Since the election, I’ve written about the long association between conservatives, white supremacists and Nazis (Nazis in full daylight. No one should be surprised where conservatism and the GOP have brought us. — Aug. 13, 2017), the ominous parallels in the exploitation of white working class economic concerns by the GOP during Trump’s campaign, and origins of fascism in Europe (Looking at the birth of fascism in Italy, and seeing who Trump’s supporters really are. — Dec. 6, 2016), and the specific psychological characteristics of typical conservatives and rank and file GOP members that make them susceptible to the messages of a bigoted autocrat, making them, as I describe them, proto-fascists (The Authoritarian Personality and Trump Voters: conservatism’s true face is fascism. — Dec. 1, 2016)
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Ten years before the installation of Trump in the White House, this fundamental connection between contemporary American conservatism and fascism was described by sociologist Milan Zafirovski of the University of North Texas, Toward friendly fascism? American Conservatism in the 21st Century:
… friendly fascism is generally defined as the blueprint or outcome of the repression of and the war on personal liberty, choice and behavior, especially private moral choices. Thus understood, friendly fascism is established and sustained through government coercion and rationalized by a Puritan-based ideology and rhetoric of individual moral purity and religious salvation. If so, friendly fascism, as manifestly observed or latently germinating in conservative America (e.g. the South), appears as an equivalent, or element, or result of what Max Weber calls the “tyranny of Puritanism” deriving from Puritanical “absolute moral rigor” or “moral absolutism” (Munch 2001:120/242). Hence, a moral dictate or coercion executed by government and justified on ethical-religious grounds is the essence of friendly fascism, just as political dictatorship is the hallmark of traditional “unfriendly” fascism (e.g.Nazism) in Europe. Friendly fascism via its Puritan-based moral absolutism abrogates or disdains the ethical (liberal) principle that the “freedom of action that is the condition of moral merit includes the freedom to act wrongly [or] moral esteem would be meaningless without freedom” (Hayek 1960:80). (pp. 2-3, emphasis added)
It is crucial that we see the GOP’s ‘Southern Strategy’ not simply through the lens of Machiavellian expediency (although it certainly is that):
Southerner friendly fascism represents a sacred or moral-religious (Bible-Belt) version and counterpart of secular, political and “unfriendly” European fascism. Historically, the mark of friendly fascism, especially its various “temperance wars”, has been “moral indignation, attempts at conversion, and coercive measures”, reflecting its “evangelical roots” in Protestant Puritanism’s “absolute moral rigor” (Munch 2001:120), while in recent times exploiting the “link between moral coercion and the historic role of the crowd in promoting social control” (Wagner 1997:62). Notably, friendly fascism evinces its evangelical roots through a “Protestant sectarian bred propensity for [moral] crusades” (Lipset 1996:176). Reportedly, what some observers (Swomley 1995) call American “Neo-Fascism” is linked with the religious Right in recent times. (pp. 3-4, emphasis added)
It is no coincidence that purportedly ‘small government’ conservatives advocate sweeping and intrusive governmental authority at the state and federal level:
A recent study shows that the authoritarian or absolutist “politics of Puritanism” (Wagner 1997:136), as exemplified in “moral coercion” and “temperance wars”, is closely linked with American social conservatism. Reportedly, in its victorious “behavior wars”, US conservative politics has revealed a preference for and practice of the “apple pie of authoritarianism” (Wagner 1997:162). (pg. 4, emphasis added)
… by virtue of their “Protestant sectarian bred propensity for crusades”, US social conservatives reportedly “are much more aggressive in imposing their own morality on the body politic with respect to [various] issues than their ideological compeers elsewhere” (Lipset 1996:293). If so, the tendency to friendly fascism as a religiously-based war on moral liberty and choice may be inherent rather incidental to American cultural conservatism. (pg. 4)
The distinction between ‘social conservatives’ and ‘economic conservatives’/libertarians (a favorite trope of the media and pundits), is ultimately a spurious one, as the central purpose (one is tempted to say the ontology of conservatism, its sine qua non) is establishing the political and economic hegemony of a culturally homogenous cohort:
The mix of economic and social conservatism, specifically, freedom in the economy and coercion in the moral sphere, provides a conservative basis, source, or rationale for friendly fascism defined as the war on individual moral liberty and choice. Insofar as it mixes with social conservatism, economic conservatism or libertarianism dominating the US political arena (plus rational-choice economics) permits individual freedoms and choices in the economy, but not, or to a less extent, in the moral sphere. Historically, the neo-conservative-libertarian mix of economic freedom and moral coercion is déjà vu, because traditional despotism sacrificed liberties, choices and rights to (as Simmel observed) “licentious libertinism” in the economy,combined with “disenfranchisement” in politics and society. Prima facie, the mix is dangerous to freedom and democracy, because (if) it supplies a design, instrument or rationalization for the US neo-conservative practice of friendly fascism combining the moral-religious “tyranny of Puritanism” with economic “free enterprise”. (pg. 5, emphasis added)
The dualism between an under-regulated economy (including the work place) and an over-controlled moral or private sphere indicates US social conservatives” preoccupation and even pathological obsession with other people’s private lives. This is exemplified in their perennial Puritanical obsession with and institutional criminalization of sins and vices (Wagner1997) thereby converted into serious crimes (e.g. drug and alcohol use, prostitution and other sexual activities) deserving harsh punishment, including execution. As observers note, the American “puritan national imaginary not yet willing to relinquish its Oedipal taboos against pleasure and disobedience” (King and Murphet 2001:199), which particularly applies to the Southern Bible Belt. Overall, this region is characterized by an “unholy alliance” of political oligarchy (“good old boys”) or business plutocracy as the “dictatorship of the rich” (Niggle 1998) reducing workers to a powerless mass with no or restricted elementary labor rights (union organization) with neo-theocracy (“non-believers need not apply”) reinstituted or consolidated by the resurgence of religious fundamentalism. On the account of this coalition between secular and sacred power, politics and religion, the South resembles or approaches less Western liberal democracies than Islamic theocracies or Europe’s Dark Middle Ages. Such are the “perversities”(Merton’s word) or “normal pathology” (Boulder’s expression) of US neo-conservatism with its apparent project and practice of a new Puritan theocracy, specifically what Weber calls bibliocracy in the form of a Bible Belt, thus eventuating into friendly fascism. (pp. 6-7, emphasis added)
The moralism and corporatist market dogma are not incidental co-habitants of conservatism (or fascism), but rather mutually reinforcing functions in the service of autocracy in the service of cultural dominance:
The recent aggregate outcome of the tendency to moral tyranny, sugar-coated in “free enterprise”, has been a society in which virtually every morally “wrong” conduct can be legally classified and punished as crime, so everyone--short of the plutocratic power elite and Bible-Belt saints--becomes a potential criminal by neo-conservative definitions and classifications. (pg. 9)
friendly fascism with its moral-temperance wars is a political project rather than an unintended effect of American conservatism, “an elite strategy reflecting a belief in the responsibility of the state and private powers (e.g. corporations) to regulate and restrain personal behavior” (Wagner 1997:7). And, not knowing the society in question, the description “there is hardly an individual in the U.S. who could not be convicted of a crime, if prosecutors made areal effort to do so” may be mistaken as describing traditional despotism, European fascism,Third-World dictatorships, or Islamic theocracies--all defined by extreme arbitrariness in legal classifications and sanctions of crimes and criminals--rather than a contemporary Western democracy. (pg. 10, emphasis added)
In this, we can more clearly see the affinity Trump’s supporters display for authoritarian regimes as a model of governance, in the service of establishing the ‘rightful dominance’ of their perceived cultural tribe:
In virtue of this salient disproportion between crime and capital punishment, fascist, ultra-conservative US and theocratic (Islamic) penal systems essentially converge on an arbitrary death-penalty penal system, despite their other differences in ideology, religion, and politics. Generally, they converge on “tough on crime” policies as their common property, which sheds light on and exposes US conservatives” manifest or latent affinity with fascists and Islamic (and other) theocrats8. In essence, fascist, conservative and Islamic legal systems share a Draconian penal code, whose radical disjuncture between crime and punishment, notably the death penalty, rests on the primeval or barbaric “tit-for-tat” principle of vengeance. Many recent “tough” laws,passed by conservative Congress and state legislatures and driven by a variation of that principle in the form of Puritan retribution for sins defined as crimes, are symptoms of “Draconization” or“secondary barbarization” (Bauman 1997:23) of an already Draconian or semi-barbaric criminal justice system compared to other Western societies. A manipulated, misinformed, disinterested or apathetic public usually grants blank approval to “tough on crime” policies that a coalition of Machiavellian conservative politicians and moral-religious entrepreneurs, exemplified in the Bible Belt, strategically and/or fanatically design, impose and execute. (pg. 12, emphasis added)
In particular, besides US conservatives” peculiar obsession with other people’s vices and sins, including their intimate lives, a sort of perverse logic lies behind this conservative-driven and-exploited hysteria of “sexual crimes”. This is the logic of creating a moral climate of generalized uncertainty, guilt, and fear such that “no one is above the law” resembling the fascist equivalent atmosphere in ideological-political terms. (pg. 13)
From this perspective, we can better understand how the criminal justice/prison industry serves the intertwined goals of cultural and economic dominance:
A symptom of the neo-conservative mix of “licentious economic libertinism” with moral repression defining friendly fascism is the expansion of the prison capacity and population in the US in recent times. The driving force behind this expansion seems the conservative “intolerance of cultural otherness” rationalized as “tough on crime” polices targeting moral deviance by harsh laws and government coercion, including the police and even the military (the war on drugs). (pg. 14)
… in virtue of their common hostility to liberalism or the principle of liberty, European fascism, including Nazism, American authoritarian conservatism and Islamic theocracy appear as “brothers in arms” or “bed fellows”, despite their other differences. Alternatively, by comparison to Western liberal democracies, in America at the beginning of the 21 century st the neo-conservative criminal justice system based on massive incarceration and widespread executions constitutes a “unique anomaly” (Pager 2003:962), an anomalous symptom of American exceptionalism sustained and celebrated by US conservatism. (pg. 19)
In the aftermath of the election, there have been endless analyses of how to understand the rise of Trump, many portraying him as an interloper in the GOP, and his voters as somehow a distinct and new species, derived from the economic anxieties of the White Working Class (an hypothesis that has been repeatedly debunked, but continues to surface as a zombie narrative); this, ultimately, constitutes an elaborate apologetics for the GOP and conservatives (‘don’t paint us all with that brush’, ‘we’re not all the deplorables’). This is not merely a self-serving rationalization for tolerating the presence of overt Nazis (like those that terrorized Charlottesville) within the ranks of the GOP, it is a effort to obscure and disavow the true motives and goals of conservatism:
… while the North won the“civil war”, the South may win--and apparently is winning as shown in the 2004 election—what US neo-conservatives call “culture wars” raging for long, thus exacting a sort of moral victory and revenge; such are the peculiar workings and effects of American conservatism heading toward friendly fascism at the start of the 21st century. At the minimum, American conservatism, including its “Establishment leaders” has greatly contributed to friendly fascism or a “repressive corporate society” in America. (pg. 22)