Guest post: The old style of fascists often hid behind tears
Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Entry points.
On one level, Julia Carrie Wong is correct — instrumentalising the concept of “transphobia”, as a particularly-potent example of the more general “phobia”-based political discourse which has come to dominate rhetoric over the last couple of decades, *is* a tributary that leads to a sort of popularist authoritarianism that is becoming the modern conception of fascism.
But of course Wong doesn’t see that it is she who, by attempting to direct the rivers of fear and hatred and contempt into controlling how other people express themselves and even what they are allowed to think, is the mouthpiece for modern fascism. Of course she is simply defending what she sees as the truth, and she is working to protect the most vulnerable minority in the history of the world — it just so happens that protecting this minority requires us to reform society by jettisoning the hard-won freedoms of assembly and expression, along with the presumption of innocence and the ability for a professional to disagree with whatever governing body claims the consensus to be. And she believes that dismantling these things in the name of fighting fascism will only have positive consequences (at least until the society she helps to build decides that she is a fascist after all, and devours her as she wishes it would devour so many others).
The more traditional conception of fascism as blood-and-soil authoritarian nationalism has been dead and buried for about eighty years. But even in its time, the old style of fascists often hid behind tears, claiming to be the victims of a uniquely evil history, grasping for the power to overcome and revenge themselves upon that history. The new fascists, whatever their ostensible cause, are not so different from the old.
“On one level, Julia Carrie Wong is correct — instrumentalising the concept of “transphobia”, as a particularly-potent example of the more general “phobia”-based political discourse which has come to dominate rhetoric over the last couple of decades, *is* a tributary that leads to a sort of popularist authoritarianism that is becoming the modern conception of fascism.”
The historian Preserved Smith wrote this in his book “A History of Modern Culture” :
” the word “atheist” was at that time a bugaboo epithet, like “Bolshevist” or “communist” at present.”
“Transphobe” and “TERF” have become bugaboo epithets in the modern world.
Note how extremist trans activists in the United States happily stigmatise whole countries, like Sweden and Britain, as “full of TERFs” and “TERF island”. This ideology popularises xenophobia, authoritarianism (“NO DEBATE! You are denying trans people’s existence!”) and threats of violence.
I was just watching a documentary on George Carlin, and it was obvious how committed he was to freedom of speech. I would love to hear his take on the trans culture and the cancellation of speakers for believing biology is relevant.
Doesn’t this description fit Putin’s Russia, though? Not in all details, of course – Putin maybe more of a cleptocrat than a mere fascist, but the ideology surrounding his rule seems plenty fascist to me, Russia being the victims of history and all that. There are plenty of pundits saying Russia is fascist, and plenty saying it’s not. But that all boils down to definitions, not so much to any disagreement about what is really going on in that society.
I want to suggest that it’s worse – deeper, more radical, more sinister – than that. What’s being jettisoned is the stability of the language in which any claim to rights must be articulated.
Yes, rights of assembly and expression and so on might be under threat, but they’re still thinkable as rights. Suppose you live in a society in which members of a given demographic group are told that they must pay a higher tax rate, or must not go to school, or must wear a green hat on Wednesdays whether they like it or not. All these things are bad to varying extents. They are also straightforwardly wrongs: one may have a right to go to school, and even if we think that there is not a right to go to school, we can still hold that there is a higher-order right not to be treated differently from others within the community simply because of one’s demographic.
But in all those cases, we know what we’re up against.
Let’s say that there’s a law against women attending university; and let’s say that – either because there is a fundamental right to go to university, or because there is a fundamental right to have the same educational opportunities whatever they are irrespective of sex – this policy violates at least one of the rights of women.
Well, in a funny sort of way, OK. We know what’s going on here. Anyone opposed to the policy can articulate objections to it, and that’s substantially because we know what it means: what the parameters of the words in the law are, how they’re used, to whom the law applies and doesn’t apply, and in what way it applies and doesn’t apply.
One may not like the land on which one stands, but at least it’s stable. One can at least imagine doing something to reconfigure things.
But what we are seeing is a world in which the very words in which laws and rights must be articulated are being unmoored – and not by accident, but gleefully and deliberately, and in a manner that is almost completely arbitrary, save for the one criterion of whether it happens to serve certain political ends.
That’s horrifying.
Once words become bent around outcomes, we’re all sunk – and that includes those who do the bending, would that they could see it.
@4 this is such an important point. I can’t even ask whether x event or x service is ‘women only’ without getting into a ridiculous conversation about what that actually means, and even after such a conversation none of the participants can actually be sure they’ve communicated what they intend to…so I just decline to participate in anything that would require me to be vulnerable that I can’t be 100% sure is single sex. So I, and women, lose out.
Enzyme #4
Brilliant comment! I hope Ophelia makes it a guest post.
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