Trials
Fintan O’Toole explains Trump’s fascism tryouts:
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon.
Fascism doesn’t have to wear 1930s clothes to be fascism. It’s not a historical category, it’s a political one; it wasn’t killed, it was injured.
Trump is ignorant of almost everything but he does grok test marketing.
He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
And there is no magic mechanism that is guaranteed to stop him before it’s too late. If only there were.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
That all seems accurate and it’s terrifying how closely it matches what Trump has already done. Maybe the good news is that he’s so horrible that the 60% hates him just as intensely as the 40% hate us?
The next stage, O’Toole says, is to get people to accept outright cruelty. That’s the stage we’re in now.
To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.
I’m not sure he’s right that it’s been a big success. On the other hand it’s hasn’t been the crushing disastrous regime-ending failure it should have been.
This is scarier than I thought.
I’ve never thought of Trump as clever enough to pull off something as calculated as this. He seems to thoughtlessly blunder from one thing to another. Hearing him talk, he sounds like a babbling idiot, and I can’t imagine anyone being that good of an actor that they could maintain it so long or consistently. Trump may be “his own man,” but he sure seems easily guided and led (given the way he will reflexively respond to or parrot Fox New talking points).
I still think he’s the figurehead (and lightning rod) in all this, rather than the actual guiding mind behind it all, assuming that there is only one, as opposed to a group of people competing amongst themselves for power, influence and control of Trump. And how do the Russians fit into this? Putin certainly helped Trump get into the White House, but how do the domestic powers behind Trump’s throne deal with such a powerful outside influence?
I’m not sure this is the next step. We’ve already had animals, which may be a test run for the somewhat more dehumanizing vermin. But the dehumanizing language has already begun, and was even implicit in much of the campaign rhetoric – not blatant, not said outright, but there nonetheless.
He started testing his style on his Republican primary opponents. That worked so well, he moved it to his Democratic challenger. He had already tried out the sexist language on Carly Fiorina, so he knew it would play on Hillary, who was hated by so many for so long.
The problem isn’t totally that his people tolerated it; the biggest problem is that so many people on the left acquiesced, and even helped to heat up the rhetoric against the candidate they saw as being less perfect than the candidate they preferred. The left continues to blame her for the loss, never willing to notice that the Donald is responsible for his own actions, his voters are responsible for their own actions, and that she won substantially more votes than her opponent. In fact, she won more votes than any white man in history, and more votes than Obama in his win in 2012. But pundits on the left continue to blame her – she ran a bad campaign, she had too much baggage, she was too tied to “special interests” (by which they mean any interest of people who are not white males).
Trump has taken over the propaganda machine, subverted the press, and did it without force or bloodshed. He simply took advantage of unspoken, unwritten rules in the press which tie them to the business-as-usual model of political analysis and the refusal to call a sitting president a liar, a thief, a coward, a deplorable…or a fascist. So they can lay the loss at one remark by Hillary in which she accurately identified Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables, claim that the electorate doesn’t like nastiness, and ignore the reality that the nastiest of all nasties won the election on a technicality and slimed his way to Washington accompanied by more gators and crocs and poisonous serpents than any other President in recent history (perhaps in all of history).
Now none dare call it fascism. It’s pretty much on a par with Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.
I don’t at all buy the theory that what we’re seeing is a careful series of trial runs, followed by recalibrations, followed by more trial runs, all carefully working toward a well-defined goal.
I think the facts better fit the theory that Trump is an impulsive man-baby who wants to do whatever he feels like doing whenever he wants to do it, and what he wants to do shifts constantly.
Ophelia, you are right to doubt the policy of separating families was some kind of secret success. I’d go further and say that suggestion is ludicrous. It was a clear failure and they have backed way down (in a real way, not faking it as many initially feared).
And it seems silly to suggest Trump is slowly working up to “vermin” when he entered the game with “rapists”.
I agree with much of Your Name’s not Bruce?‘s assessment. It’s possible there are smart people with a master plan, but it’s not Trump.
However, I am skeptical they’re marching us toward fascism. I think they’re just trying to keep the man-baby in check while they push for the usual Republican goals of slashing government, eliminating regulations, and cutting taxes on the rich. You may hate that agenda, but it’s not fascism.
I think the fascist-looking elements come from Trump himself, just because he’s a bully who always wants to get his way. It’s very damaging, but it’s not a calculated march to fascism.
He doesn’t need to be the faintest bit clever to do what he’s doing. His experience of life has taught him that it is possible to get away with an unbelievable amount of cheating and other hanky-panky and his attack instinct has so far worked better than the opposite would ever have done. If he ever does go down, it will be a complete shock to him.
What Stewart said – we needn’t suppose he’s that smart to believe that there is a strategy implicit in his behavior. Plants seek light; Trump seeks power in tribalism. The plants don’t need to understand phototropism to demonstrate it; Trump doesn’t need to understand fascist political theory to be an effective instance of it. All he has to do is push where he can, back off and make excuses where he must, and repeat.
It’s also a false dichotomy to suppose it’s a plan of his versus him being a convenient stooge. He’s not a planner or a thinker or a detail guy – it’s enough that he pushes his own hobbyhorses and degrades democracy whichever bit works at a time, while picking out kakistocrats to destroy institutions one by one according to their talents and interests. He works as the lightning rod just doing his thing – it doesn’t much matter if he can conceive of it that way or not, he doesn’t need to do any clever or understanding work, “leadership” for him can be brutal and near brainless and perfectly effective.
Yes. I suppose I don’t really believe the careful planning aspect of the idea either. It’s more that he wants to be as shitty as he can possibly get away with. It’s not that it’s called fascism, it’s that that’s what it is, whatever it’s called.
It’s blundering and fully conscious both at once. The constant stoking of racism and rage at Trump’s “rallies” isn’t done by accident.
Was the family separation policy a success or a failure? It depends what outcome you are measuring. I’m on the side of partial success (from their point of view). We used to talk about shifting the Overton window, that window has been completely smashed. You had people on TV defending the deliberate orphaning and incarceration of babies and young children and far too many people in the country nodding their heads in agreement.
Where would a loyal Republican draw the line now? How far is too far? When it comes to undocumented immigrants, the answer is there is no line. Even immigrants here on visas or green cards like me are worried. Hell, a US citizen makes a protest through an act of civil disobedience and because she happens to be naturalized not natural born (horrid phrase btw), some of the Fox news blowhards are calling for her to be stripped of her citizenship. It’s a message to all the naturalized citizens of this country – you’re a second-class citizen and not a real American so behave yourself.
Think they won’t strip people of LPR status or citizenship for trivial reasons? It’s already happening – USCIS has a unit now dedicated to discovering the most insignificant of errors and omissions on people’s applications to generate an excuse to deport them.
I think Ophelia has nailed it – it can be both blundering and calculating at the same time. Hitler’s government was one of the most chaotic, disorganized and frankly incompetent governments imaginable and they still managed to commit horrors. Don’t think the country can’t do the drunkard’s walk into appalling crimes. Babies and children in concentration camps are being neglected and mistreated; we’re already there.
Thanks, Jeff. To articulate a bit more where I think it comes from, I suspect most of us make more of an effort not to do things we know are wrong, perhaps out of a mixture of conscience and fear of consequences. Trump seems to lack both and has thus discovered what many of us never find out: that it is possible to get away with an enormous amount of shit without having to suffer for it. A large part of it is the sheer brazenness.
How was the Brexit ‘referendum’ rigged? Or Trump’s election? Oh yes the plebs in the UK and US didn’t vote “correctly’, however to equate that with a coherent fascist strategy is nonsense.
O’Toole needs to take off his little tinfoil hat and get some perspective.
from ‘Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay’, by Mary Midgley:
“Konrad Heiden, in his life of Hitler, stresses the incoherence and vacillation of his policies, the random, opportunistic way in which he picked up his ideas, largely according to their saleability:
“‘Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind, but a sail to catch the wind…. The more passionately Hitler harps on the value of personality, the more clearly he reveals his nostalgia for something that is lacking…. Yes, he knows this mass world, he knows how to guide it by “compliance”…. He did not have a plan and act accordingly; he acted, and out of his actions a plan arose.'”
Sorry about those complicated quotation-marks. Heiden’s book appeared in English translation in 1944.
Ah interesting – I have that book but haven’t read it. Puts on list
RJW – Why the sneer? Do you think the votes for Brexit and Trump were wise?
And how Trump’s election was rigged has been much discussed; there were a number of ways. One was gerrymandering; another was widespread voter suppression.
Another of course was Comey’s interventions.
@Tim # 11:
I’m sure you have a source for your 1944 date of Heiden’s Hitler biography, and it may indeed have been reprinted in an updated edition then, but I have the first American edition in front of me now and it’s 1936, the same year as it appeared in German (translator: Winifred Ray).
If I were British or a US citizen I wouldn’t have voted for Brexit or Trump.The point isn’t whether the votes for Trump and Brexit were ‘wise’, but whether they were democratic. Given the UK’s FPTP system the Brexit vote was probably a rare example of an accurate popular vote in Britain and it wasn’t a referendum in the usual sense since it’s not legally binding on the government. Of course there’s the Electoral College gerrymander and vote rigging but they’re not unique to the Trump era, undemocratic electoral systems are as old as the US.
What point? Whose point? That’s not what you said, you said “the plebs in the UK and US didn’t vote “correctly’.” Is that about whether or not the vote was democratic?
And you’re wrong about the gerrymandering; there has been a huge surge in it since the Shelby ruling.
@11 Tim Harris,
I’d recommend ” The German Dictatorship ” by Karl Bracher.
@8 Claire
We can overstate the ‘incompetence ‘ of the Nazi government The regime’s army was demonstrably superior in quality to the Allied Armies which opposed it. Also Nazi Germany was, apart from the development of nuclear weapons, in some manufacturing developments, technically more advanced than its enemies. Not entirely corrupt, incompetent or disorganised.
The 1944 edition of Heiden’s book was translated by Ralph Mannheim, according to the note on Midgley’s book (which is well worth reading).
Yes, RJW, you may recommend other books. As to the quality of the German Army, I in the main agree, but the quality of the German Army had, I think, rather little to do with the Nazis but rather to do with German military military traditions (I am an admirer of the writer Ernst Junger, by the way). Perhaps you might address Heiden’s remarks about Hitler, instead of pretending that Nazi Germany as a whole was not wholly ‘corrupt, incompetent’ and ‘disorganised’. No doubt it wasn’t. It was certainly very competent and quite organised where killing Jews was concerned. Perhaps killing Jews and others is not for you a mark of corruption? Or the way leading Nazis used their positions to milk the nation? I wonder if you have thought about what being corrupt means. But I hardly think the invasion of the Soviet Union, or the declaration of war on the USA after Pearl Harbour was the mark of a sensible government. Perhaps you think otherwise.
As for the ‘plebs’ not voting correctly, there were quite a few non-plebs who voted for Brexit (I know some). What you are doing is trying to win an argument by pretending that anyone who who thinks voting for Trump or for Brexit was foolish or wrong is merely a snob — it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that people might have good reasons, as opposed to mere snobbishness, for thinking that Trump and Brexit would be disastrous. There were, after all, quite a few German people who voted ‘incorrectly’ for Hitler.
@ Tim:
Thanks. Now I’m wondering how the two differ. The 1944 release couldn’t possibly cut off at 1936, I’m assuming.
Tim Harris@20
(1) With you comments about the quality of the German army you’ve misunderstood the reality of total war. The Allies defeated the Mazis because they, particularly the US and the Soviet Union, had far greater combined industrial capacities. Traditions alone wouldn’t have sustained the Nazi war machine without the materiel supplied by Germany’s industries.
(2) Nazi Germany was a collection of competing fiefdoms. If the country was as dysfunctional as you claim, how did it survive until 1945. I’m not claiming that the regime wasn’t corrupt btw, but I’m skeptical in regard to generalisations. Your arguments from “it was certainly very competent” onwards are inept, they are essentially ad hominem attacks and not worth a rebuttal.
Dear RJW,
It was you who declared that the regime’s army was demonstrably superior to the Allied armies without mentioning the ‘materiel’ supplied by Germany’s industries. Now you bring this factor in. Yes, of course, traditions alone would not have sustained the German army. We do actually realise that. We are not pig-ignorant. Or wholly thoughtless. And then you go on to assert that the Allies defeated the Nazis because of their greater industrial capacities and indulge in some diversionary verbiage about ‘total war’. Well, if we are talking about total war now, and including the production of ‘materiel’ in the demonstrable superiority of whoever’s armies, then it is surely right to conclude that the the Allied armies were demonstrably superior to the German army, however excellent its fighting capacity. You need to learn to make distinctions.
‘If the country was as dysfunctional as you claim, how did it survive until 1945?’ you ask. (I think you mean ‘regime’ rather than ‘country’.) Well, Hitler came to power in 1933, and 12 years later the vaunted 1,000-year Reich ended with the country totally defeated, in ruins and in chaos. Does twelve years seem to you such a long time?
I am glad to learn that you do not claim that the regime wasn’t corrupt. I think you should learn to be sceptical about a few other things in addition to generalisations.