More On Trump And Fascism

August 30, 2020

August 30, 2020

Referring to my recent post about Trump’s fascist leanings and his explicit flouting of Constitutional laws and norms, I received the following private message:

Q: I am surprised you even posted that, Robert. What does any of that matter? From one corrupt political movement to the next.

A: That's not how I see it. Politics is undoubtedly corrupted, just like any other human endeavor. There are better and worse levels of corruption, but that's not the point here--although if we debated that point, I'd say that Trump and all his people are 100% corrupted and will stop at nothing, which is not true (in my opinion) of Biden and his friends. But that is not the point.

My essay made the point clearly, I thought, and you are papering over that point with a false-equivalency argument: "They're all rascals." That's just nihilistic. And that is just how fascist dictators gain power in the first place--by disheartening everyone and destroying any trust in elections and institutions. Instead, the "Great Leader" is the only one to be trusted--the only one who can fix it. That is the classic cult of personality, and it is nothing but a hypnotic trance.

Of COURSE, the institutions are corrupt. It's only we humans who staff them, and we have all kinds of games running--sex, money, power--but what is the alternative? Humans require social structures to survive and deal with the contingencies of life. Anarchy is not a viable option. So it will be one form of government, however flawed, or another. I favor democracy over a fascist cult of personality with an uncriticizable Great Leader ruling the roost and no term limits, but if you disagree, fine by me. You have every right.

Yes, democracy is complex and messy. It's the worst form of government imaginable . . . except for all the others.

To be clear, ordinary human greed and corruption are everywhere on Earth. Every niche that can provide a source of money or power, legal or illegal, will be filled. That's one thing. The creation of a fascist state is another thing entirely: the end of democracy and the beginning of an authoritarian dictatorship. If you don't understand the difference, that's on you.

Q: I am not a Republican, by the way. But I don't see the creation of a fascist state. All I see is a bunch of fear-mongering from the left.

A: If you do not hear the fascism in Trump’s words, I can only assume that you do not know what fascism is. Perhaps you have never considered it. As I said in my essay, I heard the fascism in Trump’s rhetoric when he first began running for office. It was nakedly apparent to me. Perhaps you do not understand what fascism is. Here is a good summary from a recent book by Jason Stanley:

1. A mythic past. “Fascism always promises to return us to a mythic past,” Stanley said. For Hitler, that meant returning to the past of the Holy Roman Empire, when Germans ruled over non-Germans; for Mussolini, that meant the Roman Empire itself.

This past is a place where the patriarchy rules supreme, where in-group men are warriors and in-group women are mothers and wives. This past is mythic, Stanley said: it is fake. It never really was, except in the words of fascist politicians.

2. Propaganda. Stanley said fascist politicians always revert to anti-corruption campaigns, even when they are transparently corrupt. He said the Nazis were among the most corrupt regimes in history, plundering the wealth and property of European Jews and yet still waged a relentless propaganda campaign that promised to rid the continent of corruption supposedly introduced by Jews.

Trump branded Clinton as “Crooked Hillary” and promised to “drain the swamp” despite his long history of underhanded business and political dealings. Vladimir Putin, at the same time that he is reviving mid-20th century Russian fascist thinker Ivan Ilyin, consistently lambasts the European Union as fascist.

3. Anti-intellectualism. “The enemy of fascism is equality,” Stanley said. He said fascist politicians continually attack universities as hotbeds of cultural and political Marxism. He said these politicians uphold a mythical “common man” as always knowing what is right while deriding women and racial and sexual minorities who seek fundamental equality as seeking political and cultural domination.

4. Hierarchy. As opposed to liberal democracies, which are based on freedom and equality, fascism enshrines a dominant group’s traditions as the unequivocal rule.

5. Victimhood. Throughout fascist politics, the dominant group consistently portrays itself as a victim. The Nazis said they were the victims of the minority Jews. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán held an international conference on the persecution of Jews in October 2017, during which he declared that Christians are the most persecuted group in the world.

6. Unreality. Fascist politicians rely on conspiracy theories instead of facts to justify their calls for power. “When ‘Birtherism’ came,” Stanley said, “everyone should have been terrified.”

7. Law and order. The fascist politician promises a regime of law and order not to punish actual criminals but to criminalize “out-groups” like racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. “Right now,” Stanley said, “we’re seeing criminality being written into immigration status” in the United States. He said fascist politicians thrive on launching purportedly specific attacks against certain segments of a population, like “criminal” immigrants or Jews, and then broadening that definition to include the entire group.

8. Sexual anxiety. Stanley said the fascist politician always foments panic around the threat of rape perpetrated by out-group men against in-group women. “The particular threat is rape,” he said, “and then you create fear among people by talking about rape, and then you try to attack people’s diminished sense of traditional manhood by fomenting fear about sexuality.”

9. Sodom and Gomorrah. Fascist politicians always locate virtue in the countryside and small towns—-never in cities with their mixtures of people, races, “decadence” and permissiveness.

10. Arbeit macht frei. Fascist politicians identify out groups as lazy, attack welfare systems and labor organizers, and promote the idea that the group on top is hard-working, while in contrast, the groups on the bottom are lazy and drains on the state and should be forced to work, ideally for free.