Authoritarianism / Fascism

I have thoughts backed up, many of them, obviously. As election day approached, I found myself thinking more and more about Lakoff, in the context of the New Republicans' ability to convey a narrative about who they are and what they stand for. It's monstrous, but has a kind of coherence. By contrast the Democrats don't have anything like that. As an institution, they are a moral and civil vacuum. They are rightly seen as calculating and untrustworthy.

However I take issue with Duran and Lakoff's assertion that the Democrats were practicing identity politics. If anything they were doing quite the reverse: identity complacency. The Republicans have been wielding identity politics frighteningly effectively.

In 2024, Kamala Harris tried to move to the right to find the mythical “center.” It didn’t work. Moving to the right doesn't get you to the center – because there is no center. When a Democratic politician moves to "the right" during an election, it erodes their authenticity. In fact, such tactics might have demotivated Democratic voters who were disillusioned to see their candidate running as a Republican Lite.

[…]

Moving forward, Democrats must stop making these superficial, last-minute lurches toward Republican ideas. They must frame the case not as left or right, but for the people and the public good. Moving to the right only convinces voters that the right has better ideas. It's a desperate short-term strategy with harmful long-term consequences.

[…]

Especially helpful to Trump were large social media accounts that thrive on engagement from outraged Democrats. As in 2016, Trump’s "opponents" created a parasitic economy in which constant outrage over Trump's every utterance was the name of the game. Again, this was a massive failure – because focusing attention on Trump’s power — even his power to harm — helps Trump. (Don't expect these professional social media hounds to change their tactics. Amplifying Trump is their bread and butter.)

The attacks on Trump managed to help spread his message far and wide. If Democrats and the liberal press had spent less time reacting to Trump, they might have done a lot better job of trumpeting — and trumpeting loudly — their own candidate’s positives. 

In Australia, we do much the same by putting a cost premium on dangerous knowledge.

Florida’s public universities are purging the list of general education courses they will offer next year to fall in line with a state law pushed for by Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting “woke ideologies” in higher education.

These decisions, in many cases being driven by the university system’s Board of Governors, have the potential to affect faculty and thousands of students across the state. Hundreds of courses are slated to become electives after previously counting toward graduation requirements, which university professors and free speech advocates fear is just the first step toward those classes disappearing entirely.

The state’s involvement in a curriculum process — which has historically been left to universities — is riling academics and students who oppose how officials are using new authority to weed out courses like Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, and Women in Literature.

“This sort of state overreach could spell disaster for student and faculty retention, and the academic standing of Florida institutions,” said Katie Blankenship, who leads a state office for free speech advocacy group PEN America.

Yet the Board of Governors maintains that the state is merely carrying out the intent of the GOP-dominated Legislature, which in 2023 called for a wholesale review of general education offerings to ensure the courses stray from teaching “identity politics” and avoid “unproven, speculative, or exploratory” content.

This is why I find the "attacking LGBTQ people is a vote loser," arguments no consolation. There are six good (i.e. bad) reasons why fascists do it, and winning votes is only one of them:

This report explores the connection between two escalating crises: the systematic targeting of LGBTQ communities and democratic backsliding worldwide.

It examines how the rhetorical, political, and physical attacks targeting the LGBTQ community are, in addition to a critical rights issue, a key tactic in the authoritarian playbook, cloaking themselves as culture war politics as usual. 

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It outlines six goals of LGBTQ scapegoating: 

• Stigmatize: By censoring discussions and depictions of marginalized groups, perpetrators further stigmatize them, reinforcing their status as scapegoats.

• Mobilize a Base: Turning LGBTQ communities into a common enemy energizes and consolidates political support among certain factions.

• Win Elections: Exploiting fears related to the scapegoat helps gain electoral support and secure victories in political contests.

• Polarize: Manufacturing controversies along fault lines unifies authoritarian movements and sows divisions within a political opposition.

• Distract: Inflaming fear, disgust, and anger at scapegoats diverts attention from critical issues, government failures, or unpopular policies.

• Normalize Political Violence: Targeting LGBTQ individuals through intimidation, violence, and militia activities desensitizes the public to violence against this group and society at large.

We are currently getting a terrifying preview of what all this would look like in practice. Trump has never shied away from admitting – from promising – that his mass deportation “will be a bloody story.” And the leaders on the Right are currently doing their best to ensure that there will be blood long before the election.

On September 9, J.D. Vance used his social media to rail against “Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” He added: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

[…]

Over the next few days, Vance kept doubling down. On September 10, he claimed a child had been murdered by “a Haitian immigrant who had no right to be here.” The senator from Ohio did not care that the child’s parents begged him to stop using their boy, who was killed in a car accident, to demonize immigrants.

[…]

This vile propaganda has had its desired effect. Already on September 12, City Hall, schools, and the DMV in Springfield had to be evacuated because of bomb threats from people raging against the Haitian immigrants. Acts of vandalism against the Haitian community followed. More threats against elementary and middle schools as well as against public officials on September 13. On September 14 and 15, hospitals had to be evacuated – so did universities, as someone threatened to shoot members of the Haitian community on campus. Ohio State Troopers now sweep every building in every school in Springfield Ohio, every morning before the start of classes, looking for explosives, because the bomb threats keep coming. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis are marching through town – the Proud Boys, and a group called Blood Tribe. Life in Springfield, Ohio upended. All based on a lie.

I am pornography. Granted, it's not necessarily the first thing you'd notice about me. That is to say, I am not the subject of pornography, but the thing itself, 24/7. It's jolly tiring, I can tell you.

The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define “pornography,” their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the “normalization” of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls “gender ideology.” Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. “Pornography,” Roberts continues, is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” And how should it be outlawed? “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” Project 2025 is not targeting “pornography” as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography. 

The US Bill of Rights? That's pornography. Have you seen what's in it? Can you imagine how exposure to that sort of thing might harm children?

Wow; this guy knows the US Right. His argument that what unites them is a powerful shared vision of what (indeed who) they do not like is utterly sound. By the time they have worked their way through this list, there will be very little satisfaction to be had from watching them turn on each other.

As the broader public turns its attention to these plans, and most people rightfully react with a mixture of horror and concern, a lot of skepticism remains. What is the role of Trump in all of this: Isn’t it more likely that he is going to mess things up, as he has never shown any interest in meticulous planning nor the necessary discipline to enact an ambitious agenda? The Right may try to present a unified front now, but there are so many groups and factions here, and they don’t all share the same ideas about what America should look like: Shouldn’t we expect a lot of infighting and self-sabotage rather than a well-oiled regime? And most importantly, perhaps, haven’t we been through this once before: Isn’t it more likely we get a repeat of the kind of chaos that was so characteristic of the first Trump presidency?

These questions are important. But too strong a focus on Trump’s erratic nature and the many rivalries on the Right obscures the fact that reactionaries are actually united by the desire to punish their enemies, “take back” the country, and restore the “natural order” of unquestioned white Christian patriarchal rule – a unity that is indicative of a broader realignment on the Right towards an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism. And those who expect merely more of the same chaos that defined Trump’s presidency tend to overlook the fact that the Right would be operating under much more favorable conditions this time: With a fully Trumpified GOP, a reactionary super-majority on the Supreme Court, and with the omnipresent threat of escalating political violence intimidating anyone who dares to dissent.

Trump world wasn’t ready in 2016. The American Right more generally wasn’t ready – they didn’t have the know-how, the plans, or the personnel to get anywhere close to remaking the nation in accordance with their reactionary vision.

They are determined to not make that mistake again. “Project 2025” is evidence that the Right has concrete plans to take over and transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: Exacting revenge on the “woke” enemy – and imposing a minoritarian reactionary vision on society. 

This is straight out of the Project 2025 template.

A completed draft Texas Republican Party platform refers to homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” and Drag Queen Story Hour as “predatory sexual behavior.” The platform has been voted on by state party delegates and will be formally adopted on Wednesday after a final vote count.

The list of state party priorities calls for an end to legal same-sex marriages, same-sex parenting, all LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination laws, all transgender rights — including gender-affirming care for children and adults — a ban on LGBTQ+ content in schools and libraries, the defunding of all diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and legal protections for anyone who discriminates against queer people based on “religious or moral beliefs.”

Furthermore, the Texas GOP platform calls for a complete end to all of the following: pornography, federal welfare programs, minimum wage laws, mandatory sick or family leave policies, net neutrality, removal of Confederate monuments, pro-immigrant sanctuary cities, public education of undocumented children, no-fault divorce, non-abstinence sex education, abortion, birthright citizenship, professorial tenure in colleges and universities, cannabis legalization, anti-climate change legislation, contact tracing for the tracking of communicable diseases, federal regulations ensuring safe farm food production, and U.S. participation in the United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Days after dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli air strikes against displacement camps in Southern Gaza, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley wrote “Finish them!” on Israeli artillery shells. 

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Alongside her chilling note, Haley wrote “America loves Israel!” and autographed the bomb.

 If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)? 

While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”