The 2024 Presidential Election: Fascists Regain Power

By David Starr

 

Eventually, people will recover from the shock at seeing the Republicans win the presidential election, in a landslide. Something is terribly wrong with the United States, and the two ruling parties have not helped, being hellbent on holding on to power. 

 

Both parties may differ in some respects in regards to tactics, but ideologically, they have the same goal: maintaining and expanding the rule of capital, and usually at the expense of workers and the poor. 

 

Having Donald Trump in as president again (more like tyrant) and Congress now controlled by the Republicans, there’s a chance that fascism will move further ahead in imposing the Republicans’ right-wing agenda. Project 2025 makes up that agenda. On its website, the culprits who have forged Project 2025 make it sound like its benefitting the working class, stopping corruption, and promoting democracy. It is made for imposing conservative “values” on the USA and its people.

 

On its site, the creators of Project 2025 belch out the same old demonization of liberals and the left. It says, “The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.”

 

Could it be that right-wingers can’t differentiate between liberals and the left? It appears that way, lumping all their opponents and enemies together. 

 

It goes on: “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country form the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.” With the election of Trump, and the Republicans controlling Congress, it looks like the right has a chance to push their reactionary agenda.

 

The site mentions that the “2025 Presidential Transition Project is being organized by The Heritage [Fascist] Foundation,” which has had close associations with Trump and his first regime. And they are of course still working together. 

 

Project 2025 is called “a historic movement, brought together by over 100 respected organizations from the conservative movement, to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.” Sounds noble, but Trump and the Republicans are a part of the Deep State, despite the attempt to make them look anti-establishment. 

 

Here are some of Project 2025’s goals: 

 

• Secure the border, finish building the wall, and deport illegal aliens

 

• De-weaponize the federal Government by increasing accountability and oversight of the FBI and DOJ.

 

• Unleash American energy production to reduce energy prices

 

• Cut the growth of government spending to reduce inflation

 

• make federal bureaucrats more accountable to the democratically elected President and Congress

 

• Improve education by moving control and funding of education from DC bureaucrats directly to parents and state and local governments

 

• Ban biological males from competing in woman’s sports

 

These goals amount to scapegoating undocumented immigrants, take over government to weaponize it with the right-wing agenda and have the control of it by one person, i.e., Trump, cutting government oversight where the elites will further profit while the working class and poor languish, having Trump loyalists in government subservient to Trump, destroy public education by putting it at the mercy of unqualified people in each state, and scapegoating the LGBT community.

 

One disturbing trend is members of the working class voting for Trump and the Republicans. Quoting Matt Karp in Jacobin, “…the Democrats’ position was doubly dire. Across the last decade, the defining pattern of national politics has been class dealignment: a vast migration of the working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, matched by a flood of professional-class voters away from the Republicans.” 

 

In particular, since 1992, the Democrats have focused on being more pro-business than prioritizing the interests of the working class and poor. There is a limited attempt to side with those demographics, but there has been the emergence of Third Way/corporate/neoliberal Democrats who have neglected them. 

 

Now, there seems to be a switch, with workers supporting Republicans and professionals supporting Democrats.

 

A major reason for many voters to side with Trump and the Republicans is the state of the economy. These voters think that Trump governed well in growing the economy, while Biden was less able. The Biden administration’s record on policies isn’t all bad and all good. But Trump’s attempts at character assassination made Biden look like he failed on the economy. Karp writes, “Almost 80 percent of the voters who listed the economy as their top issue cast a ballot for Trump.”

 

Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker that: 

 

“Electing Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake. But America has now twice elected him as its president. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario–that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly pandemic, who tries to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, and threatens retribution against his political enemies could win–and yet, it happened.”

 

A big factor for the Democrats’ loss was adhering to an unsuccessful corporate/neoliberal agenda, which they have done for years. The Democratic leadership refuses to change the course of the party and thus gets bad results more often than not. 

 

Biden didn’t help the situation by insisting on staying in the race, given his disastrous debate with Trump and his mental decline. When Harris took over, she only had a little over three months to campaign. But it’s also Biden’s stance on Gaza that ruined his legacy as president. He cautioned Israel to be more civil in its mass murder of Palestinians, but when rebuffed, Biden still sent weapons to Israel to kill even more Palestinians. 

 

In The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson writes, “It will take some time sort out all that went wrong, but let’s begin with the current president, who was responsible for a host of necessary and long-overdue changes in national policy, but who was also incapable of making the case for them to the American people.” Biden is a long-time neoliberal and a Zionist for that matter. Those two characteristics have not been beneficial for the Democratic Party, as it leaned right-ward and thus didn’t incorporate a real left/progressive agenda that would be popular with most U.S. citizens. 

 

It remains to be seen whether Trump, and Project 2025, will be successful. Meyerson doesn’t think so:

 

“It’s important for Democrats to remember that when Trump’s performance in office was still fresh in the public’s mind four years ago, he was soundly defeated. There’s no reason to think his second term will be any more successful than his first, and not just because he has become even more unhinged as he’s aged. His tariffs could restart inflation; his deportations and the abuses he will unleash will prove highly divisive; the policies of a MAGA-tized Senate and federal agencies, determined to destroy the laws and regulations that protect public health, diminish corporate abuse, and ensure democratic elections will not win majority support among the public.”

 

Shock has to evolve into determination and resistance to oppose Trump and Project 2025. There’s really no choice, since fascism will supposedly eat away at governmental structures and the degree of democracy that exits in the U.S. Democrats must bring back its focus on the working class and poor, without caving to Republican demands in the name of “bi-partisanship.” 

 

The future of the United States depends on it.