1 in 3 Americans are fascists!
Not! Could we please stop using the term "fascism" like a cherry atop a poisoned sunday?
Trigger warning! If you’re likely to be triggered by words like “fascism” or “Nazi” or “Hitler,” please read no further. This post is not for you. Sorry. (I’m Canadian, sorry.)
This little fellow mysteriously appeared on my desk this week. I have to assume that the repeated occurrence of the word “fascist” in the news is to blame, causing some sort of time travel, inter-galactic anomaly portal thingy.
Worse than inappropriate, still, I think he’s kinda cute.
I am annoyed with the media. (Angry is such a harsh word.) First because, com’on, THERE ARE NO FASCISTS IN AMERICA. At least, not that you or I would know enough about to matter. Which is exactly the point.
Of course, there are pockets of ridiculousness everywhere. But they are not electing officials, determining policy, threatening the stability of the nation. No, they are minuscule, fringe elements of crazy people that have adopted a despicable and obsolete ideology because, well, who knows why? and who cares?!?
I blame the media because they play along. Given how partisan and propagandistic the media has become, you would think it would be the least they could do to try defusing the situation.
That said, fascism is maybe worth knowing something about. The German intellectual, Walter Benjamin, who knew something about fascism, having committed suicide in 1940 at a border crossing trying to flee the Nazis, said fascism is about the aestheticization of politics. “Aestheticization” means dressing something up in fancy clothes so it looks great when in fact it is a disgusting, fetid sack of guts, which is kinda what politics have become today. (Too harsh?)
What Benjamin was getting at was that real politics (politics that is about economics, taxes, public order, leadership, that sort of thing, i.e. meaningful) is supplanted by style: the look or the feeling of what a party or an ideology stands for veils what it actually does. For example, the Nazis claimed they were rebuilding Germany to its former glory when what they were actually doing was beating people up until they gained power and then, much worse.
These days both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of styling the truth. Nothing like the Nazis, but both are trading in images of what they stand for, not concrete policy one can reasonably agree or disagree with. We could argue about which party is worse, but let’s not, for now at least. (And it’s no better in Canada, trust me, politicians everywhere have lost their minds.)
The real danger when a damning term like fascism or Hitler or Nazi is used recklessly is that it sends people into despair and they go back to doing the same thing they have always done, voting as their parents did, or their neighbours or co-workers do, or (as the academics will later smugly tell us) as their “class” does. I don’t really believe people are persuaded by propaganda, pro or con. We’re smarter than that.
Right now, it seems there’s nothing Democrats can do or say that will persuade people who do not already feel themselves to be Democrats to change. Calling Donald Trump a fascist just makes matters worse. The Democrats, for many people, including credible people within their own ranks, have simply become unelectable.
Republicans don’t even try to convince Democrats. They is what they is (apologies to Popeye). But we should know by now that Despicable Don cannot pass up a media opportunity. So he flings the word back in the face of his accusers, much to their beyond ignorant surprise and consternation. Shame on him. Shame on them.
OK. End of rant.
There’s another side to fascism that might be worth exploring, maybe another time. That is the actual aesthetics of fascism. There is a very distinctive style to fascist culture, if you will, one that viscerally conveys a sense of power. The filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and the architect Albert Speer are perhaps the best known progenitors of the aesthetic. It is highly romantic and heroic while also being banal, clichéed. But it is not only that. It can be moving. It has “affect,” something that is painfully lacking, one might argue, in contemporary art today.
Is there something interesting to be learned from this aesthetic if it can be isolated from the heinous ideology with which it in modern times has been fatally linked? Maybe.
Then again, maybe not.
If you got this far, congratulations, and thank you. I’m sorry.
