This time, we are told, is not like the other times.
This time — this this time, not all the other this times — it is nothing more than the future of democracy at stake. If we (and the ‘we’ here is not Republicans, never Republicans, nor is it liberal Democrats, who are assumed to know better than to think that their participation in presidential elections is largely meaningless; the ‘we’ is leftists, communists, socialists, anarchists, and anyone who has the temerity to ask what’s in it for them, or just doesn’t vote at all) don’t vote D in the upcoming election, the game is up. Trump wins the election, free and fair elections disappear forever in America, and we will all be ground beneath the heel of right-wing tyranny.
There is nothing to be gained from questioning this. Trump’s victory is assured if even a single one of us fails to cast our vote for the current president, even though he already lost once and his base of support is smaller now than it has ever been. Biden’s policy failures are irrelevant, because the stakes are simply too high, and it does not matter that he is widely disliked and that his flagging support is largely his own fault; nor will he step down to make room for another Democratic candidate, despite having suggested repeatedly that he would do so before he won the election in the first place. Trump has certainly made clear his intentions to rule through fiat, and it does no good to remind anyone that he says a lot of things and accomplishes very little through a combination of laziness, incompetence, and lack of ideological commitment.
The choice is simple: re-elect Joe Biden to the presidency, or lose democracy forever and see an era of outright fascism ushered in at the hands of Donald Trump and his cronies. Maybe you’ve heard this one before, but this time they really mean it. It does not matter how little you might respect Biden or the Democratic Party. It does not matter how many of Trump’s policies he has continued or broadened; it does not matter how many of his own promises he has failed to keep; it does not even matter that he is materially aiding and abetting the most violent ethnic cleansing of the 21st century. The choice we face may seem like the same one we’ve been told we face every four years for the past forty, but the stakes really are higher — as high as they can possibly be.
Here’s the thing, though.
We are being sold an image of the future that comes from people who have no experience of the kind of tyranny they assure us Trump intends to inflict on us, unless it is as enthusiastic cheerleaders of the United States inflicting it on other countries. The narrative is that we will wake up the morning after the election to find jackbooted thugs roaming the streets, executing dissidents, throwing minorities into concentration camps, calling off elections, punishing political enemies with jail or death, and ignoring or overturning the law willy-nilly. We will go from zero to Hitler in the space of a single day.
The problem with this narrative isn’t that Trump isn’t a genuine authoritarian threat; he is. The problem isn’t that fascism isn’t on the rise both at home and abroad; it is. The problem isn’t even that a lot of Americans would be perfectly happy to vote a strongman into power; they are (though the Democrats have a lot less interest in actual democracy than they lay claim to). The problem is that this isn’t how fascism happens. It didn’t happen this way anywhere genuine fascism arose; it didn’t happen in Spain, it didn’t happen in Japan, it didn’t happen in Italy, and it didn’t happen in Germany, which is the one historical fascism liberals ever talk about. And it won’t happen that way here, either, no matter who wins the next election.
Those of us on the left with an actual material analysis know that the wishes of the voting public are largely irrelevant in America. While Trump is willing to push the country towards fascism, is he able? It’s a serious question, and it deserves serious thought and analysis instead of a worst-case scenario meant to do nothing but preserve an already-rotten status quo. Much more of it than most people are willing to contemplate will come down to what the people with real power — the moneymen — decide to do. They don’t really like Trump, for a number of reasons. For one thing, they can spot a phony a mile off, especially when it’s one of their own. For another, they were willing to put up with him for years as long as he was good for business and he let them operate in peace. But while light authoritarianism is generally good for business, full-blown fascism is not.
With his base shrinking and becoming more extremist — and, crucially, less likely to ally with wealthy elites — the split between the wealthy corporate interests and the less class-loyal true believers in the Republican Party becomes more pronounced. The bosses and the CEO class will have to do what they have always done in times of growing right-wing reaction: They have to make a bet on fascism being worth it. That is, they have to decide if the hassles they think Trump will spare them (taxation, labor troubles, government regulation, bad attention from the press, foreign entanglements) will outweigh the hassles Trump will cause them (widespread social unease, trade issues, mass violence that isn’t easily ignored, a lack of legal redress if things go sideways, and the constant worry that the bribed won’t stay bribed). This is particularly true if Trump — who they are canny enough to know is a world-class grudge-holder — really does intend to upend the legal system that they have so painstakingly learned to bend to their own advantage.
They have good reason to believe that Trump will become nakedly corrupt rather than merely generally well-disposed to big capital; they are listening to what he says just as much as liberals are. (Many of them are liberals themselves, of course.) They don’t relish the idea of being cut out of the sweetheart deals they rely on in favor of Trump’s chosen cronies. This isn’t a new phenomenon; capital always places these wagers when authoritarianism is on the rise, but they don’t always make the right bet. It’s hard to guess which way they’ll go, particularly now that some of the big-money operators are tech people who have become true believers to the hindrance of the bottom line.
So it’s not just a question of how, say, Clarence Thomas will roll if Trump manages to make the Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of his presidential chances. It’s likely he’ll dance with the ones that brung him; he’s constitutionally inclined towards authoritarianism. He also won’t live much longer, certainly not long enough to face any consequences if Trump’s reign falls short of the thousand-year mark the way fascist regimes usually do. But he does have a keen sense of self-preservation, and he has to have wondered how much pull he’d really have if Trump — or a Trump-adjacent brute who takes racism a lot more seriously than he does — just decides to be done with him once and for all. We might even wonder what the people paying his bills think he should do, and if their answer differs from his own.
It’s also a question of how many disparate elements of the American machine will react if an open authoritarian wins. We are often led to assume that when such a leader comes to power, a switch labeled FASCISM gets flipped and we wake up the next morning in 1939 Berlin. But a lot of people with a lot of power — none of whom, it should go without saying, include us or, likely, anyone we know or care about — are going to have to make some tough decisions if Trump wins the presidency and his cronies try to functionally end the nominal democratic system we have in America.
He obviously can’t govern by force; we have seen the kind of people who are willing to do violence on his behalf, and they are few in number and low in competence. It is by no means certain that the military would support him wholesale; the rank and file soldiers will have lots of conflicted feelings if they are given the charge of domestic repression, particularly if — as is likely — it will be directed at Spanish-speaking populations, while the brass has seen how quickly he’s willing to sell them out if they don’t toe the line. Cops tend to like him institutionally, but our police aren’t federalized and it would take a lot of doing to make them so, which means we have a lot of unconnected, disjointed communities with no effective coordination and plenty of reasons not to take on heavier duties than just locking up more minorities than usual.
We’ve already talked about the moneymen. The church isn’t the power it used to be, and there’s a lot of uncertainty about him in those ranks as well, given the varying cultural and ethical issues in a country that has no single dominant religious sect. Trump’s constant bitching about the Deep State suggests he doesn’t have the national security apparatus entirely sewn up, and every elected official, judge, bureaucrat, and government employee will be making their own bets that he’ll both return their loyalty and never lose in a way that will make them face any consequences. The fact that judges in two states — neither of which are particularly liberal — have issued rulings finding him ineligible to run again suggests that maybe the whole country isn’t willing to sacrifice the system for the sake of one pissy old blowhard.
The only cohort he has set in stone is the exurban white bourgeois, and while they are the north star of post-war America, they may not be enough to support and maintain a mass reshaping of the way the country functions. Even a lot of elements of the Republican right want a government that basically doesn’t work, not one that’s been given the maximum of unaccountable power. None of this is to say that a worst-case-scenario Trump win wouldn’t be awful, or that it wouldn’t result in unspeakable misery, or won’t lead to something even worse; what would harm the country more — an authoritarian Trump presidency, or a military coup meant to prevent an authoritarian Trump presidency? It is only to say that the assumption that Trump’s victory is both inevitable and sure to result in an immediate fascist turn that will irrevocably disrupt American society, the American state, and the way America works is a faulty assumption that relies on the belief that it’s a lot easier to wreak massive change in this country than it is.
Now, that’s how fascism doesn’t work. But how does it work? It works when liberal and centrist elements allow the system to decay and decline to the degree that its systems are understaffed, underfunded, and not taken seriously by the public. It works when liberals don’t treat authoritarianism seriously and allow it to infiltrate and gnaw away at the state in the name of some wholly imaginary bipartisanship. It works when democratic elements are spooked by electoral losses and decide to throw in the towel on their own principles and ethics, moving ever further to the right in hopes of appeasing rightist elements who have no interest whatsoever in being appeased. It works when the press and the chattering classes decide that the left is the greatest threat of all and agitates for sweeping them off the board, making more and more room for the far right. It works when liberals and centrists in government decide that the best way to fight their opposition is to do things the opposition would do, never realizing that if voters want a right-wing government, they will just vote for right-wingers, not liberals who conduct right-wing actions. Possibly this all sounds familiar to you.
Because this time, we are told, it’s different. We have to re-elect Joe Biden to stop fascism and the death of democracy. It doesn’t matter if the Democrats haven’t kept their promises; they want to — oh, how they try! — but the Republicans always block them. We can’t complain when Democrats fail to govern properly; the G.O.P. will always do whatever they want even if the Ds try to stop them. We can’t hold it against Biden that his promised reforms never happen; we live in a country where the system makes it easy for the government to hurt you, but hard for the government to help you. Liberal policies should be judged only by their intentions and not their results, because the Supreme Court will inevitably block any positive results of Democratic legislation. And we dare not hope for anyone to save us outside the two-party system; third parties can never win. It’s the American way. Holding our noses and voting for Joe isn’t even the best option; better still to inhale deeply, breath in the stench of rot, and pretend that it’s the beautiful scent of lily of the valley.
Unfortunately, too many people are waking up to the hollowness of this argument, the falseness of this choice, and the dysfunction of this country. More people every day are noticing that the government does nothing for them but make promises it will never keep, and they are joining the poor and downtrodden in choosing not to support the process that exploits them, takes what it wants from them, and hangs them out to dry while it rewards those who have already been rewarded beyond measure. It is becoming impossible to ignore how many liberals and centrists raise hell about the blight in the system when their favored candidates lose an election, only to go back to ignoring it when they win. Every day more people are rejecting the lies and scorning the chance to buy into something that will never give back.
If what they say is true — if the choice is between eternal Democratic victory and full-blown fascism; if only one party can actually wield power and the other is perpetually helpless; if the government can only harm and never aid; if only one leader can truly govern and no other party or movement can succeed; if the system is hopelessly rigged and no one has the interest or the ability to reform it — then democracy has already lost. Those conditions describe nothing that could be legitimately called a democracy; the worst-case scenario they have dangled before us for half a century has already come to pass.
Now, what are you going to do about it?