Backfill: The F-Word and the C-Word
Or How to Tell Your Left from Your Right
"New to Substack? You need to clue people in on what you’re about."
The company will give you loads of tips, all designed for eventual monetization, but if I were smart, I'd already be rich and probably not despise the term "branding" with every fiber of my being.
Accordingly, I'm backfilling with recent content I've already written so people can see what tubs I thump, while noodling around for the next thing I want to talk about.
This was posted to Facebook on March 14, 2024, probably because I hate my friends.
Slightly revised, but now with High-Tech Embedded Links!(TM) and a New Post-Script!(TM) that ends on a Topical Dune Reference That Just Can't Be Missed!(TM)
March 14
Let’s talk about fascism, kids!
Max McCoy has a good piece, his 100th, at the Kansas Reflector (you should give them money) on the subject. The piece is good not least because he cites John Ganz
(give him money, too) via Rick Perlstein, who are both required reading on pretty much any subject, any day. But, as is pretty standard for McCoy’s work, it’s a melancholy and meditative reflection.
His question is “Why are Americans increasingly seduced by fascism?”
McCoy’s answer involves fascination with the new and bold and powerful as well as our historical amnesia. While he references history and several of his other pieces, there’s no on-point hook from Kansas in this one to answer his question. His piece is more retrospective in feel, circling certain themes of his: the past’s never being past, the effort—almost need and urgency—to humanize, and an almost Wendell Berryan ethos of reconnection with people and place. But it’s hard to tackle an entire country’s drift (rush?) to fascism this way.
It's hard to tackle it any way.
In case you missed it (it only took up about six years of online and scholarly hair-splitting, so you can be…forgiven?), there was a big ol’ debate about what constitutes fascism and whether or not we could call what’s been happening in America “fascist” or if it would be better to say it’s “proto-fascist,” “wannabe-fascist,” “authoritarian,” “illiberal,” or some other weasel word.
It was crazy-making. Some argued fascism had to look pretty much exactly like it did in Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, or Hitler’s Germany (which didn’t look exactly like one another, but never mind), so if what we were seeing in the US didn’t fit that precise model, no luck, so sorry, here are some nice consolation prizes, and thank you again for playing.
Did we need to have gangs of thugs roaming the streets looking to engage with anti-fascist forces? Did we HAVE that (Proud Boys, Unite The Right)?
Did there need to be a rising communist movement to threaten capital such that it threw in with the would-be dictator? Did Bernie’s failure to become FDR 2.0 qualify?
Did we need to have a strong or a crumbling civil society? High unemployment? Some recent national humiliation?
Should we focus on precursors that give rise to fascism, or should we focus on the core ideology of fascism? (There really isn’t an “ideology,” per se.) Or should we look for things fascism does, then see if we’re seeing the same behaviors and tendencies in our politics?
January 6 kinda-sorta resolved the debates in that several prominent fence-sitters switched to using the F-word. Most of the rest of the participants in “the discourse” (including John Ganz) just tired of the bickering, pedantry, and bad-faith and decided to list off the most popular synonyms whenever they wanted to refer to the whatever-it-is they wanted to address in their writings.
I started following the debate already tired. My take from the go was this: at the moral root of fascism is a certain kind of evil that consists in slotting human beings into a hierarchy of value and worth, from the Aryan to the Jew, the Brahmin to the Dalit, from the esteemed white Southern gentleman planter to the lowly n-----.
Anywhere you see any semblance of this tendency to rank the essential worth and dignity of human beings from high to low, you are seeing what ultimately culminates in—and always flirts with—fascism, which was, for my generation of midwestern little boys, the ultimate social evil.
I thank Indiana Jones and some great WWII movies for that lesson: Nazis = bad.
Since I grew up in America, it had to be the Nazis who became my archetype for the baddies, of course, because perish the thought that I’d be taught that those motherfuckers really admired what we’d pulled off with our Jim Crow regime and drew from it for the Nuremberg Laws.
Make no mistake: whatever we might call Jim Crow, or the regime of legal slavery that preceded it, these were morally fascist regimes. Apartheid regimes partake of fascist morality. Totalitarian slave states do as well. Authoritarianism anywhere, whatever they’re based on, embrace it. Theocratic laws and governments declare that one faith is worthy and all others are dogshit, so adherents of the one are worthy while followers of any others are fit only to be scraped off one’s shoes.
My point here is that fascism is, at base, in its most fetal form, abuse of power against those made powerless. It may exist on a spectrum, ranging from the literal schoolyard bully through authoritarian laws to authoritarian regimes to whatever checkmark-satisfying criteria allows us to call Hitler, well, Hitler. But the germ, the essence, the seed of it is a moral failing, a sin for lack of a better word, that says one person is any better or worse than another, that a group of people are better or worse than another.
And we’ve got that core belief in spades in the US of A all around us. Always have.
I think it’s pretty inarguable that capitalism, at least since it left the humble shops envisioned by Adam Smith, is all about ranking people based on their worth and value, signified by their…well, worth and valuables.
Insofar as America has always had a race problem, it has always been a caste society. And we’ve always been a society that ranked straight men highest.
If you want to start a big fight on the Left, just ask whether Class, Race or Sex is the more primordial nexus of oppression in history or the world today. I think smart Lefties just go with Beat poet Diane di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #8”:
NO ONE WAY WORKS,
It will take all of us
shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down.
If there’s a through-line on the Left, though, it’s this amorphous idea of liberation. When people are being held (or beaten) down, fight against “the thing.”
Whether it’s the domination of wealth saying the poor aren’t worthy, or white supremacy trying to define the world through its sick lenses, or straight cis patriarchs insisting that any kind of deviation from some rigid binary of expression will bring down Western Civilization and/or the Wrath of God, the Left tends to react allergically, sensing “the thing”—the deep moral sin, the rot, of fascist ranking of human worth.
Whether it rises to some academically-sanctified formal definition of the F-word or not, Lefties tend to sense the DNA of “the thing.”
And, oh, yes, we get it wrong, so horribly wrong. Ever met a human being who doesn’t indulge in some iota of “I’m better than you” thinking? I haven’t.
The Black Panthers had major misogyny issues. Class warriors tend to be blind to race and sex and gender. Us white male lefties tend to be blind to…well, everything…until someone spells it out for us (then it’s a coin-toss whether we’ll get it or get huffy and turn reactionary). It’s a huge mess.
Part of it is the lack of organization on the Left, though that raises the danger of institutionalizing and orthodoxing doctrines the way the Right-Wing has done with its own ennobling versions of its history and beliefs.
But the instincts are right. The through-line is right. The focus on abuse of power, the emphasis on how society treats “the least of these.”
But something McCoy doesn’t get into is the contrasting through-line, and maybe it’s because he yearns for a rehumanization of our polity, a moving away from the nationalization of politics, a ratcheting down of the pre-programmed partisanship that can never see any feet of clay on “our guys.” I think McCoy wants us all to hunker down around a diner table and get to know each other as people, so that we can’t hate one another anymore at the behest of televised fascist provocateurs.
Well, I want that, too, as far as it goes.
Trouble is, the fascist provocateurs are all coming out of one side of the political divide, as McCoy admits with his citations about Trump and Jan. 6. And if we look for a through-line, we’ll have to drop the nostalgia about the good old days and revise our mental models.
It’s so-called conservatives.
The F-word debate isn’t alone. There’s another pundit and scholarly debate afoot, and it’s about whether or not Trump represents a rupture in conservatism and the GOP, or whether he signifies continuity, as in “it was always going to end up here sooner or later.” The Left, predictably, tends to come down on the latter side. And I think they have the stronger argument than the rupturists. Call it the C-Word debate: for Conservativism, Continuity or Crackup?
Much of it started with the Never-Trumpers, those chastened (?) “conservatives” who rejected Trump. We may be seeing their last stand now in the race for the White House 2024, where significant chunks of primary voters are rejecting him. Many of the Never-Trumpers were so-called Neo-Cons from the George W. Bush era, with certain ideas of conservatism at odds with other factions inside the right-wing tent represented by more nativist, populist bigots like Pat Buchanan. The rips and frays of that tent had, or so we’d been taught, been mended over time by “fusionist” figures like William F. Buckley who allegedly kept out the worst of the crazies, but newer and less credulous scholarship shows that the crazies were never evicted from the party or the movement, just demoted from front office to backrooms, relegated to providing the motivating Id the rest of the GOP would cover with responsible-sounding policy papers as camouflage.
What we thought was a stable and responsible period of “sensible and pragmatic conservatives” may well have just been an artifact of the Cold War, when everybody had to play a little nicer for the time being, and Trump’s GOP might be the truest face of conservatism most of us have seen in our lifetimes. Try to wrap your noggin around that instead of pining for Nancy Kassebaum.
Despite his obstinate and semi-pedantic contrarianism on the F-word debate regarding Trump, political theorist Corey Robin wrote a whole book (The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, 2011) pretty definitively showing how the animating force of the political right, as his publication materials say…
“…is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.
“Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society–one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention has been critical to their success.”
The thing conservatives want to “conserve” is hierarchies of power and status, that is, who is (and should be) above whom, forever and ever, Amen. So it has always been.
Trumpism hasn’t been a change from this animating drive; it’s just been an unmasking of it and a triumph of a particular faction within the right-wing that’s always been there.
Even the embrace of Orban and Putin. To grasp that through-line, read Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. This is not new. This is who a significant portion of the right have always been and yearned to be more openly, because the motivating force behind conservatism hasn’t been the cover stories they’ve claimed all these years (limited government, individual freedom, low taxes, etc.); it’s been enabling and empowering the people who deserve to be in power over others to be in power over others, because they are worthy and the other people are not. Full stop.
Or read George Lakoff’s Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (the 1996 first edition is my preferred one, before Lakoff got trendy). As Guy Durand of the Lakovian FrameLab put it…
“In the conservative moral hierarchy, Christianity must be above other religions, just as whites must be above non-whites, men must be above women, and so on. Here is the hierarchy, as outlined by Dr. Lakoff:
- God above Man
- Man above Nature
- The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak)
- The Rich above the Poor
- Employers above Employees
- Adults above Children
- Western culture above other cultures
- America above other countries
- Men above women
- Whites above non-whites
- Christians above non-Christians
- Straights above LGBT
“This hierarchy illustrates how Republicans view morality. That is, the world must be ordered according to this hierarchy in order to be “moral.” Some readers may find it repugnant to refer to such a system as “moral,” but it is essential to understand that political ideology is rooted in vastly different views of morality.
“By understanding this conservative hierarchy, you will understand the beliefs that bind conservatives together, and that unite all of their policies and ideas. Whenever you have a question about a conservative policy, consult the hierarchy and you will find the answer.”
The whack-jobs and grifters all over the political right? We’ve seen them, too. They’re all over right-wing history. Historian Seth Cotlar is working on a book about
the Republican chair of Oregon (elected in 1978), Walter Huss, a literal Nazi Jew-hater. Huss’ personal archives are the stuff of nightmares, like Boys from Brazil-level creepy.
Or read John Huntington’s Far Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (2021), whose press materials explain…
“…for almost a century, the far right has forced so-called "respectable" conservatives to grapple with their concerns, thereby intensifying right-wing thought and forecasting the trajectory of American politics. Ultraconservatives of the twentieth century were the vanguard of modern conservatism as it exists in the Republican Party of today.
“Far-Right Vanguard chronicles the history of the ultraconservative movement, its national network, its influence on Republican Party politics, and its centrality to America's rightward turn during the second half of the twentieth century. Often marginalized as outliers, the far right grew out of the same ideological seedbed that nourished mainstream conservatism. Ultraconservatives were true reactionaries, dissenters seeking to peel back the advance of the liberal state, hoping to turn one of the major parties, if not a third party, into a bastion of true conservatism.
“In the process, ultraconservatives left a deep imprint upon the cultural and philosophical bedrock of American politics. Far-right leaders built their movement through grassroots institutions, like the John Birch Society and Christian Crusade, each one a critical node in the ultraconservative network, a point of convergence for activists, politicians, and businessmen. This vibrant, interconnected web formed the movement's connective tissue and pushed far-right ideas into the political mainstream. Conspiracy theories, nativism, white supremacy, and radical libertarianism permeated far-right organizations, producing an uncompromising mindset and a hyper-partisanship that consumed conservatism and, eventually, the Republican Party.
“Ultimately, the far right's politics of dissent—against racial progress, federal power, and political moderation—laid the groundwork for the aggrieved, vitriolic conservatism of the twenty-first century.”
My point is that we may be pining for a unity that never was, a normal that never was.
If the gut-level sensibility that tends to animate the Left—the rejection and suspicion of dehumanizing hierarchies of human beings—is a good thing (and I believe it is), then that genie won’t go back into its bottle, no matter how much revisionism and censorship Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo, and the anti-trans legislators try. Bullies are baddies. Nazis and slavers are villains. There’s no rehabilitating them. They must be rejected. You don’t punch down, period. You look at who has the power, and what they are doing with it, and if they are picking on people, you fight them.
And if the through-line of the Right I’m arguing here—and which is supported by political theorists, historians, cognitive linguists, sociologists, you name it—is correct, then all the nostalgia about “reasonable Republicans we really wish were still around” is time and energy wasted.
Yes, saying that may be off-putting, may make conversations around the table at the local diner more difficult, not less, but the alternative is to spin and soften truths rather than face them. That gets us into more and more trouble over and over again.
Were Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum…fascists?
(Pause while huge chorus of Lefty pals stop whooping and hollering YES!!!)
Well, yeah, they participated in the moral sin that lies at the root of fascism, with their support of conservative policies and politicians and movements and organizations.
But the F-word represents a spectrum of evil. Did they realize this? Did they know what they were doing at the time? HellifIknow. And who really cares at this point?
The point is that imagining a world of serfs and Lords then slotting people into such a caste system is evil, and we all tend to think that way and need to stop doing it.
We sure as hell need to reject a political party that has always done it, has embraced figures who defend and advocate that practice (from Edmund Burke to Trump and beyond), and is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the avatar of that spiritual rot.
Postscript:
Is there any meaningful difference between a Republican and a “conservative” (i.e., proto-fascist reactionary)?
Please clarify: Is there a difference anymore? Was there ever a difference? Is there any necessary difference? Because these are all differently shaded questions.
The GOP, throughout its history, has been an ideological party (see Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, by David A. Hopkins and Matt Grossmann). So to talk about Republicans, it’s fair to talk about ideology, and what undergirds that ideology, where it comes from, where it leads. They lean into this. They rely on this. They get votes by symbolically waving the flag and trotting out Mom, apple pie, and family values while Dems list off programs and plans and issues that appeal to various constituencies within their very broad and increasingly pluralistic coalition.
I know the Right especially hates being psychoanalyzed (though they do it all the time to the Dems), but when you base your party on an ideological model, you invite that sort of thing unless you claim (and they kinda-sorta try this) that ideology can be the product of purely rational and objective assessments of human nature and unalloyed perceptions of reality (which is silly, but a lot of old white people seem to buy it). In today’s world, the contradictions and cognitive dissonances are so glaring that we simply have to put conservatives on the couch.
Once upon a time, Republicans seemed to have a distinctive and small set of core policy “principles” that allegedly distinguished them from Democrats. Rs were for “small government, individual liberty, strong defense, personal responsibility, fiscal restraint”—stuff like that.
I want you to notice two things about the items in that list.
First, they do not match up with the GOP of today, and certainly not with the GOP post-Trump. They don’t fit even the disgruntled GOP politicians retiring in droves, much less the arsonists allegedly driving them to do so.
Second, the Republicans who claimed to be about the old set of policy priorities, and who maybe even voted that way: did they really believe in that stuff…or was it all a sham, a bad faith effort to promote a pretty evil worldview? Back in the day, we largely bought their sincerity, even if we disagreed with their moral vision. But is the real reason they’re rejecting Trump now because he’s too toxically honest about their fundamental program? Did he go too fast and frankly into the Id that always drove their ideology, thus giving up the game, pulling back the curtain, revealing who they always were, tipping off the marks and thus existentially endangering the entire project of the Republican party (by, well, taking it over)?
Even now, I can scan the items in the old sales pitch conservatives used to hawk and admit some validity in each item.
Small government: we certainly don’t want a police state, universal surveillance, Brazil-like levels of nutso bureaucracy; we want responsive government where it makes sense to have government, and we’re discovering collective action problems that atomized, individual action just cannot cope with. Not to mention, our understanding of government is impoverished: there are models for how to rule ourselves we’ve starved of thought and imagination because of our fixation on State vs. Individual for 250 years.
Individual liberty: we don’t want laws telling us who we can love and marry, whether we can use contraceptives in our most intimate encounters, what we can and cannot do with our own bodies. We don’t want the state telling us we have no choice but to work for pennies under dangerous conditions or abusive bosses. We want the freedom to feel safe at public schools and parades from mass shooters. We want the liberty to choose what to believe and how to act on that belief (while respecting the rights of others) instead of being forced or pressured to show fealty to one small sect’s vision of what their God is and demands.
Strong defense: we want the country to be tough enough to fight back in various ways against aggression, certainly against us, but also to stick up for and assist our allies.
Personal responsibility: like anyone, we probably preach it more than practice it, but it remains a value we can’t deny. We just recognize that placing everything on the shoulders of lone, floating atoms called individuals is a recipe for breaking people; folks need social conditions and systems that enable them to survive and thrive.
Fiscal restraint: if that means don’t piss away our money, sure. If it means not betting the farm on something untried, starting with pilot programs, then tweaking and/or expanding to the extent they work, great. If it means categorically never spending money on anything because of an ideological commitment that “X causes dependency” or whatever, go fuck yourself.
But all the above assumes good faith debate and discussion. It assumes no secret agendas. It assumes the people spouting “fiscal restraint” or whatever really believe in such a thing in a realistic and grounded and legitimate sense, in a sense that’s defensible.
Yet what have we seen?
We’ve seen such people (whether they really were or just now seem to have been) die off in American politics—a bygone generation we now claim to pine for…
Or we’ve seen such people never get into office in the first place because they have to survive a GOP primary where the loons dominate and vote for the most batshit demagogue instead of the more measured and practical and grounded Republican…1
And we’ve seen the resulting incentive structure shift to favor the batshitted, such that only the frothing performers who rile up the ratings and algorithms even bother to run, which means they tend to know fuck-all about government, principles, critical thought, history, etc., or else they know some of this stuff but their sociopathic personalities simply don’t register anything except their own personal “brand” enhancement and profile…
And we’ve seen these new avatars of “conservative Republican politics” drop-kick every one of the so-called old-school principles of “conservatism” willy-nilly to embrace hypocrisy as a feature, not a bug, because of its attention-grabbing shock value to “own the libs” (those silly normies who still think the game is about consistency and integrity instead of getting and using power, baby!).
So it’s enough to make you wonder if any of the old “conservatives” ever believed any of those staid talking points at all, or if they were just patiently laying the mythic groundwork for the day Donald J. Trump would mate with Marjorie Taylor Greene to produce, at long last, the Kwisatz Haderach to rule the known Universe.2
Looking forward to White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, By Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. Apparently their argument is, in part, that if red state voters won’t elect Democrats who push policies that would benefit them, they can at least start electing better Republicans. Hope this isn’t just warmed-over What’s the Matter With Kansas? analysis.
I've got Bircher libertarians like the Kochs as the Spacing Guild navigators, racist theocrats as the Bene Gesserit (Phyllis Schlafly! now Katie Britt), warmongers as the Imperial House of Shaddam the IV, with the Harkonnens as maybe all the unmentionable frothing cannibalistic nutbags the fusionists tried to hide away in the attic all those years. Not going any deeper on the metaphor, so don't start with me, but the Atreides would probably be the centrist-libs who never think they could ever have anything in common with the baddies but end up enabling the totalitarian Emperor. Also: you're welcome for the DJT + MTG image. Pleasant dreams.