The Paul Street Report, 9.26.2022
For those of us who were clued into Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s fascist essence from the beginning and even before the start of his presidency, it’s been darkly amusing to watch the aftermath of Joe Biden telling Democratic Party donors nearly a month ago that “MAGA Republican” Trumpism is “semi-fascism.”
Republicans took umbrage at even the qualified and downplayed application of the “F-word” to their party’s Dear Leader and base. Some Democrats whined that “fascism” was too “provocative” – a radical “overreach.”
And then top Republicans showed yet against why the word applies to them with no prefixes required. Lindsey Graham threatened “riots in the streets” if Trump is indicted (much less tried and convicted) for any of the grave felonies he has committed in (fascistically) trying to subvert and cancel the 2020 presidential election and/or by absconding to his private estate with boxes of top-secret national security documents he had not right to keep in his possession. Trump himself echoed this sentiment, predicting civil unrest if he is indicted last week.
These were fascist threats of political violence directed at the United States House of Representatives’ January 6th committee, the White House, the US Department of Justice, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis. The message was clear: “Try to impose the rule of law on our holy transgressor Donald ‘Shoot Somebody on Fifth Avenue and Not Lose Any Voters’ Trump and our thugs will impose the rule of force on you!”
The Cruelty is the Point
Last week the bitter, charisma-challenged mini-Trump Florida governor Ron DeSantis (notorious for trying to set up his own personal state militia among other authoritarian moves) further proved why it is appropriate to call “MAGA Republicans” fascists. He kidnapped and politically trafficked 48 asylum-seeking Venezuelans, using taxpayer money to fly them without warning in Martha’s Vineyard to “expose” supposedly “radical Left” as “hypocrites” who refuse to face the consequences of their supposed commitment to “open borders.” The reporting on this sadistic and racist “political stunt” – now under criminal investigation – revealed that Texas and Arizona’s Republifascist governors Greg Abbott and Doug Ducey have been spending taxpayer dollars to lure and dump Mexican and Central American migrants (13,000 so far) in “liberal” northern “sanctuary cities” including Chicago, New York, and Washington DC.
Ducey has “dumped like human garbage” migrant busloads including women with small infants near US Vice President Kamala Harris’s Washington home at six in the morning.
Who does vicious racist-nativist-sexist shit like that?
Fascists do, that’s who.
The cruelty is the point.
Neo-Nazi Blood Libel: One Fingered Sieg Heils and Creepy Music in Youngstown
And then there’s Herr Trump’s and thousands of Trump backers’ chilling display at one of his hate rallies in Youngstown, Ohio last Saturday night. Trump fully embraced the QAnon cult, playing a song that sparked his demented, conspiratorial, and white-supremacist/nationalist fans to respond with the creepy one-fingered Q salute. He gave a dark speech on the decline of America over music that was essentially identical to a song called ‘Wwg1wga’ — short for QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.” As Trump droned on about how “radical Left [actually corporate-centrist] Democrats” were stabbing the great nation in the back (a classic fascist-palingenetic nationalist theme), hundreds of his followers raised single fingers in reference to the “1” in the song’s title.
The shocking exhibition came after Trump recently posted an image of himself wearing the Q pin on his lapel under the slogan “The Storm is Coming.” QAnonists see the “storm” as the moment when their Orange Master will violently crush his enemies and take back power, arresting top Democrats and executing them on live television. As “P”BS reported last week:
“After winking at QAnon for years, Donald Trump is overtly embracing the baseless conspiracy theory, even as the number of frightening real-world events linked to it grows. On Tuesday, using his Truth Social platform, the Republican former president reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the words ‘The Storm is Coming.’…As Trump contemplates another run for the presidency and has become increasingly assertive in the Republican primary process during the midterm elections, his actions show that far from distancing himself from the political fringe, he is welcoming it…He’s published dozens of recent Q-related posts, in contrast to 2020, when he claimed that while he didn’t know much about QAnon, he couldn’t disprove its conspiracy theory…Trump’s recent postings have included images referring to himself as a martyr fighting criminals, psychopaths and the so-called deep state. In one now-deleted post from late August, he reposted a ‘q drop,’ one of the cryptic message board postings that QAnon supporters claim come from an anonymous government worker with top secret clearance.”
Something Left Out
The mainstream reporting on the Youngstown horror has left out something rather critical about QAnon: it’s a fascist, neo-Nazi cult. As the prolific left Lehigh political scientist Anthony DiMaggio explains in a commentary titled “Erasing QAnon Fascism”:
“QAnon’s conspiratorial politics are based on the claim that Democratic leaders are vampiric pedophile[s]… a recycled form of Nazi-era propaganda, drawn from the ‘blood libel’ claims offered by the Third Reich, which posited that Jews needed to be targeted for elimination because of their efforts to drink the blood of children…The antisemitic bent of QAnon is revealed by mid-2022 polling…which finds that half of the movement’s supporters …[believe] that liberalism has ‘equipped Jews to…gain control of the world.’…Looking at historical definitions of fascism[1],..QAnon checks the boxes on many fronts… Its members embrace the cult of personality, blindly believing that Trump, who is framed almost as a deity figure, will defeat the ‘deep state’ pedophiles by publicly executing Democratic officials… [QAnon] target[s] the news media, Hollywood, and elements of the professional bureaucracy,… portrayed as complicit with the deep state. …[It] overlaps well with the blind worship of Hitler in the classic era of fascism… [Like classic fascism,] QAnon is authoritarian and dictatorial… It sees Trump as a would-be dictator who will rule over the American people and defeat the ominous, omnipresent ‘deep state’ pedophilic threat…Finally, QAnon is fascist in its commitment to eliminationism. It depicts the Republican Party’s and Trump’s political adversaries as demonic and beyond the pale – as an existential threat to American society and its children. Its supporters explicitly call for the public execution of Democratic officials. Trump has echoed this eliminationism in his recent attack on Biden, whom he called ‘an enemy of the state.’ Eliminationism was also core to Third Reich fascism, via the consistent demonization of Jews as a threat to Aryan ‘pure blood,’ and as representing a fifth column threat working on behalf of communist revolution (‘Jewish Bolshevism’) that must be eradicated…”
Anyone still denying that Trump himself is a fascist in the late summer of 2022 is revealing their utter historical, ideological, and political cluelessness or cowardice.
I laughed out loud two weeks ago when I heard a cable news commentator claim that leading “experts” had been pushing Biden to identify Trump as a fascist before the president rolled out the dreaded F-word with the prefix “semi-” attached. Where were all these experts when “the most dangerous criminal in human history” – as Noam Chomsky accurately described Trump (while mistakenly refusing to call Trump a fascist) in early 2020 (even before the 45th president showed himself to be a sadistic mass-homicidal pandemicist) – held the world’s most powerful office? Even as the Trump administration came to its ugly and transparently fascistic apotheosis in the summer and fall of 2020, one highly placed academic “fascism expert” after another made transparently ridiculous arguments about why Trump didn’t fit the bill.
The elite higher-educational buffoonery on this score included (the supposed authorities included European historians Eliah Bures, Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, and Stanley Payne, Columbia University political scientist Sheri Berman, University of Texas government professor Jason Brownlee, NYU political scientist Corey Robin, and the vaguely Trumpen-leftish Yale law professor and historian Samuel Moyn.
Speaking to Salon’s Chancy de Vega in late July of 2020, New York University’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on 20th Century Italian fascism, said that she felt (presumably academic) pressure to “use the word ‘fascistic’ as opposed to ‘fascism’ to describe Donald Trump” because “when we use the word ‘fascism’ most people think of an instant shutdown of democracy and brown shirts and other political thugs in the streets.” It was an interesting comment. There were “brown shirts and other political thugs” in the nation’s streets when Ben-Ghiat spoke to de Vega, as antifascist and other civil and human rights protesters in Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere could have told the professor in July of 2020. There would be more in coming days and months. The critical mistake Ben-Ghiat cited without calling it a mistake – thinking that the F-word didn’t apply until there was the rapid installation of a dictatorship with fascist forces crushing opposition on the streets – was just one among a handful of errors that many members of th liberal and intellectual classes made vis-a-vis Trump and Trumpism-fascism.
The cognitively dissonant stubbornness of many tenured, doctorate- and monograph-brandishing thinkers’ fascism-denial would last beyond the election, even as Trump tried to reverse the presidential contest’s outcome to the point of encouraging rampaging fascist mobs, replete with armed Three Percenters and neo-Nazi Proud Boys (who wore t-shirts saying “Six Million [Jews killed in the Holocaust] Wasn’t Enough” and “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong”), to engage in “wild” armed protests of the election, and asking his advisors about the possibility of declaring martial law and militarily seizing voting machines to prevent the inauguration of Joe Biden. The denialism among many “fascism experts” persisted even after the bloody January 6th Attack on the Capitol. One notable exception was Paxton, author of the classic text The Anatomy of Fascism. Ninety-nine percent of the way through Trump’s fascist presidency, Paxton changed his mind in the face of an attempt to violently overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and constitutional rule of law. He wrote a Newsweek editorial titled “I’ve Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until New.” That garnered a brief bit of deserved snickering from those of us who had previously joined the organization Refuse Fascism, which was formed immediately after Trump’s election[2].
(Readers interested in the specifics of this foolish and cowardly academic/intellectual denialism are encouraged to read the entertaining if disturbing fourth chapter of my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. It is titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial.”)
No “Semi-” Required
Here we are nearly 21 months out from Trump’s attempted Capitol Hall Putsch. On top of Trump’s open embrace of the neo-Nazi QAnon cult, Graham and Trump’s threats of political violence, and the (ongoing) gubernatorial kidnapping discussed at the outset of this essay, the top of this essay, shock troop members of the Republi-fascist/Amerikaner base have been habitually harassing, hounding, targeting, doxing, trolling, and otherwise threatening teachers, nurses, doctors, school officials, school board members, elected officials, election officials, public health workers, poll workers, librarians, library board members, judges, district attorneys, rabbis, epidemiologists, immunologists, archivists and other professional and public workers, including even law enforcement officers. The Republic-fascist Party is using the Big Hitlerian Lie that the 2020 election was stolen – a classically fascist untruth that would make Joseph Goebbels blush – to justify elaborate “red” (try “brown”) state schemes not merely to suppress and gerrymander minority votes but to cancel aggregate state-level popular votes in the next presidential election. High-level national Republi-fascists have an elaborate plan to staff the executive and legislative branches with fascist operatives deep into the federal bureaucracy. The rightmost (Reich-most) party’s judicial and legislative actors are moving to” impose female-enslaving forced motherhood on a national scale; crush liberal and left public assembly and free speech rights; accelerate the process of turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber (something that would have horrified Hitler); turn the nation into a Hobbesian shooting gallery; outlaw the honest teaching of history and current events. Driven in no small part by paranoid-style demographic fears of coming white minority status and raking in cash from revanchist dark money billionaires, they are looking to achieve triple-branch consolidation and never let go.
“Americans”: your “exceptional” City on a Hill is full of fascists. There’s no “semi-” about the f menace afoot.
How Seriously are we Supposed to Take MSNBC Anti-Fascism?
Its good, I suppose, to see Joy Reid and other talking heads on MSNBC now semi-regularly if too passingly say “fascism” in relation to Trump and his party and base. But, really, how avoid the word in a time when the Republicans’ 2024 presidential front-runner and de facto campaigner is a former president and ongoing wannabe fascist strongman, a putschist, and blood-libel conspiratorial cultist (and cult object) whose backers want him to execute supposedly communist and Satanicm child-devouring Democrats on live tv – and who is championed by a bevy of hyper-partisan major party politicos working to engineer a constitutional coup on his behalf (or on behalf of another and possibly more dangerous neofascist like DeSantis or Virginia governor Greg Youngkin) in 2024-25? Even the barely semi-liberal “reach across the aisle” Democrat Joe Biden has (kind of) used the F-word now.
And how seriously are we supposed to take MSNBC’s purported egalitarian horror over the (very real) domestic authoritarian menace when Reid and her ilk absurdly treat the fascism of the Republican Party as some kind of late-breaking news bulletin, when they skim over the “Inauthentic Opposition” corporate Democrats’ deep complicity in the ever-creeping fascisation of US politics and society, and when they regularly parade as supposed progressive experts commentators such high-level veterans of the US military, police, and spy state as John Brennan, James Clapper, Barry McCaffery, David Patraeus, and Andrew McCabe? How about regular MSNBC legal expert Neil Katyal, who waxes eloquent on the crimes of Trump while serving as the multi-millionaire $2,465-an-hour lead attorney heading Johnson & Johnson’s truly sinister dummy company bankruptcy maneuver to get out of paying off cancer victims in a giant and righteous lawsuit against that criminal drug company.
The veteran journalist and historian Terry Thomas did some background research on Katyal and reports the following: “he’s a real monster, way beyond what I thought. He represented Cargill and Nestle against charges they engaged in child slavery. He argued before the SCOTUS in 2020 that the charges were somehow invalid because – get this – the company which supplied poison gas to the Nazis wasn’t charged at Nuremberg. That some evil shit.”
And how seriously are we supposed to take MSNBC’s commitment to democracy when it spent day after day fawning over the British monarchy in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death?
Without serious and focused discussion of what fascism is, past and present, and the role of both the nation’s dominant parties and the country’s broader structures and institutions of oppression and hierarchy in bringing the terrible political pathology to chilling life atop one of the two major parties in the US, moreover, increased mass media use of the word could easily become a form of banalizing normalization – of making fascism just another ridiculous aspect of US politica’ culture like people voting for candidates based on who they’d most like to have a beer with.
I can think of some far preferable commentators to bring on to the cable and airwave news and commentary circuit – actual radical Left and some liberal activist-intellectuals who nailed what Trump and Trumpism were and are all about from day one.
Dear MSNBC: call me.
Endnotes
1. DiMaggio does not in this essay define fascism. What follows is an approximation of the definition I work with. It is taken from a recent CounterPunch essay I published under the title “Only Fools Count on Capital to Stop Late Fascism.” Some basic elements of the disease are touched upon by the prolific human ecology professor Andreas Malm and his colleagues in the Swedish anti-fascist Zetkin Collective (ZC).On page 405 of their important 2020 volume White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, Malm and ZC refer to “the basic strands” of “a sort of DNA code of fascism” as “ anti-Marxism, anti-feminism, racism, imperialism, the preoccupation with fertility, the promotion of inequality, accolades to violence, and a giddy myth of palingenesis” – that is, the myth of lost but soon to be reborn national greatness, stolen by liberal and Left elites accused of “stabbing the nation/fatherland in the back” by promoting and “replacing” (purportedly) virtuous and hard-working native whites with (supposedly) dangerous and inferior non-white others. More than six years ago, in an essay on then candidate Trump, the liberal New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik suggested another useful description of the ideological sickness that the future president with orange-tinted skin shared with Mussolini, Hitler, and a slew of contemporary far-right politicians including Viktor Orban, the Hungarian strongman who has emerged as a hero of the Republican right:
“There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ …his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’… The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.” These are useful descriptions to which we should add some other key definitional ingredients: the “Orwellian” campaign against truth and intellectuals, conspiratorialism, cults of personality centered on powerful and always male “charismatic Leaders,” and – of critical significance – the deployment of the military and paramilitaries and mobs to crush dissent and overthrow previously normative electoral bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law. “Lawlessness in the name of law and order” is a particularly relevant “calling card” of the sickness, as the Yale philosophy professor and leading fascism scholar Jason Stanley has noted.
Anyone who doubts that the Trump presidency matched these descriptions of fascism should read the second and third chapters of my most recent book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals and the Trumping of America : “The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold” (Chapter 2) and “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21” (Chapter 3). You can work backwards from this volume’s index, searching phrases like “Charlottesville,” “Portland,” “Proud Boys,” “Hitler,” “Jason Stanley,” “How Fascism Works,” “Rittenhouse, Kyle,” “Bannon, Steve,” “George Floyd Rebellion, response to,” “Capitol Riot,” “January 6th,” and “pandemicide.” You can also read the first chapter, titled “Is it the Fascist Apocalypse Yet?” in my October 2020 book (written while Trump was trying to use the George Floyd Rebellion as his attempted Reichstag Fire) Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement. “Fascism,” as a Refuse Fascism activist told me in Washington DC as Trump’s Christian fascist Supreme Court was preparing to strip women of their constitutional right to an abortion, “lives on in America and Europe today. It doesn’t require a mustache.”
2. With no prompting from RF or any other radical or left group, Iowa City teenagers and college students chanted “No Trump, No KKK, no Fascist USA!” while occupying Interstate 80 on the Friday after Trump’s election. Local high school students had been educated by constant racist, nativist, sexist, and homophobic threats from white male bullies saying “we’re gonna get you when Trump is elected!”