boutons_deux
05-16-2017, 10:00 PM
Donald Trump's election has sparked a heated debate about the past, particularly over whether the Trump administration represents a continuum, if not an echo, of the protean origins of fascism. This is an argument that combines the resources of historical memory with current analyses of the distinctive temper of a new and dangerous historical moment in the United States. For instance, an increasing number of pundits across the ideological spectrum have identified Trump as a fascist or neo-fascist, while resurrecting some of the key messages of an earlier period of fascist politics. On the left/liberal side of politics, this includes writers, such as Chris Hedges, Robert Reich, Cornel West, Drucilla Cornell, Peter Dreier and John Bellamy Foster (https://monthlyreview.org/2017/04/01/neofascism-in-the-white-house/). Similar arguments have been made on the conservative side (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-how-fascism-comes-to-america/2016/05/17/c4e32c58-1c47-11e6-8c7b-6931e66333e7_story.html?utm_term=.ab4f0b439dab) by writers, such as Robert Kagan, Jeet Heer, Meg Whitman and Charles Sykes.
Historians of fascism, such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton have argued (http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/watch-a-yale-historian-explains-to-maher-how-trump-resembles-1930s-fascists-and-makes-the-russia-connection/) that Trump is not Hitler but that there are sufficient similarities between them to warrant some concerns about surviving elements of a
totalitarian past crystalizing into new forms (https://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/15/father_of_fascism_studies_donald_trump) in the United States.
Paxton, in particular, argues that the Trump regime is closer to a plutocracy (https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/american-duce/) than to fascism.
But, I think Paxton overplays the differences between fascism and Trump's style of authoritarianism, particularly underemphasizing Trump's ultra-nationalism, militarism and his embrace of the neoliberal state which does not suggest the rule of free-market capitalism but a more extreme example of the corporate state or what Mussolini called the corporatist state. In this case,
traditional state power has been replaced by the rule of major corporations and the financial elite.
At the same time, the
social cleansing and state violence inherent in totalitarianism has been amplified under Trump.
Both Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, the great historians of totalitarianism, have argued that the conditions that produce authoritarian logics have persisted well after their mid-twentieth century expressions. Wolin, in particular, insisted in 2010 that the United States was evolving into an authoritarian society.
(http://www.truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=4327:the-public-intellectual-henry-a-giroux)Recently, though, numerous critics have denied the persistence of fascism and totalitarianism. They have argued that Trump is either a sham, right-wing populist, or simply a reactionary Republican. Three notable examples of the latter positions can be found in the work of cultural critic Neal Gabler, who argues that Trump is mostly a self-promoting con artist (http://billmoyers.com/story/the-sham-presidency/) and pretender president whose greatest crime is to elevate pretense, self-promotion and appearance over substance, all of which proves that he lacks the capacity and will to govern. Andrew O'Hehir claims we have to choose (http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-really-building-fascist-regime-or-it-all-just-showmanship-either-way-threat?akid=15530.40823.ZMvjXo&rd=1&src=newsletter1076583&t=6) between whether Trump is just a clown or a fascist dictator and in the end seems to pivot more toward the clown argument, though he admits Trump is nonetheless dangerous. A more sophisticated version of this argument can be found in the work of historian Victoria de Grazia, who has argued that Trump bears little direct resemblance to either Hitler or Mussolini and is just a reactionary conservative (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/30/donald-trump-fascist-republican-100-days).
Certainly, Trump is not Hitler, and the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic. But
it would be irresponsible to consider Trump to be a either a clown or aberration given his hold on power and the ideologues who support him.
What appears indisputable is that Trump's election is part of a sustained effort over the last 40 years on the part of the financial elite to undermine the democratic ethos and highjack the institutions that support it. (aka, VRWC)
Consequently, in the midst of the rising tyranny of totalitarian politics,
democracy is on life support and its fate appears more uncertain than ever.
Such an acknowledgment should make clear that the curse of totalitarianism is not a historical relic and that it is crucial that we learn something about the current political moment by examining how the spread of authoritarianism has become the crisis of our times (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/lessons-from-hitlers-rise/), albeit in a form suited to the American context.
History, once again, offers us a framework in which a global constellation of authoritarian economic, social and political forces are coming together that speak to tensions and contradictions animating everyday lives that transcend national boundaries for which there is not yet a comprehensive, coherent and critical language.
What has emerged is a climate of precarity, fear, angst, paranoia and incendiary passion.
Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, it would be wise to resurrect one of the key questions that emerges from her work on totalitarianism, which is whether the events of our time are leading to totalitarian rule.
Whether or not Trump is a fascist in the exact manner of earlier totalitarian leaders somewhat misses the point, because it suggests that fascism is a historically fixed doctrine rather than an ideology that mutates and expresses itself in different forms around a number of commonalities.
There is no exact blueprint for fascism, though echoes of its past haunt contemporary politics.
As Adam Gopnik observes (http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/being-honest-about-trump):
... to call [Trump] a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form -- an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic.
It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter's come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy's.
The undeniable truth is that Trump is the product of an authoritarian movement and ideology with fascist overtones.
In responding to the question of whether or not he believes Trump is a fascist, historian Timothy Snyder makes clear that the real issue is not whether Trump is a literal model of other fascist leaders but whether his approach to governing and the new political order he is producing are fascistic. He writes (http://www.salon.com/2017/05/01/historian-timothy-snyder-its-pretty-much-inevitable-that-trump-will-try-to-stage-a-coup-and-overthrow-democracy/):
I don't want to dodge your question about whether Trump is a fascist or not. As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism.
Whether he realizes it or not is a different question, but that's
what fascists did. They said, 'Don't worry about the facts, don't worry about logic, think instead in terms of mystical unities and direct connections between the mystical leader and the people.'
That's fascism. Whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we forget, that is fascism.
Another thing that's
clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.
And Mr. [Steve] Bannon's preoccupation with the 1930s and his kind of wishful reclamation of Italian and other fascists speaks for itself.
To date, Trump's ascendancy has been compared to the discrete emergence of deeply reactionary nationalisms in Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere. I would like to broaden the lens with which we view these incipient events in ways that allow for a deeper historical understanding of the international scope and interplay of critical forces that respond to the shifts and contradictions brought about by a globalizing world increasingly brought to the brink of catastrophe by technological disruption, massive inequities in wealth and power, ecological disaster, mass migrations, relentless permanent warfare and the threat of a nuclear crisis. In the United States, shades of a growing authoritarianism are present in Trump's eroding of civil liberties, the undermining of the separation of church and state, health care policies that reveal an egregious indifference to life and death, his manufactured spectacles of self-promotion, contempt for weakness and dissent, and his attempts to shape the political realm through a process of fear, if not tyranny itself, as Snyder insists in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
History contains dangerous memories and this is particularly true for Trump given the ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply woven into his rhetoric of hate and demonization, his mix of theater and violence, his frenzied defiance of basic laws and his policies supportive of ultra-nationalism and racial cleansing. All the more reason for Trump and his acolytes to treat historical memory as a dangerous ghost that harbors critical tools for understanding how the present has become the past and the past informs the future. Historical memory matters because it serves as a form of moral witnessing, and in doing so becomes a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized. We cannot pretend as if the current conditions exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises.
Echoes of Trump's fascist impulses have been well documented, but what has been overlooked is a sustained analysis of his abuse and disparagement of historical memory, particularly in light of his association with a range of current right-wing dictators and political demagogues across the globe. Trump's ignorance of history was on full display with his misinformed comments about former president Andrew Jackson and nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglas. Trump's comments about Jackson having strong views on the civil war were widely ridiculed, given that Jackson died 16 years before the war started. Trump was also criticized for comments he made during Black History Month when he spoke about Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive, though he died 120 years ago. For the mainstream press, these historical missteps largely reflect Trump's ignorance of American history. But I think there is more at stake than simply ignorance, given the appeal of Trump's comments to white nationalists (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40527-trump-s-remark-on-andrew-jackson-was-a-dog-whistle-for-white-nationalists).
Trump's comments provide a window into his ongoing practice of stepping outside of history so as to deny its relevance for understanding both the economic and political forces that brought him to power and the historical lessons to be drawn, given his egregious embrace of a number of authoritarian elements that resemble the plague of a fascist past. His alleged ignorance is also a cover for enabling a post-truth culture in which dissent is reduced to "fake news," the press is dismissed as the enemy of the people and a mode of totalitarian education is enabled whose purpose, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is "not to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." Trump may appear to be an ignoramus and a clown, but such behavior points to something more profound politically, such as an attack on any viable notion of thoughtfulness and moral agency. His forays into international politics offer another less remarked upon form of fascistic embrace.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40593-dancing-with-the-devil-trump-s-politics-of-fascist-collaboration
Historians of fascism, such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton have argued (http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/watch-a-yale-historian-explains-to-maher-how-trump-resembles-1930s-fascists-and-makes-the-russia-connection/) that Trump is not Hitler but that there are sufficient similarities between them to warrant some concerns about surviving elements of a
totalitarian past crystalizing into new forms (https://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/15/father_of_fascism_studies_donald_trump) in the United States.
Paxton, in particular, argues that the Trump regime is closer to a plutocracy (https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/american-duce/) than to fascism.
But, I think Paxton overplays the differences between fascism and Trump's style of authoritarianism, particularly underemphasizing Trump's ultra-nationalism, militarism and his embrace of the neoliberal state which does not suggest the rule of free-market capitalism but a more extreme example of the corporate state or what Mussolini called the corporatist state. In this case,
traditional state power has been replaced by the rule of major corporations and the financial elite.
At the same time, the
social cleansing and state violence inherent in totalitarianism has been amplified under Trump.
Both Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, the great historians of totalitarianism, have argued that the conditions that produce authoritarian logics have persisted well after their mid-twentieth century expressions. Wolin, in particular, insisted in 2010 that the United States was evolving into an authoritarian society.
(http://www.truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=4327:the-public-intellectual-henry-a-giroux)Recently, though, numerous critics have denied the persistence of fascism and totalitarianism. They have argued that Trump is either a sham, right-wing populist, or simply a reactionary Republican. Three notable examples of the latter positions can be found in the work of cultural critic Neal Gabler, who argues that Trump is mostly a self-promoting con artist (http://billmoyers.com/story/the-sham-presidency/) and pretender president whose greatest crime is to elevate pretense, self-promotion and appearance over substance, all of which proves that he lacks the capacity and will to govern. Andrew O'Hehir claims we have to choose (http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-really-building-fascist-regime-or-it-all-just-showmanship-either-way-threat?akid=15530.40823.ZMvjXo&rd=1&src=newsletter1076583&t=6) between whether Trump is just a clown or a fascist dictator and in the end seems to pivot more toward the clown argument, though he admits Trump is nonetheless dangerous. A more sophisticated version of this argument can be found in the work of historian Victoria de Grazia, who has argued that Trump bears little direct resemblance to either Hitler or Mussolini and is just a reactionary conservative (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/30/donald-trump-fascist-republican-100-days).
Certainly, Trump is not Hitler, and the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic. But
it would be irresponsible to consider Trump to be a either a clown or aberration given his hold on power and the ideologues who support him.
What appears indisputable is that Trump's election is part of a sustained effort over the last 40 years on the part of the financial elite to undermine the democratic ethos and highjack the institutions that support it. (aka, VRWC)
Consequently, in the midst of the rising tyranny of totalitarian politics,
democracy is on life support and its fate appears more uncertain than ever.
Such an acknowledgment should make clear that the curse of totalitarianism is not a historical relic and that it is crucial that we learn something about the current political moment by examining how the spread of authoritarianism has become the crisis of our times (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/lessons-from-hitlers-rise/), albeit in a form suited to the American context.
History, once again, offers us a framework in which a global constellation of authoritarian economic, social and political forces are coming together that speak to tensions and contradictions animating everyday lives that transcend national boundaries for which there is not yet a comprehensive, coherent and critical language.
What has emerged is a climate of precarity, fear, angst, paranoia and incendiary passion.
Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, it would be wise to resurrect one of the key questions that emerges from her work on totalitarianism, which is whether the events of our time are leading to totalitarian rule.
Whether or not Trump is a fascist in the exact manner of earlier totalitarian leaders somewhat misses the point, because it suggests that fascism is a historically fixed doctrine rather than an ideology that mutates and expresses itself in different forms around a number of commonalities.
There is no exact blueprint for fascism, though echoes of its past haunt contemporary politics.
As Adam Gopnik observes (http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/being-honest-about-trump):
... to call [Trump] a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form -- an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic.
It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter's come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy's.
The undeniable truth is that Trump is the product of an authoritarian movement and ideology with fascist overtones.
In responding to the question of whether or not he believes Trump is a fascist, historian Timothy Snyder makes clear that the real issue is not whether Trump is a literal model of other fascist leaders but whether his approach to governing and the new political order he is producing are fascistic. He writes (http://www.salon.com/2017/05/01/historian-timothy-snyder-its-pretty-much-inevitable-that-trump-will-try-to-stage-a-coup-and-overthrow-democracy/):
I don't want to dodge your question about whether Trump is a fascist or not. As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism.
Whether he realizes it or not is a different question, but that's
what fascists did. They said, 'Don't worry about the facts, don't worry about logic, think instead in terms of mystical unities and direct connections between the mystical leader and the people.'
That's fascism. Whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we forget, that is fascism.
Another thing that's
clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.
And Mr. [Steve] Bannon's preoccupation with the 1930s and his kind of wishful reclamation of Italian and other fascists speaks for itself.
To date, Trump's ascendancy has been compared to the discrete emergence of deeply reactionary nationalisms in Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere. I would like to broaden the lens with which we view these incipient events in ways that allow for a deeper historical understanding of the international scope and interplay of critical forces that respond to the shifts and contradictions brought about by a globalizing world increasingly brought to the brink of catastrophe by technological disruption, massive inequities in wealth and power, ecological disaster, mass migrations, relentless permanent warfare and the threat of a nuclear crisis. In the United States, shades of a growing authoritarianism are present in Trump's eroding of civil liberties, the undermining of the separation of church and state, health care policies that reveal an egregious indifference to life and death, his manufactured spectacles of self-promotion, contempt for weakness and dissent, and his attempts to shape the political realm through a process of fear, if not tyranny itself, as Snyder insists in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
History contains dangerous memories and this is particularly true for Trump given the ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply woven into his rhetoric of hate and demonization, his mix of theater and violence, his frenzied defiance of basic laws and his policies supportive of ultra-nationalism and racial cleansing. All the more reason for Trump and his acolytes to treat historical memory as a dangerous ghost that harbors critical tools for understanding how the present has become the past and the past informs the future. Historical memory matters because it serves as a form of moral witnessing, and in doing so becomes a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized. We cannot pretend as if the current conditions exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises.
Echoes of Trump's fascist impulses have been well documented, but what has been overlooked is a sustained analysis of his abuse and disparagement of historical memory, particularly in light of his association with a range of current right-wing dictators and political demagogues across the globe. Trump's ignorance of history was on full display with his misinformed comments about former president Andrew Jackson and nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglas. Trump's comments about Jackson having strong views on the civil war were widely ridiculed, given that Jackson died 16 years before the war started. Trump was also criticized for comments he made during Black History Month when he spoke about Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive, though he died 120 years ago. For the mainstream press, these historical missteps largely reflect Trump's ignorance of American history. But I think there is more at stake than simply ignorance, given the appeal of Trump's comments to white nationalists (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40527-trump-s-remark-on-andrew-jackson-was-a-dog-whistle-for-white-nationalists).
Trump's comments provide a window into his ongoing practice of stepping outside of history so as to deny its relevance for understanding both the economic and political forces that brought him to power and the historical lessons to be drawn, given his egregious embrace of a number of authoritarian elements that resemble the plague of a fascist past. His alleged ignorance is also a cover for enabling a post-truth culture in which dissent is reduced to "fake news," the press is dismissed as the enemy of the people and a mode of totalitarian education is enabled whose purpose, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is "not to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." Trump may appear to be an ignoramus and a clown, but such behavior points to something more profound politically, such as an attack on any viable notion of thoughtfulness and moral agency. His forays into international politics offer another less remarked upon form of fascistic embrace.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40593-dancing-with-the-devil-trump-s-politics-of-fascist-collaboration