Unlike in 2016 Trump has a programme (Project 2025) and a team drawn from a Republican party that is at his beck and call, perhaps with the exception of a few frightened Republican senators. But Trump, unlike Hitler, does not have a militia at his command capable of terrorising the population. In any case, he didn’t need to create chaos to become president of the world hegemon, which was far from being the case in Germany in 1933.

His failed coup attempt in January 2021 demonstrated the beginnings of such a militia, which needs a presidential pardon in order to overcome the defeat of its aspirants and rebuild itself under the watchful eye of its advisers and in proportion to the resistance of the street. For the moment, this resistance is no match. Nothing is lost by waiting. We are still in the interregnum and already the militias are remobilising. Note an article from the New York Times Editorial Board “[i]n an online survey of more than 7,200 adults, nearly a third of people answered that political violence is usually or always justified.”

 Illusory hopes for Democratic electoral revenge in 2026

Supporters of respect of institutions are already banking on the 2026 elections to renew Congress, including the entire House of Representatives. The historical trend is for the opposition to make a comeback, which is all the more promising given the slim Republican majority. Analysts predict that the combination of the tariff hike, even if it is not the incredible one announced given Trump’s transactional tendencies, and the manu militari expulsion of a mass of immigrants reducing national production, even if it will be difficult to count them in the millions each year given the complexity of the logistics, will herald a return of the inflation. Inflation was at the heart of Trump’s victory. Logically, this would be followed by a defeat in 2026, especially as Trump has guaranteed the ultra-rich and big business a drastic tax cut and a lot of deregulations.

This is the scenario of the Democrats and other “liberal” do-gooders, including the part of the American left, which politically speaking defers to the electoral process. Since there is no chance of building a significant electoralist (centre-)left party between now and 2026, given the ideological reinforcement of the “least worst” tactic, which has never seemed so reasonable, and the incredible obstacle course, which will continue to multiply, to build it, the Democrats are by default the only alternative electoral choice. But who is naive enough to believe that the fascist leaning Republicans are going to allow a more or less normal election to take place when they have already mastered the tactics of manipulating the electoral rolls and the electoral process and challenging the courts, with the top of the system under their control, in addition to the astronomical and unlimited election spending and the traditional gerrymandering.

If there are elections, they will be “illiberal” so as to ensure a Republican victory. Remember that the Jim Crow system that blocked the vote of the vast majority of African-Americans in the South operated until the 1960s, and that in 2013 the Supreme Court struck down the federal law that was the product of the civil rights movement, preventing a return to Jim Crow tactics. With the Trumpists in government, the stage is set for even worse. In order to intimidate visible minorities and the poor, who already vote relatively little - Trump “actually got only 28% support of Americans of voting age.” - Trump, in addition to rebuilding militias, will be able to count on a militarised police force whose murderous record has continued to climb and whose violence and systemic racism no longer need to be demonstrated.

 An osmosis between militias and soldiers not countered by the general staff

Will the army, the hard core of the capitalist state, come to the rescue of bourgeois democracy? There is a bridge between the troops and the militias, comments the New York Times Editorial Board: “One of the most troubling facts about adherents of extremist movements is that veterans, active-duty military personnel and members of law enforcement are overrepresented. One estimate, published in The Times in 2020, found that at least 25 percent of members of extremist paramilitary groups have a military background.” After the failed coup attempt on 6 January 2021, the General Staff, which had been asleep at the switch, finally took some steps to screen recruits “[b]ut those reforms were more easily ordered than executed.” It’s even more lax for the police: “Yet most departments don’t have explicit prohibitions on officers joining extremist paramilitary groups, according to a 2020 study by the Brennan Center for Justice.”

The source of this extremism, combined with the racism inherent in the history of the United States, is to be found in the wars of the empire: “The end of wars and the return of the disillusioned veterans they can produce have often been followed by a spike in extremism. The white power movement grew after the end of the Vietnam War, with veterans often playing leading roles. Antigovernment activity climbed in the 1990s after the first Iraq war…”. One can imagine the effects of the post-2000 wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, which added the frustration of defeat to the ordinary military barbarity of imperial wars.

We can also doubt the loyalty of the general staff to parliamentary democracy, a workers’ and people’s conquest skilfully recuperated to trap the proletariat in an electoral rut and convenient for arbitrating conflicts within the bourgeoisie. However, this purely representative democracy, with no control by the electorate, is in no way indispensable - if anything, it is paralysing - for dealing with the existential crises of the national bourgeoisies, which is even more true for world capitalism in a state of “polycrisis” against the backdrop of the ecological crisis precipitating the drift towards a “Hothouse Earth” and the sixth great extinction. Although the USA has never experienced a coup d’état, his presidency at the apex of a constitution with a biased democracy (e.g. the non-proportional Senate, the Electoral College) has always given way to victorious generals (Washington, Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower) in a country where his presence is omnipresent, as is its culture of arms.

 “Austoritarian” neoliberalism is leading the world towards fascisation

The anti-communist McCarthyism of the post-World War II era, given the prosperity and undisputed global hegemony of the US, never threatened US representative democracy, while non-capitalist economies were building so-called communist dictatorships to pressure their populations into catching up and protecting themselves. Today, the series of military defeats since the Vietnam War and the rise in power of China and the BRICS bloc and others point to a decline in American hegemony. The resulting “multipolarity” is unfolding against a backdrop of polycrisis and a depressive long wave since the economic crisis of 2008.

This depressive wave is reflected in the USA’s large fiscal and trade deficits, against a backdrop of record public debt, at a time when the USA is experiencing relatively full employment and low inflation. This supposedly good economic climate, highlighted by the Democrats during the last election campaign, has left the working class, on which the Republicans have focused, hungry for more, given the polarisation of inequalities, which means that the very rich are monopolising the fruits of growth. “Capitalist societies have reached their climatic, economic, social and political limits. Since the great crisis of 2007-2008, accumulation has been very low. Dominant finance favours the distribution of dividends so that the rich can become even richer.”

Will the USA, at the head of this “austoritarian” neo-liberalism at the end of its tether, maintain its representative democratic institutions? The world’s other major powers (China, Russia, India) are experiencing hardening dictatorships or fascist, illiberal democracy... which nonetheless let itself be surprised at the last federal elections in India. Several middle powers in the Middle East are moving in the same direction (Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia), while in Latin America, Brazil is on a shaky ground and Argentina has an unbridled extreme right-wing democracy that could inspire Trump. The great democracies of Africa (Nigeria, South Africa) and South-East Asia (Indonesia, which has just elected an ex-general with blood on his hands) are sinking into neoliberal putrefaction. As for the few exceptions on the centre-left, most recently Sri Lanka, they are taking care not to call into question the neoliberal world order.

 The all-powerful US army is the Deep State

Unlike Hitler, who took six years to rebuild the might of the German army, which had been truncated by the Treaty of Versailles, in full view of his enemies without them batting an eyelid, the Trumpist Republicans have in their hands by far the most powerful army in the world, not counting the support of its NATO allies. This army, however, stretched across every continent, has failed to deliver in the recent imperial wars in the Middle East. Among the Republicans, isolationism, absent from the Democrats, competes with the assertion of power. With Trump, the temptation of a transactional ’deal’ at the expense of Ukraine and Taiwan competes with the loss of credibility as a global policeman. The temptation to support Zionism’s strategic ally in extending its genocidal war on Iran competes with giving priority to the Asia-Pacific.

In the US, the “Deep State” is the army, even if this is not as obvious as in Egypt and Pakistan, for example. Isn’t the basis of the Marxist conception of the bourgeois state, in the final analysis, a “group of armed men”? In the US, the gargantuan funding of the army explains the deficiency in public services and income support just as, paradoxically, popular pride in it explains chauvinist patriotism. One might think that, as a last resort, in the event of the American political crisis escalating to a climax, the army’s general staff – though there is no guarantee of its unity - would be the arbiter of the situation, using tactics and forms that may or may not respect the Constitution. We can be sure that whatever the outcome, democracy, bourgeois or not, will take a beating.

 A mass uprising driven by solidarity-based material degrowth

The alternative to this likely gloomy scenario can only be a mass uprising of the kind the world has seen since 2011, including in the US with the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter and also among women in 2016 when Trump was first elected. To be effective, however, this uprising needs to be sustained, which means it needs a plan of action, which presupposes an organisation with a political orientation enriched by a programme from which a strategy is derived. Without this alternative, a polycrisis left to its own devices leads straight to a fascist dictatorship. Because it will have no choice, this dictatorship will impose green capitalism in an Orwellian society. This society will subsidise to the hilt and to no avail the geo-engineering that claims to counter the greenhouse gases from hydrocarbons. This is the crux of Trump’s alliance with Musk, the “all-electric” king of billionaires, the other side of the coin of this green capitalism that cannot renounce the hegemony of the market.

Solidarity-based material degrowth, which not only reconciles humanity with itself but also with nature, can be described as ecosocialism, although the expression is becoming an overused commonplace, emphasising its intrinsically anti-capitalist anti-growth side. This solidarity-based material degrowth resting on democratic planning is the only possible horizon, the light at the end of the tunnel, of this alternative, the only one capable of defeating fascism based on a confused and frightened working population feeding the far-right vote, the militia and the troops.

Marc Bonhomme, 25 November 2024

www.marcbonhomme.com ; bonmarc videotron.ca

-----------------------------