The Most Irresponsible and Reckless Aspirants

Fascist violence comes home wearing a familiar expression.

Americans have, in the post-war era, been both too quick and too slow to warn about the incipient rise of fascism on our native soil. Too quick, because there is a knee-jerk tendency among leftists (who are fascism’s primary targets) and liberals (who are fascism’s primary enablers) to apply the term to anyone with whom they have political disagreement, and too slow, because Americans believe themselves to be somehow inherently anti-fascist and incapable of understanding how precarious our distance is from what is, in Henry Wallace’s words, “capitalism plus murder”.  Fascism has all sorts of characteristics and contexts by which it must be understood, and many of them are difficult or even contradictory; as good as we are at both capitalism and murder, we are even better at ignoring complexities and misunderstanding history.  But if it is safe to say one thing, it is that if you find yourself living under fascism, you will know, and there will be nothing ambiguous about it.

Still, the fact that we are not there yet does not mean that we should pretend the warning signs are anything but that. The escalation in recent months of police violence in response to, well, the escalation in recent months of police violence shouldn’t be read as anything but a dress rehearsal for when the people in charge start to treat seriously the idea that the citizens of America are a threat that should be treated like insurgents in any of the other countries we have destabilized and destroyed. Other fascist triggers are practically part of the American tapestry:  racialized nationalism, exceptionalism as an excuse for denying the universality of human rights, government working hand in glove with capital against labor, and a fear and loathing of a nebulously defined effete urban decadence. Some, though, seem antithetical to the American character: a disdain for individualism, for example, and an embrace of a powerful groupthink devoted to a specifically statist, albeit highly tribalized and undemocratic, authoritarianism.

Robert Paxton, still the most cogent thinker about fascism this country has yet produced, reconciled most of these contradictions nicely in two ways:  by pointing out that fascisms vary depending on many malleable factors based on the place and time from which they emerge, and by noting that because the ultimate aim of fascism is a constant violent struggle through action to exercise power, there is always a gulf between the ‘ideology’ of fascism (in fact, it has none, or at least none that cannot be easily discarded when necessary) and its practice. This tends to confuse both the simple-minded. who mistake Nazism for a socialist project simply because they had the word in their name, and the too smart for their own good, who tend to reflect a view of fascism as a series of more or less aesthetic expressions. It is from this latter view that we make categorical mistakes like thinking fascism is inherently anti-intellectual (certainly not the case in most of the major mid-20th-century fascisms, who delighted in their self-perceived intellectual prowess), or closely tied to religion (Paxton correctly points out that Spanish fascism was highly religious, as is its various American manifestations, but that Nazism was fairly standoffish about religion and Italian fascism openly opposed it).

Fascism in America has always been present; its most obvious example was that of the Ku Klux Klan.  It is certainly on the rise now, even if we have not yet made the transition from soft authoritarianism, and as the liberal party establishment proves itself ever more incapable of effective governance and the conservative party openly excuses militance and corruption, the ground will become ever softer.  Our largely unquestioning embrace of austerity and our tolerance of brutal inequality will further smooth the path.  But if it comes—or when it comes—it will not come in the predictable flavors we have sampled in decades past, or in popular entertainment.  The Klan will continue to be its ideal:  comprised of brave citizen soldiers driven to vigilantism by the ‘excesses’ of disenfranchised blacks and their white enablers. But it will bear other imprints:  marketing and advertising, as part of an overall capitalist ‘branding’; a strong Judeo-Christian element; a valorization of police and soldiers coupled with a general disdain for their effectiveness; and the willing compliance of the press under the guise of neutrality. It will retain strong elements of masculinism, but I do not think it will be as blatantly misogynist as the fascisms of the past, because there are far too many women in positions of authority willing to climb the heap of bones it will build. 

One thing is for certain, though: an important rubicon was crossed this week, when a 17-year-old wannabe cop named Kyle Rittenhouse took to the streets during a mass protest against the inexcusable police violence against a black man named Jacob Blake.  Blake, an unarmed man, was shot seven times in the back by police after breaking up a fight; as so often happens, the entire thing was filmed by passers-by and revealed the nauseating viciousness of law enforcement. Of course, nothing was done by the local authorities beyond offering meaningless platitudes, and people took to the streets; so, too, did a number of local white “militiamen”, an altogether precious term applied to gangs of armed racist hoodlums ready to spit death in defense of laundromats and street signs. Because the only thing separating them from these white nationalist thugs is the protection of their badges and police unions, the cops did nothing to disperse them, choosing instead to concoct ways of punishing the protestors. The end result of all this was that Rittenhouse, a direct descendent of the squadristi and the freikorps, shot three people and killed two of them.

It is absolutely crucial to understanding the present moment that we do not think anyone—the capitalist press, the politicians of either party, the fascist sympathizers already looking to excuse a double homicide, or the police themselves—can be persuaded into changing their minds about justifying Rittenhouse’s unjustifiable crime through anything like argument, reason, or fact. Rittenhouse is already being branded a heroic figure acting in self-defense, and if he had died in the process of gunning down peaceful civilians, he would become a new Horst Wessel.  Just as certainly, Blake is already being branded a criminal, a degenerate, and a lowlife who is responsible for his own shooting, and if he dies, he will become, to the same cohort, a new Marinus Van Der Lubbe.

It should be no surprise that these myths—for they are myths in the purest sense of being imaginary stories that motivate the cultural unity of a people, as exclusive to their story as their own lives—are already being made and that no degree of fact-checking will mar their beauty. It is already being claimed that Jacob Blake had a knife in his car; does it matter to anyone solemnly nodding their head in assent that this made him a dangerous criminal (even if it were true, which it almost certainly is not) that it is not a crime to have a knife in one’s car, or that it is not a crime to have a knife on one’s person, or that it is unlikely to the point of fantasy that he intended to stab the half-dozen armed and armored cops who surrounded him, or that even if it were a crime for someone to have a knife, it is not a crime punishable by immediate execution in the street without trial?  On the other side of the coin, it is also being claimed that Kyle Rittenhouse was in fear for his life, as if anyone made him leave his house that night; as if he were not literally armed for confrontation; as if he were not more of a present and immediate threat than any of the people he shot; as if an empty Coke bottle is a Molotov cocktail, as if a skateboard is a deadly threat, as if anyone may commit murder on the basis of being scared.

Hannah Arendt reminded us that the propaganda of totalitarian leaders is “marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.” While there is no doubt that Donald Trump is an especial dullard, and that his cronies and enablers are craven heels forever on the take, they at least have understood this truth that likewise did not elude Arendt or Orwell or generations of communists, but seems to have eluded the understanding of liberals:  truth, facts, right, and law do not exist on some abstract plane from which they cannot be ruffled by the base and venal opinions of corruptible men.  They belong to the person with the power to enforce their reality. Donald Trump is not running roughshod over the concept of civility and the rule of law because he is some unprecedented manifestation of evil never before seen on the American stage; he is doing it because those who oppose him lack the vision, the will, and the power to stop him, and they prefer to rely on the feeble strength of the norms he has repeatedly trampled. They have failed to understand that it is action that gives fascists their power, and that it is action and only action that can take that power away.

Another eternal truth about fascists is that you cannot vote them out of power. And with every move made by liberals to placate and normalize the behavior of fascists and their sympathizers, with every Democratic mayor who stands up for their police force when they commit acts of horrifying violence against the people, with every Democratic governor who signs off on a fleet of armored vehicles for a small town with a low crime rate somewhere in their state, with every ‘progressive’ politician who thinks they can forestall the inevitable by shaking hands on a deal to increase military budgets, fund more state surveillance, and put more money in the pockets of cops, the day draws nearer when they will no longer be able to control the monster they helped create.  Already the writing is on the wall for those willing to read it. In my home city of Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot ran as a progressive liberal—not on the strength of any policy position, but simply by dint of being a queer woman of color—has spent much of her term completely caving to the legendarily corrupt and violent police force, going so far as to barricade her own home with ranks of cops she has given the authority to set laws about who may go where and when and raising the bridges to downtown to seal off protesters like a medieval castle raising its drawbridge; in Kenosha, the police chief has suggested that no deaths would have occurred if all the protestors had just stayed home.  This is particularly egregious victim-blaming, as it is much more to the point that no deaths would have occurred if the murderer had just stayed home, but this is the very sophistry the bosses want to draw you into, to throw flak into the clear blue sky of an obvious act of white supremacist violence by a member of a right-wing vigilante mob.

It should be crystal clear that the endgame of all of this is to declare that it is the police, and not the people, who make the laws as well as enforce them.  It is to establish as beyond dispute that not only do the police have the right—indeed, the obligation—to perform executions on anyone they feel is disobeying those laws, without the benefit of counsel or trial.  It is to determine once and for all that civilians have the right—indeed, the responsibility—to arm themselves and carry out vigilante murder against anyone they judge to be on the other side of whatever lunatic mission they are on. And as long as politicians, the media, and people in positions of authority, who have the capacity to challenge or change this narrative, instead choose to engage in apology, obfuscation, and mealy-mouthed both-sidesery, nothing about that will change; it will only get worse, bloodier, bleaker. You cannot appeal to a fascist’s principles, because they have none.  There is only one way to resist:  disengage from this futile discourse and save your energy trying to convince those who murder in their dreams to stop defending those who murder in reality.  Turn that energy towards solidarity, unity, and total resistance.  Strike at the workplace, fight in the streets, organize in your homes.  This is what we mean by socialism or barbarism.  We know how the fascist movie ends; let’s shut off the projector before it begins.