Once Again on the Liberal Myth of "Trump's Base"

(Letter)

2 November 2019

RE: “On The Liberal Myth of ‘Trump’s Base’” in #1158: Paraphrasing Molotov in Berlin: If “Trump’s base” is fictitious, then who are those “howling mobs”—your characterization—at his rallies, and why do they so resemble the howling mobs in Charlottesville?

J.

WV replies:

In the WV No. 1158 (26 July 2019) article mentioned above, we corrected our repeated references to “Trump’s base” as being the source of the current reactionary political climate, including the White House’s anti-immigrant measures and brazen racism. We were echoing the Democratic Party liberals and media who blamed white workers, the so-called “deplorables,” for Trump’s victory in 2016. We were echoing the notion that Trump pursues his policies in order to play to his “base,” thus wrongly implying that American bourgeois democracy represents the “will of the people” as opposed to that of the capitalist class. Trump is simply a representative of that class. He does not have his own independent political base separate from the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party establishment and many liberals paint Trump’s supporters as a homogenous mass of unhinged racists and the Trump era as uniquely racist. They also promote the lie that racial oppression in this society is the result of the racist attitudes of white people. In harping on “Trump’s base,” we capitulated to that idealist framework, the logic of which would be to write off the possibility of winning white workers to the struggle for black freedom and socialist revolution. Black oppression is rooted in the American capitalist order; the rulers push racial and ethnic divisions to derail class struggle and maintain their system. By fashioning this mythical “base,” the Democrats are trying to cover up their own role in implementing the bourgeoisie’s war against the working class, immigrants, black people and all the oppressed.

Our reader points to our use of “howling mobs” to describe people at Republican rallies for the 2018 midterm elections, when Trump was railing against the immigrant caravan of desperate Central American refugees. The article where this appears was written before our correction when we were still operating in the false “Trump’s base” framework. There were plenty of chauvinist howls at these rallies, but Trump was whipping up crowds to go out and vote for the Republican ticket (just as previous Republicans did with the nativist Tea Party movement). This is fundamentally different from what took place in Charlottesville in 2017, where armed fascist gangs who were out for blood chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” brandished Confederate flags and swastikas and killed anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer.

It is a dangerous mistake to draw an equal sign between racist ideas and fascism. The fascists are paramilitary shock troops held in reserve by the capitalist rulers to be unleashed at times of social crisis against any prospect of revolutionary struggle by the working class. Their purpose is the destruction of the workers movement, including unions and the left, and racial genocide. The nine black churchgoers slaughtered in Charleston in 2015, the eleven Jewish worshippers murdered in a synagogue outside Pittsburgh in 2018—this is the reality of fascist terror.

Though the openly racist and misogynist Trump administration certainly has emboldened white-supremacist scum, it is not fascist. He did not come to power by mobilizing fascist gangs but rather through the regular mechanisms of the American bourgeois electoral system, of which racism and nationalist jingoism are a regular backdrop. Characterizing Trump and his supporters as fascist disarms people in the face of the race-terrorists, who must be crushed in the egg through labor/black mobilizations to stop them.

Trump is simply a raw expression of this exploitative social order that breeds racial oppression, anti-immigrant chauvinism and outright fascist horror. The liberal myth of “Trump’s base” is nothing more than an alibi for the Democrats who, no less than Republicans, administer the capitalist profit system.