The Full Hard Right: The Fascist Takeover of America and the World

It started with 9/11, though the seeds that germinated then were planted by Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, and copiously watered by Ronald Reagan. It picked up some speed during Barack Obama’s presidency as he failed to deliver on most of his campaign promises. 


But then, it reached full steam and zoomed ahead in 2016 due to a confluence of factors—Hillary Clinton’s unlikability as a politician, Bernie Sanders’ sabotaged effort to win the Democratic Party nomination, the unpopularilty of the #metoo movement with lots of straight men and a few women (see Bridgette Bardot’s essay), and the unpopularity of the lockdowns and general frustration with the left’s COVID policy. 


But the final and biggest piece of the puzzle was the lovability of Donald Trump. You read that right. I said the LOVABILITY of Donald Trump. Stay with me…


We’ve forgetten who Donald Trump is. Forget about all his proto-fascist ravings. That’s Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller with their hands in his back, working his mouth like a puppet. Donald Trump was a well-watched, often interviewed figure in American society for decades and never showed any signs of being ideological.


To think Donald Trump was hiding his far-right views while hanging out with the Clintons, fucking porn stars and trying to put his stamp on Hollywood is to misunderstand his personality. Trump is all about money, gilded glitz and glamour, and self-glorification, but people LOVE him, because those are the real values of our culture. We pretend to hate this about ourselves, but it is nonetheless who we are. 


I listen to a lot of hiphop music from the 90s. Rappers were constantly shouting out Trump in positive refereneces. And the rappers I listen to are mostly from New York, so being multimillionaires also, they likely knew Trump or knew people who knew him. Trump was what urban Black men in the 80s and 90s (and most still today) aspired to be. He represented the same values those rappers did: a lust for wealth, misogyny, womanizing, and an “I don’t give a fuck” attitude. Trump, like them, was low-class. “I’m the ghetto’s answer to Trump—I’m cancer to the Hamptons.” - Jay-Z, 2003. 


Trump was a popular TV host. He had a popular global lifestyle brand. He was a very popular figure before he got into politics. He was the perfect vehicle for Bannon and Miller and their cabal to use as a voice for their White Nationalist fascist propaganda, and Trump obliged them, not caring about ideology one way or the other but seeing an opportunity for profit and ultimate self-aggrandizement.  If the Democrats had reached Trump first with a bigger offer, he’d have run as a liberal. 


The unforeseen side effect (unforeseen by liberals but perhaps foreseen by Trump’s handlers) was that his personality brand would draw politically-disengaged people into his political brand. People who didn’t even know what fascism was, and didn’t care about politics, supported Trump because he was a celebrity. 


Trump’s celebrity status won over a lot of former liberals who were television junkies and tabloid readers. Two of my sisters are rabid Trumpists and blithely ignore the racism of the MAGA movement. They think it means every Black person except them, Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson. They are far from alone. The media and Washington insiders still don’t grasp the breadth of Trump’s appeal. 


So as I said, we’ve forgotten who Trump is. I have one thing in common with Trump and George W. Bush: polls are total bullshit. I know this as a scientist and as an observer. There are too many unaccountable variables for polls to be reliable, like the tendency of people to lie about personal or sensitive matters, or the unassesible and uncorrectable issue of who will choose to participate in a poll or not and under what circumstances, and what biases are contained in the willingness to take a poll on a particular issue or not. The results that polls yield are actually what society wants to present itself to be, not the truth. 


So if you don’t know it by now, Trump is exceedingly popular and the force of his personality and image has won millions to the far-right movement, many of them former liberals and many of them establishment conservatives afraid to admit they like him.


This is one very distinct difference I’ve noticed between the right and the left. Most liberals proudly declare themselves as liberal or progressive. But a lot of right-wingers seem ashamed of being right-wing. They claim to be “libertarian”, “moderate”, “apolitical”.  Some can even claim to be liberal with a straight face while articulating a hard fascist ideology (*cough* Joe Rogan).


But why is there so much negative coverage of Trump if, as I argue, he is exceedingly popular? First of all, in our modern environment, negativity sells, so most news coverage is negative period. But it is all a matter of passion. 


The most liberal twenty percent of Americans hate Trump with a fierce passion. So too do politically engaged, educated conservatives who place a high value on institutional stability—about 5% of the electorate and shrinking as they see that Trumpism has been able to accomplish some of their deeams like the fall of Roe vs. Wade. 


So about a quarter of the nation hates Trump with a boundless, vitriolic passion, and about a quarter follow him like brainwashed cult zombies. But the half in the middle?  The dirty secret is that most of them admire Trump, even though some are afraid to admit it even at the ballot box. 


A recent news article asserted that Trump is the “most investigated, least prosecuted man in history”. While I would contend some mob bosses like Meyer Lansky or Joe Bonanno may hold that title, Trump’s in the running. I don’t believe even the beloved Ronald Reagan could have gotten away with half the shit Trump has done (Iran-Contra almost took Reagan down, and in the grand scheme of things, that was no big deal, the kind of thing the US government has been doing forever). 


First of all, while they give lip service to charging Trump, politicians know that an attempt to prosecute Trump would start a civil war THAT DAY. The inability to get the public interested in prosecuting Trump is because is he is so popular, including secretly with many liberals. That is why the far-right poltiics that Trump has become a paid spokesman for are sweeping the nation almost without resistance (there’s lots of hashtag resistance on Twitter but no resistance in the real world).  Trump’s apparent power, boldness, strength and refusal to back down ever (and his cadre of slavishly loyal followers) is what most Americans aspire to in this selfish culture. 


We admire Trump just like we admire Michael Corleone. Who hasn’t dreamt of breaking an organization and taking control of it the way Trump took control of the Republican party? Who hasn’t dreamt of making former rivals crawl on their knees as humbled sycophants the way Trump has with McCarthy, Lindsay Graham and so many other Republicans?  Trump is the embodiment of a power fantasy, and in a society filled with people who increasingly feel powerless, his appeal is magnetic. 


The result of this secret admiration of Trump is a mass exodus from liberalism. Trump isn’t saying anything new or doing anything new. Fascist populism is a century old. Trump’s success is a personality cult, borne of his unique combination of traits—icon of wealth, model-dating ladies’ man, popular business brand, and television celebrity, who scrupulously avoided ideology before entering politics, so that he could credibly sell himself as a fresh voice and a political outsider. 


What has happened is that the furthest wing of the left has gone full Trumpist, falling for Trump’s fake populism. I believe this is a direct result of Trump’s perceived strength contrasted with the obvious feckless weakness of Democratic Party leaders. 


The poster boy for this left shift to the right is moderately popular and once very funny political comedian Jimmy Dore, and his cadre of co-hosts and guests. It isn’t that their criticisms of Democrats and liberals are all wrong. Fox News is right sometimes. But like Fox, Dore these days rarely ever turns his lens of critique on conservatives. So the takeaway that most of his viewers will have is that he lambastes liberals, and expresses the same opinions Fox News expresses, so if a self-described liberal agrees with Fox, and appears on Fox, that must be the truth. That’s how propaganda works, by creating a false perception of consensus. 


Jimmy often jokes on his show that he is dumb. As Eminen said, a lot of truth is said in jest. Jimmy is clearly insecure about his intellligence and expresses a reflexive hostility toward people who attended elite educational institutions, just like the idiot class in “‘Merica” tends to do. 


Dore has this prepostrous clip where he is talking about Bill Gates being a college dropout and claims to know more about medicine than Gates does. This shows how out to lunch Jimmy is. A guy like Bill Gates, indisputably a person of high intellgence who has made medical issues a focus of his life for decades, likely knows more than most doctors. But Dore’s full hard right bias shows in this clip when he accuses Gates of being a pedophile with no better evidence than the fact he knew Jeffrey Epatein and then alleges that he stole all the technology that made Microsoft successful, a popular idiot-class myth applied to all super-wealthy people. Sounds pretty Q-Anon, doesn’t it? 


Dore frequently insults people just because they attended Harvard or Stanford or Yale. I heard the same attitude amongst prison inmates. (Full disclosure: I went to Stanford, did a lot of hard work to get there, so of course I take this personally). This is the attitude of the typical Trumper: a straight White male from a working class background who views “liberal elites” negatively. That’s Jimmy Dore. Like many Trumpers, Dore has some socialist-leaning views primarily with respect to labor, but it has been part of the fascist program to pretend to be pro-worker forever. That’s why the Nazis called themselves “national SOCIALISTS”. 


As dumb as Jimmy Dore may or may not be, I think he’s definitely smart enough to know what he’s doing. Jimmy has a lot of bitterness toward Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Tutks where he used to work, and claims that their show has changed since they took money from this source or that. I’ve been listening to The Young Turks sunce 2008. Their show hasn’t changed much except in format. 


It’s Jimmy’s show that’s changed, and while he panders to poor people just like Republicans do by pretending he is one of them, he just recently bought an expensive house in LA…not long after he turned on all the Democratic politicians he used to support except unelected fringe figures like Nina Turner who Republicans LOVE. Far-left fringe figures help the right just as kooks like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Lauren Boebert help the left. 


The biggest change in Dore’s show is a change in TONE. He still gives occasional lip service to liberal ideas as many on the far-right do to try to make themselves appear more reasonable. But Dore now constantly mocks feminism and noticably levies his harshest attacks at female politicians and media members—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Ana Kasparian. 


When I first started listening to Jimmy in 2016, he was a strong LGBTQ allay. Now, Dore constantly makes homophoic jokes, frequently doing an effeminate voice and telling adolescent homophobic jokes about people with funny sexual-sounding names. He says that Joe Biden is mentally impaired (which he might be) but Dore constantly mocks and makes fun of this. Yes, liberals did this with Reagan, but we’re supposed to be more evolved now.  The tone of Jimmy’s show now mirrors the tone of far-right comedy—rooted in mockery of everything the left claims to stand for and defend. 


Jimmy is smart enough to know race is the third rail, so he steers clear of parroting right-wing talking points on that, lest he be labeled a racist and lose any ability to credibly claim not to be a right-winger. But aside from this, he has staked out right-wing positions on most all issues except labor and policing. 


Dore’s views on police are personal, not political. He frequently mentions that he comes from a family of cops and had an alcoholic cop father and states that he knows that all cops are scumbags. So he is fiercely anti-cop because clearly he had a hard time with cops close to him in his life. But this does not a liberal make. A lot of right-wing militia types are anti-cop, too. 


Dore still offers occasional half-hearted criticism of Trump, but mainly he seeks to promote the idea of a right-left populist alliance and to explain and justify the rise of Trumpism as a fault of the Democrats, which is somewhat true and somewhat false. What’s the opposite of damning with faint praise? That’s what Dore does with Trump. He praises him with faint criticism.


Dore frequently says Biden and Obama are WORSE than Trump, a position only a fool or a fascist can have. Biden is, in my view, an awful and ineffectual president, and far right of center, as Obama was. Biden’s a pretty bad president, that’s true. But WORSE than Trump?!?  


Jimmy’s tortured logic for this is to cherry-pick a few Biden and Obama actions or policies that are worse than Trump’s, and then to claim that weak, conservative Democrats enable and empower the right. While this is true to an extent, weak Democrats are not responsible for planting the seeds of fascism in America. 


Democrats are moving to the right because America is moving to the right, because Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” is an enduring, smashing success. About two-thirds of Americans are fascists at heart, pushed in that direction by  eight solid decades of rabid, pathological American anti-Communism and the right’s far more effective messaging. 


You can see all the harbingers of fascism rising in America over the past sixty years, and accelerating to hyper-speed in the Trump era. America is becoming increasingly violent and chaotic, which fascists love and encourage to make their “law and order” program more appealing (remember Trump’s raucous 2016 campaign rallies?). Americans are becoming increasingly xenophobic. Communities are becoming increasingly segregated and polarized. Inequality is increasing. On all sides of the political spectrum, there is a strong sense that things are going badly. These are all the conditions that precede a full fascist takeover. 


The polls progressives point to that assert that the country is actually liberal are bullshit. America was center-right twenty years ago. Today, it’s full hard right. People say in polls that they want progressive things, but when they have a chance to vote for politicians who support those positions, they won’t. 


What wins elections in America? Law and order. Tough on crime. American exceptionalism. Tax cuts. Deregulation (except of the woman’s womb). Anti-immigration. Dog-whistle racism. (and these days, overt racism). That’s who we are. 


Because we’ve had a couple of conservative Democratic presidents and a few Democratic Congresses that still bow down to Republicans even when they have a SUPER-majority, we miss the big picture: right-wing IDEAS are winning everywhere, especially at the state and local level where in all but a handful of places, Republicans have complete control. 


So Jimmy Dore is not alone in pulling “the full hard right”.  America is going the same way, and many public figures are on the bandwagon. Russell Brand. Glen Greenwald (although some will say he’s always been a right-winger). Elon Musk seems to be pulling the full hard right now, which makes me sad because I admire(d?) him. 


I contend that Bill Maher has done this too. He was an early adopter of the rightward shift back in the wake of 9/11. He does a more credible job of still sounding like a liberal in spots, but his audience is more sophisticated than the Youtube audience, so he has to be more careful. But his controversial rant on trans-kids the other day might get his liberal card fully rescinded. 


But one cannot blame these individuals. America has taken the full hard right. These guys and girls hopping on the bandwagon are just being practical. They are looking out for number one. You never heard of a Golden State Warriors fan outside of Oakland before 2015. Now their jersey are everywhere. That’s our culture—side with the winning team.  And the right HAS ALREADY WON. And they’ve won total victory over America’s soul. 


If you’re a real liberal, make sure you passport is up to date, and start checking immigration rules in some countries you like. But the global sweep of fascism is such that there may not be anywhere to hide. 


At present, I take a very dire view of America’s immediate future. I think we are in 1929 Germany right now. A global stock market crash and recession is coming imminently, and right-wing forces in banking and finance will ensure it happens under Biden’s watch. In 2024, the Trumpists will sweep to total power just as the Nazis did in 1933. It is going to get very very bad for America and the world. 


The new global Fascism won’t look like Nazi Germany. The new fascists learned the lessons of Hitler’s failure. They won’t try anything as bold and stupid as the Holocaust or the invasion of Russia. They’ll seek to strangle enemy nations with economic sanctions, and seek to kill the undesirables within by a thousand political paper cuts, the slow erosion of rights until fascist apartheid is established.


The media is making a last-ditch effort to stop Trumpism—they are promoting the hell out of Ron DeSantis. It’s basically the reverse of the Republican strategy in propping up Bernie Sanders. Republicans know a self-described socialist won’t win a national election in America where socialist is the same as communist, and communist is the next worse slur next to the “n-word”.  


The hope is that DeSantis can out-Trump Trump in a Republican primary, but without Trump’s name -recognition and celebrity appeal, and without Trump’s ability to deny being an ideologue, will get skunked in the general election by whatever empty suit the Democrats put up. 


This is a well-comceived strategy, but I think the country is too far gone right for it to work. This would have worked in 2016, but now Trumpism is bigger than Trump. Any politician with a Trumpist ideology will get all his votes, plus some because they won’t have Trump’s personal baggage. 


Remember, Trump can only have one more term. The likely result of this inflating of Ron DeSantis will be DeSantis as Trump’s VP in 2024 and the DeSantis as president 2028-2036, if the apocalypse can be forestalled that long. 


The right-wing takeover of the world is complete. A lot of liberals (almost all women) are talking about fighting since the fundamentalist, reactionary Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. Sorry Natalie Portman, I love you, but it’s way too late to start fighting now. Marine Le Pen’s fascist party just won a huge victory in the French elections! That’s the canary in the coal mine when France is going fascist. 


This sets the stage for World War III. This time, America and NATO will be the fascist Axis and Latinos, Blacks, Muslims and liberals will be the new Jews, the demonized other. This will drive Russia and China toward an alliance, which the West knows, which is why they are trying to preemtively weaken both. Which way the Middle East will go is an interesting question. Most of the Muslim world went full fascist in World War II, but today they are demonized in Europe and America. 


Nobody really wins a world war. It is disaster for both sides. We can look back and see that. The Allies didn’t win World War I. They just set the stage for the rise of the Nazis. And the Allies didn’t defeat fascism in World War II—look where we are. 


But today’s liberalism cannot win a war. Fascists and White Nationalists have been preparing for violence forever. That is their whole mindset, their whole ideology. Liberals are mostly pacifists, and the few that aren’t haven’t been practicing and training for war like the right-wing has. 


January 6 was just a small-scale preview of the violent right-wing insurgency coming if the far-right doesn’t win at the ballot box. The Trumpist Republican Party will never accept another election defeat again. “We won or it was rigged” will be their new slogan. Long after Trump is dead, he will remain the leader of the party, just as Reagan did. Trump has achieved immortality. Trump’s not as bad as Hitler, but because of his personal appeal, he may actually supplant Hitler as the number one figure worshipped by fascists. 


How did we get here? Well, I believe it is the failure of liberals to adequately understand fascism. I’ve referred to fascists as right-wingers, but this is actually not correct. Fascism actually ENDED the right-left dynamic, and hijacked democracy, but no one recognized this. 


Fascism is a union of right and left ideas, which is why right-wingers and left-wingers can both call each other fascists and sound halfway credible. Identity politics is purely fascist. What the Republicans don’t tell you is that they are doing identity politics, too. It’s just that they only have two identity groups: conservative straight White men and the women who are subservient to them. The Democratics have too many identity groups, which is why they are fragmented and feeble while the Republicans are united and strong. 


Fascist identity politics was designed to allow the power class to win elections in a world where most people are poor. Democrats keep talking about the “threat to our democracy”, but they are steadily losing democratic elections to fascists. Donald Trump got over 70 million votes twice! Democracy is not going to stop fascism. Fascism was purpose-built to thrive in democracies!


Most Americans wrongly believe Hitler invented fascism.  Because he hated Jews, lots of people wrongly believe that antisemitism is a necessary component to fascism. It’s not. Fascism requires an enemy, but that enemy need not necessarily  be Jews. Today’s fascism, at the power level, is not antisemitic. Indeed, even in Hitler’s Germany, there was a faction of the Nazi party who felt that the antisemitism of Hitler and his inner circle was a bad idea. 


So Hitler was actually a late arrival to the fascist ideology, and did not practice it as well as other fascists did, hence provoking the destruction and subjugation of Germany. Fascism actually formed in Spain under Franco and Italy under Mussolini, and neither was antisemitic to the level Hitler was. 


So why did fascism really arise? The power classes in Eurooe and America saw the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the rising demands for democracy around the globe. They didn’t want to lose everything like the Russian Czarists did. So they took on the populist language of the left. Fascism is thought of as anti-Democratic, but in fact it was DESIGNED to win elections. It does this through the central innovation of an insight into human nature. 


Fascists realized that people care more about a sense of belonging than the practical circumstances of their lives. Hence, the rabid ethno-nationalism, Hitler’s “volk”, Mussolini’s allusions to ancient Rome…American fascists obsession with the Founding Fathers. A sense of belonging and an idea of racial superiority sells better than a chicken in every pot.


In the early days of democracy, people voted for their own interests. But fascism convinces people to vote for their TRIBE. Fascism is inherently tribal, as a substantial enough majority of humans still are, enough to allow fascists to win elections. They can’t usually win 51%, but democracies are rigged so they don’t need to. Parliamentary systems in Europe and the Electoral College and Senate in America allow victory without winning a majority of the votes. 


Fascism gets power through democratic systems, and then suspends democracy, usually with the support of most of the populace. Most people would rather starve with their brothers than prosper with strangers. Liberals don’t get this. Fascists do. 


Fascism is thought of as a male-driven ideology, but when the conditions are right, women love fascism, q.v. Leni Riefenstahl, Eva Braun. When are the conditions right for women to embrace fascism? When there are lots of rich men and lots of poor men and no middle class in a society, and that society is a patriarchy. In a patriarchy, women must find a way to acquire resources, and if rich fascists are the only ones who have them, that’s where women will turn. Hence, Trump winning the White female vote…over a White woman! Call Hillary Clinton a bad candidate all you want. If you can’t see the meaning in that, you’re blind. 


What is the antidote to fascism? A secure middle class and a stable, competent NON-POLITICAL public education system. A middle class is a moderating force in a society. People who are comfortably middle class are less likely to embrace radical ideologies. When the middle class begins to feel destabilized or threatened, fascism rises. An educated people understand how fascism works and are less likely to fall for it. But it is way too late to try to establish these necessary defenses against fascism on the fly. The facsists are already theee steps ahead of liberals. 


A structural antidote to fascism is rank-choice voting, where rather than voting for one candidate, you pick your top three or five. This works because while radicals might get a lot of first-place votes, they are likely to be left off of a lot of ballots. So rank-choice voting favors moderates, which is why this idea cannot get any reaction in America. There are no real moderates left! That is another misunderstanding of fascism. They go after the moderates first, then the liberals. 


The only real question now is, will they push the button and end or massively set back our civilization? Or will it simply be a protracted conventional war that will mean decades of suffering for all but the super-rich? Or will there be a war at all?


Fascists are in firm control of the planet right now. A real war may not be necessary. Get ready for lots of media proxy wars like the one in Ukraine. Somewhat just like Oceania’s war against…what was it now, Eastasia or Eurasia?


So is there any hope? Yes. There is hope in the fact that humans have survived a long time and endured many grave crises. There is hope in the fact that a lot of young people seem more enlightened…but it seemed that way in the 60s, too. I do believe there will be a massive change as people over 50 now (the pre-computer generations) start to die off. Our last best hope is that people raised in the internet era will be better when they get power out of the hands of all the crusty old people that have it now. But will it be too late?


We may survive this crisis, and perhaps next time we will finally establish a global civilization that actually works. But the outlook for the next century, perhaps for the next few centuries, is very bleak. We are about to enter a New Dark Age. Actually, it’s already here. But it’s going to get much much worse…

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