All regimes within the fascist genus in monopoly-capitalist society have as their principal object the destruction of liberal democracy. This is effected by means of a system of coercive rule centered on a leader or demagogue around whom a mass of “stormtroopers” drawn from the lower-middle class or petty bourgeoisie is mobilized, relying on a revanchist, racist, nationalist, and patriarchal ideology. It is characteristic of fascism that corporate property and the position of the monopoly-capitalist class remain sacrosanct. Private economic power within the society becomes more concentrated, even while control of the state becomes more centralized.
Such regimes, once they have gained control of the executive branch of the state, whether by election or coup, do not rule simply through raw power, but cling to some notion of legal order as the basis of their rule, claiming to conform to a constitutional order. What would normally be considered extralegal coercion is justified in terms of various “states of exception” such as the declaration of a “national emergency” or martial law, along with the introduction of a leadership principle enhancing executive authority, allowing the usual constitutional barriers to be crossed. This process, however, requires the support or acquiescence of the larger society. Hence, consolidation of such regimes is not the work of a day. Full dominance can only be achieved through a lengthy process that in Nazi Germany was known as Gleichschaltung, meaning synchronization or falling into line, whereby the entire state apparatus and the larger cultural apparatus are brought step by step under the regime’s control.
In the destruction of the liberal democratic state, a fascist or neofascist movement needs to gain control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches; the administrative state or civil service bureaucracy; the military and national security apparatus; police; prisons; the political party apparatus; the public education system; and, below the national or federal level, regional and local governments. However, Gleichschaltung does not stop with the conquest of the state apparatus but necessarily extends to the entire cultural apparatus of society, including the media, the educational system as a whole (both public and private), the wider legal sphere (lawyers and law schools), trade unions, the sciences, and the arts—eliminating all areas of critical thought and potential opposition.
In Nazi Germany, Gleichschaltung began with the introduction of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in April 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. This law allowed for the firing of all “non-Aryans” or Jews and all political opponents (principally Communists and socialists more generally) from the civil service, including judges, professors, art museum directors, teachers, musicians, and conductors—and immediately extended to the practice of the professions in general, for example, lawyers and notaries. The aim was to gain complete control over civil society—all the way to the creative arts. In the words of Hitler in Mein Kampf, “The purification of our civilization must include almost every field. Theatre, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and displays must be cleansed of exhibitions of a world in a process of putrefication, and be put in the service of a moral idea, a principle of State and civilization” (Adolf Hitler quoted in Jean-Michael Palmier, Weimar in Exile: Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America [London: Verso, 2017], 23).
Gleichschaltung in Germany was carried out mainly in the first two years of the Nazi regime. An example in the universities can be seen in the appointment of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the official Nazi choice, as rector of the University of Freiburg in April 1933—at the same time as the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Heidegger introduced the Nazi salute at Freiburg, and denounced intellectuals he disliked to the Gestapo as friends of Jews, leading to their removal. In his inaugural address as rector, he presented the Führerprinzip (Führer principle), promoted by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, according to which, in Heidegger’s words, “The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law” (Karl Dietrich Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration’ [Gleichschaltung]: The Consolidation of National Socialist Rule in 1933 and 1934,” in Republic to Reich, ed. Hajo Holborn [New York: Vintage, 1972], 109–28; John Mann, “Heidegger’s Feeble Excuses,” Philosophy Now, no. 18 [Summer 1997]; Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], 39–58; Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993); Richard Wolin, Labyrinths [Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 103–22]).
The dramatic effects of Gleichschaltung in the cultural realm under Nazi rule could be seen in the attacks on “degenerate art,” that is, modern art, particularly Dadaism and expressionism, and all art attributed to Jews and “Cultural Bolsheviks.” In 1936, Count Klaus von Baudissin, a dedicated Nazi who, in 1934, had been appointed director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, sold Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky’s famous painting Improvisation 28, declaring that it represented an attempt to “Russianize German art.” This quickly led to a general purge of art associated with “Cultural Bolshevism.” Much of the banned art, including hundreds of paintings, was confiscated at the orders of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in order to mount the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937. After visiting the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, visitors cleansed themselves by walking over the park to the House of Art, the “new temple in honour of the goddess of art,” as Hitler praised it, filled with classical “heroic kitsch” (John-Paul Stonard, “The 1930s All Over Again?: Trump and the ‘Entartete Kunst’ Revisited,” The Art Newspaper, March 28, 2025; Andreas Hüneke, “On the Trail of Missing Masterpieces: Modern Art from German Galleries,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany [New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991], 122–25).
Today, Donald Trump’s MAGA regime is introducing a similar process of Gleichschaltung aimed at both the state apparatus and the cultural apparatus. Immediately upon taking office in his second term following the 2024 elections, the Trump administration commenced the destruction of the federal civil service (or “administrative state”), reducing federal civilian government employment across the board, but specifically targeting those associated in any way with diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “Cultural Marxism.” Arguing that whatever the president does is legal, the administration has fired off a long series of executive orders signed by Trump aimed at ensuring the courts, media, universities, public schools, museums, and institutions of art all fall into line.
When threatened with loss of federal funding and other coercive measures, numerous liberal institutions have capitulated (including several elite law firms; certain targeted universities, such as Columbia University; and key media, as in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, which has declared that its opinion pages will now only carry views in line with MAGA ideology). Yet, others have tried to organize and resist. Judges in some cases have objected to the trampling of the law underfoot. A movement among lawyers is calling for the legal profession to refuse to negotiate with Trump. Harvard University has said no to Trump administration attacks on freedom of academic speech along with its demands with respect to the surveillance and deportation of visa students. (As a result, Harvard has been threatened with the loss of $9 billion in federal funds and the removal of its nonprofit status by the Internal Revenue Service.) Over four hundred presidents of universities, colleges, and scholarly societies published a joint statement on April 22, 2025, protesting “the unprecedented government overreach and political intervention now endangering American higher education” (Derek Sayer, “Democracy Dies in Daylight: The Great Institutions of Liberal America Are Falling to Trump Like Dominoes, One by One,” Canadian Dimension, April 7, 2025; Bill McKibben, “At Last, College Presidents Are Standing Up to Trump,” Mother Jones, April 25, 2025; Sheila Heen, “Don’t Negotiate: Negotiation Strategy Notes for Lawyers Under Attack from the Trump Administration from Harvard Law Professor of Negotiation [April 13, 2025],” MR Online, April 15, 2025).
The struggle is especially fierce in the arts. Almost twenty years ago, when British artist Chris Ofili’s remarkable painting, “The Holy Virgin Mary,” generated a public controversy, Trump, who was then considering a run for president, declared that “As president, I would ensure that the National Endowment of the Arts stops funding of this sort…. It’s not art. It’s absolutely gross, degenerate stuff.” In the name of combating degenerate or “woke” art associated with “Cultural Marxism,” and eliminating “waste,” the budgets and staff of both the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) have been slashed under the new Trump administration. The NEH is undergoing a staff cut of 65 percent. One-twelfth of the budgets of both the NEH and the NEA are to be devoted to Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes, which will consist of hundreds of statues, each costing $100,000 to $200,000, aimed at promoting American patriotism. In his executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History,” Trump targeted the Smithsonian American Art Museum, highlighting its exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” declaring that it presented the false view that “race is not a biological reality” but rather a “human invention,” and criticizing it for its misdirected attacks on “institutional racism” and “scientific racism.” On this unreasoning basis, the executive order placed overall approval of Smithsonian exhibitions under the charge of Vice President J. D. Vance (Benjamin Sutton, “Chris Ofili Painting, Once Called ‘Degenerate’ by Trump, Gifted to Museum of Modern Art by Trump Supporter,” Hyperallergic, April 19, 2018; Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order on Building the National Garden of American Heroes,” January 18, 2021; Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order on Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History,” March 27, 2025; Benjamin Sutton, “Trump Administration Will Use Humanities Grant Money to Build Patriotic Sculpture Park,” The Art Newspaper, April 11, 2025).
It is clear that the Gleichschaltung now being imposed on the United States is aimed at bringing all political and cultural institutions into line with MAGA ideology. There can only be noncooperation with such efforts. Moreover, noncooperation under these circumstances cannot be passive. Active unified resistance by the population is now required—a struggle that goes beyond resisting fascism/neofascism to confronting the capitalist system that gives rise to it.
The cover of this issue of MR is a political cartoon by Theodor Seuss Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss. In the Second World War, Geisel published hundreds of political cartoons, primarily for the magazine PM. A number of these, such as the one on the cover, were attacks on the “isolationist”/pro-Nazi organization the America First Committee, which had as its most prominent spokesperson the U.S. aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was presented with a medal by Hermann Göring on behalf of Adolf Hitler. The same slogan of “America First” has now been adopted by President Trump as the basis of his foreign policy. (See the Review of the Month in this issue by John Bellamy Foster.) Although Geisel was strongly antifascist, not all of his political cartoons are commendable. He penned racially charged cartoons in line with the U.S. wartime policy of internment of Japanese Americans, for which he was later to apologize. In conjunction with this, some of his later work for children (as in Horton Hears a Who! and The Sneetches and Other Stories) was directed against racial prejudice.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember not only Geisel’s anti-America First/anti-Nazi political cartoons during the Second World War, but also his racially constructed anti-Japanese American cartoons, the latter as a reminder of one of the greatest disgraces in twentieth-century U.S. history—the internment camps for Japanese Americans. The Alien Enemies Act, which was the “legal” basis for these internments is now being used by Trump to carry out massive deportations of immigrants, some to concentration camps abroad. For more information on Geisel, see Molly Gottschalk, “Dr. Seuss Satirized ‘America First’ Decades Before Donald Trump Made It Policy,” Artsy, February 3, 2017, artsy.net.
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