On the Porch: A Conversation with Michael Roberto

 

Come on up to the porch to have a chat with Randy Voller — former mayor, real estate developer, musician, man-about-town and more — in a recurring conversation and slice-of-life program presented by VRC Limited. If you love great conversations and amazing anecdotes, then come on up and join us…On the Porch!

 

Michael Joseph Roberto is a musician, historian, writer and retired NCA&T associate professor in contemporary world history. His first book, “The Coming of The American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940” was published in 2018. He is at work on a sequel about the increasing peril of American fascism since Donald Trump won the White House in 2016.

 

 

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More from Michael Joseph Roberto: an op-ed penned and submitted to 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro, titled “FDR Would Call Trump a Fascist”

FDR Would Call Trump a Fascist

I’ll put it this way. It is a matter of history.

Many among us fear that Donald Trump and the mass movement he leads pose an existential threat to American Democracy.

As a historian who has written about the origins of American fascism, it is my belief that Trump and Trumpism, as a sweeping and totalizing force, are fascist.

Trumpism is the verve of American fascism, a menacing and hateful spirit driving people toward the destruction of the nation in the name of saving it. This distinguishes fascism from all political ideologies on the right that seek to conserve or preserve existing forms of rule, and by reactionary and militant means when necessary.

In this case, we might ask if the intensity and zeal of Trumpism would abate should its leader be denounced for what he is, a homegrown, fascist demagogue planning on re-entering the White House one way or another, as recent history has aptly demonstrated.

This is why Judge Tanya Chutkan’s decision to make public the 165-page brief by Special Council Jack Smith is so crucial to placing Trump’s actions in historical context. We are now in a parallel moment with an earlier time when the peril of fascism was real, here in the United States and elsewhere.

Allow me to make my case in accordance with Smith’s.

As Smith and his team argue, Trump functioned as a private person, specifically, as a candidate for re-election, when refusing to protect his own vice-president, Mike Pence, from a mob Trump himself had inspired to go to the White House.

Many who stormed the Capitol were holding signs and banners, or shouting at the top of their lungs, to hang Pence. Who put them up to it? Who was bent on doing what he needed to do to get what he wanted – only to have it fail in the end!

Throughout the entire sequence of events outlined by Smith, it was clear that the Constitution and the democratic principles it upholds, as well as the implicit ethics the office requires, were never on Trump’s mind as his followers wreaked havoc and destruction throughout the chambers of the Capitol.

These simple facts, palpable and incontrovertible, compel us as citizens to denounce Trump.

And here’s why history matters.

On April 29, 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent a message to Congress requesting that it create and fund a committee to examine the growing concentration of wealth and political power in the American economy.

Roosevelt, certainly no socialist, understood that America’s leading corporations and financial institutions had become a system of power steadily eroding competitive enterprise, which he revered as the backbone of American democracy. By the late 1930s, monopoly-finance capital had become hegemonic in American capitalism, and as Roosevelt saw this, the greatest internal threat to democracy.

So, what is the parallel between then and now?

As Roosevelt wrote to legislators, the rise of fascism in Europe had brought home “two simple truths” to all Americans:

“The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism – ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

“The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.”

Now consider this definition in relation to Trump and Trumpism.

The intent of Jack Smith’s brief is to demonstrate that Trump functioned as a private individual, and in so doing represented what he took to be his undisputed rule over the Republican Party, a private group, to attempt deceptively and maliciously to usurp constitutional government from above and below.

Indeed, Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, provide a striking example of Roosevelt’s first truth.

As Smith so ably shows us, Trump was determined to remain president no matter what it took, and in so doing swept aside his public responsibilities as president, as commander-in-chief, all to serve his private ends.

Trump actively sought to subvert constitutional democracy as a private individual, consciously ignoring his official, public obligations as the president.

According to Roosevelt’s definition, Donald Trump is a fascist dictator in the making and Trumpism is the force totale made real by the growth of a mass movement, the Republican Party, and business partners at all levels of American business enterprise directed toward the control and ownership of the domestic economy.

From top to bottom, these private entities are systematically destroying the legal legitimacy of local and regional governments while privatizing public space – all in the name of progress. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, now surpasses all Trump’s minions as the prophet and guru of Trumpism.

This is the meaning of monopoly in its highest, i.e., final form in the period of Late Capitalism.

Can we really believe Trump and Trumpism, once triumphant, will provide employment aimed at the production and distribution of goods required to achieve an acceptable standard of living most Americans need and deserve in the twenty-first century?

Or will it be the American Behemoth at full strength, devouring and regurgitating everything in its path until it man and nature alike can no longer survive?

Roosevelt held to a viewpoint historians and others call the problem of good vs. bad capitalism. Preserve and strengthen what is good by eliminating the bad.

Simply put, Roosevelt understood the source of bad capitalism in 1938, as fascist monopoly, good capitalism as competitive enterprise and democratic. For those like me, this is a false dichotomy of the first magnitude. But that is another discussion.

What matters most at this moment is this.

As citizens, we should call Trump what he is because our own history obliges us to do so. As my own scholarship and wrhaveng has made clear, fascism emerges from within as opposed to arriving from without. Contemporary world history also reveals that great enemies of democracy cannot be defeated unless the people fighting them comprehend their character. Each one of us can fulfill Roosevelt’s legacy by doing whatever we can to halt Trump’s march toward fascist demagoguery.

In 1938, FDR’s definition of fascism came from his great wish to further social democracy in America, however he deemed it possible.

At that moment, he had also become the symbolic leader of the struggle against fascism, here and abroad.

This is worth pondering.

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