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"
Later
In October 2024, Zimmer wrote a follow-up.
"There is no consensus definition of fascism – there are different definitions and approaches, plural," and our idea of it "doesn’t easily lend itself to thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes on whether or not something / someone is fascist." Nonetheless:
"It is true that the term “fascism” is overused colloquially and in the public discourse. Quite often, it is uttered as a casual slur. Or it is used strategically to stigmatize something or someone as the ultimate evil. But the fact that the term is also being used in careless ways that don’t hold up analytically must not keep us from acknowledging that it is diagnostically correct to call Donald Trump and his movement fascist. Trump is not “the new Hitler” and he is not “just like Mussolini” – such facile analogies are useless and silly. We are not facing an exact replica of the Ur-fascism that rose to power in Europe’s interwar period. Trumpism is a specifically American, specifically twenty-first century version of fascism."
Given that the election is approaching, "I do want to repeat and emphasize the case for applying the fascism concept to Trump/Trumpism."
Please realize:
"Since the spring, the rhetoric and planning surrounding the racial purge of the nation has ramped up considerably. This is the central promise of Trump’s election campaign: to conduct an unprecedented mass deportation. To do this, Trump and white nationalist purge-planner-in-chief Stephen Miller envision the creation of a deportation force larger than the U.S. military, sweeping the country, rounding up anyone they can get their hands on. This isn’t empty campaign theater either: Russell Vought, the guy who is chiefly responsible for Project 2025’s “180-day Playbook,” has proudly admitted that he has been preparing the executive orders to turn those mass deportation fantasies into reality as quickly as possible."
Early in the year, Trump said he wanted to deport 15 million people, then 20 million … the number keeps escalating. The exact number is not important, but the magnitude is: The estimated number of undocumented people in the country is far lower, and the rightwingers know it. What they are planning is a purge of the nation that will not be confined to undocumented people. Miller has been talking about “denaturalization” for a long time. And rightwing thinkers openly fabulate about the need to go much further. In an infamous essay titled “Conservatism is no longer enough,” published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021, Glen Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic.
— Thomas Zimmer, "Donald Trump, American Fascist: Trumpism is what a specifically American, twenty-first century version of fascism looks like. And in November, fascism is on the ballot. Democracy Americana, Oct 15, 2024
What's a permission structure?
Eric Sentell gives a good explanation in An Injustice! ("How Voters Give Themselves Permission to Vote Irrationally," Oct 22, 2024). If you make a choice contrary to available evidence, you probably have to give yourself some kind of permission. That is, because you aren't properly reasoning, you rationalize. That faux reason is a permission structure. This may include oversimplifying the situation to good vs. evil, so "you just vote for “good” against “evil” and feel fantastic about yourself." Or you say that the man who is threatening to do something obviously bad doesn't actually mean it: he's "blustering" to gain power or attention or engaging in "locker room talk" to add color. Once we're engaged in a permission structure, it's hard to observe what we're really doing with our familiar examples. We may need to look for unfamiliar examples, apply the same logic, and notice where the holes are.
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
Trump's former chief of staff
John Kelly says Trump is a fascist. (October 2024)
This is a distraction
Here's "the populist message generally," says Hank Green:
Argentina
"If you recall the history of fascism, you might know that a strong state was often a key facet of the programs implemented in the 1930s and ‘40s. The fascist leadership typically sought to limit the autonomy of capitalists and their corporations, and subordinate them to the state. But the iteration of fascism embodied by Trump and Milei prioritizes the interests of the oligarch class to such a degree that limiting the capacity of the state, both to regulate corporations and to provide services that could instead be privatized for profit, becomes the number one priority. The head of Trump’s transition team has already called him the CEO of the United States Incorporated, and Milei’s actions over the past year make clear that he looks at Argentina in the same way.
Argentinian journalist Diana Cariboni says that if there is one country we should look to for the playbook of Trump’s second term, it’s Argentina. As she writes for openDemocracy, “If there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.”"
— J. P. Hill, Time to prepare: We know a little about what lies ahead. We have to get ready. New Means, Nov 11, 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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