Going Going Gone
Unfortunately, the invasion of democratic Ukraine by an autocratic mass murderer has, quite reasonably, been a distraction from, in Philip Roth’s no longer anachronistic words, “The Plot Against America.” Of course the latter is not nearly as deadly, taking place mostly in the committee rooms of state legislatures, but historically it may be even more path-breaking: So we need to take some time off from total war to look at our own not-yet-violent civil war.
I begin with a reminiscence. Back in the day, when there were three major league baseball teams in New York City, each had an iconic radio broadcaster: Mel Allen for the Yankees, Red Barber for the Dodgers, and Russ Hodges for the Giants. And there was one trope in particular they had in common, a favorite way of calling home runs: they would shout into the mic, “There’s a long drive to left… that ball is going, going, GONE!
That litany came back to me the other day, watching a ball from the bat of a contemporary New York Yankee, and interspersing it with an occasional switch to MSNBC. Every day in every way, American democracy is going going –and I don’t know if the Left Fielder with his back against the wall will be able to reach this one — gone…Like Andy Pafko of the Dodgers on October 3, 1951: “There’s a fly ball to Left, Pafko to the wall–the Giants win the Pennant, the Giants win the Pennant!”
Backs against the Wall; but now a high wind is blowing the Flag in, not out, gale force coming.
The overarching assault, of course, is on democracy–the common understanding of what’s at stake, though we could also call it representative government, or constitutional government, or republican (sic!) government. But why the assault; why the explicit repudiation of universal suffrage and the rule of law?
There are deep causes, and more instant causes visible in American political economy and culture. The latter are by now commonplace, but a few words–controversial and cursory–about the former.
What we have been witnessing for a many decades, dating back at least to the great Oil Embargo and Oil Price Shock of 1973, is the end of the unchecked exploitation of natural resources by imperialism, as well as the rise to competitive power in at least some if not all productive sectors; and of new national actors: above all China. In turn, this movement led to the era of de-industrialization in the United States, generating the rise of some sectors and the unstoppable decline of others–what Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction” of capitalism. In this case, of the industrial working class.
Adam Smith failed to anticipate what happens when “private profits” are made by giant corporations overseas. This world-wide process is euphemistically called “globalization,” but in actually it’s world capitalism, in which very few nations, and certainly not the United States, have any idea what to do about the necessary losers that capitalism generates. Only a handful of social democracies have been able to stem the tide.
In the absence of international socialism–and who has any idea how that would work–the contenders for power are a tepid reformism that can’t keep up with the pace of change, and Fascism. That is to say a political mass movement in what we call advanced capitalist societies.
Fascism accomplishes three things: The political system, unable to generate a leader who can make capitalism more productive of economic equality, offers instead: 1) economic nationalism, which is based on 2) the apotheosis of white racism, in turn based on the scapegoating and consequent normalized hatred of marginalized ethnic groups; and 3) in its post-modern form, the placation of male hysteria in the face of movements for gender equality and sexual pluralism.
All of this, almost by definition, is brought together by a male leader, a Great Man, who promises to overturn liberal egalitarianism, and authorizes male violence (with its female accomplices who hope to gain from their adherence to patriarchy) as the means to that end. As one letter writer to the Times points out, “he has emerged stronger than ever, with his legal troubles melting away, money pouring in and vast numbers of Americans fervently supporting him.” And again, in headline prose, “For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance.”
That is the road to Fascism; that is where we are now. Here are some of the straws in that wind, or maybe more accurately rooftops in the tornado:
The Big Lie: the “Stolen” Election.
Fascism usually turns on the Big Lie–it’s always someone’s fault, and the “someones” are those who’ve betrayed “the people,” that is, white nationalist patriarchy. The Big Lie of Donald Trump is the biggest and most successful in the history of legitimate governments, though Hitler had quoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Mein Kampf–but not during an election campaign, in which he did not do nearly as well as Donald Trump did in either of his two.
Everything follows from that; all serious, right now all ground-level politics, is about it. It has become the official ideology of all Republican activists, such that candidates for local, state, or federal office must repeat it to get the endorsement of the Ex, and implicitly the support of the Propaganda Agency of Fox News. In those states where Republicans control the state legislatures, the purpose of all legislation having to do with voting is to elect 2020 Deniers to vote-counting or vote-casting offices; who will have the power to send their own “electors” to Congress for certification and to give them the power to either control or destroy the electoral process.
In states where courts have power to find such actions unconstitutional, and are not in their hands, they–that is, state legislatures, will pass laws giving themselves total power, distort the electoral count, thus creating chaos, and count on the Supreme Court Republicans to provide the necessary vote to legitimize their actions and send the election back to the House of Representatives, where Republicans are almost certain to have a majority in at least twenty-six states. All of this is out in the open; everybody knows this is the goal: no one knows how to defend against it.
However. winning or stealing elections is one thing; how to govern is quite another. Autarchy, based on protective tariffs, will not save jobs in declining sectors; it will merely increase the balance-of-trade deficit. But accomplishment is not the purpose; the purpose is to maintain mass hatred of the scapegoats; to dehumanize them. How can that goal be achieved when the opposition represents millions more American than your own Party?
In that respect, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo tells us:
“…the most outlandish and genocide-friendly features of the Pizzagate and QAnon movements suddenly [become] totally ubiquitous and mainstream among Republican officeholders….It turns out the Democratic Party really is run by a conspiracy of pedophiles and child sex traffickers. And now you don’t have to go to 4Chan or 8chan to hear that. You can just open the emails from your Republican senator or Member of the House of Representatives.”
Has anything like this ever happened before, anywhere?
But that’s just the beginning: small or great, major or minor, everyone is fair game: here are some examples of how we are told to respond to the Satanic pedophiles:
“Lock Her Up”: Nowhere in any democracy has this chant been heard before; now a sure call-and-response favorite at any rally; along with the promise to impeach Nancy Pelosi. Liz Harrington, the spokeswoman for former President Donald Trump, delivered a speech at a conference organized by QAnon proponents this weekend in which she called for mass arrests of the people who purportedly “stole” the 2020 election. (“Purportedly” is not her word). Vladimir Putin can do no better.
“Enemy of the People”: I doubt that the ex-President has read Ibsen, but another sure-fire rabble-rouser, along with “Fake News Media, Fake News Media.” These are no longer rhetorical; the War on Reporters has been declared, in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, LA County. More to come.
Fake Science The Washington Free Beacon falsely reported that the Biden administration planned to distribute “crack pipes” as part of a $30 million grant for public grant: a concept that, while part of any support for the necessities of communal well-being, has become an accessory to the contempt for “elites” and “scientists.” This disdain is not innocent; from anti-vaxism to the denialism about climate change, it equals Holocaust denial in its costly falsification of the real world in which we have to live.
To the same point, the entire history of the welfare state is one of professionals using their expertise: Wisconsin Professor John Commons; who introduced the first Workmen’s Compensation Bill in Wisconsin; Frances Perkins, Chair of the Committee that drafted the Social Security Act; the Swedish economist Rolf Meidner who created the Meidner Plan upon which the Swedish welfare state was built; the British economist William Beveridge who drafted the Report that led to the creation of National Health Insurance; the statistician Molly Orshansky, who developed the index for measuring poverty that helped undergird the Johnsonian War on Poverty: these are just a handful of the social science experts who helped improve millions of lives. It’s safe to say that the scorners of “elite science” have done nothing for anybody except make their audiences feel superior to others.
Refusal of Debate. There will be no national debate in 2024, per the Republican National Committee. Why not? Because there is nothing to debate; no policies, as I’ve noted above, in which the Party as such has an interest. A debate is polite; an exchange of ideas, even hostile ideas. But you don’t bring ideas to a fight; you bring knives. Or guns. It’s not about who wins, but who annihilates.
In that context, what is hilarious, though not funny, are the occasional calls for “conversation,” for “listening to each other.” The Times had one of those a while back, by a woman whose name I don’t remember; though she is the first time-traveler in history, having just returned from 1960–when Richard Nixon refused to give the go-ahead to claims (probably over-stated) that the election had been stolen in Texas and Illinois, on the grounds that doing this would “divide the country.” “
“Taking over the Country,” which goes quite a bit further than that, is not something we can have a “conversation” about. It’s like a “conversation” between a white cop and a black guy driving with a broken tail-light. (See below)
Mandating School Lies. Neo-populism in the form of “parental control,” entailing the subversion of education at every level, starting with pre-K, is not incidental to tyranny. Teachers and principals and elected school board members now join journalists and health care professionals as “enemies of the people.” “That is especially true of the version of tyranny that now takes the form of White Nationalism, which is nowhere as deeply embedded as in the U.S., where it is transmogrifying into:
The “The Great Replacement Protocols” of Tucker Carlson, the most powerful opinion-maker in the nation,who’s joined forces with and is now the de facto national leader or The American Nazi Party, The Aryan Brotherhood, and all those other groups for whom the proper ancestry, skin color, and religion are the “Real America,” and the Satanic pedophiles are using immigrants to take “our place.” And so:
Immigration thus has a new and even deadlier face: illegal migrants are being smuggled into the U.S. in order to cast votes in the forthcoming elections and turn the “Great Replacement” into a reality that must be stopped by any means necessary. They must be dehumanized. The Big Lie is simply turned on its head; the June 6th Committee is nothing more than part of the “real” Big Lie: the right to vote being exercised by monstrous enemies of the people. On top of all this:
Sexual Frenzy. Homophobia, gender anxiety, misogyny. Transgender persons as the new Jews, Hitler having discredited overt anti-Semitism, though sub rosa and sotto voce it still animates much of the Right. Ask George Soros. Legislating discrimination seemed to have gone out with Reconstruction. Not any more. As Frank Bruni has put it, what is going on in Republican-dominated state legislatures is “ the demonization of L.G.B.T.Q. people as malevolent opportunists with children in our sights.”
The War on Women. This is now out in the open, and it is violent: the threat of violence is violence, it transforms your life. The War on Abortion is a real War–unless of course you’re the wife of one of the guys who’s making the war.
Now the push is not merely to criminalize abortion at every turn, but to make it a Federal crime, so that states such as New York or California or Illinois would no longer be able to be havens for women seeking abortions. That would in fact, be crossing a state line to commit murder.
Our Taliban. These are the the worst among us; the forces of a malevolent religiosity which expels any who differ from the moral world over which they seek and more and more obtain, secular power. And finally (for the moment):
Unleashing the Police. Has anyone not noticed what’s going on everywhere? This is the voting bloc that is most united of all among the devotees of Fascism: the domestic military force that is doing virtually without remission what it’s been doing since its creation two centuries ago: Enforcing racism. The Governor of Florida has taken the next, creating a special force to “police the polls.” Who needs the SS?
Putting it all together, what is happening is not coincidental, or minor league, as we might momentarily think just because it seems so bizarre, so absurd, so limited in geographical scope–and yet ultimately so lethal in intent. We’re in danger of misunderstanding the depths of hatred and intensity that have been unleashed; and that stand so far from the ordinary norms of politics as we know it that politics as we know it can not address them. Fascism has outreached its alternative.
To return to the transformative Big Lie, above everything else it is the siren call of “vote fraud,” together with the unprecedented inversion of both moral and empirical thinking that has turned January 6th into an event to be celebrated as a call to arms. These, even though illusory in the mass understanding of them, have become real, or virtual, experiences for millions. They are thus understood as the legitimization of force and violence that will be necessary to expunge the self-evident evils of political democracy.
In the official GOP, then, which includes all office-holders and activists at all levels, we have three blocs. The first is the Nazis, among them the Governors with totalitarian ambitions, like De Santis and Abbot most obviously, but several others as well, and also the weapons-carriers of the neo-Nazi groupings, now freed to do their thing without moral constraint, as on January 6th. Second are the more restrained Fascists, we might say followers of Mussolini rather than Hitler, but supportive of the Big Lie that excuses or even mandates violence. How would any of us behave toward those who fix an election and overthrow the government? With tolerance? Really? I’ll return to that question another day.
And third are the fellow-travelers, who do not say Enough is enough, this must stop! Mitch McConnell and his lock-step followers, who never follow the path of Liz Cheney and Adam Kiitzinger, or even Mitt Romney and Lisa Murakowski. I use the epithet deliberately: it’s what many journalists and intellectuals, my father indeed among them, called Americans they thought were “soft” on Communism: a doctrine that didn’t pose one-tenth of the threat to democratic institutions that stems from the Fascist mob.
Above all, it is difficult even to grasp two unfortunate truths about revolutions. First, they are not necessarily something to be embraced because they are always of the Left: always in favor of political or social progress, of liberation from tyranny, of “the people” putting their bodies in the way of tanks and machine guns. They can and often are also movements for true belief; and for the suppression or elimination of those who are not true believers, or refuse to act on or oppose the expression of true beliefs.
Finally, and most serious of all these dark prospects, it is does not take a majority to make a revolution. It takes only a fanatical dedication that they may be lacking, for any number of comprehensible reasons, by millions who are not revolutionaries, but stand outside the battle until it is clear who has won it. Which may by then be a question that can only be answered by ourselves showing equal dedication.
