Fashion-forward fascism
Euphemisms, misnomers, & obfuscations are dumb & dangerous. Use the right word.
1.
First of all, please stop calling them conservatives. You know this. This has been explained to you many times. I’m regurgitating an unoriginal thought here because I also can fall prey to binary thinking and inapplicable terms when feeling defensive. Ignore what centrist media outlets still call them out of, what? Misplaced politeness, appalling ignorance of history, or moral equivocation, because whatever actual values they have had (or not) as private citizens, they are intellectually enslaved to electoral horserace nonsense and addicted to the adrenaline rush of shallow conflict. Let us not worry too much about why. Let us stick to the humble, old-fashioned notion that specific words have specific meanings you can discern from their etymologies. Let us remember that conservatives used to be about conserving things. (Heck, sometimes even about conservation, e.g. Nixon’s environmental laws.) Not always the morally right things, but at least there was a traceable connection between the ideology and its label.
Quick digression: I’m thinking back with horror on a moment when Steve Bannon got into a green-room argument with a liberal writer (I’m forgetting which one, sorry!) just before both were about to spar publicly on a live cable news show built for exactly the shallow horseshit-racing thing. The liberal writer was backstage challenging Bannon on the basis of actual ideas and values when Bannon stopped short and said, with a laugh and a look of shock on his ever-crumbling face, something like Oh, wow, you actually believe this stuff? Just like Trump, Bannon is a fraudster with no actual values, a method actor getting paid almost as well as the Hollywood celebs he once dreamed of producing screenplays for. Rush Limbaugh was the same type. None of these people should ever be called conservative. I know it can be hard, just as hard as avoiding saying “between you and I” even if you know it’s grammatically incorrect and can explain why. It slips out of your mouth involuntarily because we’re profoundly social creatures and everybody else is saying it all the time.
David Frum and Anne Applebaum are influential anti-Trumpers who remain conservatives in the credible sense of wanting to limit government programs and preserve the status quo. Listen up but don’t fall in love if they’re fundamentally not your type. Historian and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich is a self-described Catholic conservative, and a thinker liberals can respect as the intellectual heir of famously disgruntled General Smedley Butler, who after 33 years in military service emerged clear-eyed to confirm that “war is a racket.” I have no idea how Bacevich feels about trans people or insurance coverage of contraception for employees of Catholic-run businesses, and I do not care. Humans contain multitudes, and he is not a legislator or a member of the judiciary. Leave ideological purity tests to authoritarian minds. Meanwhile, Bacevich’s books are indispensable reading on the topics of 20th-century military history, international diplomacy (or lack thereof), and a responsible end to our use of force to prop up global corporations and the rapacious rich.
There are others still calling themselves conservative for coherent reasons and most have left the GOP. Or at the very least they have come to support pro-democracy conservative efforts like The Lincoln Project—proverbial strange bedfellows for liberals/progressives but you wouldn’t want to marry them. (Make a casual mental health assessment of George Conway and his wife and most famous daughter if you need reminding.) These are not the droids you are looking for.
Friedrich Hayek, a darling of self-styled libertarians with better reading skills than your average Ayn Rand fan, came right out and explained it in “Why I Am Not A Conservative,” a chapter of his under-read economic treatise called THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY. Humans contain multitudes, and intellectuals of good conscience don’t track with popular media binaries.
2.
Original fascism, as developed and enacted by Benito Mussolini and his supporters in the Italian intelligentsia, military, and business communities, successfully conjoined the merger of corporate and state power with Italian nationalism/superiority, anti-individualism, and a generous heaping of pro-Catholic theocracy to boot. (Accidental geographic pun, sorry.) Racism/ethnic bigotry, misogyny, and anti-Semitism were in the stew as well, of course.
It is in no way an exaggeration or an expression of hysteria to call the Trump movement, its cultural offshoots, and the current GOP leadership all fascists. Fascism is their stated goal, even while they use the word freedom as a pointed mislabeling. Fascism is the accurate term for the movement in an overt way now, and it’s been accurate in a less obvious way since the days of Nixon’s racist calling-in (the “Southern strategy”), since Reagan’s open invitation to the “church” to, um, tear down the wall of the state, since the continual rear-guard actions of polite upper-class white supremacists to destroy LBJ’s Civil Rights legislation, and since the nonstop effort by members of both “business-friendly” parties to remove all post-Depression safety rails meant to keep robber barons and wealthy dynastic families from ever ascending in the USA again. (Oops and oh well.)
Please know that you don’t need to scream the word fascism as an epithet in front of your clueless Boomer parents or a histrionic rallying cry at a protest. You can say it calmly and with historical authority at your next cocktail party. Friends and family may blanch, grimace, laugh, or roll their eyes, but don’t let that throw you. The word is not a cuss or an insult. It describes a political choice in the way “Coke or Pepsi” describes a beverage choice. People who support today’s GOP are voting (and/or committing political violence) for the simple reason that fascism has been encroaching but a bit covert for 50 years, and they would prefer it overt and official. This isn’t a fairy tale about last century’s ogres bearing spooky names in high school history texts. It’s just real life, accurately described. Ask any liberal Italians you happen to know.
3.
By the way, in case you’ve forgotten, we’ve had fascism in this country before. The slaveholding South included kleptocratic dynastic families, state-supported terrorism against residents, the creation of anti-black ideology, the sanctification of such ideology via the church, patriarchal proscriptions for women, and not a small dose of anti-Semitism on the side. Check, check, check etc.
4.
Don’t be afraid of words. Be afraid of the consequences if we keep letting misplaced politeness, historical ignorance, and moral equivocation keep us from using words to describe reality.
Side note: Americans need to get over this idea that we stand outside of world history. This is the deep meaning of “exceptionalism.” It’s not simply that we think we’re better than all other nations, but also that we believe we’re utterly incomparable, in a class by ourselves, untouched by the same dialectical forces and mass psychological movements that are constantly sweeping the globe. This grand self-delusion—begun at the beginning with John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon upon the founding of Boston—got a boost when we became the apparent last country standing after World War II, and another boost when Reagan revived the “city on the hill” concept for his campaign. Presidents of all political orientations since then have repeated this theocratic vision of the USA’s fundamental moral goodness and divine specialness. I think we all might suffer on a somatic level from this ’Murca-mania, even when we’ve been taught to know better. We are trauma-bonded with our nation. It shows in the way we cling to immature and shallow niceties to avoid understanding a very well-studied historical process that just happens to be happening right in front of our faces.
Use the right words to describe things. Fascism is again in fashion around the globe. Call it by its name. Like Harry Potter, just say Voldemort out loud. Call fascism fascism, just like we should call danger danger and death death. Please stop letting authoritarians and their too-polite media mouthpieces and their value-free propagandists confuse matters.
Do it at Thanksgiving. Between your first and second servings of mashed potatoes, just say it out loud, especially if Republicans regain legislative power in the upcoming midterms.
You know, I’m really rather miffed that the fascists are winning again. I’m not at all fond of fascism as a political ideology, but apparently, many of our fellow citizens are, isn’t that remarkable? I wonder what they like best about fascism, the elevation of church practices to national laws, the expanding police-state aspects, the handing over of all power to the heads of corporations and a handful of billionaires? Say, Uncle Bob, you probably voted Republican right down the ballot—so what’s your favorite thing about fascism?
Explain your terms calmly. Follow it up with football talk or something. You’ll be fine, I think. Words are words. Okay maybe don’t do any of that if it will make you unsafe or cause your family to abandon you. Just realize you might have no choice one day.
5.
But wait, there’s Moore!
Michael Moore, I mean. His new Substack series goes point by point through his informed opinion that liberals will sweep the midterms and our worries of a fascist takeover will be stalled. I bring the world-historical pessimism and the glib, my special gifts. But maybe let a little Michael Moore into your life to counteract me. I’m going to try this on myself.
###