I recall the moment the Trump candidacy stopped being funny to me; I was at work, idly half-listening to the local NPR affiliate in one earbud. Terry Gross was interviewing someone, and the word “Trump” was used in close proximity to “white nationalist” or “identitarian” (sidenote on “identitarian”: I’ve never seen a greater distance between people who use a word intended to paint public perception and the [correct] public perception of those people). I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but resolved to do a google search using those terms when I got home.
What I found was Evan Osnos’ increasingly (and increasingly, and increasingly) essential piece in The New Yorker: “The Fearful and the Frustrated”. Since late August, I’ve been chewing on the HUGE amount of chewable material that Osnos presented in his piece, but one topic in particular keeps getting stuck in my craw.
Upon my third or fourth attempt to explain the import of his piece, a deadening thought occurred to me: people didn’t fully understand that while some of us were witnessing the early stages of a fascist movement, others had no historical or political context for understanding–let alone confronting–fascism. They didn’t understand the stakes, they didn’t understand the antecedents, and they didn’t understand (or accept) the base, Sinclair Lewis-intoned truth: “It CAN happen here.” The final conclusion I reached from these conversations is that, without a legitimate Left, there is no recourse for confrontation of fascism.
This, admittedly, is a super-bleak thought. I cannot help myself, however. I think back to every time that a potentially or materially brutal fascism has been killed in the crib (or at least prevented from militarily developing a country to the point of becoming a worldwide threat), and the single common uniting factor is the existence of legitimate Leftist critiques to confront the fascists–rhetorically and sometimes physically. Oswald Mosely couldn’t build the working class constituency he wanted to take from Labour, the Republicans in Spain so wounded their enemy that Franco couldn’t add another continental European nation to the ranks of the Axis nations, and Golden Dawn had to deal with the black balaclava-clad anarchists who wouldn’t allow them to inflict a police riot on Athenian students opposing externally-imposed austerity. Even in the one domestic occasion before now where fascism seemed on the rise, Father Charles Coughlin and the business interests who literally sought to depose FDR had to contend with the high water mark– at least in terms of population and political influence–of the Communist Party of the USA.
The point is that, in nearly all cases of fascism being confronted and defeated (or at least gravely wounded), there was a legitimate, organized, intellectually-coherent, and relatively sizable Left.
A separate, but related issue, is the lacking philosophical vocabulary of the Amerian liberal establishment when it comes to denouncing and confronting fascism. The GOP’s handling of Trump has been downright shameful, but when the so-called “progressive who gets things done” is sending out “gotta hear both sides”-level press releases the morning after we all may well have witnessed the first chink in the armor of American democracy exploited by an orange buffoon, I worry that we just don’t have the critical mass of Leftists to–as we are sometimes forced to do in America–drag our erstwhile liberal friends to the left with us.
Violence has no place in our politics. We should use our words and deeds to bring Americans together. pic.twitter.com/FofjognpIA
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 12, 2016
The unique and horrifying things about the United States in this situation are twofold: 1) we have never had a political party specifically designed to represent the interests of industrial and post-industrial Labor AND 2) the Two Party system, while generally providing a failsafe for the USA against prior European styles of radicalism, can also prove to be a “dead man’s hand” style trigger if the social, economic, and political conditions are such that a normally unacceptable primary candidate manages to receive the nomination of one of the two major parties.
Each of these points will most likely be expanded in to larger pieces–after all, explaining the rise of Trump is basically a big juicy cartoon t-bone to an internet Marxist who wants to take gutshots at the Democratic party. But for now, the morning after the incident in Chicago–so many wondering “what is to be done?”–I just needed to write this down. Even if I think writing for catharsis is necessarily narcissistic, I worry that not enough people are thinking about the Trump phenomenon with the full toolbox of historical specificity, philosophical background, and analytical capacity.