It is widely understood today that the United States is confronted with a pervasive neofascist threat. Evidence of this is visible now throughout society, not least of all in Donald Trump’s White House itself. The U.S. military is being deployed by presidential directives in cities throughout the nation, from Washington, DC to Los Angeles to Memphis to Chicago. Masked ICE (U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement) forces are pulling people out of their homes, from businesses, and off the streets all across the country, spreading terror. Antifa (not an actual organization, but standing for antifascist movements) has been declared a “terrorist organization” by presidential executive order.
In this special memorial issue on Robert W. McChesney, it is therefore useful to look at what he had to say on the subject. McChesney was the first to perceive the full extent and implications of the thrust toward fascism in the United States in this period. As a scholar in the political economy of communication, a longtime critic of monopoly capital, and a leading organizer in the media reform movement, he readily grasped the overall shift taking place at the top of the society, pointing to the destruction of liberal democracy, and its replacement by neofascism. A key element was an analysis that he did of “surveillance capitalism” with John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review July–August 2014, in which they analyzed how marketing corporations, the Pentagon, and finance had developed surveillance technology from the 1950s to the present century, extending both the commodification of and control over populations. By the end of the twentieth century, the communications sector had become both the main center for capital accumulation and simultaneously the main force—given its rapid development under monopoly-finance capital in the neoliberal era—for the de-democratization of society (John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Surveillance Capitalism,” Monthly Review 66, no. 3 [July–August 2014]: 1–31).
McChesney was familiar with some of the best general analyses of fascism, such as Michał Kalecki’s “The Fascism of Our Times,” Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, Dave Renton’s Fascism: Theory and Practice, and Samir Amin’s “The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism.” But he developed his own analysis most directly from the threat of fascism in U.S. history in the 1930s and ’40s, relying especially on the warnings of underlying fascist tendencies issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President Henry Wallace, and on the 1947 Patman Report of the U.S. Congress, Fascism in Action. Both Roosevelt and Wallace saw the danger of fascism as emanating from the growth of corporate monopolies and their penetration into the political and cultural spheres, undermining democracy. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the revolt from below of labor in the 1930s led by radical unions, instituted changes that inhibited fascism for a long time (though in the McCarthy Era, the left was greatly weakened). Nevertheless, the neoliberal decades, beginning in the closing years of the twentieth century, had so hollowed out democracy in society, increasing the power of monopoly owners of capital (today billionaires), that it had created the very situation that Roosevelt and Wallace had warned about. Moreover, growth of concentrated capital and cartelization in the communications sector in particular—a sector vital to the functioning of a democratic society—accelerated the dangers (Michał Kalecki, The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972], 75–84, 99–106; Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004]; Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice [London: Pluto, 1999]; Eightieth U.S. Congress, Fascism in Action: A Documented Study and Analysis of Fascism in Europe [Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947]; Samir Amin, “The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism,” Monthly Review 66, no. 4 [September 2014]: 1–11).
As McChesney stated in his 2015 talk, “Capitalism in the Age of Digital Technology,” published for the first time in this issue of Monthly Review, Roosevelt had explained, in McChesney’s words,
that the way to prevent fascism from ever returning in the United States—and he was very pointed about this—was that it was imperative that business monopolies be eliminated; that you could not have concentrated economic power and also have democracy; that you could not end militarism without combating fascism, since militarism and war are spawning grounds of a fascist mentality. You would have to invigorate democratic institutions, like education, and guarantee a minimal standard of living for every person. That meant everyone should have guaranteed health care, guaranteed employment, the right to belong to a labor union. FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] went so far in 1944 as to say that this should be in the Constitution. That’s how important it is. He called it the Second Bill of Rights. He said this should be the next stage in the Constitution, guaranteeing these rights to all Americans. He indicated that if we do this, we’ll never have fascism, this will prevent fascism. (See Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies,” April 29, 1938, American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu; Franklin D. Roosevelt, “A Second Bill of Rights,” January 11, 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foundation, fdrfoundation.org)
In their 2016 book People Get Ready, McChesney and John Nichols documented how Roosevelt saw fascism as the product of a situation where monopoly/oligopoly overwhelmed democratic states, undermining all human rights in the quest for total concentrated power. Wallace is quoted as saying: “American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.” For McChesney and Nichols, we were already approaching that stage. “One of the core aspects of fascism everywhere,” they wrote, “was to destroy democratic infrastructure,” while strengthening the power of private capital over society (Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, People Get Ready [New York: Nation Books, 2016], 40; Henry A. Wallace, “The Danger of American Fascism,” New York Times, April 9, 1944).
In 2017, Foster published Trump in the White House, arguing that neoliberal monopoly-finance capital, now centered on the high-tech, finance, and energy industries, had, since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008–2010, resorted to mobilizing the violently nationalist, racist, misogynist, and revanchist elements within the white lower-middle class against liberal democracy, and against both the upper-middle class (or professional-managerial class) and the bulk of the working class. The danger was that the implementation of a process of Gleichschaltung, or falling into line, initiated by the Donald Trump administration, would lead to the penetration of neofascist institutions into all aspects of political life and the cultural apparatus of society (including media and education). The resort to such extreme measures by the ruling oligarchy was a product of the need of the communication, technology, finance, and energy monopolies to ensure their continued dominance in a polarizing society while seeking to counter the decline of U.S. imperial hegemony in the world economy (John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017]).
In a foreword that he wrote to Trump in the White House, McChesney focused on the way in which neofascism had emerged out of neoliberalism, at a time when the latter no longer represented a workable ruling-class strategy since it was faced with growing economic and political contradictions and grassroots rebellions. The answer of monopoly-finance capital was to reach beyond neoliberalism to neofascism, ending any real pretense to a democratic society. What neoliberalism had sought to accomplish “in stealth fashion,” he argued, “is exactly the outcome that fascist movements invariably seek” more directly, and in a more no-holds-barred manner, that is, “a demolished democratic system in which the remaining institutions are controlled by and serve capital or are enfeebled. Our increasingly privatized education system and disintegrating journalism are ideal for propagandists and frauds. It is difficult to see how a preposterous figure like Trump could exist in public life if there were a credible information system.” However, “the good news for humanity,” McChesney concluded, “is that there is nothing inexorable about the victory of fascism. There is another road out, and that road is socialism…. A democratic society with real self-government, of the people, by the people, and for the people…. That may have sounded like a pipe dream in the past, but it is becoming clear that it is the only credible way out of our present morass” (Robert W. McChesney, foreword to Foster, Trump in the White House, 7–13).
Correction
On page 92 of Helena Sheehan’s article, “Marxism and the History of Philosophy,” in the October 2025 issue of MR, “stupid idealism” should be “stupid materialism”—referring to a quote from Lenin.