I’m duly provoked by the spat underlying this post from John Ganz, whom I follow (but not enough to pay for his substack), and whom I think is always worth reading. I may have written about this before but I’m so old I’ve forgotten whether or not I did. I think I did.
The big argument is whether Trump should be labeled a fascist. I would say yes. There is some nasty sniping at personalities and imputations of bad faith that I have no part or interest in, but the political dispute is important. I can think of two different angles.
One is the labeling as a political-agitational move. I would endorse it as political rhetoric and characterize complaints on analytical grounds as pedantic wet-blankets. Trump and his following are plainly bad enough to merit the most extreme charges conceivable. To evaluate a political claim as an analytical question is a category error.
Two is the scholarly or analytical side. I’m no scholar of fascism, but in this context I think such scholarship has limited value. I keep recalling an article I appreciated in the New York Review of Books by some lady. The bit that stays with me is her statement that fascism in the 21st Century need not be a close replica of the 1930s varieties.
An argument from know-it-alls is that we don’t have fascism looming because fascism always arises in response to a robust socialist movement. This was true in the past, but so what?
Another is that the Trump himself has failed to demonstrate an intention to utterly extirpate our Constitutional order and all democratic institutions and freedoms. I think this is stupid too. One thing that seems clear about Trump and company is that they will do whatever they think they can get away with. The plan on January 6th, 2021, has been uncovered, and they came damn close to succeeding.
A friend suggested to me that a difference between fascism and mere authoritarianism is that fascism seeps into the culture and provides a basis for mobilizing masses without need of participation from law enforcement or the military. This distinction is appealing, and I would say it is in prospect.
Virginia elected a Democratic governor in 2017, Ralph Northam. Now for Virginia the successful Democrats are usually weak sauce, but in any case it provoked a huge mobilization on the right on the issue of gun rights. There were mass meetings all over the state. It was scary as hell. The Democrats were going to take our guns away. They would ban karate schools for the kids. Of course nothing of the sort happened.
In my own centrist county, the rightists succeeded in scaring away our elected school board and a good share of our county commissioners. (Fortunately, replacements stepped up and did well in last year’s elections.) This was through a combination of anonymous death threats, disrupted public proceedings, bogus investigations of liberals by our Trumpy county sheriff and state attorney-general, and a cooperative local Foxified media (WJLA, in our case a Sinclair TV outlet).
The point is that the movement on the Right is unscrupulous, vicious, and dynamic. It evolves. It need not resemble the formations of the 1930s. It may lose in national elections, but there is no reason to think it is going away. It is as bad as you can imagine. Yelling fascism is a proportionate response. The academic quibbling, well-informed or otherwise, is a sideshow.
Correct!
It goes to motive. If it’s not really fascism we don’t have to do anything about it. If it’s not really fascism we can continue to tolerate liberal media making their false equivalences between left and right. If it’s not really fascism we can continue to live in our elite privilege and not recognize that our indifference to the deterioration of the social safety net and most of rural America is part of the problem. If it’s not really fascism we don’t have to admit that racism still hangs over our polity like the clouds that precede the deadly storm. If it’s not really fascism we don’t have to admit that unchecked capitalism is a great danger and leftists who point to it cannot be dismissed as marginal crackpots.