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Writer's pictureJan Dehn

Submission, fight, or flight?


Is your head in the sand? (Source: here)


President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated on 20 January 2025, less than two months from now. The Democratic Party just demonstrated its complete detachment from a large section of the American voting public.


The new risk is that many opponents of Trump also have their heads deeply buried in the sand as far as what is about to hit them after Trump takes office is concerned.


While most Europeans have collective memory of the consequences of fascism in the form of World War II, which was a disaster that unfolded on European soil, Americans have no commensurate experience. Their ignorance is dangerous. This is a wake-up call to Americans to choose: submission, fight, or flight.


Which is it going to be?

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Trump’s resounding victory in the recently-concluded US election (see here) revealed that the Democratic Party is completely out of touch with large sections of the American voting public, not least white working-class Americans with their sense of entitlement.

 

The Democrats lost the white working-class, when it 'betrayed' them. Over the last few decades, Democrats subscribed to a Faustian Bargain, which gave priority to middle class tax cuts at the expense of public services. This policy choice penalised all working-class Americans, but the white working-class got especially upset, because white people are used to being given de facto priority in the United States. While Republicans were also committed to the Faustian Bargain, it was the Democrats who ended up paying the price, because only the Democrats ever pretended to care about workers.

 

The US election outcome was a tragedy. Working-class Americans would be far better off with typical government-led Democratic Party policies than with anything Trump is about to dish up. America's working class needs targeted investments to raise its productivity. Instead, it will get ‘snake-oil’ policies that purport to address its problems, but which will, in fact, make the working class even worse off. Trump initiatives that will prove particularly damaging include efforts to sow mistrust about government, anti-immigration policies, perpetuating the myth of trickle-down economics (read: tax cuts for the rich), and protectionism.

 

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Anyway, we are where we are. The big question is now what happens next.

 

Looking forward, my big worry is that Trump's opponents are as clueless about what is about to hit them as they were in the recent election. Only a tiny fraction of Americans have any real understanding of fascism and the calamity it is about to inflict in the United States.

 

Experience with fascism is one area where Europeans and Americans really differ. Europeans experienced fascism in the 1930s and, for their ignorance, suffered through a devastating world war on their own soil, with tens of millions of people killed and displaced. Americans have no commensurate experience. As far as the reality of fascism is concerned, Americans are as naïve as children.

 

So here is some insight for my American friends: Fascists do not play by the rules. They do not believe in democracy. They do not respect the rule of law. They do not respect human rights. Fascists know only one rule: power. Once fascists get their hands on the levers of state power – with its enormous economic, military, police, judicial, and legislative might – they will use it in full to crush all opposition.

 

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One of the first things that will happen after 20 January 2025 is that Trump launches a government-sponsored mass-deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants. I do not think it will prove an exaggeration to say that this will be no less traumatic than the Nazi ‘kristallnacht’, the series of pogroms unleashed against the Jewish population in Germany on November 9–10, 1938.

 

There are some eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States. The purpose deporting them is to demonstrate Trump’s power though an early and decisive victory. Trump will target undocumented immigrants, because he is a racist xenophobe, but also because this is a weak and vulnerable group of people, which, Trump believes, can easily be defeated, thereby making his expected victory low-risk and more emphatic.

 

As mass-deportation gets underway, we will witness on our screens and for some of us in our daily lives what happens when the most powerful gang up on the most vulnerable. We will see officers of the US government willingly execute a program of cruel persecution against people, who do not even have papers to access the most basic protections against state abuse.


The officially sanctioned campaign to bully these, the most wretched people in America, will be utterly heart-breaking. Do you remember when Trump took children away from immigrant mothers? This will be much worse and on a much larger scale. We will see desperation, fear, panic, anger. We will see relationships and families torn apart. We will see livelihoods destroyed, futures broken, hopes smashed. We will see suicides, deaths. And all this misery will be accompanied by sadistic glee from Trump and his yes-men in government, in business, and in the media. It will be sickening. And if you voted for Trump, the blood will be on your hands.

 

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The other thing we will see early in Trump’s second term is his wholesale take-over of the United States Supreme Court. Republicans control both the House of Representatives and the Senate and Trump commands near-total loyalty within the Republic Party. He will face little opposition, when he takes control of the Supreme Court, say, by appointing ten additional judges to the Court.

 

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this. Control of the Supreme Court is the time-honoured route to dictatorship. All dictators do it. Once he controls the Court, Trump can literally do anything he wants. He can pass unconstitutional bills in Congress. He can undertake illegal actions. He will not be challenged. He can declare martial law and assume extra-ordinary powers, just like Hitler did - and get away with it.

 

And please do not tell me this sort of thing mever happens in America. Martial law has happened 68 times in US history and on at least one occassion martial law was accompanied by suspension of habeas corpus, that is, the right to a hearing and trial with supervision of law enforcement by the judiciary (see here). The precedent is there.

 

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Trump will not assume all these powers just for the sake of it. He intends to use them. His real enemies are not the undocumented immigrants, but American citizens. The point of taking dictatorial powers is to extend to his perceved American enemies the same treatment he will dish out to undocumented migrants. He wants to eliminate his enemies so that he and his henchmen can remain in power indefinitely.

 

We will therefore witness - much sooner and with greater ferocity than most American’s can even imagine - Trump's vengeance against those who wrote against him, spoke against him, pursued him in court, campaigned against him. Trump is vindictive. He will bring the full force of the state to bear on his enemies.

 

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The repression will be televised. Under Trump, the media will be turned into a mouth-piece in the service of his political objectives. He will use the press to foment an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. He will use the media to define new enemies, new scapegoats. He will use it to justify his campaigns against his enemies, so that persecutions, carefully planned and orchestrated by the government, appear fully justified. And most Americans will swallow the bait, hook, line, and sinker.


Persecutions will be public and violent. Police and the military will be the willing instruments of oppression, even more so than they are today.


The victims will have no recourse to justice in the courts. Who will be vctims? Think intellectuals, atheists, left-wingers, committed supporters of democracy, independent journalists, obstinate judges, scientists, minority advocates of all kinds, certain ethnic and religious groups, the mentally ill, ethical doctors, disabled people, the sick, principled teachers, women. All these groups will see their rights severely curtailed, many will be persecuted and punished, some incarcerated, some killed.

 

The young, being naïve and individualised by social media to the point they are unable to form effective protest movements, will discover their individualities brutally extinguished by draconian Trump measures to impose mass obedience.

 

Even the future will be under attack as Trump encourages rampant environment exploitation for short-term profit, with zero regard for the generations to come.

 

Once the scapegoating of America’s domestic ‘enemies’ has run its course, Trump will take aim at enemies abroad – imagined or otherwise – in a bid to sustain the climate of fear so essential to his authoritarian rule. This will be a world that gradually descends into lawlessness as Trump shrinks from global leadership, while openly encouraging strongmen in other countries to bully their weaker neighbours, exactly the way Russia bullies Ukraine.

 

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Given this outlook, I call on anyone opposed to Trump, particularly those in the United States, not to under-estimate the danger he poses. If you have a social conscience, empathy with the vulnerable, tolerance of people from other cultures, faith in democracy, and belief in justice you are now in grave danger. Not just in danger of becoming a target of Trump, but even more in danger of discovering this far too late and doing far too little to fight back. Exactly like Europe in the 1930s.

 

If you think I am wrong to worry about you, just take a look at who own the guns in America today, apart from the government? It is not the nurses. It is not the university lecturers. It is not the teachers. It is not the urban elites or the educated. It is not the anti-Trump substack bloggerati that still naively believes in the power of the word.

 

Rather, it is the dumb, ignorant, religious, MAGA mob of pro-Trump supporters. They have all the guns. And they have been preparing for rebellion for years.

 

Your choice is simple: submit, fight, or flee. Fighting is the only way you can defeat fascism, but it is a costly choice. And you are almost certainly not prepared. Not even close. And maybe you never will be, maybe you just don't have the stomach for that kind of fight. In which case you must flee or submit. These days, it is difficult to flee anywhere, so the odds are that you will submit. Like a sheep.

 

As you ponder your choice, bear in mind that there is not much time left. 20 January 2025. Tick-tock, tick-tock….

 

The End

 

 

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