American Democrats may be outraged by the fascist turn Trump’s policies have taken, but they refuse to fight them except through electoral charades. They don’t want to overthrow his policies, but rather inherit them once they’ve done the dirty work. They don’t want to bring down the Trumpist fascist regime, but rather succeed it. Inherit its already entrenched power, its strengthened police apparatus, its normalized state of emergency. Adopt and adapt its totalitarian foundations in their future governance.
When Trump attacks Venezuela, kidnaps its president, proclaims a puppet government under American control, and announces that Venezuelan oil will be administered by Washington, the Democrats denounce neither the illegality, nor the violence, nor the predatory imperialism. They merely murmur a few abstract warnings about the “risks.” Not a word about the crime. Not a word about the predatory war. Not a word about the trampled sovereignty.
This silence is neither moral weakness nor political surprise. It is class consistency. Social loyalty. Convergence of capitalist views. Liberal ideological congruence.
The world watches in stunned disbelief as Trump’s reactionary brutality clashes with the evanescence of any real Democratic opposition. Indeed, the world is astonished by Trump’s obscene brutality and the near-total absence of any Democratic response.
Commentators invoke depression, division, and fear. They refuse to see the essential point: Democratic leaders are complicit in anything that protects American profits. They prefer dictatorship to the slightest threat to the capitalist order. Observers refuse to acknowledge the obvious: the Democratic Party is a bourgeois, imperialist party, organically linked to financial capital, and it will never fight a policy that protects American profits, even if it tramples on the people and buries freedoms.
Yet they keep putting on this electoral farce: Trump versus the Democrats, as if fascism could be defeated by capitalist ballots, printed by the bourgeoisie. As if you could fight a fire with an empty extinguisher. As if Western capitalist democracy weren’t the historical cradle of fascism.
In reality, Democratic politicians are not fighting anything. Aware of the scale of the country’s economic crisis, determined to save American hegemony, they are complicitly silently supporting Trump in his social war waged against American and immigrant proletarians and in his multiple predatory wars conducted against all countries.
Democratic politicians are waiting for Trump to complete his totalitarian transformation so they can reap the electoral dividends of his anti-social and freedom-crushing policies, which they intend to perpetuate with a few adjustments to appear less fascist.
Democratic leaders refuse any impeachment, any break with the past, any mass mobilization. Despite repeated violations of the Constitution, despite the illegal use of the military, despite the blatant authoritarian drift, the Democratic leadership has explicitly rejected any prospect of Trump’s downfall. And for good reason. They endorse this fascist policy. This totalitarian slide. Trump must stay, act, wear down the people, crush the resistance.
As proof, just hours before an openly bellicose presidential address, a majority of Democratic senators voted for a military budget approaching one trillion dollars. Democratic congressmen are funding the very war they claim to fear. They are voting for weapons that kill American dissidents and massacre entire populations, including the Palestinian people. They are arming the predatory imperialism they claim to be containing.
During the shutdown , they were the ones who capitulated. They saved the Trump administration under the pretext of avoiding social unrest, even though these crises revealed the system’s bankruptcy. This wasn’t a mistake: it was a conscious political decision to stabilize the bourgeois state and allow the Trump administration to continue its totalitarian transformation.
The collaboration is total, from governors to “progressive” mayors. Even figures labeled “socialists,” notably the new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, flock to the White House for photo ops and partnerships with the fascist-leaning president. Their socialism is a marketing badge, not a threat. Red for Trump, pale pink for Wall Street.
While millions protest against the slide towards dictatorship, Democratic politicians, in close collaboration with the union apparatus, are working to stifle social anger and defuse the struggle. Legal complaints are replacing the fight. Procedure is replacing resistance. Bourgeois legality is being used to disarm the American working class.
However, Trump is not an anomaly. He is the concentrated expression of the American capitalist class. He does not govern alone. He governs for the billionaires, the banks, the hedge funds. He is their man (with dirty hands), their brutal tool, their obscene face. He embodies their perversity and their sadism. His authoritarianism is not a personal pathology, but a class response to contradictions that have become explosive, a historical necessity for an American ruling class confronted with the exhaustion of its system, the decline of its hegemony.
Democratic leaders know this. And that’s precisely why they aren’t fighting him. They need Trump to discipline society, crush resistance, neutralize any revolutionary prospect, and prepare a more civilized, more presentable, and institutionalized authoritarianism, but one that is just as brutal. A lasting, watered-down fascism. A modified fascism that they can manage “democratically.”
Fascists cannot be fought with the rules of bourgeois democracy. History has already written that in letters of blood. Hitler’s lesson remains valid: fascism does not collapse through elections, but through revolutionary rupture.
Only social revolution can defeat fascism. Provided it goes all the way, to the complete overthrow of capitalist power. Something American Democrats can never even dream of achieving. Because they are fundamentally committed to the dictatorship of capital. This capital that they defend with loyalty and cruelty alongside their bourgeois class brothers, the Republicans, who are compelled to do the dirty work of capitalism: to bring about the fascist shift to save American hegemony, then bequeath this totalitarian governance to the Democrats, whom observers will present as saviors.
