Warnung; Warnung Auch
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
Franchise Stamp 1938 (NSDAP). Hitler and the Nazis put their stamp on history. Will Trump and the Republo-fascists be able to do the same? A voice from the past issues a warning.
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About 4 ½ years ago, in a used bookstore, my son came across a fascinating book of history and political science on the development of fascism in a nation-state. Knowing my interest in this subject matter, he purchased and forwarded it to me tout suite. At that time, in this space I presented a few excerpts from that book. Now, given what we as a nation will be facing should the Republo.-fascists take one House of Congress, or even worse, both Houses, in the upcoming mid-term elections, as well summarized recently by The New York Times' Michelle Goldberg (as well as many others to be sure), I thought that it would be useful to revisit those excerpts, published back then. As I did at the time, I presented them with certain edits and alterations for present relevance. This time around, I will put those edits and alterations in italics to make it clear exactly which text is updated. As it happens, the text which has been updated here is very limited. Most of what is presented here is exactly the same as it was in the original.)
And so:
"A wholly definitive study is still impossible, because of the timing, and because many indispensable sources of information, such as party and organizational archives, such documents as income tax returns, intra-leadership communications, and "classified [for various reasons] documents," are as yet closed to scholars (unless leaked). With regard to many events, judgments must be based upon admittedly incomplete evidence. These difficulties, which always beset the student of contemporary politics, are aggravated here by the determined and well-organized efforts of the new government and party-in-power to discourage incisive research into its methods and objectives and to misrepresent many of its goals and techniques for reasons of political expediency. Deception is a political imperative in all government. In this regime, it is an applied science and a fine art.
"The new leaders who 'think with their hearts' repudiate all objectivity and scientific detachment as evil products of liberalism... Under these circumstances any effort at objectivity implies per se the adoption of an attitude evoking negative emotional response from the officials under observation. Like every form of highly emotionalized and subjectivized mass politics, Trumpism demands acceptance or rejection, period.
"Only a social revolution can destroy the Trumpist state. Only an upheaval in which the political power of the economically-dominant sector of the ruling class is permanently broken by mass action from below can offer hope of weakening the grip upon the sources of power of the Trumpist state. The new Trumpist absolutism is the only possible source of power for the ruling class in the age of increasingly concentrated monopoly capitalism, since it protects their interests far better than any imaginable alternative.
"In the run-up to Trumpism, the true left in the United States accepted this view of the situation. But their small size, the destruction of the militant trade unionism that they had led many years before, undertaken by a concerted effort of the ruling class across the nation, and the incredibly destructive in-fighting over who indeed were the 'true leftists,' especially in relationship to the history of the Soviet Union and its leadership, and over the 'lesser of the evils' proposition, with the resulting failure to form a Popular Front, rendered them very limited in what they were able to do to effectively fight the onslaught of Trumpism. At the same time, the bourgeois liberal forces over the years leading up to the triumph of Trumpism, on the one hand implemented a large number of policies and programs which led directly into the hands of the Trumpites, and on the other, because of their politico-economic history and record, they were totally unable to design and present an electoral politico-economic program that was a clear alternative, capable of defeating the Trumpites."
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So, from where might these quotes be drawn, you might ask. Well, the basic text, with which I have taken the (obvious) liberty of putting it into the contemporary U.S. context in certain sections, is hardly contemporary. In fact, it is drawn from a remarkable book entitled The Nazi Dictatorship: A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism, by Frederick L. Schuman, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. "So," you might say, "what is so remarkable about that? A zillion of so books have been written about the Nazi era, a few even from a true left-wing perspective." "Well yes," I would respond. "That is so. Except that the first edition of this book, from which the bulk of the (edited/updated-to-be-sure) text was drawn was published, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, on April 22, 1935, with the second, historically updated edition published on May 11, 1936."
With this understanding, it should be quite easy to see where, in the original, words like "Nazi," "fascist," "Communist Party of Germany," "Socialist Party of Germany," and so forth appeared. And oh, by the way, Prof. Schuman predicted the coming of the Second World War, as a natural outcome of fascism and its need for perpetual expansion. There are many lessons for the opposition to Trumpism to be drawn from this book and the history it presents, from a then contemporary perspective.
As for a definition of fascism-in-the-21st century, on the Trumpian model, at the time I offered this one for consideration:
A politico-economic system in which the Executive Branch of the Government: regards the Constitution as in place only on paper; demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to its policies and programs; redefines the words "truth," "science," "data," "fact," and "reality" through the use of the Big Lie technique; regularly uses the Doctrine of White Supremacy/racism, xenophobia in general and Islamophobia in particular, and homophobia to achieve political ends; suppresses of the free vote by challenging the legitimacy of the electoral system; casts "the media" as a principal enemy, with the aim of suppressing dissent and promoting distrust in it and its reporting; all in service of the economically dominant sector of the capitalist ruling class: manufacturing, fossil fuels, agriculture/food, pharma/health services, retail, transportation, banking/investment/financial services.
I use a somewhat trimmed-down one now, but I do think that it is useful to present the fuller version, from time-to-time.
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As regular readers know, I have written extensively on contemporary Republo-fascism (e.g. Republo-Fascism and Trump: A Brief Review of SJ Columns on the Subject [click here]. Like many other contemporary analysts, e.g. David Corn in American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy," I have pointed out that the fascist movement in today's Republican Party had its origins many decades ago (see my "forward history" The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, the first version of which iosotry of Americna FAscism, 2001,2002Hiwas published in 1996).
The subject is actually a very popular one right now, as a review in the Atlantic of three additional books on the same subject, makes very clear:
"Yet the recent trajectory of the Republican Party, and its turn against many of the key precepts of Reaganism, calls for a reassessment of this perspective. That is precisely what the historian Nicole Hemmer offers in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. She is joined in rethinking the evolution of conservatism by two journalists who approach the subject from different places on the political spectrum. Dana Milbank, the author of The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is a liberal Washington Post columnist. Matthew Continetti, the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, arrived at The Weekly Standard as a 22-year-old in 2003 and is now a Never Trumper at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to National Review. All three books portray a conservatism that was fraught with tensions long before Trump's emergence. Their goal is to explain why the current incarnation of the GOP shouldn't come as a surprise. In showing the deep roots of our present crisis, their analyses also suggest the limits of any politics focused on a dream of salvaging the Republican Party."
(See also Jonathan Chait's excellent column in a recent issue of New York Magazine: "How to Make a Semi-Fascist Party.")
Obviously, Trump is not anything like the creator of the movement. (That is one of the ways in which he is distinctively different from Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini [who seems to be making an after-life comeback in Italy], Francisco Franco, or the "fascist waanabe," Republican love-object, Viktor Orban.) Trump is a figurehead, or as I have characterized him, he is "the headlamp on the Republo-fascist train that is roaring down the track." To be sure, he is a very talented headlamp (if one could possibly use such a simile) and indeed a very valuable one. It is unlikely that the Party could have gotten to where it is at this particular juncture of U.S. history without him. But he is hardly a thinker (except of course about himself, see the recently released "Woodward-Trump Tapes"). But, harking back to the text of Prof. Schuman, again from the mid-1930s, in one way or another they surely would have gotten to one version or another of where they are now.
In the next two columns I will first briefly review my projection of how the Republican Party would get to where it is now that I presented in "The 15% Solution." Then I will summarize my view, shared with many others, of where they intend to take the nation. Actually, the latter is pretty easy, because they are telling us loud and clear in what direction that is. But it will be useful to summarize it.