Talkin Fash

If you're at the point of wondering if one of your major political parties really counts as fascist, your time is likely better spent training. Nonetheless, here we are.

Recently, folks who are neither historically illiterate nor prone to throw the word around have started more seriously calling “Trumpism” (which is different from “the GOP itself” how, exactly?) “fascist”. As a leftist, I do indulge in our time-honored hobby of calling people on the other side fascists now and again, but mostly just to fit in with the cool kids and maintain my cred.

So rather than take my word for it, let’s reach back to that golden oldie, Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma”. For those not familiar with this particular piece of samizdat, “An American Dilemma” is a 1500 page book about America’s racial issues written by a host of experts led by Swedish institutional economist Gunnar Myrdal. Published around 1940, questions of fascism loom large, and it even has a section dedicated to the question, “Is the South Fascist?”

There’s much to say about this book and even this section; it’s striking to read something that deals with these issues in such breadth from a time before the 60’s:

The South has not yet reached the objectivity and legality of the mature democracy. But still less does it resemble the tight, totalitarian regimentation of the fascist state. It might, perhaps, be said to contain elements of both. But, more fundamentally, the South is a stubbornly lagging American frontier society with a strong paternalistic tinge inherited from the old plantation and slavery system. Paternalism is cherished particularly as the ideal relation between whites and Negroes.

Softness! Is this a foreigner treating his subjects of study too sympathetically, or is there a hardened rejectionism in modern “PC” culture that is omnipresent to the point of invisibility? I know that of the two reviews from where I downloaded this book, one celebrated it as essential reading and the other damned it as anti-white trash fit only for the bonfire. And before we go heavy on book burners, modern anti-racists, due to its “problematic” parts, generally agree that bonfires are the appropriate place to store this book. But this is an aside.

More substantially to the question of Southern fascism, here’s what they say:

On account of the one-party system and the precarious state of civil liberties, the South is sometimes referred to as fascist. This is, however, wrong and just as wrong of the present as of the earlier South. The South entirely lacks the centralized organization of a fascist state. Southern politics is, on the contrary, decentralized and often even chaotic. The Democratic party is the very opposite of a "state party" in a modern fascist sense. It has no conscious political ideology, no tight regional or state organization and no centralized and efficient bureaucracy. The "regimentation" which keeps the South politically solid is not an organization for anything—least of all for a general policy—it is a regimentation against the Negro. The South is static and defensive, not dynamic and aggressive.

Now we have a nice list of what fascism is not, which we can line-item to gauge how bad our current situation is.

No conscious political ideology: I don’t know if MAGA-ism rises to the level of “ideology”, but it’s at least a string of words, and people act as if those words have meaning. And certainly, “Trumpism” checks many of the boxes of Eco’s typology of ur-fascism. So let’s give it to them.

No tight regional or state organization: Well this one is definitely not the case. State party leaders are heavily “Trumpist” and are doing their best to enforce orthodoxy, as are legislators, and although there is some internal GOP-on-GOP struggle for nominations, it’s certainly fair to say the tight organizations exist.

No centralized and efficient bureaucracy: Treating “Trumpism” as separate from the GOP, we can cross this off our list, too. Maybe not efficient, and maybe not a very robust bureaucracy (until election time), but certainly quite centralized.

Not an organization for anything: Before, we could only say that, similar to the ideology question, the Trumpists were for wanting Trump to be President so he can own the libtards. That’s a bit weak. Unfortunately, we can now say that the Trumpists are indeed for something.

They are for election subversion.

The broader picture

Yes, by using the Big Lie to bind together his wing of the GOP behind a unified cause of election subversion, “Trumpism” has grown into a genuinely fascist movement.

But as my use of scare quotes and GOP-shading indicates, this isn’t a bright-line change. What Louis Hartz calls “irrational Lockeanism” has always been irrational and thus fascism-adjacent, as has religious fundamentalism. The same can be said for the conservative drive towards oligarchy, in that it tries to wear the trappings of traditionalism. And gunk of our nation’s diverse bigotries certainly grease the way towards fascism, too. Not to mention the self-righteous contempt undergirding Goldwater’s political appeal, which bridges oligarchy and paranoia. The list can go on.

Looking over our recent history, however, the real catalyst of our fellow citizens’ transformation into fascists was the rise of right-wing AM radio, followed by cable news. Rush and Rupert. As much as Trump has given a personification and purpose to the fascist tendencies of the GOP base, that is, provided the binding for the individual sticks, the gathering and aligning of the sticks was the work of these mass-repeated talkers, the background noise at work. The creation of a unified consciousness, the merging of neo-confederate ideology with the broader rural and white working-class culture, and the spiritual corrosion worked by the constant demonization of the “others”, with an assist from Reaganite-Clintonite immiseration, these are the forces that created a mass of people aligned around an irrational, oppositional, paranoid, and fundamentally anti-American political movement.

How else can you characterize people who say that America is a “constitutional republic,” and not a democracy?

But ultimately, “Trumpism” is coexisting within the GOP. For now, the GOP “establishment” shows the strong influence of an elite faction which, despite being genuinely conservative and thus broadly opposed to democracy, seems to perceive two uncomfortable facts about their base’s downward lurch: first, they’re going somewhere many “small-c” members of their own party, let alone the broader American population, are unwilling to go, making the strategy just simply bad.

Second and perhaps more importantly, the base wants the elites to submit to Trump. Whether or not the elites could find a strongman they could stomach is one question. Clearly, some like Thiel and the Mercers are fine even with Trump. But I suspect a lot of them just hate the idea of having to put their precious aristocratic project in the hands of some clownish orange psycho.

And that’s the good news. The likelihood of a Trumpist-Elite accommodation seems low, at least for now. The chances that Trumpists burn some of their powder in primaries, and give us a sneak peek of general election shenanigans, is decent.

Unfortunately, that’s as close to a silver lining as I can see in this circumstance. It’s tempting to write off the Trumpists as a bunch of inept clowns. But we shouldn’t underestimate the potential power of “acts of will”, nor the power of fascism to elicit such acts. Trump is going to have some very dedicated helpers at his side, including the fifth of the US population worked by the right-wing propaganda apparatus into a spiraling rage.

Best get ready.