Vote how you will, but don’t pretend antifascism is on the ballot.

Joe Biden, like Donald Trump, is an actual, literal fascist. Here’s why.

I think it’s fair to say that pointing out the grossly racist, misogynistic, hawkish, and corrupt record of Joe Biden is… sort of played out by now. People who are more eloquent and far better informed than myself have already done that job. So, it’d be pointless at this late hour to go on a tirade about how terrible Joe Biden is, how unfit he is to lead in this crucial moment, etc.

The number of people who are still on the fence with respect to the presidential election seems vanishingly small. Whether you’re voting Trump, Biden, third-party, or not at all, your mind was probably made up some time ago. So, the point of this piece is not to criticize anyone’s choice¹, shame people for not voting “correctly,” or plead with anyone to have a last-minute change of heart. That’d be pointless.

Instead, I would just like to offer a clear-eyed view of the options laid before us, and to urge “the left,” such as it is, not to lapse back into complacency in the event of a Joe Biden victory. That, after all, seems to be the likely outcome, even if you’re reasonably skeptical of the polls.

I know many of you reading this will find relief in a Biden victory, and rightly so. Donald Trump is a bigot, a fascist, and a self-serving pig with virtually no skills that qualify him to hold public office. He apparently lacks any real convictions beyond self-aggrandizement, and yet he has mustered an army of supporters who are clearly willing not only to engage in violence on behalf of their new lord and savior, but also to sacrifice themselves. In a word, Trump is dangerous.

He has done great harm to the lives and livelihoods of countless Americans, persecuting racial and ethnic minorities, brutalizing even peaceful protesters, threatening journalists, locking away migrants without due process and taking children away from their parents, and constantly lying and dissembling about how great he is and what a wonderful job he’s been doing. He is a tin-pot dictator in all but scale.

And, he has managed to kill nearly a quarter million Americans with his woefully incompetent response to COVID-19², which is probably the single biggest reason Joe Biden has such a comfortable lead in the polls.

So, while I personally cannot condone voting for Joe Biden, I have the greatest sympathy if that is what you choose to do. And, admittedly, I would find it extremely gratifying to see this asshole, this absolute madman suffer a decisive, landslide defeat. He deserves nothing less.

But, we deserve a lot more. We deserve better than Joe Biden, the very avatar of the neoliberal status quo that gifted us Donald Trump in the first place. Again, I’m not here to tell you that voting for Joe Biden is right or wrong — only that doing so is perhaps less meaningful than it may feel. And, at the end of the day, how it feels is just as important in the calculus of voting as anything else for many people, though they may deny it.

I fully admit it would be extremely satisfying to see Trump and the GOP take a massive electoral hit. But, politics is not about what feels good. It is about the distribution and exercise of power to advance an agenda. When I converse with liberal supporters of Joe Biden, I often get the sense that they want politics to be somehow therapeutic. But it’s not. It can’t be. Politics is a fight, a struggle, and often a bloody one.

And, the struggle is ongoing. The sheer trauma of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 seems to be something liberals have yet to fully process and move past. I have many friends and family members who will undoubtedly go to bed tonight full of inner turmoil and anxiety as they await results that may not even come the next day. It would be simplifying things to say that you should all just try to remain calm and resolute, that we’ll all still be here tomorrow and life will go on, that the stakes probably aren’t as high as they feel. And, that would no doubt be unhelpful if you’re the type of person who operates on this notion that politics can have some sort of final resolution after which you can find rest and comfort. It’s a pleasing idea, but ultimately a mistaken one.

Biden or Trump, if you’re committed to anything approaching a left political agenda — freedom, equality, solidarity, and a more horizontal distribution of power and wealth — then you’re going to have a lot of work to do either way.

But that still leaves the central thesis: Biden as fascist. Too often, I hear Biden supporters — even reluctant ones — say things like, ‘I don’t like Biden, but I’ll still take his neoliberalism over Trump’s fascism any day. We have to vote for the lesser evil!’

And, while you may reasonably find Biden to be the lesser evil (though your moral calculus may ultimately be flawed), it’s much harder to say that he’s not also a fascist.

Neoliberalism is a term that gets tossed around a lot these days, but few seem to grasp what it really means. Joe Biden, most would agree, is a neoliberal. Mainstream Democrats seem to be. But so are the Republicans, which starts to muddy the waters around who our actual political enemies are. Often, in standing against neoliberals, leftists (i.e., socialists, communists, and anarchists) find resistance from their less radical counterparts among the liberal-left.

To your run-of-the-mill, well-meaning, progressive liberal (here distinguished from neoliberals as more of a cultural identifier than an ideological one), attacking neoliberals in the Democratic Party can look like support for the Republicans. This is, partially, how we end up with a whole swath of Extremely Online liberals proudly and unironically adopting the label of “neoliberal shill” and working overtime to dispense with economic critiques (à la Sanders) of their neoliberal heroes as somehow racist, sexist, or “class reductionist³” because they don’t always center issues of race or gender to the exclusion of class struggle.

Put simply, neoliberalism is an ideological commitment to letting market forces rule our lives. It is not the same as the laissez faire fantasy of so-called libertarians and “anarcho-capitalists,” where everyone basically starts on equal footing and can then freely compete with each other in a dog-eat-dog free-for-all with no government regulations, managed solely by contractual agreement between private entities and the invisible hand of the market.

Rather, neoliberalism comes with some starting conditions already baked in, namely, that there are already rich capitalists who start off owning all the factories, farms, banks, and (at least functionally) political institutions. For the working class to try to out-compete them in the marketplace or in elections is futile because the deck is so drastically stacked against us. Nevertheless, neoliberalism exists as an ideology to convince us that this system is somehow fair because those capitalists wouldn’t be rich if they didn’t deserve it. It tells us we just need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, all the way up to Mount Olympus with Carnegie and Ford and Walton and Bezos.

Of course, this rationalization is just as fantastical as the libertarian dream. It’s impossible for everyone to get to the top of the hierarchy. If we somehow managed to accomplish that, we’d have done away with the hierarchy. In other words, if the system actually worked as promised and we were all able to make it to the top with the capitalists through our own hard work and determination, then it wouldn’t really be capitalism anymore. It wouldn’t be neoliberalism.

But if that were to happen, then the ruling class would no longer be ruling over anyone. If everyone has the same amount of power and capital, then classes — our very notions of “rich” and “poor” — evaporate. But, neoliberal capitalism has many safeguards in place to prevent such revolutionary change from ever happening. And that is what frustrates the left. It also happens to be what frustrates liberals (and conservatives), though they can’t quite recognize it for what it is: a rigged game. Or, perhaps, it’s more accurate to say that they can’t quite see who’s doing the rigging and why.

Neoliberalism, then, is really just an ideological commitment to right-wing economics. It promotes the defunding, deregulation, and privatization of the public sector. To be a neoliberal is to support these things, which is why Joe Biden has historically opposed the expansion of social welfare programs, fought to protect big banks and deregulate the financial sector, and reached across the aisle with Republicans to get it done.

All of these things, it should go without saying, hurt the working class — especially the marginalized among us. And, harming us in this way helps the capitalist class. At the end of the day, it all adds up to a massive siphoning of wealth from the bottom to the top. After all, when there are fewer regulations restricting what capitalists can do to us for profit, they’ll take advantage of that fact. If they can turn a profit by polluting our air and water, they’ll do it. If they can profit by paying workers in the third world pennies per day, they’ll do it. If they can unlock new markets and natural resources by lobbying the U.S. government to overthrow uncooperative governments in the global south, they’ll absolutely do that, too.

When public services are defunded, poor people lose out but the rich often end up with some nice new tax subsidies. When those services are seen to fail (due to lack of funding, though this is rarely brought up), they are handed over to the private sector to administer — for a profit, of course. And, by offering those services at inflated prices, they once again profit from our loss.

All of that is bad enough, but the function of neoliberalism is not only to recommend such policies to those in power, but also to convince the working class — who suffer under such policies — that the neoliberal program is somehow good for them, even as it bleeds them dry.

If you’re feeling beaten down by the endless drudgery of your job, seemingly intractable financial instability, and all the associated anxiety and depression, thank a neoliberal. Specifically, thank the neoliberal politicians who comprise vast majorities of both major parties and who fight every day to keep you on that hamster wheel.

I wish I could say that that’s the worst of it, but we still have to talk about fascism, which is the even more sinister side of that neoliberal coin.

I think there is pretty unanimous agreement among leftists and liberals that fascism is basically the ultimate political evil. A great deal of opposition to Trump likens him to famous fascist leaders, or simply labels him a fascist, full stop. And, a great deal of support for Biden is rooted in the idea that we must elect him in order to stop Trump from leading us down the path to fascism.

And, to be sure, Trump is leading us down that path.

While accurate, that assessment is not the whole truth. Liberals generally seem to be of the understanding that the 2020 election has pitted Trump’s neofascism against Biden’s neoliberalism. And, while each is horrific in its own special way, the path of Biden is at least slightly less so. Biden may be an atrocious choice, but at least he’s no fascist. This idea just happens to be wrong.

It’s true that Joe Biden is a neoliberal. He’s the neoliberal. If there’s a policy enacted within the last forty or so years that served to defund, deregulate, and/or privatize, it’s almost a certainty that he supported it.

The thing is, neoliberalism is not separate from, or competing with, fascism; it is a justifying ideology of fascism. Fascism is just a specific type of regime. For one of the clearest historical examples of the link between neoliberalism and fascism, look to Chile. Hell, look at our continual flirting with both fascism and right-wing economics here in the U.S.

Fascism is a type of regime that tends to emerge as a consequence of the natural accumulation of power under liberalism. At its core, liberalism, is about free markets, representative democracy, individual liberty, and equality under the law. It’s what emerged in the transition away from monarchy, feudalism, and theocracy in the 18th and 19th centuries. And it looks great on paper! It just tends not to work out in practice because it is self-contradictory: Free markets pervert all of those other principles.

Free markets require private property as a precondition. So, to uphold the freedom of markets, laws must be created and enforced which protect the interests of the capitalists over those of the working class. They can take many forms, but in the post-Reagan/Thatcher age of neoliberalism, the economic program du jour is (stop me if you’ve heard this one before): Defund, deregulate, privatize.

This is why a starving person who, say, steals some soup for their family gets arrested, but an investment banker whose criminality results in a global recession gets a slap on the wrist, if that. The interests of the latter are privileged over those of the former to an absurd degree.

The wealthy and powerful get this special treatment precisely because they are wealthy and powerful. Capitalists accumulate vast wealth and power, which lets them buy politicians who, in turn, write laws that allow the capitalists to accumulate even more capital. Functionally, the capitalists are writing biased rules to favor themselves and protect their own interests. Tale as old as time.

But, this means that liberal representative democracy comes to represent the capitalist class almost exclusively — which is to say, it ceases to be a democracy. The system established by those Enlightenment liberals a few centuries ago was intentionally designed to facilitate capital accumulation, namely, their own capital accumulation. They, being white, landowning men, devised a system to ensure their individual liberties (i.e., their freedom to enrich themselves by exploiting natural resources and the labor of others). And they sought to ensure the balance of power would not shift against them by giving the masses too much say in governance.

In the absence of functional democracy, concepts like liberty, civil rights, etc. are revealed to be hollow platitudes. For example, capitalists can legally fire you if you say something they feel reflects poorly on their company. Liberals may argue that this is how it should be, often thinking of how employees will get fired for making bigoted remarks. But, what this amounts to is that our freedom of speech is determined by the capitalist class and their interests. Perhaps it is not ideal for any of our basic rights to be limited according to our class, even if the capitalists occasionally make decisions that align with our preferences.

So, we have an ideology — liberalism — that protects the interests of capitalists over those of workers. The problem then becomes getting the working class, who comprise the vast majority of the population, on board with that ideology. The main approach is to prevent labor from unifying to fight for its own collective interests. In other words, the capitalists’ strategy is to prevent working-class solidarity.

Scientific racism is a classic divide-and-conquer tactic. All you need to do is convince the white working class that they are superior to the other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups within the working class, and the working class as a whole becomes much easier to control. The infighting and racialized antagonism prevents workers from uniting to overthrow the capitalists. Racial divisions are manufactured to distract from the material divisions of class.

Racism has the added “benefit” of keeping the capitalist class almost entirely white. People of color are stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy, helping to maintain the reserve army of unemployed and underemployed people. This keeps wages at a minimum; people are less likely to demand better pay if they can always be replaced by those willing to work for a poverty wage. And racism keeps various racial and ethnic groups at odds with each other, precluding a united struggle for better wages across the board.

And, of course, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, sexism, and essentially all other forms of bigotry can be employed to achieve the same ends. They frequently are.

Fascism is characterized by ultranationalism, authoritarianism, and the forcible suppression of opposition. But, each of these characteristics differs from liberalism as a matter of degree, not kind. Each is a logical extension of liberalism in some way: Ultranationalism is racism pushed to its logical conclusion. Authoritarianism is the natural outcome of a “representative” democracy that represents only one class. Suppression of opposition results from laws that favor capitalists over working people.

This is why there is no consensus on when a liberal society has fully transitioned into a fascist one. It’s like trying to determine the point at which a pile becomes a heap. Most people tend not to count, say, the U.S. and Canada among the fascist countries during WWII, but both governments at that time forcibly transferred citizens of Japanese heritage from their homes to concentration camps. That’s pretty fuckin’ fashy, but it is also very much a liberal strategy. And, given the new wave of U.S. concentration camps for migrants (many of which are run by private companies), it’s clearly been adopted as a neoliberal strategy as well.

A major reason many leftists, myself included, are reluctant to vote for Biden is because the Biden/Harris ticket has quickly become the favorite of not only the neoliberal capitalists, but also outright fascists.

Richard Spencer has disembarked the Trump Train is now Ridin’ with Biden. Naturally, the immediate response from Biden supporters is that Spencer is simply trying to scare voters away from Biden to help secure another Trump victory. But, why would putative Biden voters feel pressured by the word of a neo-Nazi?

The thing is, Spencer’s endorsement should scare non-fascists away from Biden — not because he’s lying about his preference, but because Spencer has always been pretty open about his views. And, if you’ll recall, neoliberalism is the prelude to fascism, not a separate thing from it. It’s certainly not something that can combat fascism.

It’s actually pretty easy to see why a goddamn Nazi would prefer Biden over Trump: Biden and Harris will almost certainly be more competent and efficient administrators of the police and carceral state than the shitshow that is the Trump White House. That’s worth serious consideration, but the tendency of liberals is to ignore it entirely.

And, if fascist characteristics emerge from liberalism — and they constantly do, to some degree or another — then liberalism is always (again, to some degree or another) facilitating the disproportionate accumulation of power by the rich, the ultimate expression of which is fascism. Think of fascism as neoliberalism’s final form.

“Liberal democracy,” then, is an oxymoron; a society cannot simultaneously guarantee equal political power to all people and the right of the rich to maintain their own disproportionate access to power and resources. Fascism resolves — or smooths over — this contradiction through authoritarianism, which is what Spencer advocates.

Fascists generally, like Spencer in particular, will recognize the importance of workers’ rights, but only so as to preserve the capitalist system. They will not hesitate to implement stronger worker protections or greater corporate representation in government if they feel one or the other is necessary to defend capitalism in any given moment. What fascist workers’ rights better resemble are something like state-owned unions. They don’t serve the marginalized, the working class as a whole, or even the ruling elites — not directly, anyway. They only reify the hierarchy of the state which, in turn, maintains capitalism through its authoritarianism, ultranationalism, and suppression of the opposition.

That Spencer and other fascists would advocate for Biden suggests they no longer view the instability of Trump’s presidency as conducive to the strict hierarchy they want to maintain. And it’s easy to see why, with all of the civil unrest that has sprung up as a result of the combined crises of COVID-19, the resultant economic crash, and the uprisings against police brutality. More damning, though, Spencer correctly notices that four years of a neoliberal regime are not likely to change much of anything.

Despite their campaign promises, the most probable outcome is that Biden and Harris will do little more to help the working class and marginalized groups than Trump has, and things will certainly not go “back to normal” in that time. Then, the GOP will run a competent right-wing “populist” in 2024⁵, who will likely emerge victorious after the Democrats blow their biggest opportunity to show that they’re capable of governing in a meaningfully better way than the Republicans.

Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Democrats will be woefully incompetent at improving the material conditions for the vast majority of people because they embody an ideology that tells them that the way to “help” us is through defunding, deregulation, and privatization. Nevertheless, they will couch their failure in woke platitudes that alienate the “moderate Republican” voters they rely on to win elections without appealing to the left. And, they will lose again for the same reasons they lost in 2016: People across the political spectrum will be fed up with their inability to meaningfully change things, so they’ll turn to another charismatic crypto-fascist who can build a personality cult similar to Trump’s.

None of this is to suggest that Biden is the same as Trump. To the extent that an objective assessment is even possible, Biden is better in many ways. But, the actual effect he will have on the direction we’re headed will be minimal. You don’t nominate a status quo candidate to shake things up, after all. He will maintain our current trajectory, partially because of his own ideological leanings and partially due to the nature of the presidency itself. The U.S. has continued down the neoliberal path to fascism unhindered under Trump, just as it had under Obama and Bush and Clinton. There’s essentially no reason to think it won’t do so under Biden. The national security state practically runs itself, as do the myriad other departments and agencies, driven by political appointees and an army of mid-level bureaucrats.

As bad as Trump may be, his economic program is not out of line with his predecessors. Again, it’s all about wresting the last remnants of power and funding from the public sector and handing it over to private corporations. Biden’s victory, though, will make him a convenient scapegoat for any lack of improvement — which, again, is a likely outcome — in a post-Trump world.

A one-term Trump presidency opens up the narrative that Trump had “good ideas” but was hindered by those obstructionist Democrats and didn’t have the time to really get anything done, so ‘We need a better, faster Trump!’ It’d be a lot harder to paper over two disastrous Trump terms, just like how George W. Bush won handily in 2004 but his would-be successor, John McCain, was hindered significantly by the awful reputation Bush had earned the GOP after eight years in office.

Furthermore, because fascists are not afraid to implement left-sounding ideas, a Trump 2.0 would be able to build an effective coalition on “economic” ideas using appeals similar to those employed by Bernie Sanders, thereby bringing in more support among people of color than Trump ever did. Hell, there’s already evidence that the Democratic advantage among Latino voters is slipping away. And, it’s probably a safe bet that the next Trump, whoever it is, will be more effective at governing than the Donald himself.

Am I making an accelerationist case here? No, I don’t think the answer would be to let Trump have a second term just so that he can fail spectacularly. After all, his base hasn’t yet found a low that’s too low for their sensibilities yet. It’s doubtful they’d abandon their leader in another four years. Instead, my point here is simply that we need to be realistic about what we’re gaining and what we’re giving up by replacing Trump with Biden. And I worry that if the liberal-left can’t take off the rose-colored glasses with which it sees its favorite president, Mr. Not Trump, then we will be essentially abetting fascism through four or eight years of inaction.

So, what are we to do? Certainly we should not support Trump or the GOP, so let’s dispense with this idea that the left secretly wants Trump to win, due to some bizarre, misguided accelerationist idea that he’ll launch us into a full-blown socialist revolution. That’s not the path we’re on right now. Rather, the analysis here is more like “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” A Trump victory would be bad, but a Biden victory wouldn’t be a good thing in the long term either. The point is simply that the “lesser evil” utilitarian calculus that so many liberals believe in is less straightforward than it may apppear.

Perhaps the only advice I can give is this: Vote for Biden if you feel that’s what you must do. Just don’t pretend the world will fix itself once he wins. And don’t hold some grudge against those who find him too conservative to support in this election. You’re going to need a coalition of people who are willing and able to get out into the streets and agitate for a left agenda no matter who wins the presidency. Burning those bridges now would only hurt your cause in the long run.

Beyond that, it is crucial that you take your weird lefty friends’ advice to heart in the future: Pledge now to withhold your vote from any Democrat who doesn’t meet certain bare minimum criteria of progressivism. If Biden spends the next four years in office and ICE is still putting kids in cages, fracking continues to expand, and drone-bombing civilians across the Middle East, don’t vote for him. Don’t support any Democrat who is on the wrong side of history. That’s the only leverage you have at the moment, and they know it, which means you must use it or nothing will change.

They will use the threat of Republican electoral victories to scare you, and that’s a real possibility. But, electoral politics entails the constant possibility that your party will lose. So, don’t let yourself be held hostage by a party that clearly does not have your best interests at heart. Don’t give in, even if it means a short-term loss — even if it somehow means Trump again in 2024! They’ll either be forced to change for the better, or they’ll be replaced by some other party that can get things done, a genuinely progressive party that won’t stand idly by in the face of a fascist like Donald Trump. Or Joe Biden.

In closing, heed the words of Lawrence O’Donnell, speaking in 2006:

“If you want to pull the major party that is closest to what you’re thinking, you must — you must — show them that you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you’re capable of not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working within the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.”

1. Unless that choice is to vote for Trump, in which case fascism isn’t really a thing that bothers you, is it?
2. Yes, it’s his fault. If your knee-jerk response is to blame China, then I’m sorry to have to tell you you’ve been brainwashed. China didn’t guide Trump’s hand as he elected to do essentially nothing about this problem for weeks. People are dead, and he is directly at fault.
3. Genuine class reductionists are so few and far between that you’re unlikely to ever encounter one outside of the depths of tankie⁴ social media spheres. Virtually all socialists are already on board with the fight for racial and gender equality; they simply see a need to address class forcefully because liberals tend to go out of their way to avoid doing so. Treat anyone who uses the term “class reductionist,” and their political prescriptions, with skepticism.
4. If you don’t already know what “tankie” means, count yourself lucky and just move on with your life. You still have a chance to be happy.
5. Although, there’s really nothing stopping Trump from just running for a second, non-consecutive term.