Tag Archives: Fascism

An Historian Admires Biden and Fears the Other Guy

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The New York Times has described Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, as “the breakout star” of the newsletter platform Substack, where her Letters from an American has more than a million subscribers. She has a new book out called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. The Guardian calls it “a thoughtful study of how the world’s wealthiest democracy came to teeter on the precipice of authoritarianism, with an assist from [you know who]”. More from The Guardian:

[Richardson says] “the reason for the book originally was to pull together a number of essays answering the questions that everybody asks me all the time – What is the Southern Strategy? How did the parties switch sides? – but very quickly I came to realise that it was the story of how democracies can be undermined.”

Crucial in that is how history and language can be used to divide a population and convince some the only reason they have fallen behind economically, socially or culturally is because of an enemy. The antidote, Richardson argues, is an explicitly democratic history “based in the idea that marginalised populations have always kept the principles of the Declaration of Independence front and centre in our history”.

She is not pulling punches. Her preface observes that the crisis in American democracy crept up on many and draws a direct comparison with the rise of Adolf Hitler, achieved through political gains and consolidation.

“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” she writes.

America’s current malaise, she argues, began in the same decade: the 1930s. It was then that Republicans who loathed business regulations in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal began to consider an alliance with southern Democrats, who found Roosevelt’s programmes insufficiently segregationist, and western Democrats who resented the idea of the federal government protecting land and water. In 1937, this unholy coalition came up with a “Conservative Manifesto”.

Richardson says: “When it gets leaked to the newspapers, they all run like rats from it… They all disavow it, but that manifesto gets reprinted all over the country in pro-business and racist newspapers and pamphlets and it has very long legs.

“They want to get rid of business regulation, they want to get rid of a basic social safety net and send all that back to the churches, they want to get rid of infrastructure projects that FDR is engaging in because they think it costs too much in tax dollars and it should be private investment. They don’t really talk about civil rights because because FDR is really just flirting with the idea of equality in the New Deal programmes, but they do say they want home rule and states’ rights, which is code for “We don’t want civil rights.’”

These four principles would become a blueprint for Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, language sometimes mapping directly. In the early 1970s, Richardson contends, Republicans began to pursue anti-democratic strategies such as gerrymandering and shifting the judiciary rightwards. They also spent decades waging an “information war”.

A prime example was the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, an attempt to convince the public he was not a legitimate president.

“That era is when congressional investigations to smear the Democrats take off,” Richardson says. “Those investigations don’t turn up anything but it doesn’t matter because it keeps it in front of the American people – the idea that something is there.”

Enter [T], a blowhard who turned disinformation into an artform in the business world and become a reality TV star. He promised Christian conservatives he would appoint rightwing judges; he promised fiscal conservatives he would cut taxes; he promised the white working class he understood their resentments. He made the party his own….

“[T] is an interesting character because he’s not a politician. He’s a salesman and that is an important distinction because in 2016 he held up a mirror to a certain part of the American population [note: a white part], one that had been gutted by the legislation that has passed since 1981, and gave them what they wanted.

“If you remember in 2016, he was the most moderate Republican on that stage on economic issues. He talked about infrastructure, fair taxes, cheaper and better healthcare, bringing back manufacturing. He talked about all those economic issues but then he also had the racism and the sexism and of course that’s what he was really going for, that anger that he could tap into.

“Tapping into that anger was crucial to him forging an authoritarian movement, because at least in the United States the authoritarian rightwing movements have always come from street violence rather than the top and from ideas of what fascism should look like. He quite deliberately tapped into that emotional anger that he could spark with racism and sexism.”

Richardson is again not bashful about invoking the Nazi comparison when she cites the communications scholar Michael Socolow’s observation that [T’s] 2020 State of the Union address, in which he demonstrated that he could “raise hurting individuals up to glory”, mirrored the performances of Hitler, who sought to show an almost magical power to change lives….

Despite 91 criminal charges, Trump dominates the Republican primary….What would a second [T] term mean for America?

“An end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.

“I don’t think people understand now that, if he wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down. By that I mean they want to hurt their enemies for sure but, so long as they can be in control, they don’t care if it means that Nato falls apart or that Americans are starving or dying from pandemic diseases.”

Biden understands the threat. Last month in Phoenix, he issued another stark warning…. Richardson casts a historian’s eye at his record.

“Biden is a fascinating character in that in that he is one of the very few people who could have met this moment. I was not a Biden supporter, to be honest. I thought we needed somebody new and much more aggressive, and yet I completely admit I was wrong because he has, first of all, a very deep understanding of foreign affairs….

“I thought in 2020 that was not going to matter and could I have been more wrong? I think not. That really mattered and continues to matter in that one of the reasons Republicans are backing off of Ukraine right now is that they recognise, [although] it’s not hitting the United States newspapers, Ukraine is actually making important gains. A win from the Ukrainians would really boost Biden’s re-election. The Republicans recognise that and are willing to scuttle it so long as it means they can regain power….

“The other thing about Biden is his extraordinary skill at dealmaking has made this domestic administration the most effective since at least the Great Society and probably the New Deal. You think about the fact that [T] could never get infrastructure through Congress, even though everybody wanted it.

“That has been huge but 
 he needs to prove that the government can work for people after 40 years in which we had a government that we felt was working against us. That has been a harder and harder case for him to make because the media is not picking that up.

“The question going into 2024 is: will people understand that Biden has created a government that does work for the people? Whether or not you like its policies personally, he is trying to use that government to meet the needs of the people in a way that the Republicans haven’t done since 1981. He is a transformative president. Whether or not it’s going to be enough, we’re going to find out in 14 months”.

“I watch him constantly, I read him constantly, and I have met him and interviewed him. He’s fine mentally. As I get older, when I’m on task, I don’t miss a trick. I’m going to leave to go to the grocery store after this, and the chances are very good I will run into somebody I know quite well and not remember their name. That’s just the way it is.”

Richardson glides between excavations of 19th-century history and a running commentary on the hot political story of the day….

She reflects: “One of the things that people like me do is give people firm ground to stand on in a swamp. That is, 
 to have somebody say, ‘This happened, this happened, this happened and here are citations that you can go to check, and this is how things work,’ is very comforting…. “So it’s partly a search for history but it’s also partly a search to feel like you understand the world again, which is hard to do when you’re being bombarded with hearings and lies and all that kind of crap. I actually think that the meaning of it is less about history than it is about returning to a reality based community.”

They Want a Red (as in Red State) Caesar

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Even though the 2024 election is still 13 months away, we should all be paying attention to the Republican Party’s descent into outright fascism (or to use a more contemporary term, “Trumpism”). Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer explains why: far right “thought leaders” think a dictator should take control in 2025:

The incredible scenes this week on Capitol Hill — leaving the U.S. House without a speaker and promising an autumn of sheer chaos in Congress — marked a rapid escalation of the downward spiral of American democracy…..

To a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.

The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.

… Let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.

The guru of this push for a president seizing dictatorial powers to overthrow what far-right activists see as a “deep state” of liberals — corrupting institutions ranging from government agencies to the media to large corporations and the Pentagon — is a professor of politics at Michigan’s ultraconservative Hillsdale College, Kevin Slack….

In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.

“Intellectuals play a certain kind of role, especially on the right, in legitimating actions of elites in the party and [the] movement,” Linker told me in a recent interview, adding: “They’re giving people permission to do terrible things,” labeling shameful measures as “acts of virtue”….

America should be having a robust, life-or-death conversation — when TV’s cable talkfest signs on at 6 a.m. until the last words at midnight, on the floors of the House and Senate, in newspaper editorial boards and down at the barber shop and in Starbucks — about whether we really want to end this country’s 247-year uneven experiment in democracy, and whether one man should have the power to override elections, jail his enemies, free his friends, and eviscerate federal agencies.

And yet the elites that far-right extremists claim are “all powerful” seem incapable of grasping these very real threats to constitutional government or a free press. That’s particularly true of the mainstream media and its pacesetters like the New York Times or the Washington Post, which seem determine to “both sides” the descent into dictatorship — with headlines that blame dysfunction on Capitol Hill on “Congress” instead of Republicans, or that place the 80-year-old President Joe Biden’s verbal or actual stumbles on a level pitch with rising GOP fascism.

It’s all the more remarkable since we all know who the actual “Red Caesar” is — even if he is, technically, orange….The 45th president who seems to have already locked down the Republican nomination to become the 47th, has been accused of running a rambling, ideas-free campaign — except that’s not true.

As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, [he] has been pretty specific in recent speeches and interviews about the actions he would take if he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025 — such as naming a special prosecutor to go after his political enemies, blowing up civil service protections to fill the government with his acolytes, deploying the military in a massive deportation campaign, and sending troops to “control crime” in Democratic-led cities….

But the media and others struggle to understand how someone like [him] — twice impeached with 91 pending felony indictments, found in New York courtrooms to be both a rapist and a fraudster — has a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House [note: according to polls 13 months before the election]. That requires understanding the role of the right’s No. 1 chaos agent — [Steve] Bannon, who was [T’s] 2016 campaign manager — and his ability to move pawns like the foot soldiers of the McCarthy ouster, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Nancy Mace, across his messy chessboard. Bannon, now a popular podcaster …, understands better than anyone that creating political mayhem is laying the groundwork for a strongman to declare — as [T] did in 2016 — that “I alone can fix it”.

In a 2022 article, a former Bannon associate … wrote that t[Bannon] frequently told him “about the destiny of the United States and the role he sees for chaos and destruction — for ‘craziness’ — in it. The worldview he laid out to me was one where things he might otherwise consider harmful, like the dissolution of our electoral process or the erosion of shared understandings of truth, were to be embraced as fated stages in a process of national rebirth.”

So now that Bannon’s craziness is here, the phony intellects of Trumpism at Hillsdale or Claremont are seizing the opportunity to make their case for the “Red Caesar” to bring about that “national rebirth.” In addition to Hillsdale’s Slack, proponents of suspending the Constitution include the likes of Claremont’s Michael Anton, the leading academic proponent of Trumpism, who in a 2020 book floated a similar theory about a “form of one-man rule: halfway 
 between monarchy and tyranny”….

The Guardian’s Wilson noted that Anton, in an essay decrying the power of elite, liberal-minded “experts,” wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965.” What was that year’s landmark event? The passage of the Voting Rights Act, which empowered Black voters and led to the election of thousands of African American office holders.

After the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Republicans could win elections through the backlash politics of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or the demagoguery of 1988â€Čs “Willie Horton ad.” They then turned to tactics like voter suppression or extreme gerrymandering as their electorate shrunk. In 2024, the right sees dictatorship as its final “Hail Mary” pass. And it just might work.

But in thinking about a “Red Caesar,” it’s helpful to remember what the actual Caesar said right before crossing the Rubicon: Alea iacta est, meaning, “The die is cast.” In the United States in 2023, the die is not cast, not yet. The majority of Americans do not want to live under a dictatorship, and we have the power to stop this. But America is never going to prevent the “Red Caesar” unless we start talking about it, loudly and right away.

They Give Themselves Permission

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Right-wingers love to claim the left is trying to “destroy America”. Joe Biden, a long-time politician who isn’t a radical in any way whatsoever, is accused of the same. (They also sometimes call him a “communist” — at least they know enough about communism to know they’re against it.)

David Roberts, who operates a newsletter/podcast about clean energy and politics called Volts, explains what they’re doing:

In his book The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone famously called fascism “a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place”. There is much wisdom there.

A core feature of reactionary (I’ll use that term rather than “fascist” because people love to pointlessly debate semantics) movements is an inversion of power. They cast the weak as looming threats and status-quo powers as the trembling victims.

This is a familiar move … in every reactionary movement. You see it in the US when they talk about gay or trans people imposing themselves on everyone, forcing their lifestyle down our throats. Or when they talk about how white people face more racism.

Or, on a grander scale, when they talk about how social justice warriors have taken over every institution in the the US, ruthlessly imposing their woke worldview.

It’s self-evidently ridiculous, but why do they do it so consistently?

The point is to justify their own escalating violence and lawlessness. They hate difference, they hate the status quo being challenged, they hate the existence of Others in their midst, so they need to convince one another that it’s ok to cast off norms and let the violence [or criminality or immorality] out.

This is why the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism. The point of “they did it first” (for whatever “it,” censorship or voter fraud or whatever) is not that “it” is bad and no one should do it, but that it’s ok for us to do it too.

It’s not even really a moral argument. It’s just a permission structure — they did it, so we can’t be held accountable for doing it too.

So when they create this mythology about Democratic voter fraud, the point is not “voter fraud is bad,” the point is, “it’s ok for us to do it too” [which explains why the people found to have voted twice or somewhere they don’t live are almost always Republicans].

The long-running narrative about left bias in the media is not about “bias is bad”, it’s about, “it’s ok for us to make full-on propaganda”. The point about violent rioting urban lefties is not “violence is bad”, it’s “it’s ok for us to be violent”.

The clichĂ© goes “every conservative accusation is a confession,” and that’s kind of true, but it’s more accurate to say every accusation is permission — permission for the right to do in reality what it has worked itself up to believe the left is doing.

Oh I forgot to mention the classic example we’re living through: endlessly accusing the left of censorship to justify banning books and rewriting history.

It’s all a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place — a way of defending and reinforcing status quo hierarchies by exaggerating the power and efficacy of the marginalized and vulnerable, the outsiders trying to reform the status quo in an egalitarian direction.

I was thinking about this the other day listening to the @IfBooksPod episode on Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”. Goldberg desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an intellectual, but literally the only thing he could think to do is the World Biggest What About. It’s “we’re rubber, you’re glue” puffed up to hundreds of pages. It’s just how their brains work. It’s never “people should be good”. It’s always, “you can’t call us shitty because you’re shitty too”.

And that is the most primal and formative feature of reactionary psychology: the belief that everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves, it’s a zero-sum world in which tribes compete for dominance, and all the progressive talk about universalist values is just a clever con.

They have to believe that. Their worldview has no room for people of good will trying earnestly to do good for humanity. They need for all the Others they hate to be sinister and powerful and right on the verge of taking over and destroying everything.

They need it because it gives them permission to indulge their base instincts. “We have to do this violence/censorship/lawbreaking, it’s the only way to stop the gays/immigrants/professors from destroying our way of life”. Every time it’s the same.

A friend reminded me that I forgot the most perfect example for this thread: all the “Flight 93 election” stuff! If you’re not familiar, this is the right-wing idea that US culture has been hijacked by the left and is headed for some grim end, so anything the right does to regain control is justified, even if it crashes the plane. The danger from the left is so severe, so immediate, that even blowing everything up is better than the alternative. Again, the point is always to create that permission structure.

“You prosecute us for real crimes, we’ll prosecute you for fake crimes!” Sigh.

Unquote.

Mr. Roberts then provides a few recent examples of this phenomenon:

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In case you haven’t heard, some of the worst House Republicans are pushing to impeach Biden. On what grounds? They don’t know yet, but there must be something, either real or imaginary.

They Sure Act Like Fascists

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Polls suggest roughly half of Republican voters are big fans of the former president. (The misguided other half vote for him anyway.) Is it fair to call his deplorable true believers fascists?

From Noah Berlatsky for Public Notice (a newsletter that covers US politics and media):

On Tuesday, Dxxxx Txxxx was found liable for sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll and defaming her. The $5 million dollar fine didn’t deter Txxxx for even a day, though.
At his CNN town hall in New Hampshire on Wednesday night, Txxxx again smeared Carroll, mocking her claims about how he assaulted her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store….

Txxxx’s cruel monologue was repulsive. But what was even more disgusting was the audience reaction. CNN had shamelessly filled the room with Txxxx supporters. And as the former president mocked Carroll, those supporters laughed like he was a witty comedian delivering a punchline.

Txxxx is Txxxx; he was a horrible person long before he was president, and he will go to his grave a liar, a bully, and a bigot. When CNN put Txxxx on the air for ratings and clout, they knew he would spread election lies. They knew he would demean E. Jean Carroll. They knew he would direct abuse at moderator Kaitlin Collins (he called her “nasty,” his standard epithet for women who challenge him).

But commentators like to think that most Americans are better than Txxxx. The college students, the small businesspeople, and even the Republican activists who vote for Txxxx do so, pundits hope, despite his manifest cruelty, rather than because those good Americans enjoy laughing at sexual assault victims.

But CNN’s town hall was a reminder that Txxxx supporters are in fact bad people — in the sense that to support Txxxx, and defend Txxxx, requires them to become their absolute worst selves. Probably most of Txxxx’s supporters did not tell themselves before the town hall started that they were there to cheer on sexual assault. But by the end they were doing just that. That’s how fascism works.

Pundits and experts have long scoffed at the idea that Txxxx’s supporters are actually implicated in his evil — or at least, they’ve insisted that saying they are is verboten. How can 74 million Txxxx supporters be fascists?

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was widely excoriated when she said in 2016 that half of Txxxx’s voters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic” — a “basket of deplorables,” as she memorably put it.

In 2022, Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute worried that “to say that tens of millions of supporters of the other party 
 are fascists, fascistic, or semi-fascistic is to use the language of national emergency.” That transforms the other party from “adversaries to enemies,” he argues, which makes it too easy “to justify taking extraordinary action to suppress the threat.”

Hamid is afraid of the effects of polarization. But the way he keeps incredulously insisting that tens of millions of Txxxx supporters can’t be fascists also suggests that he is just loath to believe that so many Americans — our fellow countrymen, our neighbors, our relatives — can be bad people. Fascism is evil. Americans aren’t evil. So how can Americans be fascists? Let us count the ways.

The CNN town hall was a 70 minute demonstration in the grim mechanics of how. Robert O. Paxton argues that a core characteristic of fascism is “an obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood” paired with “compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity.” Fascists claim that they, the pure bearers of the nation’s pride, are being assaulted, smeared, and debased (generally by marginalized people). They then use that as an excuse for extremes of violence in the name of revenge and purity.

You could see Txxxx enact this formula over and over again in the town hall as his fans cheered. In defending his violent coup attempt on January 6, for example, Txxxx quickly brought up Ashli Babbitt, who was killed while storming the Capitol. The former president’s voice got positively misty as he said her name, and then harsh as he called the Black police officer who shot her a “thug.”

“Cold blank range they shot her,” he stormed — as if she was deliberately executed, rather than killed in a violent melee as she and her cohort attempted to get their hands on members of Congress who were trying to count the electoral votes that would finalize Txxxx’s loss to Joe Biden. Babbitt becomes a martyr for the cause, retroactively erasing or justifying everyone else who took part in the insurrection.

Again, when Txxxx was asked about his policy of separating families at the border, leaving children alone in cages, he explained it was necessary to deter immigration. “We have to save our country,” he insisted. America is in danger from immigrants that Txxxx claims are spreading disease and terror. Any excess of cruelty is justifiable to save it.

Txxxx’s ugly discussion of E. Jean Carroll was even more illustrative, [suggesting] that Carroll was mentally ill, out of control, and determined to persecute him. Txxxx is again the innocent persecuted figure, and his innocence justifies his crude smears of Carroll, even after a jury of his peers found him liable for assaulting and defaming her.

In each case here — and in many more throughout the town hall — Txxxx gives the audiences little winks or asides to remind them that he’s on their side. At one point he bizarrely suggested he would give one questioner a job in his administration. At another he gave the audience a sincere look and told them rich people “do pretty well in a lot of ways” as they laughed. He’s a comedian. He tells it like it is. He’s their guy.

Txxxx’s voters empathize with Txxxx, and he in turn empathizes with them, assuring them that they are persecuted and under assault. And then, empathizing together in an organic community of amity, he tells them that the solution to their ills is atrocity. And they enthusiastically agree.

MAGA partisans don’t see themselves as evil, because they know they’re on the side of the noble victims. Txxxx gets people to feel like they’re backed into a corner with him, and that only through him can they break free and scourge their enemies. It’s a potent cocktail of fear and rage and righteousness. It’s addictive. It’s exciting. And, as all that laughter shows, it’s fun.

Fascism is a mass movement. That doesn’t mean that people are tricked or hypnotized by a charismatic leader. It means that people encourage each other to form a community based in cruelty, bigotry, lies, and violence. The community feels good and right, not despite the fact that it gives people license to be their worst selves, but because it does. And, yes, millions of neighbors, relatives, and good, pure people can participate in the rituals of victimization, bigotry, and blood. Who is fascism for, after all, if not the good, pure people?