What do you call a man who’s willing to demonize his political opponents, to the point of calling them mentally disabled traitors, criminals, vermin, baby-killers, and racists; of suggesting that they have opened national borders—the domestic body politic—to murderers, rapists, gangsters, and sex-traffickers who are people of color from “shithole countries”; of heaping praise on foreign leaders who have crushed dissent by disabling liberal bastions or institutions such as universities and a free press?
A man who meanwhile praises himself for revoking the human right to control of one’s own body and access to health care, and for promising to violate such rights as they are inscribed in the documents that constitute the nation he proposes to lead—and then presents himself to the people made vulnerable by that promise as the sole protector of their rights?
A man who glorifies those who attempted by violent and otherwise insurrectionary means to nullify the results of a free and fair election, a man who first incited snd then stood by as the attempt proceeded, a man who has since insisted against all the available evidence that the election itself was a sham, a result rigged by his political opponents?
A man who tells you again and again that he will seek retribution against his enemies—his political opponents—by use of the state power and administrative capacities he would acquire as the elected executive of the “failed nation” he proposes to lead?
I would call that man a fascist bent on destroying what remains of American democracy. But there are many people I respect (and some I can’t) who say that I’m wrong, even “foolish,” to do so. They operate at three levels of discourse.
First, there are the politicians who, notwithstanding their cries of “threat to democracy,” normalize fascism by “reaching across the aisle” to people who, if granted the powers of elected office, will not hesitate to destroy what they see as mortal enemies of the state, or rather enemies of the Volk who constitute the American people, thus the nation as such. Those enemies are us—we lefties and liberals who either think that social democracy is the cross-class commons sense of the American majority, or who assume that civility and compromise are the ingredients of day-to-day political dealing and discourse.
I hate to say, it, but Tim Walz, a man I respect, is one of those politicians. Here’s what I said at Facebook about his debate performance.
Well, the Harris campaign strategists blew it. They prepared Walz by saying, "Just be normal, never mind drawing Vance out, let him speak his lines, he'll sound like a right-wing lunatic, and that'll be that." The strategy didn't backfire, it worked—it normalized right-wing lunacy by letting Vance dodge every question, saying (1) what's wrong with America now is Harris's fault, and (2) "we" have to do better. On health care, Vance says Trump saved Obamacare: hello? Since when? On abortion, Vance says, "we" want to offer women more choices by fortifying families, and Walz agrees: hello? Not, “How does that work under free market principles and the paternalistic, patriarchal policies Republicans insist on, which foreclose real choice?” On gun violence, Vance says, turn the schools into armed, carceral enclaves to keep the "bad guys" out, and Walz claims there's agreement there on “safety for our kids.” WTF? This Biden mantra of working across the aisle makes Democrats look like fools—like Walz looked last night, a nice, gullible guy who wants to compromise on policy with people who want to destroy everything he stands for.
The second level of discourse on which the label of fascist exceeds the bounds of propriety is the middlebrow domain of mainstream journalism and the blogosphere, where “objectivity” is the writerly means, and the middle ground—the vital center where “normalcy” abides—is the end, the rightful real estate of the fourth estate. In this rarefied atmosphere, the practitioners treat “normal politics”as the equilibrium condition toward which the marketplace of policy-relevant ideas must tend: they’re engaged, of course, in a laughable pantomime of neoclassical economics, through which we are assured that deviations from the proper intersection of supply and demand curves are products of “exogenous” forces, of events and decisions extrinsic to the the logic of markets.
A good example of this informed idiocy, the new crackpot realism, may be found in the appropriately titled Substack, “Notes from the Middleground.” Here Damon Linker trades compliments with fellow wizards like Jonah Goldberg and Mark Lilla, guys who know better than to take sides on the issues because, well, you know, then you’d have to, uh, take a side: you’d no longer be an intellectual, just a hack. “Is democracy at stake in this election? Probably. But who can say which side of the debate has it right? I mean, yeah, it’s a bad idea to tell women they can’t control their own bodies, but did you hear Vance last night? He’s saying we have ways to work this out!” That’s the sort of drivel you can sample at this level of the discourse that normalizes fascism. If you think this is an exaggeration, look at any recent issue of the New York Times, then savor these reassuring words about last night’s debate, from today’s “Notes from the Middleground”:
“Vance, by contrast, was as smooth as polished glass. All the populism was internalized, shaping his policy positions but hardly touching his manner of speaking and rhetorical choices. And that, for me, made all the difference.
“It’s true that a good part of what Vance said on Tuesday night was bullshit. He lied. A lot. (No, Trump did not work to save the Affordable Care Act when he was president. That’s just one of many examples.) Vance also flatly contradicted things he’s said in numerous interviews and speeches on the stump over the past two months. But then, Kamala Harris has reversed herself on more things than I can keep track of by this point. [my italics throughout]
“And that, in a way, is my point: Vance was a normal politician in the debate. A normal politician in a debate during the general election doesn’t spend all his time throwing red meat to his party’s base. He speaks to the country as a whole—to all Americans, including those disinclined to vote for him, in the hope that he might persuade a few of them to change their minds. That’s the most normal thing in the world in democratic politics. And that’s what Vance did—and did extremely well, on a very high level.
“And that threw into relief just how insane our politics has been over the past three election cycles—because of the enormous, looming presence of Donald Trump at the very center of it. . . . He has a very poor grasp of policy and lacks any patience for learning more about any of it. [He’s uneducated, incompetent, you see, and therefore he’s a deviation from the norm]. And he knows that a sizable faction of Republican voters loves the insanity as a form of entertainment—and he’s happy to know he’s inspired these millions of Republicans to cheer for him, regardless of how many other Americans he’s inspired to curse his name and everything he stands for.
“None of this is normal. . . . Vance showed us that it doesn’t have to be this way, even on abortion, even on guns. A politician can advocate for a list of policies; make an articulate, informed case for them; criticize alternatives in substantive terms; and admit faults on his own side and look for common ground for compromise with the other side to get things done for the American people.
“Again: Perfectly normal, even if the policy mix is rather different than what the country has come to expect from Republicans over the past half century [!!!}, and even if liberals (like myself) and progressives strongly oppose much of it. That’s what politics is supposed to be in a liberal-democratic system that works. And I, for one, felt a huge surge of relief at just how normal politics sounded for a little under two hours on Tuesday night.“
The third level of discourse that normalizes fascism is where my learned colleagues, professors and journalists, preside. For the most part, they think that the historical, empirical examples from mid-20th century Europe don’t validate the argument that Trump and the movement he has galvanized—he doesn’t lead it, he personifies it as a caricature does, by extending and enlarging the salient features of the subject to grotesque extremes—compose a contemporary rendition of fascism, or, if you must, a flamboyantly reactionary version of populism. My friend Corey Robin is probably the most prominent of these skeptics. From time to time, he posts at Facebook to the effect that calling Trump and his minions fascist is misleading. Last week he went further, and, on the grounds that the Republicans can’t agree on budget priorities and policy, or even muster enough money to hire canvassers in the swing states, he said it was foolish to label them as such. I commented as follows at his page:
Foolish? As far as I can tell, the arguments against calling Trump and his movement fascist boil down to these: (1) He's not talking about banning unions, parties; (2) He doesn't have his own militia, and has made no serious effort to assemble one; (3) His party is not unitary in its fealty to the Leader, nor in its program or ideology; (4) The liberal/constitutional tradition in the US is too strong, too flexible, too resilient, to break under the pressure of such a man and such a centrifugal following. I find these arguments unconvincing, even when taken together. I think fascism runs deeper than this, in history and at present. I think that between them, Postone and Theweleit cover more ground, and let us understand the phenomenon better. Not to mention Paxton.
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I was referring here to Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust,’” New German Critique 19 (1980): 97-115; Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (1977, trans. 1987, 1989), and Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004).
Here is a short primer on Paxton’s taxonomy from my old blog, politicsandletters.wordpress.com, November 11, 2016:
Is Donald Trump a fascist or a populist? I think he’s both. But it’s a question that can’t be answered without historical consciousness and reference. Robert O. Paxton wrote the definitive book, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). Here’s his list of its “mobilizing passions,“ slightly compressed for my purposes (see pp. 40-41)
a sense of overwhelming crisis
a belief in the primacy of the group as against the individual
a dread of this group’s decline due to liberal, individualistic, alien influences
a desire for closer integration of this group
a need for authority by “natural leaders”
a belief in such leaders’ instincts over abstract reasoning
an infatuation with violence
Paxton writes of the group in question as if the nation is its obvious source and grounding: “At bottom [fascism] is a passionate nationalism.” But then fascism was always a way of defining a nation in divisive, exclusionary terms, as a fixed, racially derived entity, so that, for example, German Jews, who had been crucial participants in the making of modern, cosmopolitan German culture—see Vienna, 1900—became aliens, outsiders, the Other.
Is Donald Trump a fascist in these terms? I now believe so, because by all accounts he represents, in every sense, white voters, women and men, who think the nation itself—now construed as a racially derived entity—is under siege. He’s trying to defend their American nation. His constituents don’t love their country, they love themselves.
The question I want to engage is actually more difficult. Is Donald Trump a populist? If you call someone a fascist, that’s a criticism, but to say the man is a populist, well, maybe that’s high praise. Ask almost any historian, from Charles Beard and Vernon Parrington to John D. Hicks and Fred Shannon, on toward Lawrence Goodwyn, Elizabeth Sanders, and Charles Postner. By their accounting, Populism in the 1880s and 90s was a mass democratic movement because it was dedicated to the abolition of the “trusts,” the late-19th century vernacular term for the new industrial corporations.
In 1955, with The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter started a brief revolt against this unanimity by claiming, on solid empirical grounds, that the Populists of the 1890s were prone to conspiracy theories, to anti-Semitism, and maybe to racism as well. This revolt, called “consensus history,” was joined by William Appleman Williams, an intellectual godfather of the New Left, who, like Hofstadter, understood corporations as integral, perhaps even organic parts of the American experience (see The Contours of American History [1962] and The Roots of the Modern American Empire [1969]). The revolt lasted exactly twenty years. Its death was announced in 1976, with the publication of Goodwyn’s huge book, Democratic Promise, a lavish paean to Populism.
I furnish these boring historiographical details because my quarrel with populism has been carried out in these professional precincts. Once upon a time, I agreed with Hofstadter’s critics. But it gradually, eventually dawned on me that the Populists were angry anti-modernists, and that their pro-corporate opponents, including the newborn AFL, were searching for a way into, and maybe beyond, modernity.
Now my quarrel with populism is public because it’s political. I do not believe that democracy means majority rule. I can’t because by this criterion the Jim Crow South was composed of democratic states. Herewith, then, my list of the “mobilizing passions” of populism, which, I believe, lets me characterize and indict—yes, that’s the word—Donald Trump as a populist.
a sense of overwhelming crisis
a belief in the primacy of the group (yeomen)
a dread of this group’s decline due to urban, corporate, cosmopolitan influences
a faith in the self-made man, the bourgeois proprietor of himself
a hatred of bankers (Jews?) and their alchemy
a suspicion of the higher learning, especially Darwinian science
You can measure the overlap of my list and Paxton’s. I will leave you with two more insights from his great book. First, “fascists can find their space only after socialism has become powerful enough to have had some share in governing, and thus to have disillusioned part of its traditional working-class and intellectual clientele.” (43) Second, fascism “has historically been a phenomenon of weak or failed liberal states and belated or damaged capitalist systems.” (81)
Are we sounding familiar?
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Collateral reading, from this Substack: