Monthly Archives: November 2021

An Expert Says It’s Typical Fascism

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Jason Stanley, a professor at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, analyzes a new piece of fascist propaganda disseminated by Fox News:  

Patriot Purge, Tucker Carlson’s new three-part series, is propaganda built around D____ T____’s Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election and buttressed by a bizarro world, alt-right and alt-reality retelling of the January 6th insurrection. But Carlson’s message being profoundly dishonest doesn’t stop it from being profoundly dangerous: both because it contains kernels of tough truths the country has been scared to face, and because it follows a classic template of propaganda that has brought down democracies before.

The conceit of Patriot Purge is that the real “Americans” — the country’s greatest Patriots — were those who went to Washington on January 6 to join what was to be a peaceful rally protesting the supposed stealing of the 2020 US Presidential Election. They were a multi-racial group of patriotic Americans coming to the capital to voice their concerns. But then Antifa, apparently working in tandem with the FBI, disrupted the peaceful protests with agents provocateurs who urged participants into the capital building. The seditious “deep state” has in this way entrapped the country’s warriors, who are now the subject of government targeting that was honed during the War on Terror.

The message of the series is clear: a great wrong has been done. The government and media have engineered a false narrative directed in the first instance towards discrediting the patriots who seek to address it, and, ultimately, with the goal of hunting down and violently suppressing them. Our media’s complicity is demonstrated by their differential coverages of the BLM protests, which are here portrayed as senseless violent riots, and the events of January 6. The patriots are innocent Americans seeking only to preserve democracy in the face of a fraudulent election. The forces arrayed against them are almost impossibly powerful. It is a repeat of the war on terror, by the same forces who engineered it, but directed against the most representative of our citizens, the “real” Americans.

It is impossible to accept this message in total without taking it to justify violent mass action against the current government, or something like a police and military coup.

Carlson’s Patriot Purge finds a martyr for its movement in Ashli Babbitt, who was shot trying to get past a Capitol Police barrier near the House chamber. Her death, in great and gruesome detail, comprises the final shots of Part I.

Babbitt’s assigned role is familiar to anyone who has seen or studied Twentieth Century fascist propaganda. Martyrs are ideally pure and innocent, and killed in a noble attempt to defeat enemies of the nation. In fascist ideology, these enemies are communists and liberals, who are represented as subverting the will of the “true” people, whose only goal is to install their beloved leader, the true father of the nation. Honoring the memory of the martyr is to worship the leader, and give all in the quest to defeat his enemies and place him as the leader of the nation.

This series is a further contribution to the months long narrative construction of Babbitt as the T____ movement’s Horst Wessel, the Nazi stormtrooper killed in a brawl in 1930, most probably by communists (but for unclear reasons), and elevated to martyrdom status by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. In this case, the martyr is an innocent, patriotic white woman. . . .

The unquestioned premise of this series is the “Big lie”, that the election was stolen, and that T____ won. The Big Lie structures the entire narrative here. It is only on this assumption that we should grant a movement that promulgates this lie full political legitimacy, and equal weight in government decisions and media representation. It is only on this assumption that those who promulgate this lie can be represented as innocent victims.

Key to fascist propaganda is an overwhelming sense of danger, one that threatens to make the country’s dominant majority into a powerless and endangered minority. T____ loyalists in this series appear only as targeted victims, at existential peril, without representation in. any branch of government or media. Throughout, law is represented as merely an instrument in the service of power. The series does not discuss what these attitudes have justified – the wave of laws sweeping Republican dominated state governments enabling the mass disenfranchisement of minority voters on the basis of dubious claims of fraud, the stacking of election commissions by T___ loyalists, or the nationwide targeting of educators associated with Critical Race Theory or Black Lives Matter. The series does not mention the mass targeting of democratic institutions, from elections to schools, the curtailing of voting rights and speech, that are the calling card of the T____ist Republican Party in its current fascist phase. And the series does not, of course, discuss the fearsome power of Fox News.

In the inverted world of the series, those who support the authoritarian cult of the leader, his base, are the democratic patriots. Those who seek to preserve fair elections are the fascists. Fascist propaganda is relentless projection, justified by lies. Carlson has proven to be a master in its use. . . .

Throughout, Carlson is correct about several important matters. He is right about the dangers of mass surveillance. He is right about the moral obscenity of the war on terror, which has created an ugly toolkit that can be used to target relatively powerless American citizens. It is past time for these to be shared bipartisan assumptions. Embedding these truths within a larger framework in the service of destabilizing democracy makes it dangerous propaganda indeed. . . .

I share his view that ordinary fellow citizens who fall under the sway of propaganda should not be demonized. Our opprobrium should instead be directed at those leading the assault, billionaires . . . [like Rupert Murdoch], elite Ivy League-trained [politicians] like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and, of course, wealthy and powerful mainstream media propagandists like Tucker Carlson.

Unquote.

Unlike Professor Stanley, however, I think the “ordinary” citizens who are so open to right-wing propaganda deserve plenty of opprobrium too. But our leaders aren’t comfortable saying that.

Keeping Yesterday’s Election in Perspective

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A recent opinion poll suggested the Democratic governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, would easily win yesterday’s off-year election. But instead of winning 55% to 45%, as the poll indicated, it looks like he’ll win 50% to 49%. Why? Because all kinds of people answer opinion polls, but it’s the angry ones who tend to vote in low turnout elections. And who is angriest today (although their anger isn’t justified)?

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post explains and offers some advice to Biden and congressional Democrats:

One of the most pervasive biases among the political media is the bias toward dramatization, interpreting every event as startling, extraordinary, and signaling a reshaped political landscape.

That is how many are interpreting the results of Tuesday’s elections, especially Glenn Youngkin’s win in the Virginia gubernatorial race. The truth is more mundane — but its implications for how Democrats should think about their future are no less profound.

Let’s begin with the context in which these elections took place. First and most important, there’s a Democrat in the White House. It is impossible to overstate how that one simple fact puts Democrats in a position to lose and lose big, not just in this election but in next year’s midterms as well.

Here’s what happens when a president gets elected: He tries to do a bunch of things, some of them work out and some of them don’t, but nobody’s life is really transformed, at least in the short term. Meanwhile, the opposition party’s voters are utterly enraged by the mere fact that someone they hate is now running the country.

So at the first opportunity (and probably the second and the third), those opposition voters rush to the polls, while voters from the president’s party are not nearly so motivated.

Now add in the fact that we’re still in a pandemic, the delta variant has slowed the recovery, supply chain problems are producing inflation, and President Biden’s approval ratings are in the low 40s.

Given all that, it would have been absolutely stunning if Democrats hadn’t gotten their clocks cleaned in these elections, just as Republicans did in 2017 after D____ T____’s election and Democrats did in 2009 after Barack Obama’s election. The president’s party lost both the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races in those years as well. Yes, the particulars of a campaign can make a difference at the margins — Republicans certainly waged a skillful if repugnant campaign in Virginia — but the basic pattern will hold.

Plenty of people will now tell you that a different strategy or a clever bit of rhetorical jujitsu could have changed the outcome in these races, and the fact that both were so close makes it at least possible, if unlikely. But here’s the reality for 2022: Only something truly earthshaking will prevent the almost inevitable outcome of Democrats losing the House and probably the Senate as well.

There were only two times in recent decades that the president’s party didn’t suffer significant losses in the midterms. The first was 1998, a year dominated by the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton, which led to its own backlash against Republicans. Approval of the GOP plunged to depths only matched when they shut down the government five years later.

The second was 2002. Amid the aftermath of Sept. 11 the atmosphere of fear and panic reigned; President Bush’s approval ratings were in the 60s, and Republicans successfully argued that Democrats were terrorist-loving traitors who wanted Americans to die.

Could something that momentous happen in the next twelve months to turn the situation in Democrats’ favor, either defusing Republican anger or elevating Democratic anger to the point where more Democrats turn out than Republicans? It’s always possible.

But ordinary good news — the passage of important bills, the fading of the pandemic, a strong economic rebound — probably won’t be enough. All that would produce a situation in which Democratic voters say, “Things are going pretty well,” and Republican voters say, “I am enraged!”, if only because a Democrat is still president and Democrats still control Congress.

So when Democrats are told that they must pass the Build Back Better bill or some other piece of legislation to have any chance of holding the House and Senate, it isn’t exactly right. If they don’t pass worthwhile bills they’ll certainly lose, since their own supporters will see them as weak and ineffectual. But even if they do pass the bills, it [very likely!] won’t be enough.

So they have to widen their view beyond 2022. Accept that they have one more year to legislate, and ask: What can we accomplish in that time? How many people can we help? How much can we improve the basic conditions in which Americans lead their lives? How much progress can we make on our agenda, not because we think there will be short-term political dividends but because it’s the reason we got into politics in the first place. Or at least it should have been.

It’s not that there will be no political ramifications to what they do and don’t accomplish now. But many of them will take years to play out. For example, passing the Affordable Care Act only exacerbated the struggles they had in the 2010 midterms, since it became a focus of Republican anger and mobilization. But eventually it became a political advantage; eight years later, voters punished Republicans for trying to repeal it.

More importantly, imperfect though it was, the ACA helped enormous numbers of people. It eliminated the nightmare of being denied health coverage because of preexisting conditions, and gave millions of Americans insurance for the first time. It was an extraordinary achievement.

So Democrats should ask themselves: What can we do now that we’ll proudly tell our grandchildren about years from now? If we really only have a year to make a difference, what are we going to do with that time?

Unquote.

It’s highly likely the Democrats will lose the House of Representatives in 2022, since they have such a small majority today and House races are affected by gerrymandering, which Republicans are real good at. But the outlook for the Senate isn’t so bad. Democrats will be defending 14 seats, while Republicans will be defending 20, and 5 Republican senators have already announced they’re retiring. Democrats could conceivably pick up seats in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, even if they’re likely to lose in Georgia. Gaining one seat would make either Manchin or Sinema less important. Gaining two would make both of them less important.