I wrote an article two years ago about why voting against fascism was a correct strategy and why we should not cringe to yell it from the rooftops. I will not exaggerate or be hyperbolic. Everything that I will claim below will either be from the mouth of the former President or from the goons and wannabe gauleiters [a district leader in Nazi Germany who served as a provincial governor, ed.] who surround him.

We cannot hope to advance our program of socialism and ever hope to see the dawn of a communist horizon in the thick haze of state sponsored autocracy, hate, and ignorance.The stakes are high. If the people’s movement fails to defeat Trump at the ballot box, the future of democracy in our republic will be in doubt. But if we vote against fascism, it will be dealt a devastating blow; as I will lay out below.

If Trump cannot be president, he will likely face years in and out of courts for the rest of his life and possibly even see jail time. Recently, Trump and his organization were fined over $364 million for fraud and banned from doing business in New York for three years. The Republican Party (GOP) will be in crisis mode. Loyalists who wish to keep using the RNC as Trump’s legal defense fund, and rebels, perhaps lead by Nikki Hailey, will continue to fight factional skirmishes. Meanwhile, the extreme policies of the GOP have failed to resonate with American voters, with the party floundering at the polls last November. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) party became the loser party. There will be the time to press the attack against the Democratic party, when we become leaders in the all people’s front. By getting out the vote to defeat fascism, we advance the cause of socialism.

With Trump removed from the equation, the people’s movement will be much bolder about rocking the boat. The lackluster turnouts we had seen for voting rights and the fear of the railroad strike can be reversed. Today, our battle cry is what it was during the anti-fascist war against Adolf Hitler’s Germany, not one step back! Voting against fascism is inseparable from the fight for socialism.

The fascist movement in America was set back but that only makes it more dangerous. The Trump administration stumbled around the Muslim ban and “shit hole country ban.” There was too much opposition from the courts and he became mired in scandal after scandal. The blatantly corrupt kleptocrats who occupied the administration managed to finally disprove the long standing myth that Republicans meant effective governance.

This is an error that Trump and the Heritage Foundation are keen on fixing. In what was supposed to be a softball interview with Sean Hannity, Trump told him that he would not be a dictator, other than for day one. This “day one” dictatorship plan has been backed by what passes for MAGA “intellectuals” such as Charlie Kirk and Stephen Miller, as a part of a new strategy called Project 2025: The Presidential Transition Project.

The blurb on their website states it’s mission:

“ It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.

This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”

The project, unabashedly Christian nationalist, lays the groundwork for the unprecedented expansion of executive authority. It would eliminate the independence of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Federal Trade Commission, (FTC), and other agencies that Trump found bothersome.

To carry out his orders, Trump has called for thousands of federal employees to be fired and to be replaced by workers who are appropriately vetted on the basis of their ideological belief in the limited role of federal government and personal loyalty to him,

“I will require every federal employee to pass a new civil service test, demonstrating an understanding of our constitutional limited government.” The former President said.

Trump’s vengeance would also extend to the Department of Defense (DoD). He expressed a strong desire to execute former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who stood against his plans to “crack skulls” and “just shoot them” during the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020. Trump staffing the pentagon with loyalists does not bode well if he chooses to invoke the insurrection act during the next mass protest movement, and orders American soldiers to use deadly force against civilians. Whether or not soldiers would shoot American citizens is speculative, though the fact that 1 out of 5 capitol rioters were veterans is not a comforting thought either, and I don’t want to find out.

Taking another page from Mein Kampf, Trump has repeatedly stated that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, and the worst part is that Republicans, by and large, agree. A CBS News Poll found that 72% of registered Republicans agreed with the statement even without hearing it came from Trump, when hearing it came from Trump, the number shoots up to 82%. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, has dutifully defended the President’s hate speech. This is not the first time Trump has quoted the Nazi dictator and has even praised him. According to John Kelly, Former White House Chief of Staff, during a 2018 trip to Paris to commemorate the end of World War I, Trump told him that Hitler “did a lot of good things.” Trump is also alleged to have asked Kelly “You f*cking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” And by German generals, he of course, meant Hitler’s generals. He has also called his political opponents “vermin” who he will “root out.”

Inspired by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, Trump vowed to oversee the largest mass deportation in US History and has become obsessed with involving the military, as well as local police, who he has also promised to shield from the law. Trump’s plans to intern migrants, potentially in their millions, at military bases, where they will be flown out of the country by military planes. Trump has also targeted the 14th amendment, threatening the Jus Soli, right of soil, citizenship. Right-wing media repeatedly ignores the fact that the GOP, following Trump’s orders, has killed any political settlement to deal with the crisis at the border and ignored the fact that red state governors like Greg Abbot of Texas are responsible for deporting migrants by bus to big blue state cities like New York, with little to no preparation or support networks in place, so they can use it as a political issue for the election in November. They also call the surge of border crossings an “invasion” and have spread the dangerous phrase “military age men” to describe migrants. Their phraseology purposely promotes cynical conspiracy theories of a “great replacement” and strokes racial fears and prejudice.

Comparing the Marxist definition of fascism from Dimitrov’s Speech to the 7th Congress of the Communist International 1935 to Trump’s statements and policies, paints a clear picture of the threat we face:

“the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital… It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”

And let us not forget about the goose stepping scum emboldened by the policies of their protectors and patrons, who will take to the streets as their overlords step into offices, as GOP officials condemn LGBT+ people as “filth,” we can be sure if Trump strikes back, he will inspire and vindicate storm troopers and Ku Klux Klanners who will feel much more safe to terrorize with a friendly face in the White House, DOJ, and DOD. (Trump attempted to give his Jan 6 followers national guard protection). The rise of transphobic, Islamophobic, and all varieties of hate speech coming from right wing media, the GOP as well as their web of aligned online influencers and personalities, has already led to a dramatic rise in hate crimes. Of course, let us not forget that Trump infamously ordered the Proud Boys and other white supremacist militias to “stand back and stand by.” All of this has already taken place in states with far-right GOP officials like Florida and Tennessee, where neo-Nazis openly bully and terrorize. This unchecked surge of hatred has already led to murder in Florida. This trend will no doubt expand nationwide if their preferred candidate is successful in November.

The list can go on for pages and pages of the horrifying policies of another Trump administration. Though the resistance of our class, make no mistake, will be fierce, we will be put on the defensive, yet again. Those who chafe at the people’s front strategy will surely be vexed to find out that another four years of Trump will once again put socialism even further in the background and the needs of liberal democracy up front. In order to advance socialism, we must advance democracy and democratic reforms.

If some find me too “liberal” let us consult our wise teacher, the venerable Vladimir Lenin. From his 1905 treatise Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, chapter II; What Can We Learn From the Resolution of the Third Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. on a Provisional Revolutionary Government?

“In answer to the anarchist objections that we are putting off the socialist revolution, we say: we are not putting it off, but we are taking the first step towards it in the only possible way, along the only correct road, namely, the road of a democratic republic. Whoever wants to reach Socialism by a different road, other than that of political democracy, will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense. If any workers ask us at the given moment why we should not go ahead and carry out our maximum program, we shall answer by pointing out how far the masses of the democratically-minded people still are from Socialism, how undeveloped class antagonisms still are, how unorganized the proletarians still are. Organize hundreds of thousands of workers all over Russia; enlist the sympathy of millions for our program! Try to do this without confining yourselves to high-sounding but hollow anarchist phrases—and you will see at once that in order to achieve this organization, in order to spread this socialist enlightenment, we must achieve the fullest possible measure of democratic reforms.”

I have discovered that Lenin becomes more relevant every year, not less, to the current conditions of the United States. Lenin said socialism is about people’s power. How can you have a working class state, where the workers are in charge, without the workers being properly organized, politically, economically, and socially, to even reach a point where that is possible or gaining the knowledge of their own true power and the experience of making their own decisions? A worker cannot run the state if they do not even understand or participate in basic democratic elections and civic affairs. Ultra leftists have attempted to turn Lenin into a mascot of their immature fanaticism while ignoring the brilliant Marxist and enlightened small-d democrat he actually was. This is something we must correct. Only by defeating fascism and preserving our democratic republic will we press ahead on the road to socialism. It is our party’s detractors who do the most harm to advancing communism, by allowing liberals to lead political struggles, rather than communists. If you cannot organize voter turnouts, then forget about your revolution.

Ironically, our enemies see this clearly. “Famous Chinese leaders like Mao Zedong and Mikhail Gorbachev loved democracy because democracy is a step toward socialism, which is a step towards communism,” said Loren Culp, failed GOP candidate for governor of Washington state. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC),during a panel moderated by Steve Bannon, fascist Jack Posobiec told a crowd “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it’.” And let us not forget that GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene swore at a 2022 event hosted by the NY Young Republicans, that if she had organized the Jan 6th coup, along with Steven Bannon, that the insurrection would have won and would have been “armed.” At this same event, the President of the NY Young Republican Club, Political operative Gavin Wax, told the crowd, that “we want total war.” Echoing the language of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Gobbels, who asked assembled Nazis in 1943, as the tide of war turned against Germany, if they desired totalen krieg, total war. Wax said “We must be prepared to do battle in every arena.” “In the media, in the courtroom, at the ballot box. And in the streets.”. As communists, we must be prepared to answer in kind, on each and every front.

President Biden, has rightfully earned the epithet Genocide Joe, for his appalling and indefensible support for Israel’s ongoing military campaign. He cannot be entrusted to defeat the fascist danger on his own, because he himself aids in the erosion of U.S. democracy too, by bypassing congress for weapon sales to Israel and authorizing airstrikes in Yemen. Congress has shown an inability or an unwillingness to legislate while we have seen an increased use of executive orders to circumvent our dysfunctional and gridlocked political system. The trend of centralized decision making around one man, as the answer to a country’s domestic problems, characterizes a world wide political phenomenon. Biden’s democracy vs autocracy thesis holds more weight than he may realize, yet he himself also contributes to the problem.

In order to successfully defeat Trump, and protect democracy, we must mobilize, organize, and rally the great masses of the working class majority in this country, which the Democratic Party often fails to do themselves. After all, the 2020 Democratic victory in Georgia, was accredited to non-partisan grassroots community organizers, instead of the Democratic National Committee political machine. Our Co-Chair Joe Sims said that “defeating Biden’s support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza is the path to defeating fascism in November.” The massive show of force in the key swing state of Michigan, where over 101,000 people voted ‘uncommitted’ rather than for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary, shows how high the stakes are for the fight for a ceasefire. Make no mistake, the fate of Palestine and U.S. democracy are now intertwined. Failure to reach a ceasefire could very well mean a defeat for Biden in Michigan and even in the entire general election. While Biden will have no one to blame but himself for his defeat, the results would be catastrophic. Ironically, Biden’s love for Israel might end up with the U.S. becoming a Janus-faced Israel; a fascist country led by a corrupt authoritarian, at the helm of a far right wing party, in command of a cruel and hateful security apparatus. We must do everything in our power to ensure this does not happen.

Images: “This is what democracy looks like” (Creative Commons); “Fascism no! Freedom for political prisoners in Spain” by Romero, Rachael (Library of Congress, no restrictions);  “There are two parties” (Creative Commons); “Democracy Spring At The US Capitol 15” by Stephen Melkisethian (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Deed)

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