This is a followup to my post Thank You, Adolf Hitler - We Have No Excuses Thanks To You. I make a direct connection between what happened in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, and what America is heading for under Donald Trump. My point is that the terrible things that happened under fascism could happen in America — only the targets and the excuses would be different.
Several commenters, YellerDog, bluehammer, and NotGeorgeWill, cited examples, both current and historical, that show America is not immune to the call of fascism. It’s out there and has been for a long time. The graphic at the top of this diary (feel free to share!) is based on a poster that has been getting a lot of attention because that list of warning signs is seeing items getting checked off on a daily basis. It’s a fair description of the policies currently being promoted by the Republican Party, without the spin. (Example here, via Digby. These are the people running things now.)
Is Fascism the right word to use? A lot of people have a real antipathy towards that word, because it has been tossed around a lot, sometimes in ways that strain credulity. Yes Jonah Goldberg, we’re looking at you. (You can find a collection of rebuttals to Goldberg at Orcinus in the left margin of links at the web site, under Liberal Fascism: Two responses: and HNN Special: A Symposium on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.)
Part of the problem is that we sort competing political orientations on the basis of Left versus Right. It goes back to the French Revolution, where political factions sorted themselves by sitting on the left or right side of the national assembly. (They were blessed/cursed with Centrists too.) Left is now seen as liberal while Right is conservative. A single criterium isn’t always enough to make useful distinctions though, and Goldberg is deliberately blurring the lines to discredit liberals as fascists. It’s another example of deliberate projection by the Right.
Jerry Pournelle came up with a method of sorting political philosophies that’s a bit more useful, the Pournelle Axes, or Pournelle Chart. It works by sorting according to two different criteria: beliefs about government [statism versus freedom, government as evil, necessary evil, good] and beliefs about progress [rationalism — stuff just happens versus progress can be made by planning and government action]. I’m underlining beliefs to make the distinction that beliefs may or may not correspond to actual reality in the way they are implemented...
While you can argue where something falls on those axes, and argue over the labels Pournelle attached, it does have the advantage of separating out political divisions that using Left-Right alone would lump together. (You can use other criteria, such as the Nolan Chart or the Political Compass.)
This suggests where to seek allies (by these criteria) and where fault lines might be found among groups lumped together by simple Left-Right labels. It also shows how conservatism can slide into fascism — and it is these days, with its rejection of science and ‘social engineering’, embrace of deregulation to ‘free up’ market forces instead of government regulation, and so on. (Again, see the list of warning signs above.)
Dealing with fascism is complicated because fascism itself isn’t exactly subject to strict definition. There’s a certain amount of ad hoc improvisation depending on the circumstances when it is arising once more. David Neiwert addressed the problem of describing fascism in Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis (pdf) From the introduction:
Is fascism an obsolete term? Even if it resurrects itself as a significant political threat, can we use the term with any effectiveness?
My friend John McKay, discussing the matter at his weblog archy [http://johnmckay.blogspot.com/], wonders if the degraded state of the term has rendered it useless. After all, it has in many respects become a catchall for any kind of totalitarianism, rather than the special and certainly cause-specific phenomenon it was. Anyone using the word nowadays is most often merely participating in this degradation.
Nonetheless, I think Robert O. Paxton has it right in his essay “The Five Stages of Fascism”:
We cannot give up in the face of these difficulties. A real phenomenon exists. Indeed, fascism is the most original political novelty of the twentieth century, no less. ... If we cannot examine fascism synthetically, we risk being unable to understand this century, or the next. We must have a word, and for lack of a better one, we must employ the word that Mussolini borrowed from the vocabulary of the Italian Left in 1919, before his movement had assumed its mature form. Obliged to use the term fascism, we ought to use it well.
The following essay is devoted to that idea. Its purpose is, if nothing else, to give the reader a clear understanding of fascism not merely as an historical force but a living one.
emphasis added
The rest of the exegis is a long exploration of how fascism manifests and what it encompasses. There’s no fascism manifesto that lays out its principles in stone; it mutates and reinvents itself, though keeping to some common threads. It’s not a system based on rational thinking so much as an appeal to rationalizations: toxic nationalism, cultural/racial identity, etc. etc. It’s often more easily defined by what it’s against. It’s real enough though, and perhaps a more effective way of understanding it is by looking at the psychology of the people who are drawn to it.
The key word is authoritarianism, something that can pop up on the Left or Right.
I’m going to break this off here, and try to finish up with one more installment: Hitler, Trump, The Republican Party and the Problem of Power. I’ve cited parts of it previously, and again there’s a lot to think about, which is why I’m giving it its own space. I’ll pull out one quote from Sara Robinson writing back in 2009 for those who want to argue about what fascism is/is not and whether you can talk about it in America.
Writing about fascism for an American audience is always a fraught business. Invariably, a third of the readers will dismiss the topic (and your faithful blogger's basic sanity) out of hand. Either they've got their own definition of fascism and whatever's going on doesn't seem to fit it; or else they're firm believers in a variant of Godwin's Law, which says (with some justification) that anyone who invokes the F-word is a de facto alarmist of questionable credibility. I get letters, most of which say something to the effect of, "Calm down. You're overreacting. We're nowhere near there yet."
Another third will pepper me with missives that are every bit as dismissive -- for exactly the opposite reason. To them, anyone who's been paying the barest amount of attention should realize that America has been a fascist state since (choose one:) 1) 9/11; 2) Reagan; 3) McCarthy; 4) The Civil War; 5) July 4, 1776. For them, my careful analysis and worried warnings are dangerously naive -- clear evidence that I'm simply not seeing the full horror of America as it truly is, and always has been, at least since (insert date here).
Given this general crankiness, I probably wouldn't bother with the subject at all -- except for that final third who keep me going. From them, I've gotten a blizzard of anecdotes, questions, meditations, ideas, suggestions, manifestos, and love letters (including lots of link love). The piece sparked a lot of conversation all across Left Blogistan about what fascism is and what it ain't and what we need to be watching for. And that kind of thoughtful discussion is exactly what I hoped for. I wanted people to start paying attention.
If people aren’t paying attention now in 2017, they’ve either bought into Trumpism completely, live in FOX News World, or are still in denial. See you with the final installment tomorrow.
In the meantime, I’m leaving you with Mel Brooks classic “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers. Yes, I’m going to go there: Compare the enthusiasm on stage and the messaging with the enthusiasm at Trump rallies, and look at the audience reaction of disbelief and denial.
It’s not as funny as it used to be.