The “Mid-Term” Elections Will Not Save Us From Fascism
PART’s Perspective:
by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART)
The so-called “mid-term” elections are less than a month away. Yet the very name underscores the centrality and primacy of executive power and the imperial presidency within the US political system.
The election is “mid-term” only in reference to the four-year term of whoever is in the White House. The representatives and senators seeking re-election are at the END of their own terms. Relative to the US Congress, the House of Representatives is elected in its entirety every two years, and the same is true of a third of the (essentially undemocratic) Senate. Whether or not the Supreme Court further upholds Trump’s bizarre theory of the “unitary executive”, the presidency, embodied in a single individual, holds more power than any member of the other branches or, has been made evident, than the entire legislature combined. We may chant, “No Kings!” but the president of the US is an emperor.
At the state level, when there are bicameral legislatures, both the upper chamber, usually also called a state Senate, and the lower chamber, commonly an Assembly or House of Representatives, are both apportioned in districts with roughly equal populations in each district, with larger populations and geographic reach typically for each seat in the smaller senate than for the more numerous representatives or assembly-members. But in the US federal system, the Senate is based on two Senators for each state, regardless of population, flying in the face of the essential democratic rubric of “one person, one vote”. Los Angeles County alone, with 17,000,000 inhabitants, has a larger population than 40 of the fifty United States (all of whom get two US Senators each), yet California as a whole gets only two Senators, the same as Montana, Wyoming or Rhode Island.
So the entire “mid-term” election, with 34 Senate seats at stake, is a set-up from the beginning. The Constitutional system was designed to limit or prevent popular sentiment and opinion from having effective control over the entire government. There is no need to “rig” the election when the entire political and electoral system is rigged from the foundation to favor moneyed interests and scattered rural populations. It intentionally discounts the numerical majority of poor people, especially people of color, in urban areas.
The electoral college system which has named the loser of the popular vote the winner of the presidential election twice in this century is based on the equal representation of less populous states with more populous ones in the US Senate, in a system that was designed to protect racial chattel slavery. The mistrust of urban populations of poor and working class communities, especially of Black, Raza, Indigenous and Asian/Pacific people, is also manifest in almost every state, where the state capital and seat of government is in a small city as far as possible from the largest city in the state — Albany, not New York City; Springfield, not Chicago; Sacramento, not Los Angeles; Tallahassee, not Miami or even Jacksonville.
Nonetheless, despite all these utterly undemocratic features of the federal/imperial electoral and governmental system, a lot of people are pinning their hopes, perhaps understandably, on the mid-term elections to “correct course” and check the increasingly untrammeled power of DJ Chump. Although the Democrats are often referred to as spineless, hope springs eternal that once in the majority in the House and/or Senate, they would counter Trump with more backbone than the jellyfish GOP majority, which has enabled all his depradations and protected him from removal from office for his crimes.
Despite hopes for a so-called ‘blue wave’ or even a ‘blue tsunami’, Trump’s MAGA super-pac, the Republican Senatorial and House Campaign Committees, the RNC, and individual techno-fascist and energy mega-donors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising and get-out-the-vote operations for threatened Republicans in House and especially Senate races. Elon Musk alone has already pumped nearly $400 million dollars and counting for the last few weeks into efforts to maintain the GOP Senate majority. Not to mention gerrymandering and voter suppression in so-called “red” states.
Electoral politics aside, CA Gov. Newsom and AG Rob Bonta caved in and settled a lawsuit seeking to prevent the merger and takeover of Warner-Discovery (which runs CNN and the HBO cable and streaming service) by the Ellisons’ Skydance/Paramount, which has already taken control of CBS and its fabled news division, putting it under the control of the rabid Zionist and reactionary Bari Weiss. Further broadcast media monopolization in the hands of the techno-fascists who already run most of the social media platforms bodes ill for the possibility of the so-called “Fourth Estate” of the press operating as much of a check on the political and economic powers-that-be.
France and India are aflame with militant youth-led protests over austerity measures and unresponsive political parties unwilling to meet the demands for change. Indian youth created the Cockroach Janata party overnight to oppose Modi’s repressive Hindu nationalism. Yet here in the US, where autocratic measures and the deprivation of social services may be even worse, and Christian nationalists hold sway in Congress, the White House and the Pentagon, all we see is a reliance on electoral politics and polite, ritualistic protest rallies designed to advance the Democrats’ electoral agenda.
Groups like Indivisible and the No Kings rally organizers need to recognize that far more is needed than the election of Democrats in place of Republicans in so-called “swing states” or districts. The fascistization of US politics is well under way and requires more than electoral opposition or rotation in power by the corporate parties. At a recent international gathering of right-wing states and parties, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, angling to run again for US president as a MAGA hard-liner in 2028, delivered a speech and a 100+ page document attacking Cuba, the Black freedom struggle in the US, and anything to the left of MAGA, including Democratic Party office-holders, as violence-prone communists intent on subversion. In the interests of their own safety, Democratic-Party-oriented liberals and social democrats must oppose this effort to criminalize the Black movement, international solidarity, and the left.
This new McCarthyism seeks to amp up support for Trump’s war measures, economic sanctions, strangling energy blockade, and other attacks on Cuba. It uses that in turn to justify racist measures against and persecution of the Black liberation movement, and even mainstream political figures like Antonio Villarraigosa, Karen Bass, and Maxine Waters as conscious agents of a Cuban-led conspiracy and covert operations. It runs hand-in-glove with pro-Israel efforts to label support for Palestine as antisemitism or even terrorism. It’s no coincidence that Homeland Security has now staged a raid on the home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
Such moves must be denounced, but more important, we must redouble our efforts and solidarity with the Cuban people and their revolution and sovereignty, with the Black liberation movement, with Palestine, and with efforts for the socialist and anti-colonial transformation of US society.
A few quotes from Rubio will serve to demonstrate the grave threat this now-dominant politics of neo-fascism poses. He wrote, “For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”
Rubio projects onto Cuba the tools of US efforts to overthrow the Cuban revolution (which included assassination attempts, invasion attempts, biological warfare, propagandistic media, subsidies to dissidents and infiltration of agents and terrorists into Cuba) in order to justify further such efforts and the intensification of the US stranglehold on the island nation.
He then goes on to paint a picture of “communists” hidden everywhere in the US, operating as agents of Cuba, most particularly in the Black movement for freedom, justice and equality, but including not just the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Zohran Mamdani in his cross-hairs, but even Barack Obama (apparently not enough of a war criminal to satisfy Rubio and Trump). He links the Cubans to Palestinians.
Rubio says that “the most successful and enduring sphere of Cuba’s campaign against America has taken place on the ideological battlefront. Since the 1960s, the regime has served as the beating heart of a new and distinct kind of Marxism, …from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa. Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.” Again, and not coincidentally, a subpoena has been issued to the People’s Forum in NYC, one of the groups Rubio named.
Rubio sees Cuban internationalism and anti-imperialism as uniquely threatening. “Castro’s Marxism was radically different from its Soviet counterpart. It was permeated by something new: The doctrine of tercer-mundismo (“Third Worldism”). The concept of the “Third World” had initially emerged in the context of the Cold War, referring to the bloc of nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East that belonged neither to the American capitalist “First World” nor the Soviet socialist “Second World” spheres. But in Castro’s Cuba, the concept would harden into both a self-conscious ideology and a revolutionary identity.”
He continues, “As the socialist magazine Jacobin approvingly recounted earlier this year, it was Cuba that ‘was seen by many in the Third World as the ideal site for radically rethinking anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonization.’ What Cuba was proposing, Jacobin writes, ‘was essentially a decolonization of Marxist thought.’”
After this excursion into revolutionary theorizing, Rubio proceeds to blame Cuba for “inspiring” hundreds of bombings in the US more than 50 years ago, in 1971-72, against the US war in Vietnam, and then gets into his real target, the Black liberation movement. Starting with Robert F. Williams (though neglecting his equally militant wife Mabel) who advocated for armed self-defense against Ku Klux Klan night-riders and were forced into exile in Cuba, Rubio moves on to an indictment of Malcolm X, Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), Assata Shakur, and Black Lives Matter.
He includes by name also LA Mayor Karen Bass, who once was in the Venceremos Brigade, “Hasan Piker; Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls; … the Democratic Socialists of America; former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, former Spanish deputy prime minister Pablo Iglesias; several other current and former members of European Parliament; and Isra Hirsi, campus activist and daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.).”
In section VI of the document, entitled Racial Revolution, Rubio on behalf of his master, Trump, says “Cuba played a foundational role in the formation of Black Power ideology. Throughout both the twentieth and twenty-first century, the regime has sought to cultivate a fifth column of American black extremists through appeals to international racial solidarity – framing both Cubans and African-Americans as oppressed Third World peoples arrayed against the common enemy of white America.”
It’s probably ignorant and unintentional irony on Rubio’s part in the use of the term “fifth column”. The term derives from a statement made by the fascist general in Franco’s assault on Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, who declared that in addition to his four columns of soldiers attacking Madrid to overthrow the Republic with Nazi German and Fascist Italian support, he had a “fifth column” of Falangist supporters inside Madrid itself. “Fifth Column” was previously a reference to a treasonous fascist element within.
Of Kwame Toure Rubio writes, “The central ideas he popularized — Black Power, the reimagining of blacks as a colonized people inside the United States, and the now-widespread concept of “institutional racism,” which Carmichael is widely credited with inventing — became the operating grammar of black radical (and later, mainstream liberal) politics for the next half-century.”
I am unfortunately not aware of any “mainstream liberals” who support Pan-African liberation or the view that Black people are colonized inside the US, although they should if they want to face reality.
But Rubio’s intent is to lay the basis for the further criminalization of the Black freedom struggle, and for prosecutions under the “Foreign Agents Registration Act,” FARA, [see sidebar below].
Already under the Biden administration, the Feds prosecuted the Uhuru Three, leaders of the African Peoples Socialist Party and the African Peoples Solidarity Committee, as alleged agents of Russia, an attempt that was defeated by a vigorous defense by the APSP, the Uhuru Movement, and their allies based on the right of anti-colonial free speech.
But despite that earlier setback, Rubio goes on in the same vein for pages, smearing the George Floyd Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, Black Congresswomen Ayanna Presley and Maxine Waters, and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani as somehow manifestations of Cuba’s successful subversion of US politics and culture.
He then goes on to indict so-called “fellow travelers” as dupes responsible for undermining US efforts to destroy the Cuban revolution. “These partnerships provide Cuba with access to city councils, universities, trade delegations, churches, hospitals, and local activists, collectively feeding a nationwide pro-Cuban constituency that can then lobby the U.S. government on Havana’s behalf. In cities with Cuban sister city partnerships, local governments have frequently passed resolutions advocating for Cuban regime interests. The ICAP-affiliated National Network on Cuba boasts of 117 resolutions representing 60 million people in the United States – across U.S. state legislatures, city councils, county and school boards, labor unions, and other organizations – advocating for reforms such as lifting the U.S. embargo and removing Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) list.” These are in fact great successes of the movement to get US hands off Cuba.
How must we respond to Rubio’s new McCarthyism? It’s easy enough to ridicule his denunciation of Barack Obama for meeting with Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn 35 years after they resurfaced from the Weather Underground, or the fevered imagination in which Antonio Villarraigosa, the consummate self-serving political sell-out, is portrayed as an agent of Cuban subversion.
But this would repeat the errors of the liberal response to McCarthyism during the first Cold War — criticizing him for indiscriminately lumping loyal pro-imperialist liberals in with the supposedly nasty red menace of communism. It would also ignore the blatant racial coding of Black and Brown people as anti-American, un-American and disloyal, which has been the cornerstone of Trump’s neo-fascism.
The proper response is a denunciation of anti-communism, of those neo-fascist and white supremacist politics, and of the racist tech broligarchy of billionaires who back them. It’s no surprise that Elon Musk of X/SpaceX/Tesla, Peter Thiel of Palantir, and vulture capitalist David Sacks, whose private equity firm has invested heavily in Meta and other A-I, and who all three made their first fortunes together in PayPal, all grew up in apartheid South Africa, and are all big backers of Trump and of JD Vance (with whom Rubio is contending for heir apparent of MAGA and successor to Trump in 2028). Rejecting Trump’s labeling of his Democratic Party opponents as communists is insufficient; the right of communists, socialists, and anarchists to speak out and campaign must be defended.
But even more important, we must step up and stand up in solidarity with Cuba, in opposition to the new colonialism of Trump’s aggressive military Keynesianism and energy extractivism in Iran, Venezuela, Somalia, Ukraine and elsewhere, and in conscious anti-racist and anti-colonial solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the Uhuru movement, and the enlightened sectors of the labor movement that have broken with business (as usual) unionism and separated from the CIA-led efforts to make US labor federations stalking horses for US global domination.
The best defense against neo-fascism is a good offense against imperialism, colonialism, racism and war. This requires far more than electoral opposition. Whatever the outcome of the “mid-term” elections, we must struggle to demand a reversal of the NDAA that has integrated the Israeli military and surveillance apparatus into the US military and strategic planning. We must demand, not just a denial of Trump’s and ‘Secretary of War’ Hegseth’s request for a half-trillion dollar increase in the military budget, but a massive reduction in US weapons spending, particularly the elimination of A-I surveillance and autonomous tanks and vessels, of nuclear weapons and of the militarization of space. We must call for the closing of US military bases — not just confinement to quarters as occurred recently in Okinawa after a US service member killed a local woman — and an immediate end to the US war on Iran and the US-financed Israeli war on Palestine and Lebanon, and the Saudi war on Yemen.
If the Democrats regain control of the House and Senate, will they do any better than they did when they had both houses of Congress and the White House and the presidency under Obama and later Biden? Will they end the war on Iran and the attacks and blockade on Cuba? Will they stop arming Israel’s genocide?
Will they adopt single-payer healthcare, and reverse the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that robbed the social safety net to finance further tax cuts for the super-rich? Will they enact labor legislation that eases the path to organizing workplaces to build rank-and-file union power? Will they build social housing, abolish the federal death penalty, or pass federal legislation guaranteeing reproductive rights?
Will they scrap the Foreign Agents Registration Act that hangs like a sword of Damocles over non-profit organizations, lawyers, and political activists? [See sidebar on FARA.] Will they break up media monopolies, join with China in regulation of A-I, or end the use of fossil fuels like coal and methane (AKA “natural gas”)? Not likely, nor would they override Trump’s veto of such legislation, or Supreme Court rulings against them.
Even Trump’s impeachment and removal from office is insufficient. If enacted, those measures would be at best “non-reformist reforms.”
Our goal must be a revolutionary transformation of US society and its political and economic system, based on decolonization, recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, reparations, and the establishment of social control of production and distribution on the basis of ecological consciousness, environmental restoration, and human need, not corporate profit.
Anything less will condemn future generations to environmental devastation, economic privation, and police-state political repression.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)
by the US Center for Non-Profit Law [Excerpts]
FARA is a World War II era anti-propaganda statute that requires an “agent of a foreign principal” engaged in covered activity to register with the Department of Justice unless they meet an exemption. Its provisions are famously sweeping and vague. This provides the federal government wide discretion for enforcement, creating uncertainty for nonprofits and others in navigating the Act. It also creates the danger that FARA will be used in a politicized manner by the government to target voices it disfavors.
Some observers believe that FARA only covers the agents of foreign governments. However, a “foreign principal” under the Act includes not only foreign governments, but also foreign individuals, foundations, nonprofits, companies, and other entities.
The Act covers a broad range of …activities [besides lobbying and electioneering]. This includes …attempts to influence “any section of the public within the US” on domestic or foreign policy[, which] can cover a wide range of public advocacy. [It] also includes a “political consultant”, …someone who simply “inform[s]” a foreign principal “with reference to the domestic or foreign policies of the US”. Covered activities do not even need to involve politics. For example, an “agent” that “solicits” or “disburses” “things of value” on behalf of a foreign principal is also covered by the Act.
The agency relationship can be far more informal than many appreciate. An entity can be considered an “agent” under FARA even if they act at the mere “request” of a foreign principal or they are financed by a foreign principal “in major part” ([Neither] “request” [nor] “major part” [is] …defined in the Act).
[FARA] creates significant burdens. An “agent” needs to register with the US DOJ, provide regular (publicly available) updates of activities covered by the Act, and … must make a “conspicuous” statement [to the public] that it is acting on behalf of a foreign principal. All staff engaged in covered activities also have to submit short-form registrations.
If required to register, nonprofits acting independently in furtherance of their mission can be stigmatized as “agents” of a foreign principal. Staff at organizations frequently do not want to register as they fear potential negative repercussions to their career. Those that willfully fail to comply with FARA can face criminal penalties, creating a potentially chilling effect given the Act’s lack of clear bright line rules.
During the McCarthy era, W.E.B. Du Bois was prosecuted under FARA for circulating an anti-nuclear petition at the “request” of a French nonprofit. Since 2020, over 20 Congressional investigations have claimed dozens of nonprofits may be violating the Act – often focusing on whether the nonprofit ever acted at the “request” of a foreign principal in a covered activity. …These accusations often fail to address potential exemptions for registration in the Act, but these exemptions are also vague, frequently leaving nonprofits on uncertain legal ground.
More information about the Foreign Agents Registration Act and how to navigate it is available here:
TTT notes: FARA was used extensively under the Biden administration. In 2024, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) was charged by the DOJ with taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent of Azerbaijan. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) was convicted of bribery and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt. The DOJ also charged two employees of RT with conspiring to violate FARA by paying right-wing media influencers to spread Kremlin talking points in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. But the biggest attack, which was turned back, was against the anti-colonial Black left.
Victory over FARA for the Uhuru 3
In 2022, the FBI carried out pre-dawn, military-style raids on seven homes and offices of the Uhuru (“Freedom”) Movement and the African People’s Socialist Party in St. Louis, MO and St. Petersburg, FL. In 2023, the Uhuru 3 were indicted under FARA on bogus charges of failing to register as “agents of a foreign government” or “Russian agents” for exercising their right to advocate for the liberation of African people, as the Uhuru Movement had been doing for 50 years. In September, 2024 the trial took place in federal court in Tampa, FL. The jury found the Uhuru 3 not guilty of being Russian agents. They were convicted of a lesser charge of conspiracy, a thought crime, but in the penalty phase, the judge refused to impose prison time or even a fine. The APSP and APSC used the trial to campaign vigorously for their right to advocate for the liberation of African people everywhere, and are appealing the conviction, about to file a writ to the US Supreme Court. More about the Uhuru Movement here: https://handsoffuhuru.org/about-the-uhuru-3/
Victory rally for Uhuru 3, Chairman Omali Yeshitela of APSP in white, center; Penny Hess of APSC on his right (left in photo), and Jesse Nevel of the Uhuru Solidarity movement (second from right in photo) overcame a FARA prosecution.
The House Ways and Means Committee, citing concerns about “gaps” in government regulation of entities acting as agents of foreign principals, has issued sweeping subpoenas for internal records of the Peoples Forum in NYC, which TPF is resisting. You can learn about that effort here: https://peoplesforum.org/blog_post/the-peoples-forum-responds-to-congressional-subpoena/
Earlier this year, Montana’s AG Austin Knudsen led an attack under FARA against environmental non-profits. According to his press release, he led a coalition of 19 attorneys general asking the USDOJ to investigate over 150 U.S.-based climate activist groups allegedly taking money from foreign entities to influence energy policy in the US. “Foreign actors are attempting to sabotage our nation’s energy sector by funneling dark money to their climate activist cronies in the U.S. The law is clear – if U.S.-based nonprofits take money to lobby and influence policy on behalf of a foreign principal, they need to register under FARA,” Knudsen said. “I urge Attorney General [Pam] Bondi to open an investigation into this matter immediately.”