A long two-part series by Thomas Zimmer, worth reading.
Part I
Zimmer writes in Fascism in America? (Part 1), Democracy Americana, May 22, 2024:
"I ultimately don’t care all that much about whether or not someone uses the term fascism, the fascism concept, or deploys the fascism analogy. While I am convinced that certain ideas and strands on the Right, and certainly Trumpism itself, are adequately described as a specifically American, specifically twenty-first-century version of fascism, I’ll repeat that my own interpretation is not centered around the fascism concept. I also don’t think that the European interwar period is the most useful analogy for our political moment: The long domestic struggle over egalitarian pluralism and the intense, often violent counter-mobilization that has defined it is often more instructive. ... Whether or not someone uses the label fascism is not the key question. What matters is the analysis underneath: Are we getting the diagnosis right?"
The point is that there are people who apply the fascism label to today's US, as well as people who don't, who don't understand the right-wing. Using or avoiding the word "fascism" doesn't mean you understand the right-wing.
Among Zimmer's reasons for using the word "fascism":
"Donald Trump, let’s start here, has a fascistic way of describing the problem – and offers a fascistic solution. According to Trump and those who support him, the country is in decline. It is threatened by outsiders – immigrants, invaders who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, as Trump has put it. The nation is also threatened by the enemy within: Un-American forces of radical leftism and globalist elites. If Trump is to be believed, in order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make it Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be purged. Trump has repeatedly promised to round up and deport 15 million people – a deportation operation of unprecedented scale, explicitly targeting non-white immigrants, necessitating the creation of a federal deportation force unlike anything that currently exists. “Palingenetic ultranationalism,” the political theorist Roger Griffin has argued, forms a core myth of fascism – “palingenesis” means re-birth or re-creation, a movement or ideology desiring the rebirth of the nation through revolutionary change."
He says it's also important to understand "the permission structure that governs conservative politics: Anything is justified in defense against what they see as a radically 'Un-American,' extremist 'Left' that has supposedly taken over the Democratic Party, the government, and the major institutions that are determining America’s future."
Part II
His follow-up, "The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem," was published two days later.
He's talking about "a specific strand of leftist interpretation." As for leftists who avoid applying the term to the US, they are, Zimmer says, "engaged in a political struggle against what they believe is the real enemy: The (neo-) liberal elites, which they define in very broad and unspecific terms to include basically the entire mainstream of American politics from Center-Left to Center-Right, and particularly the Democratic establishment."
In other words, there are leftists who want to pick their fight with the center, to push it farther left. They are wary of agreeing with the center that the right-wing is the true threat, for then they'd have to work together with the center, and this would dilute their left-wing cause. (Listen to Daniel Bessner’s podcast interview in which he argues "that the fascism narrative signaled a crisis of liberal hegemony.") However, in Zimmer's opinion, this position is "increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right. Their incessant warning that the real danger lies in liberal hysteria has turned into sophistry in defense of a premise that is more and more at odds with empirical evidence."
Recently, at this event (video), the topic came up:
"Why would people of color make common cause with those who openly identified as Nazis and white supremacists? Because, as Steinmetz-Jenkins suggested, they were disillusioned, disaffected – frustrated with a system that wasn’t working for them. That was, in this interpretation, the real problem on which we should be focusing if we are worried about democracy: Not the hysterical “fascism” chimera, but the neoliberal order and those who uphold it. Anything else is just an undue distraction. "
Zimmer says:
"I am on the Left myself, although I have no personal or institutional ties to the American Left, as I only moved over from Germany a little over three years ago... * * * I disagree with the fascism Skeptics that the *real* problem is (neo-) liberalism, and whatever is happening on the Right is just a subordinate issue – a side contradiction, in more Marxist terms. They are both real. Acknowledging how the devastations brought about by neoliberalism have helped create the conditions under which Trumpism can thrive does not mean the radicalization of the Right, the rise of extremist forces within the rightwing coalition, can be wholly subsumed as a side effect"
Read more
I'm not a scholar, but I've blogged a little about this topic. For "Books Are Our Superpower," I wrote Is the word ‘fascism’ too extreme? after How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley.
The portrayal of staged events
Here's a cultural element of fascism.
"In professional wrestling, kayfabe (/ˈkeɪfeɪb/) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.
Kayfabe, in the United States, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with."
The main thing to understand about abortion ban exceptions do not exist. They are ornamental. They’re like plastic fruit. They are not meant to be used, they’re just there to make the ban look reasonable. bsky.app/profile/jbou...
— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) May 26, 2024 at 8:49 AM
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I have found the concept of “kayfabe” so astonishingly valuable for thinking about USA politics these days (for a while). These “exceptions” are kayfabe as are the sanctimonious enactments of concern by fascist, anti-abortion crowd.
— 🇵🇸Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer🏳️🌈 (@nuclearanthro.bsky.social) May 26, 2024 at 9:52 AM
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same goes for divorce ban exemptions for domestic violence conservatives want women trapped in abusive relationships
— ben chambers 🏴 (@benjaminchambers.bsky.social) May 26, 2024 at 9:04 AM
Some people won't have rights if other people get them?
I think it would be good, actually, if APSA didn't provide a platform for fascists to work out in detail and coordinate their plans for destroying democracy piece by piece, but maybe that's just me
— Kevin Elliott (@kjephd.bsky.social) Sep 6, 2024 at 6:00 PM
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'Previously comfortable people'
"Charlottesville, like the rise of Trump, was a moment in time when a lot of previously comfortable people started to contemplate supremacy in a different way, I think. There was something in the way public opinion and authority all the way up to the president seemed not only incapable of meaningfully opposing as obvious a hate group as can be imagined, but almost allergic to the moral implications of what it meant for so many of our fellow citizens to have found common cause with such a group."
A.R. Moxon, interviewed by Parker Molloy (Patreon), May 30, 2024
See also
Mass Appeal: How contemporary fascist aesthetics mask, excuse, and normalize violence. Vicky Osterweil, Real Life Mag, June 15, 2017
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