Understanding and Changing

“Philosophers,” the young Karl Marx wrote, “have tried to understand history; the point is to change it.” 

I’ve long thought that famous quotation advances something of a false dichotomy between understanding and changing history, or at least that it does this if you want to change history in a decent and desirable fashion.

Any deranged nut with an AK-47, an AR-15, a suitcase bomb, or a truck filled with explosives can change history to some degree – in a terrible way.

If you want to change history in a wonderful way, helping move humanity from oppression, exploitation, and ruin to survival and emancipation, you do in fact need to know and understand the past and the world to grasp numerous things including the lessons (both positive and negative) of past revolutions and movements for human liberation.

That said, yes, ultimately we progressives, radicals, and revolutionaries want to change and not merely understand history.

Prediction Says Something

I thought of young Marx’s pithy comment this morning as I reflected on the limits of the intellectual work I’ve done over the last three decades.

I have this memory of something the world systems Marxist political economist Giovanni Arrighi said in a graduate seminar I took back in the 1980s at Binghamton University. Arrighi related how a historian had recently asked him if he’d “ever set foot in an archive” to find empirical proof on past events to support his work. “Once,” he had said, “in [apartheid] South Africa. Never again!.”

His main point was that one can find proof for one’s analysis in future as well as past events – in the ability of one’s assessment of the objective situation to predict future developments.  He claimed that his particular analysis of capitalism and class struggle (I don’t recall the specifics) had foreseen and explained the economic stagflation of the 1970s.

Well, I’ve spent many days in the archives (my doctorate is in history) and I’ve also – more to the point of this commentary – been fairly good at predicting some key future developments.  I had Barack Obama picked as the next US president once John Kerry was defeated by George W. Bush in 2004 — not a common belief at the time thanks to the color of Obama’s  skin – because I thought Obama was perfectly matched to the political and cultural rebranding US capitalism-imperialism would require after the long national Bush nightmare. 

I predicted the terrible neoliberal, imperialist, and objectively white supremacist nature and ruling class-friendly trajectory of the Obama presidency and that it would spark and empower a white nationalist “populist” reaction.

(A funny story on this: in late 2007,  my wonderful progressive editor at Routledge Press shot down my original proposed title for my third book, my first one on Obama, which came out in the spring before Obama was first elected president.  My title idea: “The Empire’s New Clothes.” The editor rightly thought such a brazen and predictive title would hurt the book’s chances of being picked up by libraries and big bookstore chains. We went with Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. When it came time for me to write my next book, on Obama’s first year plus in office, I got my original title with some elaboration in the subtitle: The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power.)

I wrote in March of 2016 on CounterPunch that a fascist Trump presidency could in fact “happen here” and went on later to join others in predicting that Trump would not accept an election outcome that didn’t go his way.

I predicted that the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats would respond to Trump with Weimar-like appeasement, conciliation, and even complicity, consistent with the Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s analysis of them as “the inauthentic opposition.” 

I predicted that Trump would win again in 2024 (wrong, Allan Lichtman!) and that his re-election would mark a great acceleration in the march towards fascist consolidation in the United States. That is happening now.

I am perhaps exaggerating my clairvoyance (hardly unique to me) a bit but not all that much, really.

The Thrill is Gone

Okay, so what? Yes, there is a certain amount of intellectual satisfaction in seeing one’s sense of likely future developments validated. “See,” you get to boast, like I said.  I must be on to something. Maybe folks  should start listening to me if you want to understand history and prepare for the future!”

I won’t pretend it hasn’t sometimes been fun to say, “told you so” to Trumpenlefty creeps who have accused me and others of  having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and being a “hysterical” “boy crying wolf” on the US-Amerikaner fascist menace. It’s a shame more Germans didn’t develop Hitler Derangement Syndrome n the 1930s, no?  

But the enjoyment of being proven right by future developments wears off. For me, “the thrill,” to quote BB King, “is gone,” as the world’s most powerful country moves at an accelerating pace along the dark path of fascist consolidation – a catastrophe for all humanity in a world already mired in existential climate crisis and chock full of nuclear weapons, mass poverty, savage inequality, authoritarian rule, rampant irrationalism, maddening fundamentalism, and demographic destabilization and flight, the next global pandemic waiting in the wings.

“Some of us saw it all coming. We tried to warn you.”  Great! Good for us – that and $2.50 will get me a ride on the subway. Or a trip in a Homeland Security van to a detention camp one day.  

No, understanding shit is great but the point is to change it, something that takes not just brains, science, theory and empirical knowledge but courage and conscience.

“We Livs in a Fascist Dictatorship”

Here in the US I think the main gap in properly responding to Trumpism-fascism is going to revolve less around understanding what it is than around what is to be done about it.  There’s still a lot of denial, disbelief, disinterest, dread, and dumbness getting in the way of acknowledging what’s really happening here, but the cold fact that the Trump regime is fascist is less and less of a tough sell every single day thanks to the ever more transparently fascist conduct of the Trump47 regime (the details of which I’ve been writing about since before the second Trump inauguration[1]).

“Fascism,” says Refuse Fascism, “is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights…Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors….History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”

That this is what we are up against in the US is ever more clear  in the wake of the Trump fascist regime’s vicious extrajudicial kidnapping of Mahmod Kahlil and its open defiance of federal judicial orders regarding their rounding up and deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans and their denial of the visa-holding Lebanese national and Brown University physician’s Dr. Rasha Alawieh’s right to return to the United States from a trip abroad.

Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump has wildly called for the impeachment of a federal judge whose order he defied. He put up a TruthSocial post calling one of those judges — get this — “a Radical Left Lunatic” and a “troublemaker and agitator sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.”

Mein Trumpf went on to claim that the judge has no legitimate authority to rule against Trump because Trump won the 2024 election “by a lot” and the judge is un-elected.

Trump’s robotic Christian fascist press secretary denied that a mere federal judge has any legitimate authority over the executive branch.

Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan — an openly thuggish authoritarian who threatens to jail mayors whose’ cities shield immigrants from ICE gendarmes — said this about the administration’s criminal deportations: “We are going to make this country safe again … We are not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.”

As the liberal lawyer Elie Mystal recently said:

“We live in a fascist dictatorship. That’s what’s happening right now. That’s what it feels like. This is where we are. There is not a coming constitutional crisis; we are in the constitutional crisis right now. Because what do we have — how can we call ourselves a democracy, how can we call ourselves a nation of laws, if one man, and one man alone, Donald Trump, is able to defy the other two branches of government? That’s what we have here. And that’s what Trump promised to do, and that’s what he is, in fact, doing.”

Yes, we are in the middle of an accelerating  fascist Amerikaner coup. Trump47 is NOT  “joking” about blowing through the US Constitution’s two-term limit. As the liberal editor of The New Republic Michael Tomasky explains:

“Trump wants to be president for life – and he’s already preparing for it…When this [Trump’s threat to go for a third term through any means at his disposal including force] comes up on cable news, the host typically asks the guests whether Trump is just trolling the libs or should be taken seriously. It’s a silly question, because the answer is obviously both. He’s always trolling. But if you’ve watched these first four weeks and think he’s not capable of finding a way to suspend the Constitution and stay in office, well, you’re not watching the same show I am…If you think I’m being hysterical, I’m sorry, it’s you who are being naïve. Trump has already orchestrated a coup against the United States in which he wanted to see his own vice president hanged. What more proof of his intentions do you need? Yes, he ultimately backed down and left office as scheduled. Privately, he knew he lost. Now, as he’s constantly telling us, he legitimately won—in what he falsely refers to as a ‘landslide.” He obviously believes he’s been given a mandate to do whatever he wants.”

(What “mandate”? As I noted recently on ZNet, only 29% of the nation’s adults for Trump last November, Trump’s 1.5 percent official popular vote victory is one of the smallest ever in the history of US presidential elections, Trump’s victory in the Electoral College is due to just 0.15%of the US electorate; Trump would have lost to Harris in both the Electoral College but for stepped-up neo-Jim Crow racist voter suppression across the country.)

As Tomasky points out, the Senate-approved confirmations of abject Trump loyalists to head the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Justice Department, and the National Intelligence Service have given “Trump personal control over the country’s legal and intelligence services.” Trump has successfully placed fascist subordinates atop the Department of Homeland Security (the noxious dog-killer and right-wing sadist Kristi Noem), the Department of Defense (the open Christian white nationalist Pete Hegseth), and the FBI (the far right lunatic Kash Patel).  The Republifascist-controlled Senate will likely soon confirm the horrific three-star MAGA general Dan “Razin” Caine as Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This time, unlike during Trump’s first term, Tomasky notes, there will be “no one around to stop Trump from declaring martial law and suspending the Constitution or even an election.”

(And, really, why shouldn’t Trump think he can blow through the Constitution again and again?  His return to the White House stands in bold defiance of the third section of the 14^th Amendment, which explicitly forbids a former insurrectionist from holding any public office in the US unless Congress has exempted him or her from this prohibition by a two-thirds vote. And the Trump-crafted Supreme Court has granted him [in last July’s The United States v. Trump verdict] blanket immunity from prosecution [during or after his time in the White House] for any crime – yes, any crime, including the murder of one’s political opponents – he commits in connection with his “official presidential duties”!)

In other news, Hegseth is moving to push Black soldiers out of the armed forces in order to align the military more closely with the white supremacist Trump coup. Trump will count on fascist paramilitaries — including a bunch he let out of prison — to help keep him in power by force. Credible rumors from within the US government have been sent my way that “by April 20 Trump has asked secretaries of homeland security and defense to determine if he should invoke the Insurrectionist Act and deploy US military to surprise civil disorder.”

April 20^th, by the way, is Adolph Hitler’s birthday.

Waiting for the next election is too late.  It is surrender. It’s not even clear that elections will be held given Trump’s ongoing desire to be a fascist dictator for life and (as Tomasky notes) the underestimated ease with which elections can be suspended via martial law.  

The Biggest Block: What is to be Done

The real tough nut to crack is acknowledging the need for prolonged mass action to bring down the whole Trump fascist regime (TFR), yes, before it’s too late.  Without the collapse of the TFR, resistance will be damn near futile.  As the eloquent Refuse Fascism (RF) activist Coco Das recently said:

“The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go! Imagine this demand resounding through the streets and institutions and airwaves of this country, bringing society to a halt, filling people with the determination to stay in the streets until their demand is met. Until this regime faces that kind of political crisis, it can absorb protests against one attack or another. With their bloody hands on the levers of power and their bloody fangs on people’s necks, the regime will constantly have the initiative while the people will constantly be on the defensive, vulnerable to being divided and conquered and beaten into submission, physically, mentally, and morally. If we allow that to happen, it is not only people living in this country who will suffer. The Trump fascist regime – while it echoes the slave-holding confederacy, Jim Crow segregation, and Nazi Germany – has no historical precedent in the scale of destruction it is setting into motion. With the climate crisis at a tipping point, the looming danger of war between nuclear-armed powers, and a global refugee population of over a hundred million people, this regime is a threat to the very future of humanity and life on this planet. ‘The clock ticks toward the midnight hour. Each minute brings new shocks and jolts. Each second shatters lives.’ In The Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America. The Fascist Trump Regime Must Go!”

Robert Reich: Not So Hot on What to Do

Coco Das and RF’s call for the end of the TFR (Trump Fascist Regime) as soon as humanly possible is what’s missing from the popular liberal commentator and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s recent call for “resistance”:  

“Friends, I cannot say this any other way: We are in deep sh*t. These are truly scary and rough times. Trump appears at the Justice Department and calls for his opponents to be jailed. He ‘detains’ students who have committed no crime but peacefully expressed their negative views about Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza. He invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove unauthorized immigrants, without evidence or hearing. Sides with Russia, China, and North Korea against Ukraine. Purges career officials and installs political hacks more loyal to him than to the United States. Fires inspectors general. Demotes senior prosecutors. Threatens law firms that represented people he considers his personal enemies. Pardons the hoodlums who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He and Musk mow down wide swathes of our government. Republican lawmakers, fearful or unprincipled, say and do nothing.

Democrats are in disarray. Chuck Schumer green lights a continuing budget resolution that allows Musk and Trump to close down even more of our government.

And on it goes. You have every right to feel depressed and enervated. You have every reason to despair.

But wait.  It’s possible that future generations will look back on this scourge and see something else — not just what was destroyed but also what was born….It’s entirely possible that future generations will look back on this awful time and see the seeds of fundamental reform.

Many of you are leading this. In hundreds of thousands of ways, you are beacon lights. You are the beginning of positive change. Whether it’s your appearances at Republican town halls, or your phone calls that are daily jamming the Capitol and White House switchboards, or your mountains of emails and letters, or your myriad actions protecting the vulnerable in your communities, or your grass-roots activism in Wisconsin and elsewhere: You are the groundswell of America’s new resistance, the green shoots of our future democracy.

The backlash to Trump is growing. His disapproval ratings have jumped nearly 10 points since he was sworn in. People are flooding meetings and rallies, demanding an end to Trump and Musk’s reign. Bernie, AOC, and other progressive politicians are drawing huge crowds.  These are terrible times — the worst I’ve lived through, and I’ve lived through some bad ones….But as long as we are alive, as long as we are resolved, as long as we are taking action to stop the worst of this, as long as we are trying to make America and the world even a bit better — have no doubt: We will triumph.”

Reich, who has long (since even before the 2016 election) identified Trump and Trumpism as fascist (even if he doesn’t say so in this particular commentary), gives a useful brief summary of Trump47’s leading recent outrages.  And he’s right to call out the inauthentic opposition – theHollow Resistance (the title of my 2020 book on ex-president Barack Obama’s stunning silence on the first administration of a president Obama all too privately knew to be a fascist[2]) – of the Weimar Democrat Charles Schumer ($D-NY), whose budget cave and that of nine other Senate Democrats is a despicable surrender straight out of my longtime writings on the neoliberal, fascism-appeasing nothingness of the capitalist-imperialist Dems. 

Good for Reich.  But what does he propose we do to change history in a desirable way? While there is a passing reference in his commentary to people “demanding an end to the Trump and Musk’s reign,” whatever he means by that exactly (when? In 2028-29? now?), he offers nothing really, beyond applauding folks for doing traditional civic things like making noise at town halls and calling into Congressional switchboards, and attending rallies where leading elected liberal electoralists denounce “oligarchy” and “kleptocracy” (but not fascism!) He calls these actions “green shoots of our future democracy,” even though a functioning democracy is materially impossible under the class rule system – capitalism – that he says he wants to “save.” (I am referring to a 2016 Reich book bearing one of the most oxymoronic titles ever concocted: Saving Capitalism for the Many Not the Few.) 

Where is Reich’s call to conscience, moral responsibility, and courage to actually bring down a regime that is a grave existential and fascist threat to all humanity, not just Americans?  Please note the painfully limited and incremental, minor nature of the historical agency Reich promotes:  “action to stop the worst of this” and “to make America and the world even a bit better.” How tepid, in the face of Trump’s attempt at full fascist consolidation in the world’s most dangerous and powerful nation and empire!  

No! The whole damn Trump Fascist Regime must go! It is a dire white supremacist, women-hating, LGBT-bashing, xenophobic-nationalist, warmongering, pandemicist, and eco-cidal fossil-fascist threat to humanity that must be removed as soon as humanly possible!

In These Times of Sorry Surrender

It is amazing how tame some of what “the left” calls “resistance” can be. A recent article at the liberal, social-democratish journal In These Times trumpets a labor and “social movement” call for a “general strike” to win better collective bargaining agreements for U.S. union members (less than 10 %of US workers “in these times”) on May First in – are you ready for this? – 2028.

You read that correctly: Twenty freaking Twenty-Eight. Forget the moral and practical limits of a trade unionist appeal to economistic self-interest – “more for us” – under a fascist regime in the parasitic core of the world capitalist empire….

Wait, no, don’t forget that, but put it to the side for a moment (if you can) and reflect on the time frame: three years and forty-four days in the future – May 1st, 2028! What the holy gradualist, incrementalist, and surrender monkey f#*k!  Imagine the supreme and possibly irreversible mutilation the TFR will have inflicted on humanity and the planet by the silent spring of 2028!

Why 2028? Because that’s how the US capitalist state’s savagely time-staggered major party and candidate-centered election cycle has trained millions of Americans, including the In These Times writer, to understand the brief little moments in which all of us corporate-managed peons get to supposedly engage in meaningful “politics”[3] by making marks next to the names of candidates selected in advance for us by the un-elected dictatorship of capital.

Notes

1. See The Paul Street Report here.   

2.  In the fall of 2016, prior to that year‘s presidential election,  Obama said this to Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate Tim Kaine: “Tim…we’ve got to keep a fascist [Trump] out of the White House.” Obama never uttered the F-word (fascism, that is) to describe Trump in public during all of Trump’s first presidency.  Whether he has done so since I do not claim to know.  There was a brief window during the last three weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign when Kamala Harris was persuaded to publicly identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist.    

3. As the great left intellectual Noam Chomsky wrote two-plus decades ago: “Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is a method of marginalising the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalised quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics.”

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