Donald Trump: Not a Hitler, but a Ford
by Muhsin Y.
Recently,
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been making a stir
in the mainstream media with his "outrageous" comments. Many of these
remind the historically informed read of Nazi policy: After all, one
need merely replace the word "Jew" with the word "Muslim" to cause
polite US company to reject out of hand the idea of barring the minority
in question from going through US immigration, or having to wear
special identification badges within the US.
But at
present, Trump lacks many important tools that were at the disposal of
Adolf Hitler, his apparent hero (and indeed he is reported by his
ex-wife to have kept a copy of "My New Order" by Hitler by the bed).
Hitler had an extensive network of organised militants ready to
specifically attack the organs of Weimar democracy. Hitler had his own
openly fascist party. The Republican Party, for all its reactionary
qualities, is still within the realm of bourgeois democracy, and US
bourgeois law and order is still stable enough to have no need for an
open fascist group to maintain the economic order.
Indeed,
we can say that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are still
two sides of the same coin. They cooperate in one government (unlike in
many other bourgeois democracies where one will witness a party (or
coalition) in government and an opposition), they tend to agree on
foreign policy, and they largely agree on domestic economic policy.
Although
anything is possible, I predict that Donald Trump is not going to be
elected president of the United States in 2016. But he still represents a
real danger: Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a future fascist
movement in the United States.
The Republican Party may at
any time split (already there is the "Tea Party" faction within it), or
the Republican and Democratic parties, serving different sections of
bourgeois interest, may come to an impasse at some point in the future.
Fascism
is always a tool that is useful for capitalism and imperialism, and in
the current climate, a fascist leadership in the US would indeed
resemble Donald Trump: Using Muslims (and/or other hated minorities) as
the existential threat to "the nation", this leadership would be run by
corporate interests and mobilise militants (today's white supremacist
and xenophobic "gun nuts") to shore up its rule through actions which
might "embarrass" the legal state forces at first. It would, like the
Nazis in Germany, promise to return "the nation" to its former
greatness.
"Make America great again."
What's
interesting is that there was another US capitalist whose widely
promoted ideas are associated with the emergence of US fascism, or if
not a full fascist order, certainly the glimmer or threat of fascist
elements being permitted to operate. I am speaking of course of Henry
Ford.
Henry Ford's anti-Jewish ideas made him very popular
with the Ku Klux Klan, and his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent,
painted the Ku Klux Klan sympathetically. Henry Ford's own qualms with
them seem to have been their methods, not wanting to be required to wear
a mask, as he put it (if we assume that this was not merely stated for
reasons of wanting to keep his hands, personally, clean). From the Ku
Klux Klan's side, they stated in 1923 that they would be sympathetic to
Ford running for president. Ford's presidency was not to be. But
things turned out quite differently for the Ku Klux Klan's German
equivalent, the Freikorps. The Freikorps were paramilitary groups who,
after WWI, were the fighting force of reaction used to destroy socialist
and progressive forces in Germany, just as the Ku Klux Klan attacked
the CPUSA, before Khruschevite revisionism rendered them a non-threat.
The Freikorps got their "Ford" in Hitler, and the rest, as they say, is
history. And Hitler indeed wanted to be their "Ford": His most famous
work, Mein Kampf, was inspired by Ford's work, "the International Jew".
Ford recognised some of himself in Hitler, and backed him (against their
shared enemies, socialism and "the Jews").
The
peoples of the US were saved from the open fascist nightmare suffered by
Germany because, after the victory of WWII, the "New Deal" allowed for
sharing of super-profits generated by the US's expanded imperialist
domination. This, in turn, prevented the need for a full and immediate
confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat in the US, as much of
the proletariat was bought out by a labour aristocracy. Finally, again,
we must state that the Khrushchevite revisionists dismantled the once
militant CPUSA, leaving the US left demoralised, divided, and
disorganised for decades to come.
But if we are Marxists, and we
believe in history, we know that capitalism creates its own
contradictions, and cannot be reformed. In the march towards the end of
capitalism, these contradictions may sharpen again, as they did in
Germany, when the German imperialists lost their iron grip on power as
rival imperialist forces outmaneuvered them. Like Henry Ford, Donald
Trump is a capitalist with his fangs fully bared, readying himself and
his class for full confrontation and the abandonment of all pretense of
democratic rights in the name of "national" (actually bourgeois)
interest.
The problem, therefore, is not Donald Trump. He may suffer a heart attack and die tomorrow, but he is a reflection of the material conditions of today, and perhaps the material conditions of tomorrow.
The right-wing violence we see today may indeed grow, and it will have
political and economic defenders if the material conditions demand it.
The left in the US would do well to respond by preparing accordingly.
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Hitler kept a portrait of Henry Ford in his office in Berlin.
ReplyDeleteAn even bigger crime in plain sight was the late senator Prescott Bush of the Bush dynasty and his cronies continued to profit from the German War machine until they had their assets seized under the "Trading With The Enemy Act" in 1942. As recent as 2004 the Bush family was sued by two former Auschwitz survivors for their shady deals.
What all this means is that the US is not becoming a fascist nation, it already is.
... yes, I concur... in terms of political awareness, I am not a professional but rather a member of the educated/informed laity...
ReplyDelete... I had forgotten about the Freikorps, but I think you do a 'dishonour' to Ford in your comparison - I think you reasoning and context is spot on... as that singular entertainment, I compare Trump to an amalgam of Manuel Noriega and Jim Jones...
... but yes, what Trump opens the future US to - and I don't see it as a potential but a definite future, just one that is changeable in degree - is 'unthinkable', or unconscionable, acts by the Right... the Tea Party have worried the (previous) center of the GOP because, repeated like a raison d'être, is their broadening disregard for process - and the patience required in process - be it the process of government or judicial due process... we're looking at the political counterpart of the religious/cultist conceit that 'we' can make an agreement with 'them', and while it will bind 'them' it won't bind 'us', because 'they' are not part of 'us' and thus we can only be bound when we promise our word with our brothers - except - as can be seen historically, this dichotomy can only be maintained iff [the mathematical 'if and only if'] 'us' remain pure and undiluted in our philosophical/cultural/racial homogeneity - which requires active but *slow*, patient deliberation, which we have seen, they are incapable of...
... so my particular view of the GOP - and the vanishing standards of the US media punditry - is that it is a timebomb that *will* go off... what I don't foresee is when and 'how big the boom'