Saturday, October 12, 2019

On the risk of fascism in the US

Some definitions: Literature (not to be confused with literary fiction) is a small subset of creative written works—of any genre—that continually set the standards for all other creative written works, even those that don’t aspire to literature; Fascism is a political ideology rooted in immutability and predestination that denies agency to anyone who doesn’t participate in its categories. Because fascism is a simple, reductive way to classify or “tag” individual human beings, it becomes the most immediately profitable politics for the wealthy elite in societies with extreme inequality and under-regulated commerce. Because one of literature’s greatest strength is to complicate individuals, to both enrich and translate their inner lives, it is, in aggregate (with notable exceptions), an antifascist endeavor.

Culture is where fascism and literature intersect, as well as where, say, disingenuous novelists, newspapers, publishers, and social media platforms can interfere with literature’s struggle against fascism. Culture is where the undermining of literature compounds and accelerates fascist politics...

— "An Irrelevance of Talent: Bigots Don't Really Care about Literature," Patrick Nathan, Substack, Dec 1, 2022

Fintan O'Toole wrote in June 2018 that "what is being trialled is fascism" and "what we are living with is pre-fascism."

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.

And, furthermore, O'Toole wrote, fascism aims to "inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery."

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, after resigning from the Republican party, told Rolling Stone in June 2018:

We're seeing at this moment a president of the United States do five things. He is using mass rallies that are fueled by constant lying to incite fervor and devotion in his political base. The second thing we see him do is to affix blame for every problem in the world. Many of them are complex, not so different from the issues faced at the end of Agrarian age and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We see him attack minority populations with words like "invade" and "infest." The third thing he does is a create a shared sense of victimization caused by the scapegoated populations. This is the high act of Trumpism: From Trump to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham, everyone is a victim. The fourth thing he does is he alleges conspiracy by nefarious and unseen hidden forces — the "deep state." And the fifth thing is the assertion that "I am the law, that I am above it." He just said immigrants don't get a hearing; they don't get a court representation.

"Revolutionary conservatism," if you happen to come across the term, may be a reference to fascism.

In October 2019, Paul Krugman argued that "if Trump were cannier and more self-controlled, the march to autocracy might well be unstoppable." But because "he actually seems to believe the bizarre conspiracy theories his supporters drum up to excuse his actions" and "evidently lacks any kind of self-restraint" to prevent himself from self-incriminating, American democracy has a fighting chance.

The surprising thing about the constitutional crisis we’re now facing is that it took so long to happen. It was obvious from early on that the president of the United States is a would-be autocrat who accepts no limits on his power and considers criticism a form of treason, and he is backed by a party that has denied the legitimacy of its opposition for many years. Something like this moment was inevitable.

What still hangs in the balance is the outcome.

In October 2019, Dana Milbank wrote:

[After taking office,] Trump soon stated that “I have the absolute right” to fire FBI Director James Comey. He subsequently proclaimed the “absolute right” to provide Russia with an ally’s highly classified intelligence; the “absolute right” to pardon himself; the “absolute right” to shut down the southern border; the “absolute right” to fire special counsel Robert Mueller; the “absolute right” to sign an executive order removing the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship provision; the “absolute right” to contrive a national emergency to deny Congress the power of the purse; the “absolute right” to order U.S. businesses out of China; the “absolute right” to release apparent spy-satellite imagery of Iran; and, most recently, the “absolute right” to ask other countries to furnish evidence that Joe Biden is corrupt.

Kellyanne Conway asserted Trump’s “absolute right” to give his son-in-law a security clearance over security professionals’ objections. White House counsel Pat Cipollone said current and former White House officials are “absolutely immune” from testifying before Congress. As others have noted, Trump has repeatedly said the Constitution’s Article II empowers him “to do whatever I want” and bestows on him “all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.”

* * *

He responded to the resulting impeachment inquiry in the House with a bizarre letter from Cipollone asserting, essentially, that Trump is exempt from all congressional oversight and won’t participate in this “unconstitutional inquiry” — even though the Constitution expressly gives the House “the sole Power of Impeachment.”

Christine Emba's opinion for the Washington Post in November 2019:

Promoting his new book, “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us,” Donald Trump Jr. naturally assumed that any protesters at his event at UCLA on Nov. 11 would be coming at him from the left.

But the hecklers who shouted him offstage last weekend hailed from the right. They were booing his college Republican hosts for not being reactionary enough.

Which means: The next wave of American conservatism is further to the right than President Trump himself.

John Stoehr writes in November 2019 about the fascism that can come if white people "tune out" its rise or otherwise assume it will turn out OK.

* * *

Jake Thomas wrote in September 2019:

CNN analyst and former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa noted on Monday that many of President Donald Trump’s political talking points just so happen to coincide with those put forth by Russia’s troll farm, as detailed in a criminal complaint filed in court last year. Rangappa highlighted that Trump’s Sunday tweet warning of civil war if he is impeached, by way of a quote from evangelical Pastor Robert Jeffress, was also one of the talking points pushed by Russians.

* * *

"This is what authoritarians do. They tell you exactly what they hope to achieve, and how they hope to do it. The problem is that nations don’t often take them seriously, because they can’t imagine the unthinkable. My friends: it’s time to imagine the unthinkable."
— “American Democracy Will Die in 150 Days.” Umair Haque. Eudaimonia. June 9, 2020.

"What was the purpose of the mayhem caused by police in front of the White House? Simple: It was a photo-op of Trump with a Bible he clearly doesn’t read in front of a church he doesn’t attend. The once seemingly hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler became crystallized. Trump signaled, through a series of disturbing events last week, that he is prepared to do whatever is necessary to hold onto power, even if it means literally and figuratively trampling on the rights of Americans."
— “Fascism Has Arrived in America. Now What?” Danielle Moodie. Zora. June 10, 2020.

"The pseudo-fascist establishment in the US has only one goal, retention of power to preserve the current collapsing system. That establishment consists of a small minority who have made fortunes at everyone’s expense and have no interest in any future that does not make them even richer and more powerful. They have no interest in rights or human well being, and the lies that they use with the outrageous claims that they make to keep people in line."
— “America Post-Collapse.” Mike Meyer. Age of Awareness. June 6, 2020.

"Autocrats declare their intentions early on," Masha Gessen says in Part 1 of Surviving Autocracy. "We disbelieve or ignore them at our peril." Trump has always expressed his admiration for autocrats. When he cozies up to them, there's usually no broader political strategy for U.S. benefit. He might have a one-off transaction in mind for his own benefit, Gessen says, but, more so, he genuinely enjoys their company and wants to portray himself as one of them.

"Senator Chris Murphy just said," Scott Dworkin reported on April 13, 2020, that "Trump playing a campaign video in the White House briefing room was against the law."

On June 25, 2020, the Stockholm-based Institute for Democracy published an open letter signed by hundreds of former world leaders and Nobel Laureates claiming that governments worldwide are using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to scuttle democratic norms and processes.

In a New York Times article, reporter Ellen Barry spoke to a Trump supporter on November 6, 2020 after the vote count appeared to be in Joe Biden's favor. The Trump supporter said:

He could imagine the United States splitting into two countries, one governed by Mr. Trump and one not. He could imagine suspending elections so Mr. Trump and his family could rule without interruption for 20 years.

“I guarantee you, Trump supporters would not care,” he said. “I guarantee you, if you got 69 million Trump supporters, and you said, ‘Would you be good with Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump as president?’ a lot of people would be 100 percent behind that.”

2022 update: The 2024 presidential election prospects look bleak.

As Garrett Bucks wrote, fascism is "an ideology that asks its adherents to have a deeply pessimistic take on humanity in general — to lean towards distrust for the masses, to extinguish all hope of cooperation and trust and to replace it with a belief that salvation will come through the rule by a small group of our societal betters." (Substack, Sept. 1, 2022)

Update: January 2023

Of the Republican Party's unwillingness or inability to elect a Speaker of the House in early January 2023, Amanda Marcotte wrote for Salon:

...about the Republican Party's self-conception in its exciting new fascist iteration (which was forged under Donald Trump but doesn't really have much to do with him either). Fascism needs to be understood less as an ideological movement and more as a movement devoted to the worship of power for its own sake, and also a dramatic aesthetic of constant warfare and performative purification of an ever-narrower conception of the body politic.

Those are big words, and I apologize, but here's a simpler way to put it: Fascists are a bunch of trolls who are never satisfied. They must always prove their power by ganging up on someone who's been cast as an "outsider." As the Atlantic's Adam Serwer famously observed, "The cruelty is the point." Most of the time, the targets are racial and sexual minorities, liberals or immigrants. But sometimes, that restless need to constantly bully someone manifests in purification rituals, where a once-trusted or even beloved insider is deemed an outsider who must be ritually purged. It's just Kevin McCarthy's turn in the proverbial barrel, though he almost certainly hasn't helped his cause by constantly debasing himself before the hardliners. He's marked himself as a weenie, and that just makes his tormentors enjoy watching him suffer even more.

The Trump era has, understandably, led to a nonstop and frustrating debate over what exactly "fascism" is. I favor the famous 1995 essay by Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, who argued that fascism is a movement of "rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion," replete with contradictions and incoherencies, and yet that "emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations."

In other words, fascism is about vibes more than fleshed-out ideas. Very, very authoritarian vibes. One big reason we can identify Republicans as fascist now is because while their appetite for power knows no end, their willingness to govern — that is, to use power to achieve substantive ends — has diminished to nothing. It's all vibes and no ideas, beyond an inchoate loathing of anyone they deem too dark-skinned, too queer or too literate to be truly American.

In his "Ur-Fascism" essay, Eco laid out 14 features of fascism, which add up not to a coherent political philosophy so much as a series of antisocial impulses. It's worth reading in its entirety, but the McCarthy debacle illustrates some of Eco's most important observations: Fascism is deliberately irrational. Indeed, it makes a fetish of irrationality. It's a "cult of action for action's sake" that believes thinking before acting "is a form of emasculation." The fascist believes that "life is permanent warfare" and therefore there must always be an enemy to struggle against. That's why fascists love conspiracy theories. Their "followers must feel besieged," and since they have no real oppressors to rail against, they make up imaginary ones.

After Trump's coup failed and the red wave of the midterms didn't materialize, Republicans are turning on each other. Even healthy political parties tend to have periods of recrimination after suffering bitter defeats. For the dysfunctional Republicans, however, this anger is being refracted through their increasingly fascist worldview, which is paranoid, irrational and hostile to democracy. That's why the demands made by the anti-McCarthy faction are incomprehensible and seem to change by the hour. The mentality that "life is permanent warfare" leads to the party's desire to constantly purify itself of the enemy within, in this case the despised "RINOs." But as more and more RINOs get purged, the definition becomes more expansive and maintaining party purity becomes almost impossible. Eventually, craven sycophants like McCarthy are rechristened as RINOs and thrown overboard. There is no endpoint where the party has finally cleansed itself.

Adam Serwer on Bluesky, November 28, 2023: "Trumpism, like QAnon, is just politics as a murder fantasy. There are left wing versions of this kind of politics but they're not governing states or serving in Congress".

Relatedly, my essays for Medium (paywalled, please become a member!):
On Serwer's book, The Cruelty is the Point I hope they all cawthorn each other

Oh look, they did cawthorn someone (Oct. 3, 2023):
Kevin McCarthy Voted Out Of House Speakership | HuffPost, Oct 3, 2023
Kevin McCarthy Reached The Limit Of His Transactional Politics | HuffPost, Oct 3, 2023
Kevin McCarthy's Ouster As House Speaker Could Cost GOP Its Best Fundraiser | HuffPost, Oct 5, 2023
Trump endorses Jim Jordan for House speaker CNN, Oct 6, 2023
House remains paralyzed with no end in sight for speakership battle after Jordan’s exit, Clare Foran, CNN, Oct 21, 2023
Nine More Republicans Sign Up For Speaker Bid, Likely Public Humiliation: The GOP threw out Kevin McCarthy, rejected Steve Scalise, and strongly rejected Jim Jordan. Can they agree on anyone? Jennifer Bendery, HuffPost, Oct 23, 2023
The Republicans who say we don’t even need a speaker: Public polling shows that many on the right don’t mind if the speaker fight is protracted — and may even prefer it that way, Aaron Blake, Washington Post, October 23, 2023
They try to blame their opposition to gay marriage, which was legal throughout the US for seven years (since 2015) before being reaffirmed by lawmakers in 2022. They're still mad about it. Nice try at that displaced anger. I think Republicans are really mad about each other. Some Republicans Kept The House Shut Down Over Gay Marriage Rep. Tom Emmer’s support for gay marriage helped doom his brief bid to become speaker. Kevin Robillard, CNN, Oct 24, 2023

They continue: Ousted George Santos Plots Revenge Against Ex-House Colleagues In Online Tear The disgraced congressman fired off a series of tweets promising to file ethics complaints against some of the House members who voted him out. Hilary Hanson, HuffPost, Dec 2, 2023

On the other hand, many non-Trumpist Republicans have been worn down. While it would certainly "help immensely now" if "responsible Republicans" would "speak up more clearly" (Two magazine covers and 'preaching to the choir' about Trump: Would his supporters care if they truly understood the threat? Margaret Sullivan, Substack, Dec 7, 2023), it isn't clear who's left to speak up. Representatives Patrick McHenry, Ken Buck, and Mitt Romney are retiring, and Representative Anthony Gonzalez and Peter Meijer already did. The GOP’s death cycle: How the Republican Party turns fascist." Robert Reich. Substack. December 7, 2023.

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