In Kenosha, Wisconsin, a 17-year-old Nazi killed two antiracists protesting the kkkcops’ attempted murder of Jacob Blake. In Lacey, Washington, an anti-fascist was assassinated by a federal government death squad after being targeted for the killing of a racist linked to Patriot Prayer, a group of armed white nationalists. With an upsurge of mass antiracist struggle since the May 25 lynching of George Floyd in Minneapolis, mounting political violence reflects a capitalist system that is falling apart before our eyes.
The U.S. is becoming a failed state. In the era of Covid-19 and the disastrous Donald Trump presidency, we are witnessing an unprecedented collapse of the economic, medical, scientific, infrastructural, education, and media systems of U.S. capitalism. As liberal electoral “democracy” is exposed as a fraud and catastrophe, the finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class has realized that it can no longer govern in the traditional way. It is turning to Plan B—to fascism, the state of capitalism in crisis.
As full-blown fascist China rises in wealth and imperialist power, the days of the U.S. empire and its 20th-century “liberal world order” appear to be numbered. Global conflict seems more inevitable by the day. History teaches us that periods of fascism and inter-imperialist war present both great dangers and great opportunities for the workers of the world. World War I triggered the communist revolution in the Soviet Union; World War II did the same in China. Whenever World War III arrives at our doorstep, the international working class will have the potential to seize state power and smash capitalism once and for all. But this won’t happen automatically. It requires the leadership of a mass communist party, and the consciousness of workers to reject the bosses’ deadly ideas of racism and nationalism—and the lie that capitalism can be reformed to serve workers’ needs.
The myth of liberal democracy
With political and social order disintegrating with the approach of the U.S. presidential elections,  the rulers’ crisis is compounded by internal division and the accelerating erosion of the U.S. position around the globe. The Small Fascists, a band of isolationist, anti-tax billionaires clustered around the likes of the Koch, DeVos and Mercer family fortunes, have mounted an openly racist takeover of the Republican Party, a siege that paid off with the Trump presidency. They have irrevocably broken with the big-spending, war-mongering, finance capital Big Fascists, the liberal racists led by multinational businesses like ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase.  
Amid the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic and the barrage of antiracist uprisings, and with the federal government under the Small Fascists’ thumb, the Big Fascists are being forced to rely on governors, state attorneys general, and state legislatures to regain control in the fall elections. Local fights could swiftly turn bitter and violent, and there is no guarantee that either side will accept the other’s electoral victory. A “peaceful transfer of power” is no longer a sure thing. When capitalist elections can no longer function, the legitimacy of liberal democracy will be in peril.
Crackdown on Small Fascists looms
The Big Fascists are committed to preserving a fading American empire and preparing for World War III with China and possibly Russia. To do so, they must discipline U.S. society—beginning with their own class. The scorched-earth drive to defeat Trump in November is directed at the Small Fascist bosses whose interests he represents.  
The prospect of mass conversion to the openly racist, anti-government, and anti-science Small Fascist program, backed up by a hard core willingness to engage in armed insurrection, is a huge threat to the Big Fascist political program of a revamped multicultural U.S. imperialism. In this highly combustible situation, a serious crackdown on “free speech” and “civil liberties” is in the works. Two cases in point: the July Congressional hearings to serve notice on Big Tech, and Facebook’s concession to ban new political ads in the run-up to the November elections, a move that figures to hurt Trump’s re-election chances.  For now, at least, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is obeying his marching orders from finance capital (New York Times, 9/3).  
For the Big Fascists, the stakes for winning back the White House and the U.S. Senate are at an all-time high.  Pressure to regain control of these institutions will force them to act with urgency between now and November. This will in turn inflame the Small Fascists and their base, and likely tip their dogfight further into armed violence, if not civil war between the two wings of the ruling class.  
No matter who wins, November’s election won’t restore the dominance of U.S. imperialism. is more, elections can’t fix racism. As Gerald Holmes, a Black forklift operator in Kenosha said, “What good is it to go out there and [vote]?  It isn’t going to make any difference” (NYT, 6/1).
Let us take our cue from the hard-earned wisdom of Black workers like Gerald. Workers and youth have not forgotten that Joe Biden, the Democrats’ great liberal hope for president, authored the infamous 1994 crime bill that led to the mass incarceration state and destroyed generations of Black and Latin families.
Warning: liberal fascism ahead
When protesting in the streets, anti-racists are far more likely to be attacked by liberal-run police departments than white nationalist vigilantes.  Biden's vehement rejection of “violence” is a one-way street; killer cops still get the green light to attack protesters.  The Big Fascists’ viciousness in repressing anti-racist demonstrations exposes the true nature of liberalism, in line with the historic ruling-class strategy to keep a monopoly on legitimate violence.  In July alone, police departments intervened in 170 demonstrations, using force 54 percent of the time (ACLED report, 9/5). From May 24 to August 22, local cops and other authorities intervened against demonstrators, often with tear gas, batons, rubber bullets, and more, 725 times (U.S. Crisis Monitor).  Repressive violence is Big Fascism in action, and it’s all the more dangerous  because it mostly goes unnoticed. Big Fascist Biden's platform expands spending on police by $300 million (NYT, 9/2) while fake leftist Bernie Sanders wants to pay police more, not defund them (New Yorker, 6/9).   
Only communism can smash fascism
The road to fascism is being paved in real time. We face the prospect of continued vigilante attacks, including some with Small Fascist state-level collusion, on the reformist left wing of the Democratic Party. But while these right-wing assaults may seem to echo the Cold War attacks by U.S. bosses against communists in the 1950s, the most dangerous choice for workers today would be to ally ourselves with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Elizabeth Warren and their ilk. Through hard experience, workers know that the vast majority of racist police killings, where cops get off scot-free, occur in cities with liberal Democratic mayors. We cannot fall into the trap of defending one set of oppressors from another, or siding with Biden’s Big Fascists in their crackdown on Trump’s Small Fascists. For workers, only communism can free us from the murderous oppression of capitalism.