[An authoritarian bloc with a fascist core is driving for control
of all branches of the federal government; the rest is detail.]
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MAGA AUTHORITARIAN RULE OR THIRD RECONSTRUCTION?  
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Max Elbaum
June 20, 2023
Convergence Magazine
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_ An authoritarian bloc with a fascist core is driving for control of
all branches of the federal government; the rest is detail. _

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Thirty years after its publication, _THE AGE OF EXTREMES_
[[link removed]] by
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm still stands as the best history of
the “short twentieth century (1914-1991).” Every chapter of this
pro-socialist “story of a victory from the point of view of the
vanquished” holds important lessons for those of us fighting for
working-class power. In the U.S. today the chapter on the rise of
fascism holds particular relevance.

Hobsbawm makes the crucial point that, for all their boasting about
“capturing the street,” neither the Italian nor the German fascist
movements “conquered power” via any kind of violent uprising.
Rather, they came to power “in constitutional’ fashion.” He
adds:

“The novelty of fascism was that, once in power, it refused to play
the old political games, and took over completely where it could.”

The savviest operators among those who are now threatening to impose
white Christian Nationalist rule on the US learned that history
decades ago. They used it to craft a take-and-permanently-hold power
strategy  adapted to the specifics of the US constitutional
system—and their persistent, think-long-term effort has paid off.
The authoritarian bloc, now operating under the banner of MAGA,
has captured the Republican Party
[[link removed]] and
the Supreme Court
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and holds trifectas in 22 states
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steadily moving ahead with plans to corner complete federal power in
2024.

This is the underlying political dynamic that we must keep in mind
amid the media frenzy over Trump’s indictment and how that might
affect the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

MAGA can be stopped if we accurately understand the existence and
composition of the country’s anti-MAGA majority
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can help catalyze it into action. But that will require opponents of
authoritarianism to block the specific routes by which MAGA intends to
take power, effectively deploy our energies and resources, and gain
enough strength to take the offensive.

Trump or no Trump, MAGA is pressing ahead

The strength of the indictment in the “classified documents” case
has produced an uptick in contention over who should be the MAGA
standard-bearer in 2024. Worries about over-reach—present since the
SCOTUS overturned Roe
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been more frequently expressed. But no significant section of the
Republican Party is stepping away from the drive toward authoritarian
rule. Not the presidential hopefuls who are “putting some
distance” between themselves and Trump (Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim
Scott). Not the Senate leaders who have stayed quiet about Trump being
indicted (Mitch McConnell). And not two MAGA Supreme Court Justices,
who, out of worry at the Court’s loss of legitimacy
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calculated that one ruling upholding Black voting rights will allow
them to play a more credible role in MAGA’s drive to power.

And certainly not the MAGA base, which post-indictment is even more
convinced that white male Christian conservatives are the most
persecuted group
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the U.S., with millions believing that using violence
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change that is fully justified. 

Electoral College, gerrymandering, voter suppression

In Italy, fascism came to power constitutionally in 1922 when
the King appointed Mussolini
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Minister. In Germany in 1932, Hitler was appointed Chancellor
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President Paul von Hindenburg. The undemocratic features of the U.S.
constitutional/electoral system are different from those of
1920s-‘30s Germany and Italy, so aspiring authoritarians have
crafted approaches that take advantage of U.S. specifics.

Key to authoritarian strategies here are the racially biased Electoral
College in combination with a federal system that gives significant
power to individual states; the winner-take-all-two-party structure;
and the failure of the Constitution to protect elections in some
significant ways. Absent Constitutional limits on money in elections
and safeguards for the principle of “one person, one vote,”
gerrymandering, voter suppression and the outsize influence of
corporate interests have run amok.

White supremacists took advantage of these features to maintain the
Jim Crow system in the South for close to a century. (See especially
Sarah Churchwell, American Fascism: It Has Happened Here
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Jim Crow was not dismantled until the 1960s upsurge spearheaded by the
Black-led Civil Rights Movement forced passage of the 1965 Voting
Rights Act. The mass pressure that drove that victory also compelled
both legislative and judicial bodies to curb some of the worst
gerrymandering and election money abuses.

But the racist right never accepted these as irreversible steps, just
as they never accepted the gains of the New Deal era (trade union
rights, social programs), or the extension of social programs
(Medicare) and women’s rights (Roe) coming out of the 1960s. They
knew that these were not explicitly codified in the U.S. Constitution,
and to the extent they were implicit, there was a reading of the
Constitution (“originalism
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that could render them unenforceable.

Because of this, changing the rules that govern electoral terrain
became a top priority for the instigators of the right-wing backlash
that began in the late 1960s and became dominant after the 1980
election of Ronald Reagan. The Federalist Society, founded in 1982,
was the main vehicle for carrying out this strategy
[[link removed]].
 Legal work (establishing a pipeline for right-wing lawyers to become
judges; fleshing out originalist theory; filing suits in carefully
chosen cases) was synergized with issue campaigns. “Third Party”
efforts were rejected in favor of taking over the Republican Party.
For a recap of the results of their painstaking, well-funded, and
ruthless work (gutting the Voting Rights Act, ruling that challenges
to partisan gerrymandering could not be made in federal courts,
gutting campaign finance reform,  overturning Roe, etc.) see Michael
Podhorzer’s article “To the Supreme Court, the 20th Century Was
Wrongly Decided
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Red States preview a MAGA-ruled country

The consequences have been devastating. They can be seen most vividly
in numerous “Republican trifecta” states,  in both  the
conditions imposed by new legislation
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inhabitants of those states and the arrangements MAGA has put in
place
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ensure that they remain in power.

In states they control, Republicans have pushed through extreme curbs
on abortion [[link removed]];
sweeping restrictions on gender affirming medical care
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youths; bans or limits on discussion of sexuality, history and/or
race/racism in schools, and loosening already tattered gun control and
safety measures. Legislation loosening restrictions on child labor
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coming out of the shadows in states where right-to-work laws and other
anti-worker, anti-poor people policies hold sway.

GOP governors and legislators are simultaneously putting in
place measures that undermine majority rule
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make successful electoral challenges to their one-party rule very
difficult if not impossible. Voter suppression is now business as
usual
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Republican-controlled states. Gerrymandering districts is
giving Republicans a grip on state legislature majorities
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super-majorities) even in states where the electorate is split close
to 50-50 (for example, Wisconsin
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Carolina
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In Ohio
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states [[link removed]], they’re taking aim at
direct democracy by trying to limit the initiative process.  And with
control over state legislatures, Republicans have moved to silence
or reduce the power of elected bodies
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cities that include large people of color populations and tend to vote
Democratic for example in Mississippi
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in Texas
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Essentially the GOP has put in place “authoritarian enclaves
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where they can implement their agenda as they pursue the goal of
capturing full federal power. And they use the benefits of these
enclaves to their advantage in that pursuit – increasing their share
of “safe” House seats, suppressing the vote to affect close races
for Senate seats or in the contention for that state’s electoral
college votes for President. All this will only get worse if the
Supreme Court gives them a favorable ruling at some point on
the Independent State Legislature Doctrine
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The 2024 election and beyond

All this shapes the terrain on which the Left has to fight through
November 2024 and beyond. Three major imperatives stand out.

One, we need to be as clear-eyed as MAGA’s core on the fundamental
political dynamic at work in the US today. The specifics of the
DeSantis-Trump contention, the terms of House Speaker McCarthy’s
revised deal with the Freedom Caucus, and the twists and turns of each
legal case against Trump need to be tracked to produce the most
effective messaging and “rapid response” actions. But we can’t
let these things distract us from the main story: An authoritarian
bloc with a fascist core is driving for control of all branches of the
federal government; the rest is detail.

Second, if MAGA succeeds, not only will most people in the US and
across the globe face more dire conditions, but organizing to change
the direction of the country will become qualitatively more difficult.
Pushing for the deep structural changes it will take to address
inequality, climate change, restrictions on democracy and militarism
is difficult under an administration over which the growing but
still-fragmented progressive world has some influence. It will be
orders of magnitude harder if we are facing a Justice Department that
acts as if McCarthyism was too cautious; an administration that lauds
“stand your ground” killers and white supremacist militia members
as heroes; and a judiciary and NLRB owned and controlled by Charles
Koch.

Electoral victory is essential but not sufficient

Third, electoral terrain will be the main battlefront against MAGA at
least through 2024. MAGA’s “constitutional” route to permanent
minority rule runs through winning or stealing elections. So all
candidates of the party MAGA now controls need to be defeated at every
level and those results need to be protected. Across the anti-MAGA
spectrum different groups and individuals will pursue different types
of work and have different priorities between now and 2024. But some
need to give organizing priority to battleground states and
congressional districts, and we need to come together to vote
anti-MAGA on election day.

At the same time, without a militant and organized base in the
millions that makes its weight felt in all aspects of public life,
partisans of social justice will not get beyond fighting one defensive
election after another. And catastrophe awaits if we lose just once.
Building that kind of base requires deep organizing work
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building/rebuilding grassroots participatory organizations, and making
a compelling narrative about this country’s history
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“new common sense” of tens of millions. 

In the 19th century defeating the Confederacy required the
combination of years of abolitionist organizing, the election of
Lincoln in 1860s, the power of the U.S. (“union”) Army, and the
“general strike [[link removed]]” of
the enslaved to defeat the Confederacy and bring about Reconstruction.
In the 20th century, it took a decade of civil rights organizing and
militant action combined with electoral repudiation of Barry
“desegregation-is-a-states’-rights-issue
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Goldwater in 1964 to produce a Second Reconstruction ending Jim Crow.

Will the next chapter of US history be a reprise of the Confederacy
and Jim Crow? Or will we be able to achieve a Third Reconstruction
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_Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board
and the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to
Lenin, Mao and Che 
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Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New
Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is
also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of Power
Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections 
[[link removed]](OR Books, 2022)._

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