TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE

TRUMP
in the White House
TRAGEDY AND FARCE

John Bellamy Foster

Copyright © 2017 by John Bellamy Foster
All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the publisher.

ISBN (paper): 978-1-58367-680-6

ISBN (cloth): 978-1-58367-681-3

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK

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 Contents

Foreword by Robert W. McChesney

Preface

1. Neo-Fascism in the White House

2. is Is Not Populism

3. Trump and Climate Catastrophe

e Nature of Resistance: A Brief Conclusion

Notes

Index
To Carrie Ann
 Foreword
by Robert W. McChesney

IN TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE: Tragedy and Farce, John Bellamy Foster
connects the great and pressing issues of our times, the resolution of which
will go a long way toward determining the course of human civilization for
generations. ose issues are climate change, capitalist stagnation, and,
centrally, the return of fascism to the United States and the global political
scene.
When Foster and I were young men—we attended college together in the
early 1970s—the term fascism was bandied about periodically. It was oen
used in a pejorative sense, as the ultimate put-down for someone opposed to
progressive politics, or just to castigate any unpleasant person on a “power
trip.” Yet in the United States and Western Europe, the idea that fascism was
a plausible political development seemed entirely farfetched. Where it
continued to exist, in Franco’s Spain for example, its days were numbered.
e experience of the Second World War guaranteed that no credible
political party or gure would ever advocate such a reprehensible and
repudiated political order. By the 1970s, we were all “democrats,” at least
rhetorically.
When neoliberalism emerged as the dominant political movement in the
United States and much of the world by the 1980s, it was careful to
distinguish its embrace of so-called free markets and hostility toward trade
unions and the welfare state, not to mention socialism, as having nothing to
do with fascism or the xenophobia that invariably accompanies fascism.
Neoliberals were for a puny and enfeebled government that would not
interfere with individuals as they went about their lives however they best
saw t. Government was liberal, the polar opposite of fascist.
e recent emergence of neo-fascist movements in Europe, and now
Donald Trump’s 2017 ascension to the U.S. presidency, courtesy of the
Electoral College, has forced a serious reconsideration of fascism and its
relationship to capitalism and to democracy. As Foster notes, in the 1950s
Paul Sweezy characterized fascism as the antonym of liberal democracy. And
now, with economic stagnation prevalent and seemingly permanent for
capitalism worldwide, crises of poverty, inequality, and grotesque political
corruption are increasingly the order of the day. Liberal democracy is
failing, as social problems are spiraling out of control. Zombie fascism is on
the march again.
We are fortunate to have a scholar like Foster tackle this subject. As a
leading political economist and theorist, Foster contextualizes fascism and
provides an accessible and coherent, yet sophisticated, analysis. And as
perhaps the leading environmental sociologist in the world today, Foster
connects the emergence of neo-fascism to the climate crisis that threatens
the survival of our species. Needless to say, it is a frightening picture at every
level.
If one thing becomes clear in reading these essays, it is that the notion
that neoliberalism, or “libertarianism,” as its boosters prefer to call it, is the
polar opposite of fascism is entirely bogus. Libertarianism is, in fact, the
other side of the exact same coin. Nancy MacLean provides crucial evidence
to this end in her recent book Democracy in Chains (Viking, 2017), which
details the origins and rise of libertarianism and the radical right in the
United States since the 1950s. It is impossible to read the internal
correspondence of the masterminds of libertarianism and not see the
fundamental contempt for liberal values and the rule of law. eir concern
with civil liberties is opportunistic. Shout from the mountaintops about the
rights of man when it advances the position of the hard right; remain mute if
not be outwardly supportive when leists are purged.
What becomes clear in MacLean’s account is that the masterminds of
libertarianism are driven by a contempt for democracy above all else. eir
great fear is that anything close to genuine majority rule would be
antithetical to the maintenance of existing capitalism, with its extreme
wealth inequality, which libertarianism heartily approves. In fact,
libertarians, or “free market conservatives,” see their most important
mission as protecting and extending the class domination of the wealthy few
by any means necessary.
 is explains the obsession among libertarians (read “neoliberals”) to
limit the ability of the dispossessed to enjoy the right to vote, to encourage
gerrymandering, to allow moneyed interests unchecked power over
government officials and bodies, and to do whatever is possible to corrupt
effective popular governance and thereby guarantee the rule of capital. But it
goes far beyond that. e libertarian obsession has been far more strategic,
and its proponents are playing the long game.
On the one hand, the neoliberal movement has been obsessed with
conquering the court system and changing the Constitution—or changing
interpretations of the existing Constitution, which is effectively the same
thing—to reduce the possibility of effective majority rule. e idea is to
make it so that no matter who gets elected, the rule of wealth cannot be
meaningfully altered or undermined. Just lock in structures that repel the
ability of the majority to change course.
On the other hand, the neoliberal/libertarian crowd has been obsessed
with eliminating those institutions that make effective political participation
in a democracy possible, what is termed the “democratic infrastructure.”
What do I mean by this? If you eliminate labor unions and other
organizations for those without property, sharply reduce quality public
education and a credible independent news media, undermine the
independence of public universities, devote billions to generating slick
propaganda, make it virtually impossible to launch effective new political
parties, and privatize as much of traditional government functions as
possible, then having the right to vote is largely handcuffed and ineffectual.
You get a “democracy” where the outcome is all but predetermined. e
logical result is that people become disenchanted and apathetic, and turn
away from politics, dismissing it all as a massive pile of bullshit. And that is
precisely the libertarian goal. People should put all their energy into their
commercial affairs and leave governance, such that it is, to their economic
betters, those who own the society’s commanding heights.
In this sense, neoliberalism is distinct from fascism; in the former people
tune out politics, whereas in the latter people get worked up in a lather over
various racist and nationalist “solutions” to the immense problems of a
society in crisis and without a functioning governing system.
 e neoliberal assault on the “democratic infrastructure” of the United
States has been proceeding for a good four decades now and has been
signi cantly completed. It means that the United States is now a formal
constitutional republic, but very far from being even a marginally
democratic society. And this means that the civil liberties Americans have
taken for granted stand on a much imsier foundation.
is is the central point I am making: what neoliberalism and
libertarianism have accomplished in stealth fashion is exactly the outcome
that fascist movements invariably seek—a demolished democratic system in
which the remaining institutions are controlled by and serve capital or are
enfeebled. Our increasingly privatized education system and disintegrating
journalism are ideal for propagandists and frauds. It is difficult to see how a
preposterous gure like Trump could exist in public life if there were a
credible information system.
But wait, the acolytes of Milton Friedman protest, we are principled. We
believe in civil liberties and freedom. We hate the surveillance state and
some of us even oppose all these wars the United States is constantly
ghting. e rhetoric is impressive, and there may be a few rank-and- le
libertarians who actually practice what they preach. But history shows that
whenever there is a crisis of the system that threatens existing property
relations, the libertarians throw in unconditionally with the militarists,
madmen, and fascists who tear up any pretense of liberal democracy and
engage in wholesale human rights violations and violence against dissidents.
e active and enthusiastic participation of University of Chicago
economists with the fascist Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s is
exhibit A in this regard. And in the United States, it is chilling to read in
MacLean’s book just how quickly the “small government” crowd approved of
illegal police violence against protesters in the 1960s.
e neoliberals also protest that they are not racists like the neo-fascists
and their policies are motivated by a deep concern for improving the
situation of society’s least fortunate, regardless of their race or ethnicity. But
in MacLean’s account, it is even more chilling to read of their disregard, and
at times contempt, for the effects of racism in our society. is should be no
great surprise as the modern “free market” movement was birthed in close
collaboration with vile white supremacists seeking to preserve Jim Crow in
the postwar South. e actual history of racial exploitation is incompatible
with the neoliberal view of the history and legitimacy of capitalism in the
United States, so it gets thrown under the bus.
e libertarian movement, bankrolled signi cantly by the infamous Koch
brothers, has effectively taken over the Republican Party. is has
encouraged the neoliberal restructuring of the United States over the past
four decades and has paved the way for a gure like Trump, and an incipient
neo-fascist administration, to gain power. And the manner in which the
Republican Party in Congress has embraced Trump with little hesitation
since his inauguration demonstrates that there is considerable common
ground in their political economic objectives. If the Republicans do part
with Trump it will not be over principles or policies. It will be because
Trump will be seen as a bad bet whose bizarre behavior could jeopardize
their political fortunes. By any independent account, Trump is a lazy,
ignorant, unre ective, and unprincipled sociopath, a blowhard and a
dangerous moron—a person who lies so routinely it appears he is incapable
of even understanding the idea of truth or falsity. Even the Koch brothers
realize this could be a problem to achieving their ambitions.
But Trump’s personality is also the basis for his support. It has made him
the most powerful person in the world. His unpredictability and the
frightening neo-fascist inclinations he encourages are now all of our
problems.
e last great wave of global fascism occurred in the 1930s, during the
Great Depression. With fascism’s inexorable attraction to war and
militarism, it led to the Second World War and, with the emergence of
nuclear weapons, to the credible concern that it could lead to the extinction
of our species. Fortunately, fascism was defeated then, but it would always
lurk in the background ready to pounce as long as capitalism exists.
e good news for humanity is that there is nothing inexorable about the
victory of fascism. ere is another road out, and that road is socialism. Not
the single-party dictatorship with its maximum leader that masked its
crimes behind the noble term and tradition. But the real thing. A
democratic society with real self-government, of the people, by the people,
and for the people. An economy that serves the people rather than an
economy that demands the people serve the needs of the owners.
 at may have sounded like a pipe dream in the past, but it is becoming
clear that it is the only credible way out of our present morass. e good
news is that people around the world are moving in that direction. It is
striking that young people, in particular, are increasingly seeking progressive
and humane solutions to the problems before us and have shown little taste
for fascism compared to older generations. e numbers are on our side. But
the neoliberals and the fascists have always known that, and they hold the
reins of power. In this timely book, John Bellamy Foster explains the nature
of their project and its implications better than anyone.
 Preface

RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT in the Republican primaries in January 2016, Donald

Trump half-jokingly told a receptive audience at Dordt College in Sioux
Center, Iowa (an institution affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church
in North America): “I could stand in the middle of Fih Avenue and shoot
somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Shaping his ngers like a
gun and acting as if he were pulling the trigger, he added, “It’s like,
incredible.”1 It is this sense of his capacity to act with complete impunity that
best de nes Trump, the celebrity billionaire, now president of the United
States.2
e present book, however, is less about the character of the new
occupant of the White House, than the rise of the radical right that his
election represented, and its historical basis and signi cance. Although
Trumpism is commonly characterized as a form of right-wing populism, the
analysis in the following pages focuses on the concrete, sociological reasons
for seeing this new political development as a type of neo-fascism, part of
the larger fascist genus. Similar political developments are evident in Europe
—in the National Front in France, the Northern League in Italy, the Party for
Freedom in the Netherlands, the UK Independence Party, the Sweden
Democrats, and in similar parties in other countries. In the United States,
however, this has taken an even more dangerous form, bringing together
white supremacists, Christian fundamentalists, neo-fascists, and capitalist
billionaires. is is a tragedy. It is also a farce. It represents “the destruction
of reason,” best represented by the Trump administration’s “ecocidal
capitalist” claim that climate change science is a hoax.3
e chapters that make up this book were written over the period from
Trump’s electoral victory in November 2016 up through the nal days of
April 2017, which ended his rst hundred days in office. Although there has
been some slight updating to account for major events since that time, the
book is meant to cover this unique period in the history of the U.S.
presidency, roughly the rst six months since the 2016 elections.
Understanding the challenges raised by the rise of Trumpism is crucial in
recognizing the strategic context of the present. What is needed is active, not
passive, resistance by the vast majority of people, the wretched of the earth,
aimed at the reconstitution of society as a whole. e alternative is darkness.
I would like to thank Martin Paddio and Michael Yates for inspiring me
to make my initial writings on Trump into a book and for their help at
various stages in the process. John Mage, as always, gave me sound advice,
criticism, and support, without which I could scarcely have gone forward. I
am also enormously indebted to others at Monthly Review, including Brett
Clark, Hannah Holleman, Fred Magdoff, R. Jamil Jonna, Intan Suwandi,
Colin Vanderburg, and Victor Wallis, all of whom helped with the
copyediting and proo ng of the original pieces and provided valuable
advice. Erin Clermont copyedited the nal book. Robert McChesney kindly
agreed to write the foreword. Joseph Fracchia provided his wisdom and
sense of history in discussions on the history of fascism. István Mészáros
gave me constant encouragement and allowed me to read some of the
chapters of his magni cent, though still un nished, work on the critique of
the state. I’m particularly grateful to Naomi Klein for sending me in the rst
week of June an advance copy of her own book on Trump, No Is Not Enough:
Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics. is was useful in helping me to develop
some of the points in this preface. As before, I would like to indicate my
deep appreciation to Carrie Ann Naumoff, with whom I discussed all of this,
albeit haphazardly, from beginning to end, and whose presence is indelibly
marked in these pages.
—JUNE 11, 2017
EUGENE, OREGON
 Neo-Fascism in the White House
ere is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now
is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy,
if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may
be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a
perilous position.
—JACK LONDON, THE IRON HEEL1

Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken up
residence at the White House: neo-fascism. It resembles in certain ways the
classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with
historically distinct features speci c to the political economy and culture of
the United States in the opening decades of the twenty- rst century. is
neo-fascism characterizes the president and his closest advisers, and some of
the key gures in his cabinet.2 From a broader sociological perspective, it
re ects the electoral bases, class constituencies and alignments, and racist,
xenophobic nationalism that brought Donald Trump into office. Neo-fascist
discourse and political practice are now evident every day in virulent attacks
on the racially oppressed, immigrants, women, LBGTQ people,
environmentalists, and workers. ese have been accompanied by a
sustained campaign to bring the judiciary, governmental employees, the
military and intelligence agencies, and the press into line with this new
ideology and political reality.
Who forms the social base of the neo-fascist phenomenon? As a Gallup
analysis and CNN exit polls have demonstrated, Trump’s electoral support
came mainly from the intermediate strata of the population, that is, from the
lower middle class and privileged sections of the working class, primarily
those with annual household incomes above the median level of around
$56,000. Trump received a plurality of votes among those with incomes
between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, especially in the $50,000 to $99,999
range, and among those without college degrees. Of those who reported that
their nancial situation was worse than four years earlier, Trump won fully
77 percent of the vote.3 An analysis by Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-
Rosell of Gallup, updated just days before the election, indicated that in
contrast to standard Republican voters, much of Trump’s strongest support
came from relatively privileged white male workers within “skilled blue-
collar industries.” including “production, construction, installation,
maintenance, and repair, and transportation,” earning more than the median
income, and over the age of forty.4 In the so-called Rust Belt, the ve states
(Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) that swung the
election to Trump, the Republican vote increased by over 300,000 among
voters earning $50,000 or less, as compared with 2012. Meanwhile, among
the same demographic, Democrats lost more than three times as many
voters as the number Republicans gained.5 None of this was enough to win
Trump the national popular vote, which he lost by almost 3 million, but it
gave him the edge he needed in the Electoral College.
Nationally, Trump won the white vote and the male vote by decisive
margins, and gained his strongest support among rural voters. Both
religious Protestants and Catholics favored the Republican presidential
candidate, but his greatest support (80 percent) came from white evangelical
Christians. Veterans also went disproportionately for Trump. Among those
who considered immigration the nation’s most pressing issue, Trump,
according to CNN exit polls, received 64 percent of the vote; among those
who ranked terrorism as the number-one issue, 57 percent.6 Much of the
election was dominated by both overt and indirect expressions of racism,
emanating not only from the Republican nominee but also from his close
associates and family (and was hardly nonexistent among the Democrats
themselves). Donald Trump, Jr., in what was clearly a political ploy,
repeatedly tweeted Nazi-style white supremacist slogans aimed at the far
right. Trump’s only slightly more veiled statements against Muslims and
Mexicans, and his alliance with Breitbart, pointed in the same direction.7
As the Gallup report pointedly observed:
In a study [Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler?] of perhaps the most infamous
[nationalist] party, the geography of voting patterns reveals that the political supporters of
Hitler’s National Socialist party were disproportionately Protestants, if living in a rural area,
and those in lower-middle administrative occupations and owners of small businesses, if living
 in an urban area. us, neither the rich nor poor were especially inclined to support the Nazi
Party, and even among Christians, religious identity mattered greatly.8

e clear implication was that Trump’s supporters conformed to the same

general pattern. According to the Hamilton study, it is generally believed
that “the lower middle class (or petty bourgeoisie) provided the decisive
support for Hitler and his party.”9 Hitler also drew on a minority of the
working class, disproportionately represented by more privileged blue-collar
workers. But the great bulk of his support came from the lower-middle class,
representing a staunchly anti-working-class, racist, and anti-establishment
outlook—which nevertheless aligned itself with capital. Hitler also received
backing from devout Protestants, rural voters, disabled veterans, and older
voters or pensioners.10
e parallels with the Trump phenomenon in the United States are thus
sufficiently clear. Trump’s backing comes primarily neither from the
working-class majority nor the capitalist class, though the latter have mostly
reconciled themselves to Trumpism, given that they are its principal
bene ciaries. Once in power, fascist movements have historically cleansed
themselves of the more radical lower-middle-class links that helped bring
them to power, and soon ally rmly with big business, a pattern already
manifesting itself in the Trump administration.11
Yet despite these very broad similarities, key features distinguish neo-
fascism in the contemporary United States from its precursors in early
twentieth-century Europe. It is in many ways a unique form. ere is no
paramilitary violence in the streets. ere are no black shirts or brown
shirts, no Nazi Stormtroopers. ere is, indeed, no separate fascist party.12
Today, the world economy is dominated not by nation-based monopoly
capitalism, as in classical fascism, but by a more globalized monopoly-
nance capitalism.
Aer its defeat in the First World War, Germany in the 1930s was in the
midst of the Great Depression, and about to resume its struggle for
economic and imperial hegemony in Europe. In contrast, the United States
today, long the world’s hegemon, has been experiencing an extended period
of imperial decline, coupled with economic stagnation. is represents a
different trajectory. e White House’s “America First” policy, unfurled in
Trump’s inaugural address, with its characteristically fascist “palingenetic
form of ultra-nationalism” (palingenesis means “rebirth”) is not aimed at
domination of Europe and its colonies, as in Nazi Germany, but in restoring
U.S. primacy over the entire world, leading to the “potentially deadliest
phase of imperialism.”13
Further distinguishing the neo-fascism of our present moment is the
advent of the climate change crisis, the very reality of which the White
House denies. Rather than address the problem, the new administration,
backed by the fossil-capital wing of the Republican Party, has declared atly
that anthropogenic climate change does not exist. It has chosen to defy the
entire world in this respect, repudiating the global scienti c consensus.
ere are deep concerns, raised by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which
just moved its doomsday clock thirty seconds closer to midnight, that this
same irrationalism may extend to nuclear weapons.14
But if the White House is now best described, for all of the above reasons,
as neo-fascist in its leanings, this does not extend to the entire U.S. state.
Congress, the courts, the civil bureaucracy, the military, the state and local
governments, and what is oen called, aer Louis Althusser, the “ideological
state apparatus”—including the media and educational institutions—would
need to be brought into line before a fully neo-fascist state could operate on
its own violent terms.15 Still, there is no doubt that liberal or capitalist
democracy in the United States is now endangered. At the level of the
political system as a whole, we are, as political scientist Richard Falk has put
it, in a “pre-fascist moment.”16 At the same time, the bases still exist within
the state and civil society for organized, legal resistance.
Here it is vital to understand that fascism is not in any sense a mere
political aberration or anomaly, but has historically been one of two major
modes of political management adopted by ruling classes in the advanced
capitalist states.17 Since the late nineteenth century, capitalist states,
particularly those of the major imperial powers, have generally taken the
form of liberal democracy—representing a kind of equilibrium between
competing social sectors and tendencies, in which the capitalist class, by
virtue of its control of the economy, and despite the relative autonomy
accorded to the state, is able to assert its hegemony. Far from being
democratic in any egalitarian sense, liberal democracy has allowed
considerable room for the rise of plutocracy, that is, the rule of the rich; but
it has at the same time been limited by democratic forms and rights that
represent concessions to the larger population.18 Indeed, while remaining
within the boundaries of liberal democracy, the neoliberal era since the
1980s has been associated with the steepest increases in inequality in
recorded history.19
Liberal democracy is not, however, the only viable form of rule in
advanced capitalist states. In periods of systemic crisis in which property
relations are threatened—such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the
stagnation and nancialization of recent decades—conditions may favor the
rise of fascism. Moreover, then as now, fascism is invariably a product of the
larger context of monopoly capital and imperialism, related to struggles for
hegemony within the capitalist world economy. Such a crisis of world
hegemony, real or perceived, fosters ultra-nationalism, racism, xenophobia,
extreme protectionism, and hyper-militarism, generating repression at home
and geopolitical struggle abroad. Liberal democracy, the rule of law, and the
very existence of a viable political opposition may be endangered.
In such conditions, as Bertolt Brecht declared, “Contradictions are our
hope!”20 It is necessary then to ask: What are the speci c contradictions of
neo-fascism in the Trump era? How are they related to the larger crisis of
the U.S. political economy and empire? And how do we exploit these
contradictions to create a powerful, united resistance movement?

THE CLASSICAL FASCIST GLEICHSCHALTUNG

“e antonym of fascism,” Paul Sweezy wrote to Paul Baran in 1952, “is
bourgeois democracy, not feudalism or socialism. Fascism is one of the
political forms which capitalism may assume in the monopoly-imperialist
phase.”21 e issue of fascism, whether in its classical or current form, thus
goes beyond right-wing politics. It raises, as Baran replied to Sweezy, the
much more signi cant question of the “jumping [off] place” that marks the
qualitative break between liberal democracy and fascism (and today
between neoliberalism and neo-fascism). e complete development of a
fascist state, understood as a historical process, requires a seizure of the state
apparatus in its totality, and therefore the elimination of any real separation
of powers between the various parts, in the interest of a larger struggle for
national as well as world dominance.22 Hence, upon securing a beachhead
in the government, particularly the executive, fascist interests have
historically employed semi-legal means, brutality, propaganda, and
intimidation as a means of integration, with big capital looking the other
way or even providing direct support. In a complete fascist takeover, the
already incomplete protections to individuals offered by liberal democracy
are more or less eliminated, along with the forces of political opposition.
Property rights, however, are invariably protected under fascism—except
for those racially, sexually, or politically targeted, whose property is oen
con scated—and the interests of big capital are enhanced.23 e political
forces in power aim at what Nazi ideology called a “totalitarian state,”
organized around the executive, while the basic economic structure remains
untouched.24 e fascist state in its ideal conception is thus “totalitarian” in
itself, reducing the political and cultural apparatus to one unitary force, but
leaving the economy and the capitalist class largely free from interference,
even consolidating the dominance of its monopolistic fraction.25 e aim of
the state in these circumstances is to repress and discipline the population,
while protecting and promoting capitalist property relations, pro ts, and
accumulation, and laying the basis for imperial expansion. As Mussolini
declared: “e fascist regime does not intend to nationalize, or worse,
bureaucratize the entire national economy, it is enough to control it and
discipline it through the corporations. . . . e corporations provide the
discipline and the state will only take up the sectors related to defense, the
existence and security of the homeland.”26 Hitler likewise pronounced: “We
stand for the maintenance of private property. . . . We shall protect free
enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic
order.”27
Indeed, an oen overlooked Nazi policy was the selling-off of state
property. e concept of privatization (or re-privatization) of the economy,
now a hallmark of neoliberalism, rst gained currency in fascist Germany,
where capitalist property relations remained sacrosanct, even as the new
fascist state structure dismantled liberal-democratic institutions and
instituted a war economy. At the time of Hitler’s rise to power, much of the
German economy was state-owned: sectors such as the steel and coal
industries, shipbuilding, and banking had been largely nationalized. Under
Hitler, the United Steel Trust was privatized in just a few years, and by 1937
all of the major banks were privatized. All of this increased the power and
scope of capital. “e practical signi cance of the transference of
government enterprises into private hands,” Maxine Yaple Sweezy wrote in a
major 1941 study of the Nazi economy, “was thus that the capitalist class
continued to serve as a vessel for the accumulation of income. Pro t-making
and the return of property to private hands, moreover, have assisted the
consolidation of Nazi Party power.”28 As Nicos Poulantzas noted in Fascism
and Dictatorship, “Nazism maintained juridical regulation in matters of the
protection of the capitalist order and private property.”29
If privatization within industry was crucial to the rise of fascism in
Germany, thereby further concentrating the economic power of the
capitalist class, it was the consolidation of Nazi rule within the state itself
that made the former possible, breaking the liberal-democratic order
altogether. is process, known as Gleichschaltung—“bringing into line” or
“synchronization”—de ned the period of consolidation of the new political
order in the years 1933–34. is meant politically integrating each of the
state’s separate entities, including the parliament, judiciary, civil
bureaucracy, military, and the local and regional branches of government,
and extending this to the major organs of the ideological state apparatus
within civil society, or the educational institutions, the media, trade
associations, and more.30 is synchronization was accomplished by means
of a combination of ideology, intimidation, enforced cooperation, and
coercion, usually by pressuring these institutions into “cleaning their own
houses.” e leading Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt promoted the two principles
governing Gleichschaltung in the German case: (1) the removal of “non-
Aryans,” and (2) the Führerprinzip—“leadership principle,” placing the
leader above the written laws. During this period a kind of judicial cloak
legitimated the consolidation of power, to be largely dispensed with later. As
Schmitt explained, the object of Gleichschaltung was unity and purity,
achieved through the “extermination of heterogeneity.”31
Gleichschaltung in Germany was aimed at all the separate branches of the
state and the ideological state apparatus simultaneously, but underwent
several stages or qualitative breaks. e Reichstag re, set only a month aer
President Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler as chancellor in January 1933,
prompted the issue of two executive decrees providing a legalistic
justi cation for the violation of the constitution. ese decrees were further
legitimized by the Enabling Act, or “Law to Eliminate Peril to Nation and
Reich,” in March 1933, giving Hitler unilateral power to enact laws
independent of the Reichstag. is was soon accompanied by the arrest and
purging of political opponents. is period also saw the initiation of the
“Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service” that allowed for the
application of Gleichschaltung to all civil service workers. is initial stage of
bringing into line ended in July 1933 with the abolition of all political
parties other than the National Socialist German Workers Party.32
e second stage was aimed at establishing control over and integration
of the military, as well as the universities, the press, and other social and
cultural organizations. Not only did Hitler move to consolidate his control
of the military (the Wehrmacht), but, in the attempt to integrate the military
with the Nazi project, he declared in December 1933 that the army was “the
nation’s only bearer of weapons,” undermining the claims of the Nazi Party’s
paramilitary, brown-shirt wing, the SA—Sturmabteilung, “Assault Division”
or Stormtroopers.33
e “extermination of heterogeneity” within major cultural institutions is
best illustrated by the absorption of the universities into Nazi doctrine. As
rector of the University of Freiburg, beginning in 1933, the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger was charged with the institution of
Gleichschaltung as his main official duty. Heidegger carried out these
functions to the letter, helping purge the university and denouncing
colleagues. In these years, he worked closely with Carl Schmitt to promote
the Nazi ideology, helping to rationalize anti-Semitism and presiding over
symbolic book burnings.34
e third, decisive stage of Gleichschaltung was initiated with the bloody
purge of the SA leadership from June 30 to July 2, 1934, and the subsequent
establishment, particularly following Hindenburg’s death that August, of
Hitler as the ultimate source of law, as celebrated in Schmitt’s article “e
Führer Safeguards the Law.” From this point on, fascist rule was
consolidated in all of the main institutions of the state and the chief
ideological organs of civil society.35
 Other fascist states have followed a similar, if less totalizing, trajectory.
“In the much slower process of consolidating Fascist rule in Italy,” Robert O.
Paxton writes in e Anatomy of Fascism, “only the labor unions, the
political parties, and the media were fully ‘brought into line.’”36

THE TRUMPIST GLEICHSCHALTUNG

Many of these developments were speci c to Europe in the 1930s, and are
unlikely to recur in anything resembling the same form in our day.
Nevertheless, neo-fascism today also has as its aim a shi in the
management of the advanced capitalist system, requiring the effective
dissolution of the liberal-democratic order and its replacement by an
alliance between large capital and what is now called the “alt-right,” openly
espousing racism, nationalism, anti-environmentalism, misogyny,
homophobia, police violence, and extreme militarism.
e deeper motive of all these forms of reaction is the repression of the
workforce. Behind Trump’s appeals to alt-right bigotry lie the increased
privatization of all state-economic functions, the reinforcement of the power
of big business, and the shi to a more racially de ned imperialist foreign
policy. Yet to put such a neo-fascist strategy in place requires a new kind of
Gleichschaltung, whereby various institutions—Congress, the judiciary, the
civil bureaucracy, state and local governments, the military, natural security
state (the “deep state”), media, and educational institutions—are all brought
into line.37
What concrete evidence is there, then, that the Trump White House is
working to implement neo-fascist forms of capitalist state management,
transgressing legal norms and abrogating liberal democratic protections?
Here it is useful to remind ourselves of the characteristics of fascism in
general, of which U.S. neo-fascism is a speci c form. As Samir Amin states
in “e Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism”:
e fascist choice for managing a capitalist state in crisis is always based—by de nition even—
on the categorical rejection of “democracy.” Fascism always replaces the general principles on
which the theories and practices of modern democracies are based—recognition of diversity of
opinions, recourse to electoral procedures to determine a majority, guarantee of the rights of
the minority, etc.—with the opposed values of submission to the requirements of collective
discipline and the authority of the supreme leader and his main agents. is reversal of values
 is then always accompanied by a return of backward-looking ideas, which are able to provide
an apparent legitimacy to the procedures of submission that are implemented. e
proclamation of the supposed necessity of returning to the (“medieval”) past, of submitting to
the state religion or to some supposed characteristic of the “race” or the (ethnic) “nation” make
up the panoply of ideological discourses deployed by the fascist powers.38

e ultra-nationalist and ultra-right-wing slant of the new

administration is not to be doubted. In his inaugural address, written by his
alt-right advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, Trump declared, in what
economist Joseph Stiglitz has called “historical fascist overtones”:
From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. . . . We will reinforce old alliances and
form new ones—and unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will
eradicate completely from the face of the Earth. . . . We must protect our borders from the
ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our
jobs. . . . America will start winning again, winning like never before. . . . At the bedrock of our
politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to
our country, we will discover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to
patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. . . . When America is united, America is totally
unstoppable. ere should be no fear—we are protected, and we will always be protected. We
will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement and, most
importantly, we are protected by God. . . . Together, We Will Make America Strong Again. We
Will Make America Wealthy Again. We Will Make America Proud Again. We Will Make
America Safe Again. And, Yes, Together, We Will Make America Great Again.39

e ideological framework and political strategy of Trumpism are chie y

the work of Bannon, formerly head of Breitbart News and now chief White
House strategist, who also directed Trump’s electoral campaign in its nal
months.40 Bannon is anked by two other Breitbart ideologues, Miller, a
senior adviser to Trump and a protégé of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and
Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant for national security. Another Breitbart
principal, Julia Hahn, has been appointed as a “special assistant to the
president,” working under Bannon as his chief assistant, and is known as
“Bannon’s Bannon,” a polite reference to her role as an unrestrained ultra-
right ideologue, hired to keep congressional Republicans in line.41
Bannon’s neo-fascist ideology can be seen as consisting of six major
components: (1) the need to overcome “the crisis of capitalism,” particularly
in the United States, brought on by the rise of “globalism” and “crony
capitalism”; (2) the restoration of the “Judeo-Christian West” as the spiritual
framework for a restored capitalism; (3) the promotion of extreme ethno-
nationalism, targeting non-white immigrants; (4) an explicit identi cation
with what he calls a “global populist movement”—that is, global neo-
fascism; (5) the insistence that the United States is in a global war, a “global
existential war,” against “an expansionist Islam” and “an expansionist China”;
and (6) the notion that the rise of the alt-right represents a quasi-mystical
“great Fourth Turning” in U.S. history—aer the American Revolution, the
Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War.42
Bannon’s ideology was most vividly on display in a 2014 talk at a Vatican
conference, in which he praised the far right “populism” of France’s National
Front, led by Marine Le Pen, as well as Britain’s UK Independence Party. He
argued that “the harder-nosed the capitalism, the better.” But this required a
restoration of lost Judeo-Christian “spiritual and moral
foundations. . . . When capitalism was . . . at its highest ower . . . almost all
of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian
West. . . . Secularism has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to
defend its ideals.” For Bannon, the enemy was not just liberals but the
“Republican establishment” and their masters, the promoters of “crony
capitalism.” ese were the true enemies of “middle-class people and
working-class people.” e racism in the movement he represented was not
to be denied outright, but rather “over time it all gets kind of washed out” as
people pull together in a patriotic alliance (while excluding others). All of
this ts within a larger sense of a crusade: “ere is a major war brewing, a
war that’s already global. . . . You will see we’re in a war of immense
proportions.”43
Most remarkable was the sympathetic way that Bannon, elding
questions aer his talk, called upon the ideas of the Italian fascist Julius
Evola, a source of inspiration to and supporter of Mussolini, and later of
Hitler, who emerged aer the Second World War as a leading gure in the
Traditionalist movement of European neo-fascism, making him a hero of
the alt-right white supremacist leader Richard Spencer in the United
States.44 In the 1930s, Evola declared, “Fascism is too little. We would have
wanted a fascism which is more radical, more intrepid, a fascism that is truly
absolute, made of pure force, unavailable for any compromise. . . . We would
never be considered anti-fascist, except to the extent that super-fascism
would be equivalent to anti-fascism.” In his postwar writings, he argued that
Traditionalists “should not accept the adjective ‘fascist’ or ‘neo-fascist’ tout
court,” but rather they should emphasize only their “positive” characteristics,
allying themselves with the “aristocratic” values of the European tradition.
e goal was the creation of a new, spiritual “European Imperium . . . We
must create a unity of ghters.” e ultimate intent was the resurrection of
traditional sovereignty understood as the spiritual power of a nation, or
patria (fatherland).45
Bannon, himself a strong promoter of “palingenetic ultra-nationalism,” in
tune with Evola, argued that those in the Judeo-Christian West needed to
resurrect “traditionalism . . . particularly the sense of where it supports the
underpinnings of nationalism.” Most important, he told his audience at the
Vatican, was the restoration of the “long history of the Judeo-Christian
West’s struggle against Islam.” Speaking of sovereignty in Evola’s sense,
Bannon stated: “I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to
see sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism for their
country.” But as he made clear, this rst required the deconstruction of the
political “governing class” and of the state in its current form.46
Insofar as the Trump White House sees itself as empowered to unleash a
neo-fascist strategy of Gleichschaltung, along the general lines suggested
above, one would expect to see an assault on the major branches of the state
and the ideological state apparatus, transgressing legal and political norms
and seeking to vastly increase the power of the presidency. Indeed, much
early evidence suggests that the political culture has changed in this respect
in the brief period that the administration has been in power. All the major
sectors of the state have come under attack. e most extreme action was
Trump’s January 27 executive order immediately banning immigrants from
seven predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, which, in the
face of national protests, was quickly overturned by the federal courts. is
led Trump to issue personal attacks on individual judges, in an effort to
delegitimize them in the eyes of his supporters, a move that could be seen as
a preliminary attempt to bring the judiciary into line.47
ese events were followed in February by Trump’s executive order
establishing a quasi-legal basis for the mass deportation of an estimated
eleven million undocumented individuals in the United States—even long-
term residents and those never convicted of any crime, and without
reference to age. is was to be complemented by the administration’s long-
promised construction of what the president called, in his February 28
address to Congress, “a great, great wall along our southern border.” In this
legal and political morass, Trump is inheriting 103 judicial vacancies, nearly
twice the number inherited by Obama, giving the new administration the
ability to restructure the judiciary in ways likely to remove constitutional
rights and reinforce repression.48
Trump’s con ict with the national security state or “intelligence
community,” consisting of hundreds of thousands of employees across
seventeen agencies, began almost immediately, and was prefaced by his
repeated attacks on the intelligence agencies while running for office. In late
January, he issued a directive—later reversed—reorganizing the National
Security Council (NSC) and the Homeland Security Council (HSC), in
which the CIA director, the director of national intelligence, and the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were removed from the regular
members of the NSC and HSC Principals Committee; and, in another break
with precedent, Bannon, the White House chief strategist, was added to the
Principals Committee. A popular backlash prompted the administration
partially to backtrack, restoring the CIA director as a member of the
Principals Committee and eventually removing Bannon from that role, but
the intention of undermining the existing structure of authority within the
national security state was clear.49
e Trump administration’s attempts to destabilize and bring into line the
national security state provoked a countervailing response in the form of a
proliferation of leaks within the “deep state” that within a few weeks brought
down Michael Flynn, Trump’s initial pick as National Security Adviser—
partly due to con ict with Vice President Pence and more traditional
Republicans. Tensions were further in amed by Trump and Bannon’s
sudden move to shi the United States’ geopolitical posture away from the
New Cold War with Russia and toward a global battle against “radical Islam”
and China. Although he has peppered his administration with generals in
order to integrate with the military, Trump remains locked in con ict with
much of the national security state.
Nor is the rest of the state free from such efforts to bring it into line.
ere are more than 2.7 million civilian employees in the federal
government. Trump supporter Newt Gingrich stated that “ninety- ve
percent of the bureaucrats are against him.” Longtime Republican operative
and Trump strategist Roger Stone has said that “there aren’t that many
Trump loyalists in the White House,” necessitating a rapid change in
personnel. Press leaks from within the state convinced Trump supporters
that the most pressing task was to accelerate the removal of civilian
employees not in line with the new administration. According to Newsmax
CEO Chris Ruddy, Trump’s close friend and adviser, “e federal
bureaucracy itself is a powerful machine, and they tend to have very
establishment ideas”—meaning opposed to the new alt-right agenda.50
is is part of a more general attack on the civil bureaucracy. Bannon has
declared that a “new political order” is imminent, promoting “economic
nationalism” and entailing the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
e administration, he says, will be in a constant battle for
“deconstruction.”51 e undermining of the civilian bureaucracy has been
most pronounced in the environmental agencies, mostly because there
whole departments can be brought under the ax. In a meeting with business
leaders shortly aer his inauguration, Trump indicated that his
administration planned to cut governmental regulations on business by “75
percent,” and “maybe more.”52 Beyond nancial deregulation, the plan is to
go aer environmental regulations in particular, along with
environmentalists within the federal bureaucracy.
Myron Ebell, head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a major organ
for climate denial, and a key Trump adviser on the environment, has
declared the environmental movement “the greatest threat to freedom and
prosperity in the modern world” and has attacked climate scientists and
other members of what he calls the “expertariat,” with the aim of removing
them from government.53 Ebell has gone so far as to characterize the Pope’s
encyclical on climate change as “leist drivel.”54 is anti-establishment
rhetoric, so integral to the success of Trump’s campaign, is now being used
to legitimize cuts of 20–25 percent in the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) budget and 17 percent in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
A sweeping purge in areas of the federal government related to
environmental protection is expected, with whole agencies directed at issues
like climate change eliminated and employees bullied into compliancy. e
recent Republican congressional revival of a defunct 1876 law that would
allow the salaries of federal employees to be reduced to $1 a year is being
wielded as a weapon to threaten governmental employees.55
Cornel West has spoken of the “repressive apparatus” that de nes the
Trump administration. “at’s the neo-fascist dimension of it. It’s not just
the attack on the press,” West told his audience at Harvard’s W. E. B. DuBois
Institute. “He will be coming for some of us. We have to say, like DuBois,
like Frederick Douglass, and like the nameless and anonymous freedom
ghters of all colors, we can stand [up]. . . . I refuse to normalize Donald
Trump and his neo-fascist project.”56 How and at what speed the new
administration will unleash this repression is still unclear, though the
massive scale of the deportations of undocumented immigrants—projected
to be far greater than those under Obama—and the scarcely veiled racism
that animates them, is already evident. ere is little doubt that the Trump
administration will reinforce the “new Jim Crow” system of racialized mass
incarceration. He has insisted on the need for further privatization of federal
prisons, something already being introduced into policy by Sessions. Before
Trump’s election, as many as 141,000 people signed a petition sent to the
Obama White House—heavily promoted by Breitbart—requesting that
Black Lives Matter be listed as a terrorist organization. Trump, himself,
insisted, prior to the election, that Black Lives Matter was a “threat” and that
the U.S. attorney general should be asked to do something about it, starting
with “watching, because that’s really bad stuff,” which suggested the need for
massive surveillance. He has also come out for expanded racial pro ling by
police across the country.57
At the same time, an assault is being prepared on labor unions, in
particular public-sector unions. e Republican Congress, bolstered by
Trump, is proposing a national “right-to-work” law aimed at stripping
unions of their funding by making it possible for workers to be free riders,
receiving the bene ts of union bargaining without having to pay the “agency
fees” to support it, with the result that the unions are to be driven into a
nancial crisis. Right-to-work laws already exist in twenty-seven states. e
U.S. Supreme Court, with a restored conservative majority, may achieve
much the same result even more quickly in upcoming court decisions,
stripping public-sector unions of their ability to deduct agency fees from the
paychecks of workers covered by the union agreement. School privatization
is likewise aimed directly at breaking teachers’ unions. e overall goal is to
end de facto, if not de jure, workers’ rights to organize in the United States.58
ough Trump’s rst choice for labor secretary, fast-food mogul Andrew
Puzder, was forced to withdraw amid popular protest and Republican
discomfort, his nomination was fully in line with this labor-crushing
campaign. Puzder was found to have consistently ignored and violated wage,
safety, and overtime laws in his fast-food conglomerate, CKE Restaurants. In
Puzder’s place, Trump chose the current secretary of labor, R. Alexander
Acosta, a former member of George W. Bush’s National Labor Relations
Board who went on to become assistant attorney general in the Justice
Department’s Civil Rights division in the Bush administration. Acosta’s
singular response to all tough questions in his con rmation hearings was
that he would simply follow the orders of Trump, whom he regarded as his
boss.59
Trump’s education secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos, who has long been
dedicated to the privatization of public education, represents an assault on a
bedrock of democracy in the United States. DeVos is a strong supporter of
charter schools and school vouchers aimed at the demolition of the entire
public education system in the United States, which she has dismissed as a
“dead end.” e federal government provides relatively little money to public
K-12 education, which is mostly funded by state and local governments.
Most federal money is devoted to helping students with disabilities and
those from low-income communities. Trump, however, has vowed to fund
vouchers massively nationwide in a proposal that assumes that states will
kick in more than $100 billion for vouchers, taking that directly from public
education. Trump’s choice of DeVos indicates that the emphasis in the new
administration will be on promoting maximum privatization of U.S. public
education, which would lead to vastly increased disparities in access to
education and destroy teachers’ unions and teacher professionalism. But
DeVos has objectives beyond that. She has stated that in privatizing the
schools “our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to
advance God’s kingdom.”60
e Trump administration’s effort to bring universities into line was
evident in the new president’s response to a riot that occurred on the UC-
Berkeley campus in early February, when protestors clashed with police,
prompting the cancellation of a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, then a
Breitbart senior editor (and close Bannon associate) known for his white
supremacist, misogynist hate speech. Aer Yiannopoulos’s talk was
canceled, Trump tweeted that Berkeley should be denied federal funds.61
Trump’s election has fueled right-wing attacks on universities. Days aer his
election, the right-wing nonpro t Turning Point USA announced the
creation of a “Professor Watchlist” targeting more than two hundred
professors in the United States (including me) as dangerous progressives to
be “watched”—a move designed to intimidate the universities.
e new administration is marked by an extraordinary attempt to bring
the mainstream media in line with its neo-fascist objectives. Trump has
declared that he is in a “running war” with the media and that journalists are
“among the most dishonest people on earth.” Barely a month into his
presidency, Trump tweeted that the mainstream media “is the enemy of the
American people” and that the New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, and
CNN were all “FAKE NEWS.”62 ese were not of course rational attacks on
the mainstream capitalist media for what Edward Herman and Noam
Chomsky called its “propaganda model”—or the systematic day–to-day
ltering of news in order to promote capitalism and its power elite, while at
the same time excluding or marginalizing all le criticisms. Rather, Trump
was disparaging the non-Murdoch mainstream media for its general defense
of separation of powers and civil liberties.63 is included the media’s
questioning of Trump’s claim that he only lost the popular vote in the
election due to voter fraud, its coverage of his ban on immigration from
seven predominantly Muslim countries, and its treatment of the new
administration’s contacts with Russia.
In an alarming display of Goebbels-like tactics, Bannon told the press to
“shut up” in a press conference in January, and declared, “e media here is
the opposition party. . . . e media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and
no hard work.” He further ranted, “You’re the opposition party. Not the
Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. e media’s the opposition
party.” For Bannon, this “opposition party” has to be completely brought
into line. e object, as noted by the New York Times, is to so manipulate
and intimidate the media that it will “muzzle itself.”64
 In an extraordinary instance of Gleichschaltung, the Trump-dominated
Republican Party issued a “Mainstream Media Accountability Survey,” rife
with leading questions, misleading “facts,” and ideological posturing, which
the usually staid National Public Radio called “phenomenally biased.”65 is
was soon followed by the exclusion of the New York Times, CNN, Politico,
BuzzFeed, and other media from a White House press brie ng, due to their
unfavorable stories on the Trump administration (the Associated Press and
Time refused to attend in protest).66 Bannon’s Gleichschaltung strategy is also
aimed at the traditional right itself. us, in December 2016 he declared,
“National Review and e Weekly Standard are both le-wing magazines,
and I want to destroy them also.”67
As part of a general ideological campaign, Bannon’s attacks on the media,
in what is a long-standing technique of fascist and neo-fascist “radicals,”
borrows from the language of the le, referring to “the corporatist, globalist
media” as the enemy. Yet the real ideological driving force of neo-fascism is
the ultra-nationalist one of the resurrection of a national-racial culture. us
Bannon has spoken in Evola-like terms of the United States as “a nation with
a culture and a reason for being,” creating a distinct principle of
“sovereignty.”68 e concept of the restoration of national “sovereignty” has
become a key organizing principle of the alt-right ideology promoted by
Breitbart and has been employed to justify the anti-immigrant stance of the
Trump White House.69
Part of the power of the Trump administration lies in a largely compliant
and ideologically right-wing Republican-dominated Congress. But the
Gleichschaltung extends to the Republican Party leadership too, the chief
gures of which are being bullied into line. An indication of this is Bannon’s
hiring of Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, known for her unrestrained attacks on Paul
Ryan and other leading Republicans, as his assistant—thereby warning the
Republican leadership of what could await them if they were to refuse to
play ball. Hahn made her reputation by accusing Ryan of eeing “grieving
moms trying to show him photos of their children killed by his open
borders agenda.” She charged Ryan of being a “globalist” linked to crony
capitalism, and as the mastermind of a “months-long campaign to elect
Hillary Clinton.” Here the Gleichschaltung strategy aimed at the Republican
Party itself is quite clear: “A number of House Republicans told the
Washington Post that Hahn’s involvement signaled Bannon’s plans to
possibly put her to use against them, writing searing commentaries about
elected Republican leaders to ram through Trump’s legislative priorities and
agitate the party’s base if necessary.”70
What makes the rise of a neo-fascist White House of such great concern
is the enormous weight of the U.S. presidency, and the long-term breakdown
in the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. e undermining of the
congressional power to declare war, established in the Constitution, is well
known. Moreover, with the Patriot Act and other measures, the power of the
executive branch has been greatly expanded so far this century. In his
statement in signing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2011,
Obama affirmed that the executive branch now has the power of “inde nite
military detention without trial of American citizens,” removing thereby the
protections of the courts and individual rights established in the
Constitution. is means an enormous extension of the power of the
presidency against that of the judiciary, continuing a process of the
abrogation of judicial review in expanding areas of “national security,” which
has seriously undermined the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution.
Such power conferred on the presidency makes conceivable an abrupt shi
of the state in a dictatorial direction, ostensibly under the rule of law.
Although Obama in 2011 indicated that he would not authorize military
detention without trial of U.S. citizens, which he said “would break with our
most important traditions and values as a nation,” he did not question the
legal right of a future president to do so, or ght against this provision
within the law, which abrogated the constitutional protections of citizens.
With the advent of what Bill Moyers and Michael Winship have called a
virtual “coup” in the executive branch of government, there is much less
assurance that the White House will exercise restraint in this area.71

TRUMP AND THE DECLINE OF U.S. HEGEMONY

Trump was elected to the presidency on a pledge to “Make America Great
Again.” Following the ideological template offered by Bannon and Breitbart,
he pointed to the reality of continuing economic crisis or slow growth, high
unemployment, the deteriorating economic conditions of the working class,
and the weakening of the United States in the world as a whole. His answer
was economic and military nationalism, “draining the swamp” (the end of
crony capitalism in Washington), and attacks on big government. All of this
was laced with misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. Among Trump’s pledges
was an end to economic stagnation, with the newly elected president
promising an annual growth rate of 4 percent, compared to just 1.6 percent
in 2016.72 He declared he would create jobs through massive infrastructure
spending, elimination of trade agreements unfavorable to the United States,
spurring investment by cutting taxes and regulations, and colossal increases
in military spending—at the same time protecting entitlements such as
Social Security and Medicare.
Aer years of feeling ignored by the dominant neoliberal ideology, large
numbers of those in the white, and particularly male, population who saw
themselves as lower-middle class or relatively better-off working class rallied
to Trump’s economic nationalist, overtly racist cause—though of course few
had any real notion of what this would fully entail.73 e fact that the
Democratic Party nominated Hillary Clinton, the very image of
neoliberalism, over Bernie Sanders, with his grassroots social-democratic
candidacy, played into the Trump-Breitbart strategy.
Trump also drew considerable support in the election from the
“billionaire class,” particularly within the FIRE ( nance, insurance, and real
estate) and energy sectors, which saw his promises on cutting corporate
taxes, increasing federal nancing of private rms in infrastructure
developments, and promoting economic nationalism, as ways of leveraging
their own positions. Aer the election Wall Street’s support turned to elation
with stocks rising rapidly. Between Trump’s win and February 24, the Dow
and Nasdaq both rose by 13 percent, Standard and Poor’s by 10 percent.
Most of the enthusiasm was for expected tax cuts and massive
deregulation.74 According to the London-based Financial Times, “Donald
Trump is creating a eld day for the one percent.” Meanwhile, his repeated
promises of infrastructure investment to create jobs for the working
population were being revealed as largely fraudulent, a case of “bait and
switch.”75
Although it is true that Trump still promises a $1 trillion investment in
the nation’s physical infrastructure, this was never meant to take the form of
direct federal spending. Rather, Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross
Jr., is the author of a highly questionable report claiming that tax credits to
corporations on the order of $137 billion would provide the nancing for
private companies to leverage $1 trillion in infrastructure spending over ten
years. e entire plan, as concocted by Ross, rests not on governmental
spending on infrastructure, but rather on giving capital back to capital: a
huge windfall to private contractors, much of it subsidizing projects that
would have occurred anyway.76
Trump promised to ght crony capitalism and to “drain the swamp,” but
has lled his cabinet with billionaires and Wall Street insiders, making it
clear that the state would do the bidding of monopoly- nance capital. Ross
has assets valued at $2.9 billion, and was designated by Forbes as a “vulture”
and a “king of bankruptcy.” DeVos, secretary of education, is worth $5.1
billion, while her brother, Erik Prince, called by Intercept “America’s most
notorious mercenary” and a Trump adviser, was the founder of the
universally hated Blackwater security rm. Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s
treasury secretary, is a cento-millionaire hedge fund investor. Rex Tillerson,
the new secretary of state, is the former CEO of ExxonMobil. Trump’s initial
seventeen cabinet picks (a number of whom were forced to drop out from
consideration) had a combined wealth that exceeded that of a third of the
population of the country. is does not include Trump’s own wealth,
currently in the billions. Never before has there been so pure a plutocracy, so
extreme an example of crony capitalism, in any U.S. administration.77
What paved the way for Trump’s neo-fascist strategy and gave it
coherence was the deepening long-term crisis of U.S. political economy and
empire, and of the entire world capitalist economy, aer the nancial crisis
of 2007–2009. is le the system in a state of economic stagnation, with no
visible way out. e nancialization process, characterized by expanding
debt leverage and market bubbles, which in the 1980s and ’90s had helped
li the economy out of a malaise resulting from the overaccumulation of
capital, was no longer viable on the scale needed.
In 2012, I published e Endless Crisis with Robert W. McChesney, based
on articles that appeared in Monthly Review between 2009 and 2012. In the
opening paragraph, we observed:
 e Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession arose in the United States in 2007 and
quickly spread around the globe, marking what appears to be a turning point in world history.
Although this was followed within two years by a recovery phase, the world economy ve years
aer the onset of the crisis is still in the doldrums. e United States, Europe, and Japan
remain caught in a condition of slow growth, high unemployment, and nancial instability,
with new economic tremors appearing all the time and the effects spreading globally. e one
bright spot in the world economy, from a global standpoint, has been the seemingly
unstoppable expansion of a handful of emerging economies, particularly China. Yet the
continuing stability of China is now also in question. Hence, the general consensus among
informed economic observers is that the world capitalist economy is facing the threat of long-
term economic stagnation (complicated by the prospect of further nancial deleveraging),
sometimes referred to as the problem of “lost decades.” It is this issue, of the stagnation of the
capitalist economy, even more than that of nancial crisis or recession, that has now emerged
as the big question worldwide.78

Five years later, this “big question” has in no sense gone away. Economic
stagnation is endemic. As the Financial Times acknowledged in February
2017 in an article questioning the stagnation thesis, “the secular speed limit
on growth in the advanced economies is still much lower than it was in
earlier decades.”79 e U.S. economy has had only a meager 2.1 percent
average annual growth rate since the end of the Great Recession in 2010. e
country has now experienced more than a decade of less than 3 percent
growth, for the rst time since growth rates began to be recorded in the
early 1930s—a period that includes the Great Depression.80 e labor share
of income of all but the top 1 percent has been declining dramatically.81 Net
investment, which normally drives the economy, is stagnant and in long-
term decline.82 Unemployment rates, while seemingly low at the beginning
of 2017 are, as the economy approaches the peak of the business cycle, being
kept down largely as a result of millions of people leaving the workforce,
together with an enormous increase in part-time work and precarious
jobs.83 Income and wealth inequality in the society meanwhile have been
soaring. U.S. household debt, now at $12.6 trillion, is the highest in a
decade. Despite an aging population, homeownership in the United States is
at its lowest level since 1965.84
Nor are these conditions con ned to the United States. e G7 richest
countries of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and
United States, taken together, saw an average rate of growth in 2016 of 1.3
percent, capping a long period of slow growth. e European Union had a
growth rate of only 1.7 percent over the last decade, 1.8 percent in the last
year. (To put these gures in perspective, the average annual growth rate of
the U.S. economy in the depression decade from 1929 to 1939 was 1.3
percent.)85
ese economic conditions are accompanied by the shi of production
from the Global North to the Global South, where about 70 percent of
industrial production now takes place as opposed to around 50 percent in
1980.86 Although today’s monopoly- nance capital in the North continues
to siphon vast economic surpluses from the South via multinational
corporations, including nancial institutions, these surpluses for the most
part no longer feed production in the North but simply add to the gross
pro t margins of companies, stimulating nancial-asset accumulation.
Hence there is a growing disconnection between record wealth
concentration at the top of the society and income generation within the
overall economy.87 All of the major economies of the triad of the United
States and Canada, Europe, and Japan have seen the share of income going
to the top 1 percent skyrocket since 1980—rising by more than 120 percent
in the United States between 1980 and 2015, even as the economy
increasingly fell prey to stagnation. e top decile of wealth holders in the
United States now holds more than 70 percent of the wealth of the country,
while the bottom half ’s share is virtually nil. e six wealthiest billionaires in
the world, four of whom are Americans, now own more wealth than the
bottom half of the world’s population.88
In the United States, these global shis are further complicated by the
slow decline of U.S. hegemony, which is now reaching a critical stage. With
the U.S. economy currently growing at a 1.6 percent rate and the Chinese
economy growing, despite its slowdown, by around 7 percent, the writing is
on the wall for U.S. hegemony in the world economy. e U.S. share in the
global economy has fallen steadily since 2000. In 2016 Forbes announced
that the Chinese economy will likely overtake the U.S. economy in overall
size by 2018.89 Although the United States is a far richer country, with a
much higher per capita income, the signi cance of this shi, and of the
more general erosion of U.S. hegemony according to a wide array of
indicators, is now the main global concern of the U.S. power structure. e
United States retains nancial hegemony, including the dominance of the
dollar as the world’s leading currency, and is still by far the world’s leading
military power. But history suggests that neither of these can be maintained
in coming decades without hegemony in global production. e Obama-era
strategy of trying to maintain economic hegemony not simply through U.S.
power alone, but also through the power of the triad, is failing, due to
economic stagnation throughout the advanced capitalist economies in the
United States and Canada, Europe and Japan. is has fed a more economic-
nationalist outlook in both the United States and United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, the restructuring of the U.S. economy in the context of its
declining global hegemony has contributed to the widespread impression
that its diminishing global power—dramatized by its endless and seemingly
futile wars in the Middle East, which produce few victories—is the source of
all the pain and hardship endured by the lower-middle and working
classes.90 Foreigners “taking U.S. jobs” and immigrants working for low
wages have thus become easy targets, feeding an ultra-right nationalism that
is useful to those in power, and that merges with the concerns of part of the
ruling class.91 e result is not only the growth of Trumpism in the United
States, but Brexit in Britain, and far-right movements throughout the
European core. As Amin has written:
e following phenomena are inextricably linked to one another: the capitalism of oligopolies;
the political power of oligarchies; barbarous globalization; nancialization; U.S. hegemony
[now declining and therefore even more dangerous]; the militarization of the way globalization
operates in the service of the oligopolies; the decline of democracy; the plundering of the
planet’s resources; and the abandoning of development for the South.92

More recently, Amin has called this the problem of “generalized

monopoly capitalism.”93
All fascist or neo-fascist movements emphasize extreme nationalism,
xenophobia, and racism, and are concerned with defending borders and
expanding power by military means. What is known as geopolitics, or the
attempt to leverage imperial power in the world through control of wider
portions of the globe and their strategic resources, arose in the imperialist
struggles at the beginning of the twentieth century, as articulated in the
work of its classic theorists, Halford Mackinder in Britain, Karl Haushofer in
Germany, and Nicholas John Spykman in the United States, and can be
regarded as inherent to monopoly capitalism in all of its phases.94 Beginning
with the 1990–91 Gulf War and its immediate aermath, U.S. geopolitics has
been aimed at restoring and entrenching U.S. hegemony in the wake of the
disappearance of the Soviet Union from the world stage—making the
United States the sole superpower. As articulated by U.S. strategists in the
early 1990s, such as Paul Wolfowitz, the goal was to take advantage of the
limited amount of time—Wolfowitz saw it as a decade or at most two—
before a new, rival superpower could be expected to arise, during which the
United States could freely carry out regime change in the Middle East and
North Africa, and along the periphery of the former Soviet Union.95
is approach led to a series of U.S.-led wars and regime change in the
Middle East, Eastern Europe, and North Africa. e Persian Gulf in
particular was a priority, of vital strategic value not only geographically but
because of its immense oil resources. But gaining control of all of Eastern
Europe and weakening Russia was also crucial.
e push of NATO into Ukraine, supporting a right-wing coup in the
attempt to check Russia as a reemerging superpower, led to a Russian
pushback under Vladimir Putin, with the annexation of the Crimea and
intervention in Ukraine along its borders. Russia further responded by
aggressively intervening in Syria, undermining the attempt by the United
States, NATO, and Saudi Arabia to bring down the Assad regime through
their support of surrogate pro-Sala st forces (committed to the creation of a
fundamentalist Sunni state). Meanwhile, the destruction of Iraq in U.S.-led
wars, and the Western and Gulf-state promotion of pro-Sala st armies in the
context of the surrogate war in Syria, combined to bring about the rise of the
Islamic State.96
ese grim facts, representing what Richard Haass, head of the Council
of Foreign Relations, has called “a world in disarray,” have opened a ri
within the ruling class over U.S. geopolitical strategy.97 e main part of the
ruling class and the national security state was strongly committed to a New
Cold War with Russia. In accord with this, Hillary Clinton vowed, if elected
president, to introduce no- y zones in Syria, which would have meant
shooting down Russian as well as Syrian planes, bringing the world to the
brink of global thermonuclear war. In contrast, Trump initially put his
emphasis on a détente with Russia so that the United States could
concentrate on a global war against “radical Islamic terrorism” and a cold-
hot war against China, in line with Bannon’s Judeo-Christian war—
resembling Samuel Huntington’s notion of the “clash of civilizations.”98 Here
Islamophobia merges with China-phobia—and with Latinophobia, as
represented by the so-called defense of the U.S. southern border.
In the Trump vision of the restoration of U.S. geopolitical and economic
power, enemies are primarily designated in racial and religious terms. A
renewed emphasis is put on placing U.S. boots on the ground in the Middle
East and on a naval confrontation with China in the South China Sea, where
much of the world’s new oil reserves are to be found, and which is China’s
main future surety of access to oil in the case of world con ict. However, the
result of this attempt to institute a sudden shi in the geopolitical strategy of
the United States has been not only a falling-out in the U.S. ruling class
between neoliberals (and neoconservatives) and Trump-style neo-fascists,
but also a struggle within the deep state, resulting in the leaks that brought
down Flynn.99
Trump’s geopolitical strategy ultimately looks east toward China, taking
the form of threatened protectionism combined with military posturing.
e new administration immediately moved to set aside the Trans-Paci c
Partnership, which appeared to be failing as an instrument for controlling
China—preferring instead blunter methods, including a possible
confrontation with China over the South China Sea.
Overlaying all of this is Trump’s declaration that the United States is
about to enter one of the “greatest military buildups in American history.” In
his budget he has indicated he intends to increase military spending by $54
billion or by around 10 percent of the Pentagon’s current base budget.100
is is likely to be seen also as a means of absorbing economic surplus, since
the vast infrastructure spending promised in the presidential election is
unlikely to materialize given traditional Republican party resistance. (As
indicated above, the Trump plan to provide tax credits to industry for
infrastructure spending will do little directly to stimulate the economy.)
Can Trump succeed economically? An analysis in the Financial Times at
the end of February suggests that “the effect of Mr. Trump’s economic
agenda will be to deepen the conditions that gave rise to his candidacy.”101
Given the secular stagnation in the economy, and the structural basis of this
in the overaccumulation of capital, any attempt to put the U.S. economy on
another trajectory is fraught with difficulties. Former Treasury Secretary
Larry Summers writes: “I would put the odds of a U.S. recession at about 1/3
over the next year and at over 1/2 over the next 2 years.”102 Coming along
aer a lost decade of deep economic stagnation, including an extremely slow
economic recovery, this would likely be experienced as calamitous
throughout the society.
Against this one has to recall that it was Hitler who rst introduced
Keynesian economic stimulus through military spending, privatization, and
breaking unions, instituting deep cuts in workers’ wages.103 A neo-fascist
economic strategy would be a more extreme version of neoliberal austerity,
backed by racism and war preparation. It would be aimed at liberating
capital from regulation—giving free rein to monopoly- nance capital. is
would be accompanied by more aggressive attempts to wield U.S. power
directly, on a more protectionist basis. In the longer run the economic
contradictions of the system would remain, but the new economic
nationalism would be aimed at making sure that in the context of global
economic stagnation the United States would seize a greater share of the
global pie. Nevertheless, an expansion of the war economy is fraught with
dangers, and its stimulus effects on production are less potent than in the
past.104 ere is no surety that the United States would win a trade and
currency war or a global arms race, and such developments could presage
the kind of rising con ict that historically has led to world war.

THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF DONALD TRUMP

Brecht’s 1941 satirical play e Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was an allegorical

attempt to place Hitler’s rise in Germany in the more familiar context—at
least to American audiences—of Chicago gangsterism (in this case, a mob-
controlled cauli ower monopoly), so as to suggest how fascism might be
prevented in the future. Brecht’s main point, apart from stripping the Nazi
protagonists of any traces of greatness, was that the fascistization of society
was a process, and that if the nature of the fascist techniques of gaining
power, by means of propaganda, violence, threats, intimidation, and
betrayal, were better understood at an early stage and by the population in
general, they could be countered through a conscious movement from
below. Fascism, Brecht believed, was bound to be defeated, but the
continuation of capitalism ensured its reemergence: “e womb he [Ui, or
Hitler] crawled from is still growing strong.”105
Given the reality of the penetration of neo-fascism into the White House,
knowledge of the process of “bringing into line” that is now being attempted
by the executive branch, is essential in organizing a systematic defense of the
separation of powers and constitutional freedoms. But in resisting the U.S.
alt-right, the old Popular Front strategy of the le uniting with
establishment liberalism is only practical to a limited extent in certain areas,
such as combating climate change, which threatens all of humanity, or in
efforts to protect basic political rights. is is because, short of real
structural change, any initial gains achieved through such an alliance are
likely soon to be abrogated once the immediate crisis is over, causing the old
contradictions to reappear. An effective resistance movement against the
right thus requires the construction of a powerful anti-capitalist movement
from below, representing an altogether different solution, aimed at epoch-
making structural change. Here the object is overturning the logic of capital,
and promoting substantive equality and sustainable human development.106
Such a revolt must be directed not just against neo-fascism, but against
neoliberalism—that is, monopoly- nance capital—as well. It must be as
concerned with the struggles against racism, misogyny, xenophobia,
oppression of LGBTQ people, imperialism, war, and ecological degradation,
as much as it is with class exploitation, necessitating the building of a broad
uni ed movement for structural change, or a new movement toward
socialism.
e worse thing in present circumstances would be if we were to
trivialize or downplay the entry of neo-fascism into the White House or the
relation of this to capitalism, imperial expansion, and global exterminism
(climate change and the growing dangers of thermonuclear war). In his
statement for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump, while
pointedly failing to mention the killing of six million Jews, declared, in
Manichean terms: “It is impossible to fathom the depravity and horror
in icted on innocent people by Nazi terror. . . . As we remember those who
died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the
innocent. . . . I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my
Presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat
the powers of good.”107
More than three decades ago, le historian Basil Davidson concluded his
Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War with these words:
Now, in our own time, the old contest [fascism versus the democratic resistance] is there again.
Self-appointed super-patriots of the far right . . . croak their froglike voices to the tunes of a
victory which, they would have us believe, was theirs: whereas, in fact, the truth was precisely
the reverse. New “national fronts” clamber on the scene, no smaller or more stupid than the
Nazis were when they began. Old equivocations are replaced by new equivocations, just as
apparently “respectable and proper” as the old ones were.
ey are all things to resist. Now as then: but sooner this time. A lot sooner.108
 is Is Not Populism
I am concerned with power politics—that is to say, I make use of all
means that seem to me to be of service, without the slightest concern
for the proprieties or for codes of honor.
—ADOLF HITLER1

e rise of Donald Trump to president of the United States is commonly

thought to represent the triumph of “right-wing populism,” or simply
“populism.” e term populism is notoriously difficult to de ne, since
lacking any de nite substantive content.2 It is used in the dominant
discourse to refer to any movement that appeals to “the people,” while
attacking “the elites.”3 In the United States, populism has a much older
history associated with the great agrarian revolt of the late nineteenth
century.4 But today the concept primarily has to do with the growth in
Europe, and more recently in the United States, of so-called right-wing
populism—and only secondarily with what are labeled le-wing populist
movements, such as Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, or Occupy in the
United States.
Right-wing populism is a euphemism introduced into the European
discussion in the last few decades to refer to movements in the “fascist
genus” (fascism/neo-fascism/post-fascism), characterized by virulently
xenophobic, ultra-nationalist tendencies, rooted primarily in the lower-
middle class and relatively privileged sections of the working class, in
alliance with monopolistic capital.5 is can be seen in the National Front in
France, the Northern League in Italy, the Party for Freedom in the
Netherlands, the UK Independence Party, the Sweden Democrats, and
similar parties and movements in other advanced capitalist countries.6
e same basic phenomenon has now triumphed in the United States, in
the form of Trump’s rise to chief executive. Yet mainstream commentary has
generally avoided the question of fascism or neo-fascism in this context,
preferring instead to apply the vaguer, safer notion of populism. is is not
just because of the horri c images of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that
the term fascist evokes, or because it has been increasingly used as an all-
purpose term of political abuse. Rather, the liberal mainstream’s aversion to
the neo-fascist designation arises principally from the critique of capitalism
that any serious engagement with this political phenomenon would entail.
As Bertolt Brecht asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about
Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it
forth?”7
In today’s political context, it is crucial to understand not only how the
failures of neoliberalism give rise to neo-fascism, but also to connect these
developments to the structural crisis of monopoly- nance capital—that is,
to the regime of concentrated, nancialized, and globalized capitalism. Only
based on such a thoroughgoing historical critique is it possible to conceive
the necessary forms of resistance.

THE CLOAK OF POPULISM

e notion of right-wing populism is employed in liberal discourse as a

mildly negative epithet; one that both decries this tendency, and at the same
time offers it a cloak—by setting aside the whole question of fascism/neo-
fascism. is re ects the ruling class’s ambiguous relation to the “radical
right,” which, for all its supposed “radicalism,” is recognized as fully
compatible with capitalism. Indeed, the forces of the neo-fascist right,
though still regarded warily by global elites, have been systematically “de-
demonized” in much of Europe, and are oen seen as acceptable partners in
a center-right (or right-center) government.8
e Trump phenomenon is now undergoing a comparable assimilation.
Historians Federico Finchelstein and Pablo Piccato wrote in a recent
Washington Post op-ed that “racism and charismatic leadership bring Trump
close to the fascist equation but he might be better described as post-fascist,
which is to say populist. . . . Modern populism arose from the defeat of
fascism, [and] as a novel post-fascist attempt to bring back the fascist
experience to the democratic path, creating in turn an authoritarian form of
democracy.” Other mainstream commentators are even more allergic to any
association of the Trump phenomenon with fascism. us Vox writer Dylan
Matthews insists, “Trump is not a fascist. . . . He’s a right-wing populist.”
Most pundits dely avoid the question altogether. For New York Times
columnist omas Edsall, Trump represents “the ascendance of right-wing
populism in America,” plain and simple.9
e hegemonic liberal approach to these issues is deeply rooted in
transformations in political theory that go back to the Cold War. Populism
as a political rubric is seen as conforming to the coordinates of the theory of
totalitarianism, as propounded most famously by Hannah Arendt. In this
view, all forms of opposition to the liberal-democratic management of
capitalist society, from whichever direction they come, are to be viewed as
illiberal, totalitarian tendencies, and are all the more dangerous if they have
mass-based roots. Society is thus only democratic to the extent that it is
restricted to liberal democracy, which con nes the rights and protections of
individuals to those limited forms conducive to a structurally inegalitarian
capitalist regime rooted in private property. Such a society, as Marxist
economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy wrote in Monopoly Capital, “is
democratic in form and plutocratic in content.”10 Within this dominant
possessive-individualist perspective, populism has therefore come to mean
all movements with any popular appeal that challenge the prevailing liberal-
democratic state apparatus in advanced capitalist societies.
A major ideological shi occurred with the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991, leading to the almost universal acceptance of the liberal-democratic
state as the sole bulwark against totalitarianism (and evil), a view associated
in particular with Arendt. As Slavoj Žižek writes in Did Somebody Say
Totalitarianism?:
e elevation of Hannah Arendt into an untouchable authority . . . is perhaps the clearest sign
of the theoretical defeat of the Le—of how the Le has accepted the basic coordinates of
liberal democracy (“democracy” versus “totalitarianism,” etc.), and is now trying to rede ne its
(op)position within this space. . . . roughout its entire career, “totalitarianism” was an
ideological notion that sustained the complex operation of “taming free radicals,” of
guaranteeing the liberal-democratic hegemony, dismissing the Leist critique of liberal
democracy as the obverse, the “twin,” of the Rightist Fascist dictatorship. And it is useless to try
to redeem ‘totalitarianism’ through division into subcategories (emphasizing the difference
between the Fascist and Communist variety): the moment one accepts the notion of
“totalitarianism,” one is rmly located within the liberal-democratic horizon. e contention
[here] . . . is that the notion of “totalitarianism,” far from being an effective theoretical concept,
is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the
 historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us
from thinking.11

Today’s conventional use of the term populism derives directly from this
same “liberal-democratic horizon.”12 Populism is seen as representing
incipient anti-democratic, dictatorial, and even totalitarian tendencies, to be
found on both right and le, insofar as they oppose liberal democracy. Jan-
Werner Müller answers the question What Is Populism?, raised in the title of
his book, by calling populism a “danger to democracy.” It can be described
as “the permanent shadow of representative politics.” Likewise, Cas Muddle
and Cristóbal Kaltwasser state in their Populism: A Very Short Introduction:
“eoretically, populism is most fundamentally juxtaposed to liberal
democracy.” Populists are thus seen as tending toward “extremism,” precisely
in their opposition to the liberal-democratic state that has traditionally
dominated in capitalist society.13
Nearly every substantive issue is lost in this de nition of populism, most
notably the different ways in which le and right revolts occur, their distinct
class-ideological bases, and their divergent, indeed incompatible, objectives.
Fascism is the antonym of liberal democracy within a capitalist society. Its
advocates wish to replace liberal democracy with a different form of
management of the capitalist system, removing basic civil rights and limits
on executive power, strengthening the repressive apparatus to weaken
working-class organization, and adopting ethno-nationalist forms of social
exclusion. In contrast, socialism is the antonym, not of the liberal-
democratic state, but of capitalism itself. Socialists seek to replace capitalism
with an entirely different mode of production, based on both “substantive
equality” and “substantive democracy.”14
Nevertheless, faced with a resurgence of fascist tendencies in Western
societies, many on the le have chosen—perhaps only for the sake of
convenience—to join the Arendtian consensus. Hence, populism is
portrayed even by leading analysts on the le as an incoherent and irrational
attack on elites, born of anti-democratic and totalitarian tendencies.
Acceptance of this view marks a signi cant political and ideological retreat,
ceding the terms and direction of the debate to the interests of the liberal-
democratic establishment.
 Commenting on the hegemonic framing of the radical right as populist,
and the analytical problems it presents, Andrea Mammone observes in his
Transnational Neo-Fascism in France and Italy that “the terms populism and
national populism” were deliberately introduced in recent decades by liberal
European commentators in order to “replace fascism/neo-fascism as the
used terminology.” is move was designed to “provide a sort of political
and democratic legitimization of right-wing extremism.” Moreover, the
rechristening of such movements as populist, Mammone argues, had less to
do with any aspect of the movements themselves than with the presumption
that liberal-democratic institutions were now too solid to permit an actual
neo-fascist takeover. Instead, these neo-fascist forces were increasingly seen
as politically malleable, with a potentially useful role in stabilizing capitalist
society, checkmating the le.15
Likewise, political scientist Walter Laqueur notes that use of the term
populist generates nothing but “great fuzziness,” and requires subcategories
to distinguish le from right. It is particularly misleading, he argues, with
respect to the right-wing movements to which the term is most oen
applied. Hence, Laqueur prefers to use “neo-fascism” for what is variously
called “right-wing extremism, right-wing radicalism, radical right-wing
populism . . . [and] national populism”—all terms that he nds
“unsatisfactory” in addressing a historically speci c political tendency
within the larger “fascist genus.”16
Given this complex and contested ideological context, it is all the more
important to acknowledge those notable radical commentators, including
Walter Dean Burnham, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole, Henry
Giroux, Paul Street, and Cornel West, who have rejected the populist
designation for the Trump phenomenon and see it as part of a larger “neo-
fascist wind” disrupting advanced capitalist states. Nor is this a minor issue:
at stake is nothing less than the le’s understanding of and response to an
ascendant transnational neo-fascist movement in Europe and the United
States, in the context of a deepening economic and political crisis.17
Political movements within the fascist genus have their mass basis in the
lower-middle class or petty bourgeoisie, overlapping with the more
privileged sections of the working class. e lower-middle class in the
United States today comprises close to a third of the U.S. population. Its
representative members are lower-level managers, semiprofessionals,
crasmen, foremen, and non-retail sales workers, with household incomes
typically running around $70,000 a year.18 It is from this stratum, and from
some workers in blue-collar industries, especially in rural areas, as well as
from owners of small businesses and corporate franchises, that Trump has
drawn his most ardent support.19
In this respect, the lower-middle class can be understood as what C.
Wright Mills called the “rearguarders” of the capitalist system. In times of
crisis, this class oen gives rise to a “radical” petty-bourgeois ideology,
divorced from both more traditional working-class and liberal views: one
that criticizes “crony capitalists” and government elites, while at the same
time allying itself with giant corporations and the ultrarich against an oen
racialized “other,” namely low-income people of color, immigrants, and the
working poor.20 More privileged than the increasingly precarious majority
of the working class, but denied the security and wealth of the upper-middle
class, this section of the population is the one most prone to intense
nationalism and racism, calling for the revival of “lost” values and traditions
—or “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” (palingenesis means rebirth).
Ultimately, the neo-fascist project, like classical fascism before it, relies on an
alliance of the lower-middle class with monopoly- nance capital, leading
ultimately to the betrayal of the movement’s mass base.21

A “LEGAL REVOLUTION”

e sheer elasticity of the concept of populism is evident in the fact that

Hitler and the Nazi Party are oen cited as examples of this phenomeon.22
Classical fascism was a complex political formation that, despite the violence
associated with its rise, has oen been described as the result of a “legal
revolution.” Both Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany sought to carry
out their political “revolutions” within and through the capitalist state
apparatus, maintaining at least a semblance of the constitutionality needed
to stabilize and legitimize the new order. Indeed, the dominant image of
fascism projected by the movement itself was of an “organized capitalism”
under a centralized “total state”—referring to the concentration of power
within the state—and a new, racialized vision of national sovereignty.23
 In his legality oath at the 1930 Leipzig Reichswehr trial, Hitler told the
court: “e Constitution only maps out the arena of battle, not the goal. We
enter the legal agencies and in that way will make our party the determining
factor. However, once we possess the constitutional power, we will mold the
state into the shape we hold to be suitable.” Hitler rose to power not by
abolishing the Weimar Constitution, but rather, as historian Karl Bracher
explained, through “the erosion and abrogation of its substance by
constitutional means.”24 By November 1932, it was clear that the Nazi Party
could not win a majority of the parliamentary seats. Hitler, however, would
nd another way to power, through his appointment as chancellor.
Once at the helm, Hitler moved quickly to invoke Article 48 of the
Weimar Constitution, which authorized the executive, together with the
army, to claim emergency powers and enact any measures deemed necessary
to restore public order (originally intended as a safeguard against the le).
is meant that the executive was free to act independently of the
parliament, promulgating laws on its own, and suspending civil liberties.
With the setting of the Reichstag re at the end of February 1933, a month
aer he was sworn in as chancellor, Hitler was able to wield Article 48,
thereby concentrating power in the executive. is was soon followed by the
Enabling Act (the Law to Eliminate Peril to Nation and Reich), which
further eroded the separation of powers.25 However, the transition to full
power and the consolidation of the ird Reich required a process of
Gleichschaltung, or “bringing into line,” over the course of 1933–34, during
which most other branches of the state and civil society were incorporated
into the new Nazi order—largely voluntarily, but under a growing terror
regime.
It is important to recognize that all of this was given legal form, as was
fascist management of the state in general. Historian Nikolaus Wachsmann
notes that far from renouncing the law or the judiciary, the Nazi state
imposed a system of “legal terror”:
e ird Reich did not become an all-out police state. Leading Nazis occasionally even made
public gestures of support for the legal system, at least in the early years of the dictatorship.
Hitler himself publicly promised in his speech on 23 March 1933 that the German judges were
irremovable. At the same time, though, he also expected the legal system to fall into line with
his general wishes, demanding “elasticity” in sentencing. Crucially, Hitler and other senior
Nazis stressed that judges were ultimately answerable to the “national community,” not to
 abstract legal principles. e only guideline for judges, it was said, was the welfare of the
German people, and the mythical “will of the national community” was frequently invoked to
justify brutal punishment. at this “will” was in reality nothing more than the will of the Nazi
leaders, or more precisely Hitler’s own, was not seen as a contradiction. . . . e legal apparatus
was an essential element of Nazi terror. It played a central role in the criminalisation of
political dissent and the politicisation of common crime. Trials were not completely hidden
from the public. On the contrary, the Nazi media were full of news about court cases and
sentences.26

Hitler explicitly refused to set aside the Weimar Constitution and codify
his new order, arguing that “justice is a means of ruling. Justice is the
codi ed practice of ruling.” A new constitution would therefore be
premature, and would only weaken the “revolution.” Eventually, of course,
the Gleichschaltung process was complete, and the identi cation of the
Führer with the law was absolute. Under the resulting Führerprinzip, as the
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt wrote, “the Führer safeguards the Reich.”27
Similarly, Mussolini’s defenders always insisted, in the words of Italian
fascist Julius Evola, that Il Duce “did not ‘seize’ power, but received it from
the King, and under the conformist institutional garb of entrusting the
government to him there was the equivalent of a sort of completely legal
investiture.”28 Fascist propaganda strained to give to Mussolini’s dictatorship
the trappings of constitutionalism, as if the October 1922 March on Rome
had never taken place. is appearance of legality was only made possible by
the support of the capitalist class and the military, as well as the broader
political right. e elaborate performance of constitutional order continued
even as systematic repression and authoritarianism deepened.
A de ning feature of fascism was its continuation of the capitalist
separation of state and economy, even as the role of the state was
transformed. e very notion of the “privatization” of the economy, now
associated with neoliberalism, was a Nazi invention, re ecting the ird
Reich’s massive denationalization of industry in sectors such as steel,
mining, shipbuilding, and banking.29 Command of industry and nance
was returned to capital. e Nazi state strongly favored economic
concentration, passing legislation designed to promote cartels. Tax policy
likewise favored the capitalist class: “Tax increases were levied primarily
upon non-business taxpayers in the population. e tax burden was thus
enlarged for wage earners and consumer groups in general.”30 And though
Hitler’s concern to protect big business and private property did not prevent
him from encouraging embezzlement and corruption among his associates,
in general private property (at least for “racially pure” Germans) and the
institutions of capitalism remained sacrosanct.31
At the same time, fascist regimes in both Italy and Germany were known
for supporting and even expanding the welfare state, albeit with racial
exclusions. Social provision grew enormously under Mussolini, garnering
global praise. In Germany, the welfare state was a cornerstone of the regime.
As historian Sheri Berman writes: “e Nazis . . . supported an extensive
welfare state (of course, for ‘ethnically pure’ Germans). It included free
higher education, family and child support, pensions, health insurance, and
an array of publicly supported entertainment and vacation options.”
Economic expansion, driven by demand generated through spending on
infrastructure and the military, ensured full employment, even as unions
were abolished and wages repressed. e number of unemployed fell from
almost 6 million in 1933, when Hitler came to power, to 2.4 million at the
end of 1934, when he was to consolidate his power as Führer. By 1938,
Germany had effectively achieved full employment, while most other
capitalist countries were still mired in the Great Depression (the
unemployment rate in the United States that year was 19 percent). In the
eyes of much of the world, fascism’s claim to legitimacy was that it had
found a way to make capitalism work, even as it appeared to be
disintegrating elsewhere.32
None of this is to deny the deeply repressive character of the fascist state,
its abrogation of human rights, its militarism, imperialism, and racism.33
Yet, at the same time the classical fascist state sought to legitimate itself and
consolidate its position with the population—or that part of the population
that it considered its mass base. Once in power, however, fascist states
purged many of their more “radical” followers (as in the “Night of the Long
Knives,” June 30 to July 2, 1934, in Hitler’s Germany) in the process of
linking up more rmly with monopoly capital.
Today’s neo-fascism builds on these earlier fascist myths of the “legal
revolution,” along with the notion of a more organized, efficient capitalist
state, able to transcend the liberal-democratic impasse. It promises both
policies of ethno-national exclusion and of revitalized economic growth and
employment through infrastructure spending and military expansion. At the
same time, it is oen less inclined than the traditional right to attack the
welfare state or to promote austerity. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National
Front has recently tried to remake itself as a more broadly “anti-
establishment” party, exploiting popular discontent to attract a wider range
of supporters, including some who formerly identi ed with the le. Despite
this cynical rebranding, the party’s politics of petty-bourgeois resentment,
reactionary Catholicism, and virulent xenophobia, together with its link to
the upper echelons of the capitalist class, mark it as neo-fascist.34
Like the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s,
neo-fascism arises from interrelated crises of capitalism and the liberal-
democratic state, undermining the latter while seeking to shore up the
former. Given that explicit identi cation with classical fascism remains
taboo in mainstream politics, organized neo-fascism today is presented as
formally democratic and populist, adhering to legal-constitutional
structures. Nevertheless, like all movements in the fascist genus, neo-fascist
ideology combines racist, nationalist, and culturalist myths with economic
and political proposals aimed primarily at the lower-middle class (or petty
bourgeoisie) in alliance with monopoly capital—while also seeking to
integrate nationalistic working-class supporters and rural populations.
Increasingly, neo-fascism draws support from relatively privileged wage
workers that in the late twentieth century enjoyed a degree of prosperity and
status but who now nd their living conditions imperiled in the stagnating
advanced capitalist economy of the early twenty- rst century.35
e single most important ideological gure in the growth of neo-
fascism in Europe in the post–Second World War years, and in the
promotion of its distinct cultural perspective, was the Italian philosopher
Julius Evola (1898–1974). As Laqueur has observed, Evola was at the
“extreme wing of historical fascism,” in uencing Mussolini with respect to
race and racism, and later turning to Hitler as a more authentic
representative of the fascist project. Signi cantly, Evola was present at
Hitler’s general headquarters in 1943 on the very day when the Waffen-SS
troops were to bring Mussolini there, following their rescue of him from
imprisonment in Italy aer he was deposed. In the 1930s, Evola wrote:
“Everything that is heroism and the dignity of the warrior in our conception
must be considered justi ed from a higher point of view: in the same way
that we have to oppose, with complete precision and on all levels, everything
that is a democratic and levelling disorder.”36 Evola was known for his
virulent anti-Semitism, even by the standards of the time. He frequently
criticized fascism for not being pure enough.
Following the Second World War, Evola was to develop a set of neo-
fascist theoretical works under the mantle of “traditionalism,” including
postwar editions of his fascist treatise Revolt Against the Modern World
(1934), as well as such works as Men Among the Ruins (1953), Ride the Tiger
(1961), e Path of Cinnabar (1963), and Fascism Viewed from the Right
(1970). e fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, he argued,
needed to be defended in its “positive” aspects and separated from the
speci c mistakes that Hitler and Mussolini made that led to its defeat in the
Second World War. As Evola scholar H. T. Hansen put it in his Introduction
to Men Among the Ruins, Evola came to be viewed as “the ‘spiritual father’ of
a group of radical ‘neo-fascists’ (in the broad sense of the word).” Giorgio
Almirante, party chairman of the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano), heir to
the old Fascist Party, called Evola “the Marcuse of the Right, only better.”37
Evola’s cultural analysis emphasized the values of tradition, spiritualism,
idealism, hierarchy, and counterrevolution, and pointed to the need for a
new “warrior” class.38 He wrote in Ride the Tiger: When material incentives
do not suffice, “the only in uence over the masses today—and now even
more than ever—is on the plane of impassioned and subintellectual forces,
which by their very nature lack any stability. ese are the forces that
demagogues, popular leaders, manipulators of myths, and fabricators of
‘public opinion’ count on. In this regard, we can learn from yesterday’s
regimes in Germany and Italy that positioned themselves against democracy
and Marxism.”39 e pure-fascist or neo-fascist state would be organized
around superior, elite racial stocks, divesting itself of “inferior races.”
Aryanism needed to be interpreted not as related simply to the Germanic
stock, but in a way that encompassed Europeans more broadly, or at least the
“Aryan-Roman” race.40 Evola also wrote of the “decadence of modern
woman” and the “feminist idiocy.” e revolt against the modern world
included a revolt against science. “None of modern science,” he stated, “has
the slightest value as knowledge.”41
 Although Evola had no economic analysis to speak of, he insisted that the
state of the new fascist era, like that of the old, should be based on private
property and corporatism, with the destruction of any autonomous
working-class organizations. e state, though, should retain its relative
autonomy, securing the entire system from above, through its monopoly of
the use of force. Sovereignty, viewed in palin-genetic, ultra-nationalistic, and
authoritarian terms, needed to be “absolute.”42
Evola and other neo-fascist thinkers, such as the in uential French
theorist Alain de Benoist, created the ideological foundations for the
transnational neo-fascist movement that emerged in Europe in the 1970s
and later spread to the United States. e movement was to gain a mass
following as a result of the increasing economic stagnation in the advanced
capitalist world, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since the Great
Financial Crisis of 2007–2009. Nevertheless, the organizational roots of
many of these developments were formed in Europe in the 1970s. is can
be seen, for example, in the formation of what were called “Hobbit Camps”
for neo-fascist youth in Italy (named aer the creatures in J. R. R. Tolkien’s
novels), with the notion of Hobbits standing for the lower-middle class, the
largely forgotten population rising up to transform the world. is same
idea was later to catch on with the alt-right in the United States.43 A key
gure today in what Mammone calls the “transnational neo-fascist
movement” is the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who has built his
“fourth political theory” on Evola’s ideas (as well as on those of Schmitt, de
Benoist, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger), attracting the
favorable attention of the U.S. alt-right.44

TRUMP AND THE NEO-FASCIST ALLIANCE

Ironically, it is in the United States, where there are no neo-fascist parties of

any electoral standing, that the “radical right” has enjoyed its greatest victory
so far. From the Republican primaries to his defeat of Hillary Clinton in the
Electoral College, Trump’s path to the White House depended on his appeal
to the lower-middle class and parts of the white working class, as well as
rural and evangelical Christian voters. At every turn, Trump’s campaign
 outed convention and propriety, instead exploiting Evola’s “impassioned
and subintellectual forces.”
A key source of Trump’s success was his connection to the alt-right, in
particular Breitbart News and its CEO, Steve Bannon, who became Trump’s
campaign manager. Channeling the radical right’s contempt for the political
establishment, the Bannon-Breitbart strategy spoke to the fears and
resentments of a decisive section of the lower-middle and working classes.
With Bannon’s help, Trump also attracted the strategic support of certain
powerful members of the capitalist class, particularly the Silicon Valley
tycoon Peter iel and the billionaire hedge fund mogul Robert Mercer and
his daughter Rebekah.45 Trump’s quintessentially neo-fascist strategy of
enlisting mass support through racist and nativist appeals to lower-middle
class insecurities, while allying with core elements of the ruling class, has
sown confusion in elite political circles and the corporate media. Lacking
any historical or class references, mainstream pundits saw his campaign as a
confused hybrid of right and le. Some otherwise astute analysts on the le
portrayed him as a “centrist,” while still others insisted that he had no
principles or plan at all, that his chaotic campaign was governed only by the
candidate’s egoistic impulses.46
Nevertheless, what should be clear at this point is that the Trump
administration came into office with what can only be called a neo-fascist
political project. Trump’s domestic agenda re ected the class alliances and
“subintellectual” ideology that brought him to power. In addition to the
well-known “Muslim ban” and the proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border, the Trump administration has pressed for “deconstruction of the
administrative state” (as Bannon called it); the gutting of the environmental
protection and scienti c agencies; the elimination of most federal
regulations on business; a trillion-dollar increase in infrastructure spending;
privatization of education; a huge rise in military spending; the effective
elimination of Obamacare; the end of net neutrality; and steep cuts to taxes
on corporations and the rich. Trump has lled his cabinet and advisory
positions with a ghoulish ensemble of billionaires, Wall Street insiders,
hardline generals, alt-right ideologues, and climate-change deniers.47
Although it is true that the administration’s early months were marked by
erce battles inside the West Wing between alt-right true believers and more
“moderate” plutocratic interests, these con icts only re ected the inherent
contradictions in the neo-fascist alliance that has thus far de ned the Trump
White House. e representatives of the alt-right are preoccupied with pure
power politics and with bringing the federal branches and bureaucracies
into line, while the plutocrats—Trump’s real constituency—appear to be
steering the administration toward a newly unfettered form of corporate
oligarchy.48
e symbolic rivals in this factional struggle are Bannon, the alt-right
rebreather who stands for Trump’s base—though he is himself an alumnus
of Goldman Sachs and a consummate elite insider—and Trump’s son-in-law
and adviser, Jared Kushner, a real estate scion seeking to safeguard the
interests of nancial capital. Bannon, though supporting a hard-nosed
capitalism, is primarily concerned with deconstructing the administrative
state and producing political results that appeal to Trump’s base. e key to
winning an election, he explains, is “to play to people without a college
education. High school people. at’s how you win elections.” His main
interest is thus in carrying out a “political revolution.”49 Kushner, in
contrast, is a more politically detached gure, concerned rst and foremost
with questions of capital accumulation and furthering the interests of the
ruling class—thus representing Trump’s own ultimate interest. At present,
the administration’s focus seems to be on loosening all restraints on
corporate cronyism and instituting tax reform in favor of the plutocrats:
Kushner’s domain. But as the midterm elections near, Trump will likely
swing back toward the alt-right, at least rhetorically, Bannon’s domain.
In the imperial sphere, the administration, as we have seen, initially
sought a détente with Russia, with the object of shiing the full force of the
U.S. empire against the Islamic world (or that part of it in the Middle East
and Africa not securely within the U.S. empire) and China. is planned
geopolitical shi put the White House at odds with both the national
security “deep state” and leading sections of the capitalist class, and only
heightened the con ict between the Kushner and Bannon factions within
the White House. But with his rst national security advisor, Michael Flynn,
forced to resign over his alleged ties to Russia, and with his poll numbers at
historic lows, Trump abruptly changed course by launching an attack on
Syria. In one stroke, Trump donned the attire of commander-in-chief, to
near-universal media acclaim: in the words of CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria,
he “became president of the United States” that night.
us, within little more than two weeks from late March to mid-April,
the world witnessed dramatically increased civilian casualties from U.S.
bombings in the Middle East, as Trump turned day-to-day decisions over to
the military commanders on the ground. is was accompanied by Trump’s
launching of y-nine cruise missiles at a Syrian air base; the dropping of
“the mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan; and explicit threats of military
action against North Korea.50
Some commentators naïvely suggested that this pivot toward a war-room
posture on the part of the administration con icted with its supposed
original “isolationist” values and therefore represented a shi to the center.
e mainstream media went so far as to declare that Trump’s reversals
(including the removal of Bannon from the National Security Council)
meant that he had nally decided on a more “presidential” course. In fact,
these were precisely the kind of violent swings in U.S. imperial posture that
were to be expected from a neo-fascist White House. e original détente
with Russia was dropped, without the abandonment of any of the new
administration’s earlier geopolitical objectives, aimed at increasing pressure
on the Islamic State and China.51
e stark reality is that under Trump, the United States is being armed to
the teeth, and is exhibiting greater signs of belligerence. e new
administration has now signed on to the neoconservative strategy of
simultaneously opposing both Russia and China. Nor should this be
occasion for any particular surprise. Signi cantly, it was none other than
Bannon who declared: “America has to be strong—economically strong and
militarily strong. And a strong America could be ultimately a provider of
Pax Americana,” that is, a new unipolar world empire. None of this places
Trump outside the mainstream of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, the demand to
restore U.S. power abroad is supported by the entire U.S. ruling class, as
evidenced by Hillary Clinton’s promise on the campaign trail to impose no-
y zones in Syria, which would have brought the world to the brink of a
global thermonuclear war, and by her strong support of Trump’s actions
against Syria. Nevertheless, the Trump administration in its short time in
office has managed to signal a bravado and recklessness in the use of force,
coupled with a shi toward military over civilian control in this area, that is
nothing short of ominous.52

THE NEW BARBARISM

As indicated above, the White House has been the site of competing
allegiances: responses to the interests of monopoly- nance capital on one
side, and to Trump’s lower-middle-class base on the other. ough there is
no doubt that the administration will ultimately prioritize the former over
the latter, betraying its claims to populism, to retain any credibility with its
base the White House nonetheless must perform an elaborate dance. It must
promote the interests of the corporate rich, while distancing itself from the
upper-middle-class professional strata so loathed by Trump’s supporters.53
His policies must give “expression” to lower-middle-class interests and, to
some extent, working-class demands, even if these are not to be realized.54
e political and strategic constellation represented by Bannon, Breitbart,
and the Mercers is therefore vital.
Hence, the neo-fascist strategy that marks the Trump White House thus
far is likely to continue, incorporating both the alt-right and plutocratic
factions. Upon entering the White House, Trump immediately raised up
representatives of the alt-right, who had been key to his campaign. Here the
role of Bannon, still Trump’s chief strategist, and the main link to Breitbart,
remains central. Ideologically the alt-right relies on the ideas of thinkers
such as Evola, Dugin, and Oswald Spengler (the in uential early twentieth-
century German historian and author of e Decline of the West).55 Bannon
has demonstrated considerable acquaintance with Evola’s work, professing
admiration for Evola’s “traditionalism . . . particularly the sense of where it
supports the underpinnings of nationalism” and the expansion of white-
European cultural sovereignty. For Bannon, the right’s global struggle is to
be seen in terms of a renewal of the historic war of the “Judeo-Christian
West” against Islam, now extended to include the national-cultural exclusion
of non-white immigrants into Europe and the United States.56
A crucial part of the streamlined neo-fascist appeal that Bannon
imparted early on to the Trump campaign and then carried over to the
White House is geared to economic nationalism. Bannon argues that “the
globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in
Asia.” is points to a kind of empire in reverse, where working-class, white
Americans, who formerly bene tted from unrivaled U.S. hegemony in the
world economy, are now seeing their jobs taken away by Asians, while they
are being ooded by “illegal” Latino immigrants, and by refugees from
Middle East countries dominated by “radical Islamic terrorists.” Crony
capitalists, nanciers on the take, and liberal globalists are all to blame.
Trump, Bannon, Breitbart, and the alt-right rely heavily on racially coded
language (or dog whistles) as signals to reach their more militant white
supporters, who are encouraged to see immigrants, refugees, and non-white
populations generally as constituting a combined economic and cultural
threat.57
e racial strategy can be seen in Bannon’s repeated references
metaphorically to e Camp of the Saints. is is the title of a novel by
French writer Jean Raspail; undoubtedly one of the most racist works of its
kind ever published. In 1975, when the book was translated into English, the
usually staid Kirkus Reviews wrote that “the publishers are presenting e
Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same
sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.” is rabidly racist novel depicts
an invasion by 800,000 “wretched creatures,” refugees in the derelict Last
Chance Armada, who seek to take over France as a beachhead into white
Europe, “the camp of the saints.” Meanwhile hordes of Chinese threaten
Russia, a French cruise ship has been seized in Manila, and barricades have
been erected by whites around black ghettos in New York. e title comes
from the Book of Revelation (20:9): “And they went up on the breadth of the
earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and
re came down from the God of heaven, and devoured them.” From page 1
on, e Camp of the Saints is full of murder, rape, carnage, atrocities, and the
most extreme forms of racism, reducing people to body parts, with severed
(racially signi ed) body parts strewn everywhere. Its cover advertises it as
“the apocalyptic, controversial, bestselling novel about the end of the white
world.” It is intended to generate the emotional, subintellectual basis, in
Evola’s terms, for unutterable violence, directed not just at Asians but at all
non-white races, who are seen as racial threats.58
 e Camp of the Saints has been taken up by the alt-right as a kind of
racist code. For Bannon, it refers to refugees ooding from the Middle East
and Africa into Europe. As he declared in 2015, “It’s been almost a Camp of
the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern
Europe.” A year later, he stated, “e whole thing in Europe is all about
immigration. It’s a global issue today—this kind of global Camp of the
Saints.” About the same time, he said, “It’s not a migration. It’s really an
invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”59 Aer pointedly alluding to e
Camp of the Saints in an interview with Jeff Sessions—now U.S. Attorney
General, whom Bannon has described as “one of the intellectual, moral
leaders of this populist, nationalist movement in this country”—Bannon
asked, “Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the
belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West to actually
win this war [against immigrants, refugees and Islam]?” Sessions answered,
“I’m worried about that.”60 Others have taken this up as well. Iowa GOP
Congressman Steve King, referred in a radio interview in March 2017 to the
possibility of race wars in the United States today, strongly recommending
that people read e Camp of Saints in this context.61
Trumpism is rife on a daily basis with racism, misogyny, and extreme
nationalism. Bannon and Breitbart refer coyly to the alt-right movement as
one made up of “working-class Hobbits,” a term for its “forgotten” white,
lower-middle-class/working-class adherents. is refers back to a negative
reference by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain to Tea Party
“Hobbits.”62 Bannon took it up as an ironic term, standing for Trump’s
hardcore constituency. In doing so, though, he was undoubtedly aware of
the earlier neo-fascist “Hobbit camps” that had been formed in Italy, with a
similar meaning. Indeed, the U.S. alt-right, as represented by Breitbart,
could be described today as a toxic mixture of European neo-fascism, U.S.
white supremacism, and Christian fundamentalism.
e Trump phenomenon draws on some of the most sordid aspects of
the U.S. past, including genocide (of Native Americans), slavery, Jim Crow,
and imperialism. Of all U.S. presidents, the one that is seen by Bannon (and
by Trump himself) as most closely related to the new resident at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue is Andrew Jackson. is is ostensibly because of the
popular-democratic upsurge associated with him and his attack on the Bank
of the United States; but also undoubtedly because of his wealthy slaveholder
status, his gruesome role in the Indian Wars, and his government’s forcible
removal of the southeastern tribes in the Trail of Tears. Trump declared in
an interview in April 2017 that if Jackson had still been alive (he died sixteen
years before the Confederate forces opened re on Fort Sumter) and
presumably had he been president, he would have prevented the Civil War—
an absurd statement doubtless meant as a dog whistle to Trump’s alt-right,
white supremacist supporters, who idealize the slave South and the
Confederacy.63
Trump’s own outlook and ambitions intersect ideologically with the alt-
right as his 2011 book, Tough Times: Make America Great Again, shows.
Trump declared on the campaign trail that “the only important thing is the
uni cation of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.”64
Nevertheless, the owner of Trump Tower in Manhattan represents
monopoly- nance capital, rst and foremost. Indeed, Trump’s attacks on
“crony capitalism” and his calls for “draining the swamp” are belied by the
billionaires and lobbyists that he has brought into his administration, and
the cronyism that is everywhere visible, starting with his own family and
extending to the special access to the president for those ultra-wealthy
interests who belong to his Mar-a-Lago Golf Club.65
e neo-fascist thrust of the Trump White House can be seen in those
chosen to occupy key strategic roles. An example of this is Curtis Ellis, a
member of Trump’s beachhead transition team, appointed as special
assistant to the Secretary of Labor. Ellis, a Breitbart author, wrote an article
in May 2016 for the World News Daily called “e Radical Le’s Ethnic
Cleansing of America.” In this article, which was to be celebrated by Bannon
and featured on Breitbart, Ellis argued that, for the globalist le, “the death
(literally) of white working people is a desired outcome, a feature not a
bug. . . . e death of American working-class whites was planned by the
radical le and carried out with willing executioners at the highest levels of
American politics, academia and business.”66 Such nationalistic-racist views
aimed at the le and at non-white populations were strongly encouraged by
Trump in his campaign for the presidency, and in his actions since coming
into office.
 TRUMPONOMICS AND THE CRISIS OF THE U.S. POLITICAL ECONOMY

“e neoliberal era in the United States,” Cornel West declared, “ended with
a neo-fascist bang.”67 Neoliberalism was itself a ruling-class response to the
deepening economic stagnation of the capitalist economy, as the quarter-
century of prosperity from the late 1940s through the early 1970s broke
down. Needing a stimulus in the Reagan period, the U.S. economy resorted
rst to military spending and tax cuts, but soon bene tted more
fundamentally from the long decline in interest rates (the so-called
Greenspan put), which fed a period of vast debt-credit expansion and what
Paul Sweezy called “the nancialization of the capital accumulation
process.”68 e result was a bubble economy that continued into the Clinton
and George W. Bush presidencies, and then came to a sudden end with the
bursting of the housing bubble and the subsequent crisis of 2007–2009.
Trillions of dollars were poured into corporate coffers in an attempt to “bail
out” defaulting nancial institutions, as well as heavily indebted non-
nancial corporations. e subsequent economic recovery, as noted
previously, has been one of sluggish growth or secular stagnation—a period
of “endless crisis.”69
Everywhere neoliberalism has come to stand for policies of austerity,
nancial speculation, globalization, income polarization, and corporate
cronyism, creating what Michael Yates has called “e Great Inequality.”70
“Across the advanced economies,” Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
write, “the share of GDP going to labor fell by 9 percent on average between
1980 and 2007. . . . In the United States, between 1975 and 2012, the top 1
percent gained around 47 percent of the total increase in incomes.”71 Wealth
inequality has increased even faster. In 1963, the average wealth of families
in the ninety-ninth percentile in the United States was six times that of
wealth holders in the ieth percentile; in 2013, it was twelve times.72
All of this has been accompanied by the erosion of U.S. hegemony in the
world economy; the growth of a new imperialism based on the global labor
arbitrage (taking advantage of wage differentials between the Global North
and South); the changing role of manufacturing and investment in the
context of the digital revolution; and neoliberal attacks on labor. ese
factors have enormously undermined the position of the working
population in the United States, while also intensifying the exploitation of
workers in the Global South. What was once seen—in hyped-up fashion—as
a “social contract” between capital and labor in the heyday of U.S. hegemony
and prosperity has now disintegrated entirely. With it has disappeared what
was once called the “labor aristocracy,” a minority of relatively privileged,
largely unionized workers in the advanced capitalist world who bene tted
indirectly from unrivaled U.S. imperial hegemony and the siphoning of
pro ts from the Global South.73 Monopoly- nance capital now freely
outsources production from the Global North to the Global South, in what
has become a new age of imperialism characterized by a race to the bottom
for workers throughout the world economy.74
e social democratic campaign of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election
showed the potential for a grassroots le upsurge in this context—the main
fear of the ruling class. But Sanders’s extraordinary campaign, representing
an approach that would undoubtedly have won in a contest with Trump by
drawing on a far wider working-class base, was blocked by a Democratic
Party establishment that had long since put into place a superdelegate
system and a structure of control through the Democratic National
Committee, expressly designed to prevent such a le-liberal or social
democratic takeover of the party. e road was thus le open to Trump. In
this context there is no real doubt about the source of Trump’s success. He
received a remarkable 77 percent of the vote among those who said their
nancial situation had worsened in the preceding four years.75
Few understood this overall economic dynamic better that Bannon, the
strategic brains behind the Trump campaign, who had worked on Wall
Street as an investment banker—before moving to Hollywood and making
ultra-right-wing political lms, testing the zeitgeist, and nally taking over
Breitbart. With a realism completely lacking in neoliberal circles, he
remarked, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the world is in the beginning
state of a crisis that it can’t avoid.” Raging against liberals, he stated that the
le globalists destroyed “the American working class. . . . e issue now is
about Americans looking to not get f—ed over.”76
Trump’s declarations about the “carnage” in the U.S. economy in his
Inaugural Address (written by Bannon and his Breitbart colleague Stephen
Miller, now a special adviser to Trump); his claims that the United States
should have taken the Iraqi oil as payment for its deposing Saddam Hussein;
and his self-styled “truthful hyperbole” regarding labor statistics (he claimed
the unemployment rate in 2016 was “as high as 35 [percent]” or more) were
all part of this same strategy.77 is also included his attack on unfair trade
(taken from the playbook of the le), his emphasis on protecting Social
Security, his proposal to cut prescription drug prices through competitive
bidding, and his promised trillion dollars for infrastructure spending. All of
this was designed to draw support from wage workers that the Democrats
had abandoned.
Likewise, the virulent attacks on illegal immigrants and refugees, the
building of the wall between the United States and Mexico, and Trump’s
strong law-and-order stance (including suggestions that Black Lives Matter
be put under federal surveillance) were all part of the attempt to consolidate
mass support for Trump in class-economic and racial terms.78
Casting aside the Obama-era Trans-Paci c Partnership, Trump has raised
the prospect of trade and currency wars with China to save American jobs.
He appointed as director of the White House National Trade Council
economist Peter Navarro, author of e Coming China Wars, which accuses
China of currency manipulation and unleashing a “new imperialism” on the
globe. e United States, Navarro argues, should end its “mutually parasitic
economic codependence” with China and ght back economically (and
militarily). Among Navarro’s other works are Death by China (2011) and
Crouching China: What China’s Militarism Means to the World (2015).79
Trump has vowed to more than double the rate of growth of the
economy. Yet his economic policy is largely a supply-side fantasy, which
proclaims that rapid growth will automatically follow the gigantic windfalls
to monopoly- nance capital resulting from wholesale deregulation, and
from lavish tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations they own. He
repeatedly declared that he would hugely expand infrastructure spending,
which would give a boost to the real estate and construction sectors. But
since the Trump plan is based on tax cuts to rms, thus payng them to do
what they would likely have done anyway, rather than a massive increase in
spending, and is supposed to be strung out over ten years, it will do little to
stimulate the economy as a whole. Indeed, none of this can li the economy
out of stagnation. e most likely result is continued slow growth, possibly
interrupted by a bubble effect in the nancial sector.80 e one thing that is
certain is the business cycle. e economy is nearing its peak and recession
is on the horizon, expected by many economists to commence within a few
years.
Any prospect for real economic gains for the mass of the population will
run into the triple contradiction of economic stagnation, nancial crisis, and
declining U.S. hegemony that characterize the epoch of monopoly- nance
capital. Rather than alter these conditions, Trump’s economic policy is likely
to aggravate them. is means that the Trump regime will, as its only
economic option, probably gravitate to further military spending increases
and imperialist adventures, coupled with greater economic repression of
workers at home, particularly among the poorest sectors of the workforce—
conceived as the surest way to “Make America Great Again.”
e greatest danger under these circumstances is that an increase in
internal repression—Bannon is on record as supporting Joseph McCarthy’s
anti-Communist witch hunt in the 1950s—will have as its counterpart an
increase in external repression and war without bounds, seen as a way of
spurring the economy.81 Certain restraints on the global use of force have
already been removed. A new upsurge in barbarism nationally and
internationally is in the wind, this time armed with weapons capable of
destroying the world as a place for human habitation. Indeed, the
exterminism that is a real danger in these circumstances is already evident
in the renunciation of all efforts to contain climate change, which Trump
calls a “hoax.” is, then, threatens the eventual collapse of civilization (and
even the extinction of humanity) under a continuation of capitalist business
as usual.

RESISTANCE IN THE “POST-TRUTH SOCIETY”

In “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties” Brecht stated:
Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must
overcome at least ve difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is
everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill
to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective;
and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons. ese are formidable problems for
writers living under Fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have ed or been exiled;
they exist even for writers in countries where civil liberty prevails.82
 Brecht would not be at all surprised that the rapid growth of neo-fascism
in the United States and Europe has coincided with the declaration by the
Oxford Dictionaries that the “word of the year” for 2016—in recognition of
Trump’s political rise—was the adjective “post-truth.” Signi cantly, another
word on the short list for word of the year was “alt-right.” e Oxford
Dictionaries de ne “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in
which objective facts are less in uential in shaping public opinion than
appeals to emotion and personal belief.”83
Blatant violation of the truth, and what Georg Lukács called “the
destruction of reason,” has always been associated with fascism, and has
helped prepare the ground for its rise.84 It is impossible to understand our
current social reality divorced from class analysis; nor is it possible to resist
that reality effectively without class organization. A de ning feature of
contemporary liberal-democratic ideology, which set the conditions for
today’s post-truth society, has been “the retreat from class,” and particularly
from the notion of the working class—ironically brought back into the
mainstream in relation to Trump.85 is makes it possible for the vague
term “populism” to cloak the growing neo-fascist threat of our time.
Resistance to these trends is only possible, as Brecht reminds us, by rst
having the courage, the keenness, the skill, the judgment, and the cunning to
address the truth with respect to this demonic political phenomenon. It is
necessary to recognize the truth in its historical, structural, and dialectical
connections, insisting on the fact that today’s neo-fascism is the inevitable
product of the crisis of monopoly- nance capital. Hence, the only effective
way to resist is to resist the system itself. Against today’s “neo-fascist wind,”
the movement toward socialism is the nal barricade, the only genuine
class-human-ecological defense.
 Trump and Climate Catastrophe
is very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.
Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are
stuck in ice.
— DONALD TRUMP, JANUARY 2, 20141

e alarm bells are ringing. e climate-change denialism of the Trump

administration, coupled with its goal of maximizing fossil-fuel extraction
and consumption at all costs, constitutes, in the words of Noam Chomsky,
“almost a death knell for the human species.” As noted climatologist Michael
E. Mann has declared, “I fear that this may be game over for the climate.”2
e effects of the failure to mitigate global warming will not, of course,
come all at once, and will not affect all regions and populations equally. But
just a few years of inaction in the immediate future could lock in dangerous
climate change that would be irreversible for the next ten thousand years.3 It
is feared that once the climatic point of no return—usually seen as a 2°C
increase in global average temperatures—is reached, positive-feedback
mechanisms will set in, accelerating warming trends and leading, in the
words of James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies and the foremost U.S. climate scientist, to “a dynamic situation
that is out of [human] control,” propelling the world toward the 4°C (or even
higher) future that is thought by scientists to portend the end of civilization,
in the sense of organized human society.4
Although the United States currently contributes only about 15 percent of
global carbon-dioxide emissions, a failure on its part to act to reduce
emissions would push the world more decisively toward the 2°C tipping
point.5 Moreover, in the event that the principal per-capita global emitter
and the hegemonic global power chooses to bow out, any worldwide effort
to reduce carbon emissions will be severely jeopardized. For this reason,
climate scientists are increasingly turning from the United States to China as
the main hope for leadership in combatting climate change.6
At this critical moment in history, three questions need to be answered:
What does the latest scienti c evidence tell us about the approach of climate
catastrophe? How is today’s monopoly- nance capitalism, with Donald
Trump as its authentic representative, contributing to this impending
planetary catastrophe? And what possibilities remain for humanity to avert
an Earth System calamity?

TOWARD A “FATAL IMBALANCE”

e latest evidence on climate change is jaw-dropping. On November 8,

2016, the day of the U.S. election, the World Meteorological Organization
reported that global average temperatures have risen to about 1.2°C above
preindustrial levels (dangerously close to the initial 1.5°C boundary set by
the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement), with 2016 the hottest year on record,
surpassing 2015 and 2014, both of which were themselves record-breaking
years.7
e annual Arctic Report Card of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, released in December 2016, showed that Arctic
temperatures are rising at rates twice the global average, with an average
annual increase over land areas of 3.5°C since the beginning of the twentieth
century. Arctic sea ice is critical for climate stability because of the “albedo
effect,” in which white ice re ects the sun’s rays. e disappearance of sea ice
and its replacement with a heat-absorbing “dark ocean” thus represents a
major positive climate feedback. In September 2016, Arctic sea ice dropped
to its second-lowest level ever recorded. e Greenland ice sheet,
meanwhile, continues its rapid loss of mass, further contributing to sea level
rise. e Arctic Resilience Report, published in November 2016 by the
Stockholm Environment Institute, emphasized that Arctic temperatures had
peaked at around 20°C warmer than normal for that time of year, and
warned of nineteen impending tipping points affecting the stability of the
Arctic region, some of which could “tip” the entire global climate, including
much higher releases of methane—a far more potent greenhouse gas than
carbon dioxide—due to the thawing of the tundra.8
 Over the last two years, the scienti c community has nearly doubled its
projections for sea level rise during the course of this century. It has already
increased about 8 inches, threatening island communities and low-lying
coastal areas throughout the world. e ocean could rise by close to two
meters (more than six feet) by 2100, and, over a couple of centuries, the
increase could reach six meters (twenty feet). By 2500, according to one
study in Nature, sea level rise could be as much as 15 meters (over 49 feet).9
Trillionthtonne.org, a climate-tracking website associated with scientists
at the University of Oxford, currently indicates that if present trends
continue unchecked, the world will hit the trillionth-metric-ton mark in
total carbon emissions—that is, the amount of total carbon emissions
thought to generate 450 ppm in global carbon concentration and a 2°C
increase in global temperatures—in just over twenty years. Over 600
gigatons (billions of metric tons) of carbon have been emitted into the
atmosphere so far. e closer the world gets to the trillionth metric ton, the
more drastic the effort needed to avoid breaking the planetary carbon
budget. At present, this would require planet-wide carbon-emissions
reductions of around 3 percent a year, and as much as three times that
number in rich, high per-capita carbon-emitting nations, which account for
more than a quarter of the world’s present emissions as well as the vast
majority of its historic emissions—and whose wealth offers them ample
material means to address the problem.10
As Mann, best known for developing the famous “hockey-stick” chart
showing the sharp rise in global average temperatures, concisely explains in
his 2016 book e Madhouse Effect:
A tipping point is, of course, a point of no return. In the context of climate change, it would
mean that we have warmed the planet enough to set in motion an unstoppable process. In
reality, there is no single tipping point in the climate system; there are many. And the farther
we go down the fossil fuel highway, the more tipping points we will cross. Many observers have
argued that a warming of the planet of 3.6°F (2°C) relative to preindustrial levels (something
that will likely happen if we allow CO2 levels to climb to just 450 ppm) would almost certainly
create dangerous, potentially irreversible changes in our climate. As a reminder, we have
already warmed around 1.5°F (1°C), and another 0.9°F (0.5°C) is likely in the pipeline.
Another decade of business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions could commit us to that 3.6°F (2°C)
“dangerous warming” threshold. . . .
At the current rate of 30 gigatons a year, we’ll burn through our [carbon] budget in about
three decades. To remain within the budget, we have to reduce emissions by several percent a
year, to bring them down to 33 percent of current levels within twenty years. at’s an average
 worldwide carbon footprint similar to what prevails in the developing world. By midcentury,
emissions must approach zero. at’s the black double-diamond slope.
One recent analysis determined that achieving these reductions would require that 33
percent of all proven reserves of oil, 50 percent of all natural gas, and 80 percent of all coal
reserves must remain in the ground. at means we have to phase out coal and leave most if
not all of the Canadian tar sands in the ground (that is, no Keystone XL pipeline).11

e issue before us, as Mann emphasizes, is therefore not a minor one. It

is a matter of a “fatal imbalance” in the human relation to the planet: the
crisis of the Anthropocene.12

CAPITALISM VERSUS THE CLIMATE

If natural science has taught us that the rapid pace of anthropogenic climate
change threatens to destroy the planet as a home for humanity, then we must
turn to social science to understand the social causes of climate change, and
the necessary solutions. As a rule, however, the social sciences are
compromised from the start. As shown in particular by the discipline of
economics, they are ideologically compelled to answer all concrete issues in
terms set by capitalism, excluding any perspective that challenges that
system or its boundaries. Social scientists are thus discouraged from
questioning, or even naming, the fundamental structures and workings of
the historical system in which we live.
It follows that the social-scienti c contributions most relevant to our
understanding of the causes and imperatives of climate change have
originated outside the mainstream of academic social science, in critical
analyses of capitalism.13 At issue, as decades of research have demonstrated,
is the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the increasing demands put on
the environment by a process of ever-expanding capital accumulation,
rooted in class, competition, and inequality, and on the other, the capacity of
the environment to withstand this assault.14 e growing pressure on the
climate, moreover, is currently taking an especially acute form, due to the
system’s heavy reliance on fossil-fuel production as a proven engine of
capital accumulation worldwide, together with the vested interests of wealth
and power that block any transition to renewable forms of energy.
In logical-historical terms, capitalism is a system of capital accumulation,
a juggernaut in which each new level of economic growth becomes the mere
means to further growth, ad in nitum. In the course of its history, capital
has been able to “shi” the ris it has created in the natural metabolism,
displacing them elsewhere, oen by imposing such externalities on the most
vulnerable populations. e capital-accumulation system, however, has now
expanded its operations to encompass the entire planet, disrupting the
biogeochemical processes of the Earth System itself, most dramatically in
the form of climate change. Even though a conversion to renewable energy
is hypothetically conceivable within the system, capital’s demand for short-
term pro ts, its competitive drive, its vested interests, and its inability to
plan for long-term needs all militate against rational energy solutions.15
e imperatives of capital accumulation, as analyzed in radical social-
science research over the last century and a half (beginning in 1867 with the
publication of Karl Marx’s Capital), are further complicated by the advent,
near the end of the last century, of monopoly- nance capital. In this phase
the system is characterized by higher levels of global economic
concentration, an accumulation regime dominated by nancial-asset
accumulation and the globalization of production, and a neoliberal political
order—giving rise, in some cases, to neo-fascism. Structurally related to this,
as an underlying cause, is the stagnation of accumulation in the advanced
capitalist economies, and the world economy as a whole.16 Under this new
nancialized capitalism, neoliberal policies have sought to remove all
regulations on the free ow and amassing of wealth, siphoning more and
more of total income into the nancial sector, and creating a system of
global labor arbitrage or worldwide unequal exchange, the latest phase of
imperialism.17
All of this is connected in the present historical conjuncture to the
declining hegemony of the United States, the rise of China, and attempts to
maintain imperial control via the triad of the United States, Europe, and
Japan. Elements of the U.S. ruling class, garishly personi ed by Trump and
his advisers, and of the triad as a whole are striving in these circumstances
to resurrect national and imperial power through fossil fuels (and nuclear
power), military buildups, nancial control, and the repression of
immigrants and racially de ned “others.” ey have enlisted in this new but
retrograde imperial project parts of a downwardly mobile and demoralized
lower-middle class and privileged sectors of the white working class.
 is countervailing reaction of a system in peril shows the limits of
reform in the epochal crisis—both economic and ecological—in which the
world is now entrapped. Reform is only viable under the regime of capital to
the extent that it does not come close to threatening the fundamental
conditions that govern accumulation as a whole. And well before that point
is reached, vested interests normally intervene to stop substantive reforms.18
e social transformations demanded today by the reality of climate change
(as well as economic stagnation) are of such a scale and signi cance that
large sections of these entrenched interests rightly perceive such necessary
changes as a danger not only to the immediate prospects for accumulation,
and to their own positions of power, but also to the very existence of
capitalism, whose importance, in their accounting, outweighs that of the
climate itself.19
Under these conditions, environmental reforms tend to be too limited to
achieve their goals, and even then face unrelenting opposition from fossil-
fuel companies and their investors and allies, a category that covers much of
the global ruling class. Meanwhile, the almost total failure of centrist-liberal
parties and governments, along with their counterparts in the academy, to
remove their self-imposed blinders and perceive the reality of capitalism’s
war on the earth re ects a major moral and ideological default of
establishment social science. e result is climate policies that have proven
substantially ineffective, and whose implementation represents little more
than a loss of precious time amid a rapidly worsening planetary emergency.
It is in the face of this failure of centrist climate policy that Naomi Klein,
issuing a wake-up call for the le, famously declared that, at least on this
crucial issue, “the right is right.” at is, the right is correct in believing that
this is a case of “capitalism versus the climate”—though wrong in choosing
the former over the latter. So far, in its war on the climate, Klein
acknowledges, “capitalism is winning.”20 e system shows no sign of
applying the brakes as the runaway train of the pro t system hurtles toward
the climate precipice. e world’s people in these circumstances are mere
hostages, unless they should choose to mutiny.

THE FAILURE OF CARBON REFORM

Over the last few decades, the chief aim of establishment climate-change
policy has been the ecological modernization of capitalism, but only within
the narrow limits conducive to capital accumulation. is approach is
represented at the international level by the Paris Climate Agreement, in
which 193 nations came together to sign on to a “plan” to address climate
change that, when measured against the present global emergency, is hardly
worth the paper on which it is written. e commitments made by
individual nations are entirely voluntary and nonbinding, and thus unlikely
to be ful lled, given that there is no overall mechanism for implementation
and no worldwide sanctions. And even then, if implemented, these
independent national commitments would push the climate well beyond the
2°C barrier, into a world condemned to as much as a 3.7°C increase in
global average temperature.21
e centerpiece of the Obama administration’s climate policy, which
formed the basis of the U.S. contribution to the Paris Agreement, was the
Clean Power Plan (CPP). Its proponents claimed that it was designed to
reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 26–28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.
e CPP consisted chie y of a set of executive orders extending the Clean
Air Act to the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions in electrical power
plants, to be implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Whatever its ambitions, Obama’s climate initiative fell far short of the
emission reductions that wealthy states would need to introduce if humanity
were to maintain a safe and secure relation to the climate. e year 2005 was
chosen as the baseline for emission reductions precisely because it
represented the peak level of U.S. carbon emissions. As Mark Hertsgaard has
pointed out in e Nation, the stipulated cuts in U.S. carbon-dioxide
emissions, although ostensibly exceeding 25 percent according to the 2005
baseline by 2025, would nonetheless be only 7 percent if measured against
the original 1990 baseline of the Kyoto Protocol. e latter agreement
mandated that U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions should drop by 7 percent by
2012. is original reduction target, which the United States was supposed
to have put in place under the Kyoto Protocol but ended up abandoning, was
initially conceived in the 1990s as merely a rst step in reducing carbon
emissions. e CPP’s seemingly large projected emissions reductions were
thus primarily an outcome of moving the goal posts, with the result that the
actual cuts in emissions would still be at a level grossly inadequate to protect
humanity from catastrophic climate change, with time fast running out.
Further, these prospective reductions would rely primarily on market-
friendly carbon-trading schemes that have previously proven ineffective.22
e weakness of Obama’s centrist-capitalist approach was thrown into
stark relief in the Economic Report of the President for 2017, where one nds
such statements as: “e economic literature suggests that some impacts of
climate change, particularly the rise in extreme temperatures, will likely be
partly offset by increased private investment in air conditioning, and that
movement to avoid temperature extremes, either spending more time
indoors in the short run, or relocating in the long run, could also reduce
climate impacts on health.” Such “Let em Buy Air Conditioners, Let em
Stay Indoors, and Let em Move” stances can hardly be considered serious
—or ethical—responses to climate change.23
Already in 2015, Hansen declared that because the actions outlined in the
CPP would “do nothing to attack the fundamental problem,” they were “like
the fellow who walks to work instead of driving, and thinks he is saving the
world.” Such measures, he stressed, were “practically worthless.” Instead,
steps must be taken both nationally and globally to ratchet up the price of
carbon and to keep it in the ground. “As long as fossil fuels are allowed to
(appear to be) the cheapest energy,” and no intervention is made to increase
their cost, he continued, “someone will burn them.”24 Ironically, measures
designed simply to reduce the demand for carbon in one locale tend only to
lower fossil-fuel prices elsewhere (assuming a constant supply of such fuels),
thereby ensuring that they will nd a market somewhere in the global
economy.25
It is therefore highly signi cant that even the meager efforts represented
by the Paris Climate Agreement and Obama’s Clean Power Plan—which
avoided addressing the fundamental problem, and could scarcely be said to
pose, at this level, a threat to the system as a whole—nonetheless provoked
enormous resistance from the vested interests of fossil-fuel capitalism. Not
only did Obama have to circumvent Congress to enact the CPP (and to sign
the Paris Agreement, which was possible without congressional approval
only because it contained no binding requirements), the whole climate
initiative was immediately blocked in court, since the twenty-four states
closest to the fossil-fuel industry launched a lawsuit, aided by the U.S.
Supreme Court’s order that the EPA suspend enforcement of the CPP until a
lower court could arrive at a decision. Even this seems a dead letter today,
however, since the Trump administration is already seeking to dismantle the
CPP and has announced that it will be withdrawing from the Paris Accord.26
Trump, in a version of the “big lie,” has repeatedly called climate change a
“hoax.”27 Accordingly, he has lled the ranks of his transition team and
cabinet with climate science denialists and fossil-fuel industry shills. Myron
Ebell, director of energy and environmental policy at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute and a leading climate contrarian, headed up Trump’s
transition team. Ebell had publicly accused the respected scientist Kevin
Trenberth, a senior climate researcher at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research—famous for accounting for the apparent hiatus in
global-warming acceleration, using evidence of increased below-surface-
level ocean heating—of being “part of a gang” guilty of “cooking the data” on
the climate. Financier Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump adviser and an
executive member of his transition team, compared the notion of
anthropogenic climate change to geocentrism, the belief that the Sun
revolves around Earth. In Scaramucci’s own words: “I’m saying people have
gotten things wrong throughout the 5,500-year history of our planet” (italics
added). David Schnare, who le the EPA to start an oil industry–funded
nonpro t that specialized in suits against the EPA and attacks on climate
science, was named to the transition team and charged with revamping the
EPA. Schnare gained special notoriety as the attorney who, while working
for the right-wing American Tradition Institute (now the Environmental
and Energy Legal Institute), targeted both Hansen and Mann, along with
other climate scientists, seeking to force them to release private documents
and emails. omas Pyle, head of the American Energy Alliance, a group
with strong links to the oil industry—including Koch Industries, for which
he worked as a lobbyist—was chosen to lead the transition team for the
Department of Energy. A leaked memo by Pyle lists the immediate goals of
the Trump administration’s climate policy: (1) withdrawing from the Paris
Climate Agreement, (2) dismantling the Clean Power Plan, and (3)
expediting approval of pipeline projects.
 Trump’s choices for major cabinet posts followed the same pattern.
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, his pick to lead the EPA, is still
another lawyer who has fought the EPA on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry,
and is also an outspoken climate-change denier, who wrote in 2016 that the
debate on climate change was “far from settled.” Ignoring the 97 percent
consensus among scientists on the anthropogenic sources of climate change,
Pruitt claimed that “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and
extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”
Former Texas governor Rick Perry, Trump’s pick to head the Department of
Energy—a department that, as a Republican presidential contender, Perry
promised to eliminate altogether—is a stalwart ally of the fossil-fuel
industry. He went so far as to declare in his 2010 book that “we have been
experiencing a cooling trend.” His administration in Texas deliberately
removed all references to climate change in a report addressing rising sea
levels. Congressman Ryan Zinke, from coal-producing Montana, Trump’s
secretary of the interior, likewise asserts that climate change has no rm
scienti c basis. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has repeatedly insisted,
against all evidence, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
Ironically, Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, previously the CEO
of ExxonMobil, stands out in the new administration for his
acknowledgment of the reality of climate change. However, as recently as
2013, Tillerson declared that any alternative-energy movement was doomed
to fail, and predicted that renewables such as “wind, solar, biofuels,” would
supply only 1 percent of total energy in 2040. Faced with the demands of
environmentalists and protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, Tillerson
simply stated his capitalist creed: “My philosophy is to make money.”
ExxonMobil under his leadership not only funded climate denialism, but
fought to remove all obstacles whatsoever to the increased extraction and
burning of fossil fuels.28
Most alarming for climate scientists in the rst weeks of the Trump
transition was a 74-question survey issued in early December to employees
in the Energy Department, designed to determine which scientists and
officials had been most involved in advancing Obama’s Clean Power Plan
and other measures to contain climate change. is was widely regarded as
the warning shot of a new McCarthyite inquisition against climate scientists,
prompting a frantic effort by scientists across the country to archive their
data, placing it on widely accessible nongovernmental data bases, lest
climate data in government hands be disappeared under Trump. e
incoming administration soon disavowed the questionnaire, but the damage
was done.29
In addition to singling out scientists who advanced Obama’s climate
initiatives, the questionnaire had a more speci c target: the social cost of
carbon (SCC), currently estimated at $40 per metric ton, a category used by
the Obama administration to quantify the economic impact of climate
change and thus to justify the regulation of carbon emissions in cost-bene t
terms. e SCC is by now part of established case law and cannot simply be
undone. e Trump administration, however, has made clear that it will
alter basic premises used to calculate the SCC, such as the discount rate that
relates present dollars to future dollars, thereby shrinking the calculation of
the costs. Employing a higher discount rate could make the economic costs
of climate change appear to vanish, even turn negative, so that climate
change appears not only economically benign, but bene cial. In this way the
numbers can be manipulated so that any restrictions on greenhouse-gas
emissions fail the economic cost-bene t test required by law.30
As Hansen usefully pointed out a decade ago, the problem is not the
climate denialists as such, since such contrarians, in or out of government,
are mere “court jesters” whom no one in the end will take seriously. e
problem is “the court” itself, that is,
the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as Exxon/Mobil, automobile
manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term pro t above the fate of
the planet and the well-being of our children. e court jesters are their jesters, occasionally
paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains’ disinformation
campaigns. . . . e captains of industry are smarter than their jesters. ey cannot pretend that
they are unaware of climate change dangers and consequences for future generations.31

In the new Trump administration fossil-fuel courtiers like Tillerson and

their court jesters are now in power, sitting side by side.
It would be wrong, then, to see this administration as simply a cabal of
ignoramuses, beginning with the climate-change-denier-in-chief himself.
Rather, these efforts to undermine even modest regulations and to discredit
sound science are necessary parts of an attempt by carbon capital to proceed
undeterred with the burning of fossil fuels, as if this did not constitute a dire
threat to the human species. e motive here is quite simply the
institutionalized drive for more, at virtually any cost to society as a whole. It
is analogous, but on a much larger scale, to the decades-long campaign of
misinformation by tobacco companies claiming that their products were not
killing their customers, even though their own internal scienti c research,
which they kept hidden, showed the opposite.32
Not surprisingly, it is fossil-fuel capital that was the rst to bene t from
Trump’s election. e stocks of oil and gas companies spiked the moment
the 2016 election results were announced. Peabody Energy, the leading U.S.
coal company, was pulled from the brink of bankruptcy by an immediate 70
percent increase in the value of its shares. Harold Hamm, the billionaire
fracking mogul and Trump adviser, indicated that Trump would slash oil
and gas drilling regulations: “Every time we can’t drill a well in America,”
Hamm threatens, “terrorism is being funded.” For the alt-right website
Breitbart News, whose chairman, Steve Bannon, masterminded the later
stages of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign (and was later appointed
White House chief strategist), there is no global warming, only global
cooling. Breitbart greeted Trump’s election with the headline: “e Le Just
Lost the War on Climate Change.”33
Signi cantly, Trump’s promise to “build a wall” along the border with
Mexico to block “illegal immigration” can be read at least in part as a
reaction to climate change, even as the latter is being denied—just as sea
walls are hypocritically being proposed by climate deniers in parts of the
South as a means to protect coastal real estate. e Trump plan for a more
militarized border involves the building of a thousand-mile wall (most of
which already exists, in the form of security fences), with the rest of the
nearly two-thousand-mile border largely impassable due to natural barriers.
e wall would be tightly guarded, monitored by a eet of aircra and
drones. Here it is impossible not to be reminded of a 2003 Defense
Department report, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications
for United States National Security, written for the Pentagon by Peter
Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network, which argued
that the catastrophic effects of abrupt climate change would compel wealthy
nations like the United States and Australia to construct “defensive
fortresses” along their perimeters to shut out climate refugees. “Military
confrontation,” the report warned, “may be triggered by a desperate need
[particularly in the Global South] for natural resources such as energy, food
and water,” creating new national security threats to which the “have”
nations would need to respond—militarily.34

THE FIRE THIS TIME

“Revolution,” in the words of Malcolm X, “is like a forest re. It burns
everything in its path. e people who are involved in a revolution don’t
become a part of the system—they destroy the system, they change the
system. e genuine word for a revolution is Umwälzung, which means a
complete overturning and a complete change. . . . e only way to stop a
forest re from burning down your house is to ignite a re that you control
and use it against the re that is burning out of control.”35 is controlled
back re is the meaning of counterrevolution. Today virulent anti-
environmentalism, tied to a broader neo-fascist politics linked to white
supremacy, is the back re being ignited against both efforts to combat
climate change and the larger movement for social and environmental
justice.
e urgent task before us in these dire circumstances was explained by
Eric S. Godoy and Aaron Jaffe in an op-ed for the New York Times in
October 2016, headlined “We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We
Need a Revolution.” “Following Marx, contemporary [radical ecological]
theorists,” Godoy and Jaffe note, are investigating “our changing and
dangerously unstable metabolic relationship with nature. Humans are a
unique species in that we form complex relationships to regulate this
metabolism as we produce our food, water, shelter and more robust needs.”
But the larger reality, of class and social inequality identi ed with capitalism,
means that “the affluent can afford an increase in food prices, ship in bottled
water during droughts and relocate businesses and homes when the seas
rise, while those without access to such privileges have fewer options and
disproportionately suffer.” e same logic applies to access to basic
technologies and other means of environmental defense. For these and other
reasons, climate change endangers the oppressed and underprivileged rst,
both within nations and globally.
 e only conceivable answer today to cascading planetary catastrophe is
a broad-based ecological and social revolution, in which the population
mobilizes to protect the future of humanity: a revolutionary war for the
planet. For Godoy and Jaffe, the “crucial” goal in this respect “is gaining
social control over the private, exploitative and even irresponsible direction
of the human-nature metabolism,” which has generated a metabolic ri in
society’s relation to the planet. Overcoming this ri requires a majoritarian
revolt on a global scale, the likes of which the world has never seen. A “green
revolution,” they argue, “would center the human-nature metabolism over
and against the drive for pro ts.” e goal would be to “transform the
relationships that regulate our metabolism with nature, relationships that
now allow some to pro t by denying this right to others.” From this
perspective, “Exxon and its climate science obfuscation is not so much an
enemy as a paradigmatic symptom of the worst kinds of behavior generated
by pro t-driven systems. e enemy is the violence perpetrated by [the]
racial, gendered, political, juridical and existing economic metabolisms with
nature.”36
Godoy and Jaffe’s stance aligns closely with Klein’s argument in is
Changes Everything. Behind the right’s climate denial is the economic reality
that seriously combatting capitalism’s war on the planet requires the defeat
of the system. us the only alternative for the right and its until-death-do-
us-part defenders of capitalism is to invert reality and abandon science. Like
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, the right “vomits up reason,” rejecting “the
laws of nature” and “two times two is four.”37
e right must deny science and reason precisely because they point to
the need for radical social, economic, and ecological transformation. Klein
quotes leading British climate scientist Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall
Institute for Climate Change Research, who writes that “today, aer two
decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary
change to the political and economic hegemony.” As Klein argues,
“Revolutionary levels of transformation to the market system” are “now our
best hope of avoiding climate chaos.”38
A world climate movement aimed at countering climate change, Klein
states, can be a “galvanizing force for humanity,” a “People’s Shock, a blow
from below,” compelling us to create at last the social and economic equality
that is so much needed in the world today. She rightly stresses the radical
groundswell itself, placing her faith in the leading edge of climate activism,
in the form of what she and others call “Blockadia”—a “roving transnational
con ict zone” in which climate and environmental-justice activists,
indigenous peoples, workers, socialists, and other groups throw up barriers
to resist the system.39
An example of Blockadia in this sense is the courageous struggle of
Native American “water protectors” and their allies, including thousands of
military veterans who arrived in the nal days to provide a “human shield”
at Standing Rock in North Dakota in the summer and fall of 2016. e
Standing Rock water protectors endured weeks of state violence in the form
of water cannon blasts in freezing temperatures, non-lethal bullets, and tear
gas, and succeeded in stopping for a time the construction of the $3.8 billion
Dakota Access Pipeline, intended to stretch over a thousand miles from the
Bakken and ree Forks production areas in North Dakota, through South
Dakota and Iowa, and into Illinois, with the aim of transporting up to
570,000 barrels of oil a day. e pipeline requires drilling under the Missouri
River, threatening water supplies due to possible pipeline leakages. e
drilling permit was rejected in early December by the Army Corps of
Engineers, but was resurrected soon aer by the Trump administration,
which has made no secret of its determination to see the pipeline
completed.40

A TWO-STAGE ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

e primary efforts of radical climate activists in the present historical
conjuncture have focused on blocking coal and unconventional fossil fuels,
such as oil sands, tight oil, shale gas, oil shale, and oil from ultra-deep-sea
wells.41 is approach is based on a complex climate-change exit strategy
articulated most de nitively by James Hansen, who has argued that in order
to limit the consumption of fossil fuels in today’s society while promoting
the switch to non-fossil-fuel energy sources, it is necessary to increase the
price of fossil fuels substantially through a carbon-fee-and-dividend system.
Under such a plan, a fee on carbon, imposed and ratcheted up in stages,
would be levied at the mine sha, wellhead, or point of import, and 100
percent of the funds collected would be redistributed as dividends to
families on a per capita basis. e result would be that the vast majority of
individuals, with lower carbon footprints at lower income levels, would
come out ahead, even under the assumption that the corporations would
pass on the full cost of the fees—since the cost net of dividends would fall on
those with higher carbon footprints and higher income levels. e beauty of
Hansen’s scheme is that it could help mobilize humanity as a whole on a
class basis with regard to carbon footprints.
However, a higher price for carbon, Hansen insists, is not itself sufficient.
It is also necessary to focus on the more dangerous carbon fuels, proscribing
their use. Hansen has argued that a key to any exit strategy has to prioritize
direct action aimed at shutting down existing coal plants, as well as a
moratorium on any new coal plants, and the blocking of the Alberta tar
sands—since coal and tar sands oil represent the dirtiest fossil fuels, which
could quickly break the global carbon budget. True to his strategy, Hansen
has put himself on the line and has been arrested in protests against both
coal and tar sands oil.42
Nevertheless, the Hansen exit strategy, though in uential within the
movement, particularly in its call for direct action to block coal and
unconventionals, is weakened by its overemphasis on carbon prices. Kevin
Anderson has argued that the affluent, who have the highest carbon
footprints, can always afford to pay higher carbon prices. More effective
would be direct governmental intervention to establish stringent maximum-
emissions standards for high-energy-consuming devices. is is not a
technological problem, he points out, because the energy-saving and
alternative-energy technologies already exist, and in many cases can be
immediately substituted at little long-term cost to society as a whole. It does
mean, however, confronting the “political and economic hegemony” of the
system, including neoclassical economics, which is subservient to the
capitalist order.43
All of this re ects a narrowing of the options for humanity and the earth.
In the current climate conjuncture, the historically necessary ecological and
social revolution, in which humanity as a whole would seek once again to
take history in its hands, this time to stave off the impending catastrophes of
an irrational system, would have to take part in two stages. e rst would
involve the formation of a broad alliance, modeled aer the Popular Front
against fascism in the 1930s and ’40s. Today’s radical alliance would need to
be aimed principally at confronting the fossil-fuel– nancial complex and its
avid right-wing supporters. In this rst stage of the struggle, manifold
demands could be made and broadly agreed on within the existing system—
ways of eliminating carbon emissions and economic waste while also
promoting social and environmental needs—which, although inimical to
the logic of capital, and particularly to the fossil-fuel industry, would not
necessarily call into immediate question the existence of the capitalist
system itself.44
However, in the long run, capitalism’s threat to planetary boundaries
cannot be solved by stopgap reforms, however radical, that leave the system’s
fundamental features intact while simply transcending its relation to fossil
fuels. e danger to the planetary environment posed by the accumulation
of capital is all-encompassing.45 is means that the ecological revolution
will have to extend eventually to the roots of production itself, and will have
to assume the form of a system of substantive equality for all: racial freedom,
gender and LGBTQ equality, a classless society, an end to imperialism, and
the protection of the earth for future generations.
In the long run, the struggle is therefore synonymous with the movement
toward socialism. e more revolutionary the struggle, the more it is likely
to emanate from those whose needs are greatest, and thus from the Global
South. It is in the periphery of the system, rather than in the center, that
humanity is most likely to mutiny against the existing order. Hope today
therefore lies rst and foremost in the revolt of “the wretched of the earth,”
opening up ssures at the center of the system itself.
But even if all of this were to fail and our present hopes were to go
unrealized, with the world pushed to the planetary turning point, it would
remain true, then as now, that the only answer is ecological and social
revolution. ere is no next time. It is the re this time.46
 e Nature of the Resistance: A Brief
Conclusion
All progress in the writing of modern history has been effected by
descending from the political surface into the depths of social life.
—KARL MARX1

DURING A WHITE HOUSE CELEBRATION of Israel Independence Day on May 2,

2017, Steve Bannon was photographed standing in front of a now famous
whiteboard on which all of Donald Trump’s campaign promises were
written out in longhand. Next to Bannon in the photo was the American
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a frequent contributor to Breitbart, known for his
virulent support for Israel and opposition to the Palestinians and for his
advocacy of a U.S. war on Syria and Iran. In what was clearly an orchestrated
move in conjunction with Bannon, Boteach immediately tweeted the photo,
where it quickly went viral and was picked up by the major media.2
In the carefully staged photo, Bannon was shown standing on one side of
the whiteboard in front of the “Pledges on Obamacare,” and Trump’s
“Pledges on Immigration” could clearly be seen to Bannon’s le. Checked off
were such items as “Suspend immigration from terror-prone regimes”;
“Implement new extreme immigration vetting techniques”; “Suspend the
Syrian Refugee Program”; “Issue detainees for all illegal immigrants who are
arrested for any crime and they will be placed into immediate removal
proceedings”; “Hire 5,000 more border patrol agents”; and “Triple the
number of ICE [Immigration and Custom Enforcement] agents.” Listed but
not yet checked off was “Build the border wall and eventually make Mexico
pay for it.” e aim of all of this was to signal to Trump’s white lower-middle
class and relatively privileged white working-class supporters that he was
determined to keep his campaign promises, and that he was on their side
against immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized groups.
 But a key Breitbart article on Bannon’s whiteboard also made it clear that
Trump administration goals included promises to monopoly- nance capital.
Listed on the whiteboard under “Pledges on Tax Reform,” according to
Breitbart, but not visible in the photo itself, were “Lower the corporate tax to
15 percent” and “Eliminate the estate tax.”3 ese pledges, together with the
others on immigration, testi ed to the dangerous and unpredictable alliance
forged between a reactionary lower-middle class and monopoly- nance
capital, constituting neo-fascism as a new political order in the making.
e argument in this book is that complacency in the face of the nascent
neo-fascist shi in U.S. politics would be a grave error. Perhaps the most
profound critique of this radical right threat in U.S. politics has emanated
from the eminent political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, author of e
Current Crisis in American Politics and the foremost analyst of critical
alignments in U.S. politics.4 More than four decades ago, in 1972, in the
aermath of George Wallace’s independent white supremacist presidential
campaign, Burnham argued that the U.S. political order exhibited many of
the weaknesses, in terms of vulnerability to the rise of fascist political
movements, that had characterized Germany’s Weimar Republic prior to
Hitler’s rise to power.5 e crucial factor here was the predominantly white
lower-middle-class/upper-working-class strata, corresponding to “the bulk
of the petite bourgeoisie in the traditional European class structure.” Here
Burnham quoted Marx and Engels from e Communist Manifesto: “e
lower-middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the
peasant—all these ght against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their
existence as fractions of the middle class. ey are therefore not
revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try
to roll back the wheel of history.”6
Commenting on this declaration by Marx and Engels, Burnham wrote:
In more neutral language, it can be said of such strata that they are less actors than acted upon
by social transformations which threaten without enlightening them; that they are dependent,
vulnerable, and politically reactive under stress; and that, lacking a preexisting political church
which explains their plight to them, their instinctive response to dangerously stressful social
change is to support those candidates and movements who can most effectively promise them
that such change will be stopped. As the traditional bourgeois-liberal Honoriatorenpartei [a
party controlled by political elites, lacking a clearly de ned program or basis of mass
participation outside the vote] is the characteristic vehicle of lower-middle class expression in
 stable times, so the fascist movement corresponds to the political church which emerges to
embrace these strata as a refuge from damaging change in their social environment.7

Returning to his argument in 2016 in response to the Trump campaign,

Burnham observed in “Breitbart, Steven Bannon and Donald Trump
Against the World” that Trumpism is not an aberration, but rather re ects
the deeper reality that there has long been “an embedded instability in
American politics,” pointing to the “potential for large-scale ‘jumping
overboard’ toward right-wing extremist political movements.” is re ected
a “general legitimacy crisis of the entire American regime order.”8 What
nally brought these submerged political tendencies to the fore was “the
nancial meltdown of 2008, leading to interventions by state actors to
prevent an outright depression, [and] the elevation of the rst African-
American president.” Trump, according to Burnham, “began his political
career . . . by a years’-long insistence that President Barack Obama was
literally an ‘alien other.’” As early as June 2015, Trump’s political thrust was
“squarely focused on the less-educated, lower-middle/white working class,
major victims of policies pursued by the established elites of both parties.”
Linked to this was Trump’s political “elevation of Steve Bannon, creator of
Breitbart Media, and a leading gure of the ‘alt-right.’”9
As we have seen in the foregoing chapters, there is little doubt that
Bannon and Breitbart represent the emergence of a full- edged neo-fascist
politics. Indeed, the rise of the radical right as the most combative sector of
Trumpism helps us to situate Trump himself, based on the old adage that
one can judge people by the company they keep. Bannon, as Trump’s
campaign manager and chief White House strategist, masterminded a neo-
fascist, that is, racist, ultra-nationalist, patriarchal, and nancial-capitalist,
path to power, well in keeping with Trump’s own views. Moreover, Bannon
and other Breitbart gures in the Trump White House demonstrate
considerable knowledge of and affinity for today’s transnational neo-fascist
movements emerging in Europe.
Trumpism is thus not to be regarded as an accidental or ephemeral
movement—regardless of the eventual political fate of Trump himself, who
is presently beleaguered by Russiagate investigations throwing the future of
his administration into question. e neo-fascist monster once released on
the world will not easily go away. Rather it is a de nite manifestation of the
crisis of the U.S. imperial economy, emanating both from the deepening of
the economic stagnation of monopoly- nance capital and the gradual
erosion of U.S. economic hegemony.
A characteristic of Trump himself, congruent with the movement he
represents, is a chauvinistic view of people of color, immigrants, and
women, evident in his long string of racist and misogynist statements. He is
a dedicated enemy of the wider working class, including the poor and
marginalized populations.10 He has encouraged white supremacism, neo-
fascism, and hatred toward all “Others.” From the start, this was largely
tolerated by the mainstream media, the political establishment, and the
capitalist class. Trump’s racism and misogyny were generally passed off as
the personal foibles of a tawdry billionaire celebrity, not as representing a
dangerous political tendency, even when it became apparent that these dark
outpourings were formative aspects of the political movement rapidly
developing around him. is mainstream legitimization of Trumpism most
oen took the form of presenting it as a relatively harmless “right-wing
populism,” rather than as constituting a neo-fascist political movement that
would inevitably challenge the separation of powers within the state, civil
liberties, and the forms of democratic rule.
e reasons for this handling of Trump with kid gloves are clear.
Movements in the fascist genus have always represented the rearguard
defense of capitalism, the most virulent enemy of the socialist le. ey are
thus seen as natural allies of the center right, particularly in times of
growing political and economic instability. Trumpism has fed on an anti-
leist great fear, which has grown in intensity as a result of the white
supremacist response to Barack Obama’s neo-liberal presidency, as well as
concerns at the top regarding an emerging economic populism.11
Trumpism’s rise has thus gone hand-in-hand with an enormous upsurge
throughout the country of hate crimes, including outpourings of hatred
against people of color, women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and the poor.12
is re ects the anger and distress of the lower-middle class. But behind the
even greater worries among the moneyed interests is the specter of a class-
based socialist alternative that could meld together the various movements
from below symbolized by the “99 percent movement” launched by
Occupy.13
 It was clearly such trepidations over a united le groundswell eventually
emerging in response to conditions of economic stagnation, nancialization
(including widespread indebtedness), soaring inequality, declining U.S.
hegemony, permanent war, ecological catastrophe, and the neoliberal
micromanaging of the expropriation of the population that led the powers
that be to throw their support at least partly to Trumpism, seeing it as
necessary element in the defense of their economic interests. Like other
similar neo-fascist developments in Europe, Trumpism is viewed by the
capitalist Masters of the Universe and their hangers-on as a phenomenon
that could help stabilize plutocratic rule.
If there is an actual basis for these right-wing, capitalist fears of the le in
the United States today, it is to be found not in the weak precedent set by the
neoliberal Obama administration, with its meager and contradictory efforts
to promote “equal opportunity” while at the same time encouraging
skyrocketing inequality. Rather, it lies in the realization among the well-to-
do that the crisis of the U.S. state and society had reached the point that a
genuine, uncompromising movement toward socialism might well emerge.
A clear manifestation of this potential threat to the dominant social relations
was Bernie Sanders’s extraordinarily powerful 2016 presidential campaign as
an acknowledged “socialist” or social democrat. Sanders’s progress through
the Democratic primaries was a political earthquake, the tremors of which
were felt across the country, and especially at the pinnacles of power. Unlike
Clinton and Trump, Sanders received no support from the capitalist class,
and had no wealth on which to rely. Nevertheless, Sanders proved to be close
to unstoppable as millions ocked to his political standard.
e Sanders campaign thus pointed to a potential class-political struggle
unlike any seen since the 1930s. Poll aer poll showed he would have
decisively beaten Trump.14 Sanders was particularly strong in the Rust Belt
states that sealed Clinton’s Electoral College defeat to Trump. As one
insightful commentator noted, a workerist social democrat like “Sanders
would be Kryptonite for a pseudo-populist like Trump.”15 Yet Sanders was
blocked by a Democratic Party establishment and an undemocratic system
of super delegates.16 Further, in a political contradiction that may have
proven fatal, he was unable to draw sufficient African American voters away
from their decades-long alliance with the Clinton political machine.17
 To be sure, a Sanders victory would not in itself have transformed the
political-economic power relations in Washington. He would have had no
support within the Democratic Party establishment, the state as a whole, or
the ruling class, and would have lacked any institutionalized bases of
political power anywhere in the society, since there is at present no
organized movement at the ground level on which he could have relied.
Nevertheless, what the Sanders campaign exposed was the unconscious (and
sometimes even conscious) socialist groundswell at the base of U.S. society,
and an urgent, desperate need for a new beginning. It became clear that the
only answer to neoliberalism and neo-fascism in the present age is a
reemergent socialism able to address the endless crisis of capitalism itself.
A genuine socialist political movement of any signi cance in the twenty-
rst century—given capitalism’s epochal economic and environmental
crises, its deepening, multifaceted forms of oppression, and its proclivity
toward ever-expanding wars—would have to be a revolutionary one, rooted
in construction of alternative bases of power, organized resistance, and
grassroots revolt. is means massive, organized, extra-electoral
mobilization among the great majority of the society, particularly labor,
bound together within a broad “co-revolutionary” coalition.18
e ultimate condition for a genuine socialist resistance movement in the
United States today, given the U.S. position as the hegemonic power in the
imperialist world system, together with its gradual erosion, is anti-
imperialism rooted in international solidarity. It is the revolt against
imperialism that constitutes the Achilles’ heel of the entire system. As the
platform of the Movement for Black Lives declares, “We know that
patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and white supremacy know
no borders. We stand in solidarity with our international family against the
ravages of global capitalism and anti-Black racism, human-made climate
change, war, and exploitation.”19 Inseparable from this is the
commencement of the real struggle for the defense of the planetary
environment. If the System Change Not Climate Change movement were to
gain real momentum in the United States, at the center of the imperialist
world system, it could serve to remove some of the chains currently imposed
on earth struggles already being fought against enormous odds around the
globe, oen led by indigenous peoples.
 It is the movement for a New International of the associated producers
and of the peoples of the earth that constitutes the greatest threat to today’s
imperial governance and the nancial capitalist plutocracy that it supports,
and the greatest challenge facing human liberation. What is needed, then, is
a truly global socialism, based on ecological sustainability and substantive
equality: a world of freedom in general.
 Notes
Preface
1. So a Tesfaye, “Trump’s Bloody Boast: I Could Shoot Somebody and I Wouldn’t Lose Voters,”
Salon.com, January 25, 2016.
2. Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2017), 33–34.
3. See Georg Lukács, e Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), the classic work on
the philosophical origins of fascist ideology. On “ecocidal capitalism” see Klein, No Is Not
Enough, 228.

1. Neo-Fascism in the White House

1. Epigraph: Jack London, e Iron Heel (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1907), 67–68.
2. For earlier treatments of neo-fascism in the United States since the election see “Cornel West on
Donald Trump: is Is What Neo-Fascism Looks Like,” Democracy Now!, December 1, 2016;
Henry A. Giroux, “Combating Trump’s Neo-Fascism and the Ghost of ‘1984,’” Truthout,
February 7, 2017. U.S. neo-fascism can be seen, in the words of Paul A. Baran, as “a fascism sui
generis, of a special American variety.” Baran, writing as Historicus, “Rejoinder,” Monthly Review
4/12 (April 1953): 503. e notion of “neo-fascism” rst arose in accounts of extreme New Right
movements and ideologies in Europe associated with thinkers such as Julius Evola and Alain de
Benoist. See Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 311–16.
3. CNN, “Exit Polls, Election 2016,” November 23, 2016, http://cnn.com.
4. Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell, “Explaining Nationalist Political Views: e Case of
Donald Trump,” Gallup dra working paper, November 2, 2016, available at
http://papers.ssrn.com, 12; Samantha Neal, “Why Trump’s Base Differs from the Typical
Republican Crowd,” Huffington Post, August 22, 2016,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-base-different-from-
republicans_us_57ae4c2ee4b069e7e5057715.
5. Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr, “e Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt,” Slate, December
1, 2016.
6. CNN, “Exit Polls, Election 2016.”
7. Jason Horowitz, “Donald Trump Jr.’s Skittles Tweet Fits a Pattern,” New York Times, September
20, 2016.
8. Rothwell and Diego-Rosell, “Explaining Nationalist Political Views,” 2.
9. Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 420.
Hamilton says it is impossible to con rm (or deny) the decisive role of lower-middle-class voters
based on the available data on electoral outcomes for urban areas in Germany in 1931 and 1932,
though his own data could be interpreted as supporting this. Nevertheless, the fact that fascism
was historically rooted in the lower-middle class or petty bourgeoisie is one of the most rmly
established observations in the entire literature on fascism’s rise, both in the 1930s and today,
 encompassing both Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers. See, for example, Nicos Poulantzas,
Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1974); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New
York: Doubleday, 1960), 134–76. Leon Trotsky wrote that “fascism is a speci c means of
mobilising and organising the petty bourgeoisie in the social interests of nance capital.” Leon
Trotsky, e Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Path nder, 1971), 455.
10. Michael H. Kater, e Nazi Party (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 252;
omas Childers, e Nazi Voter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 157–
59, 166–88, 225–26; Jürgen W. Falter, “How Likely Were Workers to Vote for the NSDAP?,” in
e Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany, ed. Conan Fischer
(Providence, RI: Berghan Books, 1996), 9–45.
11. Trump was never very isolated from the nancial community and billionaire class, of course. See
Robert Hackett, “Here Are the Billionaires Supporting Trump,” Fortune, August 3, 2016.
12. Paul Baran argued in the 1950s that the absence of these factors did not necessarily prevent the
growth of fascism in a U.S. context. One should not confuse the objective tendencies with its
outward forms, or expect a social phenomenon to manifest itself always in the same way. Baran,
“Fascism in America,” 181. Similarly, Bertram Gross wrote, “Anyone looking for black shirts,
mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism.” Bertram
Gross, Friendly Fascism (New York: Evans, 1980), 3.
13. Donald Trump, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 2017, http://whitehouse.gov. On “palingenetic
ultra-nationalism” as the matrix of fascist ideology see Roger Griffin, “General Introduction,” in
Griffin, Fascism, 3–4. On “e Potentially Deadliest Phase of Imperialism,” see István Mészáros,
e Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 97–120.
14. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “It Is Two and a Half Minutes to Midnight,” news release, January
25, 2017, http://thebulletin.org/press-release/it-now-two-and-half-minutes-midnight10432.
15. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2001), 85–126.
16. Richard Falk, “e Dismal Cartography of Trump’s Pre-Fascist State (and Opportunities for
Progressive Populism),” Mondoweiss, January 26, 2017,
http://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/cartography-opportunities-progressive/.
17. Samir Amin, “e Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism,” Monthly Review 66/4
(September 2014): 1–12.
18. See C. B. Macpherson, e Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977); Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1966), 155; Ralph Miliband, e State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet, 1969).
19. Michael D. Yates, e Great Inequality (London: Routledge, 2016).
20. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on eatre (London: Methuen, 1974), 47.
21. Paul M. Sweezy to Paul M. Baran, October 18, 1952, in Baran and Sweezy, e Age of Monopoly
Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 86–87.
22. Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, October 25, 1952, in ibid, 92–93. Although fascism tends to
reduce the state to one principle, it is conceivable, Baran noted in this letter, that it could take the
form of “parliamentary fascism,” that is, it need not inherently be organized around the executive
power. “e crucial point,” he wrote, “is that terrorism, oppressiveness, Gleichschaltung
[synchronization], state domination, etc. etc. are introduced in a speci c class struggle
constellation.”
23. As Chris Hedges notes, “Hitler, days aer he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all
homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered,
 culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, and the permanent
exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfeld. ousands of volumes from the institute’s library were
tossed into a bon re. e stripping of gay and lesbian Germans of their civil rights was largely
cheered by the German churches. But this campaign legitimated tactics, outside the law, that
would soon be employed by others.” Chris Hedges, American Fascists (New York: Free Press,
2006), 201. See also Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014).
24. See Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 62–82. is is the
classic account of the development of the Nazi state and its relation to the economy. Although
the “totalitarian state”—not to be confused with the later liberal concept of “totalitarianism”—is
the ideal of fascism, in actuality it was less monolithic, and more chaotic. In classical fascism, a
“dual state” consisting of the state apparatus and the party apparatus was typical, and the
centralization of state power did not prevent a kind of disarticulation, in which the state ceased
to function fully as a state in all respects, no longer accomplishing all of the tasks of omas
Hobbes’s Leviathan. For this reason, Neumann took the title of his work on fascism from
Hobbes’s Behemoth, which was on the period of the Long Parliament. See Neumann, Behemoth,
459–60; Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 1–3.
25. Poulantzas refers to the fascist state as “relatively autonomous” from monopoly capital. It seems
more appropriate to reverse the emphasis and to refer to the economy and monopoly capital as
strongly autonomous. Monopoly capital prefers a liberal democratic state but is willing to accede
to fascist management of the political economy as long as private, monopolistic capital
accumulation is allowed to continue and is even enhanced within the fascist “superstructural”
framework. See Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 85. In Nazi Germany this strong autonomy
of capital was only interfered with in the midst of the war, when Albert Speer was put in charge
of organizing industry for the war effort. See Franz Neumann and Paul M. Sweezy, “Speer’s
Appointment as Dictator of the German Economy,” in Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and
Otto Kirchheimer, Secret Reports on Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2013), 48–60.
26. Benito Mussolini, “Plan for the New Italian Economy (1936),” in Economic Fascism, ed. Carlo
Celli (Edinburgh, VA: Axios, 2013), 277–80.
27. Hitler quoted in Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), 287; Robert W.
McChesney and John Nichols, People Get Ready (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 38.
28. Maxine Y. Sweezy (also under Maxine Y. Woolston), e Structure of the Nazi Economy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), 27–35. See also Gustav Stolper, German
Economy, 1870–1940 (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1940), 207; Germà Bel, “e Coining of
‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20/3
(2006): 187–94, and “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany,” University
of Barcelona, Research Study, no date, http://www.ub.edu/graap/nazi.pdf.
29. Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1974), 344.
30. Karl Dietrich Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration’ (Gleichschaltung): e Consolidation
of National Socialist Rule in 1933 and 1934,” in Republic to Reich, ed. Hajo Holborn (New York:
Vintage, 1972), 109–28; Robert O. Paxton, e Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005),
123–24; Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 39–58.
31. Faye, Heidegger, 151–54; Carl Schmitt, “e Legal Basis of the Total State,” in Griffin, Fascism,
138–39.
32. Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration,’” 118–22. On the Reichstag re, see John Mage and
Michael E. Tigar, “e Reichstag Fire Trial, 1933–2008,” Monthly Review 60/10 (March 2009):
24–49.
33. Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration,’” 122–24.
34. Faye, Heidegger, 39–53, 118,154–62, 316–22; Richard Wolin, ed., e Heidegger Controversy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
35. Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration,’” 124–28. Here, what Bracher called the third and
fourth stages of Gleichschaltung in the German case are treated as one.
36. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 123.
37. See Oliver Staley, “ere’s a German Word that Perfectly Encapsulates the Start of Trump’s
Presidency,” Quartz, January 26, 2017, https://qz.com/895436/gleichschaltung-the-german-
word-that-perfectly-encapsulates-the-start-of-trumps-presidency/; Shawn Hamilton, “What
ose Who Studied Nazis Can Teach Us about the Strange Reaction to Donald Trump,”
Huffington Post, December 19, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-nazi-
propaganda-coordinate_us_58583b6fe4b-08debb78a7d5c; Ron Jacobs, “Trumpism’s
Gleichschaltung?,” Counterpunch, February 3, 2017,
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/03/trumpisms-gleichschaltung/.
38. Amin, “e Return of Fascism,” 2.
39. Trump, “Inaugural Address”; Joseph Stiglitz, “How to Survive the Trump Era,” Project Syndicate,
February 20, 2017, http://project-syndicate.org; “Miller and Bannon Wrote Trump Inaugural
Address,” e Hill, January 21, 2017, http://thehill.com/home-news/administration/315464-
bannon-miller-wrote-trumps-inauguration-address-report.
40. According to Vanity Fair, in August 2016, “Bannon . . . expressed a wariness about the political
genuineness of Trump’s campaign persona. Trump is a ‘blunt instrument for us. . . . I don’t know
whether he really gets it or not.’” Ken Stern, “Exclusive: Stephen Bannon, Trump’s New C.E.O.,
Hints at His Master Plan,” Vanity Fair, August 17, 2016.
41. Andrew Marantz, “Becoming Steve Bannon’s Bannon,” e New Yorker, February 13, 2017.
42. Gwynn Guilford and Nikhil Sonnad, “What Steve Bannon Really Wants,” Quartz, February 3,
2017, https://qz.com/898134/what-steve-bannon-really-wants/; Steve Reilly and Brad Heath,
“Steve Bannon’s Own Words Show Sharp Break on Security,” USA Today, January 31, 2017.
43. Steve Bannon, remarks via Skype at the Human Dignity Conference, the Vatican, Summer 2014,
transcribed in J. Lester Feeder, “is Is How Steve Bannon Sees the World,” Buzzfeed, November
15, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-
world?utm_term=.onWBXJXod#.sl5Bmrm0X.
44. Bannon, ibid.; Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian inker Who Inspired Fascists,” New
York Times, February 10, 2017.
45. Julius Evola, “Fascism: Myth and Reality” and “e True Europe’s Revolt Against the Modern
World,” in Griffin, Fascism, 317–18, 342–44; Paul Furlong, Social and Political ought of Julius
Evola (London: Routledge, 2011), 77, 89. Umberto Eco has called Evola “one of the most
respected fascist gurus.” Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.
46. Bannon, remarks at the Human Dignity Conference.
47. Anjali Singhvi and Alicia Parlapiano, “Trump’s Immigration Ban: Who Is Barred and Who Is
Not,” New York Times, February 3, 2017; Ben Rosen, “Up Close and Personal: How Trump’s
Attacks Against the Judiciary Are Different,” Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 2017.
48. Philip Rucker and Robert Barnes, “Trump to Inherit More than 100 Court Vacancies, Plans to
Reshape Judiciary,” Washington Post, December 25, 2016; ABC News, “Trump’s Order May Mark
11 Million Undocumented Immigrants for Deportation: Experts,” January 26, 2017,
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-order-mark-11-million-undocumented-immigrants-
 deportation/story?id=45050901; Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Joint Address
to Congress,” February 28, 2017.
49. Donald Trump, “Presidential Memorandum: Organization of the National Security Council and
the Homeland Security Council,” January 28, 2017; Edward Price, “I Didn’t ink I Would Ever
Leave the CIA,” Washington Post, February 20, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-didnt-think-id-ever-leave-the-cia-but-because-of-
trump-i-quit/2017/02/20/fd7aac3e-f456-11e6-b9c9-e83fce4261_story.html?
utm_term=.5f7e7251dd6c; Linda Qiu, “e National Security Council ‘Shakeup,’” Politifact,
February 1, 2017.
50. Josh Dawsey, “Trump’s Advisers Push Him to Purge Obama Appointees,” Politico, March 3,
2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-obama-appointees-advisers-purge-235629.
51. Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon Vows a Daily Fight for ‘Deconstruction of the
Administrative State,’” Washington Post, February 23, 2017; BBC, “Trump Adviser Hails ‘New
Political Order,’” February 23, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39059990.
52. Chris Arnold, “President Trump to Cut Regulations by 75 Percent,’” National Public Radio,
January 24, 2017, http://www.npr.org/2017/01/24/511341779/president-trump-to-cut-
regulations-by-75-percent-how-real-is-that.
53. Damian Carrington, “Green Movement ‘Greatest reat to Freedom,’ Says Trump Adviser,”
Guardian, January 30, 2017.
54. Henry Fountain, “Trump’s Climate Contrarian: Myron Ebell Takes on the E.P.A.,” New York
Times, November 11, 2016.
55. Carrington, “Green Movement ‘Greatest reat to Freedom’”; Penny Lewis, “What’s Coming for
Unions Under President Trump,” Labor Notes, January 19, 2017; Matthew Rozsa, “House
Republicans Support Rule that Could Allow em to Pay Individual Federal Workers $1,” Salon,
January 6, 2017, http://www.salon.com/2017/01/06/house-republicans-support-rule-that-could-
allow-them-to-pay-individual-federal-workers-1/; Ra Letzter, “Trump’s Budget Could Cut 3,000
Staff from the EPA, Report Suggests,” Business Insider, March 1, 2017,
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-budget-epa-lay-off-2017-3; “White House Proposes
Steep Budget Cut to Leading Climate Science Agency,” Washington Post, March 3, 2017.
56. David Pluviose, “Cornel West: We’re All Responsible for Gangster Trump,” Diverse, January 25,
2017, http://divereducation.com.
57. Eric Tucker, “Sessions: US to Continue Use of Privately Run Prisons,” Associated Press, February
23, 2017; CNN, “Donald Trump Defends Racial Pro ling in Wake of Bombings,” September 19,
2016; CBS News, “Donald Trump: Black Lives Matter Calls for Killing Police,” July 19, 2016; John
Hayward, “Petition to Designate Black Lives Matter as Terrorist Group Approaches 100K
Signatures,” Breitbart, July 11, 2016, http://breitbart.com.
58. Lewis, “What’s Coming for Unions”; Michael Paarlberg, “With All Eyes on Trump Republicans
Are Planning to Break Unions for Good,” Guardian, February 2, 2017.
59. Politico, “Labor Nominee Acosta: Trump Is the Boss,” March 22, 2017,
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/alexander-acosta-donald-trump-labor-hearing-236377.
60. Kevin Carey, “Why Betsy DeVos Won’t Be Able to Privatize U.S. Education,” New York Times,
November 23, 2016; Kristina Rizga, “Betsy DeVos Wants to Use America’s Schools to Build
‘God’s Kingdom,’” Mother Jones, March/April 2017.
61. Amy X. Wang, “Trump Is Picking Free-Speech Fight with the University that Birthed the Free
Speech Movement,” Quartz, February 2, 2017, https://qz.com/901215/can-a-president-pull-
funding-from-a-university-trump-picks-a-free-speech- ght-with-berkeley-the-college-that-
 birthed-the-free-speech-movement/; Abby Ohlheiser, “Just How Offensive Did Milo
Yiannopoulos Have to Be to Get Banned from Twitter?,” Washington Post, July 21, 2016.
Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart in mid-February 2017 amid a growing scandal over his
active promotion of pederasty.
62. Max Greenwood, “Trump Tweets: e Media Is the ‘Enemy of the American People,’” e Hill,
February 17, 2017, http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/320168-trump-the-media-is-
the-enemy-of-the-american-people.
63. David Bauder, “Trump’s ‘Running War’ on the Media Undermines Trust,” Associated Press,
January 23, 2017. Edward Herman, “e Propaganda Model Revisited,” in Capitalism and the
Information Age, ed. Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 191–205.
64. Michael M. Grynbaum, “Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media ‘Should Keep Its Mouth
Shut,’” New York Times, January 26, 2017; Jim Rutenberg, “In Trump Era, Censorship May Start
in the Newsroom,” New York Times, February 17, 2017.
65. Danielle Kurtzleben, “e Trump Media Survey Is Phenomenally Biased. It’s Also Useful,”
National Public Radio, February 17, 2017.
66. Lukas I. Alpert, “Some Media Excluded from White House Brie ng,” Wall Street Journal,
February 24, 2017.
67. Grant Stern, “My Mouth Is Shut, So You Can Read Steve Bannon’s Words; He Runs America
Now,” Huffington Post, January 30, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/my-mouth-is-
shut-so-you-can-read-steve-bannons-words_us_588e0fe5e4b-0cd25e49049f8.
68. Rucker and Costa, “Bannon Vows a Daily Fight”; Max Fisher, “Stephen K. Bannon’s CPAC
Comments, Annotated and Explained,” New York Times, February 24, 2017.
69. Daniel Horowitz, “Trump’s Executive Orders for American Sovereignty Are Game Changers,”
Conservative Review, January 25, 2017, http://conservativereview.com; “7 Steps to Reclaiming
Our Sovereignty,” Breitbart, July 17, 2014, http://www.breitbart.com/big-
government/2014/07/17/7-steps-to-reclaiming-our-sovereignty/; Nick Hallet, “Eurosceptic
Parties Sign ‘Stockholm Declaration’ Pledging to Defend Sovereignty, Defeat Radical Islam,”
Breitbart, November 5, 2016, http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/05/eurosceptic-parties-
sign-declaration-pledging-defend-sovereignty-defeat-radical-islam/. See also Furlong, Social and
Political ought of Julius Evola, 77.
70. Robert Costa, “Trump’s Latest Hire Alarms Allies of Ryan—and Bolsters Bannon,” Washington
Post, January 33, 2017; Marantz, “Becoming Steve Bannon’s Bannon”; Bill Moyers and Michael
Winship, “Donald Trump’s Mission Creep Just Took a Giant Leap Forward,” Moyers and
Company, February 1, 2017, http://billmoyers.com/story/donald-trumps-mission-creep-just-
took-giant-leap-forward/.
71. Barack Obama, “Statement by the President on H.R. 1540,” December 31, 2011,
http://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov; Jean-Claude Paye, “Sovereignty and the State of
Emergency,” Monthly Review 68/8 (January 2017): 1–11; Carl Mirra, “e NDAA and the
Militarization of America,” Foreign Policy in Focus, February 10, 2012, http://fpif.org; Michael E.
Tigar, “e National Security State: e End of Separation of Powers,” Monthly Review 66/3
(July–August 2014): 136–59. Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, “Donald Trump’s Mission Creep
Just Took a Giant Leap Forward,” BillMoyers.com, February 1, 2017.
72. Bob Bryan, “Trump Is Officially Making an Economic Promise that Will Be Almost Impossible
to Keep,” Business Insider, January 22, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-4-gdp-
growth-promise-2017-1.
73. For a particularly sensitive sociological account of the interests and views underlying Trump’s
appeal to many white working-class voters, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in eir Own
Land (New York: New Press, 2016), 221–30.
74. Michelle Celarier, “Meet the Wall Street Titans Who Back Trump,” New York, June 22, 2016; Ben
White and Mary Lee, “Trump’s ‘Big Fat Bubble’ Trouble in the Stock Market,” Politico, February
24, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-stock-market-bubble-235328.
75. Edward Luce, “Donald Trump Is Creating a Field Day for the 1%,” the Financial Times, February
26, 2017.
76. Steven Mufson, “Economists Pan Infrastructure Plan Championed by Trump Nominees,”
Washington Post, January 17, 2017; Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, “Trump Versus Clinton on
Infrastructure,” October 27, 2016,
http://peternavarro.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilder les/infrastructurereport.pdf; Donald
Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Joint Address to Congress,” February 28, 2017.
77. Alan Rappeport, “Steven Mnuchin, Treasury Nominee, Failed to Disclose $100 Million in
Assets,” New York Times, January 19, 2017; Dan Kopf, “Trump’s First 17 Cabinet Picks Have More
Money than a ird of All Americans,” Quartz, December 15, 2016,
https://qz.com/862412/trumps-16-cabinet-level-picks-have-more-money-than-a-third-of-
american-households-combined/; David Smith, “Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Could Be the
Wealthiest Administration Ever,” Guardian, December 2, 2016; Jeremy Scahill, “Notorious
Mercenary Erik Prince Advising Trump from the Shadows,” e Intercept, January 17, 2017,
http://theintercept.com.
78. John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, e Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2012), 1.
79. “Whatever Happened to Secular Stagnation?” the Financial Times, February 26, 2017. On the
deeper causes of secular stagnation, see Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the
Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987).
80. Center for Budget Priorities, “Chart Book: e Legacy of the Great Recession,” February 10,
2017; “U.S. Economy Set to Grow Less than 3% for the Tenth Straight Year,” Market Watch,
December 22, 2015, http://marketwatch.com.
81. Michael W. L. Elsby, Bart Hobijn, and Aysegul Sahin, “e Decline of the U.S. Labor Share,”
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2013-27, September 2013; Fred Magdoff
and John Bellamy Foster, “e Plight of the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review 65/8 (January
2014): 1–22.
82. Timothy Taylor, “Declining U.S. Investment, Gross and Net,” ConversableEconomist.blogspot,
February 17, 2017.
83. R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s eory of Working-Class Precariousness: Its
Relevance Today,” Monthly Review 67/11 (April 2016): 1–19.
84. “U.S. Household Debts Climbed in 2016 by Most in a Decade,” Wall Street Journal, February 16,
2017; Andrew Haughwout, Richard Peach, and Joseph Tracy, “A Close Look at the Decline of
Homeownership,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Street Economics, February 17,
2017, http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org.
85. Ben Chu, “e Chart that Shows the UK Is No Longer the Fastest Growing G7 Economy,”
Independent, February 23, 2017; “European Union GDP Annual Growth Rate,” Trading
Economies, http://tradingeconomies.com; Bureau of Economic Analysis, “GDP and Major NIPA
Series, 1929–2012,” Survey of Current Business (August 2012): 188 (Table 2a).
86. Foster and McChesney, e Endless Crisis, 128.
87. John Bellamy Foster, “e New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital,” Monthly
Review 67/3 (July–August 2015): 11–20.
88. Paul Buchheit, “ese 6 Men Have as Much Wealth as Half the World’s Population,” Ecowatch,
February 20, 2017, https://www.ecowatch.com/richest-men-in-the-world-2274065153.html. In
less than a year, the number decreased from eight to six men, according to a study of 2016 data
by Oxfam, “Just 8 Men Own Same Wealth as Half the World,” January 16, 2017,
https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-
half-world. Also see Michael Yates, “Measuring Global Inequality,” Monthly Review 68/6
(November 2016): 3–4.
89. Mike Patton, “China’s Economy Will Overtake the U.S. in 2018,” Forbes, April 29, 2016.
90. Many of those who see themselves as part of the lower-middle class arguably belong to the
working class, as de ned by most objective metrics. Strict lines of demarcation are therefore
difficult to de ne. For an objective look at the size the U.S. working class, see R. Jamil Jonna and
John Bellamy Foster, “Beyond the Degradation of Labor,” Monthly Review 66/5 (October 2014):
1–23.
91. For a Marxist perspective on immigration and the U.S. working class, see David L. Wilson,
“Marx on Immigration: Workers, Wages, and Legal Status,” Monthly Review 68/9 (February
2017): 20–28.
92. Samir Amin, “Seize the Crisis!,” Monthly Review 61/7 (December 2009): 3.
93. Amin, “e Return of Fascism,” 3; Amin, “e Surplus in Monopoly Capitalism and the
Imperialist Rent,’ Monthly Review 64/3 (July-August 2012): 78–85.
94. John Bellamy Foster, “e New Geopolitics of Empire,” Monthly Review 57/8 (January 2006): 1–
18.
95. General Wesley K. Clark, Don’t Wait for the Next War (New York: Public Affairs, 2014), 37–40;
John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
96. U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Report on Iraq, 2012, declassi ed 2015, available at
http://judicialwatch.org; Pepe Escobar, “e U.S. Road Map to Balkanize Syria,” RT, September
22, 2016, https://www.rt.com/op-edge/360225-us-road-map-balkanize-syria/; Samir Amin,
Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2016), 104, 127–28; Amin, e Reawakening of the Arab World (New York; Monthly Review
Press, 2016), 14, 79; Diana Johnstone, Queen of Chaos (Petrolia, CA: Counterpunch, 2015).
97. Richard Haass, A World in Disarray (New York: Penguin, 2017).
98. Samuel P. Huntington, e Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).
99. See Gareth Porter, “How the ‘New Cold Warriors’ Cornered Trump,” Consortium News,
February 25, 2017, http://consortiumnews.com.
100. Emily Stephenson and Steve Holland, “Trump Vows Military Build-Up, Hammers Nationalist
emes,” Reuters, February 25, 2017; Michael D. Shear and Jennifer Steinhauer, “Trump to Seek
$54 Billion Increase in Military Spending,” New York Times, February 27, 2017.
101. Luce, “Donald Trump Is Creating a Field Day for the 1%.”
102. Larry Summers, “I’m More Convinced of Secular Stagnation than Ever Before,” Washington Post,
February 17, 2017.
103. Michał Kalecki, e Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1972), 65–73.
104. e weakening stimulus offered by each dollar of military spending has long been noted. See
Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 213–17.
105. Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 6 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 301.
106. See István Mészáros, “e Critique of the State: A Twenty-First Century Perspective,” Monthly
Review 67/4 (September 2015): 23–37; e Necessity of Social Control.
107. Donald Trump, “Statement by the President on International Holocaust Remembrance Day,”
January 27, 2017.
108. Basil Davidson, Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 278.

2. is is Not Populism

1. Epigraph: Hitler quoted in Herman Rauschning, e Voice of Destruction (New York: Putnam,
1940), 277.
2. On the analysis of Donald Trump and populism, see, for example, Peter Baker, “As Trump Dris
Away from Populism, His Supporters Grow Watchful,” New York Times, April 18, 2017; omas
B. Edsall, “e Peculiar Populism of Donald Trump,” New York Times, February 2, 2017; Federico
Finchelstein and Pablo Piccato, “Donald Trump May Be Showing Us the Future of Right-Wing
Politics,” Washington Post, February 27, 2016; “Why Trump’s Populist Appeal Is About Culture
Not the Economy,” Vox, March 27, 2017, http://vox.com; Perry Anderson, “Passing the Baton,”
New Le Review 103 (2017), 54–55; Leo Panitch, “e Trump Way,” Jacobin 24 (Winter 2017): 17.
3. e term “populism” has been applied to such varied gures as Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chávez, Marine Le Pen, Bernie
Sanders, and Donald Trump. See Margaret Canovan, Populism (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1981), 292; Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1, 9, 13, 34–37, 48, 93; Cas Muddle and Cristóbal Kaltwasser,
Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 9, 12–13, 24, 53,
109; Ruth Wodak, e Politics of Fear (London: Sage, 2015), 10; “Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and
the Mao Factor,” CNN, April 3, 2017; David Greenberg, “e Populism of the Roosevelt Era,”
Time, June 24, 2009.
4. Lawrence Goodwyn, e Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). In Russia in the late nineteenth century there was a
quite different revolutionary populism, which also was tied to agrarian roots. See Franco Venturi,
Roots of Revolution (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966).
5. Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4–8.
6. See Simon Hedlin, “On Trump’s Populism, Learn from Sweden’s Mistakes,” Forbes, December 22,
2016; Ruth Wodak, Majid Khosravinik, and Brigitte Mral, eds., Right-Wing Populism in Europe
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013). On local successes of France’s National Front, see Valérie Igounet
and Vincent Jarousseau, “Scenes from the Front,” Dissent, Spring 2017: 88–95.
7. Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1966), 137–38.
8. Charles Bremer, “At the Gates of Power,” New Statesman, December 4, 2014.
9. Finchelstein and Piccato, “Donald Trump May Be Showing Us the Future of Right-Wing
Politics”; Dylan Matthews, “I Asked 5 Fascism Experts Whether Donald Trump Is a Fascist,” Vox,
December 10, 2015, http://vox.com; Edsall, “e Peculiar Populism of Donald Trump”; “Why
Trump’s Populist Appeal Is About Culture, Not the Economy”; Sheri Berman, “Populism Is Not
Fascism: But it Could Be a Harbinger,” Foreign Affairs, November-December 2016.
10. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966),
155.
11. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 2–3. See also Hannah
Arendt, e Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 301–18.
12. On the way that this is connected to Arendt’s own views see “Populism rough the Eyes of
Hannah Arendt: Now and en,” Eyes on Europe, April 2017, http://eyes-on-
europe.eu/populism-through-the-eyes-of-hannah-arendt-now-and-then/. A similar argument
on the liberal-democratic designation of a totalitarian-populist nexus to the one that I have
presented here, though not discussing Arendt, and tracing the shi in the way the concept of
populism was used in the Cold War “vital center” views of thinkers such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
and Richard Hofstadter, can be found in Marco D’Eramo, “Populism and the New Oligarchy,”
New Le Review 82 (2013): 5–28.
13. Müller, What Is Populism?, 2–3, 13, 93, 99–103; Muddle and Kaltwasser, Populism, 1–7, 92–96,
108–9, 116–18.
14. On substantive democracy, see István Mészáros, “e Critique of the State: A Twenty-First
Century Perspective,” Monthly Review 67/4 (September 2015): 32–37. On the critique of liberal
democracy as a contradictory state form under capitalism see C. B. Macpherson, e Life and
Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
15. Andrea Mammone, Transnational Neo-Fascism in France and Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 7, 16; Laqueur, Fascism, 4–8.
16. Laqueur, Fascism, 4–9.
17. e term “neo-fascist wind” comes from Mammone, Transnational Neo-Fascism. See also Judith
Butler, “Trump, Fascism, and the Construction of ‘the People,’” Verso blog, December 29, 2016,
http://versobooks.com; Noam Chomsky, “Trump Might Be a Disaster, But His Team Is Ready to
Loot America,” Alternet, April 15, 2017, http://alternet.org; Optimism Over Despair (Chicago:
Haymarket, 2017), 113–15; Juan Cole, “Preparing for the Normalization of a Neo-Fascist White
House,” Informed Comment blog, January 2, 2017, http://juancole.com; Henry A. Giroux,
“Combatting Trump’s Neo-Fascism and the Ghost of 1984,” Truthout, February 7, 2017,
http://truth-out.org; Paul Street, “Slandering Populism,” Counterpunch, April 28, 2017,
http://counterpunch.org; Cornel West, “Goodbye, American Neoliberalism,” Guardian,
November 7, 2016; Walter Dean Burnham, “Breitbart, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump,”
London School of Economics, American Politics and Policy blog, October 31, 2016,
http://bit.ly/2eM0FnV.
18. Dennis Gilbert, e American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (Los Angeles: Sage,
2011), 14, 243–47. e divisions between the working class and the lower-middle class cannot be
determined with precision. As Karl Marx observed, “Middle and transitional levels always
conceal the boundaries.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 1025. It is also true
that both economic and cultural factors (and consciousness) are part of the determination of
class relations in real-historical terms.
19. See pp. 19–21 in Chapter One, above.
20. C. Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 353–54. e concept of
“crony capitalists” is seen by Bannon as integral to lower-middle-class radicalism. See Bannon
quote in Lester Feeder, “is Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” Buzzfeed, November
15, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-
world?utm_term=.ibkjO8am7#.lg7mlVawO.
21. Roger Griffin, “General Introduction,” in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 3–4.
22. Canovan, Populism, 292; Wodak, e Politics of Fear, 10; “Pope Francis Warns Against Rise of
Populist Leaders ‘Like Hitler’ as Donald Trump Sworn in as President,” e Independent, January
22, 2017.
23. Arthur Schweitzer, Big Business in the ird Reich (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1964): 239–96; Franz Neumann, Behemoth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). e extent
to which notions of organized, corporatist, and state capitalism can be applied to Nazi Germany
(prior to 1939) are of course open to dispute. As Franz Neumann argued in Behemoth, the ird
Reich increased the power of cartels, and the increased organization in the economy seemingly
achieved was less through the state than through the heightened dominance of monopoly capital.
24. Karl Bracher, e German Dictatorship (New York: Praeger, 1970), 192–93.
25. Bracher, e German Dictatorship, 193–98. On the Reichstag re, see John Mage and Michael E.
Tigar, “e Reichstag Fire Trial, 1933–2008,” Monthly Review 60/10 (March 2009): 24–49.
26. Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 69, 71.
27. Schmitt quoted in Karl Dietrich Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian Integration (Gleichschaltung),”
in Republic to Reich, ed. Hajo Holborn (New York: Vintage, 1972), 126.
28. Julius Evola, Fascism Viewed from the Right (London: Arktos, 2013), 51; H. T. Hansen,
Introduction in Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002), 47–
48.
29. Maxine Y. Sweezy (see also under Maxine Y. Woolston), e Structure of the Nazi Economy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), 27–35; Gustav Stolper, German Economy,
1870–1940 (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1940), 207; Germà Bel, “e Coining of
‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20/3
(2006): 187–94; Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York: Path nder, 1973).
30. Schweitzer, Big Business in the ird Reich, 269–78, 327–28.
31. Hitler quoted in Rauschning, Voice of Destruction, 91.
32. Sheri Berman, “It Wasn’t Just Hate: Fascism Offered Robust Social Welfare,” Aeon, March 27,
2017, http://aeon.co; A. James Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 256–64; Robert O. Paxton, e Anatomy of
Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005), 147.
33. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously wrote in e Communist Manifesto: “e executive of
the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
In Marxian theory fascism in the advanced capitalist states is a deviation from this, promoting
the interests of monopoly capital (monopoly- nance capital) primarily, rather than the “whole
bourgeoisie.” It thus has a narrower foundation and is compatible with a wider repression. See
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, e Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1964), 5.
34. Enzo Traverso, “Post-Fascism: A Mutation Still Underway,” Verso blog, March 13, 2017,
http://versobooks.com; Pauline Bock, “e French Millennials Marching Behind Marine Le Pen,”
New Statesman, February 21, 2017; Bremer, “At the Gates of Power”; Kim Wilsher, “Fear of Neo-
Fascism Keeps Emmanuel Macron Ahead of Marine Le Pen,” Guardian, April 29, 2017.
35. See Jayati Ghosh, “Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy,” Dollars and Sense,
March-April 2017.
36. Evola quoted in Paul Furlong, Social and Political ought of Julius Evola (London: Routledge,
2011), 88; Laqueur, Fascism, 96; Evola, Fascism Viewed from the Right, 55; Hansen, Introduction,
in Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 48.
37. Ibid., 91–95; Laqueur, Fascism, 97; Julius Evola, e Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral
Tradition, 2009), 88–95. It was Evola’s reemergence as a major neo-fascist thinker, coupled with
his earlier leading role in the late 1920s in the “Ur-Group” of Italian intellectuals, dedicated to
providing pagan bases for right-wing ideology (Ur is a pre x standing for primordial), that
 undoubtedly inspired Umberto Eco’s famous 1995 article on “Ur-Fascism,” in which Evola was
singled out as the chief theoretical gure. “e rst feature of Ur-Fascism,” Eco wrote, “is the cult
of tradition.” Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.
38. Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 195; H. T. Hansen, Introduction, in Julius Evola, Revolt Against the
Modern World (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1995), x; Mammone, Transnational Neo-
Fascism, 67–68.
39. Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003), 173.
40. Evola, Fascism Viewed from the Right, 101, Men Among the Ruins, 75, Revolt Against the Modern
World, 167–71; Mammone, Transnational Neo-Fascism, 70. In the chapter on “e Issue of Race”
in his autobiography, e Path of Cinnabar, Evola tries to present his racial views as spiritual
rather than materialistic and to claim that they were removed from racism; in particular,
distinguishing himself from the Nazi race theorist Alfred Rosenberg, to whom he was frequently
compared. However, he contradicts himself by exhibiting racist views on every page even here,
not only in his treatments of the “Roman Aryan” race, but also in declaring that “a justi cation
for the Fascist embrace of racism was the well-documented anti-Fascist sentiment of
international Jewry.” Evola, e Path of Cinnabar, 164–67, 173.
41. Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 169, 355; Evola, Ride the Tiger, 131.
42. Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 123; Furlong, e Social and Political ought of Julius Evola, 143–
45.
43. Mammone, Transnational Neo-Fascism, 173–74.
44. Aleksandr Dugin, e Fourth Political eory (London: Arktos, 2012), 13, 28–34, 39–46, 88–89,
95–96, 193; Laqueur, Fascism, 195–96; Aleksandr Dugin, “Heidegger and Evola,” Middle East
Media Research Institute, February 16, 2017. Signi cantly, Dugin relies particularly on the Nazi
phase of Heidegger’s work.
45. Jane Mayer, “e Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency,” e New Yorker,
March 27, 2017.
46. Dan Schnur, “Trump, the Centrist President,” New York Times, March 31, 2017; “Slavoj Žižek:
‘Trump Is Really a Centrist Liberal,’” Guardian, April 28, 2016; Neal Gabler, “Forget Fascism. It’s
Anarchy We Have to Worry About,” Moyers and Company, March 29, 2017,
http://billmoyers.com.
47. See “All the President’s Billionaires,” Forbes, December 9, 2016. Bannon’s notion of
“deconstruction of the administrative state,” although of no immediate practical impact, seems to
have a kind of homologous relation to Dugin’s “deconstruction of civilization.” See Dugin, e
Fourth Political eory, 106–8.
48. “Ralph Nader Denounces Trump Budget as Corporatist, Militarist, and Racist,” Democracy Now!,
March 17, 2017; Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker, “Trump Taps Kushner to Lead a SWAT Team
to Fix Government with Business Ideas,” Washington Post, March 26, 2017.
49. Michael Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist
Plots ‘An Entirely New Political Movement,’” Hollywood Reporter, November 18, 2016,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-bannon-trump-tower-interview-trumps-
strategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747.
50. “CNN Host: ‘Donald Trump Became President,’ Last Night,” e Hill, April 17, 2017,
http://thehill.com; Alex Shephard, “What Just Happened? A Review of President Trump’s Twelh
Week,” e New Republic, April 14, 2017; Zeeshan Aleem, “U.S. Airstrikes Are Killing a Lot More
Civilians. And No One Is Sure Why,” Vox, March 28, 2017, http://vox.com; Jason Le Miere,
 “Under Trump U.S. Military Has Allegedly Killed Over 1,000 Civilians in Iraq, Syria in March,”
Newsweek, March 31, 2017.
51. Samuel P. Huntington, e Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). Trump’s
original Deputy National Security Advisor, Kissinger’s protégé K. T. McFarland, was associated
with the shi toward détente with Russia and a harder line on China, widely seen as a strategy
pushed by Kissinger himself. Trump’s removal of McFarland in April 2017 more than anything
else pointed to the end of this geopolitical strategy within the administration. In its place was a
more traditional policy of simultaneously pursuing a new Cold War with Russia with a general
attempt to expand U.S. power globally.
52. Jeremy W. Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can Be Traced to a Book that Warns, ‘Winter is Coming,’”
New York Times, April 8, 2017; Kristin Iversen, “Why It Matters that Hillary Clinton Supports
Syria Decision,” Nylon, April 7, 2017, https://www.nylon.com/articles/hillary-clinton-supports-
bombing-syria; William Strauss and Neil Howe, e Fourth Turning (New York: Broadway,
1997), 138.
53. e upper-middle-class professional strata increasingly became the focus of the political strategy
of Bill and Hillary Clinton. See omas Frank, Listen, Liberal (New York: Henry Holt, 2016).
54. e notion that fascism gives “expression” to lower-middle-class and working-class demands but
does not advance their needs in substance, since aimed principally at promoting capitalism, was
introduced in Walter Benjamin, e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(Lexington, KY: Prism, 2010), 47.
55. Breitbart, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” March 29, 2016; Robert
Beiner, “e Political ought of Stephen K. Bannon,” Crooked Timber, January 11, 2017,
http://crookedtimber.org.
56. Steve Bannon, remarks via Skype at the Human Dignity Conference, the Vatican, summer 2014,
transcribed in J. Feeder, “is Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” Buzzfeed, November
15, 2016; Nina Burleigh, “e Bannon Canon: Books Favored by the Trump Adviser,” Newsweek,
March 23, 2017.
57. Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower.’”
58. Jean Raspail, e Camp of the Saints (New York: Scribner, 1973); Jonathan O r, “Steve Bannon’s
Judeo-Christian ‘Camp of the Saints,’” Mondoweiss, March 11, 2017, http://mondoweiss.org;
“Racist Book, Camp of the Saints, Gains in Popularity,” Southern Poverty Law Center, March 21,
2001.
59. O r, “Steve Bannon’s Judeo-Christian ‘Camp of the Saints.’”
60. Paul Blumenthal, “No Matter What Happens to Bannon, Jeff Sessions Will Press His Anti-
Immigrant Agenda,” Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-steve-
bannon_us_58e376e4b0bb9638e23542 April 13, 2017.
61. Osita Nwanevu, “GOP Congressman Steve King Is Now Endorsing Explicitly Racist Books,
Because He’s Steve King,” Slate, March 14, 2017, GOP Congressman Steve King Is Now
Endorsing Explicitly Racist Books, Because He’s Steve King. On Bannon’s wider, active
promotion of barbaric-neo-fascist sensibilities via lm see Adam Wren, “What I Learned Binge-
Watching Steve Bannon’s Documentaries,” Politico, December 2, 2016,
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/steve-bannon- lms-movies-documentaries-
trump-hollywood-214495.
62. Breitbart, “Steve Bannon Speaks to Breitbart: e Forgotten Men and Women Who Are the
Backbone of this Country Have Risen Up,” November 9, 2016; Breitbart, “Steve Bannon: ‘Hobbits
and Deplorables Had a Great Run in 2016,’ But It’s Only ‘Top of the First Inning,’” December 30,
2016; CNN, “McCain Refers to ‘Tea Party Hobbits,’ Blasts Bachmann-Backed Idea,” July 27, 2011.
63. Baker, “As Trump Dris Away from Populism, His Supporters Grow Watchful”; Jamelle Bouie,
“Trump Sees Himself in Andrew Jackson,” Slate, March 15, 2017,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/03/donald_trump_sees_himself_
in_andrew_jackson_they_deserve_one_another.html; Jonathan Capehart, “Trump’s Woefully
Ignorant Beliefs about the Civil War and Andrew Jackson,” Washington Post, Post-Partisan blog,
May 1, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/05/01/trumps-
woefully-ignorant-beliefs-about-the-civil-war-and-andrew-jackson/?utm_term=.95dd2a56b6c6.
64. Clip from Donald Trump speech on CBS Weekend News, May 7, 2016. omas Frank calls the
Trump movement “the greatest fake-populist rising the country has ever seen.” Frank, Listen,
Liberal, 261.
65. Donald J. Trump, Time to Get Tough: Make America Great Again (Washington, D.C.: Regnery,
2011), 188; Sarah Jaffe, “So Much for ‘Draining the Swamp’: Wall Street’s Power Soars Under
Trump,” Truthout, April 21, 2017, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/40300-so-much-for-
draining-the-swamp-wall-street-s-power-soars-under-trump. On Trump’s personality, views,
and ambitions see Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghost Writer Tells All,” e New Yorker, July 25,
2016.
66. Curtis Ellis, “e Radical Le’s Ethnic Cleansing of America,” WorldNetDaily, May 20, 2016,
http://wnd.com; Breitbart, “Curtis Ellis Discusses ‘e Radical Le’s Ethnic Cleansing of
America,’” May 24, 2016.
67. Cornel West, “Goodbye, American Neoliberalism,” Guardian, November 7, 2016.
68. Paul M. Sweezy, “More (or Less) on Globalization,” Monthly Review 49/4 (September 1997): 3.
69. John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, e Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2012).
70. Michael D. Yates, e Great Inequality (London: Routledge, 2016).
71. Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato, “Breaking with Capitalist Orthodoxy,” Dissent (Spring
2017): 36–37.
72. “Nine Charts about Wealth Inequality in America,” Urban Institute, http://apps.urban.org.
73. e notion that a small portion of the surplus siphoned from the hegemonic power ended up
going to a “small, privileged, ‘protected’ minority” of workers, stabilizing the system, was rst
introduced by Engels in the preface to the 1892 English edition of his book, and later taken up by
Lenin. See Frederick Engels, e Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 323–24; V. I. Lenin, Imperialism (New York: International Publishers,
1969).
74. Ghosh, “Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy.”
75. CNN, “Exit Polls, Election 2016,” November 23, 2016.
76. Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can Be Traced to a Book that Warns, ‘Winter Is Coming’”; Wolff,
“Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower.’”
77. President Donald Trump, “Inaugural Address,” January 21, 2017, http://whitehouse.gov; Trump,
Time to Get Tough, 9–27; NPR, “Ahead of Trump’s First Job Report, a Look at His Remarks on the
Numbers,” January 29, 2017. e term “truthful hyperbole” was introduced by Trump’s
ghostwriter in his book e Art of the Deal. See Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghost Writer Tells All.”
78. CBS News, “Donald Trump: Black Lives Matter Calls for Killing Police,” July 19, 2016.
79. Trump, Time to Get Tough, 29–48; Peter Navarro, e Coming China Wars (New York: Free Press,
2008), 203–5; Jacob Heilbrun, “e Most Dangerous Man in Trump World?,” Politico, February
12, 2017, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/peter-navarro-trump-trade-china-
214772.
80. See James K. Galbraith, “Can Trump Deliver on Growth?” Dissent (Spring 2017): 43–50; Foster,
“Neo-Fascism in the White.House,” 19–25.
81. CNN, “Steve Bannon in 2013: Joseph McCarthy Was Right in Crusade against Communist
In ltration,” March 6, 2017.
82. Brecht, Galileo, 133.
83. Oxford Dictionaries, “e Word of the Year 2016 Is . . . ,” November 8, 2016,
http://en.oxforddictionaries.com.
84. Georg Lukács, e Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin, 1980).
85. Ellen Meiksins Wood, e Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1999).

3. Trump and Climate Catastrophe

1. Epigraph: Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, January 1, 2014, 5:39 p.m.,
http://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump.
2. Leo Benedictus, “Noam Chomsky on Donald Trump: ‘Almost a Death Knell for the Human
Species,’” Guardian, May 20, 2016; statements by Michael E. Mann quoted in “US Election:
Climate Scientists React to Donald Trump’s Victory,” CarbonBrief, November 9, 2016,
http://carbonbrief.org. Mann, in his statement, is also quoting James Hansen, who several years
earlier had used the phrase “game over for the climate” in calling for immediate action to address
climate change. See James Hansen, “Game Over for the Climate,” New York Times, May 12, 2012.
3. Shaun Marcott, quoted in “Climate Scientists React to Donald Trump’s Victory.”
4. James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 269; Kevin
Anderson, “Climate Change Going Beyond Dangerous—Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope,”
What Next Forum, September 12, http://whatnext.org; Heidi Cullen, e Weather of the Future
(New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 261–71.
5. Scott Waldman, “Rise in Global Carbon Emissions Slows,” Scienti c American, November 14,
2016.
6. See James Hansen, “China and the Barbarians: Part I,” November 24, 2010, http://columbia.edu;
Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles, e Madhouse Effect (New York: Columbia University Press,
2016), 139–40; Jean Chemnick, “China Takes the Climate Spotlight as U.S. Heads for Exit,”
Scienti c American, November 18, 2016; Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, e Collapse of
Western Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
7. World Meteorological Organization, “e Global Climate 2011–2015: Heat Records and High
Impact Weather,” November 8, 2016, http://public.wmo.int; “Provisional WMO Statement on the
Status of the Global Climate in 2016,” November 14, 2016, http://public.wmo.int.
8. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “Executive Summary,” Arctic
Report Card (Washington, D.C.: NOAA, 2016), http://arctic.noaa.gov; Henry Fountain and John
Schwartz, “Spiking Temperatures in the Arctic Startle Scientists,” New York Times, December 13,
2016.
9. Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney, “Scientists Nearly Double Sea Level Rise Projections for 2100,
because of Antarctica,” Washington Post, March 30, 2016 (updated December 17, 2016); Michael
Oppenheimer and Richard B. Alley, “How High Will the Seas Rise?” Science 354/6318 (2016):
1375–76; Julia Rosen, “Sea Level Rise Accelerating Faster than ought,” Science news blog,
http://sciencemag.org; May 11, 2015; Robert M. DeConto and David Pollard, “Contribution of
Antarctic to Past and Future Sea-Level Rise,” Nature 531 (2016): 591–97; Jeff Tollefson, “Antarctic
Model Raises Prospect of Unstoppable Ice Collapse,” Nature, March 30, 2016, http://nature.com;
Brian Kahn, “Sea Level Could Rise at Least 6 Meters,” Scienti c American, July 9, 2015.
10. Kevin Anderson, “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change Demands De-Growth Strategies from
Wealthier Nations,” November 25, 2013, http://kevinanderson.info/blog; PBL Netherlands,
Environmental Assessment Agency, Trends in Global CO2 Emissions, 2016 Report (e Hague:
PBL, 2016), 13 http://www.pbl.nl/en. e Netherlands Environmental Agency statistics include
carbon from both fossil fuels and cement manufacture.
Hansen further calculates that in order to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, as
current models minimally require, it would necessitate an approximately 5 percent annual
decline in emissions (on an exponential, or constant percentage rate basis). If a 6 percent annual
reduction were to be achieved beginning in 2020, the world could get back down to the
necessary 350 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere, that is, if it were additionally to suck 150
gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by means of improved forestry and agricultural
practices. e rich, high per-capita emissions countries are those most able to achieve steep
initial reductions in carbon emissions, because it is there that the “low-hanging fruit” are
primarily to be found. James Hansen, “Rolling Stones,” January 11, 2017, http://columbia.edu.
11. Mann and Toles, e Madhouse Effect, 28, 132.
12. Ibid., 10–11, 150; Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
13. e severity of the Anthropocene crisis prompted some major environmental thinkers to shi
from mainstream to more radical views critical of capitalism. See, for example, James Gustave
Speth, e Bridge at the Edge of the Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
14. See Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “Capitalism and the Environment,” Monthly Review
41/2 (June 1989): 1–10; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, e Ecological Ri
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg, Climate
Change, Capitalism, and Corporations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
15. e sociologist Max Weber was perhaps the rst major thinker to argue that historical capitalism
was inextricably intertwined with the fossil-fuel regime. See John Bellamy Foster and Hannah
Holleman, “Weber and the Environment,” American Journal of Sociology 117/6 (2012): 1646–60.
16. For analyses of these global trends of monopoly, nance, stagnation, and imperialism, see Samir
Amin, e Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013); John
Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, e Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2012); Costas Lapavitsas, Pro ting Without Producing (London: Verso, 2014); Utsa Patnaik and
Prabhat Patnaik, A eory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); and John
Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016). e
shi to nancial-wealth accumulation over production and income generation is also captured,
from a non-Marxian viewpoint, in omas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
17. See Foster and McChesney, e Endless Crisis, 44–45, 125–54; Amin, e Implosion of
Contemporary Capitalism.
18. Paul M. Sweezy, e eory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press,
1942), 348–52; Sweezy, “Capitalism and the Environment,” 8–9.
19. e alt-right, riding high since Trump’s election, has been de ned by National Review as a
movement of “white nationalists and wanna-be fascists.” Unfortunately, the “wanna-be” seems
less and less warranted. David French, “e Race-Obsessed Le Has Released a Monster It Can’t
Control,” National Review, January 26, 2016. French tries to blame the rise of the alt-right and
Trump on the le, rather than on the right’s own “white identity politics.”
20. Naomi Klein, is Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. e Climate (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2014), 22, 38–39.
21. See Oscar Reyes, “Seven Wrinkles in the Paris Climate Deal,” Foreign Policy in Focus, December
14, 2015, http://fpif.org; Kelly Levin and Taryn Fransen, “Why Are INDC Studies Reaching
Different Temperature Estimates?” World Resources Institute, November 9, 2015,
http://wri.org/blog.
22. U.S. carbon emissions had already fallen by 13 percent between 2005 and 2013, largely due to the
shi away from coal during the fracking boom, making Obama’s plan even less ambitious than it
appeared. See the 2017 Economic Report of the President (Washingotn, D.C.: U.S. Government
Publishing Office), 423–82; Mark Hertsgaard, “Climate Change,” e Nation, January 2 and 9,
2017, 72; Brad Plumer, “A Guide to Obama’s New Rules to Cut Carbon Emissions from Power
Plants,” Vox.com, June 1, 2014, http://vox.com; David Biello, “How Far Does Obama’s Clean
Power Plan Go in Slowing Climate Change?,” Scienti c American, August 6, 2015.
23. 2017 Economic Report of the President, 448, 472, 483. On the debate on the le over Obama’s
CCP and more radical strategies, see Christian Parenti, “Climate Change: What Role for
Reform?”; and the Editors, “A Reply to Parenti,” Monthly Review 65/11 (April 2014): 49–55.
24. Tony Dokoupil, “Obama’s Climate Policy Is ‘Practically Worthless,’ Says Expert,” MSNBC, August
4, 2015.
25. is is the thesis advanced in Hans-Werner Sinn, e Green Paradox (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2012).
26. Henry Fountain and Erica Goode, “Trump Has Options for Undoing Obama’s Climate Legacy,”
New York Times, November 25, 2016; “Trump Will Withdraw U.S. from Paris Climate
Agreement,” New York Times, June 1, 2017.
27. Ewan Palmer, “50 Other Times Donald Trump Denied Climate Change and Global Warming,”
International Business Times, September 27, 2016, http://ibtimes.co.uk.
28. Henry Fountain, “Trump’s Climate Contrarian: Myron Ebell Takes on the EPA,” New York Times,
November 11, 2016; Matt Shuham, “Trump Adviser: Global Warming Could Be Disproven Just
Like Flat Earth eory,” TalkingPointsMemo, December 14, 2016,
http://talkingpointsmemo.com; Mazin Sidahmed, “Climate Change Denial in the Trump
Cabinet: Where Do Nominees Stand?” Guardian, December 15, 2016; Tim Murphy, “Rick Perry’s
War on Science,” Mother Jones, December 13, 2016; Lee Fang, “He Waged Intimidation
Campaigns Against Climate Scientists; Now He’s Helping Trump Remake the EPA,” e
Intercept, December 9, 2016, http://theintercept.com; Dan Vergano, “Trump Transition Lawyer
Has Spent Years Suing for Climate Emails,” Buzzfeed, December 13, 2016, http://buzzfeed.com;
Michael E. Mann, e Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (New York: Columbia University Press,
2012), 367–68; Nick Surgey, “Revealed: e Trump Administration’s Energy Plan,” PR Watch,
December 4, 2016, http://prwatch.org; Steven Mufson, “Trump’s Energy Policy Team Includes
Climate Change Skeptic, Free-Market Advocate,” Washington Post, November 29, 2016; Scott
Pruitt and Luther Strange, “e Climate-Change Gang,” National Review, May 17, 2016; John
Cook, “Yes, ere Really Is Scienti c Consensus on Climate Change,” Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, April 13, 2016, http://thebulletin.org; Charlie Rose, “Charlie Rose Talks to
ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson,” Bloomberg TV, March 7, 2013, http://bloomberg.com.
29. Coral Davenport, “Climate Change Conversations Are Targeted in Questionnaire to Energy
Department,” New York Times, December 9, 2016; Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin, “Trump
Transition Says Request for Names of Climate Scientists Was ‘Not Authorized,’” Washington Post,
December 14, 2016.
30. Matthew Philips, Mark Drajem, and Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “How Climate Rules Might Fade Away,”
Bloomberg, December 15, 2016; Mufson, “Trump’s Energy Policy Team Includes Climate Change
Skeptic.”
31. James Hansen, “e Real Deal: Usufruct and the Gorilla,” DeSmogBlog, August 16, 2007,
http://desmogblog.com; Mark Bowen, Censoring Science (New York: Penguin, 2008), 303–4.
32. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
33. omas Heath, “How a Trump Presidency Will Affect 15 Industries,” Washington Post,
November 12, 2016; Michelle Conlin, “Exclusive: Trump Considering Fracking Mogul Harold
Hamm as Energy Secretary,” Reuters, July 21, 2016; James Delingpole, “Trump: e Le Just Lost
the War on Climate Change,” Breitbart, November 9, 2016, http://breitbart.com.
34. Peter Andreas, “Yes, Trump Will Build His Border Wall. Most of It Is Already Built,” Washington
Post, Monkey Cage blog, November 21, 2016; Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, An Abrupt
Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security (Pasadena:
California Institute of Technology, 2003); John Bellamy Foster, e Ecological Revolution (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 107–20.
35. A. B. Spellman, “Interview with Malcolm X,” Monthly Review 16/1 (May 1964): 23.
36. Eric S. Godoy and Aaron Jaffe, “We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a
Revolution,” New York Times, October 31, 2016.
37. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (New York: Vintage, 1993), 13; Paul A. Baran, e
Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 104. e phrase “vomits up reason” is
taken from Baran’s interpretation of the Underground Man’s rejection of the “laws of nature” and
“two times two is four.”
38. Klein, is Changes Everything, 56, 449; Kevin Anderson, “Why Carbon Prices Can’t Deliver the
2°C Target,” August 13, 2013, http://kevinanderson.info/blog.
39. Klein, is Changes Everything, 7–10, 294.
40. Lauren Regan, “Water Protectors File Class Action Suit for Retaliation and Excessive Force
Against Brutal Police,” Civil Liberties Defense Center, November 28, 2016, http://cldc.org; “News
Timeline of Standing Rock Water Protectors’ Resistance to Dakota Access Pipeline,” Daily Kos,
October 11, 2016, http://dailykos.com; Wes Enzinna, “Crude Awakening,” Mother Jones
(January–February 2017): 32–37; Jack Healy, “As North Dakota Pipeline Is Blocked, Veterans at
Standing Rock Cheer,” New York Times, December 5, 2016.
41. Unconventional fossil fuels are oen dirtier, as in the cases of oil sands and oil shale. In other
instances, they represent such a great expansion of fossil-fuel availability—as in tight oil and
shale gas (via fracking), and ultra-deep oil wells, particularly in the Arctic, now opening up to oil
exploration—that they put an end to any expectation of any “peaking” of fossil fuels in time to
alleviate the pressure on the climate. Fracking is also associated with methane leaks, which
further exacerbate climate change. It should be noted that Hansen himself sees fourth-generation
nuclear energy (still not fully developed) as a possible alternative, non-carbon energy source, and
thus part of the answer to global warming. is would be a Faustian bargain, however, raising a
host of concerns for humanity and the environment.
42. John Bellamy Foster, “James Hansen and the Climate Change Exit Strategy,” Monthly Review 64/9
(February 2013): 1–18; Foster, “e Fossil Fuels War,” Monthly Review 65/4 (September 2013): 4–
5; Bowen, Censoring Science, 305.
43. Anderson, “Why Carbon Prices Can’t Deliver.”
44. See Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About
Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 124–31; Angus, Facing the Anthropocene,
189–223.
45. See, for example, the multifaceted threat that capitalism poses toward oceans and marine life, as
depicted in Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, e Tragedy of the Commodity:
 Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
46. “If we do not now dare everything, the ful llment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in
song by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the re next
time.’” James Baldwin, e Fire Next Time (New York: Dial, 1963), 105–6.

e Nature of the Resistance: A Brief Conclusion

1. Epigraph: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 15 (New York: International
Publishers, 1975), 485.
2. “We Finally Have Photos of Steve Bannon Whiteboard of Trump Promises,” Breitbart, May 3,
2017, http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/03/ nally-know-steve-bannons-
whiteboard-donald-trump-promises-voters/; “Rabbi Shmuley: For Steve Bannon, Israel is on the
Whiteboard,” Breitbart, May 3, 2017, http://www.breitbart.com/big-
government/2017/05/03/whiteboard-rabbi-shmuley-steve-bannon-israel/; NBC News, “Steve
Bannon’s Whiteboard To-Do List Exposed on Twitter by Rabbi,” May 3, 2017,
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/steven-bannon-s-whiteboard-do-list-exposed-
twitter-rabbi-n754291. One promise barely visible on the whiteboard photo was moving the U.S.
embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
3. Breitbart, “We Finally Have Photos of Steve Bannon Whiteboard of Trump Promises.” It is now
known that Bannon continued to communicate with and in uence Breitbart aer entering the
White House as Trump’s chief strategist, for which he has been given a retroactive blank check
from the president, in violation of standard rules of ethics in governance. See Matthew Rasza, “A
Retroactive Ethics Waiver that Applies to Steve Bannon May Have Broken Ethics Rules,” Salon,
June 2, 2017, http://www.salon.com/2017/06/02/a-retroactive-ethics-waiver-that-applies-to-
steve-bannon-may-have-broken-ethics-rules/.
4. Walter Dean Burnham, e Current Crisis in American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983).
5. Walter Dean Burnham, “Political Immunization and Political Confessionalism: e United
States and Weimar Germany,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3/1 (Summer 1972): 1–30. For a
consideration of the origins of U.S. fascist movements in the 1930s and aer see Michael Joseph
Roberto, “e Origins of American Fascism,” Monthly Review 69/2 (June 2017): 26–41.
6. Burnham, “Political Immunization and Political Confessionalism,” 29; Walter Dean Burnham,
“Breitbart, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump,” London School of Economics, American Politics
and Policy blog, October 31, 2016, http://bit.ly/2eM0FnV; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Basic
Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City: New York: Doubleday,
1959), 17–18.
7. Burnham, “Political Immunization and Political Confessionalism,” 3, 30. On the nature of the
bourgeois Honoriatorenpartei, or limited-liability parties, relying on local volunteers during
electoral contests, while devoid of any de nite program, and ruled by permanent leaders and
party bureaucrats, see Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978), part 2, 1444–45.
8. Burnham, “Breitbart, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.”
9. Ibid.
10. See “Donald Trump Sexism Tracker: Every Offensive Comment in One Place,” Telegraph,
January 20, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/donald-trump-sexism-tracker-
every-offensive-comment-in-one-place/; “Here Are 16 Examples of Donald Trump Being Racist,”
 HuffingtonPost, February 16, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/president-donald-
trump-racist-examples_us_584f2ccae4b0bd9c3dfe5566.
11. Burnham, “Political Immunization and Political Confessionalism,” 6; Burnham, “Breitbart, Steve
Bannon and Donald Trump.”
12. “Hate Groups Increase for Second Consecutive Year as Trump Electri es Radical Right,”
Southern Poverty Law Center, February 15, 2017,
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/02/15/hate-groups-increase-second-consecutive-year-
trump-electri es-radical-right.
13. Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky, e Occupiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
14. See Brent Budowsky, “Why Sanders Would Have Defeated Trump in 2016,” e Hill, May 5,
2017, http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/332097-why-sanders-would-
have-defeated-trump-in-2016; David Horsey, “President Sanders?: Bernie Would Have Beaten
Trump,” LA Times, December 22, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoheticket/lana-tt-
bernie-beats-trump-20161222-story.html.
15. Conor Lynch, “Yes, Bernie Would Probably Have Won—And His Resurgent Le-Wing Populism
Is the Way Forward,” Salon, May 5, 2017, http://www.salon.com/2017/05/05/yes-bernie-would-
probably-have-won-and-his-resurgent-le-wing-populism-is-the-way-forward/.
16. Although Sanders lost the Democratic Party nomination to Clinton independent of the super-
delegate votes, the existence of the latter was continually used to convince his potential
supporters that he could not possibly win and thus to discourage their participation.
17. Salim Muwakkil, “e Paradox of Bernie Sanders and the Black Voter,” In ese Times, April 12,
2016, http://inthesetimes.com/article/19020/why-arent-more-black-voters-supporting-bernie-
sanders.
18. David Harvey, e Enigma of Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 237.
19. e Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), “Platform,” https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/.
 Index
e index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook.
Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the
terms that appear in the print index are listed below

Acosta, R. Alexander
African Americans (blacks)
Albedo effect
Almirante, Giorgio
Althusser, Louis
Alt-right
in Bannon’s ideology
Evola as hero to
“Hobbits” and
on sovereignty of U.S.
in Trump administration
Trump and
Amin, Samir
Anderson, Kevin
Anti-imperialism
Arctic region
Arendt, Hannah

Bannon, Steve: on administrative state

Camp of the Saints and
con icts between media and
on foreign policy
global warming denied by
on HSC Principals Committee
Islamophobia of
as Kushner’s rival
McCarthyism of
neo-fascist ideology of
removed from National Security Council
as Trump’s campaign manager
as Trump’s chief strategist
Trump’s Inaugural Address written by
whiteboard of
Baran, Paul
Berkeley, University of California at
Berman, Sheri
Black Lives Matter
Blacks (African Americans)
Blockadia
Boteach, Shmuley
Bracher, Karl
Brecht, Bertolt
Breitbart News
on Bannon’s whiteboard
Burnham on
global warming denied by
in Trump campaign
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
Burnham, Walter Dean

e Camp of the Saints (novel, Raspail)

Capitalism: Bannon on
climate change tied to
fascism tied to
socialism as antonym of
Carbon emissions
failure of reforms on
fees for
Chile
China: in Bannon’s ideology
climate change and
economy of
Navarro on
Trump’s policies on
Chomsky, Noam
Civil liberties
Civil War (U.S.)
Clean Power Plan (CPP)
Climate change
capitalism tied to
Ebell on
evidence on
failure of carbon reforms to control
movement on
Trump on
Trump administration on
Clinton, Hillary: black support for
 neoliberalism of
Syria policy of
Crimea

Dakota Access Pipeline

Davidson, Basil
De Benoist, Alain
Democracy: liberal democracy
rejected by fascism
totalitarianism versus
Democratic Party, Sanders blocked by
DeVos, Betsy
Diego-Rosell, Pablo
Dugin, Aleksandr

Ebell, Myron
Edsall, omas
Education, Trump policies on
Education vouchers
Election campaign of 2016
Sanders in
Trump’s comments in
Trump’s promises during
Trump voters in
Ellis, Curtis
Enabling Act (Germany, 1933)
Energy Department (U.S.)
Engels, Frederick
Environmentalism, cutting agencies for
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Clean Power Plan and
under Trump administration
Europe: neo-fascism in
right-wing populism
European Union, economic growth in
Evola, Julius
Bannon and
in neo-fascism thought
Trump and
Executive branch of federal government
ExxonMobil ( rm)

Falk, Richard
Fascism
as antonym of liberal democracy
 Brecht on
Evola’s
in Germany
as legal revolution
neo-fascism and
populism and
tied to capitalism
vulnerability of U.S. to
Federal government: environmental protection agencies in
Trump’s attacks on
Finchelstein, Federico
Flynn, Michael
Fossil fuels
pipelines for
price of
stocks in
France
Francis (pope)
Friedman, Milton

G7 countries
Geopolitics
Germany: fascism in
Gleichschaltung in
Gingrich, Newt
Gleichschaltung
Trumpism and
Global North
Global South
Global warming, see Climate change
Godoy, Eric S.
Gorka, Sebastian
Great Recession (2007-2009)

Haass, Richard
Hahn, Julia
Hamilton, Richard F.
Hamm, Harold
Hansen, H. T.
Hansen, James
Hate crimes
Haushofer, Karl
Heidegger, Martin
Herman, Edward
Hertsgaard, Mark
Higher education
Hindenburg, Paul von
Hitler, Adolf
Evola and
on German legal system
Keynesian economic policies of
on power politics
on state power
tax policies of
unilateral power given to
Hobbit Camps
Huntington, Samuel

Immigration: Bannon on
climate change and
as issue in election of 2016
Trump’s announced policies on
Trump’s campaign promises on
Income inequality
Independence Party (United Kingdom)
Infrastructure
Intelligence community
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Internationalism
Iraq
Islam
Italy

Jackson, Andrew
Jacobs, Michael
Jaffe, Aaron
Judeo-Christian West
Judiciary: expansion of executive power at expense of
in Germany
Trump’s attacks on
vacancies in

Kaltwasser, Cristobal
Keynesianism
King, Steve
Klein, Naomi
Koch, Charles and David
Kushner, Jared
Kyoto Protocol (1997)
Labor unions
Laqueur, Walter
Le-wing populism
Legal systems
Le Pen, Marine
Liberal democracy
totalitarianism versus
Libertarianism
London, Jack
Lukács, Georg

Mackinder, Halford
MacLean, Nancy
Malcolm X
Mammone, Andrea
Mann, Michael E.
Marx, Karl
Matthews, Dylan
Mazzucato, Mariana
McCain, John
McCarthy, Joseph
McChesney, Robert W.
Media, Trump’s con icts with
Mercer, Rebekah
Mercer, Robert
Metabolic ri
Mexico, proposed wall between U.S. and
Military spending:
Keynesianism of
Trump’s increase in
Miller, Stephen
Mills, C. Wright
Mnuchin, Steven
Movement for Black Lives
Moyers, Bill
Muddle, Cas
Muller, Jan-Werner
Muslims, immigration ban on
Mussolini, Benito
Evola and

National Front (France)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
National Public Radio (NPR)
National Review (magazine)
National Socialist party (Nazi Party; Germany), see Nazi Party
Native Americans
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
Navarro, Peter
Nazi Party (National Socialist party; Germany)
Gleichschaltung policy of
populism of
Neo-fascism
aim of
attacks on media and
Evola and
fascism and
fascism distinguished from
as “legal revolution”
nationalism of
populism and
Trump and
Trumpism as
Neoliberalism
of Hillary Clinton
Northern League (Italy)

Obama, Barack: on federal detention powers

Trump’s attacks on
white supremacist response to
Obama administration, climate policy of
Occupy movement

Paris Climate Agreement (2015)

Party for Freedom (Netherlands)
Paxton, Robert O.
Peabody Energy ( rm)
Pence, Michael
Perry, Rick
Persian Gulf
Piccato, Pablo
Pinochet, Augusto
Pipelines
Popular Front
Populism
“Post-truth”
Poulantzas, Nicos
Presidency, expansion of powers of
Prince, Erik
Prisons, privatization of
Privatization: of federal prisons
in Nazi Germany
of schools
in Trumpism
Pruitt, Scott
Public education
Putin, Vladimir
Puzder, Andrew
Pyle, omas

Racism
Randall, Doug
Raspail, Jean
Reichstag re (1933)
Republican Party: con icts between media and
neoliberal control over
under Trump
Revolution
Right-to-work laws
Right-wing populism
Ross, Wilbur, Jr.
Rothwell, Jonathan
Ruddy, Chris
Russia
Ryan, Paul

Sanders, Bernie
in election campaign of 2016
Scaramucci, Anthony
Schmitt, Carl
Schnare, David
Schools, privatization of
Schwartz, Peter
Sea levels
Sessions, Jeff
Social cost of carbon (SCC)
Socialism
as antonym of capitalism
movement towards
Sanders campaign and
South China Sea
Soviet Union
Spencer, Richard
Spengler, Oswald
Spykman, Nicholas John
Standing Rock (North Dakota)
State: Bannon on
Evola on
power concentrated in, in fascism
Stiglitz, Joseph
Stock market
Stone, Roger
Summers, Larry
Supreme Court (U.S.): on Clean Power Plan
on right-to-work laws
Sweden Democrats
Sweezy, Maxine Yaple
Sweezy, Paul
Syria
System Change Not Climate Change movement

Taxation: in Nazi Germany

Trump’s campaign promises on
iel, Peter
Tillerson, Rex
Tipping points
Totalitarianism
Tough Times: Make America Great Again (Trump)
Traditionalist movement
Trans-Paci c Partnership (TPP)
Trenberth, Kevin
Trump, Donald J.: Burnham on
campaign promises of
on climate change
economic policies of
in election campaign of 2016
foreign policies of
Inaugural Address of
intelligence community’s con icts with
on International Holocaust Remembrance Day
media’s con icts with
Muslim ban announced by
neo-fascist movement and
outlook and ambitions of
as post-fascist
Republican Party support for
Trump, Donald J., Jr.
Trump administration: agenda of
climate policies of
 competing allegiances within
foreign policy of
on oil pipelines
rivalries in
Trumpism
Gleichschaltung and
neo-fascism of
Turning Point USA (organization)

Ukraine
Unemployment
in Nazi Germany
United Kingdom
United States: Bannon on sovereignty of
carbon-dioxide emissions of
decline in hegemony of
economic growth in
employees of federal government of
history of populism in
neo-fascism in
right-wind populism in
vulnerability to fascism of
Universities, under Nazism

Wachsmann, Nikolaus
Wallace, George
Wealth inequality
e Weekly Standard (magazine)
West, Cornel
White House National Trade Council
Whites
Trump voters among
Winship, Michael
Wolfowitz, Paul
World Meteorological Organization

Yates, Michael
Yiannopoulos, Milo

Zakaria, Fareed
Žižek, Slavoj
Zinke, Ryan