Trump regime isn’t fascist, claims leading intellectual: It just looks that way

If there is one thing you are supposed to know about Mark Lilla it is his status as a general intellectual A professor of humanities at Columbia Lilla is a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books who frequently writes about other intellectuals like Walter Benjamin Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin His writing shows the strengths and also the self-deceiving limitations of his class when he writes about subjects that intersect with politics To briefly summarize Lilla s the majority latest foray into our current national predicament he argues emphatically that Trumpism is not conservatism and is also not fascism Well then what is it He posits that the MAGA right is fed not by conservative ideas but by chthonic forces in human nature that at different points in history gather like a hurricane and can level any decent political order Say what Are we to regard people like Donald Trump Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem as gods of the underworld His formulation might have the virtue of sending readers to the dictionary to learn a word from Greek mythology but as a political categorization it does not strike this observer as useful Related John Roberts betrayed America for Donald Trump In a separate interview Lilla reiterates his claim At its root all that we re at this time seeing has nothing really to do with conservatism As for fascism what makes him hesitate to label Trumpism as such is what you might call vilification inflation by which I mean the overuse of certain terms that bring with them automatic moral judgments emphasis mine That is why I think it wise to think of Nazism and fascism as terms referring to specific European movements that grew out of the twentieth-century interwar period in Germany Italy and Spain Let us examine his claim about fascism Political systems that resemble one another in their fundamental structure and function are like species in the animal kingdom A chihuahua is not a golden retriever but they are both dogs To say that fascism as a political system is confined to three European examples from the s is equivalent to saying that we cannot describe Switzerland as a democracy because the term properly applies only to ancient Athens By the same logic Trump cannot be a dictator a term Lilla never uses whatever the enormity of his unchallenged executive orders because a dictator was elected by the Roman Senate If that were true then even Hitler was not a real dictator Lilla boggles at labeling a system as fascist exclusively because it is a taboo word that one should not mention To say that fascism is confined to three European examples from the s is equivalent to saying that we cannot describe Switzerland as a democracy because the term applies only to ancient Athens Any critical examination of the Trump regime in relation to fascism must attempt to define fascism and compare it with what we are now enduring What follows is a partial roster of policies attitudes and habits usually common to the various strains of fascism They can be present to varying degrees depending on the system and the absence of one or more does not mean the system isn t fascist National renewal The country must be reinvigorated from its decadence by a kind of shock therapy this trait is a function of an exaggerated nostalgia and a hatred of the present Nationalism and xenophobia There are endless proclamations of national superiority and hatred of foreigners yet despite this claimed superiority wily foreigners are invariably seen to be getting the better of the national public Militarism love of violence and machismo Trump and Hegseth s performance before the generals at Quantico offers a trenchant example Cult of the infallible leader While the leader is of unit indispensable his supremacy and dominance would be impossible to maintain without the sycophancy and unquestioning obedience of millions of members of the national region Anti-intellectualism anti-rationalism and feverish emotion These traits best express themselves in a hatred of universities science and learning more generally and a superstitious embrace of faith intuition and gut feelings Misogyny This is the flip side of obligatory machismo whereby women are not equal to men their only value lies in conceiving and nurturing the chosen race Hatred of minorities Fascism lacks a rationale and focus for its followers emotional intensity without an insidious internal enemy Cultural pessimism and an obsession with tradition in general This relates to fascism s false nostalgia and its discomfort with the pluralism and nonconformity of liberal society Economic nationalism This leads to a preference for tariffs and autarky in manufacturing both as a symbol of strength and to isolate the country from foreign commercial and cultural influence Privileging of business interests and hostility to workers rights This however is conditional on business leaders obediently supporting the regime which they are mostly happy to do paradoxically it is conjoined with a loudly proclaimed but false populism and identification with the working class We need your help to stay independent Subscribe nowadays to encouragement Mike Lofgren s commentary Hostility to parliamentary democracy There is no need for a legislative body when the leader decrees the laws nevertheless fascist leaders typically maintain a Duma or a Reichstag as a marionette theater a role for which Republican congressmen and senators are well suited Monumentalism spectacle and kitsch Fascist leaders need gargantuan physical symbols of their greatness as in Hitler s plan to transform Berlin into Germania militarized parades and other gaudy spectacles also qualify and both the architecture and the spectacles as I have previously described inevitably trend toward kitsch Lying as an existential need Poland attacked the Third Reich All true Ukrainians wish to join Mother Russia Jan was a patriotic lovefest Foreigners will pay the tariffs Nihilism There are no enduring principles or values apart from the changeable whims of the leader this annihilative impulse is contemptuous of human life and will ultimately lead to social and physical destruction including widespread violence and death Fascist leaders need gargantuan physical symbols of their greatness and both the architecture and the spectacles inevitably trend toward kitsch This is my own summary list but it overlaps considerably with the characteristics of fascism described by Umberto Eco in an essay written years ago Having grown up in Mussolini s Italy Eco presumably knew what he was talking about The reader can compare either summary with the current regime in Washington and decide whether Lilla is correct to exclude fascism as an inspiration for Trump and his paladins The fact that Lilla s article appeared just as groups of Young Republicans were revealed to be admirers of Hitler and the Nazi gas chambers demonstrates how events have a way of embarrassing any claim that there are standards beneath which Trump supporters and operatives will not sink Indeed long before Trump ever appeared on the scene I witnessed people in the Republican Party expressing admiration for Nazism Pour two or three beers into a Republican and he might start warbling the Horst Wessel anthem It is certainly true that contemporary American fascism will not exactly correspond to the versions that prevailed in the s technological and social changes not to mention the enduring differences between American and European tradition will ensure differences in style When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag carrying a cross is a well-known quote inaccurately attributed to Sinclair Lewis but correctly summarizing the theme of his novel It Can t Happen Here But what about conservatism why does Lilla think it has nothing to do with Trump and his movement In his essay he says correctly I believe that there is no essence to conservatism meaning that it is not a set of fixed unchanging beliefs Just because conservatives now favor industrial protocol when they didn t years ago does not demonstrate they are not conservatives So why does he declare that Trumpism is not conservatism when tens of millions of Trump supporters consider themselves conservative and Trump s electoral car is the more conservative of the two national parties At bottom Lilla is making the no true Scotsman claim Trumpism isn t real conservatism Conservatism in the political sense arose in the modern world as a direct reaction to the French Revolution and more indirectly as a response to the Enlightenment Unlike Marxism or amendment liberalism it has no systematic ideological undertaking rather it is a set of dispositions and attitudes As its origin suggests it is primarily a reaction against modernity This is why the godfather of the post-World War II New Right William F Buckley Jr considered it his mission to stand athwart history yelling Stop This reactionary impulse is an ever-present tendency in conservatism Lilla s article appeared just as groups of Young Republicans were revealed to be admirers of Hitler and the Nazi gas chambers Events have a way of embarrassing any claim that there are standards beneath which Trump supporters and operatives will not sink Lilla does not see this In his book The Shipwrecked Mind he tells us Reactionaries are not conservatives This is the first thing to be understood about them Uh no It might be granted that a reactionary is not a conservative s identical twin but he is a sibling living under the same roof The transformation of Ronald Reagan s so-called movement conservatism to Newt Gingrich s nastier version and then to the Tea Party and eventually to Trump is hardly novel Bismarck s Germany was deeply conservative at its founding but after Bismarck s dismissal by the Kaiser and the strong reception of polemics by radical cultural pessimists like Paul de Lagarde Julius Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck who coined the term Third Reich Germany became more and more reactionary culminating in the anti-democratic extremism of right-wing parties after World War I From there it was only a short distance to Nazi dictatorship Moving from the tragic to the ridiculous one could say that Britain s Tories aka the Conservative Party have followed a similar trajectory It has been a sea change from Ted Heath the moderate s moderate who brought the U K into the European Union to Margaret Thatcher Boris Johnson and eventually the absurd Liz Truss the former leader of an critical country and nuclear power who now pilgrimages to CPAC conventions like a teenage groupie and apes MAGA rhetoric If the abiding characteristic and besetting sin of the liberal is caution complacency and a preference for the status quo which often lead to hippie-punching blind obedience to donors and inertia with conservatives it is competition against one another as to who is the the bulk conservative This may have its amusingly juvenile aspects in Capitol Hill bars after work but it is the visible manifestation of a cumulative and self-reinforcing radicalization This radicalization has functioned as a mechanistic almost Marxian dialectic At every point of dilemma in the GOP after Watergate after the elder George Bush s loss in and after Barack Obama s apparently sweeping mastery in pundits political scientists and even a limited Republican graybeards urged caution and moderation Yet in each event the party lurched further to the right Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts The bulk of Lilla s essay is an accurate accounting of the transformation of conservatism from the Reagan presidency until now He name-checks the principal authors of that transformation beginning with David Duke and proceeds through Pat Buchanan Rush Limbaugh and Sam Francis ending with the loonies at the Claremont Institute like John Eastman a failed version of Carl Schmitt and Michael Anton who authored the hysterical Flight Poll manifesto under the pretentious pseudonym Publius Decius Mus Yet Lilla balks at the implications of what is plainly there to see Describing John Ganz s book on the mutation of conservatism during the s When the Clock Broke he writes after reading the opening segment about David Duke I nearly tossed it across the room Yes yes conservatives are all Nazis Oh please He rapidly reverses his opinion of Ganz s work but it is obvious Lilla arrives predisposed to give conservatives every benefit of the doubt When discussing the false optimism of the early s when the Soviet empire collapsed Lilla cannot avoid browbeating the reader with his bizarre take on Francis Fukuyama s flawed analysis of the era The End of History and the Last Man Not that history as such was over Fukuyama never explained that so please get off his back Aside from the the plain words of the book s title Fukuyama himself wrote that history had reached not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history but the end of history as such That is the end-point of mankind s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human leadership Lilla is clearly telling us that black is white His na vet and intellectual stubbornness also led Lilla to believe as late as that the Bushes and the Clintons would continue to be the dynasts of their respective parties One can surmise that this political shortsightedness also makes him bridle at believing that Trumpism is fascist or that conservatism can morph into fascism But the signs were visible at the latest with the seating of the Tea Party Congress in perhaps even earlier in the George W Bush presidency with Republicans ghoulish enthusiasm for torturing terrorism persons of interest and maybe well before that I recall that after the Oklahoma City bombing in a Republican congressional staffer accosted me with the hypothesis that Timothy McVeigh was a scapegoat and the bombing had been an inside job by the Clinton administration to justify oppressing conservatives This theory had considerable resonance on the right wing and helped metastasize the militia movement As a historian of intellectual movements Lilla focuses closely on the various lonely cranks of the far right but never seriously grapples with why their manifestos should appeal to tens of millions of Americans or conversely whether these writers were merely clues of pre-existing beliefs rattling around in the collective American psyche Were they a bunch of demonic St Pauls converting the gentiles or were they surfers riding the wave of the nation s collective id As is customary with virtually every journalist political scientist or academic Lilla obeys a taboo even stronger than that of mentioning fascism the proscription against seriously assessing the moral responsibility of the American people Why do people believe that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent or that rioters at the Capitol were tourists or that consumers don t pay tariffs or other absurdities that an intelligent -year-old would laugh at After a certain point a willful proud ignorance masquerading as superior wisdom becomes a social menace and a stigma of poor citizenship Cultured Germans could not believe that an Austrian vagrant from the Vienna gutter could claw his way to the power of life and death over them and ultimately goose-step a nation into total destruction as millions of other Germans cheered Our intellectual class it seems similarly cannot conceive that an ostensibly washed-up celebrity from the Reagan era could become the personification of fascism in the st century and that millions of Americans prefer him to representative ruling body and the rule of law Metaphors involving Greek mythology are an evasion rather than an explanation Any civilized society must cultivate and maintain an intellectual class We should nurture them as an occasionally irresponsible group that can go against the grain of society and pronounce hard truths But when intellectuals refuse to render moral judgments when they sink into safe conventionality that in itself is a kind of judgment If at this late date Mark Lilla is still invoking Godwin s Law to avoid grappling with the existential issue of our age we must remember the comment of George Orwell a frequent critic of the frivolity of Britain s intelligentsia at an earlier time of civilizational peril We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear In times of universal deceit telling the truth will be a revolutionary act Read more from Mike Lofgren on politics and history We need a new theory of democracy because this version has failed David Brooks faces the truth of US history and runs away Goose-steppers in the name of freedom The nonsensical cult that now rules America The post Trump regime isn t fascist suggests leading intellectual It just looks that way appeared first on Salon com