Fears of a fascist future overlook the present and past

Democracy in America died a long time ago, and Democratic presidents share the blame

Millions of Americans are besieged today by a sense of civic foreboding. In addition to any number of social and economic crises that continue to grow worse with every passing day, they anticipate an election later this year in which each of the major parties’ candidates have rejected any pretense of respecting democracy.

Depending on the outcome of that election, many liberal observers fear the end of the United States as we know it, or at least the democracy that once inspired the world.

Unfortunately, those voices are too optimistic.

In fact, “democracy” in America has never been more than a fantasy.

To fear fascism in the future under a potential second Trump administration overlooks the extent to which fascism has already taken root in the United States—with outrageously bipartisan support.

When the United States was founded, our mechanisms of supposed democracy formally excluded women, racial minorities, and even white men who did not own property. On the one hand, the opportunity to cast votes has expanded since then to include more people, while the meaning and influence of those votes has diminished due to factors ranging from corporate dominance of campaign finance and the entrenchment of incumbents to attacks on voting rights and the loss of the civil rights movement’s signature victories.

Over the past 20 years, in particular, the emergence of fascism in America relied on support from presidents and policymakers who identify as both Republicans and Democrats. Democratic presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden each played crucial rules ratifying right wing policies that their party had historically opposed.

Beyond representing a historical critique, this post continues an ongoing analysis of the 2024 election which fans of neither Biden nor Trump are likely to appreciate.

Clinton’s concessions

Thirty years ago, Bill Clinton infamously embraced pro-business policies in order to compete with Republicans for donations from Wall Street. Widely credited with supposed political genius for his “triangulation” strategy, Clinton ultimately traded principles for which Democrats had long fought in exchange for his personal political success.

By supporting Wall Street’s agenda on labor rights and international trade, Clinton effectively broke the previous Republican monopoly on support from Wall Street. Few appreciated at the time how a Democratic president championing policies once favored only by Republicans would induce the entire political spectrum to shift to the right.

Obama’s obfuscations

Seemingly inspired by Clinton’s example (and advised by many of the very same apparatchiks), Barack Obama also broke with his party to embrace GOP policies on several fronts. His bailout favoring Wall Street following the 2008 financial collapse and his tragic centralization of power in the executive branch offer two of the most disappointing examples.

Obama won the White House largely because he promised to repudiate the brutish and idiotic legacy of the Bush & Cheney administration’s wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S. Constitution. But—like Clinton—Obama found it easier once in the White House to side with the Washington establishment rather than stand by the communities that got him there.

Within Obama’s first year as president, his senior legal advisor, who urged accountability for the CIA’s torture program and the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, was pushed out of office. Obama replaced him with a rabid militarist with close ties to the Israeli regime that would go on to escalate its longstanding genocide 15 years later.

The defining legacy of Obama’s presidency was an eponymous healthcare reform that, as much as any other policy passed in the last generation, emerged as a lightning rod for partisan rancor. Obamacare expanded the ranks of Americans with health coverage while denying public insurance options. As a result, it forced consumers to buy private insurance from corporations that have predictably jacked up their rates since then.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Obama focused his economic recovery efforts on Wall Street banks, choosing to abandon homeowners and renters. When a grassroots movement occupied public spaces cities across the United States to call (among other things) for greater social equity, federal officials coordinated a crackdown to violently repress it.

Obama absurdly bragged about expanding fossil fuel extraction in the midst of a global climate crisis. He undermined civil liberties and consolidated the power of criminal intelligence agencies with documented histories of human rights violations in dozens of countries all over the world.

In every one of these respects, Obama’s administration effectively joined the GOP by declaring its allegiance to capitalism and militarism before democracy. Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary under the George W. Bush administration, scathingly (and accurately) described the Obama administration as Bush’s third and fourth terms.

Obama prepared the White House for autocracy.

In retrospect, one of Obama’s most destructive decisions may have been choosing Joe Biden as his Vice President. While Biden had a largely undistinguished record in the role, it was his status as Obama’s VP that enabled Democratic Party insiders to orchestrate his nomination in 2020 despite greater grassroots support for Bernie Sanders.

Many of us recognized at the time that, by choosing a figure whose documented lies had forced him out of multiple previous presidential nomination contests (Biden), Democrats effectively announced their preference for Donald Trump over a popular Socialist backed by a massive youth movement who offered meaningful alternatives to the bipartisan dominance of Washington by Wall Street that Bill Clinton engineered.

We all got what they wanted.

Biden’s brutality

Since riding Obama’s coattails to the presidency, Joe Biden has embraced any number fascist policies, from enabling genocidal violence abroad to ignoring Congress and asserting an unconstitutional unilateral authority to declare war. He has embraced openly fascist policies at our nation’s borders, where international asylum-seekers entitled to residence within the U.S. are illegally detained by the thousands. And, like his GOP predecessor, he has chosen to duck debates rather than respect even a pretense of democracy.

Paid subscribers can read further to access a preview of an upcoming post. It will continue this analysis by expanding it to examine human rights, military industrial corruption, and how each of those spheres reveal the well-established fascism that too many liberals have ignored growing under their bipartisan feet.