CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

“Let’s Vote to Save This Land” and “America Renews Itself”

Image by Getty and Unsplash .

It’s great that wealthy Democratic Party celebrities like Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen dislike the deranged fascist lunatic atop the world’s most lethal superpower, but their stance on the United States’ 47th president falls far short of the menace posed by the Trump fascist regime.

Midler and Springsteen’s statements are incommensurate with the historical moment – a time during which, “humanity,” in the words of Refuse Fascism (RF), “is held hostage by a fascist regime that is genocidal, hell-bent on destroying the environment and which every day is bolting into place a white supremacist, theocratic, patriarchal, immigrant-bashing, science-denying, fascist America.

“Right now,” RF adds, “a fascist regime in power stands in the way of any chance at a decent future for humanity.”

“This regime,” RF rightly insists, “will not be stopped by waiting for a midterm election that [Trump operatives and allies] are actively rigging. No one should believe that a tyrant who incited—and then pardoned—the January 6th insurrectionists will respect any election he loses.”

The notion of waiting Trump out is capitulation, complicity, and advance surrender. It is, as RF says, “up to the many millions of people who do see the present existential danger to act now and make the demand TRUMP MUST GO NOW! — felt everywhere from the top to the bottom of this country.”

“Let’s Vote to Save This Land”

This is NOT how Bette Midler sees things. Look at Midler’s widely viewed new bourgeois rendition of the longtime labor-left folksinger Woody Guthrie’s iconic 1940 anti-fascist anthem “All You Fascists Bound to Lose.” The proletarian balladeer Guthrie sang about “people of every color…getting organized” to fight against fascism, “race hatred,” and capitalist “greed.” He said he’d bring his “union gun” to help those “marching across these fields where a million fascists die” to “end this world of slavery.” Woody’s focus was on the battle right now, in the present moment.

By contrast, the main theme and the main reason the fascists are “bound to lose” in Midler’s watered-down version is that “we’re gonna win the midterms…America get ready,” Midler (with a net worth of $250 million) sings, “midterms are at hand. We’ve got to stick together and vote to save this land.”

Midler says nothing about taking on racism or the greedy capitalist parasites or reaching out across racial lines to end modern slavery. She says nothing about the rest of the world.

Her focus is on bourgeois elections a half year out — a half year out while the monstrous Trump-Vance-Miller-Rubio-Hegseth-Vought regime relentlessly and right now threatens everything decent people hold dear and all prospects for a decent future.

While Woody sang from box cars and jungle camps and at labor, leftist, and civil rights rallies, Midler’s video ends with her and her fellow wealthy celebrity Barbara Hershey smiling on reclining chairs in leisure garb (holding up placards saying, “No Kings,” not “No Fuhrers” or “No Dictators” or “Remove the Dictators” or “Refuse Fascism,” or “Remove the Regime” or “Trump Must Go Now!”)

I am reminded of the Marxian historian Alan Dawley’s reference to the American ballot box as “the coffin of class consciousness.”

What Bette Midler does here is in my view rather sinister: coopting a stirring musical call for a serious people’s and proletarian fight against fascism to the project of rallying people behind ruling class candidates in a Weimar party — the dismal, dollar-drenched capitalist-imperialist Dems — that will not and indeed cannot fight fascism the way it needs to be fought.

The fact that the Republifascist party in power is subverting the elections and may even cancel them or refuse to honor their outcome make her version of “All You Fascists” doubly problematic.

“Until They Cut and Run”

This line in Midler’s version of “All You Fascists” is alarming: “Hey there all you fascists, let me put you straight When you come for the rеst of us we’ll fight you at the gate.”

Wait… for the rest of us? Shouldn’t that be for any of us?

Also problematic is this Midler lyric: “We’ll battle ICE together until they cut and run, just like in Minneapolis and when the midterms come.” There are three problems here:

1. Trump’s fascist ICE (and Border Patrol) gendarmes have not “cut and run” in Minneapolis or anywhere else across the United States. They have re-branded after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. ICE’s already vast network of concentration, torture, and death camps are expanding right now with massive “Big Beautiful Bill” money that is intact through and across the 2026 midterms elections. The raids and terror continue, dragooning more than a thousand of our immigrant brothers and sisters into the camps every single day. 2. Midler here falsely conflates the often heroic and inspiring struggle against ICE waged by the people of Minneapolis with the paralyzing muck and mire of the United States’ savagely time-staggered bourgeois electoral politics. 3. The Republifascists — the party of January 6 — have no intention of........

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