The Paul Street Report, 10. 20. 2022
Readers who think that MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan and I are off base when we argue that the mainstream “liberal” media is absurdly loathe to say “the F-word” — fascism — as fascist politics spreads across much of the world should look at a recent Washington Post commentary by that paper’s Berlin bureau chief Marc Fisher. It’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about.
Titled “Leaders of Democracies Increasingly Echo Putin’s Authoritarian Tilt,” Fisher’s column reflects on the chilling proliferation and triumph of fascist political narratives and strategies from Brazil to Hungary, Italy, Russia, the Philippines, and the United States.
Curiously but all too commonly enough, however, the dreaded F-word is completely missing from Fisher’s 2700-word essay. He can’t even work in the word with a “semi-” in front of it like Joe Biden did last August. Look at this passage from Fisher:
“In the United States, if there’s one thing President Biden and Trump agree on, it is the existence of what Biden calls ‘a battle for the soul of this nation.’ The two men phrase the nature of that struggle very differently. To Biden, the threat is authoritarianism; to Trump, it is socialism and the country’s internal ills as ‘a failing nation.’ But the polarization that the two politicians represent is a corrosive fact, and it mirrors divisions that are leading other large democracies around the world to embrace populist, right-wing leaders who promise a return to order, traditional values and a focus on the frustrations of working people.”
Beyond some obvious truths, there’s a lot wrong in those 108 words. Did Fisher really not register that Biden recently called Trumpism (“MAGA Republicans”) “like semi-fascism” – an understatement but still quite a departure from the standard and extreme mainstream flight from the F-word?
Does Fisher really not understand that the partisan polarization of US politics today is almost completely the work of the rightmost major party? No love here for the dismal neoliberal Democrats but they are the centrist party of bipartisan bourgeois parliamentarianism and “reaching across the aisle.” With all due respect for “the Squad” and Bernie Sanders, the Dems have not polarized left. The Republicans, by contrast, have polarized far to the starboard side, crossing into extreme, indeed fascist space.
Does Fisher not grasp that the right’s creepy habit of calling bourgeois centrists and not-so liberals like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi “socialists” and bemoaning the supposed decline of a once great nation under the supposed influence of nefarious radical Leftists are bright and shiny calling cards of fascist ideology and politics?
And does he really think today’s Republi-fascists are seriously focused on “the frustrations of working people” when they are dedicated to smashing labor and workers’ left and social- democratic defenders, funded by revanchist billionaires, and focused primarily on advancing racist, nativist, and sexist agendas that divide and otherwise disempower the working class?
Fisher can’t even work in the F-word when discussing Italy’s likely new prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who rose up through explicitly fascist party and movement ranks and who dog-whistles Mussolini-esque tropes. Or when he mentions the “authoritarian pasts” that classically fascist German and Japan supposedly overcame after World War II.
Consistent with Hasan’s incisive if belated[1] rants against liberal fascism-denial on MSNBC, Fisher uses designations and terms that are relevant to fascist politics even as he steers clear of the F-word itself. The ideologically unspecific word “authoritarian” appears 19 times in Fisher’s essay. “Populist/populism” (more on those terms in my postscript below) pops up 9 times. “Strongman/men” appears 6 times, as does “far-right.” Other key words are “right-wing” (3 times), “traditional values” (3 times), “order” (as in “return to” 2 times and “craving for” 1 time), “racist” (2 times), and “nationalist” (2 times).
As Hasan says about liberal media’s preference for anything but the scary F-word when it comes to discussing the openly neofascist Meloni:
“Do you notice a trend here? It’s not as bad as you think. This isn’t really fascism. Stop the hyperbole and hysteria. It’ll all be fine.…I’ve seen these headlines, these hot takes before. Remember the Washington Post Op Ed on the eve of the 2016 US presidential election, with this headline: ‘Calm Down, We’ll be Fine No Matter Who Win’? Oh yeah. Remember The New York Times Op-Ed with this headline the month before the 2020 presidential election: ‘There Will be No Trump Coup’? So look, I have a humble suggestion for many of my colleages in the ‘liberal media.’ How about in the year 2022 we stop playing down, minimizing, whitewashing, people who literally say or do fascist things? People who want to overturn elections and ban Muslims or, who, as in the case of Italy’s next prime minister, spout great replacement theory while runnng a political party that has a direct connection back to Benito Mussolini himself Can we try doing that? Please?”
Meanwhile, the Amerikaner fascist menace that I described two Paul Street Reports ago (and in book form a year ago and in numerous CounterPunch essays from 2016 on) has sharpened. Its demi-God Trump – now an open blood libel neo-Nazi QAnonist – has decided to fill out his fascist profile more classically with some not-so subtly anti-Semitic posting. Republi-fascist politicos have been advancing white supremacist and historically fascist “great replacement theory,” according to which a globalist conspiracy of Jewish elites is trying to replace supposedly virtuous, superior, and hard-working white people and culture – the real soul of the once great (but soon to be redeemed) nation in fascist thought – with allegedly lazy, inferior, and criminal non-white immigrants. The openly demented language-butchering and woman-abusing Trumpist Herschel Walker is sickeningly close to the eloquent liberal Raphael Warnock in polling for the critical US Senate race in Georgia. We have learned that the fascist Trump confidant and January 6th coup plotter Roger Stone said this to his Proud Boys acolytes after the 2020 presidential election and before the January 6th Capitol Riot: “fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence.”
The nine public hearings in which the US House January 6th committee has this year skillfully demonstrated Trump’s attempts to subvert and cancel the 2020 presidential election have done little to impact the nation’s politics. The facts turned up by the committee are clear as day: Trump and his cabal determined well in to declare victory even if he lost the contest. They waged a clear and many-sided campaign to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law. They employed legal and extra-legal means including a violent mass assault on the nation’s representative body, which Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump wanted and tried to lead. He wished for the attack to include little green men armed with military-style assault rifles.
But the committee’s findings have not moved public opinion one inch on the need to prosecute the orange facist reptile and to dismantle its racist, sexist, nativist, violent, cruel, truth-trashing, and, well…um, fascist party. False assertion and serial Hitlerian deceit trump evidence in the nation’s perilously right-tilted Minority Rule political system. The (far-) rightmost of the two major parties stands poised to win back at least the House of Representatives and to place right-wing election deniers in key positions enabling the “far-right” (to use Fisher’s language) to (with likely advance approval from the Christian Fascist Supreme Court that is 33% Trump appointed-for-life) steal the 2024 presidential election for “strongman” Trump (or for Florida’s mini-Mussolini Ron DeSantis or some other fashed-up “strongman”).
It can’t happen here? It is happening here.
But, okay, enough on that ugly and oh-so “extreme” and “radical” word fascism. Let’s try for a bit to stay with the milder, less triggering words like “authoritarian” “strongmen.”
Which reminds me, there’s another word linked to actual radical Leftists like me that the Marc Fishers of the world don’t like to use in trying to understand the criminal tragedy that is political life in the US and other countries these days: capitalism.
Absent an organized radical and multi-cultural working class Left to seriously change the balance of political forces, that authoritarian government intervention will come from the right, not the left. For all its very internal fractures, the capitalist class, including its more liberal wings, will always choose fascism over socialism or even just a hint of Bernie Sanders-style and Scandinavian social democracy. It will look the other way as authoritarian “populism” takes the noxious and false forms of white nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, religious fundamentalism, border-obsessed nativism, women-hating patriarchy, great replacement theory, Social Darwinism, city-fearing rural and small town volkism, and the revanchist enforcement of so-called traditional values that are meant to fill the giant spiritual and community voids that are created by unmentionable and soulless capitalism. Beneath all that noxious and lethal, potentially genocidal and (okay I’ll say it again) fascist politics, the prerogatives of capitalist ownership, exploitation, and empire remain fully intact under “far-right authoritarianism” in ways they would not under a left version of “big government” government intervention.
Why has the January 6th committee’s evidence of Trump and his fellow neofascist pals’ (Rogert Stone, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn et al.) vicious assault on “what remains of democracy” (as Noam Chomsky likes to say) done so little to move the needle of public opinion in ways that might lead enough US citizens to use their little, savagely time-staggered ballot-marking moments to prevent the ascendancy of an “authoritarian,” “illiberal,” “nationalist,” racist, and “far right” – try fascist – party in the self-proclaimed headquarters and homeland of popular self-government? Precisely because so little of democracy in fact remains in the militantly capitalist United States, where majority public opinion has long been routinely trumped by concentrated wealth and empire on one key policy issue after another and where it has long been understood that “money talks, bullshit walks.” The nation’s democratic pretense was mocked and exposed as inauthentic by capitalism-imperialism well before Trump rose to power.
Postscript: On Populism and Fascism
This (below) is not required reading, but may prove useful and interesting to some readers. It is long past time for pundits to please stop calling fascism “populism.” Please forgive my self-quoting here as I paste in (in italics) a perhaps (I hope) useful passage I published on CounterPunch in late April of 2017:
‘Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule of the money power – to the reign of concentrated wealth. It emerged from radical farmers’ fight for social and economic justice and democracy against the plutocracy of the nation’s Robber Baron capitalists during the late 19th century. It was a movement of the left. As the left author and journalist Harvey Wasserman notes:
“The Morgans, Rockefellers and their ilk had captured the industrial revolution that dominated the U.S. after the Civil War. The farmers of the South and West fought back with a grass-roots social movement…They formed the People’s Party. Its socialistic platforms demanded public ownership of the major financial institutions, including banks, railways, power utilities and other private monopolies that were crushing the public well-being.”
“At their national conventions in Omaha in 1892, and St. Louis in 1896, and elsewhere, they demanded an end to corporate and foreign ownership of land. They wanted a national currency based on food rather than gold and silver. They endorsed universal affordable medical care, free public education and a general guarantee of the basics of life for all humans. They demanded equal rights for women, including the vote…They also preached racial unity, especially among black and white farmers in the South, and between native and immigrant workers in the cities.”
Yes. Contemporary populists worthy of the label are leftists. They back “human rights, social democracy, peace and ecological sanity” (Wasserman). They support racial and ethnic equality and unity in the interest of working class and broad popular solidarity and struggle from the bottom up. They want government to serve the majority of the populace and the common good, not the wealthy corporate and financial Few.
The dominant media sometimes has the decency to distinguish between the “left populism” (democratic socialism) of an Evo Morales (Bolivia’s Indigeneous and ecosocialist president), a Jean-Luc Melenchon (the ecosocialist French presidential candidate) or a Jeremy Corbin (the left leader of the British Labor Party) on one hand and the “right wing populism” of a Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, or Steve Bannon on the other hand. But the makers of this distinction fail to understand that “‘Populists of the Right’ are fascists….When they take power, they become National Socialists, using the government to enrich the corporations and the rich, rather than Democratic Socialists, or social democrats, using the state to serve the people. Fascists support enriching the rich and to hell with the rest of us. They are racist, misogynist, anti-ecological, militaristic and authoritarian. They hate democracy, freedom of speech and an open media. They take power by fomenting hate and division. Le Pen, now in in the runoff for the leadership of France, is a classic fascist…”
Trump is no populist. His tax plan released last Wednesday by Goldman Sachs veterans and White House officials Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin would slash tax rates for businesses from (a seldom paid) 35 percent to 15 percent. The Trump scheme includes a “pass-through” tax cut on business income that is currently taxed at the business owners’ individual income tax rates rather than the corporate rate.
Calling Trump’s proposal as “a very big step in precisely the wrong direction,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens and Hunter Blair say that the pass-through tax cut “will help private equity managers and people like President Trump: wealthy people who will now be able to reconfigure their taxes by reclassifying themselves as independent contractors.”
Another regressive part of Trump’s plan would liquidate the alternative minimum tax, which is meant to stop the super-rich from using loopholes to escape all tax liability. Trump would deepen inequality further by repealing the estate tax on wealth transferred from deceased people to their heirs.
Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, calls Trump’s tax plan “Goldman Sachs populism.”
How journalists can continue to call the billionaire and billionaires’ President Trump a “populist” in light of such oligarchic policy initiatives is an interesting question.
Of course, Trump is something worse than just a non-populist. He’s a neofascist who hopes to rally white “heartland” working class support for his fake-populist plutocratic agenda with a toxic brew of hyper-militarism, immigrant-bashing nativism, law-and-order racism, sexism, and anti-intellectualism. Like Hilter in the early middle 1930s, Trump hopes to use the scapegoating of demonized others and foreigners – Muslims, Mexican immigrants, “China,” and other targets (Canadian timber exporters!) – to divert popular attention away from his service to the rich and powerful.’
Okay this is me today again in October of 2022. As readers may recall, Trump got his revolting tax cut for the already super-rich. That and the economic and environmental deregulation that Trump and his party bestowed upon Big Business kept leading US capital mostly silent about the reptile’s authoritarian/fascist excesses until January 6th. I do not recall Trump making any effort to advance legislation to put union organizing and collective bargaining back on a solid legal foundation and bring back the US labor movement that once did so much to bring millions of working people into something like the middle class for a generation or so.
Note
+1. Please see endnote 2 in my October 13, 2022 Substack, where I explain that a hearty cadre of left and liberal thinkers and activists had Trump and Trumpism well understood as fascist four years and more before the summer of 2020, when Hasan boasts of having figured it out.