I: Introduction

Some people take Facebook memes far too seriously. They also seem to think that the sharing of one meme, often done on a mere whim, encapsulates the essence of the sharer’s political thinking, rather than understanding that the meme is just one thought that passes through time, while a consistency of themes in memes would be a far better indicator of one’s political stance.

Of course, a lot of the snarky comments one gets from having shared controversial Facebook memes these days comes from the heated political climate leading up to the US presidential elections in November. One the one hand, the liberals are trying to scare us into voting for Harris/Walz because if Trump gets four more years, that will be ‘the end of democracy,’ as if democracy is even a meaningful concept in our global capitalist, imperialist system, exacerbated by over forty years of neoliberalism.

On the other hand, some people on the left seem to be trivializing the problem of Trump if he becomes the next president. 2025 will be an…interesting year, it seems…

II: A Trump Meme

A Trump meme that I recently shared showed a colour photo of him in absurd-looking blue shorts, and beside it was a black-and-white photo of Hitler, also in shorts. Both of them were posed similarly, leaning. Regrettably, I no longer have access to the meme, and I can’t find it anywhere.

The meme includes a quote attributed to Mark Twain: “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Now, most people’s gut reaction to this meme will be to assume it’s equating Trump to Hitler, which is a little much, to put it mildly.

I didn’t interpret the meaning of the meme that way. Note that rhyme means the middle to the end of the words in question sound the same, while the beginning of those words sounds different. Rhyming words can even have completely different spellings: day and weigh, do and threw, etc.

My point is that when history ‘rhymes,’ one isn’t experiencing the same things, but rather some things that are comparable. To be sure, Trump is no repeat of Hitler, but should a mere paralleling of some of their politics be thought so controversial, particularly thought so among leftists?

[A second point to consider: the meme was a joke (i.e., the ridiculous shorts the two were wearing). As I said at the top of this article, some people take memes far too seriously.]

In order to highlight both differences between Trump and Hitler and the jocular nature of the meme, I added this quote by Marx at the top of my post: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” I was obviously implying that Hitler corresponded to tragedy, and Trump corresponded to farce.

Anyway, a few leftist Facebook friends of mine objected quite vehemently to my sharing of the meme. One woman in particular insisted quite stridently that Trump is not a fascist, but a clown. I agree with the second part of her objection; allow me to explain why I disagree with the first part.

Before I go into the reasons for why I see Trump as, if not a full-blown fascist, at least someone with fascist tendencies, I should remind you, Dear Reader, of the contemporary political context in which Trump has emerged. Fascism arises whenever capitalism is in crisis, and when the ruling class is worried that the restive working class is showing threatening signs of wanting to revolt. Fascism is used to beat the workers into submission.

Bourgeois liberal democracy is a sham. It’s a theatrical show meant to present the illusion that ordinary people have a say in how their government is run. Go to the voting booth, check the box next to the name of the candidate you want in office, and you’ve exercised your democratic freedom of choice. Then your country will be ruled by someone you think represents your interests for, depending on the country, four or however many years until the next election. Wow, what power to the people!

Anyone who has been properly paying attention to what has been going on, especially for the past forty years, almost everywhere in the world, knows that the governments (especially in the US) have been increasingly representing the interests of the 1%, while ignoring the needs of the 99%, with more and more brazen blatancy.

This. Is. Not. Even. Remotely. Democratic.

There have been plenty of protests and demonstrations over the past ten to fifteen years or so, from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter. This is the sort of thing, due to neoliberalism‘s causing the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, that makes the ruling class nervous. We’ve also seen an increasing militarization of the American police, and Trump has expressed a desire to ramp up even more police power on at least two occasions.

A huge aspect of fascism is the settler-colonialist mentality, and the US–as well as my country, Canada, and Australia, New Zealand, Israel, etc.–is founded on the stealing of land from the indigenous peoples originally living there and killing all of those who resisted. Hitler’s ambition to go east and invade and colonize the Slavic countries, for the sake of lebensraum, was inspired by white Americans moving out west and taking more and more of the land away from the Native Americans, resulting in their genocide.

Fascists, thus, are more than just your garden-variety imperialists…they’re hyper-imperialists. Consider not only what I said above about Nazi lebensraum, but also fascist Italy’s invasions of African countries like Ethiopia in the 1930s. Just as Hitler wanted to make Germany great again, so did Mussolini want to make Italy great again. Sound familiar?

While most recent American presidents have timidly concealed their imperialist ambitions under the obvious lie that they want to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to ‘tyrannical regimes’ that often just so happened also to be sitting on lots of oil, Trump, with respect to Venezuela and Syria, has made no attempt to cover up his coveting of their oil. One of the main purposes of territorial expansion, be it of an overtly fascist nature or not, is to take the natural resources of the land one conquers and to enrich one’s own nation with them. In this, we can see a connection between Trump and fascism, but more connections are to follow, if you’ll bear with me, Dear Reader, in another digression.

III: Liberalism and Fascism

Another part of the context in which fascism should be seen is its place on the continuum of all political ideologies. In my article, The Ouroboros of Dialectical Materialism, I imagined a circular continuum symbolized by the ouroboros, on which two opposite extremes meet and phase into each other–the serpent’s head biting its tail, and all other points on its coiled body corresponding to the intermediate points on the continuum. Fascism would be the biting head, and communism would be the bitten tail…not because the two ideologies are similar or identical (Of course not! They’re diametrical opposites! I’m not doing some idiotic horseshoe theory here!), but because the one is a reaction against the other (e.g., part of Nazi Germany became East Germany).

In that article, I also said that one could superimpose the four-way political compass on the ouroboros, so that–as I pointed out above–fascism and other far-right forms of government would be in the top-right corner, towards and including the serpent’s biting head, and communism and other far-left ideologies would be in the top-left corner, towards and including the serpent’s bitten tail. Anarchism and social democracy would be in the bottom-left, and right-wing libertarianism and other moderate right-wingers would be in the bottom-right. It would seem that social democrats and other liberals would be far from fascism.

Political matters aren’t that simple, though. Another thing I pointed out in that article is that there is a tendency to slide counter-clockwise from the tail all the way along the coiled body of the ouroboros to the biting head. Over the past forty to fifty years, we’ve seen just such a slide from, for example, the centrist Johnson years of ‘The Great Society‘ and ‘The War on Poverty‘ (all while dishonestly escalating the Vietnam War and brutally fighting the Cold War in its other aspects, don’t forget), to the neoliberal revolution of Reagan and Thatcher, which began the unravelling of such things as welfare capitalism in favour of the ‘free market,’ and thence to the current immiseration of the poor and the ruling class flirting with fascism (Ukraine, Trump, the Gaza genocide, etc.).

Stalin once said, “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” This may seem, on the surface, to be a rather extreme point of view, but consider the liberal slide to the right that I described in the previous paragraph. Liberals are ‘progressive’ during good times, but they’ll sway to the right either during bad times, or if progressive policies go against their class interests. With the dissolution of the socialist states by the early 1990s, no one in the capitalist West, including liberals, had a fear of left-wing revolution, so there was no more incentive to keep alive such things as the welfare state or a diversified media.

And since imperialism is a crucial part of late stage capitalism, the Western ruling class is concerned about the rise of Russia and China. These countries threaten the class interests of the Western ruling class, which again includes the liberals. This is the real reason behind the banging of the war drums against countries like Russia and China.

Accordingly, to counter Russia’s rise, the CIA helped orchestrate a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, ousting the democratically-elected, pro-Russian and anti-IMF Viktor Yanukovych and replacing his government with one including Nazi sympathizers. Recall what I said before about the capitalist class using fascism during capitalist crises in order to hold on to power. This is exactly what the Western NATO imperialists have been doing, having used these Ukrainian Nazis to provoke Russia for eight years with violence against ethnic Russians in the Donbas, forcing Putin–who between 2014 and late February 2022, did all he could to secure a peace deal with uncooperative people on the other side–to intervene in Ukraine.

Of course, the Western media have either downplayed if not outright denied or ignored the influence of Nazis in the Ukrainian government and military, but that country has had a history of Nazi sympathizers, nurtured by the capitalist West, ever since WWII. And since much of our current Russophobia is being kindled by liberals, including many in Hollywood, then we can see how liberalism–the farthest left of which is social democracy–can cozy up with fascism.

Now, if liberals can embrace fascism, why wouldn’t conservatives like Trump (a former Democrat, by the way)? The point is that liberals can, and often do, shift to the right, even to the point of fascism if it will further their own interests. Mussolini was a socialist in his youth, then he shifted to the right (with Britain’s influence, to keep Italy in WWI) and established fascism as an ideology.

Charleton Heston was a civil rights supporting liberal, then he shifted to the right and supported the NRA. Trump, as I said above, was a Democrat for a while before running as a Republican. One grows more conservative as one gets older, right? Well, if one has lots of capital to protect.

Conservatives are already closer on the political spectrum to fascism than liberals are, so if the latter can come to sympathize with the far right, then it’s all the easier for conservatives to come that way. Left and right politics aren’t a dichotomy of ‘them’ vs ‘us,’ but a continuum where anyone can slide the one way to the other, given the right material conditions.

IV: Trump and Fascism

Now that we’ve established the political, historical, and material contexts behind which someone like Trump can be seen as at least fascist-leaning, let’s see some actual things he’s done that indicate contributions to the general fascist agenda.

I’ve already explained the fascist nature of much of the current Ukrainian government. Trump sold millions of dollars worth of Javelin missiles to Ukraine. He may have hesitated at first, only agreeing when he was convinced it would be good for US business, but still, he did have them sold. Hitler also had big business backers because they knew supporting Nazi Germany would be good for business. Fascism is hyper-capitalism and hyper-imperialism. At the end of the day, it’s all about good business.

Of course, Trump was not unique in giving aid to Ukraine: Obama may have never sent the Javelins, but his administration sent other forms of aid to Ukraine–millions of dollars in security assistance. And the Biden administration has sent in billions in aid. My saying that Trump was not unique in sending aid to Ukraine is for the same reason that I’m saying Trump is not unique among US politicians in having fascist tendencies. I’m just establishing that Trump is very much a part of the general fascist trajectory that world politics are moving unswervingly towards.

The point is that if Trump were truly not a fascist, but just ‘a clown,’ he wouldn’t have sold those Javelins to Ukraine at all. He and his supporters like to portray him as anti-war; he’s boasted that as soon as he becomes president again, he’ll immediately end the war in Ukraine. I call bullshit on that. His boast is just the typical empty promise of a politician to get votes. The US and NATO are in too deep in Ukraine to get out; they’ve invested so many billions of dollars in it. Trump couldn’t pull out even if he wanted to, and I’d say it’s a safe bet he doesn’t want to. After all, with the sale of the Javelins, war with Ukraine is good for US business, isn’t it? Trump has owned stock in defence contractors like Raytheon. He knows that war is where the money is.

He may not have started any new wars in his administration, but he never ended any, either. He almost started a war with Iran by having Soleimani assassinated, and his administration attempted a ‘Bay of Pigs’ style coup on the Venezuelan government, to get all that oil, as I mentioned above.

War is a business, and Trump is a businessman; he isn’t anti-war.

Where his fascist tendencies are at their most obvious are in his ‘America first’ rhetoric and his discriminatory wish to keep out the Latin Americans with his wall. What should also be obvious is the fact that Obama was the ‘Deporter-in-Chief,‘ Hillary spoke of the need to have a ‘barrier’ to keep out ‘illegals,’ Biden has been pretty much as harsh in his dealing with ‘illegals’ (who might not have been pouring through the southern US border if not for the US government’s immiseration of Latin Americans in their home countries via such tactics as economic sanctions and replacing democratically-elected leftist governments with authoritarian right-wing ones, thus forcing the desperate poor to try their luck in the US), and that Kamala Harris promises to be even stricter with border security than Trump (and as a prosecutor who fought to keep non-violent offenders, and even innocent men, in jail, she can be trusted to keep her promise).

Again, I’m not saying Trump is unique in his anti-immigrant positions. He’s part of a general trend toward the far right. The point is that he isn’t outside of the fascist problem, and it’s absurd to say he is outside of it. The real difference between him and the other members of the fascist-leaning establishment is that when they discuss the problem of ‘illegals’ going into the US, they use polite language, whereas when Trump discusses it, he uses the bluntest, rudest language he can muster.

Next, we have to deal with an issue that would make Trump undoubtedly a dictator…if it really comes to be. Has all of this talk about Project 2025 been a real, legitimate worry, or is it just scaremongering in the media?

First of all, nothing in the manifesto of Project 2025 should be of any surprise. We’ve all known that the conservative agenda has always been about returning the US to the reactionary politics of the 1950s and earlier. We all know how reactionary Trump is, that his name is brought up many times in that manifesto, and many of the people involved in devising Project 2025 are associated with Trump (like the Heritage Foundation), which all implies that if he’s elected, he surely would enact much, if not all, of the backward policies of the manifesto (despite his attempts to distance himself from it, assuredly to prevent a loss of votes). His adding of conservative Supreme Court justices led to the overturning of Roe vs Wade [which the Dems have never shown any serious interest in codifying], so his enacting of Project 2025 is no idle threat. (Recall that the underestimating of Hitler was a factor in his rise to power.)

On the other hand, it should be obvious to everyone that the Democratic Party is just using Project 2025 to scare liberals into voting for Kamala Harris, even if they don’t like her (they shouldn’t, for the reasons I’ve given above and will give later). Since there’s no real choice for progressives to vote for in the corrupt two-party system (and as promising as the likes of Jill Stein are, even if she miraculously wins the election, the ruling class won’t allow her to make the needed reforms to the system), then the Democrats have to resort to slimy lesser-evil voting again.

Liberals be libbing again. Oh, dear…

Other things that suggest that Trump could be reaching for dictatorial powers, it seems, include his saying, about one hour into a speech he did for his Christian followers, that if he’s voted into office, they’ll never need to vote again. Now, did he mean this, or is it just another of the many examples of verbal flatulence we’re so used to hearing from him (e.g, his claiming that ‘extreme left, Marxist Democrats‘ want to allow abortions as late as when the baby is actually born)? Surely, the Democrats are also using these words of his to scare people into voting blue, regardless of what he actually meant in saying them.

Then there was the tweet he sent, with Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” as an eerie, dramatic soundtrack, showing Trump as president not just for 2024, but also 2028, 2032, 2036,…etc., going well into and beyond the 22nd century. Is this to imply a dynasty of Trumps, with his sons, grandsons, etc., to succeed him? That tweet, if anything, comes across as trolling, provocation for the mere fun of it, and suggests, to me, a collusion with the Democrats to scare people into voting blue. Trump has always been used as controlled opposition by the ruling class.

Finally, there was that botched assassination attempt…or (deliberately?) botched security…of Trump, attempted by a kid who makes a Star Wars stormtrooper seem a marksman by comparison. Lots of conspiracy theories are floating around online in response to that debacle, almost as spastic as the January 6th farce. Is Trump, if elected, nonetheless going to use that ‘attempt on his life‘ to give himself emergency powers?

The main factor that would allow Trump to assume dictatorial powers is if he has enough followers, enough muscle, to help him do it. He didn’t have enough of it, as was obviously demonstrated in that pathetic, unarmed January 6th attempt (the Nazi Beer Hall putsch was more of something to take seriously). Since the excesses and incompetence of the Biden administration, I can imagine a lot more Americans siding with Trump. The fascist-leaning types tend to work out in the gym and get military training far more than us on the left, sadly, so there’s more of a possibility of a putsch this time.

If Trump tries to take over, the CIA–in their wish to maintain the veneer of democracy that the masses need to have some sense of hope and thus stave off revolution–could try to have him killed and make it look as if he died of old age; the conspiracy theorists would have a field day, of course, but the ‘official’ explanation sent out in the mainstream media would probably drown out all of the Trumpers’ cries of foul play. Many attempts on Hitler’s life were made, and any more attempts on Trump’s life would reinforce our sense that he’ll have assumed dictatorial powers. But again, any success or failure in such attempts would depend in large part on how many followers Trump will have to make his fascism a reality.

V: Kamala is NO Alternative to Trump

Another meme I shared on Facebook that gave me some static was one of Kamala Harris wearing a necklace resembling one costing $62,000. It’s assumed that she’s wearing the exact same necklace, having paid that much for it. The meme has her say, “Hello, fellow working class people…Today is the day I hope you will donate.”

Shit-lib supporters of her naturally got upset and not only said the usual nonsense of not voting for her equalling voting for Trump, as well as doubting that the necklaces were the same. I personally couldn’t care less if the necklaces are the same or not. I don’t generally take memes literally, as I didn’t in the case of the Trump/Hitler meme discussed above. As far as I’m concerned, it’s what the expensive necklace represents: she, as vice president and thus in with the ruling class, is in no way connected with the working class. It isn’t really about how much money she makes (though, incidentally, she has a net worth of $8 million as of 2024); it’s about which class she’s affiliated with.

As with Trump/Vance, Harris/Walz support Israel, the racist, apartheid regime that’s been murdering Gazans by the tens of thousands–at least between 35,000 and 40,000 since October 7th, which was NOT the beginning of this nightmare. This ongoing genocide is a red line, and that’s all the reason anyone needs not to vote either red or blue. It doesn’t matter how much more of a ‘Hitler’ Trump either seems or actually is: the Biden/Harris administration is already more than fascist enough, and Ms. “I’m speaking!” has made it clear that she plans to keep things the way they are in Gaza.

By a sad irony, members of the same ethnic group that were victimized by fascism back in WWII are now, and have been since a few years after that war ended, the fascist victimizers in their settler-colonialist ethnocracy. Now, this is not to give credence to the idea that Israel somehow rules the US and therefore the world, an idea whose antisemitic overtones should be obvious. As I explained in more detail in this post, it’s the Western imperialist powers that use Israel as a crucial ally in the Middle East, an extremely important region for globally strategic reasons (as well as for all that oil!), to protect their interests. Back when he still had all his marbles (and was just as evil back then as he is today), Biden said the quiet part out loud here about the true relationship between Israel and the US…and by extension, the rest of the Anglo-American/NATO empire.

So, Kamala Harris, by continuing what Biden was doing, is thoroughly entrenched in the system, supporting not only Zionism (as many non-Jews–especially evangelical Christians–do, and many Jews oppose) but also the entire neoliberal agenda as well as the system of incarceration as discussed above. This entrenchment is the real reason for her rise to prominence in politics, not competence, of which people with discerning eyes and ears can find no evidence. The fact that she’s a woman of colour is also helpful to the ruling class, for while she’ll dutifully do all their bidding, her appearance as a non-white male creates the illusion–as it did with Obama–that her election will further racial equality.

As I said almost eight years ago in this article, it isn’t the women at the top (or the people of colour up there, for that matter) who count, but those at the bottom who do, for there are so many more down there than those at the top. Who do we want to raise up to a level of dignity, a small minority of people, or the great majority of them?

Because of Kamala’s willingness to prostitute herself to the system (I need use the word ‘prostitute’ only in a metaphorical sense), she’s never needed actual ability to get as far as she has in her career, in spite of the words of those who insist that, because of that career, she must be competent. For these reasons, I feel I can speak most bluntly about her in a way that should not at all be controversial.

She is a total airhead.

All one needs to do to see the truth of this is to watch the many video clips of her doing that ditzy cackle and engaging in her many word salads. One cannot reduce the word salads to the occasional gaffe, of which even the best speakers have the bad luck of doing once in a while. She’s done way too many of these–it’s a habit with her.

Biden was showing clear signs of dementia back in 2020, and surely those working with him, and helping him with his election campaign then, knew of this problem better than anyone else. His ability when younger was no longer relevant; he was put against Trump because he was associated with Obama, whose charm had been missed after four years of Trump. Biden is a Zionist and a whore for the system, too; his current incompetence had been irrelevant, as far as the ruling class was concerned, until it was exposed in his debate with Trump. Kamala’s incompetence is similarly irrelevant: as long as she furthers the interests of the ruling class, that’s good enough for them.

VI: Conclusion

So, in answer to that one woman’s objection that Trump is a clown: yes, he is a clown, of course (look at his hair and at his orange face, and listen to his ridiculous bragging about all the amazing things he promises he’ll do; listen, also, to his bizarre statements about the ‘extreme left, Marxist Democrats’–something, incidentally, that only a far-right extremist would think about the largely centre-right Dems). He isn’t the only clown, though.

Joe Biden is a clown–at least, his dementia has turned him into one. Kamala Harris is a clown (cackling, word salads). In fact, Hitler was a clown (the toothbrush mustache and the more-or-less bowl haircut, to say nothing of his weird conceptions of the state of world politics of his time). Mussolini was a clown. We need to remember, though, that clowns, just like Pennywise, can be scary as well as funny.

A female troll who gave me a hard time about the memes I’d shared that criticized Kamala asked me, in all snarkiness, if I was even American (I’m Canadian), as if anyone outside of her sacred country has any right to say anything about the election in November. We’re talking here about a country with hundreds of military bases around the world. This is a country that orchestrates, or at least helps to orchestrate, coup after coup in other countries to ensure the latter have governments friendly to the interests of the former. This country sells weapons and gives aid to countries that commit genocides (Israel on Gaza, Saudi Arabia on Yemen–granted, my country’s government has been guilty of giving the offending countries aid, too, and I don’t have any more love of the Canadian government than I do of that of the US). The US has been engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with Russia and China, bringing us all dangerously close to WWIII. To suggest that as a non-American, I have no business criticizing her government is extremely arrogant of her.

What goes on in the US does not happen in isolation from the rest of the world. The American government’s foreign policy is a poison to the entire world, so yes, we citizens of the rest of the planet, no matter how far away we live from the US, have not only every right to voice our opinions about this upcoming election…we have the duty to do so!

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether Trump, if elected, goes balls-out fascist on us, or if all that talk about Project 2025, ‘[Christians] will never have to vote again,’ and ‘Trump 4eva’ is just trolling and scaremongering to manipulate Americans into voting Democrat. The US has already been lapsing into fascism whether red or blue (the surveillance state, the wish for mass deportations, class collaboration in the form of simping for billionaires, the enabling of genocide, etc.), and the trajectory towards even more fascism, regardless of a Trump win or a Harris win, will assuredly continue, be it a faster or slower move farther to the right.

The US, founded on settler-colonialism (as, to be fair, is my country, Canada, and many others, no less so), the enslavement of blacks, and the genocide of the aboriginals, in which a small minority of people hoard most of the wealth, cannot reasonably be called a democracy. There’s no threat of losing a democracy that never even existed in the first place.

The problem won’t be solved by voting in the ‘better’ candidate. The problem will be solved by smashing the system the injustice is based on and replacing it with a new one, to serve the people. Doing so will be extremely difficult, if not bordering on impossible–I have no illusions about that–but it’s the only way.

In an accelerationist sense, a Trump win, with him assuming dictatorial powers, could cause just the outrage needed to motivate the people into rising up in revolution. I’m not hoping for such an outcome in the election, of course. For just as his move for those powers depends on him having enough people to back him, our success in revolution, in response to him doing that or otherwise, will depend on us having enough people to back us. Are there enough of us?