Fascism-Patrimonialism

X
Fascism reconsidered
(the map is not the territory)

the new pantheon of fascism

II. expanding the concept of fascism

1. The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP performativity

2. The Social Origins of Language

I. Fascism: state-of the art scholarship

1. Patrimonialism, Fascism, and the Lynching for Rape Discourse
(Kant, Weber, Nietzsche, and Foucault)

fascism	racism	patrimonialism	white supremacy
racism	white supremacy	fascism	patrimonialism
patrimonialism	fascism	white supremacy	racism
white suspremacy	patrimonialism	racism	fascism

Aufhebung (from Wikipedia)

In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing, and eventually advancement (the German verb aufheben means "to cancel", "to keep" and "to pick up"). The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.

READ THESE TWO LINKED TEXTS NOW

Excerpts from Eric D. Weitz, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007/2018), chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360).

Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018).

David King, The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany (Norton, 2017) turns out to be an uncanny description of Trump's people

The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy
brings us close to the heart of fascism

Trump is "not hurting the people he needs to be hurting"

1. from It’s Just Too Much’: "A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane, New York Times, 1-7-19.

I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.

2. from Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism

The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. p. 84

3. from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14

Here the works of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness is employed to disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny.

Kant on Concept Formation

from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)

. . . concepts have their basis in functions, by which Kant understands “the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representaton.” (A68). A concept is a rule for combining certain representations (and thus also a principle for excluding certain others). Thus the represesntations’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’, ‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not. In this way a concept is a rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)

Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena; rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a unified explanation of nature. (p. 38)

“To make concepts out of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the btanches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree.” (pp. 250-51)

Emden/Nietzsche on Language

dddd

from Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 75

In Die fröliche Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes that language enables us to “produce” things, to shape our conception of reality: “This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are . . . it is sufficient to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create, in the long run, new ‘things’” (GS 58).

For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard as reality, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality through the development of general terms and concepts, which let us realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts and construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.

A Concept of Fascism: There are five paragraphs, each one broken down into elements

Five paragraphs from Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004):

¶ 1. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by 1) obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and 2) by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which 3) a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, 4) working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites (see Lind, Made in Texas), 5) abandons democratic liberties and 6) pursues with redemptive violence and 7) without ethical or legal restraints 8) goals of internal cleansing and 9) external expansion. p. 218

¶ 2. The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. p. 84

¶ 3. The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States. The Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional) . . . . Much more dangerious are movements that employ authentically Amerian themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and---after 1938--anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the ouskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. . . . p. 201

¶ 4. It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. p. 49

¶ 5. Today [2004] a "politics of ressentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights. . . . The languge and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. . . . No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance [one minute and 45 seconds into this video]. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy. p. 202

Roper on Q-Anon; Lachmann on patrimonialism

Lyndal Roper on Q-Anon: Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):

The hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary themes. p. 7

Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011:

Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world.

The above Concept of Fascism analyzed . . .

There are five paragraphs, each one broken down into elements

Paragraph 2, "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy" perfectly encapsulates the "populist" performativity of Trump's rallies.

Paragraph 1 is much more interesting.

Paragraph 1

Paragraph 1 can be broken down into nine elements, six of which (1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8) characterize the Trump phenomenon.

1. obsessive preoccupation with community decline
4. working in uneasy but effective collaboration with

traditional elites (see note on the concept of elites)

5. abandons democratic liberties
6. pursues with redemptive violence
7. without ethical or legal restraints
8. goals of internal cleansing

More interesting is to look at the three elements of Paxton's definition of fascism that seem least applicable: 2, 3 and 9.

2) cults of unity, energy and purity
3) a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants
9) external expansion

element 9 is violence + demonization: this is one of the laws of motion of two-party politics. (the other law is bildung and the will to power--New Deal). Subsumable under sado-sexual.

elements 2 and 3 are what is missing from the Trump-GOP

Paragraph 2

The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism (violence and demonization)

Paragraph 3

In paragraph 3 Paxton provides a summary of the history of right-wing movements in the United States up 1936.

Paragraph 4

"The earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan." What did this fascism look like in the late 19th century? (the lynching for rape discourse). And in the 1930s in southeastern Michigan (fascism in Flint, Ford, and Packard). the 1970s and today

Paragraph 5

Paragraph 5 describes the Trump campaign, even though the book was published in 2004. This kind of conceptualization is absent entirely from the two-party discursive field.

Fascism Reconsidered: Fascism as Biocultural niche

. . . and Deployed

Compare Paxton's Paragraph 5 with the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain. Atwater has shown how the discursive and symbolic elements of the Southern Strategy were generated through the construction of a theatrical arena in which hatred is expressed and sadism performed. This sado-sexual performativity is the essence of the GOP's mass appeal. Well before Trump the evocation of evil and the channelling of rage against a scapegoat (various forms of the other) was the stock-in-trade of Republican politicians, from their Know-nothing ancestors [1850s] to today’s fascist formations and modalities.

The rhetorical violence of Trump rallies, not ideology and policies, is what is fundamental. The Trump performances--the audience, the cultural-historical context, and Trump himself as a therapeutic object with which the audience member can identify--become intelligible when viewed through the prism of certain key concepts: Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment; psychoanalysis's concept of the mechanisms of defense; Wilbur Cash's concept of the proto-Dorian convention; the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain; and Robert Paxton's concept of redemptive violence.

On the right there are not issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex (the inner logic of racism). Rage enacted in a political-media theater of violence, sadism, and revenge. The cruelty of it all is the most important thing. The vicarious thrill, the “enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation”(OED): this is what is seen at Trump rallies. The GOP's performative cadre are specialists in herding raging hominids.

Randall Collins and Max Weber on Patrimonialism

Randall Collins, "Patrimonial Alliances and Failures of State Penetration: A Historical Dynamic of Crime, Corruption, Gangs, and Mafias,"The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 636, Patrimonial Power in the Modern World (July 2011), pp. 16-31

The historical shift from patrimonialism to bureaucracy is the key organizational transformation of the past thousand years. Classically, patrimonialism was organization based on private households, plus alliances among them. But there are two types of patrimonial organization: expanded households and patrimonial alliances or pseudo-tribes. The latter include ad hoc warrior coalitions, frequently organized as fictive kin. The main historical cause of the shift from patrimonialism to bureaucracy was the military-fiscal revolution and ensuing state penetration into society. But patrimonial politics did not entirely disappear. In some areas, the state fails to penetrate, leaving the possibility of mafia-style organization. Elsewhere, political machines are a mixed form of incomplete bureaucracy. Gangs are patrimonial organizations, growing in dialectical conflict with bureaucratic penetration and efforts at control. Through a comparison of American, Sicilian, and Russian mafias, the questions considered are whether crime organization recapitulates the history of the state, why some gangs become bigger than others, and why organized crime succeeds or fails in varying degrees.

Keywords: patrimonialism; modernity; bureaucracy;
state penetration; mafia; corruption; organized crime

Classically, patrimonialism was organization based on private households, plus alliances among them. Patrimonialism wields political power in the form of personal loyalty and arbitrary discretion, tempered only by tradition. The archetype of this kind of personal power is the family, but a patrimonial household is not limited to kinship per se. What makes patrimonialism capable of wielding large-scale power is that some households expand beyond kinship and become extremely large by including a large number of servants, armed guards, retainers, hostages, and houseguests; the bigger the entourage of the head of such a house, the greater his power.

It is important to distinguish, as Weber (1922/1968) did, between patrimonialism and patriarchy. Rule by the father (literally) or male dominance generally - patriarchy - can take place in many different kinds of organization; it occurs even in bureaucracy, although bureaucracy historically has been the main ally and organizational weapon of resistance to patriarchy. Patrimonialism is something more.

Patrimonial power involves personal loyalty, but it is also fraught with conflicts, betrayals, and treason—Shakespearean plots are virtual textbooks of patrimonial politics. . . . patrimonialism and bureaucracy are not bare organizational forms but sites for constructing moral visions; proselytizers for expanding bureaucratic state penetration are moral entrepreneurs as well as expanders of organizational domains. The struggle between patrimonialism and bureaucracy takes the form of rival moralities, althoug one side rarely recognizes this about the organizational form they oppose.

And this, from Researchgate: What are patrimonialism and neo-patrimonialism?

n
Nazi Masculinity

from Ann Goldberg, “Women and Men: 1760-1960,” in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011)

The alleged undermining of the patriarchal family—the ruse of the ‘double earners’ (married women performing paid labor outside the home), and sexually liberated New Women—became a powerful symbol of the breakdown of the social fabric in the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic, subject to intense poltical debate, social policy interventions, and efforts to resurrect the traditional gender order. The Nazis played directly on these gender anxieties as they built their movement in the Weimar years. Together with Jews and leftists, feminists and New Women became symbols in Nazi propaganda of the decadence and weakness of liberal democracy and modern urban life. Railing against the ‘soulless’ and ‘egotistical’ modern woman, National Socialists called for their return to the home and for the restoration of the patriarchal family—for, as the slogan went, ‘emancipation from emancipation’.

At the same time, the Nazis built upon the militarized masculinity and culture of comradship that had evolved in WWI, glorifying the ideal of a brotherhood of self-sacrificing soldier-comrades, and turning it into an extreme cult of violence, hardness, and duty to the racial Volk. A study of the writings of the Freicorps—right-wing paramilitary groups of ex-soldiers and officers formed in the aftermath of WWI—explores the unconscious fears and desires of this fascist masculinity. It shows the deep mysogyny of men who posssessed weak, fragmented egos, whose terrors of psychic dissolution were associated with femininization and female sexuality, and who, as a result, embraced a cult of masculine hardness and violence as an emotional defense mechanism.

Now We Turn to the Anglo-Saxon Roots

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world” (Darwin, 1871)

“the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded races” (Wallace, 1864)

“The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come in competition.” (Kidd, 1894)

from T. D. Price and G. M. Feinman, Chapter 1, “Social Inequality and the Evolution of Human Social Organization”, in Pathways to Power: New Perspectives on the Emergence of Social Inequality (Springer, 2010)

In a very real sense, human society over the last 100,000 years or more may have been characterized by a fundamental tension between relations based on dominance, hierarchy, and kin altruism (part of our primate heritage) and new capacities for social cognition, cultural learning, alliance building, and cooperation, whether the latter behaviors were learned or part of recently acquired innate tendencies (Boehm 2000, Stone 2008: 79, Tomasello et al. 2005).

two commentaries on Victor Nell, "Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators," Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, 211–257

1. from Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Cruelty: A dispositional or a situational behavior in man?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p.230

The basic question remains, however: How far are aggression, violence, and cruelty in humans today the result of predisposition factors, or biological or archetypal processes, and how far are they the result of cognitive/emotional processes evoked by situational factors?

2. from Albert Bandura, “A murky portrait of human cruelty,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p. 225

At the macrosocial level, Nell greatly exaggerates the prevalence of human cruelty. There exist wide intercultural differences representing both warring and pacific societies with large intracultural variations and even rapid transformation of warring societies into peaceful ones.

f
f
f
(Wallace)
Racism in England: 1864 to 1894

from Hunt Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism” in Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Texts--Backgrounds, and Contexts--Criticism, Paul B. Armstrong, ed. (Norton Critical Editions) pp. 373-4

Darwin himself concluded, in The Descent of Man: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world”. Alfred Russel Wallace ended his 1864 article by saying “the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded races”. Eduard von Hartmann in his 1869 Philosophy of the Unconscious, a book Conrad read, wrote that it wasn’t humane to prolong "the death struggles of savages who are on the verge of extinction. . . . The true philanthropist, if he has comprehended the natural law of anthropological evolution, cannot avoid desiring an acceleration of the last convulsion, and labor for that end.” And in 1894 in Social Evolution Benjamin Kidd observed, “The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come in competition.”

English visitors to Conrad in Kent recollected him as “not of our race”, “like a Polish Jew”, “the conventional stage Hebrew”, “simian”, “oriental mannerisms”, “very Oriental indeed”, “spectacularly a foreigner”, an Oriental face”, “semi-Mongolian”, and “like a monkey”.

Before the Southern Strategy:
the Lynching for Rape Discourse

from Jacquelyn Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia, 1993), p. 150

The imagery of lynching—in literature, poetry, music, in the minds of men—was almost inescapably erotic. . . .

Rape and rumors of rape became a kind of acceptible folk pornography in the Bible Belt. As stories spread, the attacker became not just a black man but a ravenous brute, the victim a beautiful, frail, young virgin. The experience and condition of the women. . . were described in minute and progressively embellished detail: a public fantasy that implies a kind of group participation in the rape of the woman almost as cathartic as the subsequent lynching of the alleged attacker. . . .

The small percentage of lynchings that revolved around charges of sexual assault gripped the southern imagination far out of proportion to statistical reality. In such scenes, described in the popular press in strikingly conventionalized words and phrases, the themes of masculinity, rage, and sexual envy were woven into a ritual of death and desire.

from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949. Norton ed. 1994)

. . . the lynched Negro becomes not an object that must die but a receptacle for every man’s damned-up hate, and a receptacle for every man’s forbidden feelings. Sex and hate, cohabiting in the darkness of minds too long, pour out their progeny of cruelty on anything that can serve as a symbol of an unnamed relationship that in his heart each man wants to befoul. That, sometimes, the lynchers do cut off genitals of the lynched and divide them into bits to be distributed to participants as souvenirs is no more than a coda to this composition of hate and guilt and sex and fear, created by our way of life. 162-3

In the name of sacred womanhood, of purity, of preserving the home, lecherous old men and young ones, reeeking with impurities, who had violated the home since they were sixteen yers old, whipped up lynchings, organized Klans, burned crosses, aroused the poor and ignorant to wild excitement by an obscene, perverse imagery describing the “menace” of Negro men hiding behind every cypress waiting to rape “our” women 145

Two chapters from Pieter Spierenburg, ed., Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, (Ohio State U. Press, 1998):

Terence Finnegan, "The Equal of Some White Men and the Superior of Others": Masculinity and the 1916 Lynching of Anthony Crawford in Abbeville County, South Carolina

Stephen Kantrowitz, “White Supremacist Justice and the Rule of Law: Lynching, Honor, and the State in Ben Tillman’s South Carolina”

Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynchings in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1993)

d
The Southern Strategy: the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain

from Wikipedia: (Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)

As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

after the Southern strategy:
"He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting"

Donald Trump says:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

a Trump voter in the Florida panhandle says: (from "It’s Just Too Much: A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane," New York Times, 1-7-19.)

Friedrich Nietzsche says: (from The Geneology of Morals, II, 14)

d
Fascism in Flint, Ford, and Packard

Among the great work sites of American Industry,
the Rouge did have a fascist odor about it

The first paragraph is a description of the politics of patrimonialism.

The second paragraph is an account of patrimonialism as a form of life.

Lichtenstein's use of the expression "fascist odor," however, forces us to clarify what we mean by "fascism" and "fascist." In this regard consider Weitz, Paxton and Lachmann

Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011:

Fascism at the Rouge, circa 1941

from Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit:
Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (Basic Books, 1995), p. 82

Fascism in Flint, 1937

click here for full text

the KKK in Packard, circa 1942

In the matter of . . .

Preferment of Charges against Frank Buehrle by Kurt Murdock,
President of PACKARD LOCAL U.A.W.-C.I.O. #190, held at the
local Headquarters of the Local at 6100 Mt. Elliott Avenue, in the
City of Detroit, Michigan. April 3rd, 1942, at 7:30 P.M.

Trump and Fascism: contemporary journalism

"Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Yes and no.", Isaac Chotiner interviews Robert O. Paxton (IndexAugust2016) Slate FEB 10, 2016

Fascism: a bibliography from Wisconsin Democracy Campaign

"The Mass Psychology of Trumpism," Eli Zaretsky

"Too Close for Comfort: How much do the early days of the Trump administration look like the Third Reich? Historian Richard Evans weighs in."

Fascism Reconsidered: Texts as Contexts

from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:

Let us add at once that . . . the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . . . gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.

from Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival : ressentiment and the abject hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 28

. . . ressentiment is trapped forever in the slights of the past. . . . . What “empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused, but impotent hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in his place.

from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 96-7

Now let’s see how things are with people who are capable of revenge . . . When the desire for revenge takes possession of them, they are drained for a time of every other feeling but this desire for revenge. . . . . Now let’s look at this mouse in action. Let’s assume it has been humiliated (it is constantly being humiliated) and that it wishes to avenge itself. . . . The nauseating, despicable, petty desire to repay the offender in kind may squeak more disgustingly in the mouse than in the natural man who, because of his innate stupidity, considers revenge as merely justice . . . . In its repulsive, evil-smelling nest, the downtrodden, ridiculed mouse plunges immediately into a cold, poisonous, and—most important—never-ending hatred. For forty years, it will remember the humiliation in all its ignominious details . . .

from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 22:

Oh this insane, pathetic beast--man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts . . .

All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man . . . . There is so much man that is hideous!--Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

from Timothy R. Pauketat, An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America (Routledge, 2012), p. 30

Indeed, this is the very basis of the Western world, with religions that profess beliefs while simultaneously disciplining bodies and purging them of their desires.

Lyndal Roper on Q-Anon: Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):

the cognitive shortcomings of liberalism

The excerpt at the right is from a study of Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, both whom are at the Annenberg School for Communication, a major institutional element that is part of the liberal media establishment*. Its failure to note the obvious--the sado-sexual performativity of Rush Limbaugh--is one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary two-party (liberal) discursive performativity. The vulgarity and sadism of Limbaugh's rhetoric is the main event in this theater of ressentiment, while the "issues" are merely the occasion for the expression of emotionally appealing sexual inuendo and sadism. Hall and Cappella just don't get it.

Maureen Dowd does get it. Her pithy summary of the sado-sexual character of the GOP's impeachment of President Clinton in 1998 should be compared to the bemused perplexity of Jamieson and Cappella.

Katherine Stewart also gets it.

*Liberal establishment is a term that requires elaboration. It is the antithesis of New Deal progressivism in three fundamental ways. First, the genetic ontology of progressivism is bildung and the will to power (civic republicanism); The genetic ontology of liberalism is nihilism (commercial republicanism: consumerism). Second, the nation is the primary ontology--not interests groups or victims. Third, planning is an integral part of progressive nationalism. Today's liberalism is referred to as the left, thus covering over the genetic-ontological transformation of the post-war years (see Hall et. al.)

Oelwein, Iowa - Western Campaign Trip - Informal remarks (speech file 935), October 9, 1936
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - Campaign Address (speech file 930), October 1, 1936

The Freud-Jamieson Black Hole of Liberalism

from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2008), p.p. 188-89. (Emphasis added.)

Limbaugh's attempts at gender-based "humor" are of the locker room variety. As the California gubernatorial recall was heating up, Limbaugh informed his folowers that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante--"whose name loosely translates into Spanish for 'large breasts'--leads the Terminator by a few pionts" (August 18, 2003). A photomontage on the Limbaugh website shows a photograph of Schwartzenegger's head and shoulders from his Pumping Iron days as a body builder. A naked woman has been transposed onto his shoulders. Over her breasts is a sign reading BUSTAMONTE. When Madonna endorsed General Wesley Clark, Limbaugh reported that she had "opened herself" to him. Why the vulgarity in this message does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his audiences is a question for which we have no ready answer.

from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14

from Maureen Dowd, "Starr Chamber: The Sequel. President Trump reaches deep into the perv barrel for his defense team," NYT, Jan 18, 2020.

The Starr chamber was a shameful period of American history, with the prissy Puritan independent counsel hounding and virtually jailing Monica Lewinsky and producing hundreds of pages of panting, bodice-ripping prose that read more like bad erotica than a federal report, rife with lurid passages about breasts, stains and genitalia. Like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale and other Pharisaic Holy Rollers before him, the prosecutor who read the Bible and sang hymns when he jogged became fixated on sex in an unhealthy, warped way.

Starr, who once clutched his pearls over Bill Clinton’s sexual high jinks, is now going to bat for President “Access Hollywood.” After playing an avenging Javert about foreplay in the Oval, Starr will now do his utmost to prove that a real abuse of power undermining Congress and American foreign policy is piffle.

In 2007, he defended Jeffrey Epstein. By 2016, Starr was being ousted as president of Baptist Baylor University for failing to protect women and looking the other way when football players were accused and sometimes convicted of sexual assaults.

from "Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus: The Christian right doesn’t like the president only for his judges. They like his style."
By Katherine Stewart, New York Times, Dec. 31, 2018

A lot of attention has been paid to the supposed paradox of evangelicals backing such an imperfect man, but the real problem is that our idea of Christian nationalism hasn’t caught up with the reality. We still buy the line that the hard core of the Christian right is just an interest group working to protect its values. But what we don’t get is that Mr. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes and anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction.

I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core.

on the hermeneutics of "intelligent design"

excerpts from MEMORANDUM OPINION, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist., 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005); John E. Jones III, United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania (also Wikipedia article on the Dover Area School District).

1. An Objective Observer Would Know that ID and Teaching About "Gaps" and "Problems" in Evolutionary Theory are Creationist, Religious Strategies that Evolved from Earlier Forms of Creationism

The history of the intelligent design movement (hereinafter "IDM") and the development of the strategy to weaken education of evolution by focusing students on alleged gaps in the theory of evolution is the historical and cultural background against which the Dover School Board acted in adopting the challenged ID Policy. As a reasonable observer, whether adult or child, would be aware of this social context in which the ID Policy arose, and such context will help to reveal the meaning of Defendants' actions, it is necessary to trace the history of the IDM.

Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism"
(18 September 2018 LRB)
Part 1 of 3

Since the Republican primaries of 2015-16, some people have turned to psychiatry in an effort to locate the irrational wellsprings of Trump’s victory, but so far little progress has been made. This is because most of the effort has gone into analysing Trump, who is often described as suffering from ‘narcissistic personality disorder’. Not only are such diagnoses, made from a distance, implausible; they also fail to address a more important question: the nature of Trump’s appeal. Constituting something close to a third of the electorate, his followers form an intensely loyal and, psychologically, tight-knit band. They are impervious to liberal or progressive criticisms of Trump or his policies. On the contrary, their loyalty thrives on anti-Trump arguments, and digs in deeper.

There is an older body of psychological thought, however, that illuminates the kind of tight bond Trump has forged with a significant minority of Americans. Inspired by Freud, this thought arose following the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, when Americans, too, had become wary of authoritarian elements in their society. Southern politics had been rife with race-baiting demagogues like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo since the 1890s, and the popularity of the pro-Mussolini radio priest, Father Coughlin, demonstrated the appeal of an authoritarian message to the immigrant North.

At the highpoint of the New Deal, it was widely understood that legitimate economic grievances needed to be addressed. But there was something more, which manifested itself in intense loyalty to agitators and demagogues like Coughlin. To understand that devotion, Frankfurt School refugees from Hitler – including Leo Löwenthal and Theodor Adorno – drew on a Freudian-inspired ‘mass psychology’ to analyze anti-Semites and demagogues in the US.

Their crucial innovation was the discovery of the special form that authoritarianism takes in democratic societies. Previously, the agitator had been thought of as a kind of hypnotist, while the crowd that responded to him was credulous and childlike. Open to rumor and fear, it demanded strength and even violence from its leaders. As the 19th-century French psychologist Gustave Le Bon put it, the crowd ‘wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters’. Freud had this model of crowd psychology in mind when he wrote that

the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he [must] be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent.

Hitler, Mussolini, Ataturk and even De Gaulle fit this model, as they drew on mass media, parades, sporting events and film to project themselves as father figures to enthralled nations.

Part 2 of 3

Adorno realised, however, that the model only applied in part to American demagogues. What distinguishes the demagogue in a democratic society, he argued in ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ (1951), is the identification between the leader and his followers. The narcissism in question is not only Trump’s. More important is that of his followers, who idealize him as they once, in childhood, idealized themselves. Beyond that, the demagogue has a special appeal to wounded narcissism, to the feeling that one has failed to meet standards one has set for oneself.

The successful demagogue activates this feeling by possessing the typical qualities of the individuals who follow him, but in what Adorno, quoting Freud, called a ‘clearly marked and pure form’ that gives the impression ‘of greater force and of more freedom of libido’. •In Adorno’s words, ‘the superman has to resemble the follower and appear as his “enlargement”.’ The leader ‘completes’ the follower’s self-image. This helps explain the phenomenon of the ‘great little man’, the ‘Aw shucks’, ‘just folks’ demagogue like Huey Long. He ‘seems to be the enlargement of the subject’s own personality, a collective projection of himself, rather than an image of the father’ – a Trump, in other words, rather than a Washington or Roosevelt.

One might object that Trump, a billionaire TV star, does not resemble his followers. But this misses the powerful intimacy that he establishes with them, at rallies, on TV and on Twitter. Part of his malicious genius lies in his ability to forge a bond with people who are otherwise excluded from the world to which he belongs. Even as he cast Hillary Clinton as the tool of international finance, he said:

I do deals – big deals – all the time. I know and work with all the toughest operators in the world of high-stakes global finance. These are hard-driving, vicious cut-throat financial killers, the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table and fight to the bitter end to gain maximum advantage.

With these words he brought his followers into the boardroom with him and encouraged them to take part in a shared, cynical exposure of the soiled motives and practices that lie behind wealth. His role in the Birther movement, the prelude to his successful presidential campaign, was not only racist, but also showed that he was at home with the most ignorant, benighted, prejudiced people in America. Who else but a complete loser would engage in Birtherism, so far from the Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Harvard aura that elevated Obama, but also distanced him from the masses?

Part 3 of 3

The consistent derogation of Trump in the New York Times or on MSNBC may be helpful in keeping the resistance fired up, but it is counterproductive when it comes to breaking down the Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on their leader as an attack on them. ‘The fascist leader’s startling symptoms of inferiority’, Adorno wrote, ‘his resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths’, facilitates the identification, which is the basis of the ideal. On the Access Hollywood tape, which was widely assumed would finish him, Trump was giving voice to a common enough daydream, but with ‘greater force’ and greater ‘freedom of libido’ than his followers allow themselves. And he was bolstering the narcissism of the women who support him, too, by describing himself as helpless in the grip of his desires for them.

Adorno also observed that demagoguery of this sort is a profession, a livelihood with well-tested methods. Trump is a far more familiar figure than may at first appear. The demagogue’s appeals, Adorno wrote, ‘have been standardized, similarly to the advertising slogans which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business’. Trump’s background in salesmanship and reality TV prepared him perfectly for his present role. According to Adorno,

the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority.

To meet the unconscious wishes of his audience, the leader

simply turns his own unconscious outward ... Experience has taught him consciously to exploit this faculty, to make rational use of his irrationality, similarly to the actor, or a certain type of journalist who knows how to sell their ... sensitivity.

All he has to do in order to make the sale, to get his TV audience to click, or to arouse a campaign rally, is exploit his own psychology.

Using old-fashioned but still illuminating language, Adorno continued:

The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance, functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds.

Since uninhibited associative speech presupposes at least a temporary lack of ego control, it can indicate weakness as well as strength. The agitators’ boasting is frequently accompanied by hints of weakness, often merged with claims of strength. This was particularly striking, Adorno wrote, when the agitator begged for monetary contributions. As with the Birther movement or Access Hollywood, Trump’s self-debasement – pretending to sell steaks on the campaign trail – forges a bond that secures his idealised status.

Since 8 November 2016, many people have concluded that what they understandably view as a catastrophe was the result of the neglect by neoliberal elites of the white working class, simply put. Inspired by Bernie Sanders, they believe that the Democratic Party has to reorient its politics from the idea that ‘a few get rich first’ to protection for the least advantaged. Yet no one who lived through the civil rights and feminist rebellions of recent decades can believe that an economic programme per se is a sufficient basis for a Democratic-led politics. This holds as well when it comes to trying to reach out to Trump’s supporters. Of those providing his roughly 40 per cent approval ratings, half say they ‘strongly approve’ and are probably lost to the Democrats. But if we understand the personal level at which pro-Trump strivings operate, we may better appeal to the other half, and in that way forestall the coming emergency.