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Defeating Fascism in the U.S. [1]

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Date: 2024-11-10  

This election installed a fascist as President, and supported him with a Congress that is dedicated to helping him reach his fascist goals.

The Biden Administration only has a few weeks before the fascists start yanking the levers of power. But those few weeks may be critical to hardening the government against the worst damage.

The fascists were “kind” enough to announce their game plan in advance with their Project 2025 pamphlet and public pronouncements of their intent to deport. So, we have a good idea where they plan to strike first.

Step 1: No Schedule F

One of those places is in the federal workforce, where they tried Schedule F four years ago and are very likely to try to fully implement it this time. This would replace Civil Service workers with political appointees loyalty to the regime and not the Constitution. This is the practical way in which they plan to implement fascist policy.

The Biden Administration can frustrate that plan by giving Civil Service workers binding employment contracts. They should offer workers contracts for employment with contractual provisions. This would make it impossible to replace them with at-will employees.

To do that, those contracts should specify that they can only be dismissed for cause that involves conviction of a felony offense. Dismissing them otherwise should carry a stiff penalty, written into the contract, that would pay that worker a very significant sum of money. For example, $1 million for each additional year they have before retirement age.

By doing this, we could make it far too expensive to dismiss Civil Service employees.

In addition, these contract should specify a guarantee that their scope of work will not be reduced while they are employed. This prevents the fascists from hiring Schedule F workers and then giving them the work of the Civil Service employees.

And, in addition, the Biden Administration should sign binding contracts with unions to represent these workers, with terms of service of ten years or more. These contracts should have very expensive termination clauses, in the range of billions of dollars, so that it isn’t feasible for the fascists to end them. Those contracts should allow the appropriate union to represent the workers for their workplace environment.

When Hitler came to power, the Nazis required the Hitler salute from all government employees.* Requiring federal employees to pledge their loyalty to the person in charge above their loyalty to the Constitution is the Hitler salute of the modern American fascist movement. So, we need to insist that employees can only swear allegiance to the Constitution and not be forced to swear allegiance to any person in the government or any other ideology.

Since the Supreme Court is already corrupted by the fascists and Congress will be dominated by their compliant loyalists, we will not have any official power to fight back. Our democratic values need to be enforced by the public. And since more than half of them are out in the ozone, that falls to the remaining American public. We need to put pressure on our representatives to follow democratic norms and obey the laws.

This is particularly important if you have Republican representatives in Congress. That’s an opportunity to send them the message that you care about how federal workers are treated. But what’s probably more effective is to identify Democratic challengers for these seats right now and establish plans to replace Republicans with better people. So, find someone who can run and befriend them. Provide them with money, time, and other support. Republicans in Congress (and more local offices) will be more amenable if they understand someone is actively working to displace them in the next election. So, you know, like use democracy on these people.

Step 2: Surge Support for Ukraine

The other major initiative from the Biden Administration to harden our government against the fascists is to preposition all of our authorized military aid for Ukraine in Europe and turn ownership of it over to the Ukrainian government. Congress allocated billions of dollars in aid. Not a penny should be left for the next administration. If we are quick about it, we can put enough military equipment and ammunition in Ukraine’s hands to prosecute the war for the rest of 2025 without any serious interruption. And that would completely jerk the rug out from under the fascist plans to settle this dispute with Russia at Ukraine’s expense.

The Weight of the People

The new President has a long history of violating the law. He’s done it repeatedly, and the courts have not been competent to stop him. But the American people are not on board with this in any significant way.

We have a good chance of defeating the fascists. Power-drunk leaders often make the mistake of believing they are all-powerful. They don’t realize, until too late, that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte launched an invasion of Russia. In 1941, Adolph Hitler attacked the Soviet Union (and therefore Russia). In 2001, Osama bin Laden launched an attack on the U.S. by hijacking passenger airliners.

These attacks all have something important in common. They were doomed to fail. They were doomed because their perpetrators underestimated the size of the opponent.

When Napoleon’s troops reached Moscow, they were about eight time zones short of conquering Russia. Same with Hitler’s troops. They had the illusion that if they could take the capital they could control the country. They simply had no concept of how vast Russia is. If you set out walking from Moscow, you might reach the Pacific next month.

When bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center and tried to attack Washington, D.C., he didn’t have even the slightest clue how vast the U.S. economy is or how powerful the U.S. military was. The U.S. reached out and smashed him. We’re still here. He isn’t.

The fascists in this country today have no idea how vast the United States is. They think they can cow over 330 million people. The U.S. cannot be controlled from the White House. The appropriate role of the President is leader. That’s why that person is called “president” and not “führer”. It’s an office where you preside, not dictate.

Even though the new President got a majority of the popular vote, he doesn’t have the backing of the majority of people. Even many people who voted for him know he’s a bad guy and didn’t want to vote for him. They were just hoodwinked into thinking the alternative was “worse”. Ha, ha. Joke’s on them!

Defeat This Administration

We, on the left, need to take down this new administration. That’s not all that hard, frankly. You saw what just happened to Biden. The Republicans spent his entire term maligning him. They criticized him right out of the gate. And he was competent and did a lot for the American people, something not possible in the next term.

There’s literally no proposal in the Republican plan that will help anyone. They plan to cut taxes for the rich. That doesn’t help anyone. They plan to raise tariffs. That would run up inflation. They plan to deport people. That’s going to make things more expensive, too.

This is the corporate greedy taking profits. It’s how the game is played. Democrats fix the economy. Then Republicans ruin it by sucking it dry. After that, Democrats come in and fix it again.

Each time they make a bad move, we should be very public about how this is hurting the American people. The Republicans lied repeatedly about the Biden Administration to try to take him down. (Remember all the attacks on Hunter Biden? Remember all the investigations of President Biden? These were all based on lies.) The difference here is that the truth is harmful, and will be harmful, to the next administration.

The Republicans won by promising the American people a pony. There’s no feasible way for them to give the American people that pony. So, we need to remind people over and over, “They said you’d get a pony!”

Yes, We Lost; That’s the Past

I’ve seen, of course, a lot of hand-wringing over the losses this year. That energy would be better spent attacking Republicans. We had a good campaign with a huge bankroll. And that bankroll came from millions of Democrats making small contributions. My perception is that we limited what were destined to be losses and really strengthened the party.

I believe it is Harry Litman who said that he thinks Kamala Harris over-performed. His point is that on election day, President Biden had a 40% approval rating. Historically, the President’s approval rating on the day of the election has been predictive of the vote he or a person in his party was going to get in that election.

Kamala Harris got nearly 48% in the popular vote last Tuesday. Eight points better.

We should build on that success.

And, we now have this additional data point about how race and gender affect the outcome of the presidential election. We’ve had two people of color and two women run for President in the last 16 years. The Black man won and the two women didn’t. That says a lot about our country. It gives us solid information about how we need to change things to bring about equality and justice.

Not just that, but the other lesson from this election is that we really need to fix the racism and sexism in America. What we see clearly here is that those factors robbed our country of the best person for President. That’s a solid indication that DEI is the right course.

For hundreds of years, we’ve systematically shot ourselves in the proverbial foot by excluding people based on these extraneous factors. As a result, we’ve under-performed. Where we could have had the best person, our prejudices limited our candidate pools. This has hurt us across the board: in our personal lives, in business, and in government.

Regardless of the race, religion, or sex of our next presidential candidate, we need to work every day from now until November 2028 to stamp out that debilitating discrimination. Frankly, even if we nominate a straight, white dude for president next time, the people of this country associate our brand with DEI. So, we need to make sure that is a positive association.

Bend the Arc Toward Justice

We will win.

We just need to protect as much democracy as we can until the 2028 election. The pendulum will swing back again because we will have four years of horror to point to. It’s not likely the American people will want to continue that, especially if the incoming administration remains hellbent on destroying the economy.

I’m very optimistic about the future. I was never Joe Biden’s biggest supporter. But he is entirely right that no one should count America out. We can achieve great things, and none of the greatness we aspire to is beyond our reach, if we work together to achieve it.

* According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, “All German civil servants had to use it [the Hitler salute] after July 1933, and it soon became the social norm and civic duty.” … “The Hitler salute made clear who the enemies were, since by 1937 Jews were banned from performing it.” But, “its real aim was to sap everyone’s dignity and damage the bonds of civil society—a crucial goal of every authoritarian regime.”

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