Night of the Fash

At Madison Square Garden with Trump and his lineup of third-rate grifters and bigots

I went to Trump’s Woodstock of fascism at Madison Square Garden and am writing a report for Counterpunch. I will also post that here, but I want make two points for now.

First, if Trump wins then his second administration is going to be bad, really bad, but not in the way you think. There will be awful things from Project 2025 such as dismantling reproductive rights. The worst will be the dismantling and corruption of the administrative state, which will damage pretty much every facet of society.

Reichsführer Stephen Miller delivered a blood and soil speech out of 1938.

As bad as that will be, Trump 2 has even worse plans in store that we aren’t talking about. They will try to spread MAGAfication across all of America. They will use their power to mold society, education, media, and state and local politics along violent patriarchal nativist ends. They are not going to eliminate the Department of Education because it is a valuable repressive instrument, such as pro-Palestine speech and the study of race and gender. MAGA shock troops will try to silence anyone and anything that espouses socialist, democratic, and liberatory ideals.

If you want a model, look to Orban's Hungary, Putin's Russia, Modi's India. Trump and his ghouls are poised to MAGAfy state and local governments in ways the bankrupt liberal establishment is completely unprepared for.

This brings me to my second point. The Democratic Party needs to be destroyed. It has already destroyed itself after 32 years of careening to the right. Clinton fulfilled the Reagan Revolution. Obama expanded the “war on terror” to seven countries, gave us mass surveillance, and made Wall Street wealthier and more powerful. Biden turned Trump’s border, energy, Israel, and anti-China extremism into bipartisan policy.

It is the idea of the Democrats that needs to be destroyed. We need to demolish the left-wing delusion that the Democratic Party is somehow a vehicle that brings us closer to socialism, and social and racial justice.

The Democrats’ transformation is complete. It is a hard-right Republican Party formerly known as the Democrats, and the opposition is fascist MAGA formerly known as the Republicans.

The party that liberals and many leftists believe is the party of FDR is a combination of the Dick Cheney administration and the first Trump administration. The only "liberalism" is merely libertarianism, such as pro choice and gay rights. That's it.

Otherwise, the Democrats are a party of Big Banks, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and endless wars and genocide.

MAGA is utterly cynical and repulsive but at the Madison Square Garden rally, speaker after speaker denounced Kamala Harris's support for wars and said she was leading us to World War 3 and nuclear war. Trump and Vance on down denounced her allying with Liz and Dick Cheney.

They denounced war so many times it sounded like an antiwar rally. Tucker Carlson gloated that "the realignment is complete."

Trump and MAGA get it. Liberals don't. The Democrats have absorbed the establishment of both parties in a desperate bid to defeat All-American Fascism. Harris is supported by 7 out of the last 8 presidential administrations. Every one for the last 32 years but Trump. If the Democrats lose it will be not in spite of this duopoly but because of it.

People are tired of being shit on and fucked over. The Democrats only offer them more of the same. Trump promises a break from decades of neoliberal, neo-con failures.

Lots of bad things are headed our way. But none of it would be happening without three decades of Democrats turning far-right atrocities into bipartisan policy.