The culture of violence runs deep in American society. For example, Attorney General Bill Barr allowed military forces to attack demonstrators in the streets outside the White House so that Trump could walk to a nearby church and pose for a photo op, while ironically holding up a Bible all the while giving new meaning to a display of fascist agitprop. It is worth noting that Trump referred to the right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis who marched in a hate rally in Charlottesville in 2017 in which Heather Heyer was killed as including "very fine people," while calling protesters who marched against racism and police violence "thugs," "terrorists" and "anarchists." Trump is not just deaf to the violence being provoked by vigilantes, armed extremists and right-wing militia groups around the country, he encourages their actions.
Such spectacularized violence cannot be abstracted from those political and economic forces driving hyper-capitalism, ultra-nationalism and the politics of racial sorting, spiraling poverty and soaring inequality. These rapacious economic structures extend from a predatory financial sector to big corporations that produce massive misery, engage in unchecked exploitation, plunder the public sector and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite. This war culture also assaults every element of the welfare state.
The current stage of hyper-capitalism has waged war on the social contract, public sphere and the public good for the last four decades. One consequence has been the publicly owned bones of society public education, roads, bridges, levees, water systems have been underfunded and in many ways pushed to the breaking point of disrepair and dysfunctionality. Moreover, this attack on the welfare state and common good is increasingly legitimated and normalized through tyrannical forms of education in a variety of sites, especially in the broader cultural sphere. This is a space in which perverse ignorance, the disdain of science, the repudiation of evidence and conspiracy theories are produced not only at the highest levels of government but also in the media and other cultural apparatuses such as conservative talk radio and Fox News in the U.S., which David Enrich describes as playing a "democracy-decaying role as a White House propaganda organ masquerading as conservative journalism." Fox News and a number of other conservative cultural apparatuses function ideologically and politically to objectify people of color, promote spectacles of violence, endorse consumerism as the only viable expression of citizenship, and legitimate a language of exclusion, bigotry and white nationalism. One consequence is a deep-seated anxiety, loneliness, cynicism and profound emptiness at the heart of American society, coupled with an accelerating culture of cruelty and white supremacy.
Unfortunately, the political, medical and economic crises Americans are experiencing has not been matched by a crisis of ideas that is, by a critical understanding of the conditions that produced the crises in the first place. Yet the U.S. and several other countries are in the midst of a medical, racial, political, economic and educational crisis that touches every aspect of public life. Fascist politics no longer hides behind the call for market freedoms, small government and individual expressions of freedom. For example, Trump's hatred of dissent not only reveals itself in his view of the free press as an "enemy of the people," but also in his disdain for any institution that does not promote the willful narrative of white nationalism. How else to explain his call for a commission to establish what he embarrassingly labeled "patriotic education," a term one associates with dictatorial and fascist regimes?
Trump's admiration for racial purity and "his ongoing eugenics fixation" has been expressed in his lavish praise for what he called the "good genes" of an overwhelmingly white audience in Minnesota. This is the menacing logic of a eugenicist rhetoric that disdains bad genes, and hence willingly labels some groups as undesirable and subject to terminal exclusion. There is more at stake here than an investment in racial purity; there is also the willingness to erase and rewrite historical memory, especially the history of racial oppression. This may be most obvious in Trump's criticism of the New York Times' 1619 Project, which teaches students about the history of slavery. There is more at stake here than the divisive rhetoric of a president who is "a gift to polarization." This is an ominous language that both echoes a horrifying and dangerous historical period and normalizes the mobilizing passions of an updated fascism. This is a language that, as Adam Weinstein of the New Republic observes, reveals a government that inflames partisan positions that creates chaotic contexts not unlike those that enabled fascist movements to come to power in Germany and Italy in the 1930s. He further argues that the Trump administration represents a gangster state that has "reached an important stage of fascist maturity":
"It is time to embrace the parallels, to be unafraid to speak a clear truth: Whether by design or lack of it, Donald Trump and the Republican Party operate an American state that they have increasingly organized on fascist principles. It is also time to consider what else the fascists may yet do, during an unprecedented pandemic, amid unprecedented unemployment, faced with unprecedented resistance ahead of an unprecedented election."
As part of a broader autocratic maneuver, Trump has made clear that he will not agree to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the election. Not only has he questioned the legitimacy of the upcoming election, which the polls indicate he will lose, he has also nominated a prospective right-wing Supreme Court justice whose presence may play a crucial role in enabling him to secure his re-election if he contests it. Under such circumstances, fascist politics is now embraced by him, his sycophantic political allies and his followers without apology. Antonio Gramsci's notion that as the old dies and the new order has yet to emerge, a new form of barbarism can appear, seems more prescient than ever and has become increasingly visible under a Trump era that mirrors a frightening reality.
It is worth repeating that most of the globe is experiencing a new historical period produced by a hyper-capitalist neoliberal system that is at odds with any just, prudent and equitable notion of the future. This is a system which, since the 1970s, with its tools of financialization, deregulation and austerity, has transformed American society, if not most of the world, in pernicious ways. We now live in an age in which economic activity is divorced from social costs, all the while enabling policies of racial cleansing, militarism and white nationalism along with staggering levels of inequality that have become the defining features of everyday life and established modes of governance. The economic brutality and barbarism of neoliberal capital has joined forces with the forces of white supremacy and white nationalism to create an updated form of neoliberal fascism.
We get glimpses of this new political formation in Trump's massive tax giveaway to the ultra-rich and his reversal of policy regulations designed to protect workers, the public and the environment. Trump's White House has become a monument to white nationalism. Consider Trump's defense of Confederate monuments and his support for racial sorting, his formulation of suburbs as white public spheres, his attempt to pass laws that deny citizenship to particular groups, and his definition of cities as dark enclaves of criminality, all of which echoes a history rooted in earlier forms of fascism. Most recently, in his first presidential debate with Joe Biden, Trump refused to denounce white supremacy while signaling his support to members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, to "stand back and stand by."
His inflammatory remarks not only revealed his tribute to white supremacy and his willingness to stoke racial fears but also his support for right-wing extremist groups to continue using violence to promote social change. Trump has made it clear that he is a candidate for aggrieved white Americans and that he is willing to fan the flames of hatred and bigotry. His racist remarks reveal the degree to which he has turned democracy into ashes.
American fascism presents itself in the form of unabashed white supremacy, a defense of nativism, the longing for a strongman, a cult of ignorance that denies scientific evidence, the elevation of emotion over reason, a disregard for the law and civil liberties, an enthusiasm for using armed militias to attack protesters and a celebration of the enabling rhetoric of violence. Nativist populism as one register of an updated notion of American fascism has a long history in the United States. What is different today is that it occupies the center of power in the White House. Sarah Churchwell argues persuasively that fascism has resurfaced in America and that "it draws on familiar national customs to insist it is merely conducting political business as usual." She writes: American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn't mean they're not fascist, it means they're not European and it's not the 1930s. They remain organized around classic fascist tropes of nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity, celebration of an authentic folk and nullification of others, scapegoating groups for economic instability or inequality, rejecting the legitimacy of political opponents, the demonization of critics, attacks on a free press, and claims that the will of the people justifies violent imposition of military force. Vestiges of interwar fascism have been dredged up, dressed up, and repurposed for modern times. Colored shirts might not sell anymore, but colored hats are doing great.
Fascism in America has never gone away, it simply exists in different forms, often at the margins of society. In its updated form, American neoliberal fascism does not need to make a spectacle of swastikas, jackboots or Nazi salutes, or to call for sending those considered disposable to concentration camps. Fascism today wraps itself in local customs, ultra-nationalism, the rhetoric of purification, the flag and Nuremberg-like spectacles and legitimates itself not by banishing the media but by controlling it. Moreover, the tropes of fascism are being mainstreamed in the midst of a plague that reinforces what Bill Dixon calls "the protean origins of totalitarianism ... loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare."
As I have said elsewhere, talk of a fascist politics emerging in the United States and in the rise of right-wing populist movements across the globe is often criticized as a naive exaggeration or a misguided historical analogy. In the age of Trump, such objections feel like reckless efforts to deny the growing relevance of the term and the danger posed by a society staring into the abyss of a menacing authoritarianism. In fact, the case can be made that rather than harbor an element of truth, such criticism further normalizes the very fascism it critiques, allowing the extraordinary and implausible, if not unthinkable, to become ordinary. Under such circumstances, history is not simply being ignored or distorted, it is being erased. In this instance, the claim of moral witnessing disappears. Moreover, after decades of a savage global capitalist nightmare both in the United States and around the globe, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s.
This is a fascism that not only grants impunity to the ultra-rich and big corporations, regardless of their criminogenic behavior, but also exhibits a disdain for weakness and a propensity for violence. It poisons the air we breathe and thrives on producing widespread misery. In its current forms, the checks and balances that liberals point to as an impregnable defense against fascism in America appear quaint if not delusional in the face of Trump's frontal assault on all the institutions that shore up a democratic society along with his increasing use of state violence to squash dissent. As Peter Maass points out in the Intercept:
"... the accessories and devices of dictatorship have expanded with infectious ruthlessness in American cities. The police swinging batons wildly, the paramilitary forces refusing to identify themselves, the hysterical president trying to incite war, the vigilantes in league with the police, military helicopters clattering overhead, the general marching in the streets in combat fatigues, the state TV network loosing its tales of sabotage and mayhem it's all there, loud and clear."
Turning away from the horrors of an updated fascism can be both complicitous and dangerous. While there is no perfect fit between Trump and the historical fascist politics of leaders such as Mussolini, Hitler and Pinochet, "the basic tenets of extreme nationalism, racism, misogyny, and disgust for democracy and the rule of law" are too similar to ignore.
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