Low-Grade Fascism and High-State Illiberalism: The Choice Before Us?

 

The historian, Robert Paxton links fascism with

·         A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solution.

·         Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences.

·         The need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny.

·         The beauty of violence [rhetorical or otherwise] and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success (The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 219).

 Stated in narrative form, fascism is:

 “…a form of political behavior marked by excessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion” (p. 218).

 A discussion as to whether fascism still holds as a useful political marker in identifying right-wing authoritarian movements and governments in capitalistic societies is one for another time. The relevant point here is that the MAGA movement, inspired by the nefarious intrigues of Donald Trump, now metastasized to large segments of the Republican Party, exhibits many of the traits identified by Paxton.

 Trump remains the central figure. His election denialism and the distrust his claims have evoked within most Republican voters is a dagger thrust at the heart of the constitutional republic. His demonization of those engaged in judicial investigations into serious charges of lawlessness on his part are nothing less than a projection of his own guilt against the alleged machinations of the Department of Justice and the current President who he condemns in the most unhinged of terms. Similarly, so is his effort to escape justice by projecting “the left’s” animus against him as really aimed at his supporters who, he contends, are the actual targets of the “deep state.” Claiming to be their voice, their warrior, their justice, and their retribution, it would be difficult to minimize the evil this demagogue has unleashed in the US body politic that could never have had effect unless there was a willing public sufficiently gullible to blithely accept his baseless claims.

 In addition to Trump’s crude rhetoric, is the demonic casting of “wokeness” as a right-wing trope against the entirety of the pluralistic, multi-cultural, multi-racial society that makes up the American tapestry of our time. The “woke” pejorative is a direct attack on the predominant social and political values that have evolved from the politics of the 1960s on the need to protect the environment, the promotion of social inclusion, economic justice, equitable educational access, and the creation of good paying jobs structured in the emerging economies of the near-term future. These core values are now articulated as the underlying vision of the Biden domestic agenda, and more broadly, the Democratic Party.

 The difference between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis is that the former does not possess an ideological center, but only one rooted in what he perceives as what is good for him. In never escaping the personal, his public life is embedded in an ineradicable narcissistic wound that he seeks to project upon the nation by turning a significant segment of the adult population into fanatical conspiracy mongers, just like himself. In his use of rhetorical violence and personal attacks, Trump operates out of a low-grade fascist iconography which has occasionally resulted in the outbreak of direct violence, sometimes cheered on by the former Joker-in Chief.  By contrast, DeSantis is more of an ideological zealot whose political roots are ground in the “freedom” caucus of the House of Representatives who now seeks to rule as Governor of Florida in the authoritarian style of the illiberal Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. Notwithstanding his professed small-government conservativism, DeSantis seeks to use all the resources of government in his possession to impose his ideology on any public subject to his rule. If he becomes president, it will be America where the “woke go to die.” This is his singular mantra, which has nothing to do with the substantial issues this nation faces and will be contending with in the next 20 years.

 Either one of them—Trump or DeSantis—in the White House in 2025 would put this nation in the gravest danger as a viable constitutional republic, capable of surviving in any way resembling a 20^th and 21^st century vision of what one would expect and hope for in a free, modern nation. At least for one claiming to be a beacon of democracy, one poised to meet the national and international challenges of the next couple of decades while maintaining the nation’s core values in the quest “to form a more perfect Union, [to] promote the general Welfare, and to secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and our Posterity” (Preamble to the US Constitution).

 The tyranny of a small, but politically potent minority is threatening to rain political terror on the body politic, which will take the concerted effort of a large and far from focused majority to counteract. It is upon this forthcoming struggle that a significant portion of this nation’s direction will be determined for the foreseeable future. Whether we are ready to grapple with the political consequences that are before us, in which the stakes are substantial, remains to be seen. One thing is clear; we cannot rely on any inevitable arc of history bending upward to save us.