Re: YOU "heard" it first here

Comrades,

Mark Baugher has already done most of the work of clearing the ground, and I want to build on his post rather than restate it. He is right that Trump's regime is Bonapartist rather than fascist, right that Trump possesses no coherent ideology, and right that fascism "from above" is a contradiction in terms. Trotsky's criterion and Gramsci's criterion both fail to be met, and Marv is correct to add the classical condition: fascism is capital's emergency weapon against an insurgent working class, and there is no insurgency for it to answer. But it does not follow from any of this that what we face is ordinary bourgeois democracy with authoritarian seasoning. The absence of fascism is not the presence of normality. What we face is a determinate state form with its own logic, and naming it correctly matters because strategy follows from analysis.

The form is patrimonial Bonapartism. Bonapartism, from Marx: the autonomization of the executive when the bourgeoisie surrenders its political rule to preserve its social rule, the state machine standing over society, the adventurer who guarantees capital's material power while humiliating its political representatives. Patrimonialism, from Weber: rule in which office is held as personal benefice rather than legal competence, in which the staff is recruited and retained through household loyalty rather than bureaucratic career, and in which the revenues and powers of the state are treated as the ruler's personal patrimony to distribute among retainers. Trump does not smash the state apparatus in the name of a mobilized mass movement, which is what a fascist seizure looks like. He converts the apparatus into a household. Offices become benefits. The professional stratum is purged not to build a party-state but to install servants whose tenure depends on personal fealty.

This is where John O'Brien's detail deserves more attention than his conclusion, though the documented version is more instructive than his gloss. What the reporting from last fall established is that at least half a dozen senior political appointees, Hegseth and Rubio on Generals' Row at Fort McNair; Noem in the house designated for the Coast Guard commandant; Miller; and others besides have taken up residence in housing built for the nation's top uniformed officers, to the point of straining its supply, and that confirmation of senior Coast Guard officers was reportedly slowed in part because seating a commandant might displace Noem from the commandant's house. Read that last item twice. An appointment to a sovereign office subordinated to the housing of a favorite: that is not coup preparation; it is patrimonialization, and it is almost too perfect an illustration. The distribution of residences to loyal officials is the distribution of benefices to retainers. It is what patrimonial rulers do. Fascism builds parallel mass organizations, a party militia, and a totalizing ideology that wins active consent. Patrimonialism hands out houses. The distinction is not pedantic. A fascist movement has to be fought in the streets by organized mass defense, and if that were the situation, John's popular assemblies would be the beginning of an answer. A patrimonial executive produces a different crisis: a crisis of legality, of succession, of the calculability on which the bureaucratic state rests. The repression Charles catalogs is real, and nothing in the Bonapartist analysis minimizes it. ICE terror is state terror. But it is administered through the apparatus itself, by agencies wielding delegated sovereign power, not by an autonomous movement of armed squads smashing workers' organizations while the state looks away. That is why Charles can be right about every fact and wrong about the label and why Marv can be right about the criterion without the conclusion that capital's house is in order.

Because it is not. Here I part company with Marv in one respect. The grumbling of sections of capital is not attachment to democracy, and it is not merely the ordinary liberal wing of a split ruling class. Weber saw the problem a century ago: patrimonial rule is structurally hostile to rational capital accounting. Capital requires calculable law, predictable administration, and exactions fixed in advance. What it gets from a patrimonial executive is tariff rates set by mood, carve-outs sold as favors, golden shares, shakedowns of law firms and universities, and the treatment of regulatory power as an instrument of personal tribute. Some capitals profit enormously from proximity to the household, and Hari is right that the new potentates exercise influence out of proportion to their number. But Weber had a name for accumulation through the ruler's favor rather than the market: politically oriented capitalism. Its beneficiaries are court favorites, not the bearers of a class program, and their ascendancy is a symptom of the state form, not a fascist vanguard. The unease of the rest of the class is the unease of capital confronting arbitrariness, not conscience.

Which brings me to Hari's thesis that the mainstream of the ruling class is moving toward a full fascist state, confirmed by the Democrats having thrown the election. Mark has already said what needs saying about the evidentiary structure of this claim, and Hari's reply concedes the point while relabeling it: proof comes later, inductive logic, and the cunning of the ruling class. But a method that treats the absence of evidence as the signature of cunning can prove anything and therefore proves nothing. The Democrats' 2024 conduct requires no conspiracy. A capitalist party disciplined by its donors, terrified of its own base, and institutionally incapable of offering the working class anything it might remember on Election Day will produce exactly the sequence Hari describes: the protected decline, the late substitution, and the subterranean candidate. Stupidity, as Michael says, though I would call it the structural stupidity of a party whose function forbids it from doing the one thing that would save it. No one had to throw the game. The class character of the party threw it.

Finally, Michael's original speculation about the 25th Amendment. The patrimonial analysis explains why this lever no longer exists. The pushing out of Johnson and Nixon that Charles invokes worked through party structures and a professional state apparatus that retained autonomy from the person of the president. Those are precisely the transmission belts the administration has spent eighteen months patrimonializing, and John's own evidence, the purged generals, and the replaced Justice Department personnel show the work being done. The establishment cannot depose a ruler whose staff it no longer staffs. What patrimonial regimes have instead of orderly removal is the succession crisis, because loyalty to the person does not transfer to the successor. Vance would inherit an apparatus of retainers whose benefices were granted by someone else. That, and not a ruling-class intervention, is the crisis worth war-gaming, and the calendar delivers itdepend2028.

Our tasks do not wait on it. The tribune work, the organizing, and the defense of every target of the deportation machine: all of that stands whatever we call the regime. But we will do it better if we know what we are looking  at
--
Tony


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