Faux fascisti

In Whit Stillman’s film Barcelona of 1994, there is a scene in which Chris Eigeman’s character, an American naval officer in uniform in the Catalan capital, is taunted in the street by a pretty local girl with the epithet facha — or fascist. Naturally he takes exception to this, pointing out that a great many men wearing the uniform of the American armed forces had died fighting against fascism.

This was a great applause line for American audiences, but it was irrelevant from the point of view of many young people in post-Franco Spain. “Fascism” for them was something home-grown and all but unconnected to the titanic struggle between the Axis and Allied powers in 1939-45, during which Franco’s Spain had been neutral. The Barcelona girl was using the term as it was used during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, when it served the propaganda purposes of the Russian-financed and communist-led anti-fascist coalition to pretend that everyone not a part of that coalition was, ipso facto, a fascist.

Pursuing their “popular front” strategy, the communists thus kept their coalition together and kept themselves in control of it — even though the alleged “fascists” were also a coalition of, in addition to actual fascists, royalists, conservative Catholics and other anti-communists. The term was almost entirely meaningless, as Orwell noted in his 1944 essay, “What is Fascism?” But the habit of labeling anyone to the right of themselves as fascists has since been adopted by the international left and has persisted among its sympathizers to this day.

So when Kamala Harris averred, two weeks before the election, that she considered Donald Trump to be a fascist, it was not because Donald Trump was a fascist, or even because she genuinely thought he was a fascist. Her private thoughts, if any, about this as about everything else remained as opaque as Mr Trump’s were and are — to his frequent discomfiture — transparent. Rather, Ms Harris’s use of the term should be seen as a breaking of cover, a declaration of her self-identification with the dominant party within her party, the party of the “woke” left.

For the f-word — hitherto left to the administration’s media surrogates, apart from President Biden’s claim two years ago that the MAGA movement was “like semi-fascism” — was being used as the Spanish communists taught their allies to use it nearly ninety years ago. For them, it referred not to a political philosophy or movement. It was instead a tribal shibboleth for identifying the enemy. And the enemy, to the communists, was anyone standing in the way of their inevitable triumph, foreordained by “History,” whatever his or her actual views might be.

It would be giving Vice President Harris too much credit for honesty, however, to suppose that she was outing herself as a Marxist-Leninist. It seems much more likely that she — or her handlers (a qualification always to be understood whenever her name is mentioned as the subject of an active verb, including “thinks” and “believes”) — simply saw it as a tactic in the political game, like everything else the party said and did during the campaign. If so, however, it was a puzzling one to many, who had only weeks earlier been dazzled by “the politics of joy” and the upgrading (or downgrading) of the Republican opposition from evil to merely “weird.”

This must be why Vox, the left-wing website that describes what it does as “explanatory journalism,” felt it needed to explain to its readers: “How ‘Trump is a fascist’ became Kamala’s closing argument.” The article itself, by Christian Paz, was pretty incoherent. It noted, on the one hand, that the “threat to democracy” topos hadn’t been working especially well for President Biden and, on the other, that Ms Harris now thought that stepping it up to out-and-out “fascism” with the help of renegade Republicans and ex-Trump staffers harboring grievances against him would have better luck. But Mr Paz acknowledged, both implicitly and explicitly, that this was a strategy, supposedly to win votes from the few remaining undecided voters in swing states — and therefore not intended as a factual statement about Mr Trump’s political views.

Even as strategy, however, even as a last, desperate throw of the dice, labeling her opponent — and by implication his millions of supporters — as “fascist” didn’t seem to make sense. As Jonathan Martin of Politico wrote:

reams of voting results and research indicate those issues long ago pushed so many people away from Trump’s GOP. They are not what animates that small number of people who remain undecided in the second-to-last week of October. What new voters are being won with denunciations of Donald Trump’s character?

Likewise, polling expert Sean Trende found that the “Harris campaign has already reached every voter they can with [the] ‘Orange Man Bad’ message.”

Why, then, did she step up “Orange Man Bad” to “Orange Man Fascist”? Why did she not rebuke such supporters as Anne Applebaum who extended the comparison to Mussolini (the original fascist), Hitler and, bizarrely, Stalin? One answer, supplied by J. Peder Zane of RealClearPolitics, was that such people were, quite literally, “in the grip of madness” and “can’t help themselves.”

Conservatives give Kamala Harris and her allies too much credit when they say she is gaslighting Americans by insisting that Donald Trump is the second coming of Adolf Hitler and that his tens of millions of supporters are budding brown-shirts. Gaslighting suggests calculated deception, a knowing attempt to spread useful lies. Democrats and their “Never Trump” GOP confederates see themselves as truth tellers – they honestly believe their angry delusions are reality. Like most sufferers in the grip of derangement, they insist that visions which exist only in their minds are obvious facts. Hence, their closing argument is not so much a political ploy as a symptom of psychological distress.

Without denying this possibility, I believe that there was a method to Ms Harris’s madness in abandoning her attempt to pose as a moderate in favor of a renewed declaration of allegiance to the far left by adopting its language and nomenclature. I believe that she knew (or believed she knew) that she was losing, that the “vibes” and the “joy” of the previous two months had become too obviously empty and inauthentic and, therefore, that she was looking ahead to the post-election election, the lawyers’ election, which has become a seemingly permanent feature of our presidential politics.

Whatever the actual election result — assuming, as everyone who followed the polls did, that it would again be close — she and her fellow left partisans were expecting to deploy their army of lawyers to defend her victory or to challenge Mr Trump’s. And if, as she must have begun to expect, the latter eventuality was the more likely, she would need also to call into action again the deep state “Resistance,” the FBI and the Justice Department along with activist Democratic judges throughout the land.

Moreover, as Mark Steyn wrote, “if Trump is a fascist, aren’t the shock-troops of something called ‘antifa’ all but obligated to rise up against him?” Such an opposition might be expected to succeed either in invalidating Mr Trump’s election or, failing that, in harassing the presidency of Trump II as they harassed that of Trump I — but with “fascism” in place of “Russian collusion” as their rationale for calling his election as president illegitimate.

If so, the media were quick to take the hint. Philip Bump of The Washington Post compared a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden to a Nazi one held there 85 years ago on no firmer ground than that “speakers in 1939 lamented government spending, railed against Marxism and complained about how information negative to their allies was ‘played up and twisted to fan the flames of hate in the hearts of Americans’ by the news media.” And of how many political rallies of all parties since 1939 could the same not have been said?

Even before the Nazi comparisons re-emerged in the last week of the campaign, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt were testing the post-election waters. Writing for The New York Times, the professors professed to find that

Democratic self-rule contains a paradox. It is a system premised on openness and competition. Any ambitious party or politician should have a shot at running for office and winning. But what if a major candidate seeks to dismantle that very system? America confronts this problem today. Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy.

Especially, it seems, if he wins an election! Their answer to their own “What if. . .?” question turned out to be to get in ahead of the dismantler of democracy and do their own dismantling job first, by what they call “societal mobilization,” to deny the presidency to the apparent election winner. This sounds a lot like the “whole of society” approach to managing public opinion favored by the security services of the Obama administration, according to Jacob Siegel — and also, ironically enough, to what Signore Mussolini used to call “fascism.” Now there’s a paradox for you!

The ever-indefatigable Matt Taibbi spotted this and other examples of pre-emptive action against Mr Trump’s electoral surge as recommended by the media:

These warnings fall under the category of “pre-bunking,” a practice in which authorities try to inoculate against badthink by seeding the public with possible bad news in advance of an election, a storm response, a new vaccine policy, etc. Pre-bunking is the messaging equivalent of a doctor warning of a “little pinch” before shoving a forearm up the clacker. Homeland Security officials have a near-religious belief in “building resilience” through such tactics. Still, you could appoint a chimpanzee to run DHS and it should know that if you warn people not to worry about something ten billion times, they will start to do just that, especially when the not-worrisome thing is a nuclear superpower’s sudden inability to count. So what gives? For what bad news are we really being prepared? . . .Reports of official “anxiety” about potential “chaos and unrest” have been coming in huge quantities. If you now add mention of “social mobilization” or restoring order with “the military” to that mountain of agita, it suggests a certain scenario has been coming up too often in someone’s tabletop dice rolls.

“The Democrats’ entire argument now,” writes this one-time darling of the Democrat left,

is a vote for Trump is a vote for historical infamy, and he must not only be beaten, but eliminated as an option. “We gotta lock him up… politically,” is how Joe Biden put it. The Harris campaign by week’s end degenerated into surrogates shouting “Hitler!” into the void, with everyone from Kamala herself to Walz to Hillary Clinton pounding the “fascist to the core” theme. An openly frustrated former CIA chief John Brennan denounced as “appalling” the fact “so many Americans” are tuning them out when they drop the H-word. . .They don’t sound like people sure about the wisdom of conceding. What if that’s the bad news all this pre-bunking is preparing us for?

No matter how you look at it, in other words, no matter what the endless counting and recounting of the ballots cast in the two months leading up to November 5 (and, in some places, for days and weeks after it) eventually produced, it was beginning to look to a lot of people like there was a bad time coming as one side or the other refused to admit defeat in what was universally expected to be a close election.

Even so, it seems to me undeniable that there was, and is, an asymmetry in the bitter partisanship between the two sides. Here’s Peder Zane again, in an earlier piece for RealClearPolitics: where he contrasted the likely response of the two parties to electoral failure:

If Trump loses once more, [Republican] party leaders will, as in 2020, admit defeat and denounce efforts to overturn the result. Frankly, they will be happy to turn the page on the Trump era. The Democrats, by contrast, are a top-down party. While no one should be surprised by a repeat of the contained violence their supporters unleashed around Trump’s inauguration, the real action will occur once more in the corridors of power. In a repetition of Trump’s first term, party leaders will refuse to accept his election. An army of Democratic Party lawyers is amassed, awaiting instructions on how, and where, to challenge the results. If, as the polls suggest, Democrats retake the House, they have already floated the idea of refusing to seat him, invoking the Civil War-era 14th Amendment to claim he is a Jan. 6 “insurrectionist.” Assuming that gambit fails, they will almost certainly launch multiple impeachment efforts against him while their stenographers in legacy media continuously cast him as an existential threat to the Republic. As during Trump’s first term, every day will be a nonviolent version of Jan. 6. You cannot, after all, find common ground with Hitler.

Still less, he might have added, can you find common ground with “garbage” — as President Biden called Trump supporters (and then claimed he didn’t) during the last week of the campaign.

I find a special poignancy in Mr Zane’s conclusion: “It pains me,” he wrote, “to say that the next four years will be more bitter than the last eight. We, the people, have painted ourselves into a corner by turning to the unforgiving world of politics to find identity and meaning. Will we ever find the courage to say enough?”

One can imagine a real Democratic president, a Bill Clinton or a Jimmy Carter, with such courage, but not a figurehead like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, both of them non-entities put before the public by the party’s hard-nosed ideologues who, as the sudden replacement of Joe by Kamala at the head of the ticket last summer showed, have been really running things for the last four years. The same people have dominated the executive branch since Barack Obama’s day and even before it, if the renegade CIA under George W. Bush was anything to go by. Even a forewarned President Trump, mark 2, will find it no easy task to root out the “whole of society” party with which the whole of the federal bureaucracy is now riddled.

Our only chance of escape from the Kamala-lot, under one president or the other, is a really decisive win for Team Trump — one beyond not only what Mark Steyn calls “the margin of cheat” but proof even against “societal mobilization” and the left’s army of lawyers arguing for his illegitimacy before sympathetic judges. As I write, this sort of Republican win is what seems to have happened. It would be rash to assume that the real ideologues in the media and the deep state ‘resistance’ will even now give up their harassment campaign against President-elect, and President, Trump, but enough of their fellow-travellers might be cured of the Hitler delusion that, by the time of the next election, the great super-tanker that is the media-driven American ship of state might have begun to turn around. We may hope that the non-endorsement of any candidate by both the Los Angles Times and The Washington Post suggests that it already has.