Fetch: Fascists
The past is a horrible place. And yet it is easy to romanticize. We can look back at times of struggle and recognize acts of courage and heroism. Landmark events and iconic activists become part of the mythology. When the struggle achieves success (say, The Civil Rights Movement), we laud the individuals who spoke up and fought against oppression, even as we risk distracting ourselves from forces that continue to oppress us (say, structural racism.) When the struggle fails, we take the loss as a warning. The two world wars of the 20th Century provide classic case studies of failures compounding each other, leading to Manichean zer0-sum conflicts, devastation on massive scales, and plenty of fodder for regret. In the thirty years between the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humanity found a lot to take heed from.
So here we are seventy years after all that and still worried that fascism will overwhelm democracy. It is worth noting that not only the Left expresses this fear, but the Right, too, when it sloppily conflates socialism and fascism and then, for good measure, the market-friendly reforms of center-left Democrats. (I’m not saying they’re justified, but the TEA Party people seem genuinely concerned about the Nazi bogeyman; they just don’t know what they’re talking about.) The campaign of Donald Trump looks like a fascist threat. You don’t have to be a leftie or a Democrat to sense it; you can be one of Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination, or one of the Republicans horrified by the behavior of the candidate and his supporters.
As for the theme, or “message”: Well… the Trump candidacy is the closest thing to a fascist movement I have seen in my lifetime. Certainly white supremacists, neo-Nazis and unthinking violent types support him, he leads with a buffoonish magnetism many have compared to Mussolini, and he appeals to familiar nationalist, racist and misogynist tropes used by fascist movements a hundred years ago. Other conditions of the past obtain: increasing poverty, economic incoherence, fear and displacement, desperation and anger.
When protesters from Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders and others (not always left wing, plenty of conservatives hate Trump, too) were ejected violently by supporters and security personnel at recent Trump rallies, I got worried. It reminded me too much of the attacks Socialists faced when confronted by fascists in Weimar Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Yet after some reading up on the subject, I realized that the analogy had serious limits. As awful as the bullying has been at Trump rallies, the street fighting and mob violence in the streets of Berlin were unlike anything you would find on the streets of any American city today. Even the police crackdowns of Ferguson or Occupy, bad as those incidents were, are simply not comparable. And it’s worth remembering how much worse things got as Hitler secured his dictatorship.
At this point in the primary season, many in the Clinton camp accuse Sanders supporters of underestimating the threat posed by Trump, often in a cynical bid to secure the nomination of their favored candidate. But we are still a long way from the kind of fascist takeover the Germans and Italians suffered many decades ago. Currently the party Trump is running in is trying to undermine his candidacy and prevent his nomination; there are more conservative voices against him than for him. Should they prevail, his nearest rival Ted Cruz, though much more frightening in the abstract (he truly believes the awful things he says), is a certain failure in the general election. Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, they stand a much better chance of winning in November against either Trump or Cruz than probably any previous Democratic candidate against a Republican since Bill Clinton ran against the first Bush. We might even see a romp akin to LBJ’s against Goldwater.
What is alarming about the Trump candidacy is that it has lasted this long with this much potential for succeeding in one of only two major parties in our political system. The mainstream ideology of the GOP is barely less vicious than Trump in its contempt for women, minorities, the disabled and the poor; nor much less callous in favoring unstable, violent policies on the global stage. This is a sick, moribund party that has played with the worst aspects of American psychology for decades. Yet so long as we have a two-party system propped up by wealthy donors and corporate media, we as a people will continue to suffer the consequences of gridlock, incompetence and cynicism.
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