But the latter two variants of rightwing populism or neofascism retain Cold War attitudes toward Russia. Still, the Kaczynski regime has managed to combine social welfare measures, rightwing nationalism, Islamophobia, virulent heterosexism, and anti-immigrant politics into a stew that, with the exception of its stance toward Russia, is quite similar to Orban's Hungary.
Two things stand out here when one examines the US case in the light of these international dimensions. One is that in the United States, a major political party, the Republican Party, has evolved in just a few years into a far-right, nearly neofascist party, with a small 'moderate' minority. These moderates are quickly purged if they express any explicit opposition to Trumpism. Moreover, the violent politics of 6 January was so extreme that even European far-right groups publicly condemned such use of political violence. In this sense, the Trumpist Republican Party may be both more powerful within its own country—except for the case of Orban in Hungary—and even further to the right than most of its international counterparts. Shockingly, Trumpism can be seen as further to the right even when one compares it not to mainstream conservatives but to far-right parties in Europe. Thus, the 6 January attack was condemned by Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally Party, itself often termed neofascist. Of course, the virulent radicalism of Trumpism is connected, as discussed earlier, to the long history of white mob violence, state violence, and openly authoritarian rule that persisted in much of the US South until the 1960s.
A second thing that stands out about the United States is that, because of the Cold War tradition and the United States' position as the leading imperial power, with Russia continuing today as a military rival and China as an economic one, mainstream liberals and old conservatives continue to be shocked by Trumpist complicity with Russia. These traditional liberals and conservatives are even more shocked by how exposés of this do not seem to budge his support one iota. Thus, due to the power of habit and the persistence of old frames of reference that no longer fit the present reality, a section of elite opinion and the media (e.g. MSNBC-TV) continue doggedly—and ineffectually—in their quest to 'expose' what is already obvious to Trump's own followers, that he is complicit with Russia. And in response, nostalgia on the left sometimes leads to defense or minimization of Russia's agenda and its effect (e.g. The Nation). I would suggest that we simply need to view Russia as on the whole a conservative, even reactionary, power. Nowadays, it is mainly allied to far-right groups around the world, with exceptions like its support for regimes with leftwing antecedents like Cuba and Venezuela. But this does not alter Russia's fundamental impact or direction at a global level. It even seems to be lending some support to the Taliban, after its seizure of power in Afghanistan in the wake of the collapse of the US client regime.
Interrogating the Rural–Urban Divide
Much ink has been spilled to show that Trumpism's base lies in smaller cities and rural or exurban areas, whereas urban areas are fairly solidly anti-Trump. Much data and historical experience supports such patterns, going all the way back to Karl Marx's time, and even before. In 1851, the French peasantry formed a mass base of support for the Bonapartist coup, as Marx noted in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Then, during the Paris Commune of 1871, the rival bourgeois parliament (dubbed the 'rurales' by the left) gathered outside Paris at Versailles to organize its repression. In doing so, they drew upon troops from rural areas to fight against the 'godless' working-class Communards. Similar events have been repeated, up through and since, as seen in the unwillingness of rank-and-file Chinese soldiers repress the student–worker uprising of 1989, whereupon troops from faraway rural areas with a little knowledge of the ongoing events were brought in to do the job.
Even as he analyzed Bonapartism and the repression of the Commune as drawing upon rural support bases, Marx attacked any notion of an immutable rural conservatism or a permanent urban–rural divide. For that would have doomed the urban-based workers' revolution to which he devoted his life. Instead, he called for a peasant uprising in Germany in the 1850s, saluting the publication of Engels' 1850 essay, The Peasant War in Germany. As the US Civil War loomed, Marx noted the initial opposition to secession on the part of poor southern whites from up-country rural counties, carrying out a careful analysis of voting returns to make his argument. He also wrote of possible class-based alliances after the Civil War between these poor whites and formerly enslaved Blacks, elements of which came about for a time during Reconstruction.
In addition, Marx theorized at a more general level the revolutionary potential of rural populations in his own time. In his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, he attacked the notion, put forward by the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, to the effect that other social classes, including the peasantry, '"form only one reactionary mass" in relation to the working class' (Marx, in press).
Marx focused on this issue in a more specific way in his late writings, which explored village and Indigenous societies across the globe, from India and Russia to the Iroquois of North America. In these writings, he singled out the Russian communal village as a locus of resistance that could touch off a wider European communist revolution (Anderson, 2010; Shanin, 1983).
Previous generations of US radicals certainly recognized at least aspects of this problem, which is why in the early years of the twentieth century, the Socialist Party established the headquarters of its newspaper, Appeal to Reason, not in New York or Chicago, but in Girard, Kansas. Unfortunately, the Socialists often courted rural and sometimes southern whites by downplaying their critique of racism. Thus, it was a step forward when—despite other flaws emanating from its Stalinist orientation—the Communist Party fostered both white folk singers like Woodie Guthrie and Black blues singers like Leadbelly during the Great Depression. This was an example of the wide recognition of the need on the part of the socialist left to reach out beyond its bases in big cities and university towns, and to connect to progressive forms of populism in rural areas. This attitude may be in shorter supply today.
It is also important to note that in many countries, the United States included, rural areas contain significant populations of oppressed ethnic minorities. These minorities may constitute a sizable portion of the population in certain rural regions. These populations have often mobilized against the dominant classes of rural regions even when local members of the majority population have not. Thus, they can be important and reliable allies of the left. To take three prominent examples, the rural US South has for centuries contained a large Black population (in some states and counties actually a majority), the West Coast agricultural belt has featured important populations of mainly Latinx farmworkers, and the upper Midwest includes a significant Native American population, all of them key social bases for the left. Similarly, the Russian Tsarist empire's grain belt comprised an important Ukrainian population, whose national aspirations became a crucial factor in the 1917 revolution. Again, in similar fashion, today's rural areas of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria contain large numbers of Kurds, another oppressed minority that has been at the forefront of many progressive movements in the region. Again, these kinds of social facts show that it is a distortion to speak of rural areas as uniformly conservative or racist.
Among the industrially developed countries of Western Europe and North America, one striking recent example of the mobilization for progressive change on the part of a rural—or at least decidedly non-urban—population was the Yellow Vests movement of 2018–2019 in France. Initially, a protest against higher gasoline taxes, its participants occupied the country's ubiquitous roundabouts, shutting down automobile traffic. President Emmanuel Macron, elected as a moderate alternative to the neofascist National Rally Party, responded with brutal and unremitting violence to these 'illegal' actions. At the same time, the Yellow Vests, who comprised many women, soon deepened the social character of their demands in order to feature issues like raising the minimum wage, smaller class sizes in the public schools, and a halt to the closure of public facilities like post offices and train lines in rural areas. At their peak, the Yellow Vests were able to shut down large sectors of the economy, at a level not seen since 1968 (Anderson, 2018; Coquard, 2018).
A somewhat similar dynamic emerged in the US teachers strikes, also in 2018, which began in West Virginia but soon spread to Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona, which are hardly industrial, liberal, or very union-friendly states. As Lois Weiner writes, these strikes did not limit themselves to wage demands, important as these were in states where extremely low wages were forcing teachers into second jobs. She notes that 'gender and race influenced the movement', which also exemplified 'workers' self-organization' (Weiner, 2018: 4). Furthermore, these strikes were 'laying the ground for a new labor movement in the South' (Weiner, 2018: 12). Unlike the much larger Yellow Vests, who were eventually worn down by the harsh tactics of the French police, the US teachers won some gains.
Conclusion
In sum, the Trump-dominated Republican party has moved in a dangerous, neofascist direction, with a mass base in rural areas and also among elements of the white middle and working classes, and with a huge financial base from wealthy donors. It is a constituency that has been created through a kind of overtly racist appeal that many thought had vanished after the 1960s. Trumpism is thus in continuity with older pro-slavery and openly racist movements going back to 1861, while at the same time forming part of a new, global surge of neofascism.
In the United States, people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, most of the unionized working class, environmentalists, and many youths form a solid wall of resistance against the fascist threat. In responding to it, however, it is important to recognize that rural areas are not uniformly pro-fascist, that rural whites are not uniformly or permanently Trumpist, and that these areas comprise significant numbers of people of color. In this sense, we need to avoid the Lassallean trap of painting rural areas as uniformly 'reactionary'. In analyzing the possibilities of resistance to Trumpism, and of neofascism more generally, Marxist and critical social theory needs therefore to focus on Bakersfield as much as Los Angeles, on rural Georgia as well as Atlanta, and on rural France as well as Paris.
The neofascist threat today in the United States is deep, and may be deepening as the Trump base moves increasingly toward attitudes that justify violence and other extralegal means. Second, the blatant attempts to suppress the vote in many states, disproportionately but not exclusively southern ones, show a dangerous slide toward openly anti-democratic politics. Third, the advocacy of overturning electoral majorities through manipulation by state officials carries with it a real danger of civil conflict or even a slide toward civil war. All three of these developments are racialized, both directly and indirectly. This is what ties Trumpism to the 1861 pro-slavery mob that attempted to overturn Lincoln's election. But as argued earlier, Trumpism also exhibits many features that might be called neofascism, a more modern phenomenon. How these aspects connect to each other needs to be specified more if we are to mount a successful challenge to Trumpism. At the same time, we should, as I have argued, avoid the Lassallean trap by focusing more on rural areas and by viewing them dialectically, not as monoliths but, like the rest of society, as riven by social contradictions. Thus, we need to recognize, on one hand, the deep racism of US society over the centuries and its connection to rural areas, while at the same time, viewing those areas—or at least significant portions of them—also as potential sites of resistance to Trumpism. A truly dialectical analysis requires nothing less.