This Dumpster Fire of a Reichstag Fire

Trump’s military crowd was handpicked for supporters.

At this moment you might be forgiven for asking, “So where are we at now with the fascism thing?” My answer: “Well on the way.”

Think of the moment after World War II, with fascism crushed, and the allies—Capitalist Democracy and Soviet Communism—standing briefly side by side over its inert body, each believing with differing forms of relief that this thing had been put away for good. Then imagine the big screen slo-mo in reverse of something broken in pieces at first slowly and then with a rush coming back together, whole again. 

That’s what the past few months have felt like to me here in MAGA America. The elements have been coming together steadily. Let’s summarize: the president freeing convicted violent right wing insurrectionists; a furious scapegoating of immigrants, in a formerly proud nation of immigrants, to draw attention away from the looting of the public sector and destruction of government services by billionaires; armed masked men seizing people off the street, in workplaces, shopping centers and courtrooms, and taking them away in unmarked vehicles to privately operated detention centers, or to their countries of origin where they face harm, or to countries they hadn’t come from—more than fifty thousand people newly behind borders, bars and fences; a judge arrested; a union leader arrested; a mayor from the opposition party arrested; a U.S. Senator from the opposition party arrested—each while peaceably defending immigrants against state-sanctioned kidnapping; and a massive ongoing chorus of right wing media spewing a toxic smokescreen of lies to reshape reality into a public narrative greasing the skids to fascism. 

And now, the murder of elected leaders of the opposition party. No, I’m not fantasizing this act resulted from a direct order from Trump; it didn’t need to be. It’s the logical outcome of his continuous encouragement of violence within his MAGA movement base and amplification in the conservative media ecosphere.

[Note: I wrote this article a week ago. So the “now” of the last paragraph is too old, because “now” the United States has gone to war, and this new step pretty much completes the fascism checklist. (Is there such a thing? Sort of. See my previous articles on the topic here, here, here and here.)]

Throughout, some of us have kept thinking, “There’s a path out of this nightmare. We have four tests. If the courts don’t hold, there’s the 2026 elections. If the elections don’t hold, there’s mass action in the streets. And finally, if the streets fail us, the American military won’t let their old enemy—fascism—prevail…will they?”

The question of the military

The question of the military, however, is a fraught one. Although legally and (mostly) historically neutral on American soil, it is the foundation of American imperialism abroad and has never been constrained in that role by the democratic pieties to which it proclaims allegiance here. Since the end of World War II and about-face on former ally Soviet Union, during which Communism was essentially refashioned as the replacement ideological “ism” for vanquished fascism, every international military adventure by the United States has been draped in the robes of Democracy against Communism or some other form of authoritarianism—even when all too obviously it was democratically elected forces that the US itself was overturning. 

So that’s a key question: what does democracy mean to US military forces inside the country today? Despite local (city and state) government objections, including a star turn by Gavin Newsom on prime-time national TV, muted oppositional muttering within the National Guard, and a temporary restraining order by a judge (on hold at the moment), we have yet to see the reversal of Guard deployment to L.A. Trump’s dispatch of a contingent of Marines—as if Los Angeles were Iwo Jima—has pushed the boundaries of acceptable military usage on American soil (along with our willing suspension of disbelief) out to the vanishing point. Juxtaposed with that you have the president encouraging soldiers on duty to jeer his hallucinatory perceived enemies (including a former president) and cheer as if they’re at a campaign rally—which, due to the presence of a vendor selling MAGA paraphernalia to the soldiers—it was. 

All of this is real, in real time. 

Dumpster fire of a Reichstag fire

The fascist president of the United States and his followers have been working overtime to set up a plausible illusion of lawless chaos and rebellion—a right wing media-fueled dumpster fire of a Reichstag fire—in order to justify bringing the iron fist of the state repressive apparatus onto downtown Los Angeles. But what Trump is trying to do is much bigger than that singular local action.

In a political democracy that sits on top of a coercive economic foundation—capitalism, which does not require political democracy to reproduce itself—the fragile edifice of control by the people over the plutocrats has always faced deep challenges and in fact can never be fully realized. People power versus money power, especially after Citizens United, has become a race against time, and with Trump in the White House and MAGA control over the other branches of federal government, we—the people, the climate, the future, the immigrants who built and continue to build America—are at this moment losing that race.

The 4,000 National Guard troops in LA have detained exactly one person, whom they then released; a bargain for the $134 million of taxpayers’ funds it took to bring them there.

Well on the way to fascism

Trump and MAGA are testing how far they can push the membrane of political democracy before it breaks. Ultimately, he can ignore the courts, and he may be able to shut down the 2026 elections. But if they are large enough, he cannot ignore the demonstrations in the streets, at which point he needs know about the military’s inclinations. He is probing now, with his illegal military deployments and his immoral political speeches to the troops and sickening encouragement of MAGA violence, whether that key portion of the membrane is his or democracy’s. 

This is no longer an early stage of the process. We are well on the way to fascist America. History says that it’s not inexorable. The direct action of thousands of ordinary people—as we saw on April 5, May 1, and June 14 on “No Kings Day”—establishes a bump in the road that, with continued organizing, can enlarge itself to millions of people and thus a powerful barricade to the dismantling of our incomplete but essential political democracy. It takes me and you; there’s no one else, and now is the time. It will continue to be time until the job is done.