Confronting American fascism: We're the Allied Forces

The Atlantic observed that "before the election, Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025 because it veered so far to the right. But now he’s making the plan look downright timid." Other than being a chronic larcenist of truth, Trump had reason to disavow the project. Its veering to far right excluded explicit acts of fascism. He's correcting that.

As I was writing yesterday about the now-undeniable descent of authoritarianism on America, a federal judge was putting it in legalese. In Trump's embryonic stage of his tenure's ghoulish gestation he's defying the magistrate's "plain text" order to free billions of dollars in federal grants he had imprisoned. The magistrate is displeased, and said so. The Times, with a historic thump, noted that this "mark[s] marks the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate."

Also yesterday, former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen wrote in a Times op-ed that "a key component of the rule of law" is the White House's respect for the constitutionally established institution that holds the power of the purse, Congress. Accordingly, and let's be more precise, the Reich chancellery "is not to make determinations about which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not." The Treasury secretaries' error in thinking was that they failed to perceive the more-precise transition — worse, they perceived it but held back.

Taking a newsy front seat of late is Vice-Despot JD Vance's stultiloquence of 2021:

I think Trump is going to run again in 2024.... When the courts stop [his dictatorial takeover he should] stand before the country and say — [Andrew Jackson-like, although he never said it] — "The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it." We are in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.

(For the curious, historian John Meacham reports that Jackson actually said "The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born" — like Trump, he was subliterate — "and they find that it cannot coerce [the defendant] to yield to its mandate.” Vance's essential misapprehension, however, was in identifying his brotherhood of fascists as "conservatives." The genuine species of that persuasion would be not "uncomfortable" with going "pretty far out there." They'd be appalled. Adolf detested his conservatives.)

To really appreciate just how maniacally far Trump's True Believers have gone, skip past JD's dream-swept vision of an American Roman Empire and hie thee to the 18th century and Joseph de Maistre, diplomat, judge, political philosopher. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945, fellow philosopher Karl Popper added fascist to Maistre's résumé, for a bit more than a decade after the French Revolution he penned a treatise titled Considérations sur la France (Considerations on France), which called for the Bourbon monarchy's restoration and yet the Catholic Church's absolute authority over all French affairs — in short, theocratic totalitarianism.

Now skip ahead to Adrian Vermeule, a contemporary legal "scholar" who advocates Catholicism's supremacy in the American system. From that he somehow further concludes that "judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers." It seems Adrian was on "The Gong Show"; the peeling take-a-hike words of Constitutional Law Professor Steve Vladeck followed: "The point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that whether acts of state are 'legitimate' can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance."

I thought this brief hence inadequate review of America's in-place fascism was advisable as a refresher lead-in to the post's twofold title of confronting America's fascism — an inconceivable term just 10 years ago — as a unified allied force. Millions of Trump-yoked victims of his authoritarian psychosis are screaming, writing or crying Lenin's What Is to Be Done? Is it hopeless, this foulest of sewers into which the madman has tossed the nation? Indeed is it so hopeless, we're helpless?

No! — which I say again louder and with even more conviction. The vice despot is "pretty far out there" in Caesarian reverie and we're decidedly far from helpless 'cause it ain't hopeless. In answer to the above American Sanity Firsters' pained question, I pass along one anti-Trump observation and one activist suggestion, to which I attach a few others.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, retired, director of the National Security Council, European Affairs, only until July 2020 because of Herr Trump & Henchmen's "campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation," ponders the "consequences of Trump’s overreach." The latter will "materialize, public opinion will likely turn against him and the Republican Party, much as it did following the backlash to Trump’s first domestic misstep—a complete funding freeze. However, real accountability won’t come until the 2026 midterms."

Electoral accountability ... assuming. You bet the midterms will be momentous in backlash but they are not and cannot be the only real one. "Old School" voters sure as hell don't feel like doing nothin more than turning calendar pages until The Year of Our Lunatic 2026. (Neither am I saying Vindman says they do.)

In the here and now, conservative attorney and political commentator George Conway cries with us: "I know in my heart that our 236-year experiment in the federal rule of law, in

democratic self-governance for the United States of America, in American constitutionalism, is essentially over." Regrouping, he adopts the John Paul Jones' rallying cry of our not-yet beginning to fight.

The only recourse is to go out on the streets and march. That is the only recourse... There is no logical stopping point for them. The only recourse will be for people to get out and say, we want the rule of law, we want a government that obeys the law, and that's going to require people to go out on the streets, because that is, there is no other alternative.

Conway's battle strategy is logical: The people are duly directed to get out by the millions and shriek his words. Many already have. Strategists also know that massive gatherings of intense protest tend to whittle in numbers, and ordinarily, altogether. Such demonstrations are damned difficult to sustain, all the organizing and mobilizing for a third, fourth, or 101st time. Lenin asked "what to do" but we're not Bolsheviks eager to amass and storm the Bleak House, a fitting Dickensian name for what was once the White one.

That's not to say I have no hope for Conway's knockback right down to wherever my cockles pulsate. Massive, intense and perpetual protests might well occur. If so they'd be things of virtuous beauty as the Bleak House's inhabitant morphes wickedly uglier — another beaut, in that emotional fury leads without exception to astounding stupidities, something Trump has a kung fu black belt in.

Inexorably, every battle strategy leads to tactics, those underneath audibles characterized by desperate need and its sister, sort-of magically organized mayhem, precisely what Tolstoy portrayed in his War and Peace battleground extravaganza. Here there are no organizers, no mobilizers, it's every man and woman for themselves. Collectively nonetheless.

So to Mssrs. Vindman and Conway's strategic recommendations, I affix the following by-no-means-comprehensive tactical advisories. Add to them your own, be creative, go wilder than that muttonhead JD.

Rather sedately I suggest the writing of letters to the editor every friggin' week. Daily would be overkill, your editorial overseer would tire of the excess and your target audience — America's fascist scheißkofps — would be happily bereft of your outrage. Attend local town halls as well as your village's council meetings and be politely obnoxious. As long as we still have a fictitious representative democracy, use it. Pols cerebrally diseased and their non-counterparts of the clean and sometimes sober love to pretend they're one of the people every so often. Show up at their local forums, repeat council behavior.

If you're trapped in a red district or state call your unrepresentative tax-paid goons' Washington offices relentlessly. Politicians profess disinterest in polling yet they execute just that each day. Their offices register incoming calls as pro or con issue-specific; the bosspeople receive the tallies and, strangely, read them as vox populi. Take advantage of their delusion — be a furious con. When you're not calling them, call your local radio talk-show's escape from the ABCs of U.S. Constitutionalism. This I have done joyfully countless times. Any dissent really pisses them off — both the gibberish-adept host and wireless land's dunderheads — but you never know, among them may be fence sitters.

Two final tactics. Be not afraid to educate your errant relatives and friends via emails, forwards, assemblages, any chance or medium. Their potential ire is nothing compared to rational remonstrances — yours — to what plagues us all. All being operative. Last, for the really bold, the JD-supersedingly wild and passably artistic, hang on the front door a white-backgrounded swastika with "T" written below in indelible ink. (Note: The manufactured symbol of hateful psychoses is, I found, impossible to obtain. I wanted to hang the sick representation on my front door, 20 January 2025. My intention was a bust.)

If nothing else, never let loose from your mind the ghastly fact that we are confronted by fascism, and we are the opposing, ultimately victorious, Allied Forces. Today shall not stand.