According to the AFL-CIO, 42 per cent of its members – overwhelmingly white – voted for Trump. That is fewer than in 2016, but after 4 years of Trumpian anti-working class policies and extremist rhetoric, the obvious question is why such a modest slip in support? And what about other sections of the working class – again overwhelmingly white workers – that supported him in his first campaign? Polls suggest that their support hasn’t declined in any significant way either. Any reliable profile of Trump’s mass/ fascist base has to be arrived at empirically, not derived from what abstract Marxist theory tells us it looks like – the despised petit bourgeoise and middle strata. Marxist theory gives us a point of entry and way of looking at a phenomenon, but not too much more than that.

An addendum: Abstract theorizing gives us a way of looking at the phenomenon, a point of entry. but only that. It has to be followed by concrete and empirical analysis of fascism’s base. To assume that its base includes only the “middle strata’ or people in contradictory class locations or sections of capital is a mistake – a big one in fact.

““If one is not concerned with the steps between the present and the future, one does not deal with politics, radical or otherwise.” Eric Fromm

On the road to freedom, there will always be unexpected allies. A wise movement will welcome them, even if their change of heart is only temporary and tactical. We saw that yesterday when Liz Cheney and 9 other Republicans voted for impeachment.

In their opposition to the impeachment of Trump, more than one House Republican cited this excerpt form Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural address:

“”With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

What they forgot is that Lincoln understood that the prerequisite for that moral invocation was the decisive military defeat of the insurrectionists in the South. And General Sherman with Lincoln’s full support at that same moment was doing exactly that as he and his army marched through the Deep South laying waste to the Confederate Army and Confederacy.

The quisling Republicans, dripping in white supremacy and political extremism, are either outright lying or engaging in the worst forms of false equivalency to make their case against impeachment.