For A Mass Labor Party In The USA

2 months ago

SF: 'Waymo Has Got To Go': Demonstrators Call For Robotaxis To Leave San Francisco

www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/sf-waymo-has-got-to-go-demonstrators-call-for-21296028.php

By Bay City News Service

Jan 14, 2026

A sign calling for the removal of robotaxis from the streets of San Francisco, Calif., at a rally on Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. Waymo has been expanding its autonomous vehicle services across the Bay Area. (Andres Jimenez Larios/ Bay City News)

A sign calling for the removal of robotaxis from the streets of San Francisco, Calif., at a rally on Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. Waymo has been expanding its autonomous vehicle services across the Bay Area. (Andres Jimenez Larios/ Bay City News)

Andres Jimenez Larios/Bay City News

A small group of demonstrators gathered outside one of Waymo's car depots in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon to denounce its presence in the city.

Members from several advocacy groups held a rally outside the exit of a fenced parking lot in the Bayview neighborhood, calling for local and state leaders to stop Waymo activities and introduce accountability methods for other robotaxi companies.

Steve Zeltzer with the United Front Committee for a Labor Party demanded that Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company owned by Google and its parent company Alphabet, halt all activities in San Francisco. He said major natural or man-made disasters could be made worse by autonomous vehicles that stop moving and block roadways or take up resources from first responders following the shutdown of telecommunication equipment.

"A major earthquake is going to happen in San Francisco and the Wi-Fi and the other infrastructure will shut down," said Zeltzer. "[Waymo vehicles are] dependent on the electric facilities in San Francisco. We have to shut down these Waymo vehicles, and we have to demand that there be accountability, which there is not in San Francisco."

A series of massive power outages in December left parts of San Francisco in the dark, turning off stop lights and other communication equipment. Waymo vehicles came under scrutiny from public officials when cars in the affected areas stopped moving and blocked roadways for other vehicles and emergency responders.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and several supervisors criticized Waymo for creating a safety hazard and pressured the company to adopt safeguards for future events.

Lurie initially welcomed robotaxi companies onto Market Street after approving the reopening of the central roadway to private ride-sharing vehicles in August of last year. He said it was part of a plan to provide more transportation to help revitalize downtown.

San Francisco Taxi Worker Alliance Board Member Mark Gruberg has been a taxi driver since 1983 and echoed the other protesters' sentiments. He said he believed Waymo's activities pose a risk to the livelihoods of transportation workers.

"Transport workers, cab drivers, Uber and Lyft drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers, shuttle drivers, we're all in the crosshairs of this as these systems take over," said Gruberg. "At a certain point the automatic systems are going to say, 'We don't need those stinking people.'"

Gruberg also said taxi workers can provide a more positive and comfortable experience than others form of transit. He said Waymo's accessibility network, a group of partners dedicated to help transport people living with physical, visual, cognitive and sensory disabilities, was ineffective.

"They're really trying to sell people a bill of goods on this issue of disabilities, people with disabilities are far better off if they have an actual human driver," said Gruberg.

However, several disability rights organizations have praised the robotaxi service for its ease of use and what they say is a more comfortable environment for riders wary of being driven by other people.

Tony Stephens, assistant vice president of communications at the American Foundation for the Blind, said people with or without service animals have been illegally discriminated against by human drivers. He said robotaxis have brought a large sense of comfort to people like himself.

"Even for those who do not use a guide dog, but still can't drive because of blindness or vision loss, it's impossible to describe what that sense of independence feels like when your whole life, you have had to rely on the favor of others to drive you around," he said.

Waymo continues to grow its operations across the Bay Area. The company received approval from its regulatory authority, the California Public Utilities Commission, to operate on select freeways and into San Jose's airport.

Data reported to the commission shows how Waymo has exponentially grown in popularity across all the markets it operates in, from averaging 100,000 passengers each month in early 2024 to regularly moving over 1 million people by late 2025.

"Waymo is on a mission to be the world's most trusted driver, making it safe, more accessible and more sustainable for riders to get around," said spokesperson Katherine Barna. "We serve hundreds of thousands of trips every week, offering a reliable transportation option to diverse groups of riders and improving road safety in cities where we operate. We remain committed to open dialogue with the communities we serve."

Copyright © 2026 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area. … See MoreSee Less

SF: 'Waymo Has Got To Go': Demonstrators Call For Robotaxis To Leave San Francisco

www.sfgate.com

A small group of demonstrators gathered outside one of Waymo’s car depots in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon to denounce its presence in the city.

For A Mass Labor Party In The USA

2 months ago

Higher Education in the Time of Fascist Plague
socialistproject.ca/2026/01/higher-education-in-the-time-of-fascist-plague/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPD_ZJl…
PUBLIC GOODS • January 1, 2026 • Henry A. Giroux

The horrors of fascism have returned, not as ghosts, but as a plague, fueled by racial hatred and historical amnesia, infiltrating schools, universities, and the public sphere through state violence, fear, censorship, and manufactured ignorance. Across the globe, fascist forces – emboldened by resurgent colonial logics, neoliberal cruelty, and virulent white nationalism – have transformed universities into battlegrounds for democracy’s future. Dissent against a genocidal war in Gaza is not merely discouraged but criminalized, while political intimidation and extortion directed at major institutions, especially higher education, are recast as the new language of governance. In this critical moment, the urgency of defending higher education has never been clearer. As both a site of knowledge production and democratic possibility, higher education must resist becoming a tool of fascist and neoliberal control. Its role in nurturing critical thought, social responsibility, and civic courage is central to the survival of democratic values in the face of rising authoritarianism.

It is no longer enough to rehearse the familiar language of education’s democratic mission or nostalgically invoke its emancipatory promise. Those ideals must be rethought and radicalized; they must be expanded, sharpened, and reclaimed as ethical and political imperatives equal to the darkness of our times, especially the threat posed by neoliberal fascism. In this instance, what is needed is an argument for understanding higher education not as a refuge from politics but as one of its most decisive battlegrounds, a place where public consciousness is shaped, where the struggle over truth and power unfolds, and where the pedagogical conditions for resisting emerging fascism must be forged anew. Such recognition compels us to confront the deeper forces shaping this crisis, to ask what forms of power are waging war on education and what is truly at stake in this escalating assault.

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Faculty meeting, University of Vienna, 1938.
Education – A Battlefield
What is at stake, however, is far more than a rejection of gangster capitalism and the global misery it produces. The deeper danger lies in recognizing that education has become the primary battlefield in the cultural and ideological wars waged by authoritarianism. Neoliberal capitalism, in its fascist mutation, does not simply impoverish; it seeks to colonize consciousness, to erode the capacity for critical thought, and to replace democratic imagination with the deadening certainties of hierarchy and fear. Universities now sit at a dangerous crossroad where truth is contested, civic memory is either erased or preserved, and the formative conditions for democratic life are nourished, or systematically destroyed. To defend higher education, then, is to reclaim its power to cultivate the forms of agency, solidarity, and critical awareness necessary to challenge the lies, brutalities, racism, corruption, and manufactured ignorance that sustain authoritarian rule. It is to insist that education remain a crucial site of critique and possibility – one capable of expanding the horizon of the future at a moment when fascism seeks to close it down.

Such a task demands thinking the unthinkable: not merely reforming neoliberal capitalism but abolishing it, and cultivating pedagogical spaces where new modes of agency, solidarity, value, and identity can be forged. Only through such radical reimagining can education become the ground from which democratic life is rebuilt and the struggle for a liberated future renewed.

The threat to American society is not merely external, evident in the lawlessness and militarization that now permeate almost every aspect of public life. It resides in the pedagogical terrain itself, in the ways authoritarian movements mobilize cultural institutions, digital ecosystems, and state power to produce a public consciousness increasingly habituated to cruelty, disposability, white nationalism, and historical amnesia. Trump’s educational politics, steeped in racial hatred, ultra-nationalism, and authoritarian contempt for reason, exemplify a broader global project: the transformation of education into a tool for consolidating hierarchy, manufacturing consent, and converting higher education into laboratories of indoctrination. To confront this project, it is not enough to criticize his corruption or his embrace of economic exploitation, staggering inequality, unadulterated cruelty, and racial hierarchies. We must expose the cultural fantasies and pedagogical practices that animate these policies, the false promises of belonging they extend, and the forms of political and ethical illiteracy they cultivate.

What is required, then, is the radical reimagining of pedagogy. Higher education must reclaim academic freedom, dissent, critical thought, and democratic governance not as abstract principles but as urgent practices of resistance. This means creating pedagogical conditions that nurture individual and collective agency, reconnect critique with social change, and transform private suffering into shared political consciousness. It means building classrooms and campuses where justice can be named, where inequality can be confronted, and where democratic forms of life can be rehearsed and renewed. It also means forging solidarities among faculty, students, unions, workers, and social movements, nationally and internationally, as part of a broader struggle for equality, justice, and freedom.

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The task before us is clear: for higher education to endure as a democratic public good, it must take decisive action. It must recognize that democracy cannot exist without an informed public, that justice requires a language capable of confronting and narrating injustice, and that freedom depends on a pedagogy dedicated to nurturing the fragile yet vital work of civic courage – and the refusal of complicity with the mobilizing passions of fascist politics. Stephen Rohde, focusing on Northwestern University, warns that universities must resist succumbing to “Trump’s ongoing campaign, steeped in hypocrisy, self-delusion, bribery, and cowardice… to dismantle the independence of American colleges and universities,” for doing so would make them complicit in cementing the bigoted regime of MAGA. In the following, I will explore what this struggle demands and why the fight over higher education is, at its essence, a battle for the very meaning of radical democracy.

Higher Education Under Siege: The Rise of Neoliberal Fascism
Across the world, universities are under siege, and democracy itself is approaching a terrifying threshold. From Hungary to India to Turkey, governments are hollowing out the university’s democratic mission, attacking intellectual freedom, weaponizing history, policing critical pedagogy, and stripping away the civic imagination that sustains democratic life. What is at stake is not just the pursuit of truth but the moral and pedagogical fundamentals of democracy, a delicate balance between knowledge and responsibility, learning and the courage to bear witness. In these darkening times, it is not only knowledge that is being policed but agency itself, as the lifeblood of an informed, critical, and resistant citizenry.

When education is severed from its moral and civic grounding, democracy erodes. Truth becomes suspect, knowledge becomes dangerous, and educators are seen as enemies by those who fear the power of enlightened judgment and the task of holding power accountable. Once the classroom loses its capacity for moral witnessing, critical thinking, and civic courage, the conditions for domination are set. Ignorance becomes virtue, conscience is silenced, and democracy’s fragile bonds begin to fray from civil and legal rights to the institutions meant to protect them. In such a climate, the struggle for education is inseparable from the collective solidarities that make democratic life possible.

Theorists as diverse as Pierre Bourdieu and Thomas Pikety have noted in a number of books and essays how neoliberalism, a predatory form of capitalism, has waged war on the welfare state, dismantled the public sphere, and hollowed out the very notion of the common good. Masked by the rhetoric of freedom and efficiency, it elevates market logic into a totalizing ideology, demanding that every domain of life bend to economic imperatives, thereby separating economic practices from social costs, and in doing so disparages any viable notion of social responsibility. In practice, it concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite, celebrates ruthless individualism, and commodifies the most sacred dimensions of human existence. The social wreckage it leaves behind, systemic racism, militarism, mass precarity, and staggering inequality, is not an aberration but a defining feature of a politics built on dispossession, domination, and terminal exclusion. Paramjit Singh, writing in The Bullet, insightfully sums up neoliberalism’s bad-faith premises and the wreckage it produces. He is worth quoting at length:

“Across the world, neoliberalism has exhausted the moral and material foundations of the liberal order that once began as a promise of equality, justice, prosperity, efficiency, and freedom. In practice, it has produced deep inequality, widespread dispossession, ecological devastation, and the disintegration of collective life. However, neoliberalism’s most enduring damage lies not only in its economic consequences but also in its epistemic effects. It has weakened the categories through which societies understand justice, equality, community, and reason… In the neoliberal era, both dissent and reason have been profoundly degraded. Decades of globalization, financialization, and privatization have depoliticized everyday life, replacing collective struggle with individualized anxiety. The rhetoric of choice, empowerment, and personal fulfillment has displaced the language of class. Under such conditions, dissent risks becoming spectacle, and reason risks degenerating into strategy, emptying both of their transformative political content. We inhabit a world that protests incessantly, yet rarely challenges the structural roots of crisis.
“As neoliberalism decays into an upgraded fascism, its machinery of repression intensifies. No longer able to legitimate itself, it blames its failures on immigrants, Black people, and all those deemed ‘other’. Dissent is criminalized, social life militarized, immigrants are abducted, and hate is normalized. Under Trump, this assault has crystallized into open warfare, rooted in the belief that critical education poses a direct threat to the authoritarian project.”
The Role of Higher Education in Defending Intellectual Freedom
This hostility is echoed at the highest levels of the regime. J.D. Vance, the US Vice President, has called higher education a “hostile institution.” Donald Trump rails against colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” stating that student protesters as “radicals,” “savages” and “jihadists” have been brainwashed by faculty “communists and terrorists.” These poisonous declarations shape policies that transform education into a site of repression, censorship, and laboratories of indoctrination. Moreover, these comments play a powerful role in crushing the critical functions of higher education, which is central to consolidating authoritarian power.

Against this backdrop, as fascist politics surges across the globe, it is crucial for educators to confront a set of urgent and unsettling questions. What does the rise of illiberal regimes mean for higher education in an age of manufactured fear, state terrorism, and state-sponsored lies? What responsibilities fall to universities when the very idea of democracy is under siege? What happens to a society when education is disparaged for its claims on democracy, civic culture withers, and academics are told to look away? What happens when educators are pressured into refusing to speak the unspeakable? In Trump’s America, and in countries around the world drifting toward fascism, silence becomes a form of complicity and inaction, a profound moral failure. The university cannot retreat into neutrality when the stakes are this high; its task is to defend the public imagination, nurture democratic agency, and refuse the tyranny that seeks to extinguish both.

Domestic Terrorism and Authoritarian Rule
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 marks not only a political crisis but a profound tragedy for democracy. Under Trump, we face a terrifying new era of state terrorism evident by the erosion of due process, mass abductions, vicious attacks on higher education, and the increasing presence of a police state. America is at war with itself at the same time as it threatens war in Venezuela. Racism and hatred have moved from the shadows to the seat of power, reshaping the political landscape with brutal clarity. ICE operates as a modern Gestapo, patrolling American cities with the explicit aim of terrorizing immigrants and people of color. State violence has become a public spectacle, disinformation has supplanted truth, and the democratic bonds of shared responsibility have withered into a corrosive politics of shared fear.

Trump is unhinged in his gleeful embrace of white supremacy, a malignant worldview that saturates every policy he advances and every cruelty he authorizes. His white nationalist rhetoric has grown so extreme that he publicly indulges in a fascist delirium of racial cleansing, declaring Somali immigrants “garbage,” insisting they “contribute nothing,” and claiming they come “from a country that stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” Such racist invective not only legitimizes cruelty and a politics of disposability as governance; it also fuels his broader assault on higher education. Institutions committed to critical inquiry, dangerous memories, academic freedom, equality, justice, and pluralist imaginaries are now treated as intolerable because they pose a direct threat to the racist hierarchies and exclusionary nationalism that anchor an authoritarian state. As The Guardian recently noted, Trump’s driving ideological conviction is that there is not enough racism in either the United States or Europe, a worldview that both fuels and legitimizes his most extreme authoritarian policies.

Trump represents the endpoint of gangster capitalism, the culmination of its violence, disposability, and moral rot. He is the twenty-first-century, hyper-charged incarnation of Patrick Bateman from the film American Psycho, a figure fashioned through cruelty, unchecked violence, narcissism, and the celebration of domination. Every policy Trump advances radiates this criminogenic logic, from the killing of more than 80 people in small boats in the Caribbean to cutting off life-saving aid through USAID, condemning millions to misery and death. He is the living embodiment of a death-machine, a leader for whom state-sanctioned violence and ruthless governance become not just a tool of control but a source of perverse pleasure.

The Assault on History: Erasing Memory and Shaping Power
Such hostility inevitably turns toward history, the most dangerous teacher of all. The subversive power of historical understanding, its capacity to illuminate suffering, expose injustice, and nurture democratic hope, is precisely why it has become a target for right-wing forces intent on erasing or sanitizing uncomfortable truths. This is not abstract: it shapes policy. Efforts to censor critical ideas, erase episodes like slavery, and eliminate depictions of systemic racism exemplify this dangerous turn. Donald Trump has openly stated that“he would punish schools that teach students accurate US history, including about slavery and racism in the country.”

Across the United States, an aggressive campaign is underway by right-wing groups to erase history and transform schools and universities into instruments of ideological control. Books are being banned, professors targeted, gender and ethnic studies eliminated, trans identity vilified, student protests criminalized, and honest historical narratives suppressed. This is not symbolic; it is the blueprint of fascist politics and governance, a state-sanctioned strategy to extinguish the democratic imagination.

If the emerging fascism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere is to be confronted, critical education must again become a vital force in democratic life. Higher education has to be understood not as a problem to be tamed but as an indispensable resource for rebuilding democracies in crisis. This begins with reclaiming a language capable of exposing lies, dismantling systems of oppression, and illuminating the corrupt relations of power that shape everyday life. Hannah Arendt understood that language reveals the hidden “crystallized elements” that make authoritarianism possible. The language of critical pedagogy, rooted in historical memory, justice, and ethical imagination, offers a powerful arsenal for truth-telling, resistance, and the refusal of untruths.

Under such circumstances, one crucial goal of critical pedagogy is to cultivate historical awareness, equipping students to use history as a vital lens for understanding the present. Through the critical act of remembrance, the history of fascism can be illuminated not as a relic of the past but as a persistent threat, its dormant traces capable of reawakening even in the most robust democracies. In this sense, history has to retain its subversive function, drawing on archives, historical sources, and suppressed narratives to challenge conventional wisdom and dominant ideologies.

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Higher Education Complicity: Universities as Enablers of Authoritarianism
From Florida to Texas, far-right governors are transforming education into a vehicle for repression. Teachers are threatened with criminal charges for acknowledging gender diversity or reproductive rights. At the national level, student activists, particularly those protesting US support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, are being surveilled, detained, and, in some cases, forcibly abducted and held in detention centers without transparency or due process. These actions mark a dangerous escalation in the use of state terrorism to crush dissent and stifle free speech.

Under Trump, the assault on higher education has taken on the character of political extortion. Universities are threatened with funding cuts, targeted investigations, and public humiliation unless they align with the regime’s ideological demands. Faced with this mafia-like pressure, many institutions, such as Columbia University, Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard, capitulate: some pay large financial ransoms to keep research programs afloat, submit to monitored or pre-approved syllabuses, push faculty into self-censorship, and watch as entire fields from gender studies to critical race scholarship are eliminated.

Once considered bastions of critical thought and academic freedom, these institutions have now aligned with the very political and ideological forces they should resist, transforming into silent collaborators in the rise of fascist politics. In capitulating, they have not only abandoned the integrity of higher education but become complicit in the creeping authoritarianism that seeks to control not only knowledge but the very language of dissent. These once-revered institutions are now incubators of conformity, breeding grounds for a new authoritarian oligarchy and class of billionaires that serves power rather than truth, injustice rather than justice, racial and class hierarchies rather than equality. In the face of this onslaught, they have traded their moral compass for the illusion of survival, surrendering their role as guardians of democracy to become facilitators of its destruction.

Academic freedom becomes a privilege dispensed by administrators rather than a right grounded in democratic life, and universities shrink into obedient service providers, enablers of authoritarianism rather than spaces of critique and possibility. The result is a culture of fear in which marginalized students and critical scholars endure the deepest betrayals, their histories and identities recast as political liabilities. This is the university remade by coercion, subject to racial cleansing, drained of its civic responsibility, and stripped of its public purpose. In this punitive vision, neo-fascism on steroids, education is no longer a democratic necessity; it becomes an instrument for policing memory, enforcing obedience, and erasing those who fall outside the boundaries of white nationalist belonging.

Higher Education and the Militarization of Race: “Confronting White Nationalism”
The assault on education, then, cannot be separated from the broader pedagogical struggle unfolding across the globe. The current fight against a growing fascist politics is not simply a struggle over state power, it is a fight over the production of historical memory, over who gets to speak, who gets erased, and who is allowed to imagine a future. The horrors of the past, from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa, make clear that the rewriting of history is always tied to the whitening of the nation, to the violent sorting of populations into those who belong and those who do not. Universities are central to this battle because they are the institutional guardians of historical memory and critical knowledge. When they are attacked, censored, or hollowed out, the very capacity of a society to learn from its past is imperiled.

These intertwined assaults on education and democracy become even more visible in the racialized militarization of public life. The deployment of troops into cities with large Black and brown populations is not merely a spectacle of state power; it is another expression of white nationalism and racial cleansing, a violent pedagogy that teaches citizens who counts and who is disposable. This narrowing of citizenship is not unique to the United States. Across the globe, from India to Hungary, the question of who belongs is being reshaped by religious zealotry and fantasies of racial purity. Viktor Orbán makes this logic unmistakable in his declaration that the aim of his illiberal democracy is to eliminate what he calls “mixed races.” As Nicola Bertoldi observes, any struggle for a radical democratic society requires that “the lessons from our dark past [be] learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” for building a post-capitalist future. That task is impossible without institutions, especially schools and universities, that nurture critical memory, cultivate democratic agency, and resist the machinery of erasure.

Confronting the Challenges of Authoritarianism in Education
One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, and others is the need to address the question of what education should accomplish in a society at a historical moment when it is slipping into the dark night of an emerging fascism. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy?

What language must higher education reclaim to redefine its mission, to help faculty and students imagine futures beyond the present, see themselves as agents rather than victims or clients, and take responsibility for shaping democratic public life? In an age marked by the abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people, and the broader public, to challenge repressive forms of authority and hold power accountable?

In part, this suggests developing educational policies and practices that not only inspire and motivate people but are also capable of challenging the growing number of anti-democratic tendencies under a global tyranny of gangster capitalism. Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and the elevation of war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. In this view, education becomes something other than an obsession with accountability schemes, market values, imagination-crushing methodologies, or the crude empiricism of a data-driven society. Rather than function as an instrument of pedagogical terrorism and deadening conformity, it should open a space for thinking, translating, acting, and imagining otherwise.

In light of the current assaults on education, what might it mean for educators to take seriously the notion that democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence and learning to modes of agency that embrace the demands of social and economic justice and the virtues of the common good. Any meaningful vision of critical pedagogy should have the power to provoke a radical shift in consciousness, a shift that helps us see the world through a lens that confronts the savage realities of geopolitical issues including genocidal violence, mass poverty, the destruction of the planet, and the threat of nuclear war, among other issues. Global capitalism thrives on staggering inequalities, settler colonialism, and the twisted anti-democratic ideologies that uphold it. A true shift in consciousness is not possible without pedagogical interventions that speak directly to people in ways that resonate with their lives, their struggles, and their experiences.

Education has to help individuals recognize themselves in the issues at hand, understand how their personal suffering is not an isolated event but part of a broad, systemic crisis. In addition, activism, debate, and critical engagement should be central to a student’s education. Activism is a form of education, a way of guiding students to become both knowledgeable and engaged citizens. In this sense, critical pedagogy must cultivate conditions that empower students not only to think critically but to act with purpose and conviction.”

There can be no authentic politics without a pedagogy of identification, an education that connects people to the broader forces shaping their lives, an education that not only helps them understand the roots of their oppression but also empowers them to imagine and fight for a world where they are no longer victims but rather active agents of change. Without this, we risk perpetuating a politics that is disconnected from the lived realities of those it seeks to empower. The poet Jorie Graham emphasizes the importance of engaging people through experiences that resonate deeply with their everyday lives. She states that “it takes a visceral connection to experience itself to permit us to even undergo an experience.” For language and appeals to truly matter, they must be anchored in the tangible realities and struggles that shape people’s existence. Only then can communication penetrate consciousness, forging connections between body, mind, and others beyond the poisoned solidarities that sustain hatred, war, and consumerist obsessions.

When teaching loses this visceral, grounded quality, pedagogy risks numbing the mind and body, a condition easily reinforced by a broader culture dominated by screens, virtual spectacles, disconnections, and reductive oversimplifications. To resist this drift into a culture of immediacy and regressive distraction which is never removed from the experiences students bring to the classroom, educators must reclaim their role as public intellectuals, embracing their responsibilities as both critical teachers and active citizens in ways that spark dialogue and mobilize action.

This means speaking to wider publics about urgent social issues, developing a language that links everyday troubles to the systemic forces that produce them, and advancing a politics committed to economic and social justice. It also requires creating conditions in which educators have real agency over their labour and a meaningful voice in university governance. Yet this aspiration is continually undermined by the growing neoliberally produced precarity of academic life: without tenure or secure positions, many are cast into spaces marked by fear, repression, crushing workloads, powerlessness, isolation, and, for some, conditions approaching poverty.

Education should rise to meet these challenges, offering a vision capable of resisting what Mark Fisher called neoliberalism’s “slow cancellation of the future” and helping us imagine a life beyond massive inequality, environmental destruction, and the glorification of war and militarization as national ideals. In this context, education cannot surrender to academics who insist there is no room for politics in higher education or the classroom, nor to administrators who claim that universities have a responsibility to remain neutral. This position is not only deeply flawed but also complicit in its silence over the current far-right politicization of education or the utterly damaging transformation of higher education into an adjunct of corporations; it is also a script for depoliticizing schooling as an institution as well as both faculty and students.

Neutrality and the Erosion of Academic Freedom
The call for neutrality in many North American universities is a retreat from social and moral responsibility, masking the reality that these institutions are deeply embedded in power relations. As Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta aptly argue, neutrality “serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate,” obscuring the inherently political nature of university life. From decisions about enrollment and research funding to event policies and poster placements, every administrative choice reflects a political stance. Neutrality, far from apolitical, is a tool that silences dissent and shields power from accountability.

It is essential for educators to recognize that learning unfolds across a multitude of sites, circulating not only through formal institutions but through the wider currents of everyday life. As Shea Howell warns, this truth carries immense weight in a moment when “controlling public culture is essential to the consolidation of fascist power.” And following Raymond Williams, we are reminded that education must do more than transmit knowledge, it must be woven into the very fabric of social transformation, for “learning must be a crucial part of the process of social change.”

The most powerful forms of education now operate far beyond schools and universities. In an age of recent technologies, concentrated power, and ubiquitous social media, culture has become a dominant pedagogical force, shaping how people see, feel, and imagine the political world. Democracy is no longer toppled only by coups; it is hollowed out from within, eroded by the ghosts of past tyrannies revived through symbols, digital spectacles, and the relentless machinery of propaganda. What appears as entertainment, distraction, or common sense is increasingly the terrain where political identities are forged and the boundaries of the imaginable enforced.

Beyond Thresholds of Disappearance and the Colonization of the Mind
The current historical moment is defined by what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls “thresholds of disappearance, the proliferation of depoliticized multiplicities,” those institutions and cultural spaces that domesticate power differences, transforming systemic projects of resistance into commodified, private acts of rebellion. In this landscape, neoliberal culture and pedagogy form one of the most consequential thresholds of disappearance, draining politics of substance while stripping education of its radical possibilities. At stake is the recognition that education, whether mediated through schools, digital platforms, or the wider culture, has become an urgent site of struggle, a decisive political terrain where agency is fashioned, desires are mobilized, oppression is normalized and hope itself becomes either militarized or rekindled.

This machinery of disappearance is amplified by cultural forces that speak through images laced with bigotry, saturated with violence, and driven by the logics of cruelty, exclusion, and ethnic cleansing. Culture no longer reflects the past; it erases it, functioning as a pedagogical regime that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues “colonizes the mind.” We inhabit a world saturated with disimagination machines, engines of civic stupidity and right-wing narcotization, designed to sever people not only from the material conditions that rob them of rights, agency, and hope, but also from the histories, knowledges, and modes of critical thought that make genuine freedom possible. These apparatuses do more than distort reality; they shrink political imagination, corrode critical thought, and render individuals increasingly susceptible to the authoritarian scripts that shape everyday life.

Fascism thrives in precisely these manufactured silences and curated amnesias. Once the public is habituated to disappearance, to the erasure of histories, the trivialization of suffering, the commodification of dissent, the ground is laid for more overt forms of authoritarian control. Fascist politics feed on this hollowing out of civic memory, replacing the complexities of historical truth with mythologized narratives of purity, grievance, and fear. Consider how right-wing movements sanitize the January 6 riot by recasting it as a patriotic uprising: the goal is not merely to distort an event but to reengineer the collective memory that anchors democratic life. What emerges is a political culture in which cruelty becomes a language of belonging, exclusion a measure of citizenship, and forgetting a civic duty. In this sense, the assault on history is never merely symbolic; it is a pedagogical strategy that shapes desires, identities, and the very possibility of democratic agency.

In the era of digital media, platforms like Fox News, Elon Musk’s X and corporate giants such as Facebook, Netflix, and Google have become powerful teaching/propaganda machines, amplifying far-right values and the predatory ethos of gangster capitalism. What we confront is not simply a political failure, it is an educational crisis. Fascism no longer announces itself merely through decrees or armed repression. It is a pedagogical project that shapes memory, desire, and the boundaries of the imaginable. Fascism also colonizes memory, determining what needs to be remembered, forgotten, mourned, and celebrated. It wraps itself in spectacles of cruelty, in a language steeped in hate and terminal exclusion. It operates through laws, yes, but also through habits, images, and the daily language games that dull moral sensibility.

Trump’s most fervent acolytes, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and others, perform Nazi salutes as if rehearsing the dark future they are resolved to summon. Stephen Miller channels Hitlerian rhetoric under the banner of patriotism, insisting that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Trump resurrects Confederate symbols and the mythology of white supremacy, elevating monuments to genocide as emblems of national pride. Under his rule, the culture of fascism is neither subtle nor hidden; it is staged, broadcast, and normalized as the new common sense.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Trump administration’s decision to downgrade the swastika, a symbol of fascism, white supremacy, and mass murder, from a hate emblem to something merely “potentially divisive.” In a move that defies history and moral clarity, the US Coast Guard will soon place the swastika, the noose, and the Confederate flag in the same sanitized category. This moral inversion is not an accident. It aligns seamlessly with Trump’s claim that Europe faces a “civilizational crisis,” a thinly veiled invocation of white replacement theory that casts non-Europeans as existential threats to Western civilization. Such rhetoric, and the policies that follow, reveal an administration committed to the normalization of hatred, the erasure of historical memory, and the legitimization of white supremacist fantasies.

The horror of fascist violence has returned, now draped in AI-guided bombs, ethnic cleansing, and white supremacists who revel in racial purification while dismantling every vestige of decency, human rights, and democratic life. What we are witnessing is not only the death of democracy but the erosion of moral and civic conscience itself.

Education, at its best, is never mere job training, nor should it serve as an indoctrinating machine for white Christian nationalism and its narrow vision of who belongs as a citizen. True education cultivates empowered spaces of grace, rigour and, engagement where students think rigorously and speak freely, where their experiences, aspirations, and dreams can be voiced without fear. It is a courageous and protective site in which students learn to act with agency and critical judgment, and where their voices are heard, valued, and challenged. In such spaces, education becomes a bridge linking school to society, self to other, and theory to practice, urging students to confront the urgent social and political realities of their time while embracing the practice and promise of a radical democratic society.

Furthermore, education should help students cultivate a deeper commitment to justice, equality, community, and freedom. Critical pedagogy, as a rupturing practice, must refuse to equate capitalism with democracy, making it clear that one cannot discuss fascism without addressing capitalism. To be truly transformative, any viable critical pedagogy should be inherently anti-capitalist, reviving the discourse of radical democracy, and creating new political formations beyond the conventional liberal and conservative paradigms.

Neoliberal capitalism strips education of its utopian possibilities and insists that capitalism and democracy are indistinguishable, that to imagine anything beyond its rule is to invite disaster. In an age of resurgent fascism, education must do more than defend reason and critical judgment; it also needs to mobilize organized collective resistance to neoliberal fascism. Critical pedagogy in this context is not a naïve ideal but a radical necessity, a defiant force that urges us to envision possibilities beyond the suffocating confines of the present. It requires confronting the forces that seek to extinguish the radical imagination before it can inspire broader change. This struggle, though daunting, demands relentless urgency and unyielding conviction from educators and the public alike.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Education for Collective Resistance
Effective resistance to the rise of fascist politics in the United States and beyond cannot occur without making education central to political struggle. This begins with recognizing that the transformation of consciousness and the transformation of institutions are deeply interrelated. We must heed Pierre Bourdieu’s warning that the most insidious forms of domination are not only economic; they are also intellectual and pedagogical, rooted in belief and persuasion. This insight calls on academics to recognize that the current battle against emerging fascist politics and white nationalism is not only a contest over economic structures or corporate power. It is equally a battle for ideas, for the very consciousness of society, and for the power to reshape culture itself.

Education is the crucible where agency is forged, where the foundations of subjectivity are laid, and where the very essence of politics takes shape. It is here, in the spaces of learning and dialogue, that the seeds of democracy can either take root or wither away. The struggle to fulfill the promises of democracy cannot thrive in the shadows of deceit, where lies eclipse reason, ignorance erodes critical understanding, and truth is drowned by the seductive chorus of unchecked power. In this battleground of ideas, education should stand as both shield and sword, a force that defends reason and nurtures the capacities of individuals to question, to resist, and to act with the integrity democracy demands.

Policing Palestine solidarity demonstrations on US campuses.
Amid the current assault on public and higher education, educators must reclaim their role as architects of imagined futures, fostering a language of possibility that aligns education with the broader struggle for democracy. They should consider taking control of the labour process in order to engage in academic freedom and set the conditions for teaching, learning, and policy. Such a vision of education must reject the neoliberal paradigm of education as a private investment in “human capital” and instead cultivate a critical pedagogy that disturbs complacency, inspires critical thinking, and energizes students to confront the societal forces shaping their lives.

Education’s critical function lies in its power to create informed, engaged citizens who possess the civic courage to challenge injustice. This necessitates teaching students to think intersectionally, historically, and relationally. In a world dominated by fragmented knowledge, staggering levels of inequality, and the tyranny of metrics, students must be educated to become border crossers, fluent in multiple literacies, print, visual, and digital, capable not only of consuming culture but producing it as cultural critics and creators.

Critical pedagogy should be defended as the search for truth. It is a pedagogy that empowers students to act from a position of agency, equipping them to unsettle power, challenge common sense, and take risks in pursuit of justice and mutual respect. Educators must inspire students to think dangerously, imagining futures where democracy, equality, and freedom are not only values but achievable goals. This involves confronting injustice as an ongoing struggle and recognizing that the fight for justice is never fully complete.

In a society where democracy is under siege and fascism casts a growing shadow, educators should recognize that alternative futures are not only possible but that acting on this belief is essential to achieving social change. This urgent political and pedagogical mission demands both a language of critique and a language of possibility. Critique exposes abuses of power, unmasks deceit, and holds authority accountable, while a vision of educated hope dares us to imagine new horizons, empowering us to think and act beyond the confines of the present. It calls on us to reject the inevitability of injustice, to defy the predatory forces shaping our future, and to summon the courage to envision a world grounded in justice, equity, and freedom, a world we must actively strive to build.

At stake is the courage to confront the world we want to build, the world we owe to future generations. The great novelist and critic James Baldwin understood with unmatched clarity that a society’s fate is sealed the moment it abandons its responsibility to those who have not yet arrived. In Nothing Personal, he warned that when we break faith with one another, we forfeit the very possibility of a shared world. Today, that warning is no longer metaphor, it is the condition of our times.

As authoritarianism weaponizes ignorance, as cruelty becomes a governing principle, and as whole populations are written out of the category of the human, the struggle for the future falls squarely on the shoulders of educators and cultural workers. Our task is nothing less than to disrupt the pedagogy of fascism: to nurture forms of critical memory that cannot be erased, solidarities that cannot be bought off, imaginations that refuse to be colonized. If we fail, the future will be engineered by those who thrive on amnesia and revel in disposability. But if we rise to the challenge, insisting on truth, defending the vulnerable, and widening the moral vocabulary of democracy, we create the conditions under which new generations can breathe, speak, and begin again. Resistance, then, is not an option; it is the only means by which the future survives.

In these dark times, hope may be wounded, but it is not lost. Resistance and the promise of collective struggle endure, for power is never absolute, and domination cannot extinguish the will to fight back. The global rise of fascism casts a long shadow, marked by state violence, silenced dissent, and the assault on critical thought. Yet history is not a closed book; it is a call to action, a space for possibility. Now, more than ever, we must dare to think boldly, act courageously, and forge the democratic futures that justice demands and humanity deserves. •

Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism(Routledge, 2015), coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). … See MoreSee Less

Higher Education in the Time of Fascist Plague – Socialist Project

socialistproject.ca

The horrors of fascism have returned, not as ghosts, but as a plague, fueled by racial hatred and historical amnesia, infiltrating schools, universities, and the public sphere through state violence, …

For A Mass Labor Party In The USA

2 months ago

Running out of options: the US ruling class turns to MAGA Fascism
classconscious.org/2025/12/28/running-out-of-options-the-us-ruling-class-turns-to-maga-fascism/
By Robert Montgomery and Davey Heller
A person is arrested in Portland by heavily armed ICE officers dressed in army fatigues.
“Louis Bonaparte appears as the incarnation of the political mediocrity, the opportunist, the rogue, who, having played the part of a player and adventurer, returns to seize power and crown himself emperor. He is the man of the hour, the man of circumstance, and yet the man of illusion.” – The Class Struggles in France, Marx 1850

Marx’s description of Louis Bonaparte could just as easily apply to Donald Trump. Just as Marx condemned rentiers, stock-jobbers, and bankers who subsist on the wealth of others rather than on manufacturing or productive labor, today’s billionaire elite relies on finance, real estate, leveraged buyouts, financialization, asset bubbles, and derivative wealth rather than on investment in real production.

The odious Trump is no aberration. If he were gone tomorrow how much of real significance would change? This is like asking if Hitler had not existed would there still have been fascism in Germany. In order to understand Trump we need to look beneath the monstrous physiognomy and the endless spectacle of his regime. We need to see the underlying social forces that he represents. Equally important, is to recognize the broader historical and material conditions that have allowed such a grotesque figure to rise to prominence.

The top 0.1 percent make their move
We are living through the greatest concentration of wealth in modern history in the United States. The richest one percent now control an astonishing $49 trillion, approximately one-third of all wealth. Just seven tech giants—Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla—now make up one-third of the entire S&P 500. Despite their slowing profits these companies alone have accounted for more than half of the stock market’s gains over the past two years. The tech owners dominate the media spectrum and information space. They are subsidized by the Pentagon and are major contractors to the CIA.

At the center of this oligarchy is a small circle of tech billionaires — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and Larry Ellison — who have tied themselves openly to the far right and now lead key assaults on democratic institutions. Such an unparalleled concentration of personal wealth by the top .1% represents the apex of explosive levels of social inequality which cannot be reconciled with the preservation of democratic rights. Their wealth is both a symbol and an instrument of a system in which economic power has become detached from any democratic accountability.

The richest 1% of households in the United States have accumulated almost 1,000 times more wealth than the poorest 20% over the last three and a half decades, and economic inequality is getting worse at a rapid pace.

Over the past year alone the wealth of the 10 richest U.S. billionaires soared by $698 billion. That means that the top 0.1%’s share of total wealth is now at a record high of 12.6%. The top 1% of earners control more than 1/5 of all income while the bottom 20% of Americans share just 3.1% of total income.

Trump is leading a government of the most parasitic layers of American finance capital. The circle of billionaire oligarchs tapped for the Trump administration is worth four thousand times more than the previous Biden cabinet. At $383 billion this club holds more wealth than the combined gross product of 172 countries. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, helped oversee the slashing of $1 trillion from the state budget by mass firing of federal workers, outlawing their collective bargaining rights, gutting essential social insurance benefits, and destroying entire government departments. The Trump regime is a billionaire oligarchy masquerading as a government.

Deindustrialization
During the Golden of American capitalism (1945-70) the US was the world leader in ship building, manufacturing, and in mining industrial minerals:

By 2025, American shipyards no longer build oceangoing merchant vessels, only small ships and warships.
Machine tools make the machinery needed for almost every industrial — process. Now just three firms now remain of the old giants of machining.
Tungsten, a critical mineral needed for everything from jet engines to x-ray tubes, is not being mined in the US. Over 100 deposits are not being used currently . Trump’s recent concession to China on tariffs was driven by the need to get tungsten for defense production.
The 2008 financial crisis marked the end of the long process of the deindustrialization of the United States. In the recession years after the Wall Street crash the centers of rubber, steel, automobile, metallurgy, and food processing production of the Midwest were transmuted seemingly overnight, into a landscape of rusting mills, collapsing town centers, and industrial carcasses.

What had once been dense concentrations of productive labor and high-wage employment were suddenly stripped of their economic foundation. Steel complexes, auto plants, machine-tool shops, and chemical facilities—the material infrastructure of U.S. industrial hegemony—were abandoned by finance capital.

Storied working class cities like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, Gary, Detroit, Milwaukee, homes to stable working-class communities, were suddenly surrounded by shuttered mills, gutted plants, and rusting machinery left behind like the discarded carcasses of financialized capitalism.

Swathes of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, rural/small-town New York, parts of Michigan and Indiana were among the hardest-hit by the opioid epidemic and for the rise in “deaths of despair” ( suicide, alcoholism, drug overdose) in the wake of the financial crisis.

Left to its own devices, capitalism responds to market crashes by letting the less profitable firms go under in order to restore the rate of profit before beginning a new upturn. But rather than allowing the system to liquidate its dead capital through a depression, the state stepped in to keep the system on life support. Obama spent $8 trillion to bail out the banks and financial markets and rescue the auto companies. “Wall Street got bailed out and Main Street got shut out” as the slogan went.

As the recession worsened and Obama offered nothing but more misery, the liberal Democrats expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, launched new regime-change wars in Libya and Syria, while instigating a coup in Ukraine. Lower-middle-class and working-class people felt increasingly betrayed by the Democrats. In 2016 large sections of the working-class electorate, responding to Trump’s promises of reindustrialization and national revival, shifted their allegiance to the Republican Party. In the last two election cycles the Rust Belt working class has remained a decisive factor in U.S. presidential politics.

The rate of profit has not truly recovered to pre-recession levels. Corporate profits are rising in absolute terms, but the rate of return is too weak to generate sustained investment in real production. Roughly sixty percent of all corporate profits now flow straight into financial markets, feeding speculation rather than industry. Fictitious capital is driving capital accumulation, siphoning resources from production, and suppressing new investment more aggressively than at any point in the past half-century.

To prop up inflated asset valuations under conditions of stagnation and declining profitability, finance capital demands heighter rates of surplus extraction from the working class. It is this imperative that underlies a renewed offensive against the social gains secured in earlier periods: the dismantling of public services, the destruction of trade unions, and driving real wages toward subsistence levels. This is the real purpose behind Musk’s efforts inside the federal government: to clear the way for deeper cuts, more privatization, and a society run entirely for the benefit of the rich.

At the same time as profitability sinks, the organic composition of capital is rising, accelerated by AI-driven automation. Ever fewer workers are needed to operate ever larger, more complex means of production. Capital must extract more surplus from a shrinking base of labor power, which exerts more pressure on profit rates.

With profitability weak and growth sluggish, the system’s capacity to absorb democratic demands has sharply narrowed. The result is a growing contradiction between the requirements of capital accumulation and the institutional norms of liberal-democratic governance.

Behind all this lies a deeper problem: the world economy is slowing down, and global profit rates are falling. When that happens monopoly capital responds by going on the offensive against its capitalist competitors, its own working class, and against the dominated countries of the Global South. Imperialist finance capital (The ultra-wealthy and the corporations they control) want to claw back every gain workers have made. They push to tear down public services, break unions, and drive wages down to poverty levels.

However, there is a major complication for imperialism to launch this offensive on a world scale: The hegemonic challenge posed by China with its booming mix of state controlled and capitalist enterprises under the direction of the Communist Party of China. Whilst the cheap labor of China was a key factor that facilitated the US ruling class to implement the twin policies of neoliberal deindustrialisation and financialisation. The planned economy of China enabled it to actually utilise the surplus value created within China to break out of its designated role within the imperialist world market. And this created a massive economic blowback effect on the West.

In just twenty five years China has become the largest trading partner for 150 of the 193 states in the world. More than half of all economies now trade twice as much with China compared to the United States. China’s current trade surplus tops a trillion dollars. It is not just the quantity of trade but the quality of that trade that threatens imperialist finance. China now dominates trade in exactly those key economic areas that have declined in the US due to deindustrialisation such as ship building, strategic minerals and machine tools. China is no longer just a cheap labor source but a real competitor.

This massive growth in China’s trade with the world now provides an alternative source of trade, loans and investment for the countries of the Global South in particular. This blunts the attempt of the US to use the club of neo-colonial economic tactics it has relied on since World War 2 to attempt to reverse its half century of declining profitability

Of course the US will try to counter China through increasingly reckless military interventions and regime change operations but even in the military field, the US knows its days of dominance are not indefinite. This is adding to its sense of frenzy. Perhaps there are echoes of how sections of the imperialist powers in Europe and Asia turned to fascism in the 1930’s as their economies and profits shrank and the Soviet Union’s economy continued to grow.

Hostility to communist China animates all sections of MAGA from Trump to Tucker Carlson feeding the anti-communist fury that lies at the heart of all fascist movements.

Pete Hegseth, a self-proclaimed Christian crusader and U.S. Secretary of War, has openly declared that the United States is preparing for war with Communist China. In a 2020 book steeped in apocalyptic rhetoric, Hegseth frames U.S. foreign policy as a “holy war” against the left, China, and Islam, casting the Chinese as “the villains of our generation” and warning that failure to confront Communist China now will leave Americans someday forced to “stand for the Chinese anthem.”

The investigation launched by the House Republicans into whether the peace group Code Pink is funded by the Communist Party of China can be expected to be only the beginning of the attempts to link opponents of the Trump regime to China.

Whilst much of this anticommunism is not confined to MAGA alone; it unites the U.S. ruling class as a whole. On November 21, 86 Democrats joined Republicans in the House of Representatives to overwhelmingly pass a resolution condemning the so-called “horrors of socialism.”

Fascism and Capitalism in Crisis
Historically, when the material conditions needed for social stability become fundamentally incompatible with even a modestly independent workers movement, the ruling class has turned to fascism as in Germany.

20th century fascism was a regime defined by extreme crisis and sharp class tensions, the product of prolonged economic stagnation. The margin for negotiation between the working class and the bourgeoisie had nearly disappeared, leaving the capitalist system incompatible with any vestige of an independent working-class movement.

In our own time a parallel dynamic is emerging, though it takes different forms. During the Great Depression, despite a decade of deep stagnation, American capitalism still possessed vast reserves of unused productive capacity. Those reserves made New Deal stabilization and reforms possible.

However, the situation today is different. Decades of deindustrialization, financialization, and wage stagnation have eroded the economic base that once underpinned reform. The result is a growing contradiction between the requirements of capital accumulation and the institutional norms of liberal-democratic governance.

Trump is trying to consolidate a fascist regime by means of a presidential dictatorship. He has not yet succeeded. To do that he needs to overturn the constitutional order and impose a repressive police state on a polarized, still democratic population. Before he gets to that point it’s necessary to first break up the existing liberal democratic state. He needs a battering ram.

Since the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, Classconscious.org , basing ourselves on Trotsky’s Germany writings, has characterized MAGA as a fascist movement. Among Marxists this is a minority view. Most see Trump as some form of Bonapartism. Some even see MAGA as a distorted reflection of working class anger and misplaced resistance. Nathaniel Flakin, writing in Left Voice,paraphrases the standard Trotskyist argument: “… if we are already living under fascism, it means that all workers’ organizations have become fascist as well.”

Responding to this same stock axiom, Marxist economist Ernest Mandel wrote: “one hears today that only when the trade unions have been totally smashed and criminalized can we seriously talk about fascism. This is a lazy formula that disarms the left and the workers movement. It ignores the concrete social reality of capitalism in what is perhaps its deepest global crisis in history”. And this is as true today as it was when he wrote it.

While its class content remains constant, fascism takes different forms at different times and places. We do ourselves a disservice when we treat a form of capitalist class rule as fixed and unchanging for all times.

MAGA theorists
Curtis Yarvin, Dark Enlightenment philosopher, proposes that the government be structured as a corporation with a CEO-monarch wielding absolute authority. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and patron of Vice President JD Vance, echoing his philosophical mentor writes:

“Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Trump influencer Steve Bannon is the ideological bridge between the anti-elite, nationalist lower middle class of MAGA and its billionaire patrons. Bannon works to ensure elite dominance in the alliance while giving the base the illusion of power in the culture war. And it’s Bannon who is the ideologue of “deconstructing the administrative state”.

In a 2024 interview Bannon, identifying himself directly with the Heritage Foundation, spelled out the state deconstruction in explicit terms:

“Project 2025 and others are working to immediately focus on immigration, the “forever wars”, and the tax and finance. And simultaneously on deconstructing the administrative state and going after the complete and total destruction of the deep state. In the first 100 days — this is going to be different from 2016 — we will have 3,000 political appointees ready to go” (David Brooks, My Unsettling Interview with Steve Bannon, The New York Times, July 1, 2024).

The fascist ideological assault on the internal “administrative state” is closely linked to the external fight against Communist China. John Bellamy Foster, alluding to the neo-McCarthyite obsession with destroying “cultural Marxism,” points to Christopher Rufo. Rufo is a former fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute and is the author of, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo has popularized the idea that CRT, DEI initiatives, and “transgender ideology” are all products of “cultural Marxism.”

In the absence of any real Marxist presence in the United States, the term “cultural Marxism” functions as an all purpose stand-in. It is used to justify the cleansing of media outlets and universities of all left-wing and progressive ideas. At the same time, the bogeyman of “cultural Marxism,” reinforces the portrayal of communism as the central enemy of the United States. At its core fascism is anti-communist.

MAGA: a fascist movement resting on the lower middle class
In a recent article, “The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime”, Monthly Review editor, John Bellamy Foster has made a major contribution to the understanding of MAGA as a fascist movement.

Bellamy Foster clarifies the definition of fascism by returning to a class based, materialist analysis as opposed to the common ideological or personality-driven definition. When mainstream figures like Biden or Harris say, “Trump is a fascist,” what they mean is that he is an authoritarian personality who seeks to concentrate political power in his own hands. This is essentially a description of an individual’s behavior or style — an ideal-type, not a class analysis. Bellamy Foster reckons that this misses the point. The MAGA base is neither a reflection of Trump nor predominantly working class in composition. Rather it is predominantly a lower-middle-class phenomenon. As for historical fascism:

“Fascism is a particular political movement/state form within capitalism opposed to liberal democracy. It arises when the capitalist class and its state are in structural crisis. The object of the fascist movement is to annihilate the liberal democratic state through a process of ensuring that the various institutions of the state and civil society fall into line with the requirements of the fascist/neofascist requirements.”

The lower middle class (LMC) is a strata of the petit bourgeoisie: small proprietors, minor managers, and rural or suburban property holders. Its economic base is narrow and perpetually threatened by competition, debt, and creeping proletarianization. This stratum has long been disproportionately white, has supplied some of the most nationalist, militaristic, and authoritarian political tendencies, and is often fused with evangelical fundamentalism.

The ideology of this class fraction is shaped by a chronic fear of downward mobility and resentment toward “elites” imagined as eroding its fragile autonomy, status, and property. Positioned between the capitalist class and the working class, it carries its own contradictory consciousness: on the one hand, dependent on the reproduction of stable capitalist social relations; on the other hand anxious, about its own vulnerability to shifting market forces. Its resentments tend to focus not on the billionaires whose lifestyles it can only imagine, but on the strata immediately above it.

Just above it sits the upper middle class or the professional–managerial class (PMC), whose function is to administer both capital and the state. In right-wing ideology the PMC is collapsed into a single, unified enemy. It is imagined as an entrenched bureaucracy extending through government agencies, public television and radio, public schools, universities, nonprofits, cultural institutions, and the mass media.

The PMC is depicted as under siege from both directions—pressed by capital from above and by the masses from below. Within this narrative, it becomes less a class with a specific economic function than a parasitic cultural elite: self-appointed arbiters of values, language, and legitimacy. The result is a moralized class enemy, blamed not for its role in managing exploitation but for allegedly corrupting the nation’s culture.

This caricatured formation also absorbs “entitled” people of color, DEI infrastructures, and the urban poor, all seen as beneficiaries of a liberal state and hostile to “ordinary” people (read: lower-middle-class white) people. This fetishized antagonist allows petty-bourgeois grievances to be displaced from capital onto a cultural and bureaucratic elite. They view Musk and Bezos as business innovators and models for self employed contractors. The working class represents unions, higher taxes, regulations, and blue cities.

Obama’s presidency compounded these resentments. The bank bailouts, auto rescue, and health-care reform looked like the state protecting Wall Street, unionized workers, and people of color—everyone except the small proprietors and contractors who felt themselves slipping. When “recovery” meant years of precarious jobs, rising debt, and shuttered businesses, many came to believe they were being left behind. Their resentments deepened into a reactionary political formation aimed not at the capitalist class but at the state, and at those groups believed to benefit from staye interventions. This was a classic petty-bourgeois revolt: a class squeezed from above and threatened from below, directing its anger not at capital but at a demonized cultural and bureaucratic elite.

The working class does not own productive property. They own neither businesses nor rental property. The working class is multiracial, concentrated in urban or metro areas, employed in manufacturing, logistics, hospitals and hotels. It is located mostly in unionized sectors such as federal public employment, auto, steel, and other industrial or service-union strongholds.

Bellamy Foster sees the Tea Party insurgency that emerged in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008 as the political root of MAGA. The Tea Party galvanized rust belt resentment into political action. Organizing around a libertarian anti-tax, anti-elite, anti-immigrant, and anti-government program, Tea Party Republicans began the transformation of the Republican Party into today’s neofascist party of MAGA. Tea Party mascot, “Joe the Plumber,” became the archetype of the lower-middle-class, right-wing populism which prefigured MAGA.

So the class composition of MAGA is quite different from the actual U.S. working class, and recognizing that difference is central to any materialist analysis of its authoritarian politics.

By rough estimate about 1/3rd of all Republican Party voters are core MAGA. This bloc represents the precarious petit bourgeoisie, and those sections of the working class most impacted by the globalization of production. There is the usual rabble of far right xenophobes and white nationalist racists. A third influential bloc is evangelical Christians.

The ranks of the January 6th coup attempt were for the most part small scale merchant layers, retired and off duty police and military personnel, and members of fascist militias like the Proud Boys and The Oathkeepers. Ashley Babbitt, killed by the FBI as she breached the Congressional chambers, was a 14 year Air Force veteran of two wars, a security guard at a nuclear power plant, an indebted small business owner, and a follower of the far right QAnon conspiracy group.

Trotsky described this mob well: “Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat – all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”

Bellamy Foster underscores that the lower middle class/monopoly capital alliance is intrinsically unstable, and its contradictions are so deep that the bloc cannot endure for long in its current form:

a. MAGA expected lower prices— got Trump’s tariffs which increased prices an estimated $1,200 per household per year.

b. Expected reduced taxes— got massive tax cuts for elite billionaires

c. To break dependency on the welfare state— got its own entitlements cut that keep the LMC afloat

d. Trump to end the forever wars— got new military confrontations— bombing Iran, more proxy war in Ukraine, Drone murders in the Caribbean

e. America First nationalism— got expanded Globalization

f. Expected protection of domestic industry and reshoring production— got more globalism. National chauvinists cannot control a capitalist class tied to globalization.

g. MAGA Paranoia— got the Surveillance State

MAGA is suspicious of the surveillance state while Tech capital is heavily invested in AI, data mining, and surveillance infrastructures.

The billionaire class demands an ever-larger transfer of income upward from the entire population, including MAGA households.

MAGA increasingly resembles the left wing of the Nazi movement (the Strasser faction):

Mobilized as a shock force against labor, the welfare state, and democratic institutions;
disposable once monopoly capital no longer needs them.
Ultimately MAGA will share the fate of the Strasser wing of the Nazi movement in Germany. Having done their job as a batting ram for big capital they will be thrown aside. They will be precipitated into the working class or the lumpen proletariat

MAGA after Trump?
“The historic left is in total collapse. They always focus on the noise, never on the signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gains momentum and develops, is moving much further to the right than President Trump. They will look back fondly on Donald Trump. They will ask: Where is Trump when we need him?” Steve Bannon to David Brooks

MAGA is a political movement of the lower middle class that rode in on Trump‘s wings but its fate does not depend on him. Trump was a wrecking ball who smashed the liberal state. If Trump was destructive, then JD Vance represents an attempt to erect a post-liberal project. Vance is an America First chauvinist, native Appalachian, ultra-Catholic traditionalist like Bannon, and a Peter Thiel product— perfectly positioned to bridge MAGA resentment and elite rule.

Trump‘s collusion with Israel in the attack on Iran, the scandal over his refusal to release the Epstein files, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September, have combined to cause a deep crisis in the MAGA movement. The fault line divides America First isolationists like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes from Zionist globalists like Ben Shapiro and Lori Loomer. This is a reflection of the underlying class contradictions in the alliance. When the fascist movement assembled last week in Phoenix, JD Vance emerged as a full throated white Christian nationalist calling for unity in the fascist movement. Turning Point USA leader Ericka Kirk anointed Vance as the heir of Trump.

At the recent Turning Point “Americafest” conference, JD Vance declared ““In the United States of America you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
As the fascist movement identifies itself explicitly as Christian nationalist it will likely shift its center of mass to the American south, and less to the swing states of the upper Midwest like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Its organizing base will be the semi-rural, petit-bourgeois agglomerations of the Sunbelt. There are historical and social reasons for this which will be the subject of a future article .

For the entire postwar era we have lived under liberal capitalism. Liberalism is a form of political rule that works when capitalism is growing and able to tolerate concessions. Postwar liberalism has been a “rules based order”, a set of social norms like trade union rights, civil rights, legal equality, checks and balances, and political pluralism.

In the interregnum the old norms of class rule have lost their legitimacy, and no longer command popular consent, but they have not yet been replaced by a new form of post-liberal rule. And it must be stressed that the crisis can’t be viewed only through a national lens, but it is refracted nationally.

A presidential dictatorship relying on police agencies like ICE, Homeland Security and Border Patrol is in place, but fascism has yet to be consolidated. Twice in the last six months tens of millions of people have mobilized against the Trump regime in No Kings Day protests. The political terrain is contested.

Bibliography

Hedges, Chris. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. New York: Free Press, 2007.

Field, Laura K. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025.

Foster, John Bellamy. “The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime.” Monthly Review 76, no. 1 (May 2025).

Foster, John Bellamy, and Zhao Dingqi. “Deciphering the MAGA Ideology: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster.” Monthly Review, August 2025.

Parrott, Sharon. “Well, That Was Quick: Trump’s Total Betrayal of Working People Is Now Complete.” Common Dreams, February 2025.

“How Did We Get Here? The Threat of Fascism in the US.” Class Conscious, June 2020. classconscious.org.

“‘Imperialism and the Development Myth’: An Important Defence of Lenin—but Is Chinese Development Really So Limited?” Class Conscious, May 2024. classconscious.org. … See MoreSee Less

Running out of options: the US ruling class turns to MAGA Fascism

classconscious.org

An examination of the crisis that is driving the US ruling class to embrace fascism and the social forces that make up the fascist MAGA movement.