America’s Oligarchic Path into the Coming Era of Fascist Crisis Management
Tomasz Konicz, 18.03.2025
Originally published on konicz.info on 01/22/2025
The catastrophe that not only America is now heading for was already looming before Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. “Nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected, Biden assured wealthy donors at a New York campaign dinner in June 2019, when his socialist rival Bernie Sanders was still spreading fear and terror among the U.S. oligarchy during the pre-election campaign.[1] The basic features of neoliberal politics and the corresponding economic policies, as they had been dominant since the 1980s, were to remain in place. The president largely kept his word – with one major, right-wing exception: Biden adopted the protectionist economic policy of his right-wing predecessor Donald Trump[2] in order to partially halt the impoverishment of the American middle class at the expense of Atlantic competitors[3] without having to tax the increasingly expanding U.S. oligarchy.
Link: https://exitinenglish.com/2025/02/26/a-country-for-old-men/
And it is precisely this reactionary idea of wanting to hold on to the status quo, even in the face of the continually unfolding capitalist crisis, that is giving a boost to fascism. Biden, as the much-vaunted Washington “dealmaker” who knows how to negotiate compromises, was hardly able to push through any of his already inadequate reform projects, while inflation choked off large sections of the Democratic Party’s base.[4] The Green New Deal and the postulated ecological transformation of the U.S. have remained a bad joke in view of the abyss between ecological necessity and political enforceability.[5] There has been no reduction in the social divide in the U.S. that continues to grow because of the crisis: the private healthcare system remains dysfunctional, homelessness is at an all-time high, the cost of living continues to rise, and the infrastructure remains largely dilapidated.
Biden actually ensured that nothing fundamentally changed. In this respect, his administration performed a final neoliberal St. Vitus dance on a seething volcano of crisis,[6] whereby all deviations from neoliberal orthodoxy – especially with regard to the protectionist deglobalization that has been initiated –only prepared the ground for the great authoritarian turnaround that is now imminent.[7] And yet the reality of the late capitalist crisis is far more glaring than the most exaggerated caricatures or satires of recent years.
What was not expected when Biden took office in 2020 was the Democratic Party’s willingness to gaslight the mental state of its president to the bitter end. Joe Biden was no longer in full possession of his mental and cognitive faculties during the 2020 election campaign. He was mocked as “creepy” or “sleepy Joe” until, thanks to excellent networking in the U.S. political machine, he managed to prevent the old left-wing social democrat Sanders from becoming the presidential candidate in order to beat the impressively unpopular Trump in the 2020 American dementia competition. Any standard toaster could have beaten Trump at that time.[8]
Joe Biden’s presidency can thus be interpreted as a showcase of the late capitalist health industry, whose top products managed to keep the doddering president largely presentable for four long years, while the opinion industry, in its gaslighting, managed with Orwellian thoroughness to make taboo what was blatantly obvious – that there is someone residing in the White House who could hardly get a job as a janitor, since the correct perception of space-time was increasingly too much for him.[9]
The U.S. as the New Soviet Union?
In the four years of his presidency, no successor was built up. Because Joe Biden was comfortable – nothing fundamentally changed, the powerful lobby groups in the Washington political machine could be sure that the Biden administration would not dare to engage in any serious disputes despite the blithely progressing socio-ecological systemic crisis. From the fracking industry to the healthcare sector, Biden – whose “merit” was having prevented Sanders – was a safe political bet.
Above all, Joe Biden’s presidency made it clear that the complex political machines of the late capitalist core states can largely function without a leader. Only in historical situations of upheaval, in the question of war and peace, such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, can strong individual leaders actually set the historical course. In this respect, we can consider ourselves lucky that the world has survived the four years of the Biden presidency, including the Ukraine war, without a world war.
Sleepy Joe was, so to speak, the Leonid Brezhnev of the late capitalist world system in the process of open dissolution; a reliable, comfortable veteran of the U.S. political caste, whose infirmity reflects the lethal crisis of capital reaching its inner, historical limits of development.[10] The parallels between the current late capitalist world system and the stagnation of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, as the crisis theorist Robert Kurz clairvoyantly described in his work The Collapse of Modernization back in the 1990s, have long been evident.[11]
But while the old men of the Soviet nomenklatura at least managed to produce a youthful and dynamic-looking head of state and party who failed spectacularly to reform ailing Eastern European-style state capitalism, late capitalism now only produces a fascist terror clown like Donald Trump, who this time was elected truly democratically – with an actual majority of votes. The political borderliner Donald Trump – who can simultaneously deny the climate crisis while laying claim to Greenland, which is resource-rich due to the rapidly melting Arctic – embodies the entire irrationality, the death wish of capital in its agony.[12] Confronted with its own increasingly acute contradictions, the only option for capital and the extreme right as its executor of the crisis is excess, the flight forward. It is the flight into the abyss.
The Democratic Path to Post-Democracy
Trump is the journey to apocalypse personified – but the U.S. functional elites have already been on the path to the catastrophe of a chaotic collapse of value-based socialization since 2020.[13] The bland social democratic appeals of a Bernie Sanders that many things must change in order to prevent the most severe social upheavals had already gone too far. Bernie Sanders had to fail in 2020 to implement a new New Deal, which Roosevelt was still able to realize in the pre-Fordist enforcement crisis of the 1930s. This is not only due to the four decades of neoliberal indoctrination and hegemony that preceded the fateful 2020 Democratic primary.[14] A Green New Deal would simply not have been enough; it would only have been a first step in confronting the socio-ecological crisis of capital. However, the old social democrat Sanders could have initiated a different, transformational dynamic – and this is precisely what scared the U.S. moneyed aristocracy and its political elite.
Ultimately, the 2020 pre-election campaign was about finding a way to transform the system in order to counter the capitalist systemic crisis – the functional elites in the U.S., especially in the Democratic Party, instinctively sensed this. And it was precisely for this reason that Joe Biden was able to close ranks behind him very quickly by simply promising – as mentioned at the beginning – that nothing would change. This is exactly what the most important factions of American capital wanted to hear. And it was precisely this that motivated all the relevant Democratic party wings to make a concerted effort to prevent Sanders – even if a rapidly deteriorating Joe Biden had to be the price.[15] However, the crisis of capital cannot be stopped by intrigues and manipulations in presidential primaries. After the Democrats had prevented a progressive way of dealing with the crisis, the pendulum swung once again in the direction of right-wing populism and naked fascist crisis ideology. Precisely because, well, “Team Biden” didn’t actually want to change anything substantially.[16]
But everything will change because capital, as a fetishistic process of boundless self-valorization, is dying of itself. As I said, the old men in the Kremlin in the 1980s were more advanced in recognizing the need for far-reaching reforms than the political entrepreneurs in Washington who were constantly begging for sponsorship money. However, it was unclear how this transformation process would proceed in the U.S. And the Democratic blockade of a progressive path to further managing the crisis in the United States ensured that the fascist option would now unfold.
It could even be argued that Trump’s first presidency already irreversibly damaged the Democratic Party. All progressive political demands, all promises of reform made by Sanders in 2020 had to bow to the maxim of preventing Trump once again. And this meant moving ever closer to the rhetoric of the right. The Democratic Party also failed to mount a significant pre-election campaign to put forward an alternative candidate to the increasingly senile Joe Biden. The panicked Kamala Harris, the hollow shooting star of the united left-liberal stump on both sides of the Atlantic, who emerged from the second tier as the campaign heated up, offered no alternative, as she was to the right of Joe Biden. Her economic policy agenda was largely shaped by Wall Street.[17] That is why the old social democrat Sanders clung to the aged president for so long – Biden was the maximum of what was possible in progressive politics in the late capitalist Washington political machine.[18]
A New Normal for Oligarchs
Trump’s second presidency will not be a mere repeat of the shitshow during his first term. It seems certain that the foundations of American democracy – even in its current, facade-like, quasi-post-democratic state – will continue to erode over the next four years to make way for authoritarian-oligarchic, genuinely fascistic tendencies. Until now, the basis of the political establishment in Washington has been the rule of law. In concrete terms, this means that lobbies – the more financially powerful, the more influential – exert influence on legislation in order to create the corresponding framework of legal conditions that are conducive to specific valorization interests.
The oligarchic principle of power will take the place of the capitalist constitutional state, which must always function as the ideal total capitalist (even if this system-stabilizing moment has increasingly receded into the background in the neoliberal age). This is a wild form of capitalist rule promoted by the dynamics of the crisis, which can also be found in many countries on the semi-periphery of the capitalist world system, such as Russia or Ukraine. The struggle for legislation is being replaced by personal acquaintances, followers, rackets operating in legal gray areas and power blocs fighting for positions of power and access to state or public resources. The state degenerates into the prey of these very rackets, its means of power are directly instrumentalized for particular interests, for example in the struggle for economic sinecures, as was and is common in the post-Soviet region.
Thus, the erosion of the state goes hand in hand with its authoritarian reconfiguration within the fascist crisis dynamic in the 21st century. They are two sides of one and the same process of crisis-induced feralization that emerges as soon as progressive, consciously transformative crisis reactions have been suppressed. And this is precisely what can be observed in the U.S. in all its – sometimes simply ridiculous – clarity. This is not just about the far-right billionaire Elon Musk, who, with his borderline character traits – not unlike Trump – personifies the increasingly open irrationality of the capital relation in its permanent crisis.
Musk is an oligarchic vanguard. Future U.S. election campaigners will hardly be able to do without such sponsors or actors, who no longer intervene via the detour of fundraising campaigns or political action committees (PACs), but “support” their candidates directly – sometimes by simply giving money to voters.[19] Immediately after the election, Musk began supporting populist or extreme right-wing forces from the U.S. and shaping them according to his ideas, for example through interventions in the UK or through campaign support for the AfD. A perfect storm is looming, with Washington using all its power to mutate into a promoter of right-wing populist or even fascist movements in crisis-ridden Europe or – once again – in Latin America.
Musk is just the prominent leader of an “alliance of oligarchs” that has formed around Trump, as the New York Times (NYT) put it in mid-January.[20] Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Tim Cook (Apple) and Sundar Pichai (Google/Alphabet) have already paid their respects to Trump with visits to Mar-a-Lago. The billionaires have seen that “the rules have changed” – and they are “signaling their willingness to abide by them,” according to the NYT. The favor of the unstable 78-year-old egomaniac at the head of state is now crucial to avoid being targeted by the state.
The first gestures of submission – intended to win the favor of the Mad King in the White House – were sometimes made even before Trump’s election. Programs to promote minorities at U.S. companies are being discontinued one after the other – and not just at Facebook. Microsoft wisely did this in mid-2024.[21] The billionaires who own the liberal newspapers Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times prevented endorsements for Harris during the heated election campaign. After the election, Tim Cook donated one million dollars to Trump’s election party. The Disney Group donated around 15 million dollars to a Trump foundation and a future Trump presidential museum through its ABC News television station. Zuckerberg had the (already symbolic) fact checks on Facebook removed in order to open up his social networks to mass right-wing hate speech not just during election campaigns, but all year round. And only the IT gods at the top of Google are likely to know what modifications have been made to the sacred algorithms that control the pulse of the web in response to Trump’s election victory. Amazon, on the other hand, is said to have ponied up 40 million dollars for a report by and about Trump’s wife Melania Trump.
Nihil Obstat
Sounds like a fucked-up oligarchy, like something that is common in Russia, Turkmenistan or Turkey? Exactly. The U.S. oligarchs are acting out of a sense of necessity, because there is hardly anything standing in the way of the authoritarian transformation of the U.S. state. It is not even relevant that the Republicans currently hold a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, meaning that the parliamentary checks and balances that characterized the U.S. political system are barely in place. What is decisive is what has happened within the U.S. judiciary in recent years and decades.
In the U.S. judiciary, a veritable judicial war raged over the appointment of influential judges, in which tightly organized, “conservative” groups such as the Federalist Society were able to elevate their sometimes far-right candidates to many key positions in the judiciary.[22] The right-wing majority in the U.S. Supreme Court is therefore only the tip of the iceberg: the mythologized U.S. Constitution – a document written around 250 years ago and amended countless times since – offers the right-wing majority in the Supreme Court a wide scope for interpretation in order to legally flank the fascization of the U.S.
This reactionary politicization of the U.S. judiciary is disastrous precisely because the reactionary and authoritarian domestic policy plans of the Trump administration, which will in fact accelerate the fascization of the U.S., are located in a legal grey area. Much of what Washington intends to push through in the coming years will simply be decided in court – ultimately before the Supreme Court, which has already (and as a precaution?) granted the president almost all-encompassing immunity with regard to his plans to overthrow the government following his election defeat in 2020.[23] Without the Supreme Court, Trump would not have even been able to run in the election.[24]
The main features of the intended fascization of the U.S. during Trump’s second term in office are well known. Project 2025, designed by ultra-right organizations and think tanks, became a scandal during the election campaign, as it effectively aims to abolish the separation of powers, remove the limits of presidential power and purge and subsequently politicize the U.S. state apparatus along Christian nationalist ideological lines, forcing Trump to publicly distance himself from it during the election campaign. However, just a few weeks after the election, the future president praised the reactionary agenda.[25] In the meantime, Trump has brought a number of figures from the right-wing networks surrounding Project 2025 into his administration – while the U.S. media are now avoiding the once hot campaign topic and the scandal, probably out of an instinct for self-preservation.[26]
Trump is already being normalized by parts of the mainstream media. There is currently no broad political opposition movement in the U.S., the Democrats have collapsed, the media are trying to come to terms with the new right-wing power, and the economy can live with Trump rather than Sanders anyway.[27] Nothing stands in the way of the fascization of the U.S., which will first affect migrants, refugees and minorities – as usual. Trump’s threatened mass deportations are likely to be the first major confrontation over the fascization of the U.S. The U.S. right’s fight against minority equality programs will also further inflame racism.
Trump’s second presidency also seems to be fueling racist efforts to restore the dominance of “White America” in the face of the demographic changes of recent decades. Hence the right’s deliberations to change citizenship law, for example to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants born in the U.S., and the moronic talk by Elon Musk of a “demographic crisis” in a world that continues to show population growth (which is probably a legacy of his socialization in South Africa under a Boer racism that fixated on demographics). Musk is referring to the white population of northern metropolitan areas or core states such as Japan.
Racism – especially in the militarized police apparatus of the United States – could also lead to unrest and widespread uprisings during Trump’s second term in office. This time, however, the U.S. right seems prepared to take extra-legal measures against protests. In August 2020, right-wing militiaman Kyle Rittenhouse killed two demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during protests against police killings. He was acquitted in court, elevated to a symbolic figure by conservative media and honored with an audience by Donald Trump. During Trump’s second presidency, riots – such as those that shook the U.S. in spring 2020 – are likely to be confronted with much more tightly organized right-wing extremist violence. The erosion of the state – executed by racket battles over the means of power of the authoritarian state – will consequently be accompanied by an increase in the importance of the traditional American militia system.
However, and this is also obvious, it will be the stubbornly ignored crisis of capital that must destabilize Trump’s presidency, especially in its ecological dimension. For one thing, it has now come to this: the worsening capitalist climate crisis is a central factor that is increasingly driving food inflation, from which not only poor and precarious sections of the population are suffering. Trump has just managed to win over large sections of the U.S. middle class, which is at risk of collapsing, with his promises to reduce the soaring prices for food and the cost of living, which cost “Team Biden” many votes. Trump cannot remove this price pressure from the air. In the medium term, in years rather than decades, the climate crisis will threaten the food security of large sections of the population, even in the core of the world system. And right-wing shadow boxing will not help. Only violence will help.
Fascism as the openly terrorist crisis form of capitalist domination is likely to manifest itself in extreme climatic situations in the future. The New Orleans of 2005, devastated by Hurricane Katrina, provided a glimpse of a crisis management in which the collapse of state structures, arbitrary local measures, blatantly obvious rule by racket, and brutal interventions by the central state interacted chaotically. The excess of fascist violence in the 21st century, which sometimes turns against itself and turns into blind self-destruction, is likely to spread in the slipstream of the coming weather extremes, particularly in the rapidly socially eroding U.S., led by an old, deranged white man.
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[1] https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/
[2] https://www.konicz.info/2024/06/21/protektionistische-eskalation/
[3] https://www.konicz.info/2023/11/28/transatlantische-entkopplung/
[4] https://www.konicz.info/2021/12/29/der-dealmaker-in-der-sackgasse/
[5] Ibid.
[6] https://telegraph.cc/letzter-neoliberaler-tanz-auf-dem-vulkan/
[7] https://www.konicz.info/2023/11/20/neue-kapitalistische-naehe-2-0/; https://www.konicz.info/2024/01/09/vertikal-gewinnt/
[8] https://www.konicz.info/2020/03/09/amerikas-demenzwahlkampf/
[9] In addition, there was the typical debility of the left-wing swamp, who accused critics of this absurd power-political freak show, which was originally staged to prevent Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy, of “ableism.”
[10] During Brezhnev’s demented reign, the Soviet Union entered the stagnation phase of the 1980s, whose inability to reform paved the way for the collapse of the early 1990s.
[11] https://edition-tiamat.de/books/der-kollaps-der-modernisierung
[12] https://www.konicz.info/2016/12/16/donald-trump-und-die-zeit-des-borderliners/
[13] https://www.konicz.info/2020/04/09/us-funktionseliten-auf-dem-apokalypse-trip/
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] https://www.konicz.info/2020/03/09/amerikas-demenzwahlkampf/
[17] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/business/harris-economic-plan-wall-street.html
[18] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4789223-sanders-seeks-influence-harris-campaign/
[19] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlnjzzk919o
[20] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/opinion/ai-climate-change-low-birth-rates.html
[21] https://nypost.com/2024/07/17/business/microsoft-fires-dei-team-becoming-latest-company-to-ditch-woke-policy-report/
[22] https://www.konicz.info/2021/12/25/amerikas-justizkrieg/
[23] https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-immunity-supreme-court-decision-07-01-24/index.html
[24] https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/supreme-court-opinion-trump-ballot-03-04-24
[25] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-praises-project-2025-2000245
[26] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/22/project-2025-trump-picks
[27] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/capital-loves-trump/677317/
Originally published on konicz.info on 01/22/2025