We live in an age in which theater and the spectacle of performance empty politics of any moral substance and contribute to the revival of an updated version of fascist politics. Politics is now leaden with bombast: words strung together to shock, numb the mind, and images overwrought with a self-serving sense of riotousness and anger. What is distinct about this historical period, especially under the Trump regime, is what Susan Sontag has called a form of aesthetic fascism with its contempt of "all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic."
One distinctive element of the current moment is the rise of hard and soft dis-imagination machines. The hard dis-imagination machines such as Fox News, conservative talk radio and Breitbart media function as overt and unapologetic propaganda machines that trade in nativism, misrepresentations and racism, all wrapped in the cloak of a regressive view of patriotism. As Joel Bleifuss points out, Fox News, in particular, is "blatant in its contempt for the truth," and engages nightly in the "ritual of burying the truth in 'memory holes.'" Bleifuss adds, "This, the most-watched cable news network, functions in its fealty to Trump like a real-world Ministry of Truth from George Orwell's 1984, where bureaucrats 'rectify' the historical record to conform to Big Brother's decrees." Trump's fascist politics and fantasies of racial purity could not succeed without the dis-imagination machines, pedagogical apparatuses and the practitioners needed to make his "vision not merely real but grotesquely normal."
The soft dis-imagination machines or liberal mainstream media, such as "NBC Nightly News," MSNBC, and the established press function largely to cater to Trump's Twitter universe, celebrity culture and the cut-throat ethos of the market all while isolating social issues, individualizing social problems and making the workings of power superficially visible.
Politics as a spectacle saturates the senses with noise, cheap melodrama, lies and buffoonery. This is not to suggest that the spectacle that now shapes politics as pure theater is meant merely to entertain and distract. On the contrary, the current spectacle, most recently evident in the impeachment hearings in Congress, functions largely to separate the past from a politics that in its current form has turned deadly in its attack on the values and institutions crucial to a functioning democracy. In this instance, echoes of a fascist past remain hidden, invisible beneath the histrionic shouting and disinformation campaigns that rail against "fake news," which is a euphemism for dissent, holding power accountable and an oppositional media. A flair for the overly dramatic eliminates the distinction between fact and fiction, lies and the truth.
Under such circumstances, the spectacle functions as part of a culture of distraction, division and fragmentation, all the while refusing to pose the question of how the United States shares elements of a fascist politics that connects it to a number of other authoritarian countries such as Brazil, Turkey, Hungary and Poland which have embraced a form of fascist aesthetics and politics that combines a cruel culture of neoliberal austerity with the discourses of hate, nativism and racism. Political theater in its current form, especially with respect to the impeachment process, embraces elements of a fascist past, and in doing so, creates a form of self-sabotage in which the public largely refuses to "pose the question why Hitler and Nazi Germany continue to exert such a grip on modern life."
Forgetting History and the Legitimation of White SupremacyAnother lesson to be learned from the absence of history or what it means to even have a history in the discourse surrounding the impeachment hearings is not only how ignorance gets normalized, but also how the absence of critical thought allows us to forget that we are moral subjects capable of changing the world around us. Echoes of a dark past loom over the impeachment process and the crimes of the Trump administration. Not only are lessons not learned, but history is being rewritten in the image of the mystical leader, a culture of lies, and a perpetual motion machine that trades in racism, fear and bigotry.
The impeachment of Donald Trump is a crisis in need of being fully confronted both historically and in terms of a comprehensive politics that allows us to learn from alarming signs coming from the Trump administration. Such a crisis contains elements of a past that suggest we cannot look away or give in to the current assault on the past as a measure of intellectual respectability.
The refusal of the Republican Party-dominated Senate to remove Trump from office both legitimizes his lawlessness and makes clear that Trump is simply a symptom of a long-simmering fascist politics. This is a politics whose roots run deep in American politics and have produced a Republican Party that Noam Chomsky has argued is "the most dangerous organization in human history." This is a political party that forgets historical narratives that it considers dangerous. At the same time, it couples its embrace of historical amnesia with a rewriting of history that draws on a mythical past to promote toxic masculinity, patriarchy and white supremacy. There is more at work here than a notion of history that celebrates an archaic and reactionary social order. There are also the seeds of a growing authoritarianism.
History offers a model to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, making it more difficult to assume that fascism is merely a relic of the past. Memories of terror are not only present in the white supremacist parade of hate and bigotry that took place in Charlottesville, but also in the current White House, which is home to white supremacists such as Stephen Miller, who is a high-level adviser to Trump and is viewed by many as the architect of his draconian immigration policies. Recently, over 900 of Miller's emails were leaked by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh. Among the trove of emails, Miller commented on and provided reference to white nationalist websites such as VDARE and celebrated the racist novel, The Camp of the Saints. He "also reportedly espoused conspiracy theories about immigration, backed racist immigration policies introduced by President Calvin Coolidge that were praised by Adolf Hitler, and deployed slang popular in white nationalist circles to reference immigration." Judd Legum argues that Miller also "obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof's murderous rampage."
In spite of a barrage of calls from a number of politicians for Miller's removal from the White House, Trump held firm, reinforcing that widely accepted notion that Trump is a white nationalist entirely comfortable with white supremacist ideology. This is not surprising since Trump brought the language of white nationalism into the White House and mainstream politics. Of course, removing Miller would not change much. Miller is not the main white supremacist in the Trump administration. Nor can his presence hide the fact that white supremacy has been a staple of the Republican Party for decades evident in the history and contemporary presence of high-profile Republican politicians, such as Senators Strom Thurmond and Jeff Sessions, and Representatives Steve King, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher.
Moreover, the long legacy of white supremacy in the United States should not undercut the distinctiveness of Trump's white supremacist views, which he wears like a badge of honor while escalating and normalizing white supremacist sensibilities, practices and policies unlike any president in modern times. His scapegoating and demonization of politicians, athletes and other critics of color reflects more than a divide-and-rule strategy; it is an updated strategy for mainstreaming the death-haunted elements of fascism.
In addition, he has consistently waged war on the media and elevated the spurious notion of "fake news" to the level of a common-sense assumption. The latter derogatory term has a strong resemblance to Hitler's demonization of the "Lugenpresse" the lying press. Rick Noack states: "The defamatory word was most frequently used in Nazi Germany. Today, it is a common slogan among those branded as representing the 'ugly Germany': members of xenophobic, right-wing groups. This Nazi slur has also been used by some of Trump's followers."
Trump has legitimated a culture of lying, cruelty and a collapse of social responsibility. In doing so, he has furthered the process of trying to make people superfluous and disposable, all the while producing a fog of ignorance which gives contemporary credence to Hannah Arendt's claim in The Origins of Totalitarianism that, "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists."
Underneath this moral abyss, politics wages war on the truth and historical memory. This was made clear in the Senate's refusal to hear witnesses, assess evidence and remove from office a president who has repeatedly abused the power of the office and relentlessly produced a pageant of menace and manufactured drama spectacularized through threats of violence, lies, fear and white rage.
If Nazi Germany offered an image of a politics cleansed of social and moral responsibility, Trump offers us a foretaste of what the total destruction of democracy and the planet looks like. The acquittal of Trump as the end point of the impeachment process provides a glimpse of a right-wing, white supremacist party that has rejected democracy for an authoritarian mode of governance, one that benefits the ultra-rich, the corporate elite, right-wing evangelicals, militarists, ultra-nationalists and white supremacists.
The Republican Party is now organized like a cult. It has given over to totalistic visions, narratives of decline and a politics of ethnic and racial "purification."
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