Crossword — The F-Word
(Thanks to Crosshare for hosting these and other puzzles.)
As mainstream media continue to focus on the 2024 presidential elections, it is important for us to avoid getting too immersed in its traditional horse-race coverage. Handicapping the Republican primary contest may have greater than usual value, insofar as we should be tracking its messages and policy preferences. We definitely want to be mindful of the direction being taken by its voters and activists. The primary horse race matters substantially less among Democrats given that President Biden is running for re-election and faces no substantial challenger. Journalists and commentators don’t really help voters when they obsessively focus on Biden’s age (he’s three years older than Trump) or give the quixotic (if not delusional) candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., any credence whatsoever. Indeed, election observers should instead be focusing on the programmatic achievements and failures of Biden’s current term, as well as on his policy agenda for the next.
None of us should expect any significant improvement in media coverage of politics to happen soon. Indeed, there has been little change in journalistic practice since 2016 when it comes to the treatment given to former President Trump, the MAGA movement, and its fellow-travelers in government and elsewhere. People who follow the news (outside of Fox world, that is) remain subject to a daily diet that serves up Trumpist rants, grievenaces, and accusations with a side order of exploratory visits to Trump’s supporters whom some regard as the “real America.” For far too long, the news agenda has been set by the concerns and complaints of such people. Their vocabularies and vexations so frame political discourse in the United States that the right-wing view of the world has nearly become a hegemonic “common sense” (as Antonio Gramsci understood the term).
Remarkably, though, there are some indications that mainstream commentators on U.S. politics can see beyond the game schema of horse-race election coverage. In opinion columns, magazine pieces, and social media posts of various lengths and thoughtfulness, people who study and ruminate on our political life are beginning to frame the options we face as a country as revolving around a choice between democracy and authoritatrianism—not in the weak sense in which some folks proclaimed that “democracy” was on the ballot in 2020 or 2022, but in a stronger sense in which we should recognize that defeating Trump or Trump-adjacent candidates here and there does not insulate us from the challenges they represent. That movement not only has allies and supporters in the U.S., but it also has found them among reactionary forces all around the world.
The threat these parties and movements pose to representative democracies (which themselves have limitations) was initially understood as a “populism” by political scientists and others. Populism seemed an apt label because the political figures associated with them relied on demagogic rhetoric pitting the pure people against corrupt elites. As Trump campaigned for and eventually won the presidency, the language of populism was challenged by other analytical vocabularies. Political observers tried to understand Trump voters and the MAGA movement in terms of economic distress, status anxiety, and ethnocentrism (racism)—variables that had long been used to analyze the appeal of the radical right.
Another concept scholars and journalists employed to understand MAGA was that of “authoritarianism”—a concept that emphasized the personalistic style of Trump and the concomitant insistence that he knew best, that he was the “decider,” that only he could “fix” whatever was wrong with American politics and society. The authoritarian rhetorical and managerial style characteristic of the world’s most notorious “strongmen” certainly suited the titular CEO of a privately held corporation, one built around a larger-than-life, brand-name personality. Moreover, scholars also found authoritarian psychologies among Trump’s supporters in the electorate who exhibited personality traits associated with values and practices like discipline, loyalty, and order.
Further, there were a few scholars who wrote as early as 2015 about Trump and Trumpism as reminiscent of generic fascism (the interwar movements of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, among other related tendencies). They found eerie parallels between Trump’s words and deeds—e.g., his criticisms of politicians and the media, his attacks on conspicuous minority populations, his embrace of conspiratorial thinking and violent rhetoric—and those of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. For most mainstream observers, however, “fascism” was too strong a label, too combative a tag to affix to Trump and his hardcore supporters. No one wanted to overreact or to mis-apply the term. Even the idea that some of Trump supporters (the so-called “basket of deplorables”) clearly held unsavory views found few takers and was met with derision. A similar response emerged last year when Biden labeled MAGA Republicans as a movement of “semi-fascism.” Because the Trump era does not look exactly like the newsreels and movies that have shaped our image of mid-twentieth century Europe, using the F-word to characterize the contemporary period has seemed overwrought for some time now.
As someone who has studied political ideologies throughout a long career, my thought is that “fascism” is an apt descriptor of the Trumpist milieu today. Even if its applicability was debatable in prior years (I could and did argue both sides of that question), I now have little doubt about its appropriateness. How so?
Though we may not see the streetfighting blackshirts and brownshirts of the past, we have seen a variety of paramilitary groups affix themselves to Trump and proclaim their willingness to fight on his behalf. We cannot ignore that MAGA-adjacent militias have been preparing for (if not seeking to foment) an apocalyptic civil war, while some of the most visible groups marched in Charlottesville in 2017 or stormed the Capitol Building in 2021.
News accounts from a variety of sources have revealed an exceeding interest in centralizing power in the White House. Despite Trump’s repeated complaints about a bureaucratic “swamp” or so-called “deep state,” the aims he and his supporters have expressed make it clear that the goal is not to eliminate it or make it operate in the open. Instead, the goal is make it more responsive to the political whims of the president—so long as that president is a Republican cast in the MAGA mold. Rather than reducing the number of political appointees, the aim is to reinstate “Schedule F”—an executive order that aims to make most every civil servant fireable by the president.
Republican complaints about the reputed “weaponization” of the FBI, the IRS, and other agencies would be more credible if there were evidence it was happening as they claim. Those complaints might even be laudable if the proposed remedies were to bring greater scrutiny of the operations of all agencies of government, including the Supreme Court and the Congress. Greater scrutiny and limiting power is not really the point, though, because these allegations of “weaponization” are designed to delegitimize government as “political” (that is, partisan) only when it is led by Democratic officeholders. If the public comes to think that all government is partisan and corrupt, albeit in some covert or conspiratorial way, then they may well accept a more overtly partisan and corrupt effort by Trumpist Republicans to get revenge on their ideological enemies.
Problematic political and legal doctrines have been advanced to support this kind of centralization of power. Among them are the “unitary executive theory” which argues that Congress cannot limit the power of the presidency, and the “independent state legislature” theory which argues that state legislatures are the preeminent decision maker when it comes to election laws and practices. Although the current Supreme Court has not wholly accepted the former, and has recently rejected the latter, there is no guarantee that the theories will not be resuscitated in the future—particularly if Trump were to regain the presidency.
Our MAGA moment is properly seen as fascist partly because its aim is to centralize the exercise of power. Power in Congress became highly partisan and centralized from the Gingrich revolution of the 1990s onward—a fact which has made it difficult to address important national problems, let alone conduct ordinary legislative business. State legislatures controlled by Republicans have taken power away from offices and institutions whenever Democrats come to occupy them. Governors of a Trumpist bent have been using the National Guard not merely to provide disaster relief or restore public order in an emergency, but to achieve particular policy objectives on matters such as immigration.
Beyond an aim to centralize power in the hands of true believers, the only people deemed legitimate enough to hold it, Trump’s movement is also bent on revenge and retribution for a variety of longstanding grievances. Certainly, Trump himself is grievance personified—an account of his public life seems like endless saga of efforts to get even for perceived slights. His psychology, however, mirrors the concerns and complaints of a significant number of people who feel aggrieved at a loss of status and control, who are angry about a culture that they believe disrespects them, and who worry that the country’s structures and dynamics portend a world they do not wish to inhabit. As Robert O. Paxton put it, fascist movements and ideologies are often characterized by such an “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity."
In recent years, scholars have developed a consensus about the nature of fascism that goes beyond the unique circumstances that led to its emergence in the early twentieth century. What marks generic fascism, notes Roger Griffin, is a combination of ultra-nationalism and a myth of rebirth. We see both of these features at work in contemporary American politics. Ultra-nationalism has emerged not only in the MAGA discourse that values “patriots” and the “spirt of 1776,” but also in policy debates concerning educational curricula, gender identity, immigration and citizenship, and many other controversies. The myth of rebirth is present, of course, in the very idea of a movement aiming to “Make America Great Again,” but it also underlies the sense of victimization and desire for retribution that any number of conservative Christians and small-town residents articulate time and again.
Shane Burley, another analyst worth reading, notes that what distinguishes contemporary fascism is that it is focused on metapolitics, on cultural hegemony, rather than on more explicitly political efforts like elections, lobbying, and the like. What I have tried to signal above is that the fascism we see today is operating simultaneously in both dimensions of political action, dimensions that are fundamentally intertwined and interconnected. Awareness of fascism’s goals and methods is but the first step toward building and using the countervailing power that is necessary to oppose and end it.
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