Posing a GOP victory in a presidential race as a victory for fascism has been used as a scare tactic by Democrats through many election cycles.
There is at least some truth to it in today’s context. As one writer recently commented, Trump “will often use fascist language or nods to extremist groups, then claim it was a mistake or that the left and the media are twisting a narrative.”While Trump may be more of a right-wing opportunist that an outright fascist, there is no doubt that the Republican party has lurched further and further right over the past decades, and that its ranks (and some of its political leaders) certainly include elements of the US far right—which the party at least tolerates, if not welcomes. One has only to think of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who openly espouses white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideas, to see what I’m getting at.
So, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we accept the argument that “this time” we really have to vote for the Democrat—in this case, now Kamala Harris, to keep out the fascist?
The argument certainly can’t be that there’s “no difference” between the candidates. Trump is hinting that he seeks a dictatorship and wants to nullify the election process in the US; probably an idle threat, but indicative of how Trump and the January 6 attempted coup has disrupted the traditional political system in the US. Rhetorically, the two parties are quite far apart, with the GOP whipping up hatred against Blacks, Mexican immigrants, LGBTQI people, Palestinians, Jews, and so on. While Trump spews division and hate, promising mass deportations, Harris pleads for unity, inclusion, and fairness.
And yet, on certain issues there isn’t really any difference between the parties, especially when it comes to US support for Israeli apartheid. There has been consistent bipartisan military and political support for everything Israel has done for decades, right up to and including its current genocidal slaughter in Gaza.
Moreover, although the Democratic Party is still more liberal than the GOP on a number of social issues, the Democrats have followed the Republicans in lurching rightward since the Nixon era. Each time the Democrats have adapted to the right, it has only opened up more space for the Republicans to lurch further rightward. The Democratic Party is not a vehicle for resisting the right, but for accommodating to it.
Experience shows that you cannot fight the right by supporting the party that’s a few clicks left of it that is also tracking to the right. Let me give a few examples.
Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, which has now made abortion nearly or completely illegal in 24 states, the Democrats have campaigned as defenders of abortion rights. But the difference between the Democratic Party’s rhetoric and its practice has been wide for many decades. While campaigning for president, both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama promised to pass a Freedom of Choice Act that would have made abortion rights the law of the land. But the Act never materialized under either president—even though in both of their first two years of office the Democrats held the presidency and a super-majority in both houses.
Rather than defend abortion rights as they were being eroded, Democrats have consistently downplayed abortion, presenting it often as an unpleasant last resort for women. On the 32nd anniversary of Roe V. Wade, for example, Hilary Clinton remarked that “Abortion is a sad, even tragic choice for many, many women.” As Sharon Smith notes in another article on this site,
For far too many decades, the mainstream pro-choice movement has relied on Democrats to protect the right to legal abortion, even as Democratic Party politicians from both the White House and Congress have consistently failed to fulfil their pro-choice campaign promises. The consequence is that abortion rights have been so eroded over the last decades—with restrictive waiting periods, parental notification and consent laws, laws criminalizing transporting a patient to another state to procure an abortion, and the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding for poor women’s abortions, reinstated each year by Congress since 1976—that there was little left to salvage.
Practically speaking, however, the parties are often much closer than they appear. Take deportations. Under Obama’s first term, 3.2 million people were deported; 2.1 million in his second term. In Trump’s single term, 2 million were deported.
Moreover, Biden and the Democrats have shown a willingness to adopt harsh, anti-immigrant measures, ostensibly as a way of undercutting the GOP. In his state of the union address back in March, Biden accused Republicans of “playing politics” for refusing to support a new bill that would have “tightened asylum rules and created a broad presidential authority to empower U.S. border officials to summarily deport migrants during spikes in illegal immigration. It would also expand legal immigration levels, and provide additional money to fund border operations and hire additional personnel, including immigration judges, asylum officers and Border Patrol agents.”
After being heckled by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Biden pandered to anti-immigrant hysteria by mentioning Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student who was allegedly murdered by a Venezuelan migrant, referring to Riley as an “innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal.”
The message was clear: “Hey, GOP, we’re adopting a bill putting forth policies you claim to support, but you are so wrapped up in your opposition to anything Democrat that you are happy to quash it.” This apparently was meant to be a “gotcha” moment. It wasn’t. It merely exposed the weakness of Democratic Party strategy—tack rightward to win “swing voters” away from the GOP. In short, what was crafted as a means to defeat the GOP has actually fuelled anti-immigrant hysteria and thereby strengthened the right.
The approach that socialists should take to our two party system was laid out best by Hal Draper in his article, “Who’s going to be the lesser evil in 1968,” when Lyndon Johnson ran a presidential campaign promising not to escalate the war in Vietnam. Draper takes note of the fact that whenever a presidential election rolls around, the supporters of the Democratic Party cry “‘The fascists are coming!’ and vote for the Lesser Evil. In these last two decades, the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right.”
This point is crucial: that the Democrats take the votes of leftists and progressives for granted, knowing that they have no alternative but to vote against the right, and craft their election strategy to win over more conservative voters. This has been a consistent pattern up to the present day.
“In 1964,” Draper writes,
you know all the people who convinced themselves that Lyndon Johnson was the lesser evil as against Goldwater, who was going to do Horrible Things in Vietnam, like defoliating the jungles. Many of them have since realized that the spiked boot was on the other foot; and they lacerate themselves with the thought that the man they voted for “actually carried out Goldwater’s policy.”…So who was really the Lesser Evil in 1964? The point is that it is the question which is a disaster, not the answer. In setups where the choice is between one capitalist politician and another, the defeat comes in accepting the limitation to this choice.
Draper’s most compelling argument is that the Left “can’t fight the victory of the rightmost forces by sacrificing your own independent strength to support elements just the next step away from them.” Unfortunately, this is what much of the Left of the Democratic Party has done for many decades, and it has only served to legitimize a pro-capitalist, pro-war party that has done nothing to prevent the growth of the right as a political force in this country.
What if Trump wins the presidency and implements some of the authoritarian measures he’s been hinting at? You won’t find Democrats mobilizing, any more than they did when the Florida vote count was manipulated to hand George W. Bush the presidency in 2000. Where, for that matter, have mobilizations been called by Democrats to defend the right to vote against increasing right-wing voter restrictions across the country? Has reliance on the Democratic Party saved abortion rights?
It has been the passivity of the Democrats that has permitted Trump, despite his efforts to violently thwart the results of the previous election, to run again in the first place.
Throughout US history, the only way democratic rights have been expanded is through mass struggle—from the Civil War to the labor upsurge of the 1930s; from the Civil Rights movement to the fight for marriage equality—and it’s the only way they can be won today.
A successful fight against the growing threat of the authoritarian right requires mass struggle—something that Democrats recoil from. By backing the Democrats, the Left disarms itself and makes it harder to successfully build the kind of mobilizations on the streets and in the workplaces we need to genuinely resist the right.
Paul D'Amato is the author of The Meaning of Marxism and was the editor of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of numerous articles on a wide array of topics.
