The Constitutional Path to Fascism
Marisa Miale
Antifascist Action Flag, Die Rote Fahne, 3 July 1932, front page.
We will not live without freedom, and we will win that freedom, freedom without class rule, freedom up to the complete removal of all exploitation and all domination of people by people!
—Social Democratic Party of Germany, Prague Manifesto
The Roots of Reaction
We are at the beginning of a constitutional crisis. In a series of executive orders, the Trump administration has launched a campaign of terror and repression against working-class and oppressed people, and a trade war against the United States’ closest neighbors. In the midst of a purge of public employees designed to ensure absolute control over the Executive Branch, Elon Musk’s semi-autonomous Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained administrative control of the Treasury Department, including its payment system and the personal data of millions of people. With the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump administration has challenged the right to freedom of speech, and the move toward using Guantanamo Bay to incarcerate immigrants portends mass detention without due process or mechanisms for accountability. Court cases are in motion to challenge most of Trump’s orders and the legitimacy of DOGE, but enforcement will depend on US Marshals, who are under the authority of the executive. Factions of the capitalist class are moving beyond even the veneer of the rule of law, with more and more roads leading toward a coup.
With some notable exceptions, the Democratic Party has largely failed in its response to the Trump administration, floundering aimlessly while the takeover progresses. This is par for the course in the party of Biden and Harris, within which there is tension over how to respond. Senators like Chuck Schumer promote collaborationism while AOC pressures them to resist, and the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee is pushing a shift toward messaging around economic populism.
The left, too, has been largely silent. Unlike in 2017, there is minimal mass protest. DSA has suffered from a poverty of analysis, which leaves us without a clear message in response to events that unfold faster than most of us can follow. What does it mean to be a democratic socialist in a constitutional regime engulfed by bureaucratic civil war? What factions of the ruling class are in power, and what policies flow from which section of capital? What role can the working class play in a political moment so divorced from mass politics as we know it?
To determine the tasks ahead of us, we need to understand the phenomenon of Trumpism both as an outgrowth of capitalism and a form of reactionary politics adapted to our specific political order. The mass base of American fascism formed in yacht clubs and car dealerships, fueled by the spread of misogynist ideology, panic over the erosion of the gender binary and heterosexual family, and the shift from majoritarian to minoritarian white supremacy. The petty bourgeoisie, particularly whites and men, feel squeezed between decades of state austerity, the monopolization of capital, and a spread of cultural and legal egalitarianism. Responding to this pressure, they began to radicalize—seeking more and more extreme methods for returning to the golden age of the American middle class, taking direct action against their perceived enemies and providing the base for right-wing policy that smothers political freedom and working-class organization.
The ruling class, forced to either join the movement or lose its base, fragments into factions, leading to what the German Marxist August Thalheimer called the autonomization of the executive, where the fascists in power drop the veil of legislative democracy and begin ruling by decree, a practice already grounded in the executive order. In their hands, the state transforms from a tool for mediating between sections of the capitalists into a blunt instrument for enforcing the executive’s rule.
American fascism is still in the process of making and remaking itself, finding its base at once in the ruins of the Rust Belt and the mansions of tech utopians; in the blooming of a hundred Cop Cities and the militias of rural Oregon; and even among conservative women and naturalized immigrants. Fascism’s embrace of class contradiction has long baffled the left—it makes promises to the elite and to the poor, constitutes itself as both conspiracy and mass movement, and drowns class struggle in national pride. While the white middle class flocks to its embrace, it does not content itself with them—instead experimenting with other fractions of society it can drag into the movement—and in turn developing its own rivalries and splits.
While parallels to Nazism and Italian fascism do exist, both historical movements formed in moments of deeper crisis than the United States has faced at any point in the 21st century. Instead of a generalized freefall activating every part of society, we are witness to a crisis of the American ruling class, with its sections turning on each other in the wake of declining hegemony and a wing of tech radicalizing and asserting itself as the vanguard of a new system. As a result, Trumpism seems to lack classical fascism’s capacity for mass organization and mobilization, with groups like the Proud Boys floundering during his first term. For the moment, it manifests instead as a form of passive consumerism—working through bureaucratic control of the security state rather than mass politics. This is a logical response to the failure of the January 6 putsch. Militants physically occupying a government building did not translate into political power, but instituting fascism from above through purges and executive orders has. This reliance on the internal machinations of the state has led to the surreality of our current moment, where the public is both captive audience and prop, and the Executive Branch and courts are the only real political actors.
However, factions have already emerged within the administration. Trump champions economic populism and protectionism, straining the treasury by pouring money into the border regime and waging a trade war while trying to protect Medicare and Social Security. The old guard of the Republican Party aims for the destruction of the welfare state, the only actual path to appease capital and fund the expansion of the state’s repressive capacity. Musk seems intent on accruing as much personal control as possible, either to establish his own dictatorship or just to loot.
One ideology within the movement, subject to outcry from the liberal press, has been articulated by the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership. Commonly known as Project 2025, it lays out a detailed plan for the concentration of power in the Executive Branch and the destruction by decree of virtually every reform won through the system—from anti-discrimination law to environmental protections. Liberal intellectuals in publications like the New York Times and Washington Post, which have spent the last half-decade branding themselves as sentinels against fascism, produced hundreds of articles warning that the Trump administration represents a direct route to Project 2025 and the end of political freedom as enshrined by the constitution. During his campaign, Trump both embraced the Heritage Foundation’s cadre and mocked their plans, putting forward his own platform under the moniker Agenda 47, which lacks Project 2025’s rigor but matches its politics.
However he personally relates to it, Trump’s executive orders and his purge of government employees contain influence from Project 2025, and his cabinet includes architects like Russell Vought. The point of talking about Project 2025 or Agenda 47 is not to evoke a panic that Trump is set to transition the American state toward absolutism but to understand the branching paths in front of us, which will determine the level of political freedom available to organize in the coming years.
In response to Trump’s policies, a broad democratic movement has emerged, led by organizations like 50501, a decentralized network built around the demand to “uphold the Constitution and end executive overreach.” This puts DSA in a contradictory position—on one hand, the movement has fallen under liberal leadership, and abstention from it will lead to our irrelevance. On the other hand, 50501’s demands are fundamentally self-defeating, defending the causes of fascism to defeat its symptoms. It is necessary that socialists fight in defense of political freedoms alongside liberals but put forward demands that push beyond the current constitutional order and toward real democracy. When the liberals are with us against fascism, we fight together; but when they abandon us in defense of the capitalist order, we fight alone.
By contrast, sections of the left, exemplified by the Communist Party, put forward the call for a broad “all people’s front” to defend the constitutional order by campaigning for Kamala Harris. Then, after Trump’s victory, the Communists declared the beginning of “Resistance 2.0” to defend against reaction. The logic is simple: because fascism represents the most reactionary sections of capital and subverts the rule of law, a broad coalition in defense of the system can split capital and overwhelm the right.
The limitation of both 50501 and the Communist Party’s approach is that fascism does not grow from the reactionary sections of capital alone but from the entire liberal constitutional regime. The austerity of the ruling class tills the soil for an autonomous reactionary movement, and the liberal police state, bolstered by the Biden administration’s militarism and border policing, becomes a tool for the realization of fascism. Biden’s policies nourished the fascist movement by driving bearers of petty capital and even the working class toward it. Under Trump, the elite of the movement have penetrated the Executive Branch. Trump may usher in a more rapid decay for political freedom, but Harris’s election would not have defeated fascism or defended a democracy we have never had. In other words, while Trump represents a genuine fascist threat, the root of the problem is the system itself.
Fascism With American Characteristics
The current strategy of the far right represents a constitutional road to fascism, what Vought calls radical constitutionalism—not the overthrow of the republic and the end of American ideals, but the logical conclusion of our system of government designed to exclude the majority of society through “democracy” by and for white, male property-owners. Liberalism and illiberalism are vanishing twins, the former creating the legal and economic conditions for the latter to absorb the system. Trump’s executive orders demonstrate this in practice, using the existing power of the executive to test its own limits, daring the courts or the military to stop him.
Two mutually reinforcing, but not uncontested, aims emerge from the political project of the far right—finish the neoliberal project of undoing 20th-century reformism, and expand the security state to crush its opposition. The mass movements of the 20th century represented a partial challenge to the system, creating legal space for collective bargaining, winning a limited right to abortion, ending de jure segregation, etc. Reformism is an affront to, if not capitalism as a whole, one or another section of the ruling class, petty proprietors and even sections of the working class seeking privileges of their own. This sense of affront fuels the fascist movement and provides it with a voting base, though its mandate in the 2024 election depended less on growing reaction than it did on a cost of living crisis, which pushed a wider base of voters to reject the Democratic administration and into the arms of Trump.
The old reformers are dead, but a new left emerges in their wake—from the spark of socialist political action, tenant and labor unionism, and mass movements for reproductive freedom, the end of policing and the liberation of Palestine. Despite the current weakness of working-class political organization, even a limited resurgence further inflames reactionaries, confronting them with a threat as much perceived as real, a challenge to neoliberalism and Christian nationalism, and a bogeyman to generate moral panic. To wipe the old working class from memory, the right needs to smother the new working class in its infancy.
But since the Trump inauguration, the working class has been absent as a political actor, and resistance to Trump has largely taken the form of lawfare challenging executive orders. Almost a decade of organizing has failed to create a unified political subject capable of fighting the right. Progressive union leaders like the UAW’s Shawn Fain flirt with accommodation. Mass protest has yet to materialize in most cities. We cannot liquidate into a people’s front that does not exist. Instead, our task is to bring the working class onto the stage of history with an independent program, one that fights for real democracy and a world beyond capitalism. No other organization but DSA has the nationwide scale, the deep roots, or the internal democracy to be the political home of the working class. The responsibility falls on us.
Despite the threat of a fascist movement and a Trump presidency, we should avoid taking a mechanical view of the transition to open dictatorship. Already, we see paths compete with each other—will Trump continue to follow the Heritage Foundation’s plans or turn on them as he did so many of his allies in his previous term? Will he bow to pressure from the military or state bureaucracy? Or, will he be a loyal soldier for the furthest right policies in the room, providing a path to autonomization of the executive? How will his protectionist policies provoke backlash from finance capital, with its thirst for new markets, or the manufacturing industry, which depends on a complex web of imports and exports? Will the judiciary challenge the executive? Will deportation reach a scale that threatens the profit margins of agricultural capital? Is Musk accumulating power for his own gain or the reactionary project as a whole? If the Trump administration fails to cohere into a single political project, reaction will become its own worst enemy, limiting its ability to transform the state, which itself requires a massive expansion of law enforcement and bureaucracy.
For some analysts, our current trajectory is not towards fascism but a new Gilded Age, where two parties engage in bitter, violent struggle around identity while class struggles flow through channels outside of state power. Absent enough force of will from the right, this future seems likely, but we should be careful not to imagine objective limits on the far right’s ability—in commanding a mass movement and seizing control of the state—to push beyond the existing constitutional framework.
Socialist strategy under Trump will also depend on the level and form of centralization in the federal government. If current trends continue, state governments will play a greater role in governing themselves, essentially bifurcating oppositional politics between semi-democratic blue states—with freedom of assembly, working-class organization and limited welfare measures—and oligarchic red states with little to no freedom to contest the state through elections or street protests. This would transform DSA into two fundamentally different forms of organization: a mass party in New York and an underground in Florida.
But Trump’s executive orders are a challenge to the status quo, leveraging federal funding to further centralize government control. Heralded by the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, this would mean the White House taking an even more active role in shaping regional politics, dissolving the margins of the “blue state” as a refuge for welfarism, working-class organization and reproductive freedom. Of importance to the left, it would include asserting authority over district-level criminal prosecution where prosecutors are deemed too lenient, easing towards the repression of dissent regardless of city or state.
Democracy Against Empire
Regardless of which path Trump takes, and by extension, which tactics the left must take up, our basic political task remains the same: the formation of a socialist program belonging to the working class, and the struggle for democracy and against empire. Faced with the truth that the Democratic Party is no party of the working class and no bulwark against fascism, the task of building one falls on us. This requires contesting the state through oppositional, openly socialist candidates and legislative campaigns at every level of government available to us. Outside of elections, it means building mass working-class organization in workplaces, neighborhoods and social movements. Through the former, we build the political activity and confidence of a working-class constituency committed to democracy and socialism, and through the latter, we strengthen our forces for a struggle that will inevitably spill beyond the confines of the American electoral system.
Programmatically, we need to connect immediate issues faced by the working class to a higher vision of transformation, refusing to soften or abandon either pole. Operatives within the Democratic Party are engaged in a self-flagellating debate on whether to message around attacks on democracy or deeply felt, immediate economic issues. The false choice between them is, bluntly, a messaging catastrophe of world-historic proportions, and socialists would be unwise to follow them into the abyss. We need to show working-class people that we can abate the rising costs of healthcare, groceries and rent; that we can end unemployment; and that we can stop the attacks on immigrants and reproductive and trans healthcare through a radical transformation of society, not through upholding a brutal status quo.
To pull fascism up by its roots, we need to follow the revolutionary path to democracy, building a mass workers movement to demand a new republic and a socialist transformation of the economy. Through an independent left, engaged in the mass work and mass politics necessary to activate the working class and subordinate the petty bourgeoisie to its demands, we can both starve fascism of support and defeat it directly. However, by tying the workers movement to the political program of the Democratic Party, we delegitimize ourselves in the eyes of the most politicized sections of the working class, who need a party of their own to take power. In summary, two tasks present themselves to us:
Build a united front among the entire working class for the defense of political freedom from fascism, with common action but never in deference to liberal activists.
Organize the mass vanguard of the working class into a struggle against the constitutional order, and for genuine democracy.
If we march under the banner of “defending democracy”—the failed slogan of the Harris campaign, which we have already echoed in our messaging—we tie ourselves to a system that increasing numbers of the working class recognize as a dying empire. Instead, all of our work—taking seats in city council or Congress, canvassing tenants, marching on the boss, occupying campuses—should center agitation for democratic socialism, the project of defeating fascism by changing the fundamental conditions of the world. Without both socialism and democracy, the contradictions of capitalism will continue to produce reaction, and fascism will retain its road to power.
