Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

The Democratic and Republican Paths to Fascism
Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
21 Dec 2016
🖨️ Print Article

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The masks have come off, revealing the face of fascism among the Democrats. With War Fascism supreme in one party, and White Supremacist Fascism at the helm in the other (also warlike) party, it appears that “the winner of the 2016 election was the bipartisan, multi-ethnic War Party.” The Left can’t “game” this situation, or fool with the CIA. “For Black and brown folks and white progressives, there can be no alliance with either faction.”

The Democratic and Republican Paths to Fascism

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“The Democratic Party has been a wondrous vehicle for integration of Black America into the mainstream – of fascism.”

With their pell-mell rush to construct a martial, McCarthyite domestic order, the Deep State Democrats have mooted the debate over lesser evilism. The orchestrated hysteria against Russians and their domestic “agents” and “front groups” targets as an enemy of the bipartisan State anyone that questions the rationale for imperial warfare and the rule of the rich. The shock of Donald Trump’s victory tore away the Democrats’ masks, revealing the fascists beneath. When Wall Street’s “core values” are threatened -- meaning, the right to move money and jobs across borders at will, and to forcibly extend corporate power throughout the globe -- civil liberties go out the window. Thus, all but a slim slither of the Wall Street-dominated Democrats now march in lock step with Republicans -- the main difference being that the Democratic ranks are racially integrated. In Democratic America, the fascists adhere to the rules of diversity.

The bill to fund intelligence agencies that passed the House on November 30 established “an executive branch interagency committee to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments...through front groups, covert broadcasting, media manipulation, disinformation or forgeries, funding agents of influence, incitement, offensive counterintelligence, assassinations, or terrorist acts.” Every category listed, except assassinations and terror, is actually a code word for political speech that can, and will, be used to target those engaged in “undermining faith in American democracy” -- such as Black Agenda Report and other left publications defamed as “fake news” outlets by the Washington Post. The bill passed overwhelmingly, with only six Republicans and 24 Democrats voting “nay.” Of these dissenting lawmakers, only five are Black: Barbara Lee (CA), Karen Bass (CA), John Conyers (MI), Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ), and Yvette Clarke (NY).

Yes, the Democratic Party has been a wondrous vehicle for integration of Black America into the mainstream – of fascism.

“When Wall Street’s “core values” are threatened, civil liberties go out the window.”

The clarion call of anti-Russianism has served to unify both parties of the rich in opposition to President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign stance against rampant regime change and escalating war tensions with the Kremlin. House Republican leaders earlier this month signaled that they would oppose Trump’s threat to impose heavy taxes on corporations that ship jobs overseas. And Trump’s cabinet appointments, top-heavy with generals, scream everlasting belligerence -- with the exception of Rex Tillerson, the Exxon chief picked for secretary of state, whose corporate interests require peaceful engagement with Russia.

So, the winner of the 2016 election was the bipartisan, multi-ethnic War Party. The prospects for avoiding a nuclear holocaust now largely rest on Donald Trump’s skills as a peacemaker and his personal disinclination to regime change: the slimmest thread imaginable.

Fascism moves on two tracks in the U.S.A. The corporate Democratic track moves on war. The Republican (White Man’s Party) track moves on racially coded law and order. Both tracks overlap, and both parties are switch hitters. Sometimes they conflict but, for Black and brown folks and white progressives, there can be no alliance with either faction. There is no gaming these gangsters, no fooling around with the CIA, which has assumed the political point position in the anti-Russian/Trump crusade. As Black Lives Matter stated, after the votes were in:

“Because it is our duty to win, we will continue to fight. And today, like every day before it, we demand reparations, economic justice, a commitment to black futures and an end to the war on black people, in the United States and around the world.

“The work will be harder, but the work is the same.”

The War Party Democrats and White Man’s Party Republicans will both put Black Lives Matter activists in prison if these factions’ “core values” -- the interconnected evils of war and white supremacy -- are deemed at risk. Donald Trump’s supporters and surrogates said so, openly, during the campaign.

(“What we witnessed in Ferguson and Baltimore and Baton Rouge was a collapse of the social order” said Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke. “So many of the actions of the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter transcends peaceful protest and violates the code of conduct we rely on—I call it anarchy.”)

In the brief span since the election, the Democrats have reinvented and set in motion an actual fascist mechanism for political repression that threatens every movement that questions the prevailing social order and the U.S. drive for global dominance. Most Black Democratic politicians, like pitiful camp followers, have become War Fascists.

The time for appealing to “progressives” to break their ties with the Democrats is past. Since November 8, the Democrats have definitively rejected peace, trashed civil liberties and gone over to “the dark side.”

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


More Stories


  • Hands off Uhuru logo
    Solyana Bekele
    FBI Storms African Liberation Movement with Fabricated Charges: U.S. Government Escalates Brutal Assault
    06 Mar 2024
    The Uhuru 3 were recently indicted by the federal government, continuing a historical pattern of connecting revolutionary Black organizations and movements to an outside malign state actor to destroy…
  • The Turkana people protesting at the Africa Climate Summit
    Aby L. Sène
    Western Climate Agenda Goes Against African Development
    06 Mar 2024
    Carbon and biodiversity offsets are the latest imperialist weapons used against African people and their nations. Self-determination is the key to ecological health for the continent.
  • Rosa Parks
    Ingrid Banks , Jaime Alves
    Antiblackness and Palestinian Humanity: A Call to Resist Fear
    06 Mar 2024
    Internationalism is the path toward Black liberation. Black people must resist the push to silo our movements and move in this spirit of Rosa Parks - with fearless integrity.
  • A mourner places incense at a memorial for Aaron Bushnell
    Julia Wright
    A Love Supreme
    06 Mar 2024
    Aaron Bushnell's act of self-immolation is a symbol and a call for people around the world to break their silence and fight for a free Palestine.
  • Chicago racist terror of 1919
    Abayomi Azikiwe
    Cultural Renaissance, Economic Crises and the Struggle Against Fascism, 1919-1945
    06 Mar 2024
    In the time between the two imperialist wars, the spirit and politics of Pan-Africanism grew. African Americans continued to organize and built movements to resist rising fascism.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us