An Electoral Victory Is Not the Defeat of Fascism

Democratic victories are a setback for Trump and the Republican Party, but not a defeat of the forces driving fascism.

The Democratic victories in the November 3 elections are a setback for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But they should not be confused with a defeat of the political forces driving the consolidation of fascism in the United States and globally. Those forces are not confined to one political party in the U.S., nor are they simply the product of Trump's personal ambitions. They are rooted in the profound structural crisis of the global colonial/capitalist system, the declining capacity of the United States to maintain its global dominance, the increasing concentration of wealth and political power and its defense, and the historical structures of racialized and colonial domination upon which the American political economy is constructed.

Democratic Party operatives and their supporters have consistently attempted to portray the current crisis as principally the product of Trump and the Republican Party. This interpretation requires a deliberate forgetting of the bipartisan character of the expansion of executive power, militarism, surveillance, and domestic repression that has characterized politics in the U.S. for most of the 21st century.

Under the banner of hope, change, and a renewed commitment to international cooperation, the Obama administration ended up being the most aggressive imperial presidency of the post-war period. It supported coups against democratically elected governments in Honduras and Egypt; along with NATO, initiated the war to overthrow the Libyan government; supported armed opposition forces in Syria; and provided military and logistical assistance to the Saudi war on Yemen.

Domestically, Obama presided over record deportations and expanded the national security state's capacity to surveil, prosecute, and punish political dissent. His administration prosecuted whistleblowers under the Espionage Act at a rate unprecedented in modern U.S. history. It also institutionalized targeted killing through drone warfare, including the extrajudicial killings of at least three U.S. citizens in Yemen in 2011: Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

These were not incidental departures from an otherwise progressive administration. They demonstrated how liberal political leadership could expand the coercive powers of the state while maintaining the language of democracy, human rights, and inclusion, becoming what the late Glen Ford characterized as the “more effective evil.”

The Biden administration continued this trajectory. Its support for the militarization of the confrontation with Russia, including tens of billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine, reinforced the bipartisan commitment to U.S. global military dominance. Most devastatingly, Biden's administration continued supplying Israel with weapons and diplomatic protection as it carried out its genocidal assault on Gaza. The administration's conduct exposed the hollowness of its professed commitment to international law and human rights when those principles conflicted with the strategic interests of the United States. The Obama and Biden administrations provide ample evidence of this reality.

To ignore that history is to surrender political memory and make the struggle against fascism a partisan issue when both parties are committed to defending the agenda of U.S. led monopoly capital and the commitment to fascism to maintain those interests.

For African/Black and other anti-colonial peoples and forces in the U.S. and globally, the implications are clear. We cannot permit the struggle against fascism to be reduced to a campaign for the restoration of liberal Democratic governance.

Our responsibility is to help build an independent, internationalist, popular movement capable of confronting the material and ideological foundations of domination, regardless of which political party occupies the White House or controls Congress.

The struggle is not simply to defend the institutions of an existing political order. It is to establish the conditions for a genuinely democratic society and world in which sovereignty, dignity, material survival, and self-determination of peoples and nations take precedence over the interests of capital and empire.

An electoral victory in the context of neoliberal global control may slow down the consolidation of fascism, but ultimately, it is only the organized popular struggle that must defeat the social forces and material interests that sustain it.

Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).