Three fronts in the fascist crusade
Fascism is advancing on at least three fronts in this country. Fascism, here as everywhere, is first and foremost, about violence. It is about violence in word and deed: killing, intimidating, threatening.
Fascism is sometimes about violence for its own intoxicating self, but mostly it is about violence to win and maintain power. The January 6 insurrection to overturn the 2020 presidential election is the paradigm of this kind of violence, but there have been many smaller insurrections to kill or intimidate elected leaders, from the governor of Michigan to secretaries of state and other election administrators all the way down to members of local school boards.
The second front is a long war through and against the institutions. The U.S. political system is a mix of democratic and undemocratic elements. The combination of the expansion of some of the democratic aspects of the system since the 1960s—civil and voting rights—and the demographic transformation toward a minority-majority country over the last forty years triggered white panic. Panicking whites have implicitly decided that if they can no longer unilaterally choose who will be in the White House through free and fair elections, they will make elections less free and outright unfair. It’s a war against the democratic elements of the U.S. political system.
The “culture war” is the third front, although this front is more accurately described not as a war over culture but a war against culture. In his book, The Two Cultures, C.P. Snow famously analyzed the difference between the culture of science and that of the humanities. The fascist war against culture in the United States encompasses both, from the scientific work of the epidemiologist Anthony Fauci to the literary output of the Nobel laureate novelist Toni Morrison.
Historically, this war against culture is typical of the ultra-right mindset. Hitler described modern physics as “Jewish science.” Hermann Goering, the top Nazi leader second only to Hitler, gave voice to the fascist aversion to culture when he said that when he heard the word culture, he would reach for his Browning (a .380 caliber pistol manufactured in the United States beginning in 1911 and still made here in a new version today).
When it comes to violence, today’s fascists are not starting from zero. Violence is deeply interwoven with American history and culture. Violence is universal, and today there are countries with more violence than the United States. But among countries that have reached a level of economic development like the United States, this country is unique in its level of violence, especially gun homicides.
The European settlement of the American continent, which notwithstanding the linguistic appropriation by the United States of the very name America, stretches from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, was a violent affair, north and south. The United States, however, created a myth, national first and later global, about this violent territorial expansion and appropriation as a heroic saga, even divinely ordained as the Manifest Destiny of the United States. The Western is just the most prominent cultural result of that myth-making.
The lethal cult of the gun has its origins in part in Western frontier culture and in part in the need of enslavers in the South to terrorize the enslaved into submission. Slavery involved massive and extreme violence, from the point of enslavement in Africa through the brutal sea journey called the Middle Passage to chattel slavery in field and plantation. Far from the happy slaves “Gone with the Wind” version of history, maintaining slavery required inflicting extreme violence and fear on the enslaved.
Seizing the land from its native inhabitants, settling it, and expelling from it its first human settlers and keeping millions of Africans enslaved for centuries, were the crucible in which the pattern of American violence that we see today in mass shootings and other calamities, were baked in. The cult of the gun, the myth of the West, vigilantism to prevent revolt or escape by the enslaved, were fertile ground for the development of the subculture of violence and fascism in this country.
The war over the political institutions is a response to white panic over the steadily declining predominance of “real Americans.” If the electorate no longer predictably yields favorable results as defined by this group, why not purge the electorate so that it includes only real Americans?
That is what dozens of states are doing through voting suppression laws to falsify and distort electoral results. Winning is, for panicking whites, not just the main thing, but the only acceptable thing. Winning fair and square would be good, but we can no longer do that they know, as the last election showed, so let’s cheat and, in an Orwellian turn, call it the opposite, ensuring the integrity of elections.
On the culture front, truth is falsehood, falsehood is truth, the gist of the Orwellian society. The furious right-wing fight to preclude the teaching of American history through a clear lens rather than through rose-colored glasses includes bans on methods of analysis like critical race theory that demystify the narrative around race based on an exclusively white perspective. The proliferation of prohibitions on books and courses that deal with race, sexual behavior, and social justice is classic Orwellian fascism.
A common thread that runs through the current U.S. war against culture and through fascism is extreme nationalism. Already, some states have banned the teaching of anything critical of the United States. The trend is certain to grow. The whitewashing of American history is also the white washing of American history.
In this climate, a recent spate of bomb threats against historically black colleges and universities comes as no surprise, although the actors and the motives behind the threats are unknown. Ironically, black institutions of higher learning mainly were founded because white ones would not admit black students. That strategy sometimes backfired. Vice President Kamala Harris is just one of the anti-racists that have graduated from black institutions. Perhaps a scheme to maintain the color line by now has become so inconvenient for racists that some of them have decided to launch a campaign of terrorist threats to disrupt the institutions that racism made necessary.
The title of Orwell’s book about a fascist dystopia, published in 1949, is ‘1984’. That was the middle of the Reagan administration, which epitomized what in 1980 the social scientist Bertram Gross called “friendly fascism.” Subsequent Republican leaders became increasingly fascist and decreasingly friendly. The Trump presidency and its ongoing aftermath marked a transition to peak hostility and full fascism.
We can turn back the fascist tide but first we must recognize it and call it by its name. No more euphemisms like “conservative.” We are faced not with the philosophy of Edmund Burke but the reality of violent anti-democratic fascism striving to preclude a multiracial and multi-ethnic society through hook, crook, and gun. No more namby-pamby talk and action. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill on British resistance to the Germans during World War II, on every front the fascists come we shall fight them.
