As someone who was born in the rubble that was Germany after fascists got through with making Das Vaterland great again, I have anti-fascism embedded in my political DNA. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the country that accepted me and my family as displaced persons in the midst of McCarthyism and lingering fascism. A few years earlier, six months before Nazi Germany launched its blitzkrieg against Eastern Europe, American fascists filled Madison Square Garden in a massive pro-Nazi rally. Though both dialectically opposed forces have been operative within its borders, America has never been a fascist or anti-fascist country. However, today it is precariously close to fascism. Forces on the Right and Left have oddly become strange bedfellows to make that disastrous prospect possible. MAGA, the main movement propelling America toward fascism, has been curiously joined, in effect, by parties on the American Left to catapult Trump back into the White House in 2025.
On the first day of the Democratic National Convention, a group identified as The Civil Rights Alliance for America held what it called an "Abandon Biden Convention" (then changed to "Abandon Harris") at the Alhambra Hotel in Chicago. Speakers included only its organizational leaders from swing states and presidential candidates from parties on the American Left (Party for Socialism and Liberation; Green Party; and Justice for All Party). Though barely mentioning Trump, let alone the MAGA threat or denouncing either, their vitriol was exclusively and passionately reserved for the Democratic Party, Biden and particularly Harris. The founder of this anti-Harris campaign, Dr. Hassan Abdul Salam, claimed that "the only option for people of conscience is to abandon Harris", and called upon the 53,000 YouTube viewers to depose "the pharaohs in the White House". Muslim speakers from Arizona, Michigan and North Carolina echoed these sentiments and repeatedly claimed a vote for Harris is a vote of consent for genocide.
Statements from the three presidential candidates (Stein, de la Cruz, West) were variations on this common theme of contempt for the Democratic Party and a claim that voting for Harris is an act of complicity with genocide. Stein even had the audacity to assert that the Democratic Party itself actually laid the foundation for fascism in America.
If there was any doubt about the real impact and purpose of these three presidential candidacies, it disappeared at this revealing press conference explicitly designed to thwart a Harris presidency and really nothing else. All the high-sounding rhetoric about "love for oppressed people" and "our precious Palestinians" (West's phrases) evaporated in the stark light of their explicit determination to strategically draw voters away from Harris and thereby directly (and intentionally?) support a Trump victory. Why else only focus on battleground states and only give voice to campaigns likely to dilute the Harris vote, not the Trump one? Yes, "our democracy is on life support", as Stein expressed it at this troubling press conference. And the Abandon Harris effort as well as these three left-wing presidential campaigns may just pull the plug. If that happens, there will be hell to pay, reminiscent of what happened in Germany in 1933.
This is no time for pretentious politics, naive perspectives and deceitful campaigns. The wolf is at the door. and fully intends to devour American democracy with Project 2025, the US functional equivalent of Nazi legislative designs and actions which dismantled the Weimar democracy in Germany. Four weeks after his appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933, Hitler and his Nazi party (NSDAP), along with the abject cooperation of conservative and Christian parties, passed the "Presidential Order for the Protection of the State" which suspended fundamental individual rights and most civil liberties. In March of that fateful year, legislation with a distinctly MAGA ring, "Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich", was quickly passed. This Enabling Act allowed Hitler to pass and enforce oppressive laws without objection or consent by Parliament; political opponents and many others were routinely rounded up and disappeared. Within a matter of months following its rise to power, Hitler's government rapidly transformed into a legal dictatorship and vicious totalitarian regime.
Similarly, Project 2025 relies upon a concentration of power in the POTUS and his political loyalists to enact numerous anti-democratic proposals without congressional approval, whether legal or not. Central to this 900-page Presidential Transition Plan is a direct attack upon labor, working families, civil liberties, reproductive rights, public education, health care, public transportation and climate action. Targeted for elimination are Head Start programs; EPA Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil rights; National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration; the Department of Education and other agencies/programs enhancing quality of life in America. Under these draconian plans, access to food assistance is restricted; child labor protections are weakened; federal student loans are rolled back; gender equity is undermined; worker safety rules are relaxed; drilling on public lands is expanded; costs of prescription drugs are kept high; qualifications for disability benefits for vets are limited; workplace discrimination is allowed; overtime pay by corporations is cut; safety nets for farmers are removed; non-partisan federal employees are replaced with loyalists; ad nauseam.
Project 2025 is designed to do to American democracy under the first year of a Trump regime what legislation pushed by the Nazis did to Germany under the first year of a Hitler dictatorship. This must not come to pass. Prevention of this unmitigated disaster depends upon a viable united front against MAGA fascism. On the other hand, a Trump triumph would decimate the American Left much like what happened with progressives, and not only them, in Germany during a former dark time. For the three presidential candidates on the Left, there is really only one honorable and truly progressive choice at this critical juncture: withdraw, and use the time and space afforded by a Harris presidency to organize and fortify a mass movement toward a socialist America and liberated Palestine.
(Article changed on Aug 24, 2024 at 8:49 AM EDT)
