Photo/ Larry Lipton
Trump is out of the White House, but that doesn’t mean Trumpism is gone. The far right could still impose a dictatorship on this country, and we the people should be on guard.
In times of crisis, the rich may masquerade behind populist politicians who claim they will take on the system on behalf of working people. This is what Trumpism is. It represents a violent, racist approach to imposing a corporate dictatorship in an era when the corporate-run economic system is collapsing and the demands for real change threaten the rule of the giant corporations.
The coalition of corporations, billionaires, conservative voters, far-right extremist groups and white supremacists that helped elect Trump was developed over decades by a highly organized national network that still exists. It includes thousands of people in armed militias who threaten violence to impose their views, but the far right potentially poses an even greater threat at the polls in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election. Nearly 7 in 10 Republican voters in a recent Gallup poll said they wanted Trump to remain the leader of the Republican Party going forward.
Most House and Senate Republicans coddled and enabled the fascist movement that arose behind Trump in order to court the votes of Trump supporters, and they may do so again. And these politicians were nowhere to be found when armed militia took over the state capitol in Lansing, Mich., when marauding fascists beat and murdered people in Charlottesville, Virginia, or when people engaged in peaceful Black Lives Matter protests were teargassed, brutalized and arrested in cities like Detroit. Such events set the stage for what was to come.
Massive voter suppression efforts being promoted by Republican state lawmakers across the country could pose one of the biggest threats to democracy in the 2022 and 2024 elections. As the Washington Post reported recently, “33 states have crafted more than 165 bills to restrict voting so far this year — more than four times the number in last year’s legislative sessions.”
Consider too that the far right already has substantial control of government — the Supreme Court now has a right-wing majority, Trump also appointed hundreds of judges to the lower federal courts, and as Fareed Zakaria wrote recently, the Republican party “narrowly lost control of Congress [in 2020], but it did well in state houses across the country, sometimes with the help of voter suppression and gerrymandering.”
What does this all add up to? It could be that by 2024 the far right could control many state governments, both houses of Congress and the White House.
What can we, the people, do? First, we should recognize that the far right is a serious threat and needs to be crushed, at the polls and by government. But we should also see that fascism does not simply arise based on bigotry and extremism. It has economic roots. The corporations that run the country have to choose between ensuring their profits and meeting our needs in a time of crisis, and if they have to do away with democracy to ensure their power and profits, they will. That means we are going to have to rely on ourselves. We have to continue to organize, take to the streets, guard the right to vote, run progressive candidates for office at every level, and put constant pressure on the government to meet our needs and defend democracy. The next step is to continue our effort to mount a massive unified campaign based in every state to demand that government provide what we need: jobs, income, food, housing, water, health care, a safe environment, democracy, and more. We have a fight on our hands, and we need to steel ourselves for what lies ahead.
—The Editors
