Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“The disease gets worse and worse every year, and the only remedy that will have permanent effect is to abolish private ownership of industry and production for profit, and substitute public ownership with production for use.”

– Upton Sinclair, 1933

Donald Trump, after talking with the San Francisco mayor and wealthy business leaders in the Bay Area, has at least temporarily backed off from unleashing a Chicago-style ICE spectacle there.

This is but the latest un-fascist display by the Orange “Hitler,” who couldn’t even bring down Jimmy Kimmel, much less conquer and subdue a string of countries on multiple continents.

In reality, the fascist thesis as applied to Trump doesn’t really hold together well, especially if it is seen as a repetition of Nazism. Unlike Hitler, who was probably the most popular political leader in German history before WWII, Trump struggles to maintain approval in the low-forties and has yet to find a single issue that can forge a robust national unity behind the Dear Leader.

More importantly, he does not seek to establish a new system of representation beyond parliaments and traditional parties to replace the liberal model, as the Nazis did, but to enhance his own fame and fortune by picking the carcass of a collapsing U.S. empire while promising an impossible return to its “glorious” past. He’s a con-man, not a conqueror.

Do we really think that blowing up fishing boats and trying to finish wars in a single weekend to avoid stock market losses (Trump’s strategy in bombing Iran last June) represent the martial glory fascists live for?

Even if Trump wanted to be a Nazi cult leader, he wouldn’t be able to, as mass culture doesn’t exist today like it did in the 1930s. Cultural space these days is highly fragmented due to neo-liberal stratification and anti-social media, which make mass mobilization much more difficult than it was for the Nazis. So while Trump can give us more January 6s, he can’t deliver anything like Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, and his capacity to transform U.S. culture as a whole is nil.

His talent is for division, not unity, and his erratic policies look more like a staccato sequence of lunatic reality TV episodes than they do the unfolding of a fascist ideological program. Programmatic change requires order, after all, whereas Trump is an agent of chaos, which by definition can’t be normalized.

As a response to Trump’s admittedly harrowing second term, repeatedly declaring, “This is fascism!” in a rising tone of righteous indignation really does not constitute opposition, nor does it achieve anything more than a demonstration of the highly agitated state of the outraged person, which only delights the MAGA base, as such reactions are proof of their “owning the libs.”

Government of the triggered, by the triggered, and for the triggered will not win the day.

Realistically, we are in for an extended period of trench warfare, not a violent subjugation by “fascists.” The contending parties are Trump, who aspires to personal dictatorship based on his victories at the polls, and the dictatorship of money, which has never been elected by anyone. In the middle are we-the-people,........

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