Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

he seems to be ok with democracy

imo Trump does not actually have a coherent ideology (whereas most memorable fascists adhered very closely to the ideology in which they explicitly believed, the ideology of fascism), but I'd be comfortable classifying him as a berzerker fascist because he says shit that's right in line with fascist governance -- national registry of Muslims, closing mosques, his obsession with national strength & power -- not security and robust health, but "beat the other guy" strength. so, in the imaginary world where he gets elected, he might well govern like a fascist, and he's certainly said plenty of fascist things.

but he probably couldn't, himself, provide any definition whatsoever of fascism. a fascist, however wrongheadedly, believes he is doing good for his nation. Trump's pathology is messier.

OTOH it's really fine to call him a fascist because calling assholes fascists is a time-honored tradition and we're not all fedora-sporting EXCUSE ME THAT'S NOT WHAT THE WORD MEANS bores

boomin' post

was Mussolini an asshole though?

Guessing this has already been linked elsewhere: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism

Donald Trump has been endorsed by Stormfront's Don Black and by David Duke.

I'd be more concerned with Trump's supporters, who seem comfortable with fascist ideas and who would benefit from fascist policies.

Not that I think we are in danger of a fascist government, but the "Patriot" movement is fascist.

i like the distinction made in that vox article. for example there are numerous problematic governments + parties that don't deserve the fascist label like apartheid south africa which was a repressive, draconian, racist regime, but not really a fascist one. ppl calling their political opponents (on either side of the aisle) fascists has a long history but it kinda flattens the meaning of things. is trump a risk for inflaming racist violence? yes. would POTUS trump be a risk for shutting down the other 2 branches of govt and concentrating all State power into his hands? i don't think so, and there's no indication that's his plan. by contrast, hitler in 1923 was already trying to coup the government (which is to say that despite his later participation in the democratic german process his intentions to disassemble said democracy was present from the very beginning. even Stormfront racists are not necessarily fascist - bc if the word is to mean anything besides "political/ideological pov with whom i disagree" it needs to mean a particular political program. said program might include horrific racism, but that's not the trademark. also it's not like the left has a monopoly on misusing the term cf jonah goldberg's "liberal fascism" book.

thank u for starting this thread, mr. loves chachi.

also in a more general sense i'm v wary of flattening / histrionic language. it seems like inflammatory accusations (in various political arenas) are designed to inflame the passions of yr ideological cohorts more than make a sensible argument. but surely if trump deserves to be shunned + marginalized it's not bc he maybe fits some of the definitions of the word 'fascism,' but bc he has done and said actually terrible things. why add the extra step? a. trump said disgusting racist thing. b. we should shun him for that. why do we need to squeeze "therefore he's a fascist," in between? iirc slatestarcodex has written about how categorical language is used to collapse distinctions in the listeners' mind. really the use of fascism as a term of condemnation is a syllogism - x is a fascist; fascism is wrong (why? bc fascist european govts did disgusting things); therefore X is wrong. but if X is wrong on its own merits then it's unnecessary to compare X to Hitler or whomever is the stand-in in this argument for "we all agree he is evil and therefore anyone like him is also evil."

not a fascist. a poster child for why we need steep inheritance, income, and capital gains taxes. smug incurious privileged bullies like DT have way too much sway in our neo-feudal system

if anything the kind of robber baron demagoguery that Trump specializes is more unappealing than Fascism but i like the distinction because broadly speaking Fascists are team players (assuming you're on their team) where is Trump is a piggy-eyed leech who doesn't give a fuck about anything beyond his own gratification. even his Team America shtick is half a front and half his own wet dreams

also he's absolutely a product of American capitalism not a reaction against it

i'd be fine if a bunch of major media outlets wanted to run with the idea that trump is a fascist. who cares, nothing is sacred in that arena anyway. i got over the fact that obama was a 'socialist.' by the time the 'real fascists' arrive it's probably not going to matter much what we call them anyway

something that came up on the other thread is whether his desire to ban muslims (non-citizens?) from entering the US, and deporting 10 million undocumented immigrants, is an example of the obsession fascism has with cleansing but i'm not even sure if that's true. sure you could describe it as a cleansing but i don't think that trump thinks that mexicans or muslims are an inherent evil (and certainly not in the way Hitler felt about Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc). like this distinction is very subtle but he wants to keep muslims out of the country bc of worldwide islamic radicalism and he wants to deport 10 million undocumented immigrants bc they broke the law being in this country. both of those decisions are toxic and their implementation would lead to horrific violations of human rights. but both of those motivations are within the realm of rationality - there is radical islam in the world and there are a number of undocumented immigrants in this country. his solution to those problems is terrible but they are real problems. by contrast when we talk about fascist cleansing i think we mean an attempt to cleanse the population of the Other entirely - which is a motivation buried in a kind of irrational mythological understanding of the nation as a particular volk. in fact on a number of occasions i've seen trump say things like i love mexicans some of my favorite people are mexicans, whereas it wouldn't make sense for hitler to have been like no i like the jews i just think we need to figure out what to do w/ them until we have a solution to jewish terrorism. they were inherently a blemish on the unified nation by din of their coincidence of birth (which is why the racial laws were necessary), not bc of any kind of rational political motivation.

if anything the kind of robber baron demagoguery that Trump specializes is more unappealing than Fascism but i like the distinction because broadly speaking Fascists are team players (assuming you're on their team) where is Trump is a piggy-eyed leech who doesn't give a fuck about anything beyond his own gratification.

There was an interesting piece by Ollie Carroll, i think, this week suggesting that there are only two genuinely political parties in Ukraine at the moment - Fascist and Communist. Everyone else, including the whole of the mainstream, is a front for robber barons. Trump is not a fascist or 'genuinely political' in any meaningful sense but arguably one of the main dangers he poses is that blurring the lines of what passes for acceptable political discourse without actually proposing anything to address the economic and social grievances his supporters have is going to make irl fascism more attractive in the long run.

I think Trump's impulses re: Muslims and "Mexicans" are very much in line with fascist and other far right totalitarian regimes. Worth keeping in mind that Nazism didn't explicitly advocate ethnic cleansing as part of their platform (which is not to say that Hitler didn't believe that they should all be murdered as early as 1920) but were much initially focused on expulsion of non-Germans.

I gotta say I'm really confused by the "well he's not trying to dismantle democracy" line. I mean, if *you* decided to enact my tinfoil hat scenario from the primary thread, would you actually mention any antidemocratic intentions at this point?

Idk, maybe the term isn't fascist, but I feel like some form of widespread labeling needs to be done in order to differentiate him and whoever picks up his banner in four years as a different animal from the usual "Jesus told me to cut taxes" people, especially in the minds of people who, unlike me, are clever enough not to be wasting hours of their days every day following this bullshit. As scary as those guys can be, their gameplan doesn't trend towards the same kind of existential threat that makes an f-word-style regime so brutal and hard to reverse.

That said, I'm completely open to the idea that I just grew up post-Reagan and thus consider the actually-far-more-dangerous religious right to simply be a part of the scenery but am scared by the new shiny bad thing because it's new and shiny (to my personal experience, I mean, obviously this shit ain't new).

xp there's nothing in trump's presentation of history that suggests the kind of mythological cleansing of the other that hitler was obsessed w/. it's not like hitler got into power and then decided to get rid of all the jews. he was talking about jewish conspiracies and the stab-in-the-back myth very early on. it's all over mein kampf.

Indeed, in Mein Kampf, written in the early 1920s, Hitler explicitly linked the imagined deceit of the Jews in the First World War with the need for their destruction, saying that the ‘sacrifice of millions at the front’ would have been prevented if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas.’ii

moreover if you take his distinctions seriously he wants to get rid of undocumented immigrants (not American citizens of Mexican extract) and apparently backtracked on not allowing muslim American citizens into the united states. that's def not the totalizing of identity that fascism specializes in. the german people were germans, not jews or gypsies. ditto the italian people. but trump's American people includes Mexicans and Muslims. it's just the non-American Mexicans and Muslims he doesn't want and that isn't a concern exclusive to fascism unless you believe that all anti-immigrant sentiment is inherently fascistic but i see no reason to make that claim.

Nazism is hardly an ideology at all beyond the struggle of races and the anti-semitism at the heart of that, it's not only not incidental to Hitler's politics but his theoretical politics never went very far beyond it

Nazism isn't Fascism tbf

Right but Nazism also /= Fascism either, that's why it's a subset of it. I'd say Trump started demonizing immigrants and Muslims pretty much from the get go too. If your argument is "but he didn't doesn't say he want to kill them all so it's not fascism" then I think basically nothing that's Nazism will ever be Fascism to you.

I'm not saying that he's not a fascist because he didn't say he wants to kill them all. I'm saying that he is distinguishing within Mexican and Muslim groups which suggests a less than totalizing vision of peoplehood and Otherness.

Racial "cleansing" isn't necessarily inherent in fascism. The idea of rebirth is arguably more important. Racial "cleansing" is often the result of that impulse though.

If you wanted to make the case that Trump was a fascist, there's quite a lot of crossover between his movement and the palingenesis that is one of the core building blocks of fascism. There's nothing beyond the surface though.

think people shd draw some lines between "policies Trump really gives a shit about", "things Trump will say because he thinks it might get him elected", "things Trump will say because he enjoys playing the asshole character 'Donald Trump'" and "things Trump would actually be allowed to do by all the other power-holders in the US in the hugely unlikely event he became President?" because i think this stuff all makes a difference to how seriously you dissect his opinions/try to label him

altho to quote JCLC calling assholes fascists is a time-honored tradition

so i'm not sure that "make america great again" is an example of fascistic rebirth. not least because what president has not campaigned on some level under the banner of making american great again? isn't every non-incumbant campaign pretty much a "change" campaign? and he isn't really speaking to a rebirth of a white identity - even tho some supremacists have heard things that resonate for them. has he really talked at all about whiteness and white consciousness (both staples of supremacist movements)?

do we reveal anything new/useful about the world by calling him a fascist, or do we just enjoy having the opportunity to use the word?

everyone itt probably knows both the strict and loose definitions of the word fascist and understands donald trumps' political views and place vis-a-vis the republican party. there are aspects of his appeal that call back to strongman fascist leaders, but not so long ago we had a cowboy president who had a 90% approval rating and who said stuff like 'you're either with us or against us'. even though that guy was less openly racist I'm not sure the situation was less 'fascist'.

trump appeals to the white-identity nationalist reactionaries who form the base of the republican party. this group existed before donald trump and they'll exist after him, he just found himself w/ a bulworth-esque situation where he can say whatever he wants (so exactly what they want to hear rather than mostly what they want to hear) as he's not tied to any political donors or a political career.

geez I go tot sleep for a few hours

xxp It's not racial identity he's talking about, it's national identity. Pinochet was arguably not much more racist than a lot of other Latin American leaders.

Trump's palingenetic appeal - one great leader will return a faded and corrupt nation to its former glory by sweeping away the old order of both political stripes and giving birth to the new forged in his own image - is outside of the scope of yr standard politician who'll "make x great again" but i don't think he really believes it or would know what to do with the power given the opportunity.

"one great leader will return a faded and corrupt nation to its former glory by sweeping away the old order of both political stripes and giving birth to the new forged in his own image" i'm not going to say it's impossible to squint and see this as trump but i think it's a bit of a stretch. he's running as a republican, he says he likes a lot of the other candidates, he has agreed not to run as an independent, he's deeply indebted to the current system, he talks about america "winning again" but not as a rebirth or awakening. i think he's much closer to a candidate claiming to make america great again than a fascistic leader.

he has agreed not to run as an independent,

oh come on

you're penchant for giving him the benefit of the doubt is truly baffling

your egh it's early for me

i'm not giving him any benefit of the doubt, i'm just looking at what he has said and how he has presented himself. if we're talking about his true motivations i think there's a slam-dunk case that he's a berlusconi-style buffoon who doesn't believe or give a shit about any of this. if we're going to talk about him as a fascist it needs to be on the level of his political presentation and reception.

I'd argue he's not running as a Republican. He's running for the Republican nomination as Donald Trump. Either way, he's not really a fascist though i wouldn't discount the idea that there's a crossover between traditional fascism and some elements of his support base who wouldn't self-identify as such.

in the last debate they asked him (and then after the debate he was asked 2-3 more times in interviews) about whether he'd run as an independent and he said (not exact quote) that he has grown to respect the other candidates and he feels a part of the republican party and so no he has decided he won't run as an independent and he just hopes the republican party treats him fairly at the convention. he also kept emphasizing that in some polls he beats hillary bc i think he has moved onto making the case to the party that he is a bet they should take.

if we're talking about his true motivations i think there's a slam-dunk case that he's a berlusconi-style buffoon who doesn't believe or give a shit about any of this.

otm

he's made it abundantly clear his "commitment" to the Republican Party is conditional on how he's "treated" - he doesn't give a shit about the party.

he's using the party, he has no allegiance to it

i think he's going to try and start his own news network tbh

Actually Donald Trump isn't a fascist, he is a dumb whiny man-baby with freedom fries where his testicles should be

anyway I agree w what Alex in SF and JCLC have said so far and stand by what I said on the og campaign thread: there's enough overlap between the positions and statements Trump has made and traditionally fascist ideologies to merit the use of the term imo. I think it's strange and inaccurate to act like his racism and eagerness to exploit racism in his base are situational responses to particular conditions - there is no "problem" with undocumented immigrants or Muslims in the sense that Trump and his base think it is (that they're "taking American jobs", depressing wages, destroying American culture, pose a security threat, etc.), those are all window-dressing manifestations of deep-seated racism rooted in the sense that the volk (white + Christian) of America feel threatened. That his statements don't mirror or match the extent of Hitler's views is irrelevant, it's the appeal to the violation of "true" Americans, to the sense of aggrieved identity, that is fascist.

xp

since we've got this thread and part of the title is "what is fascism," let me ask a question i asked facebook yesterday:

In 1944 George Orwell wrote in "What is Fascism?":

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make.

Here's the link for full context: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

do we reveal anything new/useful about the world by calling him a fascist, or do we just enjoy having the opportunity to use the word?

back to iatee's point, beyond our potential (ab)use of the term in our little backwater of the internet, to the limited extent that the press/media has any impact on the polity's grasp of the candidates I think it's useful for major media outlets to be comfortable applying the term to Chump, it could be useful in solidifying opposition to him and making the views he espouses less acceptable in the general discourse. I think the degree to which we can limit the general acceptability of hateful demagoguery with potentially violent consequences is an important end-goal in itself.

xp

What do you suppose are the admissions Orwell thinks Fascists, Conservatives and Socialists are unwilling to make?

I would assume he means they don't want to admit how much alike they can be

i don't know why you think in a political context saturated with accusations of fascism applied to all sorts of disparate figures, ideas + parties calling trump a fascist would be anything but another trump in that bucket

guys this is all just pre-opening hype for his DC hotel

https://www.trumphotelcollection.com/washington-dc/

mainstream media has always been p hesitant to apply the label (justifiably so), Trump campaign is the first time I've seen the term used in places like the Washington Post, for ex. Trump is different.

xp

I would assume he means they don't want to admit how much alike they can be

In politics the name of the game is gaining and maintaining broad popular support. This is as true of monarchies and oligarchies as of democracies. So it is not surprising that the tactics and strategies used by practitioners of the art, as opposed to the nostrums of political theorists and philosophers, will align in many basic ways. For example, scapegoating is universal and propaganda is indispensable. Machiavelli's advice is evergreen.

I'd say the features that distinguish fascism are more of degree and of emphasis than of kind. Stalinism and Nazism manipulated very different narratives and mythologies to enlist popular support, but their overall practical strategies were extremely similar and have been widely mimicked worldwide. In turn, those strategies were derived from long standing principles used by monarchies since forever.

Trump is piecing together a set of narratives and mythologies that would be very adaptable to establishing an extra-constitutional regime based on the presumed need to secure the nation from the dire threats posed by a set of easily-scapegoated outsiders, Mexicans and Muslims in this instance. He also casts himself as so far superior to his rivals as to be, in effect, a 'supreme leader'. These are primary foundations upon which to build a cult of personality and a police state.

So, yeah, Trump is following the fascist road, which is also the road to a totalitarian, extra-legal government focused on one leader.

Mexicans and Muslims in this instance

let's not forget
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDrfE9I8_hs

Along these lines, part of his appeal is "fight Putin with a Putin."

Probably not — if we can't get to scholarly agreement on Trump being a fascist, you're gonna have a much harder sell on the Clintons. But they can all be terrible, sure.

Zimmer's point, which I feel deeply, is that some quadrants of the left seem rooted if not mired in a neoliberal triumphalist moment that compels them to insist that liberals are the actual Real Enemy and everything else is a distraction, which wasn't even actually true in say 2016 but was at least an easier case to make. (Albeit, primarily for those who live in liberal cultural centers removed from the realities of modern conservative American rule.)

But if you live in Texas or Florida or Tennessee, the idea that what you really need to be focused on is fighting the libs just seems bizarre.

neoliberal goons also be fascists?

They can be, but I haven't met any. They're terrible in non-fascist ways.

One of the phenomena I have to explain to friends who live outside Florida is that for thousands of South Florida Democrats the idea of socialism is a total non-starter, especially the ones who actually lived in Cuba and experienced a warped personality-cult totalitarian version of it. Even with my students their paradoxes fascinate me. Growing in privation in Cuba and Venezuela and the DR, they want their phones, leased cars, streaming subscriptions, and indulge in heteronormative fantasies about the home but also want some government overseeing of basic services....so long as you don't call it socialism.

I find the entire framing questionable? I've never heard anyone on the left call Trump or the rise of far right nationalism a "distraction"; rather the argument is that neoliberal orthodoxy lead to these developments and as such is incapable of defeating them.

The cruel joke is the actual fascists are also neoliberal.

No, there is a very small contingent of leftists who still are like: “Trump’s not so bad you’re being hysterical mom and dad”.

Yeah if you read those two blog posts you'll find plenty of citations saying it is more or less a distraction, a liberal deflection, etc. Not universally on "the left," which is no kind of monolith, but there is definitely a strain of thought (to which, say, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi succumbed) that sees no greater evil on the planet than the neoliberal consensus of the '90s/'00s.

xp: I don't think the modern American right — whether you call it fascist or not — can be called neoliberal. They're anti-"globalist," anti-internationalist, anti-NATO, pro-government-intervention in the economy etc.

First we defeat Trump, then we defeat neoliberalism.

Trumps administration was still very neoliberal, he made some minor tweaks to NAFTA and that’s it.

I mean for gods sake the actual existing fascist governments of history worked very well with international capital.

Ok, didn't know this was about "a very small contingent" and Greenwald/Taibbi. Don't personally think anyone needs an academic article to know what's up with those guys but ok.

The article barely mentions Greenwald, it's mostly about much more respectably people like Corey Robin and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins.

As for Trump's neoliberalism, I don't know, he threatened to leave NATO — that's not very neoliberal! He didn't do it, but one of Zimmer's points is that using Trump's failures to enact a fascist state in his four years in office as evidence that he isn't actually fascist is kind of a weak argument. It's wanting to see him as more a part of a postwar American continuum than not. And he is part of a postwar American continuum, but one that runs through the John Birch Society and the Southern strategy and paleoconservatism, not through the IMF and the DLC.

He's not anti-capital, of course not! But he is at best skeptical of any kind of international order and the multinational institutions that neoliberalism built.

Bessner's last Jacobin op-ed (not radically different from the four year old stuff he links to but a bit more timely) - https://jacobin.com/2024/04/liberals-fascism-rhetoric-democrats-election

This does not read like "fight the REAL ENEMY ie liberals" to me. Seems more like "liberals, do better."

The real objection I see from Zimmer is that the leftists are not sufficiently onside with seeing Trump and the contemporary GOP as a radical break with history rather than a continuation of the reactionary political project supercharged by the failures of (neo)liberalism over the last decades.

^ ^ ^

I don't think he thinks they're a radical break from history — quite the opposite, they're a continuation of multiple strong strands of history, which largely predate neoliberalism and have never gone away. (I mean, unless we're going to retcon history and say that slavery, e.g., was a neoliberal project.)

I think he thinks the lib-obsessed leftists underestimate the actual threats of the Trumpist/authoritarian front, because they find it politically and philosophically inconvenient to contend with.

_neoliberal goons also be fascists?_

They _can_ be, but I haven't met any. They're terrible in non-fascist ways.

But in either case, Trump probably qualifies, yes?

Like, I am thoroughly of the belief that many of the qualities of our current state and society are fascist. Things can get much worse, of course, but part of why I don’t like this kind of shit is that it puts all the blame on obvious right-wing ideologies and their promulgators rather than acknowledge liberal and neoliberal complicity with these ideologies as demonstrative of how we got here.

But in either case, Trump probably qualifies, yes?

neoliberalism being seamlessly compatible with fascism is most exemplified by Modi imo

it's maybe worth mentioning that there isn't consensus on what "neoliberalism" is either. For example, there are interpretations of neoliberalism that emphasize "government-intervention in the economy" as being key to the neoliberal project rather than antithetical, in that the function of the government is to serve the market which often requires quite a lot of govt intervention in the economy.

I associate that view with Quinn Slobodian, and I skimmed this interview w/Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, might be worth a look? https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/quinn-slobodian-crack-capitalism-interview/. He addresses the question of whether neoliberalism has ended in the last question.

I am sympathetic to the idea that some critics of neoliberalism don't reckon enough with the kinds of overt social control and enforcement of caste hierarchies (race/gender/sexuality etc.) that animate the conservative movement in the US and beyond and aren't so easily reduced to capitalist ideology (imo)

I mean, both fascism and neoliberalism have the problem that it can tempting to start applying them to everything — is Putin a neoliberal?

But in practical political terms, what Zimmer’s talking about is a concern (which I share) that some perspectives on the left lend themselves to “there’s no difference” or even “the Dems are WORSE” rhetoric, which he thinks seriously misunderstands what’s going on.

Robert O. Paxton about 15 years ago defining fascism:

– A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

– The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

– The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

– Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

– The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

– The need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;

– The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;

– The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;

– The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

I tend to think a neoliberal believes in social democracy, even espousing it openly, while being a slave to market forces, whereas the average Trump voter believes in the social democratic state so long as the Right People benefit under it, thinks little of economics if at all (i.e. so long as I and people who look like me benefit I don't care what system we live under), and so long as it actively persecutes people who don't fit The Leader's paradigms.

I mean, you can argue not much separates the Dem neolib from the Trump fascist voter except the former has way more degrees. I know a lot of Dems who put their kids in charter schools and believe in capitalism and otherwise have nothing else in common with their enemies, including self-diagnosis.

See, if you're a leftist, fascists hate you and want you to die, and don't give a fuck what you think. But liberals, those dupes, want to recruit you into common struggle against the fascists. Which is why liberals are so much more fun to spit on and call no different from the fascists, because they get so hurt when you do it. They make that sad, shocked-and-betrayed face that brightens a true leftist's whole day. Look how important your approval is to them! And how wet their eyes get when you withhold it!

As a definition of fascism in full luxuriant bloom Paxton's set of criteria do wonderfully well. Looking at the best historical examples, that is where the 'pure' fascist road leads. It doesn't describe societies that have only partly traveled that road, which muddies the discussion of where the USA currently resides on the becoming-fascist progression and how Trump fits into that picture. I was trying to piece that out in my earlier posts on this thread.

You have the liberals and the leftists mixed up, but okay

Yes, libs are often not leftists.

(I was speaking to unperson fwiw. The smugness of the liberal of the species is truly breathtaking)

Ok sure but can we talk about the self-righteousness of the leftists too?

I don't think he thinks they're a radical break from history

He does, though - the antidemocratic aims of the MAGA GOP are in line of the American project since its foundation. If the desire for autocracy and antidemocratic governance is a symptom of the adoption of fascism, when have reactionaries not been fascists... in which case isn't the question pointless semantics?

If you're not looking to find reasons to be mad at those damn dirty leftists what they're all saying is not "liberals are the enemy" (though the idea that liberals just want to get along and vibe with socialists in a common project is, uh, historically laughable) but that liberalism, particularly as embodied by the Democratic Party and its op-ed wing is incapable of defeating 'fascism' and that liberalism's modern failures and compromises have strengthened it. Which shouldn't be a surprise, that's why the people in question are socialists (or more ecumenical 'leftists') rather than liberals.

Maybe you disagree with based on the great victories of liberalism over our lifetimes, but it's hardly downplaying the seriousness of the threat of reactionaries.

Do you think fascism can be defeated? If these tendencies are ingrained in our culture -- they are -- then all we can hope is to ensure its abeyance.

For me, I think fascism involves the mobilisation and participation of the public. Which is why Putin wasn't a fascist until the Z stuff in 2022 (though there had been elements of it). Prior to that he explicitly tried to avoid energizing and activating the public, preferring a strategy of depoliticisation. Even now, he goes back and forth between these poles, as an activated populace can become difficult to put back in its box

But on the other hand I think like socialism or liberalism, fascism has a much wider and much more flexible definition now, and arguing about the 'correct' definition doesn't necessarily lead anywhere

I think to some extent these all become stand in words for "people we like" and "people we don't like", which is how seemingly different terms overlap and even become interchangeable to an extent - but I think its better to meet people where they are and work with their definition rather than argue against it (for some Joe Biden is a fascist, for others he is a liberal, for others still he is a communist, are any of these definitions 'wrong'? Depends who you ask. My cousin thinks Boris Johnson is a socialist. I'm not going to say "no he isn't. In that particular conversation I'll accept the label as true, and work with his definition instead)

Do you think fascism can be defeated? If these tendencies are ingrained in our culture -- they are

Possible? Yes. Realistic, probably not - but that last bit is the key. The tendencies are ingrained in our culture - 'socialism' demands the destruction of that political and economic culture (which is why it's continually ridiculous for people to feign shock that Jacobin writers don't just hop on board with American liberalism - they don't believe the same things).

Even in terms of abeyance, liberalism isn't good at it! That's Bessner's point in the more recent op-ed I linked to - a decade of dire warnings of fascism and the existential threat the GOP poses and things have only gotten worse, as Democratic support in core minority constituencies weakens.

Gabe Winant had a good tweet about Gaza protesters - the people getting smacked around by cops today under the watch of Democratic mayors, governors and Presidents are the shock troops you'd need to flood the streets in the event of a more successful January 20th. What do Democrats say to them then about the sanctity of property rights and the need for quiet dispersal when ordered?

Ok sure but can we talk about the self-righteousness of the leftists too?

I think the other thing which is quite interesting is people are put into particular categories as though they are manifestations of each category, and fit in each box neatly, these things become almost treated as immutable characteristics. Someone is Liberal or Leftist or Libertarian in the same way they are Tall or French, its just who they are

The smugness of the liberal is never justified, because liberals are never correct about anything afaic

Depends on what yr calling liberal, doesn’t it? Was the Warren court wrong on its civil rights rulings? Were Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the EPA and the Fair Labor Standards Act wrong? You can argue they have their problems, don’t go far enough, etc, but all had significant impacts and all are legacies of 20th century American liberalism. (The term “liberal” itself being hotly contested territory obviously.)

re: neoliberalism and fascism

so when i look at queer history, when i look at how queer liberation worked, the first people my queer ancestors had to fight were the people on the left. one of the major trans projects of the '00s was Camp Trans, a protest against the trans-exclusionary policies of the Michigan Womyn's Festival. and you could look at that and say "surely conservative transphobia is more of a threat to trans people, why are you doing that", and probably some people did. am i against feminism, against "women's spaces"? absolutely not. there are just people who were structurally excluded from spaces where we _shouldn't_ rightly have been excluded, and it's sad that our fight for exclusion wound up with that space going away entirely. the people i talk to, they don't blame the trans people for causing michfest to "lose". it was the michfest organizers' inflexible, exclusionary position on trans exclusion that doomed the festival, not trans people's advocating for our right to be included.

that's kinda how i feel about liberalism vs. leftism. i hear _so much_ of liberals worrying and fretting about how to win over trump voters, and i mean

to me, the liberal tradition i was raised with was compromise. it's a question of what you give up in order to get those votes. and i feel like sometimes liberals don't know what they're giving up and what exactly they're getting in return. i personally, i mean it is an emotional decision, not a rational decision. i don't feel listened to, taken seriously, _valued_ by liberals. and it hurts, you know? i mean yes fascists want me and liberals...

liberal/neoliberal (in this specific instance i don't know that there's a meaningful difference between the two) transmedicalism, "progressive" transmedicalism, kept me ignorant, kept me from living the life i needed to live in order to be, like, _happy_. i bought into that ideology and it hurt me. i was taught, by liberals, to believe and act in ways that were contrary to my own best interest. i could just as easily have been taught that by conservatives or fascists. a lot of people i know were taught that. i was taught it by liberals. so yeah. i'd say i have a strong personal sense of hurt when it comes to liberalism and neoliberalism, and i don't have those feelings about fascism, because i've always fucking hated fascists.

and to me this is what punditry misses, how _personal_, how _individual_, each person's beliefs are. what can you learn about the relationship between leftism, neoliberalism, and fascism from my story? what lessons can you take from it? maybe none, you know? maybe there's no larger narrative. i guess i tend to think so, which is why i'm hardly ever on politics threads. i don't feel like the way my brain works, the experience i have, really equips me to engage with larger political discourse.

If we haven’t mentioned him yet, I’d suggest Alberto Toscano’s work is very worthwhile. He’s an academic who’s been working on this stuff for a while and published _Late Fascism_ with Verso Books last year.

Two convos he’s had in the last year or two are particularly illuminating, one on the show What’s Left of Philosophy:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-whats-left-of-philosophy-75162835/episode/88-on-late-fascism-w-172783195/

And one with the New Books network:

https://www.podplay.com/sv-se/podcasts/new-books-in-american-politics-1050777/episodes/alberto-toscano-late-fascism-race-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-crisis-verso-2023-261821887

One of the helpful points he offers is not to focus on what he calls “the politics of crisis in the interwar era” so much as the shit that happened in Latin America in the 70s, like Pinochet, and what was done to force those economies into neoliberal set-ups

Also he’s a good interview with a droll sense of humor

xpost

fwiw I think that's an important perspective Kate, because it speaks to how most people — most of us most of the time — actually experience politics, which is not along neatly divided ideological lines but via messy lived experience of how power operates in our lives and our intimate/proximate spaces. So the leftist-vs.-liberal tensions that have characterized the American left-of-center make perfect sense, because e.g. the Michigan Womyn's Festival is a closer political space in a lot of ways for trans women than, like, a CPAC conference. So of course that's where the fight happens is over access to the Womyn's Festival, not over access to CPAC, because if you can't even gain recognition from your putative allies how can you even see far enough to fight against the Right?

I identify as a left-liberal (yes there is too such a thing) because there are things I value in traditions from both "the left" and Enlightenment liberalism (their emphases on collective action and individual liberties, respectively), and also things I question or distrust in both, so I kind of sit cautiously between. But also a lot of my ideas and conceptions of power and politics aren't rooted in theory or really even ideology at all so much as in observation and experience of the world and my perceptions of what motivates people to political action (or inaction).

And thanks kingfish, those sound promising.

i listened to about the first half of the left of philosophy podcast and i thought it was really interesting! (about halfway through the people with the chainsaws next door started up again and i couldn't focus on it anymore.) even before the chainsaws, though, it was a difficult listen to me, a lot of which i think is that i'm not an academic, i don't have that kind of background. i've learned a lot by listening to and paying attention to academic leftist discourse, particularly in terms of challenging my own biases and preconceptions. at the same time there's this video essayist i follow and one of the things she says a lot is "read theory", and i _don't_ read theory. i think it's valuable and interesting work and just isn't really accessible to probably most people - not just as a matter of paywalling and academic gatekeeping and elsevier and all of this other stuff, but because a lot of it is very jargony. it's not a dialect i'm fluent in. i struggle to keep up.

the thing about academia to me is that a lot of it is very abstract. which i think is... i mean when one is in a situation where one doesn't have a lot of _practical_ ability to put one's ideas into practice, i think one of the more valuable things one can do is work on what i'd say is a... a healthy mindset. it's interesting because drilling down to things i don't see it as an intellectual practice, i see it as kind of a moral or ethical practice. when the time comes to make radical change, when crisis comes, a lot of times a bunch of fucked up shit happens, like, not even on purpose. people are trying to do their best but it's really fucking hard to do the right thing when crisis hits, and sometimes people mean well but wind up fucking shit up anyway. yesterday i was talking to a friend who, like me, used to be a boy scout, and she talked about trying to "be prepared" in a time of often overwhelming change. and for me a lot of it is "what the fuck is going on, what is even happening".

i grew up steeped in the tradition of liberal thought, which i _do_ think is distinct from the tradition of leftist thought. the tradition of liberal thought left me completely unprepared to deal with trump's victory. like, my idea was that under liberalism, something like this Should Not Happen. and once i did that i found out liberal thought had disadvantaged me in other ways, like, i was not theoretically equipped to understand or accept my own gender identity through a liberal framework. doing that required me to understand and accept some radical concepts... there's this idea of "gender incongruence", i guess i'd say when gendered expectations are incompatible with one's own subjective well-being, and like... for me, i'd say that my gender is incongruent with the liberal political philosophy i had.

which isn't to say that i wholeheartedly and uncritically embrace leftist thought methodologically! i definitely think there's a strong intellectual and theoretical component to my own leftism. being "transgender", for instance, that's an abstract framing of a concrete lived experience, one that's more suited to who i am than "transsexual" or "transvestite" were. it's just the idea of "social science", that framing, that gives me pause. in practical terms, framing something as a "science", you know, that had a material advantage in terms of access to resources, and i think that's valuable. i mean one does have to make compromises and i think that was valuable.

at the same time i look at academia and it doesn't offer what it used to. there's not the sort of security in it that there used to be. this is the challenging thing to me is that the theoretical leftist tradition sometimes seems to me to be getting in the way of effective leftist practice. i don't think the idea of the "ivory tower" is a fair or useful framing, but i do feel sometimes that there's a layer of abstraction between academic understandings of leftism and people's practical experience.

which is why the part of the podcast that i heard was so interesting to me... because building coalitions comes from multiple different directions. like, how do you make sense of somebody's lived experience that isn't yours? that's inevitably going to involve abstraction, figuring out what's the same and what's different between two groups of people. and i think saying look, why do we have to compare everything to hitler? is a valid question. like everything bad comes down to the nazis, that's the yardstick by which everything is judged, and it's a terrible yardstick. it's like if someone isn't Literally Hitler it doesn't get seen as a problem.

one of the things that i've taken an amateur interest in is genocide studies, the way that gets framed, the way that it was inceptionally a matter of _norm entrepeneurship_, and the first people to take up that framing after lemkin's original framing, after the UN gave it the seal of approval, was _We Charge Genocide_, in 1951, where Black Americans said "ok look what you're doing to us is genocide". and that wasn't taken seriously, and that to me is a major failure of the attempt to fight "fascism". because then you have a liberal democratic norm, you know, gatekeeping. the charge was basically ignored and nothing was done, and that inaction sent the message that the way the US was treating Black Americans was, I guess, acceptable.

so like as a theoretical concept terms like "genocide" and "fascism" are only important to the point where one can, you know, perform norm entrepeneurship, in _every individual case_, to convince the people who have the power to stop it that they should use that power to stop it. that's gonna be an adversarial process. as an outsider i'm trying to convince people to put themselves at risk to support my values. and the only leverage i have is, you know, the power to walk away. to say "these people aren't my allies, they're acting against my values". and then i gotta be in community with other people aren't part of "the system". i can say that oh i'm an anarchist, i don't believe in systems of coercive power, but ultimately my goal _is_ reform, is for there to be a system that has a _place_ for me and the people whose values and interests i share. if i call myself an "anarchist" or a "communist" that doesn't mean anything other than "i am not your ally", by declaring myself a member of a group that liberals _don't_ see as allies i'm trying to communicate that i'm not on liberals' _side_, while at the same time i'm declaring that people with a certain set of values and beliefs, i do work to ally with them. people who will not compromise on trans rights, people who oppose what the israeli government is doing to the palestinian people, people who oppose the racist carceral justice system, these are people whose values are congruent with mine, whose goals are congruent with mine.

of course by doing that i'm taking a risk, but it is a calculated risk, an intentional risk. the less people have to lose, the more extreme risks we're willing to take. in general, most liberals probably have more to lose than i do.

idk. i don't think about politics a lot, i don't know if that's coherent. just some random thoughts. these fucking chainsaws are giving me a headache. i'm going to lie down.

the theoretical leftist tradition sometimes seems to me to be getting in the way of effective leftist practice.

The traditional academic approach to any subject is to understand the object under study in such depth and detail that the academician is able to derive its 'truest aspect' and describe it to others, thus imparting a kind of changeless knowledge. Applying that knowledge to actively change anything in the world is left to others.

Because some form of politics is entangled with every group interaction at every level of society there is an endless supply of detail to be studied and reduced to theory, so that mastering theory can also become an endless task. As far as my observations go, effective practice can be informed by theory to a limited extent, but eventually it has to rely on a set of heuristics derived from and refined by trial and error, and informed by results not theory.

First we defeat Trump, then we defeat neoliberalism.

First we take Berlin, THEN we take Manhattan