The Chimes of Freedom Clashing: The Prospects for a United Anti-Fascist Front to Restore Democracy in America, Part 1: Where We Are and Who Can Lead Us Out

Editor’s note: All Things Being Equal is delighted to feature this three part series from Sam Webb (“The World-Wide Webb”) exploring our current situation of authoritarian rule in America, its historical underpinnings, and the possibilities and prospects for political action to begin to restore democracy in America heading toward the November midterm elections and beyond. Here are links to Part II and Part III.

The day-to-day lives of most working people have improved far less than what most of them had hoped. In fact, the main trends that frame life for much of the working class that is diverse in its composition and disparate in its location in the economic structure slopes downward or moves sideways, once in a while up.

If you’re Black or brown, if you're a woman, if you’re an immigrant, if you’re trans, if you’re disabled, and I could go on, the slope is more downward still. 

How do we explain this? 

Part of the explanation is that the economic terrain — the rise of new industries and technologies, new international competitors, workplace rationalization, new patterns of demand, a militarized economy, and, not least, the structural dynamics of the U.S. and global economy — changed in ways that greatly disadvantaged most sections of the working class over the past five decades.

But more telling, the difficult circumstances, in which the multi-racial, multi-national, multi-gender working class found and still finds itself, is directly tied to a successful counteroffensive of the billionaire class, beginning in the mid-1970s, with the rise of neoliberalism and the accompanying reassertion of capitalist class power and privilege.

With its army of well-paid lobbyists, its dense network of think tanks, its control over the major means of production and communication, its ability to throw bottomless pools of money into political campaigns, and its ability to shape the governing process in various ways, the ruling class exacted concessions at the bargaining table and in legislative halls from those who labor for a living. Assisting in this offensive were both parties, but not to the same degree and not always in the same way.

Any hope that this class offensive will ease up without countervailing pressure and power of a united working class allied with people of color, women, immigrants, the young, LBGTQ, and the disabled is wishful thinking. 

Indeed, with Trump, once again, in the White House and the other two main branches of the federal government under his thumb, this broad scale offensive is intensifying and taking on a fascist/white nationalist authoritarian coloration. 

Contrary to what some say, Trump and his administration are more than a symptom of the current political crisis, they are the main organizing center of this anti-democratic, class offensive. Indeed, militant talk about “fighting oligarchy” that fails to locate the Trump administration at the helm of this offensive is myopic and mistaken. And who needs that?

In Trump, the billionaire class found a resentful, immoral, backward (in every way possible), and self aggrandizing demagogue (and aspiring billionaire) eager to animate a retrograde movement, enrich the richest of the 1 per cent, and act as a hammer in its unrestrained assault on working class living standards, democratic rights, racial and gender equality, environmental sustainability, and any hopes of a peaceful world. 

In the whirlwind of this assault, Trump, his family, and his billionaire friends are engaged, without a smidgen of shame, in corruption on a scale unprecedented in history and in the broad light of day.

If his election in 2016 signaled an assault on the existing democratic and social order, his re-election eight years later took that assault to an entirely new level. In the language of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, a war of position gave way to a war of maneuver, that is, an all out frontal offensive.

With the assistance of a new set of advisors, a Republican controlled Congress, a supplicant Supreme Court, and a program of action, courtesy of Project 25, Trump in his second term is doubling and tripling down in his mission to shift wealth to the wealthiest and intensify class exploitation, lay waste to the nation’s democratic and egalitarian rights and structures, incarcerate and expel black and brown immigrants, re-colonize native lands and resources, terrorize trans people, reimpose white racist domination, and disenfranchise voters across the country, especially people of color. 

Moreover, he’s scaling up the administration’s campaign to turn the punitive arm of the state — not least the Justice Department — against his putative enemies, radically recast and downsize the “administrative” state (including busting the federal employees union), challenge birthright citizenship, and transform educational institutions at every level.

Not least, he is dismissing out of hand science-based knowledge, exploiting without limit the ecosystem and irreparably degrading the conditions that sustain life, and breaking up the old global order, while at the same time attempting to reassert U.S. global hegemony in new forms in a world no longer ready to accede to Trump’s ambitions. 

And all this is suffused in the soup of authoritarian white Christian nationalism and great power chauvinism. 

To deflect attention from his unhinged attack, he’s targeting especially people of color, immigrants, women, and the trans community in an effort to divide the anti-Trump, anti-MAGA coalition on the one hand and to inflame and activate his MAGA base on the other. 

If all this sounds far-reaching, frightening, and challenging, your ears are hearing right. 

But we can’t leave things here. Reality is many-sided, complicated, and contradictory. And political reality is no different. To be more specific, entwined with this unprecedented turn of events in a fascistic direction is the emergence of a broad and loosely organized anti-Trump, anti-fascist coalition. It stretches from Angela Davis on the left to Never Trumpers on the right. While it didn’t develop fully formed — coalitions never do — its unity rests on the political objective of defeating Trump, Maga and their fascist designs.

In other words, it’s not a coalition of the left (although some on the left think and act as if it is). Or a coalition of left and progressive activists. Or a coalition of the left and the center. It’s broader than all that (and, hopefully, deeper.) 

Of course, differences within this coalition do crop up. It would be naive to think otherwise. But whatever the differences, the challenge is to maintain and strengthen the unity of this coalition as the country heads into the fall election season with the hope of winning majorities in the House and Senate. Such an outcome, as polling makes clear, is within reach. But only if voters in the tens of millions cast their ballots for Democratic candidates. The stakes, if you're democratic minded person, are too high to sit it out. 

After all, it’s not hyperbole to say that the outcome of the elections will either allow Trump and the MAGA movement to gain new momentum in their anti-popular, fascistic direction or give the working class and the democratic movements new leverage, space, and energy in their struggle against Trump and his political bloc.