Literature
The following statement was issued by the ITC’s affiliate organization BAMN U.S. (the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action Integration and Immigrant Rights & Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary)
NO UNION WITH FASCISM
Trump and his racist movement have launched an attack on American democracy. For democracy to survive, there must be no place for fascist terror, and no place for the authoritarian ambitions of Trump and his allies.
Trump must be impeached, convicted, and removed immediately
Trump must go by any means necessary. Having incited an insurrection against democracy, Trump has distinguished himself as a tyrant, and must suffer the punishment reserved for tyrants.
The enemies of democracy, the Trump allies who have sought to overturn the democratic will of the voters, must be expelled from the government
These enemies of democracy cannot be tolerated in any government that claims to be “of the people, by the people, for the people.” They have broken their oaths to the Constitution, and have forfeit any status as public servants or representatives. They are, in truth, the enemies of the people.
Jail the fascist thugs who assaulted the U.S. Capitol
On January 6th, Trump’s violent mob invaded the Capitol building with no serious resistance from police, and most of the rioters left without facing arrest. There is no justice in America while a President is above the law, while police can get away with murdering black and brown Americans, and while fascist thugs can stage a violent coup and face no consequences. The new civil rights movement must launch its own investigation to expose the complicit actions within the Trump regime that paved the way for the January 6th assault.
The new civil rights movement must defend democracy, liberty, and equality
Democracy is not safe in a nation where one party favors authoritarian rule, while the opposing party merely wishes to “reach across the aisle” and “heal” together with the authoritarians. It is necessary to build the new civil rights movement as an independent power, as the only force that will truly defend democracy and fight to crush the growth of fascism.
Defend the rights of all immigrants and minorities against the Trump-led racial purge and Trump’s program for a white man’s republic
The Muslim ban, the border wall, the caging of immigrant children, the suppression of minority votes, and the sanction of police murder against black and brown Americans—the Trump program is a racist vision for purging non-white America and establishing white nationalist rule. The new civil rights movement must be the front-line defender of the rights of immigrants and minorities, and must not leave these vital tasks in the hands of politicians who may give lip service to “diversity” but have failed to protect millions of people from Trump’s racist attacks.
Build mass mobilizations of the new civil rights movement across the country; reignite the protests that took over the streets in the wake of the cruel police murder of George Floyd
The movement must move—reclaim the streets! Fascist gangs, emboldened by the assault on the Capitol, will attempt further stunts and violence. But our movement is much larger and potentially much stronger. We must mobilize our movement for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, for the presidential inauguration, and beyond.
Stop the deadly policies of exposing the public to COVID-19; end the practice of sacrificing human lives for the sake of corporate profits
Trump’s unconscionable actions have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, and will continue to cost hundreds of thousands more as the pandemic grows worse. But those policies will not end on January 20th: the Biden administration intends to continue Trump’s push to reopen schools and reopen the economy in a deadly drive for corporate profits. We must fight for our very existence, fight to keep each other safe, and fight for a future in which we can finally breathe.
Millions of people watched the news footage, feeling some combination of shock, horror, and outrage. It really happened—a violent mob of Trump supporters besieged the U.S. Capitol, disrupting the meetings of Congress which had convened to formally certify Trump’s electoral defeat. The scene was surreal, a stunt of madness that would have been regarded as inconceivable, except that it had been preceded by several years full of inconceivable madness. On the sixth of January, 2021, American democracy appeared fragile, and the great myth of the United States government—the self-proclaimed democratic beacon of the world—shattered just as easily as the windows of the Capitol building.
Prior to that day, official pundits had treated Trump’s conspiracy theories as nothing more than a pile of silly words. The “stolen” election, the claims of voter fraud, and the prophecies of the QAnon cult—these were dismissed as merely the deranged fantasies of a small, weak man protecting his oversized ego. However, there was a deeper meaning that the pundits had largely failed to critique: Trump and his racist movement were making an open assault against American democracy, itself. When that assault finally took a physical form, no one was prepared for it.
For the first time in history, an American President attempted to overturn an election defeat by inciting an armed insurrection. The spectacle was almost as much a farce as the man who incited it, although it nonetheless resulted in several deaths and stunned the world into perplexity. The claims that the election was “rigged”—espoused by Trump and the large majority of his supporters—was not merely a form of childish denial. It was a conscious rejection of any democratic process that would go against the will of the white electorate, and it was therefore a conscious rejection of democracy as a whole.
In the deranged minds of Trump and his followers, if democracy will not result in white power, then democracy is the enemy. Slithering through the many muddled and often nonsensical phrases, Trump’s movement has produced its ultimate conclusion: a fascist program.
From racism, to fascism
For the national lynch mob that worships Donald Trump, their descent towards an anti-democratic and authoritarian program was not merely the product of one man’s cult of personality. They all felt that the white man’s America was being lost, and when the nation democratically elected Barack Obama as the first black President, the racists’ faith in democracy began to be lost, too. Trump started his rise to the presidency as the most prominent leader of the “birther” movement, based on a crackpot conspiracy theory challenging Obama’s citizenship. The real essence of the theory, however, was that Obama could not be a legitimate President due to the simple fact that he was black.
Trump openly joined the birther movement in 2011. That same year marked the first time in United States history that the national birth rate became majority-minority. Since then, white people have constituted less than half of the babies born, and the overall demographics of the nation were already changing sufficiently to alter the electoral landscape.
The consequences of the demographic change made shockwaves in the presidential election of 2012. Mitt Romney overwhelmingly won the white vote over Barack Obama, 59% to 39%, and yet Romney still lost the election. It was unprecedented: never before had a candidate lost a U.S. presidential election while winning a full majority of the white vote. Through this process, white America was discovering that democracy might not securely protect their privileges anymore, and that “majority rule” might no longer stand for white rule.
When Trump launched his 2016 campaign for the presidency, he was the only candidate who could speak effectively to those fears of the racist white electorate. The only acceptable condition for American democracy, according to Trump, was to make America white again. The Muslim ban, the border wall, the mass deportations, the claims of a “rigged” election with “illegal” votes—all of these appealed to the paranoia of white voters who felt that their country was being taken away from them. The fact that their leader was an egomaniacal, chest-thumping madman only served to further gratify their own longings for superiority.
But January 6th, 2021 marked a fundamental development in the character of the Trump movement. If all previous elements of the Trump program could be described as restoring a “whites only” version of democracy, then the armed revolt at the U.S. Capitol signified the will to overthrow democracy, altogether. The claims of “fraud” and the slogan “stop the steal” were merely empty rhetoric. The real content of the action was an attempted coup against the democratic will of the people. The real program of the action was the fascist ascension of an American President to the status of supreme ruler. The real significance of the action was the social shift from racism, to fascism.
The lesson of January 6th is that the fate of democracy, itself, now depends upon the heroic, anti-racist struggle of the new civil rights movement.
A storm without thunder and lightning
“Coup,” “insurrection,” and “sedition” were among the words that notable politicians and journalists used to describe the event on January 6th. But whatever one might call it, the assault on the Capitol was not a secret. The Trump fanatics had spent weeks organizing on public internet forums, encouraging others to bring guns and to be ready for action. Trump himself had called for decisive measures to overturn the election, kicking off the mayhem at a rally beforehand, while Rudy Giuliani encouraged Trump’s followers to subvert the Congressional process in favor of “trial by combat.” The security forces in Washington, D.C., regardless of whatever they expected to happen, were well aware that a large group of angry racists would be coming to town.
However, the vast D.C. security forces were practically absent from the scene. Instead, the burden of policing fell upon what appeared like the functional equivalent of museum guards. This was in stark contrast to the heavily militarized police presence that the nation witnessed during the summer—at that time, battalions of riot police attacked peaceful protesters who were demonstrating against the racist murder of George Floyd. But this time, several months after that brutal display of police aggression, the nation witnessed such minimal security as if it were an invitation to the Trump mob to overwhelm Congress. The result: invitation accepted.
Trump’s fascist thugs, themselves, were not such a formidable force, either. They lacked any coordinated discipline, having less the appearance of Hitler’s stormtroopers, but rather behaving more like rabid mallgoers storming a Black Friday sale. Their assault on democracy encroached as far as it did, not because of the strength of the mob below, but because of the permissive and treacherous leadership above. Someone in Washington, D.C. had decided to deploy only scarce numbers of police, and had given the police instructions to passively avoid confrontation or arrests. This enabled the racist mob to invade Congress like would-be conquerors—just as their inept leader, in a similarly delusional style, parades himself as a would-be autocrat.
Subsequent reporting by journalists began to show evidence that Trump, himself, had taken measures to ensure that security would be both insufficient and deferential to the assault. Various Trump appointees handed down the orders, leaving Congress as an easy mark to be fed to the appetite of the fascist thugs. Trump’s high-ranking allies—in Congress, the police, and the executive branch—willfully created the ideal conditions for the attack to penetrate the Capitol, and most of these leaders then cowered in silence once it became clear that the attack was a scandalous failure.
Every lynch mob has its ringleaders, and just like the lynch mobs of the old Jim Crow, they operate in accordance with a section of the elite—politicians who use the mob to further their own ambitions for power. Neither the corrupt leaders, nor the vicious thugs they incite to action, have any place in a democratic society. The new civil rights movement must fight for the downfall of these enemies of the people, as a necessary condition for defending the basic rights of all people.
A house divided
Before the U.S. Civil War, the motto of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, “No union with slaveholders!” was an argument against forming any government that protected slavery. It was, therefore, a demand to dissolve the union. However, President Lincoln, in his fight to preserve the union in the midst of the war, gave a more profound and powerful meaning to the idea for a democratic union without slaveholders. On January 1st, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and on that date, the war to save the union became a war to end slavery. The cause of democracy, itself, had become synonymous with cause of abolition.
Today, this nation has arrived at a similar crossroads. American democracy cannot long survive while clinging to its foundation as a white man’s republic. The emergence of a fascist movement makes this painfully clear.
Waves of immigration are changing the United States and Europe. Millions of people—from every neocolonial outpost in Latin America, Africa, and Asia—are running for their lives, seeking refuge in the very nations that are responsible for destroying their homes. These waves will only grow larger, as the economy further destabilizes and as the global climate crisis further threatens human existence.
The international crisis presents a choice of only two roads. First, the United States and Europe can embark on a path towards social equality, towards a plan for saving human lives all over the world, towards solving the greatest challenges that human kind has ever faced. Or second, the imperialist nations can attempt to cling to their crumbling towers of wealth and status, boasting with drunken reverence for their imagined superiority, while the world drowns in its own blood.
Between these two roads, there is no middle path. But nevertheless, moderate and liberal politicians all over the world keep looking for a magical compromise, a truce between the pro-authoritarian and the pro-democratic tendencies that will somehow allow their nations to return to business as usual. In the United States, the incoming Biden administration has emphasized its priority of “healing” our social divisions and “reaching across the aisle” towards the Trump forces that have attempted to overthrow democracy. In response to Biden extending an olive branch, the fascist Trump followers will break that branch and use it to attack Biden. The fact is that business can never return to usual, and that the world cannot move beyond its present problems until those problems are solved.
Politicians and media pundits are also mistaken in believing that saving the “institutions” of the government is equivalent to saving democracy, itself. Quite the contrary: those institutions are what allowed Trump to gain power in the first place. The institutions of the Electoral College, the Senate, the courts, the gerrymandered districting, and the systematic disenfranchisement of nonwhite voters—all of these factors proved to be among Trump’s greatest assets. Every ounce of power that Trump had gained, the height to which he rose above the law, these were the gifts imparted to Trump by the very institutions and the Constitution that he disdained. In contrast, the U.S. Constitution provided very limited options for removing Trump from power, while its institutions offered little to no protection against Trump’s authoritarian abuses.
Democracy is not a law, or an institution, or even a voting process. Democracy is the power of the great mass of the population, governing society in its own interests, free from the despotism of a wealthy and powerful elite who would seek to rule over them. Some of the greatest expressions of democracy in history, such as the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., were made by people who could not vote. And some of the worst examples of tyranny, including Mussolini and Hitler, ascended to power through a legal, constitutional process. It is impossible to understand that history when viewing it through the narrow lens of constitutional law and institutional grandeur.
During the summer of 2020, a mass civil rights movement marched through the streets, demanding justice for George Floyd and all victims of racist police violence. That movement expressed the most democratic virtues of the American people, inspiring the whole world to join in the demonstrations. It was the most powerful denunciation of Trump during his entire presidency, and was a bold confrontation against the government institutions that have systematically protected the ability of the police to murder black and brown Americans with impunity. That movement—speaking with its own voice, and built upon the human desire for justice rather than the institutional decree for order—possessed a more democratic character than all the institutions of government and all the words of the Constitution.
To defend democracy, that new civil rights movement must mobilize in the streets again. Our movement is the only power that can lead the way out of the crisis. Four years ago, BAMN made the following statement about the task of our movement in history, which we still endorse today:
Abraham Lincoln once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He spoke these words during a crisis in which the nation could no longer sustain the contradiction of being the land of the free and the home of slavery at the same time. One hundred years later, the nation had to resolve the contradiction of whether it represented the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the nightmare of Jim Crow. Today’s contradictions are now strained to the breaking point, testing whether we can survive with a Statue of Liberty in the harbor and a militarized wall across the southern border. Both visions for America cannot endure; one must prevail and overthrow the other. And in spite of the cleverest compromises of American politicians, they can never make the house stand half slave and half free.
Our movement is not responsible for holding up a divided house—our task is to build the struggle for freedom, equality, and democracy as the only solid foundation for our future. And to put things another way: this house has a big wall that needs to be knocked down—by any means necessary.
2021.01.07, 2021.01.10