I started this series by deliberately pointing to what Hitler showed us: there’s nothing about what happened in Germany in the 1930’s that can’t be replicated elsewhere. There are monsters in waiting everywhere, and the United States is no exception. The argument “It can’t happen here” ignores American history which shows it can and does.
I followed up by putting a name to the process: fascism in the second installment. There are warning signs all around, and every day provides more. To recap, here’s the list taken from a poster in the Holocaust Memorial Museum, with a few annotations:
Early Warning Signs of Fascism
- Powerful and continuing Nationalism — Make America Great Again, America first, etc.
- Disdain for human rights — Bring back torture, take the gloves off the police, put the Department of Justice in the hands of a racist...
- Identification of enemies as a unifying cause — Terrorists, Mexicans, the press, etc.
- Supremacy of the military — Big increases in military spending, generals filling civilian posts, etc.
- Rampant sexism — STFU Senator Pocahontas, defund Planned Parenthood, etc.
- Controlled mass media — FOX, Talk Radio, attacks on ‘lying’ MSM
- Obsession with national security — Build the wall, extreme vetting, ban on immigrants, refugees, etc.
- Religion and government intertwined — Remove wall between church and state, ban on Muslims, special entry for Christians, etc.
- Corporate power protected — Business friendly judges, deregulation, tax cuts, corporate foxes overseeing henhouses, etc.
- Labor power suppressed — Right to work laws, Anti-worker appointees to regulatory agencies, no minimum wage increases, etc.
- Disdain for intellectuals and the arts — Gagging government scientists, defunding the NEA, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, etc.
- Obsession with crime and punishment — Unfounded claims of skyrocketing murder rates, crime running rampant, national carnage, etc.
- Rampant cronyism and corruption — blatant conflicts of interest, a cabinet of billionaires, buddies, and family members, foxes appointed to henhouses.
- Fraudulent elections — Voting restrictions, gerrymandering, delegitimizing elections with bogus claims of illegal voting, etc.
I’ve focused on fascism, because totalitarian rule under an anti-democratic elite in America seems most likely to arrive by that route. Donald Trump is showing all the signs of being a Hitler wannabe — demanding absolute power, demanding idolization and unquestioning loyalty, rattling sabers, demonizing opponents and enemies.
The difference is that Hitler was creative enough to put his own stamp on it and do some original work. Trump is just following the formula and regurgitating material from the right wing fever swamp, helped by a white supremacist neo-Nazi top adviser and mentored by a brutal dictator he admires as a role model. If Trump is incoherent, contradictory, and confused, it’s a reflection of the calculated irrationality he’s been feeding on for years.
It’s easy to obsess on Trump, but more important than Trump is the bigger problem: the way has been paved for him by the Republican Party. While the list above is Trump-flavored, the broad outlines are what the GOP has been pushing all along: declaring government is the problem, not the solution; attacking an independent judiciary with demagoguery about activist judges, attacking an independent press as “liberal”, demonizing immigrants, ramping up paranoia about terrorists, cranking up religious tensions…. The list goes on and on. Trump didn’t create this, but he’s riding it for all it’s worth.
If Trump magically disappeared tomorrow, what’s listed above would largely continue. There are plenty of would-be Trumps waiting in the wings of the GOP to seize power. The Republican Party has been slipping into fascism because that’s the choice they’ve made as a way to take and hold power. Sara Robinson was warning about this back in 2009.
...Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can’t win elections or policy fights, they’re more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.
When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage — the transition to full-fledged government fascism — begins.
It’s about their only option at this point.
Demographics are against Republicans, their policies don’t work in practice, a majority of Americans don’t want what they’re selling, and they’re fundamentally anti-democratic at the core. They don’t want to govern with the consent of the governed — they want to rule, now and forever. They have no scruples about how they achieve this goal.
The word for this is authoritarianism; fascism is just their route to it. Robinson quotes Robert O. Paxton to lay out what we’re up against with this march to fascism:
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, “Everybody is somebody else’s fascist.” Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton’s essential definition of the term:
“Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.”
Elsewhere, he refines this further as
“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
. Jonah Goldberg aside, that’s a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I’ll be referring to here.
Fascism, like so many totalitarian regimes, is rooted in authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is based on two things: leaders and followers. To understand Trump and the abyss America is teetering on, there are plenty of resources available about authoritarianism and its hazards. If you want a good starting point, go look up Professor Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians. (pdf — free download.) Find a copy of John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience, which applies Altemeyer’s work to the Nixon White House and the conservative movement.
Take a look at Sara Robinson’s two related series at Orcinus, where she builds on it in Cracks in the Wall, and in Tunnels, Walls and Bridges. (Links are in the left margin, down the page on the Orcinus website.) Part 1 of Cracks in the Wall starts out by explaining what Authoritarian leaders and their followers are like. Here’s the intro on leaders:
Leaders and Followers
Authoritarians come in two flavors: leaders and followers. The two tiers are driven by very different motivations; and understanding these differences is the first key to understanding how authoritarian social structures work.
Leaders form just a small fraction of the group. Social scientists refer to this group as having a high "social dominance orientation (SDO)" -- a set of traits that can be readily identified with psychological testing. "These are people who seize every opportunity to lead, and who enjoy having power over others," says Dean -- and they have absolutely no qualms about objectifying people and breaking rules to advance their own ambitions. High-SDO personalities tend to emerge very early in life (which suggests at least some genetic predisposition): you probably remember a few from your own sandbox days, and almost certainly have known a few who've made your adult life a living hell as well.
High-SDO people are characterized by four core traits: they are dominating, opposed to equality, committed to expanding their own personal power, and amoral. These are usually accompanied by other unsavory traits, many of which render them patently unsuitable for leadership roles in a democracy:
Typically men
Intimidating and bullying
Faintly hedonistic
Vengeful
Pitiless
Exploitative
Manipulative
Dishonest
Cheat to win
Highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)
Mean-spirited
Militant
Nationalistic Tells others what they want to hear Takes advantage of "suckers" Specializes in creating false images to sell self May or may not be religious Usually politically and economically conservative/Republican
Dean notes: "Although these collations of characteristics…are not attractive portraits, the are nonetheless traits that authoritarians themselves acknowledge." In other words, these guys know what they are, and are often quite unabashedly proud of it.
emphasis added
That’s a pretty good match for not just Donald Trump but the people around him, the leadership of the Republican Party, movement conservatism and conservative media these days. Robinson’s description of authoritarian followers is just as apt, and even more frightening in some ways.
The three core traits that define them are:
1. Submission to authority. "These people accept almost without question the statements and actions of established authorities, and comply with such instructions without further ado" writes Dean. "[They] are intolerant of criticism of their authorities, because they believe the authority is unassailably correct. Rather than feeling vulnerable in the presence of powerful authorities, they feel safer. For example, they are not troubled by government surveillance of citizens because they think only wrongdoers need to be concerned by such intrusions. Still, their submission to authority is not blind or automatic; [they] believe there are proper and improper authorities…and their decision to submit is shaped by whether a particular authority is compatible with their views."
2. Aggressive support of authority. Right-wing followers do not hesitate to inflict physical, psychological, financial, social, or other forms of harm on those they see as threatening the legitimacy of their belief system and their chosen authority figure. This includes anyone they see as being too different from their norm (like gays or racial minorities). It's also what drives their extremely punitive attitude toward discipline and justice. Notes Dean: "Authoritarian aggression is fueled by fear and encouraged by a remarkable self-righteousness, which frees aggressive impulses."
3. Conventionality. Right-wing authoritarian followers prefer to see the world in stark black-and-white. They conform closely with the rules defined for them by their authorities, and do not stray far from their own communities. This extreme, unquestioning conformity makes them insular, fearful, hostile to new information, uncritical of received wisdom, and able to accept vast contradictions without perceiving the inherent hypocrisy.
Sound like people you see on Facebook or hear on talk radio? They’re out there, and they think they’re winning.
The Cracks in the Wall series tells you how to recognize these two types of pathologies, and how to deal with them. Tunnels, Walls, and Bridges provides some more tools. In a comment on the previous post in this series, ian douglas rushlau pointed to a series he’s been working on as well which looks at the historic roots of fascism in Italy and makes connections to present day America. Again at Orcinus, David Neiwert has links to critical material in the left margin of the web page. The Rise of Pseudo Fascism is just one of several very perceptive pieces. Written in 2005, it dates back to when we were just stepping onto the slippery slope.
Call it Pseudo Fascism. Or, if you like, Fascism Lite. Happy-Face Fascism. Postmodern Fascism. But there is little doubt anymore why the shape of the “conservative movement” in the 21st century is so familiar and disturbing: Its architecture, its entire structure, has morphed into a not-so-faint hologram of 20th-century fascism.
It is not genuine fascism, even though it bears many of the basic traits of that movement. It lacks certain key elements that would make it genuinely so:
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Its agenda, under the guise of representing mainstream conservatism, is not openly revolutionary.
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It is not yet a dictatorship.
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It does not yet rely on physical violence and campaigns of gross intimidation to obtain power and suppress opposition.
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American democracy has not yet reached the genuine stage of crisis required for full-blown fascism to take root.
Without these facets, the current phenomenon cannot properly be labeled “fascism.” But what is so deeply disturbing about the current state of the conservative movement is that it has otherwise plainly adopted not only many of the cosmetic traits of fascism, its larger architecture – derived from its core impulses – now almost exactly replicates that by which fascists came to power in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s.
It is in this sense that I call it Pseudo Fascism. Unlike the genuine article, it presents itself under a normative, rather than a revolutionary, guise; and rather than openly exulting in violence, it pays lip service to law and order. Moreover, even in the areas where it resembles real fascism, the similarities are often more familial than exact. It is, in essence, less virulent and less violent, and thus more likely to gain broad acceptance within a longtime stable democratic system like that of the United States.
And even in the key areas of difference, it is not difficult to discern that those dissimilarities are gradually shrinking, and in danger of disappearing.
emphasis added
That was written in 2005; by 2009 the process was even farther along. Sara Robinson addressed the situation in a three part series:
I wrote them up in a post Tools to fight American Fascism: We Should Have Listened to Sara Robinson in 2009. Here’s an excerpt — Robinson quotes historian Robert Paxton:
..In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn’t by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton’s stages, we weren’t there yet. There were certain signs — one in particular — we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren’t seeing it.
And now we are...
emphasis added
And here we are today.
One of the things that has made Trump possible is the failure to recognize how he and those like him can be identified and handled accordingly. Authoritarians are not just creatures of the right — the left has its share. You’ll find them anywhere there is any kind of power to be seized. The glorification of the business world has caused them to thrive — business is prime habitat for them. We now have the Boss from Hell running the country.
Donald Trump openly threatens the press, the judiciary, and anyone else who crosses him. He ignores experts and goes with his gut feelings or whatever was last whispered into his ear. Blatantly incompetent people are named to positions of power. High offices are for sale. Nepotism flourishes.
There’s open disdain for the norms of government and the law. Republicans in Congress don’t even pretend to consider limits on their power — other than fear of Trump and their own constituents. Trump is inciting religious war and xenophobia while screaming about an omnipresent terror threat and the need to build up our military — while alienating our allies and cozying up to Vladimir Putin. Science is under attack.
And none of this makes any sense. There’s no logic behind the fear, anger, and rationalizations other than as grasping for power. It’s government by appeals to the gut. It’s fundamentally irrational. And if the classic understanding of fascism doesn’t cover it, nothing does. In the first installment of this series, I made this observation:
We suppress this awareness because it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge it. We tell ourselves America is exceptional, yet our founding fathers didn’t think so.
They purposefully built a government with checks and balances because they’d experienced first hand what unchecked power could do — and they’d known it was people like themselves who had exercised it. They were aware that it was a gamble, that it might fail. And perhaps it is failing.
You can’t fight it if you don’t understand it, so please read up.
We are the last checks and balances at this point. Resist.