American Fascism Has Always Been Bipartisan

Photo by AussieActive on Unsplash

America is a country that has always been on the verge of perpetuating or embracing fascism. Its internal contradiction of being a democracy allegedly devoted to personal liberty and also being a violent, aspiring, and sometimes actual ethnostate founded on chattel slavery and genocide meant that oppression and authoritarianism have been here from the get-go.

It’s a meme at this point to note how America’s racist institutions inspired Hitler, but it needs to be emphasized nonetheless. Fascism was here when human beings were trafficked across an ocean and dehumanized so that they could provide “free” labor. It was here when white mobs terrorized Black and Brown Americans (as well as political dissidents) during the Red Summer of 1919. And it was here when Democratic and Republican politicians expanded the police state so that Black and Brown Americans were disproportionately incarcerated at higher rates.

We started building the fascist system we are seeing now, hundreds of years before 2025, and as we shall soon see, it was a bipartisan project.

Fascism has always been here

I cannot overemphasize how tied American fascism is to slavery. You want to talk about a totalitarian system that controlled every aspect of people’s lives. A system where the perceived enemy — the enslaved person—is considered both strong (i.e., capable of hurting white people at any time through revolt and sabotage) and weak (i.e., docile and happy about their enslavement). A system that encouraged mythmaking, hero-worship, and pretty much any other point in Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism checklist.

Well, that was the American plantation system: a violent, hyper-idealized project using the State to try to return a people to a time that never existed. As Alberto Toscano writes in The Boston Globe in an essay, you should stop reading this article to go and read:

“Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived of as beyond analogy, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left. They detailed how what could seem, from a European or white vantage point, to be a radically new form of ideology and violence was, in fact, continuous with the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery.”

In other words, fascism has been here the entire time, and it was only because it affected primarily non-white people that white thinkers ignored the parallels.

And as we are well aware (or should be), the modern police state now being used by the Trump administration to abduct students off the street (actions that are being decried as fascist ) was heavily influenced by the plantation system. You can trace a throughline from the slave catchers of the 1800s to many, though not all, modern American police departments, especially those in the South. In the words of Sally Hadden in Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas:

“In some cities, patrols were replaced by police groups. But in other Southern towns, patrols continued to function in many ways like police groups: breaking up nighttime gatherings, hauling in suspicious characters, trying to prevent mischief before it happened, or capturing the lawbreakers after the fact. The big difference was that in the South, the “most dangerous people” who were thought to need watching were slaves — they were the prime targets of patrol observation and capture. The history of police work in the South grows out of this early fascination, by white patrollers, with what African American slaves were doing. Most law enforcement was, by definition, white patrolmen watching, catching, or beating black slaves…”

Now, it would be a mistake to say that the police force only exists because of chattel slavery. While law enforcement has always been focused on maintaining the status quo, those it keeps in line vary depending on the social and political context at play. The targets of a 1900s London police force are different from those of an 1800s Charleston police force, although they still preserve some type of hierarchy.

Yet in America, it cannot be denied that one of those focuses was on preserving racialized capitalism, and the fascistic terror necessary to maintain it.

It was the violence of police as well as the extrajudicial violence of white mobs (often ignored or aided by police departments) that made this system possible. As Hadden continues:

“…Although slave patrols officially ceased to operate at the close of the Civil War, their functions were assumed by other Southern institutions. Their law-enforcing aspects — checking suspicious persons, limiting nighttime movement — became the duties of Southern police forces, while their lawless, violent aspects were taken up by vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan’s reign of racial terror in the late nineteenth century emphasized the most extreme elements of earlier slave patrol behavior.”

These fascistic roots run deep, and if we are being honest with ourselves, the building of this police state, many of my fellow white Americans are now decrying as fascist, was assisted every step of the way by all sides of our liberal democracy: conservative and progressive alike.

Fascism has been bipartisan

From the beginning, America was a bipartisan compromise on slavery — a point that hardly needs contesting when you see how intimately slavery was tied to the first version of the US Constitution (see the three-fifths compromise). This fascistic system of terror and control may not have been liked by all the white landowners who backed the US political project, but it was accepted enough for both American democracy and slavery to continue.

This paradox of ‘democracy for me’ and ‘fascism for thee’ may seem untenable, but it’s a balancing act that has been maintained for hundreds of years.

America achieved this through its definition of citizenship, creating a blurry, violent line between those who had rights under liberal democracy and those considered too inhuman by the State to receive them. It was citizenship that was stripped away from enslaved persons in the infamous Dred Scott decision, and it was citizenship that was carved out from prisoners in the 13th Amendment.

Now we are seeing Trump push to end birthright citizenship and other classifications of personhood. These actions are rightfully being decried as fascist, but Trump did not invent the fascist tool of stripping away a class of people’s humanity. We can see how it’s been part of the American project throughout, and I need to point out that the modern Democratic Party has been quite complicit in sharpening this particular blade.

Whether we are talking about a not insignificant minority of the Democratic Party supporting a bill that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (a blood and soil institution that is intrinsically fascist), or the way democratic municipalities and counties all across this country have cooperated with Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), there has been a consistent backtracking on immigration by the Democratic Party.

It was Biden, followed by Kamala Harris, who in 2024 (not the distant past) campaigned on a conservative piece of immigration legislation called the Border Act of 2024, which would have made immigration law even more unforgiving. As Ben Burgis wrote at the time:

“Under the proposed policy, the standard immigrants would have to meet to even earn the right to fuller consideration would be set much higher. And the cases would be processed not by the Department of Justice but by the Department of Homeland Security, where they would be subject to “a much faster review, often without attorneys or a deliberative process.” And a “shut-down” provision would mean that if too many undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers were encountering the Border Patrol at once, even this degraded level of due process would be thrown out the window.”

That is the policy Kamala Harris said: “…should be in effect today, producing results in real time, right now, for our country.”

Likewise, there has been so much talk about how fascist it is that Trump is using the prison system, particularly that of the concentration camp in El Salvador, to potentially punish political dissidents.

However, both parties have helped build and expand the police state. It was former Democratic President Biden who worked with two segregationists to pass the 1994 Crime Bill — a regressive law that led to the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Brown Americans all over this country — and it was then Democratic President Bill Clinton who signed it into law. It has, again, been democratic municipalities all across this nation that have had no problem expanding police budgets.

Trump has a police state now to draw on because most Democrats had no issue working with Republicans to maintain and expand it.

These are the tools of fascism, and the Democratic Party had no qualms in helping the Republican party build them when it meant helping them win over white people during elections — and that complicity is still happening.

An anti-fascist conclusion

America has, since its beginning, directed fascist violence at those it labeled as noncitizens, a category that has often been racialized. Trump did not have to invent these divisions, and he and his Republican allies had plenty of help from the Democratic party in widening them.

That does not make the Republican party better, but it does reframe the common argument that the Republican and Democratic parties are in opposition. When it comes to expanding the fascistic powers of the State, there is much more of a reciprocal relationship than many supporters of the Democratic Party would like to admit. I am tired of seeing status quo Democrats help sharpen a blade meant for people’s necks, and then make a show of acting shocked when Republicans use it. If you allow your government to build a weapon — and the way we remove citizenship from people and throw them in a box to die is a weapon — then don’t be surprised when your government uses it.

This status quo of accepting the expansion of an ever more terrifying State needs to change. We need to acknowledge the reality that allowing our government to sacrifice other groups for political expediency is hurting all of us.

The activist saying ‘none of us are safe until all of us are safe’ is not aspirational. It is literal advice. The fascist gains power by using any entry point that they can, and they start where the walls are already weakest. Trump right now is using the areas of law our political parties (not just republicans) have already weakened, such as migration and prisoner law, to cement his control. He is going after migrants and prisoners first because those are groups of people our society (and the law) already devalues.

If we allow this trend to continue, we will only have ourselves to blame.

For while fascism has largely been a bipartisan project, when it comes to the American people, it does not have to be.