It's Been Fascists versus Socialism for a Hundred Years

Media may clutch their pearls at Biden referring to the "semi-fascism" of the Trumpist wing of the GOP, but fascism is its clear progenitor, including the strong business support for its rise.

This coming month marks the hundred-year anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, which led to the establishment of his fascist dictatorship in Italy.

But in understanding that fascist movement and its modern versions - and Trumpism has clear roots in that movement (as well as its American antecedants) — it’s important to remember a few key facts.

Mussolini’s party was not revolutionary but explicitly anti-revolutionary, organized to attack leftwing politicians and labor institutions. His Blackshirts had been hired repeatedly by corporate managers to break strikes during the post-WWI period leading up to the March on Rome. His fascist party was initially elected to parliament in 1921 as part of a bloc of anti-socialist conservative parties backed by Italian business interests to keep the Italian Socialist Party out of government.

His March on Rome was mostly a show of political force to pressure his political allies. Mussolini did not illegally seize power but was appointed as Prime Minister in 1922 largely with the agreement of those other conservative parties in the government. That Mussolini would abuse his power and ultimately liquidate most of those other political allies was a miscalculation on their part, but industrialists and major landowners would continue to thrive economically under Mussolini, even as socialist activists and union strikes were banned.

A decade later, Hitler would assume power largely in the same way. In the fall 1932 elections, the Nazi Party had actually seen a drop in its vote share - which never was a majority of the population. The combined vote of the German Social Democratic Party and Communist parties was actually higher than the Nazi share. The business-backed conservative parties assumed they could use Hitler to keep the socialist parties out of power if they agreed to make him Prime Minister, but initially allowed only two members of the Cabinet to be Nazi Party members. Hitler would use accusations that Communists set the Reichstag on fire - by most accounts a fire set by Nazi operatives - as an excuse to create dictatorial powers for himself and soon liquidate not only leftist opponents but also eliminate competing conservative parties.

The attack on the Capitol on January 6th was designed as an echo of the March on Rome and Reichstag Fire, an excuse for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and assume dictatorial powers - or pressure the Congress to take unconstitutional actions to refuse to certify Biden as President and use fake elector slates to declare Trump President. That Trump lacked enough collaborators willing to back his play for power was a relief for the country but we know Trumpists are rapidly acting to fill Congress and state election official positions with those who will collaborate next time. And wealthy plutocrats from the Koch Brothers to the Mercers to Peter Thiel, along with many traditional Republican corporate interests, continue to backroll the rise of Trumpist authoritarians.

The point here is that Trumpism is part of a historical pattern of fascism that has been an endemic threat globally since mass democracy was instituted around the world a century ago (and has deep roots in the US even earlier). Manipulating racism and other divisions - and resorting to dictatorial leadership when all else failed - has consistently been the main tool of the wealthy elite to prevent the majority from adopting democratic policy to rein in their power and wealth.

Italy itself did not have universal male suffrage until 1912. While Germany nominally had universal male suffrage since 1871, representation was restricted such that left-leaning parties had little chance of governing until a new constitution was adopted after WWI with universal suffrage and representation based on votes received.

Fascism therefore became the bastard fruit of mass democracy in the 1920s. Cultivation by elites of fascist movements to divide electorates became the new tool to hold socialist majorities at bay. And those elites would support dictatorial fascist leaders as necessary when electoral strategies failed. This was not because of “populism” as the media often designates it but because it was useful to the monied interests that repeatedly encouraged it.

It Did Happen Here

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published the novel, It Can’t Happen Here, to warn that a version of European fascism could come to the United States. But the real story should have been that, in a country that had enslaved a significant portion of its population and committed genocide against another portion, fascism had already been part of our nation. Lewis tipped his head partially to that reality in aligning his fictional fascist leader with “Minutemen” troops who would fight the New Underground, a reference to the Underground Railroad that had freed people from the slave regimes of the South.

But Lewis did not fully engage the fact - and America has rarely fully engaged the reality - that the fruit of mass suffrage via the 15th Amendment after the Civil War was a fascist counterreaction. What else to call mass terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist militias backed by plantation owners overthrowing multiple Reconstruction governments and instituting one-party rule in most Southern states? As historian C. Vann Woodward would document in his Strange Career of Jim Crow, the very threat of white and black workers teaming up within the Populist Party in the late 19th century led to a new strategy by business elites of using racial segregation and the almost complete disenfranchisement of black voters to pit white workers against them via Jim Crow laws .

Those Jim Crow racial purity laws would be the model for Nazi Germany in constructing its own fascist system of racist divide and conquer:

“America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. “Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.”…

Nazis were [even] more interested in how the U.S. had designated Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the citizenship portion of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship and classified them as “nationals.”

Jim Crow fascism affected not just the South but the whole nation. Class politics melted away in the South, with the black half of its working class disenfranchised and the white half enmeshed and coopted in the one-party politics of the Southern Democratic Party where anti-unionism went hand-in-hand with racism. And southern delegates to Congress would actually get more votes than in the era of formal slavery, since they now got to vote on behalf of the whole disenfranchised black population, instead of getting votes based on just three-fifths of them.

The Supreme Court that had supported the Klan violence that abolished Reconstruction would also block most significant progressive economic legislation until the New Deal. And while conservative Southern Democrats would support some of the key emergency legislation passed by FDR in launching the New Deal, they would largely stall its expansion by 1938 and, in the wake of post-WW II strikes, nearly every Southern Democrat would support the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that fundamentally crippled labor rights in the post-war era. Throughout the 20th century, Southern legislators were often the backbone of support for anti-labor and anti-communist suppression, from the 1919 Palmer Raids to McCarthyism to the FBI’s de facto war on the black civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The Current Standoff with Trumpist Fascism

The US really only became a full democracy again with the 1965 Civil Rights Act - and that, as writers like Michelle Alexander have argued, saw the rise of the kind of “law and order” rhetoric designed to divide white and black workers and keep elites in power. Mass incarceration would disenfranchise millions of black voters and the politics of fear tied to the politics of the drug war would help feed political divisions. From George Wallace in 1968 to Pat Buchanan in 1992, we had raw fascist rhetoric stoking exactly the politics that Donald Trump would ride to the White House in 2016.

Not coincidentally, the willingness of business elites to tolerate the fascism of Donald Trump in office coincided with the Democratic Party shifting left. From Obama adopting the then-largest recovery program in US history and passing Obamacare to Bernie Sanders running for office in 2016 and the Democratic Party adopting far more ambitious progressive goals, notably at the same time as southern blacks replaced the old white southern elite as a key power in the party. That nominal Democratic Party control of the US Senate in 2020 was decided by the election of two pro-labor Democrats from Georgia, one black, one Jewish, is symbolic of that seismic shift in southern politics.

While many liberals and sectarian leftists would resist the label of “socialism” for Democratic policy, anyone from 100 years ago looking at the ambitions of the $4 trillion Build Back Better bill, approved in the House with the support of a President, would see exactly the kind of threats to business power and wealth that drove those elites to support fascism in countries from Italy to Germany and beyond back then. And while some businesses made tssk-tssk noises and temporarily cut-off political donations to Republicans who voted to support Trump in overturning the election on January 6th, most soon returned to supporting the Trumpist GOP members:

In the year since the riot at the Capitol, many corporate giants and trade groups have moved from making stern statements about the sanctity of democracy to reopening the financial spigot for lawmakers who undermined the election. Millions of dollars in donations continue to flow to what watchdog groups deride as the “Sedition Caucus,” highlighting how quickly political realities shift in Washington.

This support is ultimately not despite those politicians’ racism and cultural nationalism but precisely because business elites recognize that supporting racist divisions between voting blocs is the only way to deflect the threat of united action by working-class voters for economic redistribution of wealth and power.

And tolerating the threat of fascist dictatorship and even supporting it if necessary is just part of the calculus global business elites have made in supporting fascism for well over a century as universal suffrage became a reality threatening their power.