of fieldwork and interviews with 94 police officers, he found that the risk of violent death occupies an extraordinary amount of mental space for many officers — far more so than it should, given the objective risks.

Here’s what I mean: According to the past 20 years of FBI data on officer fatalities, 1,001 officers have been killed by firearms while 760 have died in car crashes. For this reason, police officers are, like the rest of us, required to wear seat belts at all times.

In reality, many choose not to wear them even when speeding through city streets. Sierra-Arévalo rode along with one police officer, whom he calls officer Doyle, during a car chase where Doyle was going around 100 miles per hour — and still not wearing a seat belt. Sierra-Arévalo asked him why he did things like this. Here’s what Doyle said:

There’s times where I’ll be driving and the next thing you know I’ll be like, ‘Oh shit, that dude’s got a fucking gun!’ I’ll stop [mimics tires screeching], try to get out — fuck. Stuck on the seat belt … I’d rather just be able to jump out on people, you know. If I have to, be able to jump out of this deathtrap of a car.

Despite the fact that fatal car accidents are a risk for police, officers like Doyle prioritize their ability to respond to one specific shooting scenario over the clear and consistent benefits of wearing a seat belt.

“Knowing officers consistently claim safety is their primary concern, multiple drivers not wearing a seatbelt and speeding towards the same call should be interpreted as an unacceptable danger; it is not,” Sierra-Arévalo writes. “The danger imperative — the preoccupation with violence and the provision of officer safety — contributes to officer behaviors that, though perceived as keeping them safe, in fact put them in great physical danger.”

This outsized attention to violence doesn’t just make officers a threat to themselves. It’s also part of what makes them a threat to citizens.

Because officers are hyper-attuned to the risks of attacks, they tend to believe that they must always be prepared to use force against them — sometimes even disproportionate force. Many officers believe that, if they are humiliated or undermined by a civilian, that civilian might be more willing to physically threaten them.

Scholars of policing call this concept “maintaining the edge,” and it’s a vital reason why officers seem so willing to employ force that appears obviously excessive when captured by body cams and cellphones.

“To let down that edge is perceived as inviting chaos, and thus danger,” Moskos says.

This mindset helps explain why so many instances of police violence — like George Floyd’s killing by officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis — happen during struggles related to arrest.

In these situations, the officers aren’t always threatened with a deadly weapon: Floyd, for example, was unarmed. But when the officer decides the suspect is disrespecting them or resisting their commands, they feel the need to use force to reestablish the edge.

They need to make the suspect submit to their authority.

A siege mentality

Police officers today tend to see themselves as engaged in a lonely, armed struggle against the criminal element. They are judged by their effectiveness at that task, measured by internal data such as arrest numbers and crime rates in the areas they patrol. Officers believe these efforts are underappreciated by the general public; according to a 2017 Pew report, 86 percent of police believe the public doesn’t really understand the “risks and challenges” involved in their job.

Rizer, the former officer and R Street researcher, recently conducted a separate large-scale survey of American police officers. One of the questions he asked was whether they would want their children to become police officers. A majority, around 60 percent, said no — for reasons that, in Rizer’s words, “blew me away.”

“The vast majority of people that said ‘no, I don’t want them to become a police officer’ was because they felt like the public no longer supported them — and that they were ‘at war’ with the public,” he tells me. “There’s a ‘me versus them’ kind of worldview, that we’re not part of this community that we’re patrolling.”

You can see this mentality on display in the widespread police adoption of an emblem called the “thin blue line.” In one version of the symbol, two black rectangles are separated by a dark blue horizontal line. The rectangles represent the public and criminals, respectively; the blue line separating them is the police.

In another, the blue line replaces the central white stripe in a black-and-white American flag, separating the stars from the stripes below. During the recent anti-police violence protests in Cincinnati, Ohio, officers raised this modified banner outside their station.

A demonstrator holds a “thin blue line” flag and a sign in support of police during a protest outside the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 27. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
In the “thin blue line” mindset, loyalty to the badge is paramount; reporting excessive force or the use of racial slurs by a colleague is an act of treason. This emphasis on loyalty can create conditions for abuses, even systematic ones, to take place: Officers at one station in Chicago, Illinois, tortured at least 125 Black suspects between 1972 and 1991. These crimes were uncovered by the dogged work of an investigative journalist rather than a police whistleblower.

“Officers, when they get wind that something might be wrong, either participate in it themselves when they’re commanded to — or they actively ignore it, find ways to look the other way,” says Laurence Ralph, a Princeton professor and the author of The Torture Letters, a recent book on the abuses in Chicago.

This insularity and siege mentality is not universal among American police. Worldviews vary from person to person and department to department; many officers are decent people who work hard to get to know citizens and address their concerns.

But it is powerful enough, experts say, to distort departments across the country. It has seriously undermined some recent efforts to reorient the police toward working more closely with local communities, generally pushing departments away from deep engagement with citizens and toward a more militarized and aggressive model.

“The police have been in the midst of an epic ideological battle. It’s been taking place ever since the supposed community policing revolution started back in the 1980s,” says Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies. “In the last 10 to 15 years, the more toxic elements have been far more influential.”

Since the George Floyd protests began, police have tear-gassed protesters in 100 different US cities. This is not an accident or the result of behaviors by a few bad apples. Instead, it reflects the fact that officers see themselves as at war — and the protesters as the enemies.

A 2017 study by Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, a sociologist at Colorado State University-Pueblo, examined data on 7,000 protests from 1960 to 1995. She found that “police are much more likely to try to quell protests that criticize police conduct.”

“Recent scholarship argues that, over the last twenty years, protest policing [has gotten] more aggressive and less impartial,” Reynolds-Stenson concludes. “The pattern of disproportionate repression of police brutality protests found in this study may be even more pronounced today.”

There’s a reason that, after New York Police Department Lt. Robert Cattani kneeled alongside Black Lives Matter protesters on May 31, he sent an email to his precinct apologizing for the “horrible decision to give into a crowd of protesters’ demands.” In his mind, the decision to work with the crowd amounted to collaboration with the enemy.

“The cop in me,” Cattani wrote, “wants to kick my own ass.”

Anti-Blackness

Policing in the United States has always been bound up with the color line. In the South, police departments emerged out of 18th century slave patrols — bands of men working to discipline slaves, facilitate their transfer between plantations, and catch runaways. In the North, professional police departments came about as a response to a series of mid-19th century urban upheavals — many of which, like the 1834 New York anti-abolition riot, had their origins in racial strife.

While policing has changed dramatically since then, there’s clear evidence of continued structural racism in American policing. The Washington Post’s Radley Balko has compiled an extensive list of academic studies documenting this fact, covering everything from traffic stops to use of deadly force. Research has confirmed that this is a nationwide problem, involving a significant percentage of officers.

When talking about race in policing and the way it relates to police ideology, there are two related phenomena to think about.

The first is overt racism. In some police departments, the culture permits a minority of racists on the force to commit brutal acts of racial violence with impunity.

In leaked audio, Wilmington, North Carolina, officer Kevin Piner said, “we are just going to go out and start slaughtering [Blacks],” adding that he “can’t wait” for a new civil war so whites could “wipe them off the fucking map.” Piner was dismissed from the force, as were two other officers involved in the conversation.
Joey Lawn, a 10-year veteran of the Meridian, Mississippi, force, was fired for using an unspecified racial slur against a Black colleague during a 2018 exercise. Lawn’s boss, John Griffith, was demoted from captain to lieutenant for failing to punish Lawn at the time.

Four officers in San Jose, California, were put on administrative leave amid an investigation into their membership in a secret Facebook group. In a public post, officer Mark Pimentel wrote that “black lives don’t really matter”; in another private one, retired officer Michael Nagel wrote about female Muslim prisoners: “i say we repurpose the hijabs into nooses.”
In all of these cases, superiors punished officers for their offensive comments and actions — but only after they came to light. It’s safe to say a lot more go unreported.

Last April, a human resources manager in San Francisco’s city government quit after spending two years conducting anti-bias training for the city’s police force. In an exit email sent to his boss and the city’s police chief, he wrote that “the degree of anti-black sentiment throughout SFPD is extreme,” adding that “while there are some at SFPD who possess somewhat of a balanced view of racism and anti-blackness, there are an equal number (if not more) — who possess and exude deeply rooted anti-black sentiments.”

Psychological research suggests that white officers are disproportionately likely to demonstrate a personality trait called “social dominance orientation.” Individuals with high levels of this trait tend to believe that existing social hierarchies are not only necessary, but morally justified — that inequalities reflect the way that things actually should be. The concept was originally formulated in the 1990s as a way of explaining why some people are more likely to accept what a group of researchers termed “ideologies that promote or maintain group inequality,” including “the ideology of anti-Black racism.”

A demonstrator walks past a mural for George Floyd during a protest near the White House in Washington, DC, on June 4. Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
This helps us understand why some officers are more likely to use force against Black suspects, even unarmed ones. Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychologist at John Jay and the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity think tank, has done forthcoming research on the distribution of social dominance orientation among officers in three different cities. Goff and his co-authors found that white officers who score very highly in this trait tend to use force more frequently than those who don’t.

“If you think the social hierarchy is good, then maybe you’re more willing to use violence from the state’s perspective to enforce that hierarchy — and you think that’s your job,” he tells me.

But while the problem of overt racism and explicit commitment to racial hierarchy is a serious one, it’s not necessarily the central problem in modern policing.

The second manifestation of anti-Blackness is more subtle. The very nature of policing, in which officers perform a dizzying array of stressful tasks for long hours, brings out the worst in people. The psychological stressors combine with police ideology and widespread cultural stereotypes to push officers, even ones who don’t hold overtly racist beliefs, to treat Black people as more suspect and more dangerous. It’s not just the officers who are the problem; it’s the society they come from, and the things that society asks them to do.

While overt racists may be overrepresented on police forces, the average white officer’s beliefs are not all that different from those of the average white person in their local community. According to Goff, tests of racial bias reveal somewhat higher rates of prejudice among officers than the general population, but the effect size tends to be swamped by demographic and regional effects.

“If you live in a racist city, that’s going to matter more for how racist your law enforcement is … than looking at the difference between law enforcement and your neighbors,” he told me.

In this sense, the rising diversity of America’s officer corps should make a real difference. If you draw from a demographically different pool of recruits, one with overall lower levels of racial bias, then there should be less of a problem with racism on the force.

There’s some data to back this up. Pew’s 2017 survey of officers found that Black officers and female officers were considerably more sympathetic to anti-police brutality protesters than white ones. A 2016 paper on officer-involved killings of Black people, from Yale’s Joscha Legewie and Columbia’s Jeffrey Fagan, found that departments with a larger percentage of Black officers had lower rates of killings of Black people.

But scholars caution that diversity will not, on its own, solve policing’s problems. In Pew’s survey, 60 percent of Hispanic and white officers said their departments had “excellent” or “good” relations with the local Black community, while only 32 percent of Black officers said the same. The hierarchy of policing remains extremely white — across cities, departmental brass and police unions tend to be disproportionately white relative to the rank-and-file. And the existing culture in many departments pushes nonwhite officers to try and fit in with what’s been established by the white hierarchy.

“We have seen that officers of color actually face increased pressure to fit into the existing culture of policing and may go out of their way to align themselves with traditional police tactics,” says Shannon Portillo, a scholar of bureaucratic culture at the University of Kansas-Edwards.

There’s a deeper problem than mere representation. The very nature of policing, both police ideology and the nuts-and-bolts nature of the job, can bring out the worst in people — especially when it comes to deep-seated racial prejudices and stereotypes.

The intersection of commonly held stereotypes with police ideology can prime officers for abusive behavior, especially when they’re patrolling majority-Black neighborhoods where residents have long-standing grievances against the cops. Some kind of incident with a Black citizen is certain to set off a confrontation; officers will eventually feel the need to escalate well beyond what seems necessary or even acceptable from the outside to protect themselves.

“The drug dealer — if he says ‘fuck you’ one day, it’s like getting punked on the playground. You have to go through that every day,” says Moskos, the former Baltimore officer. “You’re not allowed to get punked as a cop, not just because of your ego but because of the danger of it.”

The problems with ideology and prejudice are dramatically intensified by the demanding nature of the policing profession. Officers work a difficult job for long hours, called upon to handle responsibilities ranging from mental health intervention to spousal dispute resolution. While on shift, they are constantly anxious, searching for the next threat or potential arrest.

Stress gets to them even off the job; PTSD and marital strife are common problems. It’s a kind of negative feedback loop: The job makes them stressed and nervous, which damages their mental health and personal relationships, which raises their overall level of stress and makes the job even more taxing.

According to Goff, it’s hard to overstate how much more likely people are to be racist under these circumstances. When you put people under stress, they tend to make snap judgments rooted in their basic instincts. For police officers, raised in a racist society and socialized in a violent work atmosphere, that makes racist behavior inevitable.

“The mission and practice of policing is not aligned with what we know about how to keep people from acting on the kinds of implicit biases and mental shortcuts,” he says. “You could design a job where that’s not how it works. We have not chosen to do that for policing.”

Across the United States, we have created a system that makes disproportionate police targeting of Black citizens an inevitability. Officers don’t need to be especially racist as compared to the general population for discrimination to recur over and over; it’s the nature of the police profession, the beliefs that permeate it, and the situations in which officers find themselves that lead them to act in racist ways.

This reality helps us understand why the current protests have been so forceful: they are an expression of long-held rage against an institution that Black communities experience less as a protection force and more as a sort of military occupation.

Police officers often represent more of a military occupation than a protection force for Black communities. David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
In one landmark project, a team including Yale’s Meares and Hopkins’s Vesla Weaver facilitated more than 850 conversations about policing among residents of six different cities, finding a pervasive sense of police lawlessness among residents of highly policed Black communities.

Residents believe that police see them as subhuman or animal, that interactions with officers invariably end with arrests and/or physical assaults, and that the Constitution’s protections against police abuse don’t apply to Black people.

“[It’s often said that] if you don’t have anything on you, just agree to a search and everything will be okay. Let me tell you, that’s not what happens,” Weaver tells me, summarizing the beliefs of her research subjects. “What actually happens is that you’re bound to get beat up, you’re bound to get dragged to the station. The police can search you for whatever. We don’t get due process, we don’t get restitution — this is what we live by.”

Police don’t treat whole communities like this because they’re born worse or more evil than civilians. It’s better to understand the majority of officers as ordinary Americans who are thrown into a system that conditions them to be violent and to treat Black people, in particular, as the enemy. While some departments are better than others at ameliorating this problem, there’s not a city in the country that appears to have solved it entirely.

Rizer summarizes the problem by telling me about one new officer’s experience in Baltimore.

“This was a great young man,” Rizer says. “He joined the Baltimore Police Department because he wanted to make a difference.”

Six months after this man graduated from the academy, Rizer checked in on him to see how he was doing. It wasn’t good.

“They’re animals. All of them,” Rizer recalls the young officer telling him. “The cops, the people I patrol, everybody. They’re just fucking animals.”

This man was, in Rizer’s mind, “the embodiment of what a good police officer should have been.” Some time after their conversation, he quit the force — pushed out by a system that takes people in and breaks them, on both sides of the law.

How Hegemony Ends: The Unraveling of American Power

By Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon
Foreign Affairs July/August 2020

Multiple signs point to a crisis in global order. The uncoordinated international response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting economic downturns, the resurgence of nationalist politics, and the hardening of state borders all seem to herald the emergence of a less cooperative and more fragile international system. According to many observers, these developments underscore the dangers of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America first” policies and his retreat from global leadership.

Even before the pandemic, Trump routinely criticized the value of alliances and institutions such as NATO, supported the breakup of the European Union, withdrew from a host of international agreements and organizations, and pandered to autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He has questioned the merits of placing liberal values such as democracy and human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Trump’s clear preference for zero-sum, transactional politics further supports the notion that the United States is abandoning its commitment to promoting a liberal international order.

Some analysts believe that the United States can still turn this around, by restoring the strategies by which it, from the end of World War II to the aftermath of the Cold War, built and sustained a successful international order. If a post-Trump United States could reclaim the responsibilities of global power, then this era—including the pandemic that will define it—could stand as a temporary aberration rather than a step on the way to permanent disarray.

After all, predictions of American decline and a shift in international order are far from new—and they have been consistently wrong. In the middle of the 1980s, many analysts believed that U.S. leadership was on the way out. The Bretton Woods system had collapsed in the 1970s; the United States faced increasing competition from European and East Asian economies, notably West Germany and Japan; and the Soviet Union looked like an enduring feature of world politics. By the end of 1991, however, the Soviet Union had formally dissolved, Japan was entering its “lost decade” of economic stagnation, and the expensive task of integration consumed a reunified Germany. The United States experienced a decade of booming technological innovation and unexpectedly high economic growth. The result was what many hailed as a “unipolar moment” of American hegemony.

But this time really is different. The very forces that made U.S. hegemony so durable before are today driving its dissolution. Three developments enabled the post–Cold War U.S.-led order. First, with the defeat of communism, the United States faced no major global ideological project that could rival its own. Second, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its accompanying infrastructure of institutions and partnerships, weaker states lacked significant alternatives to the United States and its Western allies when it came to securing military, economic, and political support. And third, transnational activists and movements were spreading liberal values and norms that bolstered the liberal order.

Today, those same dynamics have turned against the United States: a vicious cycle that erodes U.S. power has replaced the virtuous cycles that once reinforced it. With the rise of great powers such as China and Russia, autocratic and illiberal projects rival the U.S.-led liberal international system. Developing countries—and even many developed ones—can seek alternative patrons rather than remain dependent on Western largess and support. And illiberal, often right-wing transnational networks are pressing against the norms and pieties of the liberal international order that once seemed so implacable. In short, U.S. global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unraveling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.

THE VANISHING UNIPOLAR MOMENT

It may seem strange to talk of permanent decline when the United States spends more on its military than its next seven rivals combined and maintains an unparalleled network of overseas military bases. Military power played an important role in creating and maintaining U.S. preeminence in the 1990s and early years of this century; no other country could extend credible security guarantees across the entire international system. But U.S. military dominance was less a function of defense budgets—in real terms, U.S. military spending decreased during the 1990s and only ballooned after the September 11 attacks—than of several other factors: the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a competitor, the growing technological advantage enjoyed by the U.S. military, and the willingness of most of the world’s second-tier powers to rely on the United States rather than build up their own military forces. If the emergence of the United States as a unipolar power was mostly contingent on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, then the continuation of that unipolarity through the subsequent decade stemmed from the fact that Asian and European allies were content to subscribe to U.S. hegemony.

Talk of the unipolar moment obscures crucial features of world politics that formed the basis of U.S. dominance. The breakup of the Soviet Union finally closed the door on the only project of global ordering that could rival capitalism. Marxism-Leninism (and its offshoots) mostly disappeared as a source of ideological competition. Its associated transnational infrastructure—its institutions, practices, and networks, including the Warsaw Pact, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, and the Soviet Union itself—all imploded. Without Soviet support, most Moscow-affiliated countries, insurgent groups, and political movements decided it was better to either throw in the towel or get on the U.S. bandwagon. By the middle of the 1990s, there existed only one dominant framework for international norms and rules: the liberal international system of alliances and institutions anchored in Washington.

The United States and its allies—referred to in breezy shorthand as “the West”—together enjoyed a de facto patronage monopoly during the period of unipolarity. With some limited exceptions, they offered the only significant source of security, economic goods, and political support and legitimacy. Developing countries could no longer exert leverage over Washington by threatening to turn to Moscow or point to the risk of a communist takeover to shield themselves from having to make domestic reforms. The sweep of Western power and influence was so untrammeled that many policymakers came to believe in the permanent triumph of liberalism. Most governments saw no viable alternative.

During the 1990s, most governments saw no viable alternative to Western sources of support.
With no other source of support, countries were more likely to adhere to the conditions of the Western aid they received. Autocrats faced severe international criticism and heavy demands from Western-controlled international organizations. Yes, democratic powers continued to protect certain autocratic states (such as oil-rich Saudi Arabia) from such demands for strategic and economic reasons. And leading democracies, including the United States, themselves violated international norms concerning human, civil, and political rights, most dramatically in the form of torture and extraordinary renditions during the so-called war on terror. But even these hypocritical exceptions reinforced the hegemony of the liberal order, because they sparked widespread condemnation that reaffirmed liberal principles and because U.S. officials continued to voice commitment to liberal norms.

Meanwhile, an expanding number of transnational networks—often dubbed “international civil society”—propped up the emerging architecture of the post–Cold War international order. These groups and individuals served as the foot soldiers of U.S. hegemony by spreading broadly liberal norms and practices. The collapse of centrally planned economies in the postcommunist world invited waves of Western consultants and contractors to help usher in market reforms—sometimes with disastrous consequences, as in Russia and Ukraine, where Western-backed shock therapy impoverished tens of millions while creating a class of wealthy oligarchs who turned former state assets into personal empires. International financial institutions, government regulators, central bankers, and economists worked to build an elite consensus in favor of free trade and the movement of capital across borders.

Civil society groups also sought to steer postcommunist and developing countries toward Western models of liberal democracy. Teams of Western experts advised governments on the design of new constitutions, legal reforms, and multiparty systems. International observers, most of them from Western democracies, monitored elections in far-flung countries. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) advocating the expansion of human rights, gender equality, and environmental protections forged alliances with sympathetic states and media outlets. The work of transnational activists, scholarly communities, and social movements helped build an overarching liberal project of economic and political integration. Throughout the 1990s, these forces helped produce an illusion of an unassailable liberal order resting on durable U.S. global hegemony. That illusion is now in tatters.

THE GREAT-POWER COMEBACK

Today, other great powers offer rival conceptions of global order, often autocratic ones that appeal to many leaders of weaker states. The West no longer presides over a monopoly of patronage. New regional organizations and illiberal transnational networks contest U.S. influence. Long-term shifts in the global economy, particularly the rise of China, account for many of these developments. These changes have transformed the geopolitical landscape.

In April 1997, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Boris Yeltsin pledged “to promote the multipolarization of the world and the establishment of a new international order.” For years, many Western scholars and policymakers downplayed or dismissed such challenges as wishful rhetoric. Beijing remained committed to the rules and norms of the U.S.-led order, they argued, pointing out that China continued to benefit from the current system. Even as Russia grew increasingly assertive in its condemnation of the United States in the first decade of this century and called for a more multipolar world, observers didn’t think that Moscow could muster support from any significant allies. Analysts in the West specifically doubted that Beijing and Moscow could overcome decades of mistrust and rivalry to cooperate against U.S. efforts to maintain and shape the international order.

Such skepticism made sense at the height of U.S. global hegemony in the 1990s and even remained plausible through much of the following decade. But the 1997 declaration now looks like a blueprint for how Beijing and Moscow have tried to reorder international politics in the last 20 years. China and Russia now directly contest liberal aspects of the international order from within that order’s institutions and forums; at the same time, they are building an alternative order through new institutions and venues in which they wield greater influence and can de-emphasize human rights and civil liberties.

At the United Nations, for example, the two countries routinely consult on votes and initiatives. As permanent members of the UN Security Council, they have coordinated their opposition to criticize Western interventions and calls for regime change; they have vetoed Western-sponsored proposals on Syria and efforts to impose sanctions on Venezuela and Yemen. In the UN General Assembly, between 2006 and 2018, China and Russia voted the same way 86 percent of the time, more frequently than during the 78 percent voting accord the two shared between 1991 and 2005. By contrast, since 2005, China and the United States have agreed only 21 percent of the time. Beijing and Moscow have also led UN initiatives to promote new norms, most notably in the arena of cyberspace, that privilege national sovereignty over individual rights, limit the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, and curtail the power of Western-sponsored human rights resolutions.

China and Russia have also been at the forefront of creating new international institutions and regional forums that exclude the United States and the West more broadly. Perhaps the most well known of these is the BRICS grouping, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Since 2006, the group has presented itself as a dynamic setting for the discussion of matters of international order and global leadership, including building alternatives to Western-controlled institutions in the areas of Internet governance, international payment systems, and development assistance. In 2016, the BRICS countries created the New Development Bank, which is dedicated to financing infrastructure projects in the developing world.

China and Russia have each also pushed a plethora of new regional security organizations—including the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism—and economic institutions, including the Chinese-run Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Russian-backed Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—a security organization that promotes cooperation among security services and oversees biennial military exercises—was founded in 2001 at the initiative of both Beijing and Moscow. It added India and Pakistan as full members in 2017. The net result is the emergence of parallel structures of global governance that are dominated by authoritarian states and that compete with older, more liberal structures.

China and Russia have been at the forefront of creating new forums that exclude the United States.
Critics often dismiss the BRICS, the EAEU, and the SCO as “talk shops” in which member states do little to actually resolve problems or otherwise engage in meaningful cooperation. But most other international institutions are no different. Even when they prove unable to solve collective problems, regional organizations allow their members to affirm common values and boost the stature of the powers that convene these forums. They generate denser diplomatic ties among their members, which, in turn, make it easier for those members to build military and political coalitions. In short, these organizations constitute a critical part of the infrastructure of international order, an infrastructure that was dominated by Western democracies after the end of the Cold War. Indeed, this new array of non-Western organizations has brought transnational governance mechanisms into regions such as Central Asia, which were previously disconnected from many institutions of global governance. Since 2001, most Central Asian states have joined the SCO, the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, the EAEU, the AIIB, and the Chinese infrastructure investment project known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

China and Russia are also now pushing into areas traditionally dominated by the United States and its allies; for example, China convenes the 17+1 group with states in central and eastern Europe and the China-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) Forum in Latin America. These groupings provide states in these regions with new arenas for partnership and support while also challenging the cohesion of traditional Western blocs; just days before the 16+1 group expanded to include the EU member Greece in April 2020, the European Commission moved to designate China a “systemic rival” amid concerns that BRI deals in Europe were undercutting EU regulations and standards.

Beijing and Moscow appear to be successfully managing their alliance of convenience, defying predictions that they would be unable to tolerate each other’s international projects. This has even been the case in areas in which their divergent interests could lead to significant tensions. Russia vocally supports China’s BRI, despite its inroads into Central Asia, which Moscow still considers its backyard. In fact, since 2017, the Kremlin’s rhetoric has shifted from talking about a clearly demarcated Russian “sphere of influence” in Eurasia to embracing a “Greater Eurasia” in which Chinese-led investment and integration dovetails with Russian efforts to shut out Western influence. Moscow followed a similar pattern when Beijing first proposed the formation of the AIIB in 2015. The Russian Ministry of Finance initially refused to back the bank, but the Kremlin changed course after seeing which way the wind was blowing; Russia formally joined the bank at the end of the year.

China has also proved willing to accommodate Russian concerns and sensitivities. China joined the other BRICS countries in abstaining from condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, even though doing so clearly contravened China’s long-standing opposition to separatism and violations of territorial integrity. Moreover, the Trump administration’s trade war with China has given Beijing additional incentives to support Russian efforts to develop alternatives to the Western-controlled SWIFT international payment system and dollar-denominated trade so as to undermine the global reach of U.S. sanctions regimes.

THE END OF THE PATRONAGE MONOPOLY

China and Russia are not the only states seeking to make world politics more favorable to nondemocratic regimes and less amenable to U.S. hegemony. As early as 2007, lending by “rogue donors” such as then oil-rich Venezuela raised the possibility that such no-strings-attached assistance might undermine Western aid initiatives designed to encourage governments to embrace liberal reforms.

Since then, Chinese state-affiliated lenders, such as the China Development Bank, have opened substantial lines of credit across Africa and the developing world. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, China became an important source of loans and emergency funding for countries that could not access, or were excluded from, Western financial institutions. During the financial crisis, China extended over $75 billion in loans for energy deals to countries in Latin America—Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela—and to Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan in Eurasia.

China is not the only alternative patron. After the Arab Spring, Gulf states such as Qatar lent money to Egypt, allowing Cairo to avoid turning to the International Monetary Fund during a turbulent time. But China has been by far the most ambitious country in this regard. An AidData study found that total Chinese foreign aid assistance between 2000 and 2014 reached $354 billion, nearing the U.S. total of $395 billion. China has since surpassed annual U.S. aid disbursals. Moreover, Chinese aid undermines Western efforts to spread liberal norms. Several studies suggest that although Chinese funds have fueled development in many countries, they also have stoked blatant corruption and habits of regime patronage. In countries emerging from war, such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and South Sudan, Chinese development and reconstruction aid flowed to victorious governments, insulating them from international pressure to accommodate their domestic foes and adopt more liberal models of peacemaking and reconciliation.

Chinese state-affiliated lenders have opened substantial lines of credit across the developing world.
The end of the West’s monopoly on patronage has seen the concurrent rise of fiery populist nationalists even in countries that were firmly embedded in the United States’ economic and security orbit. The likes of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte have painted themselves as guardians of domestic sovereignty against liberal subversion. They dismiss Western concerns about democratic backsliding in their countries and emphasize the growing importance of their economic and security relationships with China and Russia. In the case of the Philippines, Duterte recently terminated a two-decade-old military treaty with the United States after Washington canceled the visa of the former national chief of police, who is accused of human rights violations in the Philippines’ bloody and controversial war on drugs.

Of course, some of these specific challenges to U.S. leadership will wax and wane since they stem from shifting political circumstances and the dispositions of individual leaders. But the expansion of “exit options”—of alternative patrons, institutions, and political models—now seems a permanent feature of international politics. Governments have much more room to maneuver. Even when states do not actively switch patrons, the possibility that they could provides them with greater leverage. As a result, China and Russia have the latitude to contest U.S. hegemony and construct alternative orders.

CENTRIFUGAL FORCES

Another important shift marks a break from the post–Cold War unipolar moment. The transnational civil society networks that stitched together the liberal international order no longer enjoy the power and influence they once had. Illiberal competitors now challenge them in many areas, including gender rights, multiculturalism, and the principles of liberal democratic governance. Some of these centrifugal forces have originated in the United States and western European countries themselves. For instance, the U.S. lobbying group the National Rifle Association worked transnationally to successfully defeat a proposed antigun referendum in Brazil in 2005, where it built an alliance with domestic right-wing political movements; over a decade later, the Brazilian political firebrand Jair Bolsonaro tapped into this same network to help propel himself to the presidency. The World Congress of Families, initially founded by U.S.-based Christian organizations in 1997, is now a transnational network, supported by Eurasian oligarchs, that convenes prominent social conservatives from dozens of countries to build global opposition to LGBTQ and reproductive rights.

Autocratic regimes have found ways to limit—or even eliminate—the influence of liberal transnational advocacy networks and reform-minded NGOs. The so-called color revolutions in the post-Soviet world in the first decade of this century and the 2010–11 Arab Spring in the Middle East played a key role in this process. They alarmed authoritarian and illiberal governments, which increasingly saw the protection of human rights and the promotion of democracy as threats to their survival. In response, such regimes curtailed the influence of NGOs with foreign connections. They imposed tight restrictions on receiving foreign funds, proscribed various political activities, and labeled certain activists “foreign agents.”

Some governments now sponsor their own NGOs both to suppress liberalizing pressures at home and to contest the liberal order abroad. For example, in response to Western support of young activists during the color revolutions, the Kremlin founded the youth group Nashi to mobilize young people in support of the state. The Red Cross Society of China, China’s oldest government-organized NGO, has delivered medical supplies to European countries in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign. These regimes also use digital platforms and social media to disrupt antigovernment mobilization and advocacy. Russia has likewise deployed such tools abroad in its information operations and electoral meddling in democratic states.

Some of the forces driving the unraveling of the liberal order have originated in the United States itself.
Two developments helped accelerate the illiberal turn in the West: the Great Recession of 2008 and the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015. Over the last decade, illiberal networks—generally but not exclusively on the right—have challenged the establishment consensus within the West. Some groups and figures question the merits of continued membership in major institutions of the liberal order, such as the European Union and NATO. Many right-wing movements in the West receive both financial and moral support from Moscow, which backs “dark money” operations that promote narrow oligarchic interests in the United States and far-right political parties in Europe with the hope of weakening democratic governments and cultivating future allies. In Italy, the anti-immigrant party Lega is currently the most popular party despite revelations of its attempt to win illegal financial support from Moscow. In France, the National Rally, which also has a history of Russian backing, remains a powerful force in domestic politics.

These developments echo the ways in which “counter-order” movements have helped precipitate the decline of hegemonic powers in the past. Transnational networks played crucial roles in both upholding and challenging prior international orders. For example, Protestant networks helped erode Spanish power in early modern Europe, most notably by supporting the Dutch Revolt in the sixteenth century. Liberal and republican movements, especially in the context of the revolutions across Europe in 1848, played a part in undermining the Concert of Europe, which tried to manage international order on the continent in the first half of the nineteenth century. The rise of fascist and communist transnational networks helped produce the global power struggle of World War II. Counter-order movements achieved political power in countries such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading those nations to break from or try to assail existing structures of international order. But even less successful counter-order movements can still undermine the cohesion of hegemonic powers and their allies.

Not every illiberal or right-wing movement that opposes the U.S.-led order seeks to challenge U.S. leadership or turns to Russia as an exemplar of strong cultural conservatism. Nonetheless, such movements are helping polarize politics in advanced industrial democracies and weaken support for the order’s institutions. One of them has even captured the White House: Trumpism, which is best understood as a counter-order movement with a transnational reach that targets the alliances and partnerships central to U.S. hegemony.

CONSERVING THE U.S. SYSTEM

Great-power contestation, the end of the West’s monopoly on patronage, and the emergence of movements that oppose the liberal international system have all altered the global order over which Washington has presided since the end of the Cold War. In many respects, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be further accelerating the erosion of U.S. hegemony. China has increased its influence in the World Health Organization and other global institutions in the wake of the Trump administration’s attempts to defund and scapegoat the public health body. Beijing and Moscow are portraying themselves as providers of emergency goods and medical supplies, including to European countries such as Italy, Serbia, and Spain, and even to the United States. Illiberal governments worldwide are using the pandemic as cover for restricting media freedom and cracking down on political opposition and civil society. Although the United States still enjoys military supremacy, that dimension of U.S. dominance is especially ill suited to deal with this global crisis and its ripple effects.

Even if the core of the U.S. hegemonic system—which consists mostly of long-standing Asian and European allies and rests on norms and institutions developed during the Cold War—remains robust, and even if, as many champions of the liberal order suggest will happen, the United States and the European Union can leverage their combined economic and military might to their advantage, the fact is that Washington will have to get used to an increasingly contested and complex international order. There is no easy fix for this. No amount of military spending can reverse the processes driving the unraveling of U.S. hegemony. Even if Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, knocks out Trump in the presidential election later this year, or if the Republican Party repudiates Trumpism, the disintegration will continue.

The key questions now concern how far the unraveling will spread. Will core allies decouple from the U.S. hegemonic system? How long, and to what extent, can the United States maintain financial and monetary dominance? The most favorable outcome will require a clear repudiation of Trumpism in the United States and a commitment to rebuild liberal democratic institutions in the core. At both the domestic and the international level, such efforts will necessitate alliances among center-right, center-left, and progressive political parties and networks.

What U.S. policymakers can do is plan for the world after global hegemony. If they help preserve the core of the American system, U.S. officials can ensure that the United States leads the strongest military and economic coalition in a world of multiple centers of power, rather than finding itself on the losing side of most contests over the shape of the new international order. To this end, the United States should reinvigorate the beleaguered and understaffed State Department, rebuilding and more effectively using its diplomatic resources. Smart statecraft will allow a great power to navigate a world defined by competing interests and shifting alliances.

U.S. policymakers must plan for the world after global hegemony.

The United States lacks both the will and the resources to consistently outbid China and other emerging powers for the allegiance of governments. It will be impossible to secure the commitment of some countries to U.S. visions of international order. Many of those governments have come to view the U.S.-led order as a threat to their autonomy, if not their survival. And some governments that still welcome a U.S.-led liberal order now contend with populist and other illiberal movements that oppose it.

Even at the peak of the unipolar moment, Washington did not always get its way. Now, for the U.S. political and economic model to retain considerable appeal, the United States has to first get its own house in order. China will face its own obstacles in producing an alternative system; Beijing may irk partners and clients with its pressure tactics and its opaque and often corrupt deals. A reinvigorated U.S. foreign policy apparatus should be able to exercise significant influence on international order even in the absence of global hegemony. But to succeed, Washington must recognize that the world no longer resembles the historically anomalous period of the 1990s and the first decade of this century. The unipolar moment has passed, and it isn’t coming back.

ALEXANDER COOLEY is Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and Director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute.

Members of the Wayuu ethnic group watch as a U.S. army helicopter arrives for a joint exercise in the “Tres Bocas” area in northern Colombia on March 13, 2020. JUAN BARRETO / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

By William I. Robinson
Truthout

March 23, 2020 – What does a virus have to do with war and repression? The coronavirus has disrupted global supply networks and spread panic throughout the world’s stock markets. The pandemic will pass, not without a heavy toll. But in the larger picture, the fallout from the virus exposes the fragility of a global economy that never fully recovered from the 2008 financial collapse and has been teetering on the brink of renewed crisis for years.

The crisis of global capitalism is as much structural as it is political. Politically, the system faces a crisis of capitalist hegemony and state legitimacy. As is now well-known, the level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented. In 2018, the richest 1 percent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 4.5 percent of this wealth. Such stark global inequalities are politically explosive, and to the extent that the system is simply unable to reverse them, it turns to ever more violent forms of containment to manage immiserated populations.

Structurally, the system faces a crisis of what is known as overaccumulation. As inequalities escalate, the system churns out more and more wealth that the mass of working people cannot actually consume. As a result, the global market cannot absorb the output of the global economy. Overaccumulation refers to a situation in which enormous amounts of capital (profits) are accumulated, yet this capital cannot be reinvested profitably and becomes stagnant.

Indeed, corporations enjoyed record profits during the 2010s at the same time that corporate investment declined. Worldwide corporate cash reserves topped $12 trillion in 2017, more than the foreign exchange reserves of the world’s central governments, yet transnational corporations cannot find enough opportunities to profitably reinvest their profits. As this uninvested capital accumulates, enormous pressures build up to find outlets for unloading the surplus. By the 21st century, the transnational capitalist class turned to several mechanisms in order to sustain global accumulation in the face of overaccumulation, above all, financial speculation in the global casino, along with the plunder of public finances, debt-driven growth and state-organized militarized accumulation.

Militarized Accumulation

It is the last of these mechanisms, what I have termed militarized accumulation, that I want to focus on here. The crisis is pushing us toward a veritable global police state. The global economy is becoming ever more dependent on the development and deployment of systems of warfare, social control and repression, apart from political considerations, simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation. The so-called wars on drugs and terrorism; the undeclared wars on immigrants, refugees, gangs, and poor, dark-skinned and working-class youth more generally; the construction of border walls, immigrant jails, prison-industrial complexes, systems of mass surveillance, and the spread of private security guard and mercenary companies, have all become major sources of profit-making.

The events of September 11, 2001, marked the start of an era of a permanent global war in which logistics, warfare, intelligence, repression, surveillance, and even military personnel are more and more the privatized domain of transnational capital. Criminalization of surplus humanity activates state-sanctioned repression that opens up new profit-making opportunities for the transnational capitalist class. Permanent war involves endless cycles of destruction and reconstruction, each phase in the cycle fueling new rounds and accumulation, and also results in the ongoing enclosure of resources that become available to the capitalist class.

Criminalization of surplus humanity activates state-sanctioned repression that opens up new profit-making opportunities for the transnational capitalist class.

 
The Pentagon budget increased 91 percent in real terms between 1998 and 2011, while worldwide, total defense outlays grew by 50 percent from 2006 to 2015, from $1.4 trillion to $2.03 trillion, although this figure does not take into account secret budgets, contingency operations and “homeland security” spending. The global market in homeland security reached $431 billion in 2018 and was expected to climb to $606 billion by 2024. In the decade from 2001 to 2011, military industry profits nearly quadrupled. In total, the United States spent a mind-boggling nearly $6 trillion from 2001 to 2018 on its Middle East wars alone.

Led by the United States as the predominant world power, military expansion in different countries has taken place through parallel (and often conflictive) processes, yet all show the same relationship between state militarization and global capital accumulation. In 2015, for instance, the Chinese government announced that it was setting out to develop its own military-industrial complex modeled after the United States, in which private capital would assume the leading role. Worldwide, official state military outlays in 2015 represented about 3 percent of the gross world product of $75 trillion (this does not include state military spending not made public).

But militarized accumulation involves vastly more than activities generated by state military budgets. There are immense sums involved in state spending and private corporate accumulation through militarization and other forms of generating profit through repressive social control that do not involve militarization per se, such as structural controls over the poor through debt collection enforcement mechanisms or accumulation opportunities opened up by criminalization.

The Privatization of War and Repression
The various wars, conflicts, and campaigns of social control and repression around the world involve the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization. In this relationship, the state facilitates the expansion of opportunities for private capital to accumulate through militarization. The most obvious way that the state opens up these opportunities is to facilitate global weapons sales by military-industrial-security firms, the amounts of which have reached unprecedented levels. Between 2003 and 2010 alone, the Global South bought nearly half a trillion dollars in weapons from global arms dealers. Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 percent between 2002 and 2016.

Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 percent between 2002 and 2016.

 
The U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan precipitated the explosion in private military and security contractors around the world deployed to protect the transnational capitalist class. Private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan during the height of those wars exceeded the number of U.S. combat troops in both countries, and outnumbered U.S. troops in Afghanistan by a three-to-one margin. Beyond the United States, private military and security firms have proliferated worldwide and their deployment is not limited to the major conflict zones in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. In his study, Corporate Warriors, P.W. Singer documents how privatized military forces (PMFs) have come to play an ever more central role in military conflicts and wars. “A new global industry has emerged,” he noted. “It is outsourcing and privatization of a twenty-first century variety, and it changes many of the old rules of international politics and warfare. It has become global in both its scope and activity.” Beyond the many based in the United States, PMFs come from numerous countries around the world, including Russia, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico, India, the EU countries and Israel, among others.

Beyond wars, PMFs open up access to economic resources and corporate investment opportunities — deployed, for instance, to mining areas and oil fields — leading Singer to term PMFs “investment enablers.” PMF clients include states, corporations, landowners, nongovernmental organizations, even the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. From 2005 to 2010, the Pentagon contracted some 150 firms from around the world for support and security operations in Iraq alone. By 2018, private military companies employed some 15 million people around the world, deploying forces to guard corporate property; provide personal security for corporate executives and their families; collect data; conduct police, paramilitary, counterinsurgency and surveillance operations; carry out mass crowd control and repression of protesters; manage prisons; run private detention and interrogation facilities; and participate in outright warfare.

Meanwhile, the private security (policing) business is one of the fastest growing economic sectors in many countries and has come to overshadow public security around the world. According to Singer, the amount spent on private security in 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, was 73 percent higher than that spent in the public sphere, and three times as many persons were employed in private forces as in official law enforcement agencies. In parts of Asia, the private security industry grew at 20 percent to 30 percent per year. Perhaps the biggest explosion of private security was the near complete breakdown of public agencies in post-Soviet Russia, with over 10,000 new security firms opening since 1989. There were an outstanding 20 million private security workers worldwide in 2017, and the industry was expected to be worth over $240 billion by 2020. In half of the world’s countries, private security agents outnumber police officers.

As all of global society becomes a highly surveilled and controlled and wildly profitable battlespace, we must not forget that the technologies of the global police state are driven as much, or more, by the campaign to open up new outlets for accumulation as they are by strategic or political considerations. The rise of the digital economy and the blurring of the boundaries between military and civilian sectors fuse several fractions of capital — especially finance, military-industrial and tech companies — around a combined process of financial speculation and militarized accumulation. The market for new social control systems made possible by digital technology runs into the hundreds of billions. The global biometrics market, for instance, was expected to jump from its $15 billion value in 2015 to $35 billion by 2020.

Criminalization of the poor, racially oppressed, immigrants, refugees and other vulnerable communities is the most clear-cut method of accumulation by repression.

 
As the tech industry emerged in the 1990s, it was from its inception tied to the military-industrial-security complex and the global police state. Over the years, for instance, Google has supplied mapping technology used by the U.S. Army in Iraq, hosted data for the Central Intelligence Agency, indexed the National Security Agency’s vast intelligence databases, built military robots, co-launched a spy satellite with the Pentagon, and leased its cloud computing platform to help police departments predict crime. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and the other tech giants are thoroughly intertwined with the military-industrial and security complex.

Criminalization and the War on Immigrants and Refugees

Criminalization of the poor, racially oppressed, immigrants, refugees and other vulnerable communities is the most clear-cut method of accumulation by repression. This type of criminalization activates “legitimate” state repression to enforce the accumulation of capital, whereby the state turns to private capital to carry out repression against those criminalized.

There has been a rapid increase in imprisonment in countries around the world, led by the United States, which has been exporting its own system of mass incarceration. In 2019, it was involved in the prison systems of at least 33 different countries, while the global prison population grew by 24 percent from 2000 to 2018. This carceral state opens up enormous opportunities at multiple levels for militarized accumulation. Worldwide, there were in the early 21st century some 200 privately operated prisons on all continents and many more “public-private partnerships” that involved privatized prison services and other forms of for-profit custodial services such as privatized electronic monitoring programs. The countries that were developing private prisons ranged from most member states of the European Union, to Israel, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Africa, New Zealand, Ecuador, Australia, Costa Rica, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Canada.

Those criminalized include millions of migrants and refugees around the world. Repressive state controls over the migrant and refugee population and criminalization of non-citizen workers makes this sector of the global working class vulnerable to super-exploitation and hyper-surveillance. In turn, this self-same repression in and of itself becomes an ever more important source of accumulation for transnational capital. Every phase in the war on migrants and refugees has become a wellspring of profit making, from private, for-profit migrant jails and the provision of services inside them such as health care, food, phone systems, to other ancillary activities of the deportation regime, such as government contracting of private charter flights to ferry deportees back home, and the equipping of armies of border agents.

Undocumented immigrants constitute the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison population and are detained in private migrant jails and deported by private companies contracted out by the U.S. state. As of 2010, there were 270 immigration jails in the U.S. that caged on any given day over 30,000 immigrants and annually locked up some 400,000 individuals, compared to just a few dozen people in immigrant detention each day prior to the 1980s. From 2010 to 2018, federal spending on these detentions jumped from $1.8 billion to $3.1 billion. Given that such for-profit prison companies as CoreCivic and GEO Group are traded on the Wall Street stock exchange, investors from anywhere around the world may buy and sell their stock, and in this way, develop a stake in immigrant repression quite removed from, if not entirely independent, of the more pointed political and ideological objectives of this repression.

Every phase in the war on migrants and refugees has become a wellspring of profit making.

 
In the United States, the border security industry was set to double in value from $305 billion in 2011 to some $740 billion in 2023. Mexican researcher Juan Manuel Sandoval traces how the U.S.-Mexico border region has been reconfigured into a “global space for the expansion of transnational capital.” This “global space” is centered on the U.S. side around high-tech military and aerospace related industries, military bases, and the deploying of other civilian and military forces for combating “immigration, drug trafficking, and terrorism through a strategy of low-intensity warfare.” On the Mexican side, it involves the expansion of maquiladoras (sweatshops), mining and industry in the framework of capitalist globalization and North American integration.

The tech sector in the United States has become heavily involved in the war on immigrants as Silicon Valley plays an increasingly central role in the expansion and acceleration of arrests, detentions and deportations. As their profits rise from participation in this war, leading tech companies have in turn pushed for an expansion of incarceration and deportation of immigrants, and lobbied the state to use their innovative social control and surveillance technologies in anti-immigrant campaigns.

In Europe, the refugee crisis and EU’s program to “secure borders” has provided a bonanza to military and security companies providing equipment to border military forces, surveillance systems and information technology infrastructure. The budget for the EU public-private border security agency, Frontex, increased a whopping 3,688 percent between 2005 and 2016, while the European border security market was expected to nearly double, from some $18 billion in 2015 to approximately $34 billion in 2022.

The Coronavirus Is Not to Blame

When the pandemic comes to an end, we will be left with a global economy even more dependent on militarized accumulation than before the virus hit.
As stock markets around the world began to plummet starting in late February, mainstream commentators blamed the coronavirus for the mounting crisis. But the virus was only the spark that ignited the financial implosion. The plunge in stock markets suggests that for some time to come, financial speculation will be less able to serve as an outlet for over-accumulated capital. When the pandemic comes to an end, we will be left with a global economy even more dependent on militarized accumulation than before the virus hit.

We must remember that accumulation by war, social control and repression is driven by a dual logic of providing outlets for over-accumulated capital in the face of stagnation, and of social control and repression as capitalist hegemony breaks down. The more the global economy comes to depend on militarization and conflict, the greater the drive to war and the higher the stakes for humanity. There is a built-in war drive to the current course of capitalist globalization. Historically, wars have pulled the capitalist system out of crisis while they have also served to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. Whether or not a global police state driven by the twin imperatives of social control and militarized accumulation becomes entrenched is contingent on the outcome of the struggles raging around the world among social and class forces and their competing political projects.

William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. This article draws on the author’s forthcoming book, The Global Police State, which will be released by Pluto Press in July 2020.

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious? Diseases Anthony Fauci listen?s during a coronavirus press briefing at the White House, March 2020Al Drago / The New York Times

Independent Expertise Always Dies First When Democracy Recedes

By Daron Acemoglu
Foreign Affairs

March 23, 2020 – The U.S. government’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic has been confusing, inconsistent, and counterproductive. Since February, the data from China, South Korea, and Italy have clearly shown that the virus spreads rapidly in areas that do not practice social distancing—and that simple measures to keep people apart can significantly slow the rate of new infections. But the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump did not coordinate any social distancing. And even as acute cases overwhelmed Italy’s hospitals, the administration made few efforts to shore up the U.S. health-care system, increase the number of ventilators in hospitals, or make testing widely available.

Many blame these failures on the president, who initially downplayed the severity of the crisis. As recently as March 4, Trump insisted that COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, was no worse than the flu. A week later, he claimed that the U.S. health-care system was well prepared for the outbreak. For encouraging the nation to sleepwalk into a crisis, Trump does indeed deserve blame. But even more blameworthy has been the president’s assault on U.S. institutions, which began long before the novel coronavirus appeared and will be felt long after it is gone.

By relentlessly attacking the norms of professionalism, independence, and technocratic expertise, and prioritizing political loyalty above all else, Trump has weakened the federal bureaucracy to such an extent that it is now beginning to resemble a “Paper Leviathan,” the term the political economist James Robinson and I use to describe autocratic states that offer little room for democratic input or criticism of government—and exhibit paper-thin policymaking competence as a result. Bureaucrats in these countries get accustomed to praising, agreeing with, and taking orders from the top rather than using their expertise to solve problems. The more American bureaucrats come to resemble autocratic yes men, the less society will trust them and the less effective they will be in moments of crisis like this one.

HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE

In just a little more than three years in office, Trump has upended many of the political norms that previously made the U.S. political system function—including the expectations that the president would not tell outright lies; would not interfere in court cases; would not obstruct law enforcement investigations; would not condone, let alone encourage, mob violence; would not materially benefit—or allow his family to benefit—from executive power and privilege; and would not discriminate against citizens on the basis of their race, ethnicity, or religion. In eviscerating these norms, Trump has accelerated the polarization of U.S. politics—a corrosive trend that predated him but that has intensified on his watch. The costs of polarization are evident not only in the acrimony of political discourse but in the inability of politicians to compromise to solve basic problems such as lack of health care for millions, the precarious situation of the undocumented, and decaying public infrastructure—or even to prevent the government from periodically shutting down.

Trump’s tenure has been even more calamitous for one of the most important institutional pillars that for the last two centuries has constrained executive power: the civil service. To be sure, by granting the president sweeping powers to make senior appointments, U.S. political institutions don’t make it easy for nonpartisan professionalism to take root in the executive agencies. But even under administrations with very different priorities and policy agendas, most departments have managed to function effectively and pursue sound policies in fields as diverse as education, environment, commerce, aeronautics, space, and, of course, disease control. By upholding nonpartisan rules and procedures and relying on technocratic expertise, professional bureaucrats who serve under political appointees function as a kind of guardrail for administrations, preventing their more extreme or nakedly partisan policies from being implemented. A professional civil service has also been the last, most powerful defense against natural disasters and health emergencies.

The incentive to hew to Trump’s narrative—or at least not to contradict it publicly—is overwhelming.
The Trump administration not only has failed to maintain the critical health infrastructure that protects the nation from contagious diseases—for example, he disbanded the pandemic preparedness unit that was part of the National Security Council until 2018—but has actively weakened the civil service. The president’s hostility to impartial expertise has forced many of the most capable and experienced federal employees to quit, only to be replaced by Trump loyalists. His persistent attacks against those who contradict his untruths or point out problems with his administration’s policies have created an atmosphere of fear that impedes bureaucrats from speaking up. This reticence partly explains the slow, muted, and ineffective initial response to the coronavirus outbreak from federal health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The president has shown that he is willing to publicly assail individual civil servants who anger him, as he did Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council staffer who testified in the impeachment investigation, and so the incentive to hew to his narrative—or at least not to contradict it publicly—is overwhelming.

Some officials, such as Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have sounded the alarm anyway. But even Fauci has admitted that “you don’t want to go to war with a president. . . . But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”

Trump’s assault on the federal bureaucracy is leading the United States down a path of institutional decay followed by many once democratic, now authoritarian countries. From Argentina under Juan Perón in the mid-twentieth century to Hungary under Viktor Orban and Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan today, a turning point in nearly all such tragedies has been loss of independence in the civil service and the judiciary. The playbook often starts with a would-be autocrat filling state institutions with loyalists who will parrot what the leader wants to hear. Then come the inevitable policy mistakes, as ideology and sycophancy overwhelm sound advice. But without independence and commitment to expertise, politicians, top bureaucrats, and judges double down on their mistakes, sidelining anyone who speaks out against them. As public trust in state institutions dwindles and civil servants lose their sense of accountability to the public at large, the transformation to Paper Leviathan can be swift.

NOT TOO LATE
It is not too late to reverse the damage that Trump has done to U.S. institutions and to the federal bureaucracy. A first step toward doing so would be to give up the dangerous myth that the Constitution, designed masterfully by the Founding Fathers, can protect U.S. democracy even from a narcissistic, unpredictable, polarizing, and authoritarian president. James Madison proclaimed in Federalist No. 57 that “the aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” The U.S. Constitution has utterly failed on the first count. Why, then, should anyone trust it to succeed on the second?

No amount of constitutional checks or balances can rein in this president or another like him. The separation of powers hasn’t restrained Trump. To the extent that he has been contained, this has been thanks to the media, civil society, and the electorate. True, the House of Representatives has stood against many of Trump’s worst policies, going so far as to impeach him, but voters were the ones who forced the House to act by making their preferences clear in the midterms. Likewise, when the judiciary has acted—for example by staying Trump’s travel ban targeting majority-Muslim nations—it has often done so because of lawsuits and actions brought by organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union.

With the Constitution failing to restrain the president, and the civil service under attack by him, it will take societal involvement in politics as well as leadership from state and local governments and private corporations to revitalize U.S. institutions. It won’t be enough to elect a new president in November 2020. The hard work must involve civil society and private enterprises working together with the state to tackle major institutional and economic problems.

That same coalition of actors will need to see the United States through the coronavirus crisis. The White House is finally acting, but it is still not doing enough. Ventilators and test kits are not yet available in anywhere close to the numbers needed, and there appears to be no coherent plan for maintaining social distancing while at the same time getting the economy working again (which will be necessary to avoid an economic meltdown). With the administration and the federal bureaucracy failing to step up, civil society, the media, and experts outside of government must put additional pressure on the administration while at the same time picking up some of the slack themselves. It is a tall order, but Taiwan offers a model of how society can help develop solutions that complement government efforts to slow the spread of the virus and limit the death toll. The United States will have to do even more to strengthen its failing health-care system and, in the process, rebuild trust in state institutions.

The challenge of Amin’s call for an Internationale of workers and peoples

By William I. Robinson
Globalizations

Samir Amin, a leading scholar and co-founder of the world-systems tradition, died on August 12, 2018. Just before his death, he published, along with close allies, a call for ‘workers and the people’ to establish a ‘fifth international’ [https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/letter-intent-inaugural-meeting-international-workers-and-peoples] to coordinate support to progressive movements. To honor Samir Amin’s invaluable contribution to world-systems scholarship, we are pleased to present readers with a selection of essays responding to Amin’s final message for today’s anti-systemic movements. This forum is being co-published between Globalizations [https://www.tandfonline.com/rglo], the Journal of World-Systems Research [http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/issue/view/75] and Pambazuka News [https://www.pambazuka.org/]. Additional essays and commentary can be found in these outlets.

Aug 27, 2019 – Samir Amin’s call for an ‘Internationale of workers and peoples’ could not be timelier. If we are to face the onslaught of the neo-fascist right, the left worldwide must urgently renovate a revolutionary project and a plan for refounding the state. It must do so across borders under an umbrella organization that puts forth a minimum program around which popular and working-class forces can unite, and that establishes mechanisms for transnational struggle. While I concur with much of Amin’s call I also have some significant differences as well as specifications with respect to the call that I will attempt to explicate below.

Global capitalism is facing a spiraling crisis of hegemony that appears to be approaching a general crisis of capitalist rule. In the face of this crisis there has been a sharp polarization in global society between insurgent left and popular forces, on the one hand, and an insurgent far right, on the other, at whose fringe are openly fascist tendencies (Robinson, 2019 Robinson, W. I. (2019). Global capitalist crisis and twenty-first century fascism: Beyond the Trump hype.). Yet the far-right has been more effective in the past few years than the left in mobilizing disaffected populations around the world and has made significant political and institutional inroads. It would seem that Rosa Luxemburg’s dire warning at the start of the World War I that we face ‘socialism or barbarism’ is as or even more relevant today than when she issued it, given the magnitude of the means of violence worldwide and the threat of ecological holocaust. If left, popular, and working-class forces are to regain the initiative and beat back barbarism they need a transnational umbrella organization with a minimum program against global capitalism around which they can coordinate national and regional struggles and transnationalize the fightback.

The international of capital and the specter of 21st century fascism

The theme of transnational struggles from below has been discussed at great length for several decades now. Capital has achieved a newfound transnational mobility yet labor remains territorially bound by the nation-state. In the wake of the structural crisis of the 1970s, emergent transnational capital went global as a strategy to reconstitute its social power by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation, to do away with Fordist-Keynesian redistributive arrangements, and to beat back the tide of revolution in the Third World.

The corporate class and its agents identified the mass struggles and demands of popular and working classes and state regulation as fetters to its freedom to make profits and accumulate wealth as the rate of profit declined in the 1970s. As an emergent transnational capitalist class (TCC) congealed, it put in place a new transnational corporate order and went on the offensive in its class warfare against working and popular classes. Globalization enhanced the structural power of transnational capital over states and popular classes worldwide. Behind this alleged ‘loss of state sovereignty’, capitalist globalization changed the correlation of class forces worldwide in favor of the TCC. Transnational capital has been able to exercise a newfound structural power over states and territorially bound working classes, which has undermined the ability of states to capture and redistribute surpluses, and with it, the logic and basis for social democratic projects. This is the backdrop to what Amin identifies as the political neutering of traditional unions and left-wing parties and their organizations.

We should be clear that, despite nationalist and populist rhetoric, the forces of 21st century fascism do not constitute a departure from global capitalism but, to the contrary, their program advances the interests of transnational capital in the face of overaccumulation and stagnation in the global economy, as I have discussed at length elsewhere (see, inter-alia, Robinson, 2014 Robinson, W. I. (2014). Global capitalism and the crisis of humanity. New York, NY: Cambridge., 2018 Robinson, W. I. (2018).

The next economic crisis: Digital capitalism and global police state. Race and Class,

The fight against fascism is necessarily a fight against the TCC. The core of 21st century fascism is the triangulation of transnational capital with reactionary and repressive political power in the state and neo-fascist forces in civil society. Emergent 21st century fascist projects are a response to the crisis. Escalating inequalities and the inability of global capitalism to assure the survival of billions of people have thrown states into crises of legitimacy and now push the system towards more openly repressive means of social control and domination that exacerbate political and social conflict and international tensions. Neo-fascist projects are a contradictory attempt to refound state legitimacy under the destabilizing conditions of capitalist globalization.

Trumpism in the United States, Bolsonarism in Brazil, and to varying degrees other far-right movements around the world, represent the extension of capitalist globalization by other means, namely by an expanding global police state and a neo-fascist mobilization. They seek to create a new balance of political forces in the face of the breakdown of the short-lived global capitalist historic bloc. What is emerging is an Internationale of 21st century fascism. Far-right and neo-fascist groups around the world, for instance, celebrated the October 2018 electoral victory of Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro. Former Trump advisor and neo-fascist organizer Steven Bannon served as an adviser to the Bolsonaro campaign, while Italy’s extreme-right interior minister Matteo Salvini declared in an exuberant tweet that was shared by U.S. neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer that ‘even in Brazil, the citizens have sent the left packing’. The Guardian of London warned in its headline coverage that ‘Trump joy over Bolsonaro suggests new rightwing axis in Americas and beyond’ (The Guardian, 2018 The Guardian. (2018). Trump joy over Bolsonaro suggests new rightwing axis in Americas and beyond.

Beyond such political agents of a 21st century fascism as Bannon or Salvini, the TCC had banked (literally) on Bolsonaro and was delighted with his victory. As in the United States under Trump, Bolsonaro proposed the wholesale privatization and deregulation of the economy, opening up the amazon to lumber, mining and transnational agribusiness interests, regressive taxation and general austerity, alongside mass repression and criminalization of social movements and vulnerable communities that may oppose this program. As Johnson (2018 Johnson, J. (2018). After win by Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro, world’s capitalists salivate over ‘new investment opportunities’.) noted the day after Bolsonaro’s victory, the ‘world’s capitalists are salivating over the new investment opportunities’ that Bolsonaro promises. Capital markets and Brazilian funds spiked on the world’s stock exchanges the day after his electoral victory. Here we see the ‘wages of fascism’ for a global capitalism in crisis.

A new Internationale and a united front against 21st century fascism

The right has drawn on the well-known nationalist, populist, xenophobic, and racist repertoire to channel rising anxieties and transform mass anti-systemic sentiment into support for its neo-fascist program. We should be clear, however, that it has been the inability of the left to confront global capitalism and to put forth a clear leftist alternative that has paved the way for the neo-fascist right. The case of Brazil is particularly indicative. During its 14 years in power the Workers Party courted national and transnational capital, overseeing a dramatic expansion of capitalist globalization in the country (Robinson, 2017 Robinson, W. I. (2017). Passive revolution: The transnational capitalist class unravels Latin America’s pink tide. Truthout, 6 June. It demobilized the mass movements that had brought it to power and absorbed its leaders into the state. Its renowned social welfare programs depended entirely on mild redistribution during the boom period of high prices for the country’s commodities exports. Once the prices collapsed in 2014 and the economy tanked, the far-right, with the backing of the TCC in Brazil and abroad, moved on the offensive (see Fogel, 2018 Fogel, B. (2018). Brazil’s never-ending crisis. Catalyst, 3(2), 73–99.

The lessons from Brazil, Latin America, the United States, and elsewhere are clear. When faced with the inability of moderate reform to stabilize capitalism or neo-fascism, the political and economic elite will embrace the latter. And when a program of mild reform alongside capitalist globalization fails to resolve the plight of masses of people, some of these masses will embrace the fascist alternative. This is why the new Internationale that Amin calls for must stake out a clear position in frontal attack against global capitalism.

These lessons have been particularly painful in Latin America, where the Pink Tide (left turn) starting in the new century raised great hopes and expectations. As has now been discussed at some length by many, myself included, the left in state power (with the partial exception of Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia) did not undertake structural transformations; it did not challenge the prevailing property relations and class structure. Social assistance programs depended on the whims of the global market controlled by the TCC. When the price of the region’s commodities exports collapsed, starting in 2011, the left lost the very basis for its mildly reformist project.

The popular masses were clamoring for more substantial transformations. But under the pretext of attracting transnational corporate investment to bring about development, the demands from below for deeper transformation were often suppressed. Social movements were demobilized, their leaders absorbed by the institutional left in government and the capitalist state, and their mass bases subordinated to the left parties’ electoralism. There is now an evident disjuncture throughout Latin America between mass social movements that are at this time resurgent, and the institutional and party left that is losing power and influence by the day. This disjuncture must be closed and the relationship between political organizations and social movements needs to be clarified as part of the work of a new Internationale.

Here is where we need a new Internationale that puts forth a unified minimal program coordinated across borders and across regions. The World Social Forum (WSF) explicitly rejected a political program and thus contributed to the separation of left political parties from mass social movements. For a fightback to be successful, we need to build a united front against fascism and a program around which such a united front can be organized. Infighting within the ruling groups is escalating as the global capitalist historic bloc constructed in the heyday of neo-liberalism from the 1990s until the financial collapse of 2008 now unravels (more broadly, the whole post-WWII international system is collapsing, but that is a discussion to take up elsewhere). Such infighting may present opportunities for the popular classes to build broad political alliances in the struggle against fascism.

Historically such fronts have subordinated the left to the reform-oriented and ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie. This time around, in my view, any strategy of broad anti-fascist alliances must foreground a clear and sharp analysis of global capitalism and its crisis and strive for popular and working-class forces to exercise their hegemony over such alliances. For this we need an Internationale with a program. Amin notes that such an Internationale would require several years before giving any tangible results. We should not be under any illusions that a new Internationale as called for by Amin will be free of conflict. All to the contrary, we will push forward in the midst of sharp debate among many different and even antagonistic positions. In the real course of history this is inevitable.

The challenge of Amin’s call for an Internationale of workers and peoples

But the construction of programs must also involve debate over the analysis of global capitalism that is at once political and theoretical. It is here that I have significant disagreements with Amin. He correctly, in my view, notes the extreme concentration of capital worldwide and the centralization of power. However, I disagree with his confused insistence on a territorial (rather than a class/social) concentration of that capital and power, and with his insistence on a ‘triad’ (United States, Europe, Japan) framework that ignores the worldwide transnationalization of capital and the rise of powerful contingents of the TCC in the former Third World.

Amin is blind-sighted by his nation-state/triad framework. It is illustrative anecdotally that the most recent report issued by the Swiss bank UBS on the world’s rich notes that most of the world’s billionaires are in the United States but the number of ultra-wealthy people is growing fastest throughout Asia. In China, which now accounts for one in five of the world’s billionaires, two new billionaires are minted every week (Neate, 2018 Neate, R. (2018). World’s billionaires became 20% richer in 2017, report reveals.

China’s economic role in Africa, Asia, and Latin America now appears structurally the same as the traditional triad countries. Brazilian, Mexican, Indian, Saudi, Egyptian, and other capitalists who belong to the TCC now also invest worldwide in these same structures, including extensive investment in the triad countries. Another report by Forbes noted that wealth is growing faster among the super-rich in the former Third World than elsewhere. ‘Between 2012 and 2017, Bangladesh saw its ultra-rich club grow by 17.3%’, it noted. ‘Over the same time period, growth in China was 13.4% while in Vietnam it was 12.7%. Kenya and India were among the other nations recording double-digit growth of 11.7 and 10.7% respectively. The U.S. came tenth overall for UHNWI [ultra-high net worth individuals] population growth at 8.1% from 2012 to 2017’ (McCarthy, 2018 McCarthy, N. (2018). Where super rich populations are growing fastest. Forbes, 27 September.  Amin is simply wrong when he asserts that ‘the oligarchs of the triad are the only ones that count’.

Amin’s tenacious nation-state/interstate framework of analysis of world political dynamics ignores both the ‘Thirdworldization’ of significant sectors of the First World working classes and the rise of TCC contingents in the former Third World that are now globally active and part of the global investor class. It is in fact the downward mobility and destabilization of working classes in the former First World, the destruction of the old labor aristocracies, that provides the recruiting grounds for 21st century fascism but also establishes fertile new opportunities for transnational North-South solidarities (yet another reason why Amin’s call for a new Internationale is so urgent).

These are not merely analytical or theoretical differences. They have political implications insofar as we must banish any lingering illusions about a ‘progressive’ or ‘nationalist’ bourgeoisie in the former Third World with which one could ally against global capital. There may have been one in the bygone era of colonialism and the heyday of national liberation struggles in the 20th century but the interests of the leading contingents of capital and their political representatives in the former Third World now lie in the defense and consolidation of global capitalism. The ‘re-colonization’ of the world by what Amin refers to as the ‘collective imperialism’ of the triad countries is in actuality a re-colonization by transnational capital, by the TCC, not by some nation-states of other nation-states, notwithstanding that the most powerful contingents of the TCC are still located in the old triad countries and now in China as well.

The worldwide struggle from below of a new Internationale – which must be simultaneously national and transnational – must identify and prioritize the class antagonisms within and across countries and regions over core-periphery or Global North-South contradictions, even though these latter contradictions are still very much relevant, if increasingly secondary. The irony is that Amin’s ‘triad against the Global South’ framework of analysis is in direct contradiction with his entirely correct assertion that ‘the possibility of substantial progressive reforms of capitalism in its current stage is only an illusion’.

Of course, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals were all umbrella international organizations for socialist political parties, whereas the WSF prohibited political parties from participating. I concur fully with Amin that we need to ‘establish a new Organization and not just a “movement”’ or a ‘discussion forum’. At this time, in my view, it is necessary for a new Internationale to incorporate both social movements and left political organizations and parties. This is to say that a new Internationale would be quite distinct from the first four and also from the WSF, which was an international of social movements only. Commitment to a ‘minimum program’ and to joining forces around such a program with political parties may be tough for social movements to swallow. It is absolutely true that the vanguardist model of revolution in the 20th century (as an aside – this was less due to Lenin’s approach than to a fetishization of that approach) involved control of social movements from below by political parties that sought to snuff out their autonomy, and moreover, that some left political organizations in and out of the state in the new century continue to seek such control over social movements from below.

Clearly, a new Internationale must put forth a model of revolutionary struggle in which social movements from below exercise complete autonomy from political parties and from states that may be captured by such parties. If the Left attempts to control or place brakes on mass mobilization and on autonomous social movements from below, if it suppresses the demands of the popular masses in the name of ‘governance’ or electoral strategies, it will be betraying what it means to be left. It is only such mobilization from below that can impose a counterweight to the control that transnational capital and the global market exercise from above over capitalist states around the world.

Finally, any new Internationale will have to deal with the matter of elections and of the capitalist state. We have learned that subordinating the popular agenda to winning elections will only set us up for defeat even if we must participate in electoral processes when possible and expedient. But we have also learned from recent experience of Syriza in Greece and the Pink Tide governments in Latin America, as well as social democratic governments that came to office around the world in the late 20th century, that once a left force wins government office (which is not the same as state power?…?state power is imposed structurally by transnational capital) it is tasked with administering the capitalist state and its crisis and is pushed into defending that state and its dependence on transnational capital for its reproduction, which places it at odds with the same popular classes and social movements that brought it to power.

There is no ready solution to this (these) dilemma(s). But certainly, a new Internationale of workers and peoples that entails ‘an actual organization with statutes and a renovated socialist project’ is integral to a solution. Amin is right that ‘we are now in the phase of the ‘autumn of capitalism’ without this being strengthened by the emergence of ‘the people’s spring’ and a socialist perspective.’

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William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global, and international studies, and Latin American and Iberian studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism, released by Haymarket Books in 2018.

As Marxism’s old messianic character faded in the late twentieth century, too many forgot that wandering in the wilderness is often the precondition of a prophet’s appearance. With the collapse of “really existing” socialism came what seemed like a permanent triumph of capitalism and the slow, grinding destruction of whatever resisted the market’s advance. But the far-too-unexpected renaissance of socialism in the twenty-first century reveals not only how much ground has been lost, but how much baggage has been shed. The presence of an authoritarian communist superpower was not only an ideological ball and chain for left politics outside the Eastern bloc, but also a real geopolitical straitjacket: at the electoral peak of European communist parties in the 1970s, the Soviet Union never kept secret that it preferred reactionaries in power in the West.

Now that this old shadow has passed and socialists are making a slow exit from the desert, they have a chance to redefine themselves for a new century. That involves taking bigger and more difficult steps, and it is not surprising that the effort has sent contemporary democratic socialists back to the 1970s, the last historical moment when socialist thinkers enjoyed even the illusion of political possibilities. In the brief window before the neoliberal era, socialists were just beginning to ask what a left politics that could win elections in a democratic system would look like. Who would its base be—what sort of alliance between classes and identity groups would it appeal to? How would it act toward a “bourgeois” political system that communists had always seen as an unredeemable instrument of class domination? Is it even possible to be a democratic revolutionary?

These questions came together in the work of Nicos Poulantzas, a Greek thinker who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in Paris. There, Poulantzas argued that a sophisticated understanding of the capitalist state was central to a strategy for democratic socialism. Pushing as far as possible toward a Marxist theory of politics while still holding onto the central role of class struggle, Poulantzas tried to combine the insights of revolutionary strategy with a defense of parliamentary democracy against what he called “authoritarian statism.”

Recent signs of a Poulantzas renaissance, including the republication of several of his books in French and English, have a lot to do with the fact that his dual strategy for democratic socialism resonates with the task of today’s socialists: to understand how to use the capitalist state as a strategic weapon without succumbing to a long history of failed electoral projects and realignment strategies. The tensions in Poulantzas’s thinking resemble the current tensions within the left: is winning back power a matter of casting the oligarchs out of government and restoring a lost fairness, or is a more radical transformation of the state required?

It is an open question whether Poulantzas himself was able to articulate a satisfying vision for democratic socialism. His work, nevertheless, goes straight to the heart of the problems that twenty-first-century socialism must face.

Toward a Structural Theory of the Capitalist State

Nicos Poulantzas was born in Athens in 1936. In his twenties, he began a law degree at the University of Athens as a back door into philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings became a conduit for Marxism among young Greek intellectuals since, as Poulantzas later explained, it was difficult to get the original canonical Marxist texts in a country that had suffered Nazi occupation, then civil war, then a repressive anticommunist government. After a brief stint in legal studies in Germany, Poulantzas made his way to Paris, where he was soon teaching law at the Sorbonne and mingling with the editors of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s journal Les Temps modernes. Poulantzas was drafted among a crop of new, younger writers for the journal, which published his earliest writings on law and the state and his engagements with British and Italian Marxists, including the Italian Communist Party’s in-house theorist, Antonio Gramsci. His 1964 doctoral thesis on the philosophy of law was broadly influenced by Sartre’s existentialism and the thought of Georg Lukács and Lucien Goldmann, who harmonized with the Hegelian Marxism dominant in France.

Louis Althusser, then a more marginal French philosopher but soon to be famous across Europe, dissented from this Hegelian turn. Althusser’s 1965 seminar, “Reading Capital,” was a curious event in the history of Marxism that marked the intellectual itineraries of well-known theorists like Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière. The framework it launched into Marxist theory, usually described as “structuralism,” was inextricable from Althusser’s dual opposition to Stalinist economism and the humanism of thinkers like Sartre. In the classic Marxist schema, the economic “base” gives rise to political and ideological “superstructures”—in other words, most everything about capitalist society, from its political institutions to its culture, are ultimately fated by the laws of economics. The Althusserians argued that, on the contrary, all of the domains of capitalist society operate quasi-independently of one another in order to more flexibly reproduce capitalist domination. Of course, they are tightly interrelated, and the economic decides “in the last instance” whether economics or something else will take priority, but, according to Althusser himself, “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.”

Poulantzas was not a major participant in the “Reading Capital” seminar, but applied some of its theoretical principles to his own thinking about law and the state. Like Marx and Engels before him, Poulantzas believed that the fundamental role of the state is to defend class power. But the capitalist state, he argued, does this in a complex way that is obscured both by liberal and traditional Marxist theory. The capitalist state is not merely, as liberals imagined, a political structure that represents the unity of the individual members of a “civil society.” Nor is it, as in base-and-superstructure Marxism, simply an outgrowth of capital’s economic domination of labor, a straightforward tool of class power. On the contrary, liberal ideals—popular sovereignty, individual rights—are what enable the capitalist state to act in the interests of the dominant classes. Because it can pose as the representative of the people, the capitalist state is the ideal manager of the interests of the capitalist class. It can arrange compromises with the “dominated classes” necessary to establish the legitimacy of the social order while maintaining a distance from the most venal and short-sighted fractions of the capitalist class, whose natural instinct is to pursue what Marx called “the narrowest and most sordid private interests” over the well-being of the dominant classes as a whole.

Poulantzas’s shift of emphasis away from the struggle between capital and labor required him to rethink the nature of “class” and “class struggle.” Classes, he argued, are born in traditional “economic” confrontation over wages, time, and working conditions, but they are also made politically, depending on how they organize themselves and exert pressure on the political system. Poulantzas argued that the political in capitalist society in fact “overdetermines”—establishes a kind of complex, contradiction-riddled hierarchy over—other kinds of class struggle by rigging things from the beginning against the dominated classes. The same legal setup that enables the capitalist state to “organize” the interests of the dominant classes simultaneously disorganizes the dominated classes: it recognizes them, legally and politically, only as isolated individuals, with no recognition of the economic position into which they have been sorted. The capitalist state’s separation of the political from the economic isolates class struggle in factories and workplaces while the real battle has already been decided in the very functioning of the political system.

As a work of militant Marxist sociology, Political Power and Social Classes struck out onto a terrain that, since the end of the Second World War, had grown over with new liberal theories of social groups, bureaucracy, and “industrial relations” that celebrated the postwar order as an era of growing social integration and declining class conflict. Liberal sociology tended to see the growth of bureaucracy in both private firms and state administration as an inevitable result of the complexity of social organization, a new era of “managerial” or “industrial” society that was, for some, a welcome overcoming of the competition and conflict of laissez-faire capitalism. Many, though certainly not all, liberal social scientists and technocrats took an elitist view of postwar society: the Keynesian compromise delivered real gains to the masses while keeping political power safely in the hands of rational experts.

Poulantzas was not the only figure of the late 1960s to sense that Marxist theory had to advance in order to demonstrate what most everyone to the left of social democrats believed: that the liberal orthodoxy of the epoch was a delusional obfuscation of the real nature of the new technocratic Keynesian state. In The State in Capitalist Society, published just months after Poulantzas’s book, the British political scientist Ralph Miliband demonstrated empirically that the transition from the more limited liberal state to the interventionist, managerial state, had done nothing to threaten the ruling class’s consolidation of power. In many cases, he argued, it wasn’t even true that big business kept a distance from the state—in fact, it had a direct and constant presence in executive cabinets and the apparatuses of financial governance and economic planning. Influenced by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, who tried to diagnose the tight interlocking of the American ruling classes in The Power Elite (1956), Miliband assembled a mass of evidence that different kinds of elites share social origins, cultural backgrounds, educational trajectories, and mentalities, and the exceptions were subtly indoctrinated into conforming to the rules. Whatever its compromises with the working class, the capitalist state was still the instrument of the dominant classes.

Miliband’s approach to the capitalist state had certain affinities with the communist view that was Poulantzas’s other primary target. For Poulantzas, this view mistakenly saw the state as a neutral infrastructure that was corrupted by who had power over it. On the contrary, he argued, it made zero difference who was in charge because the capitalist state was already a highly calibrated machine for manufacturing class domination. This was a theoretical point with big strategic consequences, Poulantzas argued: if the left imagined the state could be left intact and steered toward socialism, it was in for a rude awakening.  “Lenin said that it was necessary to win state power by smashing the state machine,” he declared, “and I need say no more.”

Authoritarian Statism, or How We Got Neoliberalism All Wrong

As Poulantzas was debating the nature of the state in the late sixties and seventies, the postwar, post-ideological consensus was coming undone. Left-wing movements with new ideas sprouted everywhere at the same time traditional social democratic and communist parties’ memberships swelled, apparently putting them on the path to electoral power. But almost everywhere, socialism’s steps toward power were answered by brutal reaction. Fears of a left-wing government led to a military coup in Greece in 1967, and the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile was crushed by a similar—and equally U.S.-supported—coup in 1973. By the end of the decade, economic crisis had further complicated the situation, heralding a long period of retreat from the use of state power for redistributive and egalitarian projects.

Poulantzas stood out among 1970s thinkers in seeing military dictatorship and the beginnings of neoliberalism as part of a single menu of options capitalist governments had in response to economic and political crisis. There is a doggedly persistent view that the post-1970s political-economic order involved a weakening of the nation-state: that big business demanded a retreat from state intervention in the economy, while the increasingly global system enabled capitalists to circumvent national government. For Poulantzas, neoliberalism was only one facet of a broader turn he called “authoritarian statism”: a combination of the managerial powers of the Keynesian state with a strategic retreat from some of its former economic functions. New state tactics included deliberate submission to anti-democratic international institutions, economic policies that made life more atomized and precarious, and intensified surveillance and repression. In extreme situations, especially in countries dependent on larger “imperialist” powers, economic crisis could lead to “exceptional forms” of capitalism, like fascism or military dictatorship. In advanced liberal-democratic countries it was likely to look like a subtler combination of selective internationalism, intensified technocracy, and police violence.

Early in his trajectory, Poulantzas had highlighted the importance of locating each nation’s position in a global “imperialist chain” to make sense of the particular form its state needed to take to reproduce capitalist class power. In the 1970s, he focused particularly on the emerging dependence of European states and their dominant classes on U.S. imperialism, expressed in the growing investment of American capital in Europe during the 1960s. It was not enough for the European left to conclude that the crises of “monopoly capitalism” were destined to destroy it from within, as many communist parties held. For strategic reasons, they needed to understand the specific relations of imperialism and the crises they produced, including the relations between the “imperialist metropoles” of the United States and Europe. American capital, Poulantzas argued, had increased its hold over Europe through direct investment in sectors where American corporations already exercised highly consolidated international control. By doing so, they were able to exert even broader economic influence, setting the standards for raw materials, insisting on reorganizing the labor process, and imposing certain management ideologies.

The answer to Europe’s new dependence, or “satellite imperialism,” was not, as even some French liberals argued, one of the nation-state versus “multinational corporations,” or, as some leftists imagined, the chance for a coalition that aligned a national bourgeoisie with the left against the dominating forces of international capital. Despite the internationalization of the economy and the growth of supranational institutions like the European Economic Community, Poulantzas insisted that the national state was still the primary site of the “reproduction” of capitalism. The rise of supranational institutions itself was merely a part of the national state’s transformation of its role in managing the economy, facilitating economic internationalization as part of its efforts on behalf of its national ruling class.

But acting as the primary agent of internationalization put the capitalist nation-state in a position particularly vulnerable to crisis and with a limited range of responses. Internationalization weakened the unity of the domestic ruling classes, as the state acted on behalf of certain fractions of capital at the expense of others. It put the ideological unity of the nation in jeopardy by supporting lopsided economic development within its own territory—as illustrated by our current situation where booming mega-cities power the global economy while small towns and rural areas suffer painful depopulation and decline. Such contradictions are certain to cause political tension and revolt because they shatter the myth that the state is a neutral arbiter on behalf of the whole nation. (They, might, for example, get people thinking about “nationalists” versus “globalists.”) “In a certain sense, the state is caught in its own trap,” Poulantzas writes. “It is not an all-powerful state with which we are dealing with, but rather a state with its back to the wall and its front poised before a ditch.”

“Authoritarian statism,” then, was a general term for the type of capitalist governance that had emerged in the postwar period and only been accentuated by the political and economic crises of the 1970s and the upsurge of popular militancy. He deliberately intended the term as a broad stand-in for what seemed to be the transformation of capitalist government: the massive shift in power from parliaments to the executive, the decline of traditional political parties, the shift of more and more functions of governance from representative institutions to permanent bureaucratic apparatuses controlled by executive power. It also had dimensions of direct repression: the increased use of police and military violence against domestic populations, arbitrary curtailments of civil liberties, and the rise of government on an emergency basis that transcended—sometimes permanently—the normal “state of law.”

State, Power, Socialism (1978) was Poulantzas’s last major update to his theory of the capitalist state, in which one of his major tasks was to think through the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of power, and to articulate how authoritarian statism, as he later put it, brought a shift from “organized brute force to internalized repression.” Unlike Foucault, however, Poulantzas insisted that such disciplinary techniques, even though they are laundered through the state, are ultimately linked back to economic exploitation and class power. Poulantzas had already argued that the separation of the political from the economic, with its attendant creation of atomized legal individuals, was part of the infrastructure of the capitalist state. In State, Power, Socialism, he reiterated that dividing up individuals for domination in the economy is the liberal state’s “primal” role; it continually institutionalizes that fracturing, reinforcing it both ideologically and materially. In other words, the state uses its own practices to make the neoliberal individual. Old markers of social hierarchy and relationships are replaced with scientific-bureaucratic norms that classify and measure people and remind them of their status as individualized social atoms.

Poulantzas’s conception of the state had grown progressively more dynamic: where he had initially emphasized its functional, machine-like qualities, he now dramatized its internal fractures and divisions, and the contingencies introduced by its vulnerability to crisis and its tight links to class struggle. The state, in Poulantzas’s most famous formulation, was “the condensation of a relationship of forces between classes. . . . Class contradictions are the very stuff of the state: they are present in its material framework and pattern its organization.” Poulantzas’s insistence on the materiality of the state’s apparatuses and their reproduction of class power was thus a direct challenge the Foucauldian theorization of power as the all-encompassing fabric of society, a kind of game in which every act of resistance was a strategic “move.” “Power always has a precise basis,” Poulantzas countered. The state “is a site and a center of the exercise of power, but it possesses no power of its own.”

Inside and Outside the State: The Democratic Road to Socialism

Poulantzas’s evolution toward a more dynamic conception of the state had important implications for socialist strategy, one of the features of his thought that has attracted the most attention from contemporary democratic socialists. In his early work, the central argument of his theory of the capitalist state—that it was a structural device for reproducing class domination—led him to affirm a traditional Leninist strategy of “smashing the state.” But as Poulantzas got more specific about the complexity of the state’s apparatuses and their status as a force field of class struggle, he reached a new conclusion: if the state was a set of relationships rather than a “thing,” could it really be encircled or charged like a fortress?

There was no question that, in its current form, the state acted as the organizer of class domination. But a crucial dimension of Poulantzas’s theory was that, in nontrivial ways, the dominated classes were already a part of the state. In the twentieth century, the capitalist state’s fundamental task of “organizing” class struggles had forced it to take major steps—not least the creation of the welfare state—toward accommodating working-class demands. While such achievements were always under threat from capital, they were still achievements that had become a real part of the state infrastructure. In the mid-1970s, as the dictatorships of Southern Europe transitioned to democracy, and as the Italian and French Communist parties wrestled with how to participate in parliamentary politics, Poulantzas began to think about how the balance of power between classes could be radically shifted so that the weak and marginal positions the dominated classes already held in the struggles over the state could be turned into bases for rupture and transformation.

For both theoretical and strategic reasons, Poulantzas reconsidered the relevance of Leninist “dual-power” strategies that aimed to build working-class counter-institutions that would eventually grow strong enough to “smash” the capitalist state. This strategy had originated in a rather ad-hoc fashion in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917. For Poulantzas, looking at the political systems of Western Europe in the late 1970s, it was impossible to imagine a position entirely outside the state. While the dominated classes could and should build rank-and-file institutional power at a distance from the state, they could never be truly outside its field of power. “Today, less than ever is the state an ivory tower isolated from the popular masses,” he wrote. “The state is neither a thing-instrument that may be taken away, nor a fortress that may be penetrated by means of a wooden horse, nor yet a safe that may be cracked by a burglary: it is the heart of the exercise of political power.”

The rhetoric of “smashing” the state not only failed to see that the state was not a “thing” to smash, but also implied—as it ultimately had in the October Revolution—a suppression of institutions of representative democracy that could serve as a defense against an authoritarian statism under new management. Poulantzas tried to envision a way that the left could simultaneously champion both rank-and-file democracy at a distance from the state and a push for radical transformation within it. Working within the state would aim to produce “breaks” that would polarize the highly conflictual state apparatuses toward the working class, assisted by external pressure from rank-and-file organizations. “It is not simply a matter of entering state institutions in order to use their characteristic levers for a good purpose,” Poulantzas wrote. “In addition struggle must always express itself in the development of popular movements, the mushrooming of democratic organs at the base, and the rise of centers of self-management.”

Poulantzas’s attempt at an internal-external strategy aimed to walk a narrow line between a social democratic reformism that merely practiced parliamentary politics as usual and a Leninist revolutionary strategy that he saw as potentially authoritarian and in any case doomed to perpetual isolation from really-existing paths to socialism. Revolutionary critics from the 1970s to the present have argued that this was merely a reformism in disguise. Poulantzas agreed that the risk of falling into reformism was real, but suggested that such a risk was endemic to every revolutionary position in the late twentieth century. “History has not yet given us a successful experience of the democratic road to socialism,” he wrote. “What it has provided—and that is not insignificant—is some negative examples to avoid and some mistakes upon which to reflect. . . . But one thing is certain: socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.”

A Marxism for the Twenty-First Century?

Poulantzas threw himself from a window in Paris in 1979. In his final years, he seemed to be straining against the seams of his thinking—and perhaps even against the Marxist tradition itself. He had tried to remake the theory of the capitalist state for the twentieth century and socialist strategy for an era of democratic politics. Fellow Marxists have accused him of every transgression in the book: of “scholasticism,” of reformism, of abandoning the concept of class, of remaining too attached to class struggle and the determining power of the economic. He considered his own position as far as one could go toward a Marxist politics without abandoning the fundamental commitment to the determinant role of the relations of production. “If we remain within this conceptual framework, I think that the most that one can do for the specificity of politics is what I have done,” he confessed to the British journal Marxism Today in 1979. “I am not absolutely sure myself that I am right to be Marxist; one is never sure.”

The ambiguities of the final Poulantzas could stand for the whole of his work. Is it possible to square a structural theory of the capitalist state with a dynamic sense of class struggle? Can the vision of a machine-like state whose infrastructure unfailingly spits out class domination be reconciled with one that has “no power of its own,” that merely reflects the balance of class forces in society? Can we really think about class struggle without attention to historical subjects, to the consciousness of all the past discriminations and defeats that, as Marx put it, “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living?” Is the strategy of combining struggle within the capitalist state with popular movements outside it any less of a pipe dream than all the revolutionary strategies that went before?

There is certainly no question of Poulantzas answering all, or even most, of the questions that democratic socialists face today. If nothing else, his at times maddeningly abstract and incantatory writing style make his work a forbidding thicket for a reader of almost any level of preparation to penetrate. But it is also possible to argue that his very contradictions and ambiguities, which reflected an era of uncertainty that strongly resembles our own, are precisely what makes Poulantzas a provocative source today. Even if he failed to provide satisfying answers to the challenges of the 1970s, he did a great deal to highlight them.

Above all, Poulantzas draws attention to what the British political theorist Ed Rooksby calls “one of the oldest and most fundamental controversies in socialist thought”—that is, “how, and to what extent, capitalist state power might be utilized for socialist objectives.” Poulantzas’s conception of the capitalist state reveals the clear limits of the view typical on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, likely to be on full display in the 2020 election campaign, that reversing American oligarchy is primarily a matter of restoring smart governance and rolling back the grip of the wealthy on the political system. At the same time, however, it is skeptical that unreconstructed revolutionism, which has a small but vocal presence in the resurgent American left, is anything but a fantasy and a path to continued marginality. A nuanced theoretical understanding of the state could serve as an antidote to both kinds of error.

Relatedly, Poulantzas’s sense of the modulations of the capitalist state through its succession of crises are a welcome challenge to simplistic narratives that have colored even left-wing understandings of twentieth-century history. By trying to understand the phases and crisis forms of a fundamentally continuous capitalist state, Poulantzas is a helpful corrective to the notion of a mid-century Keynesian period of strong state interventionism followed by a deregulated neoliberal period marked by a weakened and undermined national state. For strategic reasons, it is important that the contemporary left understand neoliberalism as neither an overall weakening of the nation-state nor a decline in in its strategic importance. Technocratic statism is, rather, a combination of state practices developed during the twentieth century, including the selective delegation of governing powers to international bodies, that have both effectively disorganized the dominated classes and provoked social resistance that now makes them sites of controversy and struggle.

And then there are his writings on the democratic road to socialism, sketches that, while providing no answers in advance, leave a series of suggestive blanks begging to be filled in. “There is only one sure way of avoiding the risks of democratic socialism,” Poulantzas concluded his final book, “and that is to keep quiet and march ahead under the tutelage and the rod of advanced liberal democracy.” We know that path has frightening risks of its own.

David Sessions is a doctoral candidate in European history at Boston College and a graduate fellow at the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Jacobin, Commonweal, and elsewhere.

By Henry Giroux
CounterPunch, March 22, 2019

We do not live in a post-truth world and never have. On the contrary, we live in a pre-truth world where the truth has yet to arrive. As one of the primary currencies of politics, lies have a long history in the United States.  For instance, state sponsored lies played a crucial ideological role in pushing the US into wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, legitimated the use of Torture under the Bush administration, and covered up the crimes of the financial elite in producing the economic crisis of 2008.

Under Trump, lying has become a rhetorical gimmick in which everything that matters politically is denied, reason loses its power for informed judgments, and language serves to infantilize and depoliticize as it offers no room for individuals to translate private troubles into broader systemic considerations. While questions about truth have always been problematic among politicians and the wider public, both groups gave lip service to the assumption that the search for truth and respect for its diverse methods of validation were based on the shared belief that “truth is distinct from falsehood; and that, in the end, we can tell the difference and that difference matters.”[1] It certainly appeared to matter in democracy, particularly when it became imperative to be able to distinguish, however difficult, between facts and fiction, reliable knowledge and falsehoods, and good and evil. That however no longer appears to be the case.

In the current historical moment, the boundaries between truth and fiction are disappearing, giving way to a culture of lies, immediacy, consumerism, falsehoods, and the demonization of those considered disposable. Under such circumstances, civic culture withers and politics collapses into the personal. At the same time, pleasure is harnessed to a culture of corruption and cruelty, language operates in the service of violence, and the boundaries of the unthinkable become normalized. How else to explain President Trump’s strategy of separating babies and young children from their undocumented immigrant parents in order to incarcerate them in Texas in what some reporters have called cages.  Trump’s misleading rhetoric is used not only to cover up the brutality of oppressive political and economic policies, but also to resurrect the mobilizing passions of fascism that have emerged in an unceasing stream of hate, bigotry and militarism.

Trump’s indifference to the boundaries between truth and falsehoods reflects not only a deep-seated anti-intellectualism, it also points to his willingness to judge any appeal to the truth as inseparable from an unquestioned individual and group loyalty on the part of his followers. As self-defined sole bearer of truth, Trump disdains reasoned judgment and evidence, relying instead on instinct and emotional frankness to determine what is right or wrong and who can be considered a friend or enemy.  In this instance, Truth becomes a performance strategy designed to test his followers’ loyalty and willingness to believe whatever he says. Truth now becomes synonymous with a regressive tribalism that rejects shared norms and standards while promoting a culture of corruption and what former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg called an “epidemic of dishonesty.” Truth is now part of a web of relations and world view that draws its elements from a fascist politics that can be found in all the commanding political institutions and media landscapes. Truth is no longer merely fragile or problematic, it has become toxic and dysfunctional in an media ecosystem largely controlled by right wing conservatives and a financial elite who invest heavily in right-wing media apparatuses such Fox News and white nationalist social media platforms such as Breitbart News.

At a time of growing fascist movements across the globe, power, culture, politics, finance, and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. As cultural apparatuses are concentrated in the hands of the ultra-rich, the educative force of culture has taken on a powerful anti-democratic turn. This can be seen in the rise of new digitally driven systems of production and consumption that produce, shape, and sustain ideas, desires, and social relations that contribute to the disintegration of democratic social bonds and promote a form of social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of a ‘war of all against all’ replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion for others.The era of post-truth is in reality a period of crisis which as Gramsci observed “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and that] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”[2] Those morbid symptoms are evident in Trump’s mainstreaming of a fascist politics in which there is an attempt to normalize the language of racial purification, the politics of disposability and social sorting while hyping a culture of fear and a militarism reminiscent of past and current dictatorships.
Trump’s lying is the mask of nihilism and provides the ideological architecture for a form of neoliberal fascism.[3] Under such circumstances the state is remade on the model of finance, all social relations are valued according to economic calculations, and the dual project of ultra-nationalism and right-wing apocalyptic populism merge in an embrace of a toxic and unapologetic defense of white supremacy. Unsurprisingly, Trump views language as a weapon of war, and social media as an emotional minefield that gives him the power to criminalize the political opposition, malign immigrants as less than human, and revel in his role as a national mouthpiece for white nationalists, nativists, and other extremist groups.  Unconcerned about the power of words to inflame, humiliate, and embolden some of his followers to violence, he embraces a sadistic desire to relegate his critics, enemies, and those considered outside of the boundaries of a white public sphere to zones of terminal exclusion.  In this instance, truth when aligned with the search for justice becomes an object of disdain, if not pure contempt.

The entrepreneurs of hate are no longer confined to the dustbin of history, particularly the proto fascist era of 1930s and 1940s. They are with us once again producing dystopian fantasies out of the decaying communities and landscapes produced by forty years of a savage capitalism. Angry loners looking for a cause, a place to put their agency into play, are fodder for cult leaders. They have found one in Trump for whom the relationship between the language of fascism and its toxic worldview of “blood and soil” has moved to the center of power in the United States.   While campaigning for the mid-term 2018 elections, President Trump reached deep into the abyss of fascist politics and displayed a degree of racism, hatred, and ignorance that sent alarm bells ringing across the globe. Blind to public criticism, Trump has refused to acknowledge how his rhetoric, rallies, and interviews fan the flames of racism and anti-Semitism.  Instead, he blames the media for the violence he encourages among his followers, calls his political rivals enemies, labels immigrants as invaders, and publicly claims he is a nationalist emboldening right-wing extremist groups. Incapable of both empathy and self-reflection, he can only use language in the service of vilification, insults, and violence. Trump is the endpoint of a neoliberal culture of hyper-punitiveness amplified through a fascist politics that enshrines militarization, privatization, deregulation, manic consumerism, the criminalization of entire groups of people, and the financialization of everything. [4]

Fascism first begins with language and then gains momentum as an organizing force for shaping a culture that legitimates indiscriminate violence against entire groups — Black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims and others considered “disposable.” In this vein, Trump portrays his critics as “villains,”describes immigrants as “losers” and “criminals,” and has become a national mouthpiece for violent nationalists and a myriad of extremists who trade in hate and violence. Using a rhetoric of revulsion as a performance strategy and media show to whip up his base, Trump employs endless rhetorical tropes of bigotry and demonization that set the tone for real violence.

Trump appears utterly unconcerned by the accusation that his highly charged rhetoric of racial hatred, xenophobia and virulent nationalism both legitimates and fuels acts of violence. He proceeds without concern about the consequences of lending his voice to conspiracy theorists claiming that George Soros is funding the caravan of migrant workers, [5] calling CNN anchor Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television,” or referring to the basketball star, LeBron James as not being very smart.  While Trump insults a variety of public figures, his attacks on African-Americans follows the standard racist stereotype of calling into question their intelligence. Meanwhile, this inflammatory invective offers a platform for inducing violence from the numerous fascist groups that support him.

Trump thrives on promoting social divisions that amplify friend/enemy distinctions, and he often legitimates acts of violence and expressions of radical extremism as a means of addressing them. He has stated that the neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville were “very fine people,” declared in 2016 “I think Islam hates us,” lied about seeing Muslims celebrate the September 11 attacks, refers to immigrants on the southern border as invaders, all the while repeatedly using the language of white nationalists and White supremacists. Moreover, he has stated without shame that he is a nationalist. In one of his rallies, he urged his base to use the word nationalism stating “You know…we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I am a nationalist, Okay? I am a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.”  Not only does Trump’s embrace of the term stoke racial fears, it ingratiates him with elements of the hard right, particularly white nationalists. After his strong appropriation of the term at an October 2018 rally, Steve Bannon in an interview with Josh Robin indicated “he was very very pleased Trump used the word ‘nationalist.’”[i]

Trump has drawn praise from a number of white supremacists including David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys–a vile contemporary version of the Nazi Brown Shirts-and more recently by the alleged New Zealand shooter who in his Christchurch manifesto praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”[ii] Trump’s use of the term is neither innocent nor a clueless faux pas. In the face of a wave of anti-immigration movements across the globe, it has become code for a thinly veiled racism and signifier for racial hatred.

In the alleged era of post-truth, language is emptied of substantive meaning, actions are removed from any notion of social responsibility, and truth is detached from the search for justice. One consequence is the growing influence of a neo-fascist-type spectacle modeled after the emptiness and cheap pleasures of game shows, reality TV, and celebrity culture. All of which provide further opportunities for Trump to harness the public’s “free-floating anger, despair and apathy” into a celebration of militarism, hyper-masculinity, and spectacularized violence that mark his “frenzied Nuremberg-style rallies,” which serve largely as a  cauldron of race baiting and anti-Semitic demagoguery. [7]

There are historical precedents for this collapse of language into a form of coded militarism and racism — the anti-Semitism couched in critiques of globalization and the call for racial and social cleansing aligned with the discourse of borders and walls. Echoes of history resonate in this assault on minority groups, racist taunts, twisted references that code a belief in racial cleansing, and the internment of those who do not mirror the twisted notions of white supremacy. As Edward Luce  reminds us, we have heard this language before. He writes: “Eighty-five years ago on Thursday, Heinrich Himmler opened the Nazis first concentrating camp at Dachau. History does not repeat itself. But it is laced with warnings.”

In an age when civic literacy and efforts to hold the powerful accountable for their actions are dismissed as “fake news,” ignorance becomes the breeding ground not just for hate, but for a culture that represses historical memory, shreds any understanding of the importance of shared values, refuses to make tolerance a non-negotiable element of civic dialogue and allows the powerful to weaponize everyday discourse. While Trump has been portrayed as a serial liar, it would be a mistake to view this pathology as a matter of character.[8] Lying for Trump is a tool of power used to discredit any attempt to hold him accountable for his actions while destroying those public spheres and institutional foundations necessary for the possibility of a democratic politics.  At the heart of Trump’s world of lies, fake news, and alternative facts is a political regime that trades in corruption, the accumulation of capital, and promotes lawlessness, all of which provides the foundation for a neoliberalism on steroids that now merges with an unabashed celebration of white nationalism.  The post-truth era constitutes both a crisis of politics and a crisis of history, memory, agency, and education. Moreover, this new era of barbarism cannot be understood or addressed without a reminder that fascism has once again crystalized into new forms and has become a model for the present and future.

Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism, and class warfare are at the heart of an American imagination that has turned lethal. This is a dystopian imagination marked by hollow words, an imagination pillaged of any substantive meaning, cleansed of compassion, and used to legitimate the notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain. What we are witnessing is a shrinking of the political and moral horizons and a full scale attack on justice, thoughtful reasoning, and collective resistance.

Trump’s aversion to the truth resembles Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in that it provides a bullhorn for violence against marginalized groups, journalists, and undocumented immigrants, all the while disseminating its lies through a massive disimagination tweet machine. This dystopian propaganda apparatus is also fueled by a language of silence and moral irresponsibility couched in a willingness on the part of politicians and the public to look away in the face of violence and human suffering. This is the worldview of fascist politics and a dangerous nihilism— one that reinforces a contempt for human rights in the name of financial expediency and the cynical pursuit of political power.

In Trump’s world, the authoritarian mind set has been resurrected, bent on exhibiting a contempt for the facts, ethics, and human weakness. Trump is a 21century man without any virtues for whom success amounts to acting with impunity, using government power to sell or license his brand, hawking the allure of power and wealth, and finding pleasure in producing a culture of impunity, selfishness, and state sanctioned violence. His approach to politics echoes the merging of the spectacle with an ethical abandonment reminiscent of past fascist regimes. As Naomi Klein rightly argues, Trump “approaches everything as a spectacle” and edits “reality to fit his narrative.” [9]

Under the current reign of neoliberal fascism, politics extends beyond the attack on any vestige of truth, informed judgments, and constructive means of communication.      There is more at work here than the need to decode and analyze Trump’s language as a tool for misrepresenting reality and shielding corrupt practices and policies that benefit major corporations, the military, and the ultra-rich.  There is also a worldview, a mode of hegemony, which comes out of a fascist playbook, and translates into dangerous policies and practices. For instance, there is his attack on dissent evident and his support of violence against journalists and politicians who are critical of his views.  For example, in criticizing members of the Democratic Party that he labels as the radical left, he suggested one response to their opposition might be violence. He stated “O.K.? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”[10] There is more at work here than infantilizing school yard threats.  We have seen too many instances where Trump’s followers have beaten critics, attacked journalists, and shouted down any form of critique aimed at Trump’s policies — to say nothing of the army of trolls unleashed on intellectuals and journalist critical of the administration.

A few weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, a number of Trump’s outspoken critics, all of whom have been belittled and verbally attacked by Trump, were sent homemade pipe bombs in the mail. Cesar Sayoc — the man who was charged in connection with the bombings — is a strong Trump fan whose Twitter feed is littered with right-wing conspiracy theories along with an assortment of “apocalyptic, right-wing dystopian fantasies.”[11] Trump’s fans include a number of white nationalist and white supremacists who have been involved in recent killings in both Pittsburgh and New Zealand. Trump does not just fan the flames of violence with his rhetoric, he also provides legitimation to a number of white nationalist and right-wing extremists groups who are emboldened by his words and actions and too often ready to translate their hatred into the desecration of synagogues, schools, and other public sites as well as engage in violence against peaceful protesters, and in some cases commit heinous acts of violence.

Without a care as to how his own vicious and aggressive rhetoric has legitimated and galvanized acts of violence by an assortment of members of the “alt-right,” neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Trump refuses to acknowledge the growing threat of white nationalism and supremacy, even as he enables it with his discourse of walls, alleged invading hordes, and celebration of nativism. Trump remains silent about the fringe groups he has incited with his vicious attacks on the press, the judiciary and his political opponents. That is, he refuses to criticize them while shoring up their support my claiming he is a nationalist and surrounding himself with people like Stephen Miller who leaves little to the imagination regarding his white supremacist credentials. Trump told reporters after the Christchurch massacre that white nationalism both in the United States and across the globe was not a serious problem. In this instance, he appears clueless and incapable of empathy regarding the suffering of others, all while accelerating neoliberal and racist policies that inflict massive suffering and misery on millions. Violent fantasies are Trump’s trademark, whether expressed in his support for ruthless dictators or in his urging his followers at his rallies to “knock the crap out of” protesters. We have seen this celebration of violence in the past with its infantile appeal to a hyper-masculinity and its willingness to further engage in genocidal acts.

Trump is the endpoint of a malady that has been growing for decades. What is different about Trump is that he basks in his role and is unapologetic about enacting policies that further enable the looting of the country by the ultra-rich (including him) and by mega-corporations. He embodies with unchecked bravado the sorts of sadistic impulses that could condemn generations of children to a future of misery and in some cases state terrorism. He loves people who believe that politics is undermined by anyone who has a conscience, and he promotes and thrives in a culture of violence and cruelty. Trump is not refiguring the character of democracy, he is destroying it, and in doing so, resurrecting all the elements of a fascist politics that many people thought would never re-emerge again after the horrors and death inflicted on millions by previous fascist dictators. Trump represents an emergence of the ghost of the past and we should be terrified of what is happening both in the United States and in other countries such as Brazil, Poland, Turkey, and Hungary.  Trump’s ultra-nationalism, racism, policies aimed at social cleansing, his love affair with some of the world’s most heinous dictators, and his hatred of democracy echoes a period in history when the unimaginable became possible, when genocide was the endpoint of dehumanizing others, and the mix of nativist and nationalist rhetoric ended in the horrors of the camp. The world is at war once again and it is a war against democracy and Trump is at the forefront of it.

Trump represents a distinctive and dangerous form of American-bred authoritarianism, but at the same time he is the outcome of a past that needs to be remembered, analyzed, and engaged for the lessons it can teach us about the present. Not only has Trump “normalized the unspeakable” and in some cases the unthinkable, he has also forced us to ask questions we have never asked before about capitalism, power, politics, and, yes, courage itself.[12]  In part, this means recovering a language for politics, civic life, the public good, citizenship, and justice that has real substance.  One challenge is to confront the horrors of capitalism and its transformation into a form of fascism under Trump. There will be no real movement for change without, as David Harvey has pointed out, “a strong anti-capitalist movement,” At the same time, no movement will succeed without addressing the need for a revolution in consciousness, one that makes education central to politics. As Fred Jameson has suggested such a revolution cannot take place by limiting our choices to a fixation on the “impossible present.”[13] Nor can it take place by limiting ourselves to a language of critique and a narrow focus on individual issues.

What is needed is also a language of militant possibility and a comprehensive politics that draws from history, rethinks the meaning of politics, and imagines a future that does not imitate the present. We need what Gregory Leffel calls a language of “imagined futures,” one that “can snap us out of present-day socio-political malaise so that we can envision alternatives, build the institutions we need to get there and inspire heroic commitment.”[14] Such a language has to create political formations capable of understanding neoliberal fascism as a totality, a single integrated system whose shared roots extend from class and racial injustices under financial capitalism to ecological problems and the increasing expansion of the carceral state and the military-industrial-academic complex.[15] Nancy Fraser is right in arguing that we need a subjective response capable of connecting diverse racial, social and economic crises and in doing so addressing the objective structural forces that underpin them.[16]

William Faulkner once remarked that we live with the ghosts of the past or to be more precise: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  Such a task is all the more urgent given that  Trump is living proof that we are not only living with the ghosts of a dark past, which can return. But it is also true that the ghosts of history can be critically engaged and transformed into a radical democratic politics for the future. The Nazi regime is more than a frozen moment in history. It is a warning from the past and a window into the growing threat Trumpism poses to democracy.  The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice and collective action in the fight for a substantive and inclusive democracy.

Notes.

[1] See Sophia Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth: A Short History(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

[2] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Ed. & Trans. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p.275-76.

[3] I take up the issue of neoliberal fascism in Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of the Unforeseen(Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019).

[4] See Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018).

[5] Jeremy Peters, “How Trump-Fed Conspiracy Theories About Migrant Caravan Intersect With Deadly Hatred,” New York Times(October 29, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/politics/caravan-trump-shooting-elections.html

[6] Wajahat Ali, “The Roots of the Christchurch Massacre,” New York Times (March 14, 2019). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/opinion/new-zealand-mosque-shooting.html

[7] Karen Garcia, “Apocalypse Casts Shadow Over Midterms,” Sardonicky (October 29, 2018). Online: https://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/10/apocalypse-casts-shadow-over-midterms.html

[8] Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump has made 9,014 false or misleading claims over 773 days,’ The Washington Post (March 4, 2019). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/04/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/?utm_term=.6e791f431791

[9] Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough (Canada: Random House, 2017), p. 55.

[10] Jonathan Chait, “Trump Threatens Violence If Democrats Don’t Support Him,” New York(March 14, 2019). Online: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/trump-threatens-violence-if-democrats-dont-support-him.html

[11] Christopher Hayes, “Nearly half of Republicans think Trump should be able to close news outlets: poll,” USA Today (August 7, 2018). Online: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/07/trump-should-able-close-news-outletsrepublicanssay-poll/925536002/

[12] Sasha Abramsky, “How Trump Has Normalized the Unspeakable,” The Nation (September 20, 2017). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-trump-has-normalized-the-unspeakable/

[13] Gregory Leffel, “Is Catastrophe the only cure for the weakness of radical politics?” Open Democracy, [Jan. 21, 2018]. Online: https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/gregory-leffel/is-catastrophe-only-cure-for-weakness-of-radical-politics

[14] Gregory Leffel, “Is Catastrophe the only cure for the weakness of radical politics?” Open Democracy (January 21, 2018). Online: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/is-catastrophe-only-cure-for-weakness-of-radical-politics/

[15] For an analysis of the origins of fascism in American capitalism, see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).

[16] Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond”, American Affairs,(Winter 2017 | Vol. I, No 4)Online at: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2018), and the American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018). His website is www. henryagiroux.com.