In early December, before the omicron variant struck bigly—when our masks started to come off—I went to a dinner party on the upper west side. Just five people, but a large concentration of intelligence and knowledge: an authority on Italian fascism, a rare book dealer, a famous journalist (also a MacArthur fellow), a notorious cultural critic, and me, the retiring historian.
The conversation in the kitchen before dinner was a stream of exclamations that centered on the mere fact that we were gathered together, face to face, after 20 months of isolation: “You haven’t changed!” “You look so different!” “Goddamn, it’s good to see you!” “So what have you been up to?!”
Then it was on to the dining room and—once we got past excited inquiries about each dish—increasingly serious, even solemn exchanges of opinion on the state of the union. Being friends rather than family, we made this transition from food to politics seamlessly, without the emotional guardrails built into Thanksgiving dinners, where conversational traffic is confined to the one-lane road of sports or weather talk.
The questions we converged on were inevitable because everybody there was at least a liberal, at most a socialist, and by now a political junkie. In view of the Trump movement’s rhetoric and actions, including FOX News, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Newt Gingrich, the insurrection of January 6, and the larger plot against America, are we headed for a fascist future? Will Republican rule by minority—using the Senate, the suppression of voter turnout, and the Supreme Court—mean the eclipse of popular government and the end of the American republic?
Now, I’ve long resisted the urge to use “fascist” as an all-purpose label for the Left’s enemies; it always seemed a slightly hysterical gesture, that is, a disproportionate response to conservative and reactionary ideas. Until now. Or rather until Trump started** courting elements of the alt-right, where fierce devotion to white male supremacy is the common denominator, and until the Republican Party, as convened in Congress, caved to Trump’s helter-skelter, charismatic style of leadership, then to his insane allegations of voter fraud.
So my answer to both questions was “Yes, definitely.” I was remembering—not reciting!—Robert O. Paxton’s taxonomy in The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), where he lists the characteristics of fascist movements. Here’s a compressed version:
(1) a sense of overwhelming crisis; (2) a belief in the primacy of the group as against the individual; (3) a dread of this group’s decline due to liberal, individualistic, alien influences; (4) a desire for closer integration of this group; (5) a need for authority by “natural leaders”; (6) a belief in such leaders’ instincts over abstract reasoning; (7) an infatuation with violence.
I was also remembering Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (2 vols., trans. 1987, 1989), a massive psycho-analysis of the fascist personality as it emerged in Germany, ca. 1918-1939, which goes deeper than Paxton by showing that a naked fear of female bodies—and its violent corollaries at the extremity of explicit misogyny—animated every dimension of this social psychosis. (Volume 1 provides the theoretical framework and the early modern historical background, Volume 2 reads the best-selling novels of Freikorps alumni as miniature fascist manifestos, where the grotesque emotional atlas of Nazism was artfully etched.)
My emphatic answer surprised almost everyone, including the authority on Italian fascism. She and the journalist protested, saying that Trump is too slipshod a thinker, writer, organizer, or politician to lead a social movement—he has no real program except traditional Republican policies—and that he hasn’t had much effect on political discourse or structures, not even through his Supreme Court appointments.
Their regulative assumption derives (at a distance but no less directly) from the “new institutionalism” of political science, a school of thought with antecedents in the work of E.E. Schattschneider, Walter Dean Burnham, Karen Orren, and Stephen Skowronek, now elaborated most accessibly by the political theorist and public intellectual Corey Robin (disclosure: he’s a friend whose Times op-ed on these matters informed the dinner party conversation).
That assumption has two working parts. First, the constitutional fabric of politics as practiced in the US is too tightly woven and resilient to be torn by a renegade like Trump; certainly the built-in inertia of the electoral apparatus slows or suffocates radical change. Second, the liberal tradition is so deeply rooted here that its signatures—a rigorous separation between state and society, a devout commitment to individualism—can never be erased.
By this accounting, fascism is to be measured only as a political phenomenon, and “political” means state-centered, policy-oriented, electorally salient actions, not their predicates in social movements, ideological formations, and psychological dispositions or personality types. By my accounting, these predicates are already political, and, so conceived, fascism is alive and well, indeed thriving, in the US—no less than in Turkey, Hungary, or Poland.
I take my cue from Paxton and Theweleit, who treat fascism as a cultural event. They understand that social movements are constituted as well as characterized by ideological formations, and that they both solicit and reproduce a certain personality type. They understand that what Antonio Gramsci called “passive revolution” and/or “the war of position”—what we now call cultural politics—is the necessary preamble to significant change at the level of state power.
I didn’t convince anyone that my definition of fascism was better than theirs. It was a dinner party, not a seminar or a debate. But this almost raucous evening ended on another, more empirical question that I got to answer over the next few weeks. The journalist said, “Us liberals don’t really know what Trump’s supporters really think. We don’t talk to these people. How do we know what they’d do?” I objected, I said, “Of course we know what they think, look at FOX News, or CNN or Facebook, for God’s sake, they’re all over the place! We don’t have to interview them.”
Still, he had a point. I had never spoken to a Trump supporter (except obliquely, in a classroom, a setting where I had to protect them from their peers). Friends of mine in Pennsylvania and North Carolina have, because they’re surrounded by survivalists. But not me.
Not until a week later, when I found a sponsor in my daily AA meeting. Call him Jed from Baltimore. He’s a retired corrections officer, a serious Buddhist, a teacher of martial arts and meditation, a budding memoirist, and a doting grandfather. Also a fervent supporter of Trump. Jed believes that Joe Biden stole the election, that Tony Fauci used CDC money to fund the Wuhan lab that created the coronavirus, and that the January 6 insurrection was organized and staffed by the FBI. Oh, and that Milton Friedman is wrong—capitalism sucks and tax cuts for the rich are criminal. (Paxton: “[fascism] has historically been a phenomenon of weak or failed liberal states and belated or damaged capitalist systems.”)
Let’s see, what else? Liberals are wolves in sheep’s clothing, radical socialists bent upon the overthrow of all natural, social, and constitutional order: we are a nation under siege from the Left. Vaccines and masks are a joke. Homosexuality and trans-gender individuals are OK, the right to abortion is not because, well, because women are biologically constructed to bear children. Violence is nothing to fear or abjure, it’s just one aspect of everyday life and, in these times, a necessary deterrent to Antifa and the Democrats’ totally illegitimate use of state power. Kierkegaard was a smart dude—he understood what a leap of faith required and accomplished.
Old Jed wore me out. We spent more time on his world view than on the fabled 12 steps, so we never got past the foreword to the 4th edition of the Big Book. On Monday, therefore, I explained that his boiling anger about everything was an impediment to my recovery. I told him that I’m an old-fashioned socialist and a patriot, a true believer in the American experiment. And that the (real) insurrectionists were traitors, no better than the benighted fools who fought for slavery under the Confederate battle flag. He said, “I understand.” That was that.
The most disturbing thing about Jed was not the difference between his thirst for violence and his grandfatherly demeanor. No, it was his absolute certainty about the empirical grounding of his claims, and the equanimity that followed. I pressed him on his sources every chance I had, and he always came up with one, from Robert Kennedy, Jr., Ted Cruz (“smartest guy in the Senate, he went to Harvard, you know”), and Rand Paul, on toward Dan Bongino of FOX News. He’s got his facts, I got mine, and there’s no overlap—he’s a fascist who is part of a vast social movement, and I’m not. Talking or arguing with him and his fellow Trump supporters isn’t impossible, I realized. It’s pointless.***
My close encounter with Jed the fascist didn’t and couldn’t change either of our minds. In this small social space, the personal never translated into the political. For it’s one thing to know, in the abstract, that there are no facts absent a person’s values, purposes, and methods. It’s quite another to know that the person sitting opposite you believes that his facts justify your extermination.
______________
** Trump has of course been playing the race card all his adult life, from the Central Park Five to the “birther” charges against President Obama. I say his overtures to the alt-right in 2017 were a new start because he spoke from the “bully pulpit” of the presidency.
*** See my Facebook post of January 6, 2022 for a different take on the facts of the matter
Jim,
I can remember when you first told me about Jed from Baltimore. I said to myself, even with your open and inquisitive mind, this can't last. How does one reason with an unreasonable mind?
It's the political equivalent of epistemic closure.
James- Love the logo and color scheme. What is it? Who's the artist.
Compared to your highly intellectualized dinner party, Jed from AA sounds like your best remedy to confront stress and conquer sobriety en secular en seculorum. You have what it takes, most of us lack. Fortitude to confront life's changing situations and emerge with dignity intact and some plausible explanations to our motley state of affairs.
I think Ignatiev would have empathized with Jed- sold a bill of goods which he will take to his grave, never to be delivered and too late to back down. How pathetic.
You're on to something. Excerpted from your autobiography, I remember well your reading at Freddy's Bar and Backroom, Brooklyn, late October 2019. Keep writing in retirement; best elixir for a long, productive and even a satisfying life.
I hope to make a contribution in memory of Ignatiev.
Best wishes.