Fascism
Imagining Some of the Worst: Domestic Edition
I doubt I’ll have the bandwidth to follow the machinations in Washington’s halls of power, as I did during the previous administration. I got out of the habit under the current one because I was exhausted, didn’t feel threatened, and ended up living a twelve-hour drive away. And now I want to focus on the parts of my life and world where my individual agency, talents, and interests might be leveraged for things more constructive, more life-affirming.
First, though, I’ll allow myself to imagine some of the worst coming our way, just to get the darkness out of my mind and into words: the destruction of the regulatory state and of our public medical, environmental, climate, and weather research infrastructure; the violent and cruel erasure of entire communities; the enslavement, indentured servitude, or other forms of abusive exploitation of people without papers under the “protection” of unscrupulous employers, landlords, neighbors, and government agents; the creation of a new generation of Hoovervilles inhabited by people with no health insurance, no immunizations, and pensioners whose Social Security checks and Medicare benefits no longer keep them housed; preventable contagious diseases killing our children; lawfully mandated medical malpractice killing girls, women, and trans men with the bad luck to become pregnant; the loss of LGBTQ+ family, friends, and community members to exile, to self-harm, and to the violence of bullies given license by their chosen leader; the possibility that insulin might grow out of my reach; the knowledge that Medicare will never cover the costs of help with elder care while I still need such help, and while private equity funds squeeze what they can out of old folks homes, leaving them woefully understaffed, their populations vulnerable to contagious disease, inattention, and abuse.
It doesn’t have to go this way, not even under the next president. But do we think a GOP-controlled Senate will respect the filibuster the next time around, if they manage to get the House too? Isn’t that just one more convention that the next president can demand they drop? And have any of them demonstrated even the slightest willingness to defend their institution, sure in the knowledge that they are part of a separate branch of government? GOP representatives in the House are no better, as they demonstrated during the previous president’s two impeachments.
American presidents have enormous amounts of power, and now, it seems, controlling the party and the mob will give the next president even more. Or will some Republican legislators put their constituents ahead of the slash-and-burn ideologues? What groups will they decide government might have a role in protecting? Of course, the House could still flip Democratic. Some Republicans could develop a conscience. Or the ambitions, incompetence, and contradictory aims, values, and beliefs of Orange Face’s supporters could lead to lots of friendly fire and delays.
Caveat: the GOP marched in lockstep to regain the presidency, but we have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. It’s possible they prefer to carry out dissent internally. It’s also a sure thing that Mr. Red Tie will keep all eyes on himself, with lots of help from the media, while the poisons are concocted in Congress and in other parts of the executive branch.
The fact that Trotsky, Mussolini—and Goebbels, too—had all started as journalists created its own sort of dynamic with the correspondents. The politicians liked turning the tables, deploying the reporter’s bag of tricks to their own advantage: turning on the charm, trading information without giving too much away, polishing the quotations attributed to them. For their part, the reporters put themselves, at least imaginatively, in the politicians’ shoes. I want power . . .
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 7.
I never thought I’d be reprising this post from February 2017. Even the dominant color of this 1926 Mussolini cartoon is on point. 🍊
Sometimes I wonder how the former reality television star’s malevolence, laziness, and insatiable hunger for praise would play out in a second term. What would his version of fascism look like? Anne Applebaum’s depiction of Autocracy, Inc. is informative. I also picture competing ideologues, opportunists, and grifters vying for influence and ill-gotten gains.
What I can’t imagine is a coherent mass movement to support whatever the orange one’s authoritarian instincts manifest. But politicized justice, state violence, mob rule in places, unnecessary suffering by lots of people… Yes, that is easy to imagine. Incremental, inconsistent, and arbitrary abuses. Loud curfew notices on phones in areas of mass protest. Piss-poor morale in the military… Ima stop thinking now.
Am thinking Deborah Cohen’s Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) will make for a good read in these dangerous times. 📚
“Autocracy in America” – a podcast by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev
There are authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States. To root them out, you have to know where to look.
This is a fascinating and deeply unsettling listen by the authors of books indispensable for understanding the current moment: Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024); and Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). 📚
Russia Wants to Muzzle Childless Cat Ladies
The Russian parliament is discussing a law to ban so-called “propaganda of childlessness” with fines up to $4,300 for individuals. Will that help to solve the country’s demographic crisis?
“What’s behind Russia’s plan to ban ‘child-free’ ideology?,” DW, Sept. 28, 2024.
It’s almost as if they were pandering to Vance – or drinking from the same batch of Kool-Aid.
Autocracy is a political system, a way of structuring society, a means of organizing power. It is not a genetic trait. Particular cultures, languages, or religions do not necessarily produce it. No nation is condemned forever to autocracy, just as no nation is guaranteed democracy.
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024), chap. 1.
The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, last section.
“Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested." by Jordan Green, Raw Story, July 10, 2024. – Surreal report. The big orange ass attracts the freakiest henchmen.
How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 2, section: “Another Russia”.
Important historical context for this week’s unconscionable immunity ruling: Sean Wilentz, “The Dred Scott of Our Time”, NYRB, July 4, 2024, archive.ph/qJ1xx (archived version so anyone can read about this vital topic)
If the Supreme Court’s rulings are clearly at odds with our history, our constitution, and American jurisprudence, are they even binding? Can’t the other two branches of government check the rogue one? Are there no Republicans still in office with sufficient moral fibre to join this fight?
SCOTUS would do well to remember what revolutions tend to do: they eat their own.
Stunned but not surprised by SCOTUS’s DJT immunity ruling. Do these people really think that breaking the Constitution is going to make any of their “achievements” lasting?
Justitia Again
The following cartoon and comment, which I posted on February 5, 2017, did not age well.
After the latest Spiegel cover and all the news it embodies, this cartoon by Sam Machado feels really good, particularly with its use of gender against the U.S. chauvinist-in-chief.
In case you missed it, this report from July 5, 2022, sums up all the damage: “The U.S. Supreme Court term in review.”
Leadership Failure
. . . As senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who—safely ensconced in the West Wing—was too busy watching fiery television images of the crisis that was unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their cries for help.
“Six Hours of Paralysis" (Washington Post)”
Looking forward to a more productive week in quarantine now that martial law and the end of our democracy appear to be off the table for the time being.
Two Faces of America
To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.
Alex Ross (The New Yorker)
Happening Here
WPA Federal Art Project in New York City, ca. 1936/37. The play was based on a novel about fascism happening here.
Repository: Library of Congress.
American Psycho
Is insidious destruction of our democracy by a bureaucratic samurai with the soothing voice of a boys’ school headmaster even more dangerous than a self-destructive buffoon ripping up our values in plain sight?
– Maureen Dowd, “Who’s the Real American Psycho?," New York Times, November 10, 2018.
Emperor Mussolini
The caption reads, "I've decided to accept God, but he has to become Italian." The German here for "accept," "gelten lassen," could also be translated as "allow."
Source: Simplicissimus, May 3, 1926, http://www.simplicissimus.info.