“Campaign Style” Rallies My Ass...
Trump Is Organizing Fascist Lynch Mobs and Foot Soldiers
| Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Trump recently held a series of rallies, including in Fargo, North Dakota, on June 27 and in Great Falls, Montana, on July 5. While mildly critiquing some of Trump’s rhetoric, the media treats them as “campaign-style events” aimed at boosting Republicans in the midterm elections.
That’s like calling Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies “campaign” events “marred by biased characterizations of Jewish people”—as Nazi storm troopers were being galvanized and World War 2 and the Holocaust loomed.
Mobilizing and Organizing a Mass Fascist Movement... for Combat
Some people say the Trump/Pence regime isn’t fascism because there isn’t a mass fascist movement in the streets. But such a “weaponized” base is exactly what Trump is working to cohere and unleash with his reality TV/Nurembergian rallies.
At these rallies Trump doesn’t just stoke racism, misogyny, hatred, blood lust, and revenge, though he does do that. He’s also painting his fascist regime as the victim of left-wing and Democratic Party violence and preparing his followers for the possibility of actual combat against his enemies (whether the fascist regime feels they have to “go there” or whether they think the sheer intimidation of nascent lynch mobs will be sufficient).
With immigrant children being ripped from their parents, Trump not only escalated his Nazi big lies that immigrants are all drug dealers and violent gang members. He also painted Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the victim of attacks by “left-wing activists trying to block ICE officers from doing their jobs, and publicly posting their home addresses, putting these incredible people and their families in harm’s way,” and called on his followers to “defend” the ICE officers. And just days after a white reactionary (reportedly influenced by the alt-right) murdered five journalists in Maryland, Trump stoked hatred of the media—calling them fakes and liars.
Trump didn’t just repeat his racist smears of Black congressperson Maxine Waters as a “low IQ individual”; he threatened her directly by lying that she was “telling people ... to assault” administration officials (she’d called for nonviolent protest). Trump threatened Waters to “be careful what you wish for.” Waters was then deluged by death threats, including from the deputy district attorney of San Bernardino County who said, “Being a loud-mouthed c* in the ghetto you would think someone would have shot this b* by now.” (See Coco Das of Refuse Fascism, for more on what Trump said at these rallies.)
Trump warned that “Democrats want anarchy, they really do, and they don’t know who they’re playing with, folks.” And he concluded by declaring: “We won’t back down, we won’t give in, we will never, never back down, we will go forward to victory. We are Americans and our hearts bleed red white and blue...”
Trump’s rallies aren’t the only way fascist forces are being whipped up, organized, and hardened for battle. Trump just pardoned some of the Oregon militia ranchers who inspired the armed takeover of Malheur Wildlife Preserve two years ago. The alt-right fascists recently received a permit to stage an anniversary “Unite the Right” rally. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of being “assaulted while Black” by white supremacists has escalated into a nationwide epidemic (recently a Black family and dozens of mourners were driven out of church during a funeral for their mother by a white preacher).1
The Trump/Pence fascists aren’t merely trying to “maximize their leverage during this election cycle,” or while the “pendulum” is swinging their way. They’re out to break the “pendulum” and permanently lock in their fascist rule! And a key element of fascists consolidating their rule overall, as Bob Avakian analyzes in “The Fascists and the Destruction of the ‘Weimar Republic’... And What Will Replace It,” is the destruction or forced capitulation of their liberal bourgeois opponents in the ruling class and media.
As Trump Prepares for War, the Democrats Are “Eager to Work with the President”
The Democrats cannot and will not stand up against this. While Trump is whipping up and steeling his followers for violent struggle against his opponents (including against efforts to indict or impeach him), the Democrats are criticizing righteous anti-regime protests and calling for “civility.” After Trump repeatedly attacked her, Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp dismissed it as "election-year politics" and said she was eager to work with Republicans, "including with the president." Meanwhile, the Democratic Party leadership counsels people to reach out to, “understand,” and conciliate with Trump’s base of racist, misogynist, America-First fucks.
As Bob Avakian digs into in BAsics 3:10 and 3:11, while the fascists are quite willing to whip up and unleash their base, the Democrats are terrified of doing likewise with their base. These Democrats prefer order and preservation of the empire to mass upheaval, even if it’s the order of fascism. They’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The Old Order Is Not Coming Back—What Will Replace It Is Up to Us
The Democrats cannot and will not lead people in standing up against fascist thuggery. But if a core of people DO stand up against these OVERT and broadly recognizable expressions of fascism—as people did last year in Charlottesville and Boston as well as at Revolution Books in Berkeley—it can galvanize and draw forward broad support, and it can be part of beginning to really change the dynamics of the whole political situation.
Things do NOT have to go the way of fascism. There is a real and urgent need to stop this fascist regime in its tracks, to drive it out through truly massive, nonviolent political struggle. But, as we said last week:
...let’s not forget: the old order—the still-existing order—is an order of horror, a reign and rain of terror. Both the old and the new are different forms of rule for the capitalist-imperialist system; the essence is the same. The lives and bodies of billions are ground up in sweatshops, mines, and plantations every day to serve a way of life for the few that never can be—and never should be—sustained. Whole peoples were and are brutalized and slaughtered, decade after decade right up to today, in the defense of that way of life. All through the empire, women and LGBTQ people were and are devalued, invisibilized, stigmatized, abused and worse, and overall treated as less than human. And in its homeland, the founding “sins” of genocide and slavery played out and still play out, with a viciousness yet untold, every single day.
...there is a huge fight to wage right now against the imposition of fascism with the even deeper horror that this already is meaning—and the far worse it promises once it is fully implanted. There must be a monumental struggle to drive out the fascist regime in this country, and there is an urgent phase in that fight at this very moment.
But as we wage the struggle to drive out this fascist regime, what should our aims be? To go back to the old? We don’t have to live this way... we do not HAVE to choose between two monstrous alternatives. The possibility exists for a radically different and radically better world. We need a revolution, an actual revolution, to get to that world; a revolution in which millions are led to go all-out, as conditions change, to overthrow the system. The basis, argument and vision for that world can be found in the work of Bob Avakian, BA, in THE NEW COMMUNISM and other works. The framework and blueprint for a society working toward such a world has been concretized in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by BA. There is a strategy in HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution. And the leadership for the momentous struggle to bring that world into being is here, as well, in BA and the Revolutionary Communist Party he leads. As you fight the regime... GET INTO THE REVOLUTION! AND GET INTO BA!
1. The Washington Post and other outlets report people have been harassed or assaulted for
• couponing while Black
• graduating too boisterously while Black
• waiting for a school bus while Black
• throwing a kindergarten temper tantrum while Black
• drinking iced tea while Black
• waiting at Starbucks while Black
• AirBnB’ing while Black
• shopping for underwear while Black
• having a loud conversation while Black
• golfing too slowly while Black
• buying clothes at Barney’s while Black
• or Macy’s
• or Nordstrom Rack
• getting locked out of your own home while Black
• going to the gym while Black
• asking for the Waffle House corporate number while Black and
• reading C.S. Lewis while Black
...among others. [back]
We can’t be simple-minded if we’re going to actually do what needs to be done, especially if we are going to make the kind of revolution we need to make. You have to look at what’s been building in this society for quite a while now.
It’s helpful to look at it kind of like a pyramid....And if you look at this kind of pyramid thing, on the top of this pyramid is the ruling class and its different political representatives, which (even though it may be a bit oversimplified) we can look at as the Democrats on one side and the Republicans on the other. And for decades now these people who are grouped around Bush and the kind of people that they represent have been working and preparing a whole thing in society—a whole infrastructure you might call it—a whole structure within the society itself that could move this society in a whole different way towards a fascistic kind of thing when things come to that.
Look at this whole religious fundamentalist thing they’ve got. This is an effort to deliberately build up a base of people, millions and millions and millions of people, who are frightened by the idea of thinking—I’m serious—people who cannot deal with all the “complicatedness,” all the complexity of modern society, who want simple absolute answers to the complexities of this society....
On the other hand, here are the Democrats at the top of this pyramid (on the so-called “left”). Who are the people that they try to appeal to—not that the Democrats represent their interests, but who are the people that the Democrats try to appeal to at the base, on the other side of this pyramid, so to speak? All the people who stand for progressive kinds of things, all the people who are oppressed in this society. For the Democrats, a big part of their role is to keep all those people confined within the bourgeois, the mainstream, electoral process...and to get them back into it when they have drifted away from—or broken out of—that framework....
This is significant in itself but it also demonstrates a positive potential in terms of revolution. I’m not saying that we are on the threshold of revolution right now, but just looking down the road, and looking at the potential, one of the things that leads to a revolutionary situation is that millions and millions of people feel that something is intolerable. They want certain leaders at the top of society to lead them in doing something about it, but those leaders are not in the position to and don’t want to lead them in doing it—so whom do they turn to? The people who are willing and determined to lead them to do it and to take it somewhere. So this is a situation that’s full of great danger; but the same situation—or the other side of the contradiction—is that it holds much positive potential for struggle now and for revolution as things unfold.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:10
These right-wing politicians (generally grouped within the Republican Party) can, will, and do actively mobilize this essentially fascist social base...yet, on the other side, the sections of the ruling class that are more generally represented by the Democratic Party are very reluctant to, and in fact resistant to, mobilizing...the base of people whose votes and support in the bourgeois political arena the Democrats seek to gain. This (Democratic Party) side of the ruling class generally is not desirous of—and in fact recoils at the idea of—calling that base into the streets, mobilizing them either to take on the opposing forces in the ruling class and their social base or in general to struggle for the programs that the Democratic Party itself claims to represent and actually in some measure does seek to implement....
As an amplification of the basic point here, it is important to recognize this: Within the framework of the capitalist-imperialist system, and with the underlying dynamics of this system, which fundamentally set the terms, and the confines, of “official” and “acceptable” politics, fascism—that is, the imposition of a form of dictatorship which openly relies on violence and terror to maintain the rule and the imperatives of the capitalist-imperialist system—is one possible resolution of the contradictions that this system is facing—a resolution that could, at a certain point, more or less correspond to the compelling needs of this system and its ruling class—while revolution and real socialism, aiming toward the final goal of communism, throughout the world, is also a possible resolution of these contradictions, but one that would most definitely not be acceptable to the capitalist-imperialist ruling class nor compatible with the imperatives of this system!
Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:11
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