The Politics of Rage: Part 2
“Rage is the ideology of the Republican Party.”
We might say that the Party is all about getting and retaining power, but that misses the point. Politics is always about power. But it’s not necessarily, and certainly not always, only about power, but about other ends as well, and the desire to represent those ends. And in many cases it’s about representing those without power, even if through no higher motivation than getting their votes: it never pays to investigate motives, they’re not the issue.
In the United States today, the relevant contrast is this: The Democratic Party on the whole, is about representing various groups of citizens, the (relatively) excluded among them, and doing so by enacting policies that might meet (some of) their various needs. The Republican Party is about, and among its most dedicated activists, only about, expressing and institutionalizing the hatreds of its base. For example, as one commentator has noted, “turning schools into a cultural war zone by railing against equity initiatives, books with sexual content and public health measures avoids tackling issues like budget cuts and the other thornier problems facing American education.”
As Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out, the campaign of terror against an elected Democratic member of the Brevard County School Board is led by the losing Republican candidate. Again, this is unique, and I have to say astonishing in its revelation of a deep sickness not among a majority, but still a powerful minority at the core of the social order. It’s not even merely the hatred of science, or all pretensions to be telling the truth or expressing facts; it’s that all considerations of commonalty, all interest in what the Constitutions calls “the general welfare,” have been thrown aside in the face of that unmitigated rage.
The point, rather, is not to represent “the people,” whatever that means, but to overcome “the people,” that is, the majority of citizens who reject almost every policy the Party now stands for. Not because of what the policies might entail in practice–the excuse that’s often given–but because they are not designed to destroy enemies.
On the other hand, to reject hatred as the only acceptable public policy, to reject misogyny, racism, and homophobia on the basis of equity and the rule of law, is now to convict oneself of a heinous crime against white people: the only persons who, minus the liberals and old-time conservatives among them, deserve respect. Anyone who is not of them deserves to be treated with every weapon hatred can raise up–not excluding violence.
This is our Nazi moment. Those practicing any form of egalitarianism, any adherence to the rule of law, any respect for the victims of discrimination, as well as demonstrating any principled adherence to truth, might as well be Jews in 1931 Germany. In addition to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, among the works, in translation, that influenced Hitler and Nazi theorists generally the most, were two books by the American racist Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man (1922). The titles speak for themselves; the first speaks for the Republican base–the Fascist movement–today.
But why does this happen, in so many different nations with different histories and different demography? Anti-Semitism, after all, was comme il faut among respectable persons all over Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries. As for the U.S., there’s no better description than the remark by Jacob Riis, who moved freely among the power elite: “A kike is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room.”
I offer a theory, tentatively. What we call today the Right Wing goes back to the 18th Century, to a hostile response to the Enlightenment, though more prominently, and on a more organized basis, in the 19th Century. In the U.S., we can think of the Know-Nothings, the anti-Draft riots in the North, the violence against the abolitionists, the rise of the Klan, and so forth. It reached a peak with the anti-Red movements of the 20th Century, then the murderous response to the Civil Rights movement in the South, as well as the climate of lynching that preceded it; and finally what the Republican Party has become in the 21st–which was well under way already in the 20th.
The conventional approach to this development among “the people,” as distinct from the intellectuals who justify them, and the leaders who arouse and exploit them, is to speak of “grievances.” However, that’s a term without any definable meaning. Everyone has grievances, but people define and act on them quite differently. Why do the “grievances” of non-educated white working class men turn these particular aggrieved into a neo-Fascist or neo-Nazi movement? I won’t even bother to mention all the aggrieved persons who haven’t followed that path, except to note that in the 1930’s the grievances of the industrial working class, at least outside the South, turned them against their corporate exploiters, not against non-white Americans.
To follow that path, we have to look back to the 18th Century, and the Enlightenment. Whatever its shortcoming–the anti-Semitism of Voltaire, the slaveholding of Jefferson, the sexism of Rousseau–the Enlightenment, relative to its time and place, was an explosion of egalitarian thinking that has only expanded its scope over the centuries; it has never retreated or diminished.
The politics of the Counter-Enlightenment, by way of contrast, is the politics of deference to authority–an authority which a mere majority of one’s fellow citizens cannot command. To speak of representation as the be-all and end-all, therefore, is to miss the appeal of autocracy. Whoever you are, if the autocracy depends not on votes but on appealing to a constituency that will obey without question, then it will go all the way. No compromises with this voting bloc or that, no half-way measures: through the autocracy, through the likes of Hitler and Goebbels or Trump and Tucker Carlson, you will rule.
How though, does a movement get to autocracy from democracy? The answer is : populist autocracy (fascism) develops through democracy toward authoritarianism by limiting rather than expanding the scope of democracy; by hijacking its basic institutions, especially the vote.. The motor of such movements is rage (not outrage but visceral, violent rage), and the rage is generated by a politics of identity. And this politics of identity usually appears as that of white males, its primary creators and exploiters.
However, gender is crucial here, for the Counter-Enlightenment appeals to women as well, and not just on racial grounds. It ceded to them the role of defending conventional morality, which liberalism and radicalism have both come to reject in whole or in part. In fact, neither is it any longer imaginable without a serious feminist base; whereas the anti-feminist base is historically more likely to take anti-egalitarian positions.
To take another obvious example, traditionally-minded women tend to support Draconian systems of “Law and Order,” on the grounds that men will always be violent against women in any event. For these and other reasons, two competing versions of identity are available to women who think politically, and the one that is on the defensive in liberal democracies is much more likely to align itself with the politics of rage. And in so doing, of course, charts a path to male-identified political power that would otherwise be closed to women.
All in all, to sum up the neo-Fascist politics of identity, it takes the form of a performative nationalism that often works through the xenophobic scapegoating of foreign enemies, but does not need them. Internal enemies will do just as well. They are “Others”: racial or ethnic minorities, or Jews, or the Left: which in the U.S. means primarily liberals, labeled as “socialists” or “communists” or “Feminazis,” but whose unforgiveable error is to promote equality with the “other:” to oppose the oppressive politics of whiteness. And in addition, finally, the Right, having declared war on reason and knowledge, has coopted religion and turned what it calls Christianity into an instrument of hatred and lust for power.
Putting all this together, the most astonishing event of all in the current milieu is the transformation of the Republican Party into a virtual handmaiden of the January 6th storm troopers. These are somehow transmogrified into “tourists”who just wanted to wander through the halls of the Capitol. It’s as though Margaret Thatcher had said the British Navy was merely engaged in maneuvers off the Falkland Islands, or George W. Bush claimed to have sent a fact-finding mission into Afghanistan: what’s the big deal? In one fell swoop, the GOP has joined the ranks of Holocaust deniers. But isn’t that fitting?
To conclude, as soon as any collection of persons delivers themselves to Donald Trump, or emulates him in political action, as in Texas and Florida and Pennsylvania, they have left the realm of politics as we have known it and as the textbooks–every single one of them outdated–have described it. The only issue then–that is now–is democracy versus autocracy. Even abortion and guns are not merely policy prefrences; they’re central to the ontological rage: to the eradication of enemies, or at least of their power. Like Carthage, “democratia delenda est.”
I wish the Democrats in Washington would recognize this.
As Charles Blow put it, “Last Chance To Save Our Democracy.”
