The U.S. Far-Right: poised to extend its reach and scale of violence
The January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol by elements of the far-right—amateurish and pursued by a coalition of activists that grossly overestimated the extent of their power and support—constituted a breakthrough by far-right political forces. As conceived, it was destined to be easily repelled from the outset, and contrary to corporate and social media hyperbole, it fell profoundly short of constituting a viable coup attempt. Yet, it is in the reverberations of its political symbolism that it amounts to a victory for the far-right, for it constitutes a “proof of concept.”
A relatively small group of far-right individuals and groups (no more than a couple thousand), that included militants of far-right organizations (e.g., militia members, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, QAnon sympathizers), GOP state legislators, active and former military personnel, cops, small business owners, etc., were able to breach the security barriers erected by the Capitol police, engage in violence that directly resulted in two deaths (and five deaths overall), the occupation of the U.S. Senate chambers, many congressional offices, theft, and assorted acts of petty vandalism.
Such a relatively small and eclectic band of protesters would not have normally been able to breach Capitol security. A number of Capitol police agents sympathetic to the crowd did not offer much of a resistance, including some who posed for pictures with the individuals that entered the Capitol. More indicative of a degree of disdain, if not passive collusion, was the fact that the leadership of the Capitol Police had activated only three quarters of its total force that day, and refused offers for reinforcements from other law enforcement jurisdictions. This, despite previous warnings that a sectors of the far-right had openly indicated that they were targeting the Capitol as part of the pro-Trump protest organized for January 6th. All of this stands in contrast with the state response to Black Lives Matter protests, which were met with large police and National Guard deployments throughout last summer.
These events shook both Democratic and Republican politicians, who saw themselves as explicitly targeted by right-wing militants. Notably, improvised explosive devices were found at the headquarters of not only the Democratic National Committee, but also at those of the Republican National Committee. Many of these politicos were truly upset by the threat to their lives, including Vice-president Mike Pence, who was the focus of the live-streamed chant: “Hang Mike Pence.”
To be clear, despite the neophyte character of their political calculations, the assaulting mob had a number of reasons to believe that they were not alone in their efforts. They not only had been instigated for weeks by a sitting president, but they had federal-level legislators raising their demands in opposition to the certification of Joe Biden as the elected president, and their public agreement with the widely discredited claim that the election was fraudulent and stolen from Donald Trump. Brazenly, 138 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to support the non-certification effort, while seven GOP Senators chose to follow suit after the Senate resumed their deliberations soon after the putschist crowd had been cleared from the Capitol by security forces.
One doesn’t need to be dragged into the hysteric manipulations of the mainstream media to acknowledge that a number of the elements necessary for a successful coup were at play, even if stillborn in character. One significant element for a successful coup is the military. Without the support, or at least acquiescence, of significant sectors of the military, a coup is likely destined for failure. There were sectors of the ruling class and their representatives that had been concerned about Donald Trump attempting to use the military to derail the certification of the election, judging from Trump’s attempts to mobilize the military against BLM protesters last summer. He was rebuked then by upper leadership of the military—in a rare display of open dissent of the military brass toward a sitting president.
As reported by CNN, last December, “…10 living former U.S. defense secretaries published a joint open letter warning that the military shouldn’t play a role in determining the election outcome or interrupt a peaceful transition…”, after “…former national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, floated a declaration of martial law and a ‘rerun’ of the election overseen by the military in a mid-December Oval Office meeting…” Responding to this pressure, the military leadership openly indicated that any deployment of military personnel on January 6th was going to be modest, that “…the Pentagon hopes to make clear that the Guard is only serving as ‘traffic control’ without guns, military vehicles or helicopters to aid the local police in Washington and steer clear of flashpoint areas.”
The social and political elements of a crisis that would have compelled the military to enter the fray were either not in place, or at least were not present with sufficient strength in terms of a degree of political dislocation that would have prompted a military intervention and the long term consequences of such actions. To begin with, by the time the election got under way, it was evident that the ruling class was not interested in supporting Trump and his erratic presidency.
Biden and the “Return to Stability”
During the presidential primaries and thereafter, Joe Biden had made it clear to the ruling class that he was their best bet to bring back stability. This refers to a type of stability that dispenses with Trump’s disruption of governance as usual, both domestically and internationally, and his incapacity and unwillingness to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump’s bungling of the pandemic postponed the possibility of a consistent economic recovery that also fueled the explosive character of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests.
Biden’s call for unity is the necessary state of affairs for the continued and effective functioning of society under the terms of the U.S. ruling class. It is a plea to the Republican Party to join the Democratic Party’s dream of bipartisanship to stabilize U.S. politics, against the increasingly fractious practices of the Republican leadership for the past few decades. This has become more pronounced as the party has gradually come under the grip of the Koch brothers’s libertarian project that demands no compromises. Such pursuit of “unity” comes at the expense of the demands and expectations of the BLM and other social movements, which are once again thrown under the bus in favor of placating and accommodating to the Right.
For decades, the Democratic Party has appointed itself the ultimate guarantor of the stability required by the US capitalist system and gargantuan empire. During the 1930s depression Franklin D. Roosevelt explicitly stated that he was saving U.S. capitalism from capitalists themselves. During the Watergate crisis, the Democratic Party reacted against the efforts of Richard Nixon to build a shadow government—a self-coup in the making—and unlike the present, a large enough number of Republican Senators were willing to convict Nixon in a Senate trial, prompting Nixon to resign before being impeached.
During the 2000 election crisis, the Democratic presidential candidate, Al Gore, and the party itself chose to stop their objections to the obvious manipulation of the vote count in Florida—that had been stopped in its tracks by a right-wing mob (the infamous Brooks Brothers riot)—for the sake of political stability. For the sake of the continuity, the Democratic Party chose to accept the outcome of a stolen election, rather than lead their supporters into an open challenge as it feared that it could unleash political forces beyond its control at a time when left-leaning and anticapitalist activism was on the rise in the form of the anti-globalization movement.
To be sure, what Trump demanded and expected was a self-coup, in the vein of what Alberto Fujimori accomplished in Peru in the 1990s. His thirst for personal power places him in line with classic dictators like Anastasio Somoza (Nicaragua) or Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic). But born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Trump expected the work and risks of carrying out a coup to be performed by others on his behalf. While people protested in his favor, he went golfing.
On January 6th, he told the crowd that he would join them in marching to the Capitol, and then went to hide in the White House. It has become increasingly evident that he was banking on supporters at various levels and locations of government to carry out a palace self-coup on his behalf. His actions repeated a pattern well established throughout his presidency, in which the often violent mobilizations by his most militant sympathizers served the purpose of running interference and stirring up tension–and thus were useful to him as a pressure tactic–but were then unceremoniously left high-and-dry when the scheme did not play out in his favor.
His were the actions and expectations of a half-assed, wannabe dictator. Last fall, a number of articles cropped up in mainstream media regarding the various ways through which Trump may have undemocratically kept himself in power. They highlighted the various points at which his supporters could have disrupted voting and/or certification operations (see this comprehensive piece in The Atlantic). The bulk of these efforts required the collusion of a large collection of elected officials and bureaucrats. Trump’s forces indeed tried to mobilize at various strategic points, but their efforts were not strong and bold enough. In order to stand a chance, the Trumpist movement needed to act early and decisively—including the wielding of deadly force. The type of actions that the pro-George W. Bush mobs took back in 2000 during the Brooks Brothers assault that led to the interruption of the Florida vote count would have also required forceful interruption of both voting and vote scrutiny across multiple states–and only as a first step.
The actual suspension of the election procedures, the legitimation of a declaration of election fraud that would have “logically” kept Trump in power would have to be issued by Republican apparatchiks across various states, followed by the open deployment of repressive forces to guarantee that no significant opposition could be organized. The reader can imagine the scenario that could have unfolded. Clearly, most of the GOP officialdom at the state level—regardless of their sympathies for Trumpism—was not ready to jump into such dangerous and uncertain terrain and so most of them chose to certify Biden as the winner of the election.
The nature of democracy and authoritarianism in the U.S.
The level to which Donald Trump exposed the true character and disrupted the usual protocols of the U.S. version of bourgeois democracy is not an accident, nor is it simply a political trick of a successful hustler. It is the outcome of a system soaked with sharpening contradictions and multiple evolving crises. Let’s not mince words. Despite the concessions that the U.S. ruling class has been compelled to grant to sectors of the population across time, as a result of their struggles, the fact remains that the state apparatus wielded by the U.S. ruling class was designed and built as white supremacist/colonial settler/imperialist entity that allowed it to become the most successful and powerful empire in the history of humanity. (See U.S. imperialism in the Americas: the function of colonialism and racism, and how they are different.)
The level to which Donald Trump exposed the true character and disrupted the usual protocols of the U.S. version of bourgeois democracy is not an accident, nor is it simply a political trick of a successful hustler. It is the outcome of a system soaked with sharpening contradictions and multiple evolving crises.
Over decades, a variety of activists, political groups, and researchers have emphasized the white supremacist character of the U.S. as a nation, in its core state structures, in how the overwhelmingly white elites wield their power through this state apparatus, and in how it shapes social practices and expectations. As such, a white supremacist state formation is intrinsically in contradiction with extensive democracy. Historically, the push-back by the oppressed and the exploited sectors of the population has compelled the ruling class to accommodate, offering a modicum of flexibility, which indeed has reflected itself as concessions in the form of loosening the constraints on democratic rights. Yet, the monopoly on power has been always maintained by the ruling class. The victories of the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s through the early 1970s caused a disruption of the workings of the political edifice in ways that the U.S. ruling class has not found a way to stabilize to this day. The contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, and the active riposte of the far-right are the evident expression of this instability.
Historically, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery, and then of Jim Crow. Once sectors within the party were compelled to concede a number of reforms fought for by the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the more virulently white supremacist sectors of the party began abandoning it. The 1968 presidential campaign of hardcore segregationist George Wallace served as a bridge out of the party. But once these segregationists were out, it also functioned as a bridge into the Republican Party through Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”. From that point on the Republican Party functioned as the coalescing cauldron of a variety of right-wing formations that shared white supremacy and misogyny (as abetted and legitimized by the organized religious right), and used the highly manipulable notion of individual rights as inseparable from the ideology of unfettered capitalism.
That is the springboard from which all major political developments have historically catapulted themselves in the U.S. The increasingly vitriolic and virulent behavior that the most right-wing factions of U.S. polity have engaged in since the 1980s is expressed within the boundaries of such terrain. There is no symmetry of recourse between the far-right and the far-left. The far-left fights against the grain of what is already on the ground. The far-right has the rich and plentiful repertoire of ideological assumptions and ruling mechanisms that the bulk of the population takes for granted regarding the institutions, history, priorities, and ostensible principles of the U.S.
That Trump maintained consistent and broad support during his 2016 presidential campaign, throughout his four-year presidential term, and after leaving office–despite his outrageous actions and discourse–is not an aberration. Even amid glaring incompetence, he continuously captured these people’s imagination because he gives voice to their white supremacist and misogynist understanding of how to aspire to a better life. He has been able to take advantage of and skillfully wield the politics of resentment that the Republican Party has opportunistically manipulated for decades.
The approximately 40 percent of the electorate that consistently supported Trump throughout his term and that made him a viable presidential contender in 2020 speaks more about the firm grip of those types of deeply-ingrained aspirations, than the contradictory electoral efforts of the Democratic Party. Despite all of the accurate analyses put forward by many a left-leaning commentator regarding the role that the decades-long, profound deterioration of the standard of living of the U.S. working class–particularly its white component–in creating an opportunity for a demagogue like Trump, there is a hard fact that cannot be ignored: these people chose to throw their support, reluctantly or not, behind a man and a political project that was thoroughly and openly racist, misogynist, and virulent against transgender people and other marginalized sectors of society.
Some people may argue that in 2016 Trump attracted the vote of those who wanted to punish the Democratic Party for their political abandonment after years of policies that favored the rich, but Trump was already thriving on the support for his self-confident and openly bigoted discourse. But by the 2020 election, all the venom of the Trump administration had been enacted for four years and did not deter even larger numbers of people from voting for him, to the tune of over 74 million.
It is not an “either this or that” question. It is both. People endorsed an openly racist electoral campaign not despite its open racism and bigotry but in affinity with it and with their deep sense of economic and social frustration. In his Jacobin article titled “Trumpism Will Endure,” Samuel Farber emphasizes that it is incorrect to assume that Trumpism is a “white working class phenomenon” because many of its militants and supporters are not really workers, and are simplistically labeled as such by the media and liberals using as a crutch for their level of education. However, he points out that there is indeed a worrisome level of support for Trump among a not insignificant fraction of white workers.
Much has been made of Trump’s support among communities of color. That many liberals may be flummoxed by such reality is not surprising. But this lack of clarity extends to radical leftists too. The characterization of the white supremacist and proto-fascist formations of the alt-right as such was the subject of confusion among sectors of the left because of the presence of people of color in the ranks of these street fighting organizations. For example, the leader of the alt-right group Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, is of Japanese and white descent, and his sidekick Tusitala “Tiny” Toese is Samoan. Latino and Black men have been identified as members or fellow travelers of the Proud Boys.
In conjunction with the fact that these groups tactically denied being racist when they spoke to the press, pointing out their nonwhite partisans, sectors of the Antifa left were delayed in recognizing these alt-right formations as white supremacist, proto-fascist organizations. However, what is central to this question is the political project that these groups have pursued on the ground, which is one that is virulently racist in practice, regardless of the ethnicity of some of its members—a fact that became undeniable once these groups openly engaged in confronting the BLM protests last summer. The approach to assessing these dynamics is no different than that which one can use to assess the wanton murders of Black citizens by Black cops. Despite the cop being Black, the act of killing a Black person is a racist act performed as part of the normal functioning of an intrinsically racist institution.
Similarly, that a fraction of the Black and Latinx population supported Trump—much smaller than that which opposed him—reflects the fact that these persons indeed support a racist and authoritarian program despite being people of color themselves. There are a variety of reasons for such contradictory behavior, though the role of Evangelical churches as a conduit for reactionary politics in Black and Latinx communities should be considered a primary factor within these dynamics.
The strong ideological dominance of the ruling class plays a significant role in how the oppressed see themselves. Racially/ethnically oppressed minorities, women, the colonized, assimilate the ideology of their oppressors to a variety of degrees. The most politically backward sectors of these groups will embrace their inferior position within the hierarchical structures in which they live. The great Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote the following, regarding colonialism, in his Wretched of the Earth, which can be applied to other forms of oppression such as racism:
When we consider the resources deployed to achieve the cultural alienation so typical of the colonial period, we realize that nothing was left to chance and that the final aim of colonization was to convince the indigenous population it would save them from darkness. The result was to hammer into the heads of indigenous population that if the colonist were to leave they would regress into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality. At the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was not seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a sweet, kindhearted mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free rein to malevolent instincts. The colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune.
The array of people that Trump recruited into his political project constitute a political phenomenon of their own: Trumpism. As I will address below, Trumpism has a variety of currents, with elements of a proto-fascist worldview gaining ground at a disturbing pace.
The libertarian and proto-fascist wings of the right
For several decades, political commentators described the contemporary Republican Party as the coalescing grounds for several conservative strands: the Christian Right, neocons, imperialist hawks, libertarians, and assorted racists. The partisans of the cultural wars commingled with the anti-tax, small-government, and shamelessly pro-business apparatchiks. As the ravages of neoliberalism piled up, the party accelerated its move into more extreme and callous politics. Until Donald Trump entered the Republican primaries, followed by his victory in the 2016 election, the party was becoming incrementally authoritarian, through established methods.
As historian Nancy MacLean meticulously describes in her book Democracy in Chains, the Koch brothers had succeeded in turning increasing sectors of the official Republican Party into the vehicles of their libertarian dream. This is no small feat. This project entails the transformation of the entire governance structure of the U.S. into an apparatus that would be impregnable to institutional popular pressure by completely eliminating any democratic means to influence the workings of government—even by the weak democracy standards available under the U.S. version of bourgeois democracy. In other words, this was/is a robust autocracy in the making. Voter suppression and gerrymandering are only the beginning expressions of this project.
The theoretical mastermind of such a monstrosity was the right-wing academic James Buchanan, who as early as the 1955 Brown v. Board of Education (second) ruling concluded that any concessions to the masses, in this case regarding the ending of racist school segregation practices, was an act against the “economic liberty” of the wealthy. Buchanan eventually became the key theoretician of the Koch brothers crusade, and gave it an intellectual flair by naming such policies the “Public Choice” option.
Buchanan understood that the majority of the population would not stand for such absolute power grab, and designed a process to carry out this project as stealthily as possible. As summarized by MacLean, “Those who subscribe to the libertarian philosophy believe that the only legitimate role of government is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense.” Thus the laws and standard governing practice would completely disenfranchise ordinary citizens, deprive them of any institutional means of petitioning and pressuring the economic elites and their corporations. In essence, this would be the equivalent of corporate absolutist rule. Whether the libertarian dream is completely attainable in practice requires a separate discussion. However, the dogged pursuit of such goals by the Koch brothers’ political empire and its vast array of organizations has resulted in the evident disenfranchisement of ordinary citizens during the past three decades.
As MacLean documents, Charles Koch has been so focused on carrying out his project that he studied Lenin and adapted his strategy of building political cadre in the development of an army of ideologically hardcore and persistent personnel across a vast collection of think tanks, institutes, astroturf organizations, congressional aides, elected officers, etc. The political apparatus of the Koch brothers also borrowed the notion of incremental reform from the Fabian utopian socialists of the late 19th century. In this case, it was turned on its head, and instead deployed for the incremental usurpation of democratic rights.
Based on this strategy, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) became an instrument in this quest as a conduit for the gradual enactment of disenfranchising legislation at the state level and across multiple states. When the Tea Party movement broke out under the Obama administration, the Kochs lost no time in their efforts to harness it. Yet there were two strands to Tea Party politics. There was the institutional Tea Party, the Republican Tea Party caucus, through which the Kochs had secured and extended representation of their politics and policies in Congress (which also gained adepts within the Republican Liberty and Freedom caucuses), and there was the Tea Party on the ground, consisting of a coalition of hardcore racists and birthers, including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white supremacist groups, and what became the spearheading elements of the alt-right. It also included the organized and increasingly politically belligerent Evangelical movement, as well as a number of libertarians. It is this Tea Party that Donald Trump inherited, to the chagrin of the Kochs.
Back in 2016, before Trump obliterated his opponents in the Republican primaries, sociologist Theda Skocpol warned in an article in Dissent Magazine that the degree of control of the Koch brothers over the grassroots Tea Party was significantly overstated:
Grassroots Tea Partiers accomplished an utterly remarkable feat: starting in 2009, they organized at least 900 local groups, individually named Tea Party units that met regularly. Vanessa and I worked with student researchers to document those groups as of early 2011. In addition, we attended local meetings in New England, Arizona, and Virginia and did face-to-face interviews with leaders and members of local Tea Party groups. Such evidence was carefully calibrated with national surveys of the roughly 15–25 percent of all Americans who said they sympathized with the Tea Party, half of whom identify as Republicans, including a smaller subset that reported actively contributing money to it.
We learned that grassroots Tea Partiers were far from disciplined libertarian followers of ultra-free-market advocacy groups. Local Tea Party groups met in churches, libraries, and restaurants, and collected small contributions or sold books, pins, bumper stickers and other Tea Party paraphernalia on commission to cover their modest costs. They did not get by on checks from the Koch brothers or any other wealthy advocacy organizations. Furthermore, the views of both grassroots Tea Party activists and of many other Republican-leaning voters who have sympathized with this label do not align with free-market dogmas. Research by political scientist Christopher Parker at the University of Washington reinforces our conclusion that ordinary Tea Party activists and sympathizers are worried about sociocultural changes in the United States, angry and fearful about immigration, freaked out by the presence in the White House of a black liberal with a Muslim middle name, and fiercely opposed to what they view as out of control “welfare spending” on the poor, minorities, and young people. Many Tea Partiers benefit from Social Security, Medicare, and military veterans’ programs, and do not want them to be cut or privatized. About half of Tea Party activists or sympathizers are also Christian conservatives intensely concerned with banning abortion and repealing gay marriage.
…When Vanessa and I interviewed Tea Partiers in early 2011, we found many who knew nothing about professional advocacy groups claiming to speak for them on television and still others who mightily distrusted such top-down efforts…Ideas and passions may be similar across time, but, according to our research, angry, culturally fearful conservative populists not controlled from above are a major force in the early twenty-first-century United States. Tens of millions of GOP-leaning citizens, roughly a fifth of the population and about half of Republican voters, feel this way.
These people constitute the core of Trumpism, with a larger periphery of conservatives that agree with them to one extent or another, in large part because they consider themselves loyal conservatives and Republicans. Yet, there is a significant difference between those who enthusiastically support Trumpism, some of which may sporadically participate in Trump-associated public events, and those explicitly self-organized in proto-fascist political formations, such as those of the alt-right, and of course of the KKK and other older white supremacist organizations. These organizations truly believe in and plan their actions in accordance with the pursuit of some type of white ethno-nationalist reconfiguration of the state and society at large. Most of the Trumpist base does not belong to any of these groups, although there is a significant fraction that expresses explicit sympathy with the ideas. The potential for these proto-fascist groups to recruit and grow in size and influence is a worrisome prospect that can only be minimized at our peril.
Political scientists Robert Pape and Keven Ruby reported in The Atlantic that they had researched the political background and demographic characteristics of the first 193 people arrested—as of late January—for being inside the Capitol building during the January 6th assault. Contrary to their expectations, they found that the arrestees came from a wide distribution of states and counties, that they did not come primarily from Republican-dominated jurisdictions (aka “Red States”). Furthermore they found that:
…of the Capitol arrestees we studied— one-tenth—can be classified as supporters of gangs, militias, or militia-like groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters. The role that such groups played in the riot has attracted considerable news coverage. But 89 percent of the arrestees have no apparent affiliation with any known militant organization.
And that
…the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.
In other words, these people take from sectors of society known as the petty bourgeoise, who have historically been the recruitment grounds for fascist movements, as in Nazi Germany. The more diffuse far-right tendencies emergent throughout the Tea Party years of the Obama administration, began to take a more defined shape once Trump took power. Even if the numbers of street-militant alt-right activists were relatively small throughout Trump’s term, the sympathy and support they gathered went well beyond their active membership. In the first year of Trump’s presidency, antifascist activist Heather Heyer was murdered by a neofascist during the protests against the infamous “Unite the Right” rally of the alt-right in Charlottesville, Virginia. Shockingly, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, a Washington Post ABC poll revealed that roughly nine percent of the population believed that there was nothing wrong with neo-Nazi or white supremacist views. According to The Independent this amounted to 22 million people. About the same time, a different survey, by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, reported that “39% of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that ‘white people are currently under attack in this country.’”
About three and half years later, after innumerable instances of right-wing violence leading to dozens of deaths, after the preemption of a militia plot to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan, and particularly after the January 6th assault of the Capitol building, a number of polls indicate that the political positions of a significant number of people who self-identify as conservative or Republican have hardened.
The day after the storming of the Capitol, a PBS News Hour/Marist poll indicated that eight percent of the population (18 and 7 percent of self-identified Republicans and Independents, respectively) supported the action. Yet the gap between those who supported the assault and other conservatives is not that wide. For in the same poll, 23 percent of the interviewed agreed with the statement that the events at the Capitol “were mostly a legitimate protest” (47 and 25 percent of Republicans and Independents, respectively).
A poll conducted by the American Enterprise Institute between January 21st and 30th, found, to its discomfort, that “Nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) Americans agree that American democracy serves the interests of only the wealthy and powerful. Seventy percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans hold this view.” The results of the poll also indicated that a majority (56 percent) of Republicans support the use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life”, while “Roughly four in 10 (39 percent) Republicans support Americans taking violent actions if elected leaders fail to act”, and “13 percent of Republicans say they “completely” agree in the necessity of taking violent actions if political leaders fail.”
It is from within this pool of the 39 percent of Republicans willing to support violence to defend their politics that the proto-fascist formations can and will find new recruits, in particular from the 13 percent that openly expressed their willingness to engage themselves in violence. As a rough approximation, we can take the 74 million Trump voters in the 2020 election, and one can estimate that about 9 million Trumpists are ready to be called into outright violence.
As a rough approximation, we can take the 74 million Trump voters in the 2020 election, and one can estimate that about 9 million Trumpists are ready to be called into outright violence.
It is important to understand the differences between the authoritarian Koch project and the mindset of significant sectors of the Trump base that are evolving in a fascistic direction at an accelerating pace. Although both political tendencies are authoritarian, the Koch project is meant to take over from above the basic institutions of government, and strangle most of its functions except for that of state repression, while the fascist-leaning movement is one in which the “plebeian” masses expect something in return; something that the Koch project is single-mindedly working to prevent. As Skocpol neatly described in the quote above, the Social Security, Medicare, etc., that the Trump base wants to preserve, is precisely the kind of affront to “economic liberty” that Koch wants to vanish forever.
When one examines Trump’s 2020 campaign rhetoric, particularly in the weeks preceding the election, his repeated and heavy emphasis on painting the opposition party as treasonous and illegitimate solidified a mindset among his millions of partisans that anything other than a victory for Trump and Trumpism was an imminent threat to them, and that the only way the opposition could claim a victory was by fraudulent means. As such, the only acceptable knee-jerk response was and is one in which the usurpers must be removed by any means. This not only creates fertile ground for a variety of violent right-wing actions, but nurtures the conditions for an eventual civil war. This is music to the ears of the organized white supremacist and proto-fascist right. The collage of alt-right formations may be on the defensive at the moment, with a number of their members facing prosecution for the storming of the Capitol building. But this is only a temporary state of affairs.
Many liberals dismiss political trends like QAnon and other peddlers of conspiracy theories, given the nonsensical claims and messianism of their rhetoric, but fail to sense that what animates their partisans is their deep belief in the illegitimacy of any politics other than those they subscribe to, as Trump skillfully learned to exploit. The demise of these sectors and of the alt-right political formations, or of their capacity to regroup, has been prematurely declared several times during the past five years. The fundamental economic and political structures of this country, and the developments of the past decade within the Republican Party constitute a replenishing current for driving forces that push in the direction of the alt-right. Trumpism continues to harden its political outlook, and the general political horizon of growing sectors of the Trump base continues to drift toward those of the militias, and other sectors of the alt-right.
The unwillingness and incapacity of the current Republican Party to extract itself from Trump and his politics is more complex than recognized. While the Kochian sector of the institutional Republican Party continues to expand, the hold of hardened Trumpism continues to consolidate too. The spectacle of the Trump impeachment trial in the Senate made evident the centrifugal forces that continue to strain the long-standing trappings of U.S. bourgeois democracy. Every action or omission by the GOP leadership continues to feed the beast of authoritarianism, whether in its Kochian corporate-absolutist form, or through the granting of legitimacy to Trumpism, and its fascist-leaning wing. In essence, the Republican Party decided that its viability as an opposition party was more important than the instability caused by granting in practice impunity to Trump and other Republican politicos who saw the storming of the Capitol as a development to their political advantage—to say the least.
When Trump suggested that he was willing to take his ball and form a new party, it was an extortion that carried hefty leverage with it. Just before this year’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a Suffolk University-USA Today poll revealed that up to 46 percent of Republicans would follow Trump into a new party. Ultimately, CPAC became a show of fealty to Trump, and wasting no time he proceeded to shore up his new PAC by denying the RNC the ability to use his brand. His lawsuit to keep the RNC and others from using his name and his image was designed for him to control the monies donated to the GOP. It was a double whammy of political and financial hegemony over Republican Party dynamics.
Unfortunately, whatever Trump does or abstains from doing makes a difference. Every major player in the Republican Party understands the stakes. Trump is both an asset and a hindrance to the development of the proto-fascist right. His national presence, his power within the GOP, and the variety of far-right political assumptions that Trump loudly validates, is a shot in the arm to the alt-right. However, Trump’s narrow self-serving goals, his incompetence, and his political tendencies as a lumpen capitalist (glorified hustler and money launderer)—as described by Sam Farber in Jacobin—are also an impediment in the development and consolidation of the alt-right as an independent political movement.
The crux of the question for the alt-right is in how they relate to the GOP. Do they continue to find refuge and political cover within various corners of the Republican Party, and use it as a trampoline, or do they break with it? The improvised explosives found at the headquarters of the RNC is an indication that there are sectors in the alt-right who think it is time to break with the Republican Party. Yet it is evident that this party offers a great conduit to popularize their politics, and can be seen as a path to power. After all, the Nazi’s reorganized their tactics after their failed 1923 Beer Hall putsch, to take advantage of the electoral arena while still maintaining their street fighting organizations.
A number of Republican top guns have recognized that the Trump base is volatile, and have concluded that it is better to run ahead of it to control and exploit it—arrogantly thinking that they can play with fire and not get burned. For them, the politics surrounding immigration controls is an opportunity to present themselves as being “pro-working class.” Politicians like Josh Hawley (Missouri), Marco Rubio (Florida), and Tom Cotton (Arkansas) will continue to inflame the racism of the Trump base through their narrative, while others, similar to how Lindsey Graham openly incited hostility toward Black farmers:
Let me give you an example of something that really bothers me. In this bill, if you're a farmer, your loan will be forgiven up to 120 percent of your loan … if you're socially disadvantaged, if you're African American, some other minority. But if you're [a] white person, if you're a white woman, no forgiveness. That's reparations. What does that have to do with COVID?” he said.
The Republican Party has been relying on racism for decades, frequently in coded terms, but the current political context is qualitatively different. Trump emboldened racists to be open again in their rhetoric and actions. In the context of a growing number of organized proto-fascist formations, and of the open or tacit acceptance of right-wing violence as acceptable tactics by millions of Trump supporters, the overall behavior of the Republican Party will continue to radicalize its base.
The cops and other armed bodies of the state
The mainstream media has been reporting for years on the attempts by white supremacist/alt-right organizations to have their affiliates join the various local branches of law enforcement. Putting in proper context what this means is necessary, if we are going to make sense of the current political trends. The U.S. state apparatus, despite the modest degree of flexibility it has demonstrated in response to historic struggles such as the Civil Rights Movement, is a white supremacist/imperialist structure meant to serve the needs of the U.S. ruling class. As such, the police and other law enforcement institutions operate to sustain these needs.
The deadly and racist brutality the police agencies deploy in cities across the U.S. is not an aberration, but rather in accord with their historical role as guarantors of the status quo–the status quo of a white supremacist class society. As such the police have always been a white supremacist institution. Irrespective of which party controls local politics, the painful truth is that people of color continue to be wantonly abused and murdered at the hands of the police, regardless of the hypocritical rhetoric of the politicians who administer the local jurisdictions in which the police operate.
The deadly and racist brutality the police agencies deploy in cities across the U.S. is not an aberration, but rather in accord with their historical role as guarantors of the status quo–the status quo of a white supremacist class society.
Yet there is significance to the fact that organized proto-fascists are targeting law enforcement as a terrain in which to grow their ranks. There is so much in the ideological repertoire of the people who work as cops, of the assumptions of the police as an institution that is in agreement with the tenets of white supremacy, that it is understandable why proto-fascist formations think it is relatively easy and necessary to recruit in these grounds. After all, in the heyday of the KKK, it was not unusual for the chief of police of small towns or for the sheriff of rural counties to be the local KKK leader. Nowadays, one of the alt-right organizations that has gained prominence among far-right circles is the Oath Keepers. According to Political Research Associates:
Oath Keepers was registered as a nonprofit in Nevada in 2009. Stewart Rhodes, founder and president of the organization, is a Yale graduate and former Congressional staffer for Ron Paul. Founding directors included Richard Mack, who continues as a director and the organization’s most prominent spokesperson.
The stated purpose of the Oath Keepers is to organize and train current and former military, police, and first responders to refuse to “obey unconstitutional orders.”… In 2014, the organization claimed 40,000 members in chapters in all fifty states, up from 30,000 reported in a 2011 interview with Rhodes in the libertarian Reason Magazine. Full membership is available for current and former members of the military, National Guard, Reserves, police, firefighters, and first responders. Other are eligible for associate membership.
The “Friends of Oath Keepers,” listed on the organization’s website, include the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), Gun Owners of America (GOA), the Tenth Amendment Center, and S.W.A.T. Magazine.
CSPOA, an organization for “oathkeeper sheriffs,” was founded in 2011 by Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who is known for challenging the Brady Bill in Mack and Printz v. United States. Mack has also been a lobbyist for GOA and co-authored a book with Randy Weaver about Ruby Ridge, the 1992 incident which has served as a rallying cry for Patriot and militia groups. CSPOA is specifically for sheriffs who would “be willing to interpose on behalf of the people to protect their freedom.” The mission is to “train and vet them all [county sheriffs], state by state, to understand and enforce the constitutionally protected Rights of the people they serve, with an emphasis on State Sovereignty and local autonomy.” The mission statement continues, “In short, the CSPOA will be the army that sets our country free.”
At least 14 Oath Keepers have been charged in connection to the January 6th Capitol assault. The day after the storming of the Capitol, the president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police defended the actions of the right-wing crowd: ‘“They’re individuals,” he said. “They get to do what they want. Again, they were voicing frustration. They’re entitled to voice their frustration. They clearly have been ignored and they’re still being ignored as if they’re lunatics and treasonous now, which is beyond stupid.”’
Trump cultivated the support of police associations across the U.S., unconditionally defended the brutality of their members, and in return cops overwhelmingly supported him. The degree to which police and sheriffs are a solid right-wing bloc entrusted with the official capacity to engage in wanton violence with impunity, particularly against people of color, gives this sector of the state apparatus significant leeway in pursuing self-serving practices that dovetail with the ideological tendencies of the Trump base that has been quickly moving to the right. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic plenty of sheriffs brazenly and openly refused to enforce pandemic restrictions in their jurisdictions, in direct defiance of their state elected officials. They also encouraged right-wing vigilantism against BLM protesters, while on the other hand they sat idly as far-right instigators organized protests against lockdown restrictions.
At least 60 sheriffs across the U.S. openly engaged in these demonstrations. Many of these law enforcement personnel actively commingle with people that are affiliated to various degrees with the militia movement. It is this kind of political and ideological tendency that sent shivers down the spines of Democratic Party establishment during and in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol assault.
Another facet of far-right politics is how for decades the militia movement, and assorted white supremacists, have joined the military to gain military expertise. Plenty of these individuals later go on to join police and sheriff departments. In the aftermath of 9/11, the militarization of police departments, in their tactics and equipment directly inherited from the military, became increasingly overt and normalized.
How the U.S. military is breeding grounds for white supremacists requires an entire discussion of its own. However, I want to emphasize the political white elephant in the room. The U.S., as the most powerful imperialist country on the planet, has as its main goal imperial dominance and superiority. This is the international superiority of an intrinsically white supremacist country.
Every war or military action against poor and less developed nations, what used to be called the Third World, is justified in embellished terms and coded words as in response to the actions of the modern “savages”—therefore stretching into the present the same ideology and superiority justifications that were deployed to legitimize the genocide of Native Americans. The recruited military personnel come with their own ideological baggage that serves as a springboard into a more intense rationalization of the alleged inferiority of the “enemy,” absorbing and refracting the official chauvinist ideology, and combining it with their own set of bigoted notions, particularly expressing them through racist imagery and discourse against the peoples designated as the enemy of the moment—and in its most vile form directly engaging in wanton murders and massacres of civilians. As such, the military is fertile breeding grounds for white supremacy.
Every war or military action against poor and less developed nations, what used to be called the Third World, is justified in embellished terms and coded words as in response to the actions of the modern “savages”—therefore stretching into the present the same ideology and superiority justifications that were deployed to legitimize the genocide of Native Americans.
That the U.S. military continues to display, even in the aftermath of the Capitol assault, complete incompetence and disregard in dealing with these organized political tendencies within its ranks shouldn’t be surprising—as a recent Huffington Post exposé revealed. In a way, the instigation of these supremacist views has always been present in the U.S. military. However, in the current context of political fracture, the ideas and worldview historically deployed by rightward moving military personnel are finding targets, in addition to the traditional international sphere, that lie at home.
A recent NBC News report described how thousands of individuals belonging to the various special forces branches of the military belong to a number of secret Facebook groups that openly engage in far-right, brazenly racist discussions associated with the politics of QAnon, militias, etc. The sophisticated military capability of these people, their increasing numbers, and how they are willing to use their military skills to advance their politics is a serious threat.
No discussion of the connection between the growth of far-right ideology and the armed bodies of the state is complete until the Border Patrol (BP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are addressed. Since the unapologetic militarization of the border took off under Bill Clinton’s two terms in the 1990s, the personnel recruited by both the BP and ICE attracted growing numbers of virulently racist individuals—again, regardless of their ethnic/racial background. The willingness of ICE personnel to flout laws and regulations in pursuit of their targets was frequently in the news throughout Trump’s administration.
Yet the potential danger posed by these paramilitary outfits to people other than immigrants became evident once Trump decided to deploy personnel from these agencies to confront the sustained BLM protests last summer. The actual kidnapping of BLM activists by BP units dressed in camouflage, which never identified themselves as part of any government agency, is the stuff of military dictatorships and government-sponsored death squads around the world. As the election date approached last fall, a number of activists and critics expressed fear that Trump would attempt to deploy Border Patrol and ICE personnel to remain in power regardless of the outcome of the election.
The relationship between the far-right and law enforcement is not completely straight forward. As long as the far-right perceives that law enforcement is on their side, that a number of their affiliates and sympathizers are in the ranks of the police agencies, they consider the cops their allies. Yet, when the far-right pursues more radical actions, such as the Capitol attack and the kidnapping of the governor of Michigan, the reaction of law enforcement agents rests on the evaluation of a relatively small collection of considerations.
Central is the issue of the balance of power in relation to their own view of the world. Even if they deeply sympathize with the putschists, they ask themselves questions like these: (1) do I believe that the current social order is no longer sustainable; (2) are things so “far gone” that an insurrection is absolutely necessary here and now?; (3) if I join in, what is the likelihood that larger segments of society will follow suit, so it won’t explode in my face, and I won’t be left holding the bag? We know for the moment how most law enforcement personnel have answered these questions. But if the conservative sectors of the population continue to harden in their right-wing view of how society should function, both at large and locally, if social and economic dislocation deepens, there is no guarantee that these questions will not be answered in the opposite direction by large segments of the people who staff the armed bodies of the state.
We should learn the lessons of places like the former Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia-Herzegovina. As Bosnia broke down into nationalist factions, people who had lived among each other for generations found themselves on opposite sides of armed conflicts. The normal functioning of society broke down between regions, cities, and neighborhoods; even within interethnic families. Nationalistic paramilitary formations were instrumental in recruiting ordinary people to engage in the shocking kind of violence that the world witnessed in this region during the 1990s.[i]
Conclusion
The series of mutually self-reinforcing factors described above operate in favor of continued growth of far-right ideology and the reach in political influence of the more radical sectors within the activist contours inspired by Trumpism. It would be a dangerous mistake to assume that because the most assertive elements of the alt-right are currently in retreat – it means that their politics are mortally wounded. It should not be surprising that the April 11th “white lives matter” call to action resulted in flat no-show from the far-right. The complacency of many liberals in representing the right-wing as a bunch of ignorant fools greatly underestimates the capacities and determination of sectors of the far-right. The far-right is currently in retreat, waiting out the backlash against some of their members, and assessing the outcome of their ill-fated Capitol putsch. Their more astute members will both take inspiration from how they were able to briefly take over the operational grounds of the U.S. Congress, but also identify their deficient assumptions. They will likely seek cover again under the wing of Trump’s machinations.
In the meantime, Koch will continue to push forward his project of plutocratic absolutism. His efforts to oppose the passage of new voting rights legislation, H.R. 1, are in tune with his top down strategy: “a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.” The GOP will continue to work toward more gerrymandering and voter suppression. Many liberals fail to understand the qualitative shifts on the ground, and continue to observe and interpret right-wing political developments through a frozen lens. A March 2021 article in The Atlantic, “The Republican Party’s Irrational War on Voting Rights,” describes as baffling that the GOP is pursuing voter disenfranchisement legislation in 43 states, which if enacted would also negatively affect Republicans voters, in some instances in greater proportion than Democratic voters.
What this world vision fails to understand is that the Kochian libertarian project pursues the nullification of any type of electoral pressure from ordinary people, regardless of whether they politically identify as Democrats or Republicans; that the aim of this project is to circumscribe decision-making to that of a Patrician vision of “democracy.”
In this regard, the pursuit of complete control of Koch politics over the modern GOP, and the successful implementation of their project would be like an attempt to get the political monopoly of power that results from the successful fascist takeover over national governing powers—in its corporate phase—but without having to tolerate the fascist leaders’ immediate control of the polity, and having skipped the turmoil of a successful fascist movement in the streets. It is a process meant to unfold like a palace coup, an authoritarian project from above, that hopes to use the right-wing masses as a stage army at best. That is in contrast with the messy and unpredictable politics of a fascist-leaning mass movement. It is the continuous thrust in that direction, in the process undermining basic rights and mechanisms of redress of ordinary people, that the danger lies.
The Kochian and the hardcore Trumpist strands of the Republican Party are not reducible to slightly different versions of each other, for there are very significant contradictions between these camps. Yet in the current political climate, they feed into each other. Every attempt at voter suppression by Republican governors and their legislatures is welcomed by the Trump-aligned base. The segment of the Republican base that sees the other mainstream political party, the Democrats, as illegitimate and treasonous is not relenting on these assumptions—now taken as principles.
For these are not ordinary times. All the dog-whistling that the Republicans have engaged in in previous decades happened in a different political context. There has been a qualitative shift in the political dynamics. To describe it only as an increase in political polarization is insufficient. The right is building its trenches, trying to impose facts on the ground, through the political and institutional forts it has built—both regional and national, and through the executive, legislative, and judicial branches it is attempting to freeze under its control. There are millions of radicalized and radicalizing right-wing individuals in the U.S. who have nodded yes at the question of whether they would join the fray, weapons in hand, if they were issued the clarion call. What their leaders do or fail to do will make a significant difference.
The expulsion of Liz Cheney from her party leadership position is an overt sign of further consolidation to the right. The collapse of the project to institute a congressional commission to address the January 6th assault on the Capitol will leave a political void in the place where U.S. bourgeois democracy would have reasserted itself. Impunity will bathe the upper echelons of the GOP, while the slow and scattered prosecutions of small fishes will unfold with the low decibels of a whimper.
The short-lived effort of Marjorie Taylor Green to organize an explicit white supremacist caucus, the America First Caucus, in the House of Representatives—because the Republican Freedom Caucus wasn’t radical enough—attests to what the far-right now sees as possible. The Democratic Party, with its goal to sustain the unity necessary for the grand imperial construct of this country to continue its oversized hold of capitalist power across the world, is not an alternative to confront a Republican Party that increasingly thinks of itself as the only legitimate game in town.
Rather than expecting a linear trajectory of neofascist bands gradually growing in size and influence, as they storm through the streets of towns and cities, we should look at the fault lines already in place, deeper than the crude map coarsely described as the red-blue state divide. When one zooms in, to the county and city/town levels there are clear and hard fracture lines. The racism, bigotry and belligerence of years, within sectors of cities, in the suburbs and rural areas—that frequently expressed itself in provincial, local ways—has acquired an overarching sense that is interpreted as a national malaise in the current narrative of the MAGA right.
Rather than being restricted to the South, the longings to “Make America Great Again”, that Trump skillfully exploited, have become a yearning to have the trappings of the old Jim Crow South extended to the whole U.S. Regardless of the state, in every county, town or city, one will find this divide, with support for Trump being emblematic of this political and ideological mindset. It is from within these reservoirs that localized pockets of recalcitrance may follow the path of the sheriffs who refused to enforce pandemic restrictions, but into other areas of political contestation.
A mushrooming of reactionary “civil disobedience” in heavily conservative regions is not beyond the pale. In the context of tensions exacerbated by economic or social crises, enough instability could unleash snowballing events. Texas is emblematic of this potential. Its governor and its legislature are galloping ahead, wielding legislation that could outlaw the right to an abortion, ban the discussion in schools and universities of the white supremacist history of the state and the whole country—and its current consequences—and move beyond vote suppression and gerrymandering into facilitating the nullification of election results not favorable to the right.
As the political narrative of the far-right gains in reach, as its large Trumpist recruitment pool continues to harden in its antidemocratic convictions and its willingness to act upon these beliefs, the doings of the official Republican Party continue to fuel this brush fire. Complacency, passivity, and electoral cretinism are a recipe for disaster. It is our self-organization, both in resisting further attacks, and in the demand of our rights, dignity, and economic justice that can put a stop to these right-wing dynamics; that can open the door for a far-reaching pushback, and ultimately the radical transformation of this monster of a country. It won’t be easy, it will be brutal, but the alternative is one kind of surrender or another.
Notes:
[i] Ben Lieberman, “Nationalist narratives, violence between neighbours and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Hercegovina: a case of cognitive dissonance?,” Journal of Genocide Research (2006), 8(3), September, 295–309.
Héctor Reyes has been a Puerto Rican independence and socialist activist for 38 years. He is a retired, tenured teacher of the City Colleges of Chicago, where he served as Chapter Chair and Vice Chair of his faculty union. In the U.S., he has been a leader and activist against racism, white supremacy, police brutality, the death penalty, and for immigrant rights and those of the wrongly convicted. During his first experience as a college activist he helped lead a student strike against a tuition increase at his University of Puerto Rico campus in the early 1980s. He has written many articles about the issues described above in various journals, magazines and other publishing outlets.
