💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › crimethinc-yes-trump-represents-fascism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:57:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Yes, Trump Represents Fascism Author: CrimethInc. Date: December 16, 2016 Language: en Topics: Trump, Fascism, US, Read All About It Source: Retrieved on 3rd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2016/12/16/counterpoint-yes-trump-represents-fascism
Earlier this week, we published a text from a comrade entitled Does
Trump Represent Fascism, or White Supremacy? We’ve received this
counterpoint on the same topic.
Trump’s election signals a turn in a century-old cycle, one we ought to
recognize by now. The U.S. has been experiencing growing populist
discontent, a sentiment fostered by poor material conditions for the
working class. The Left has had a few token victories (a black
president, gay civil rights), but has, predictably, not demonstrated the
revolutionary potential that could lead to real changes in most peoples’
lives. This failure is bitterly felt.
Most U.S. residents see the government as corrupt and untrustworthy.
They feel alienated from the democratic process, and from their physical
communities, retreating instead into online echo chambers of shared
opinions and mythologies. The long legacy of white supremacy in the
United States, which has never truly subsided, is fed by all of this:
rather than directing their anxiety and frustration towards the true
structures of power that oppress everyone in this country, many within
the white working class are sharpening their feelings, stemming from
precarity, into resentment directed at the bodies of black and brown
people. These emotions are manipulated and exploited by members of the
bourgeoisie who are worried that their power may be slipping. The
specter of ISIS without—a true and yet mythologized enemy—is used to
justify infinite repression within.
Many people like the comrade who wrote the article “Does Trump Represent
Fascism or White Supremacy?” are cautious about calling current
political movements fascist. Dozens of books debate even the past—was
Nazi Germany fascist, or only Mussolini’s Italy? What about Franco’s
Spain, or Perón’s Argentina? More recently, people ask: do the
self-organized, until recently rather pathetically unthreatening white
supremacists in the United States who call themselves fascists actually
count as such? What about Silicon Valley billionaires pouring money into
racialized campaigns of secession? Perhaps this caution stems from the
urge to be precise, to avoid name-calling—though all know that Trump has
earned most epithets one could imagine.
In the case of the aforementioned comrade, this concern is framed as
technical:
Fascism is not just any extreme right-wing position. It is a complex
phenomenon that mobilizes a popular movement under the hierarchical
direction of a political party and cultivates parallel loyalty
structures in the police and military, to conquer power either through
democratic or military means; subsequently abolishes electoral
procedures to guarantee a single party continuity; creates a new social
contract with the domestic working class, on the one hand ushering in a
higher standard of living than what could be achieved under liberal
capitalism and on the other hand protecting the capitalists with a new
social peace; and eliminates the internal enemies whom it had blamed for
the destabilization of the prior regime.
Sure. The United States is on this trajectory, and it can only be
stopped from reaching its destination by the full-hearted efforts of
all. The fact that we have not yet arrived, that it may look slightly
different here and now, or that many proto-fascist parties in Europe did
not reach their goal, does not make the situation less serious; it
rather means that people struggle every day against oppression of all
kinds, fascist or no, and too often pay the price for that struggle. We
fight the tide, but people have fought before; nothing is guaranteed.
As McKenzie Wark recently said: “It’s curious that the political
categories of liberal, conservative and so forth are treated as
trans-historical, but you are not supposed to use the category of
fascism outside of a specific historical context… But maybe we should
treat it not as the exception but the norm. What needs explaining is not
fascism but its absence.” During Hitler’s rise to power, many calmed
themselves by saying that he would not really murder Jews, that it was
all election rhetoric. Today, as the CNN scroll asks “Are Jews people?”
and neo-fascists salute Trump with the sieg heil mere blocks from the
White House, let us not fall into a similar error.
Fascism and white supremacy are not mutually exclusive concepts; in
fact, the scholar Hannah Arendt, as well as the fascists Benito
Mussolini and Francisco Franco, attribute the rise of fascism to
European “imperial adventures” in Africa. Such murderous adventures
provided practical experience, forms of governance, and newly vicious
tactics (some of the first people gassed to death were Rif people
rebelling against Spanish colonizers) to those who went on to be
fascists. Achille Mbembe and others have shown how the creation of
whiteness and the state of exception through American and European
slavery foreground fascism on a more subtle and pervasive level. I am
not certain if fascism would be possible without white supremacy; but
white supremacy thrives under other systems of government, and I believe
anarchy is likely the only thing that can fully eradicate it. What is
clear is that white supremacy and fascism are as much bosom friends as
Trump and Steve Bannon.
The comrade to whom I am responding makes a mistake in assuming that
people’s responses are intellectually founded: “If economics were the
bottom line, white Americans would feel more secure, not less secure,
after Obama’s presidency.” People read facts (though less often, given
the growing U.S. reliance on fake Facebook news and Twitter feeds)… but
they believe stories. The story Trump, Breitbart, and a million other
online and community influencers are feeding white people and
aficionados of “traditional values” speaks to deeper and older impulses
that feel like truth. White mythology (and, Jasbir Puar reminds us,
whiteness is utterly contingent and can be extended in exchange for
loyalty) is founded in the fear of the Other; a lack of empathy or even
familiarity with the cultures and lives of black and brown people; a
suspicion that white is not right, and that the privileged will someday
pay in hell for the goods they have laid up on earth; and a boiling
resentment and sense of disenfranchisement bred by that suspicion.
Whiteness—again, a social condition—is a sickness; and white people in
America are burning with its fever. Fascism seems to many like the
solution to their problems, imagined though they may be.
I am not writing to propose a new framework that we should all use to
define our conditions of struggle. There are endless history books
describing life before and under fascism, and we ought to all
familiarize ourselves with them, and form our own judgments. Rather, I
propose that we reject the mystification of endlessly re-categorizing
our enemies. Fascists and anarchists are historic enemies, and we can
learn lessons from our previous mistakes and betrayals to help us in the
fight today. Racist attacks are on the rise in the United States; trolls
terrorize people on Twitter along lines of race, gender, gendered
expectations, and perceived “Jewishness”; politicians, emboldened by the
political climate, are already attempting to ban us from bathrooms and
from getting abortions. None of this is new, but the tone has changed.
Acting as though social democracy is infallible and that our “gentle
parent,” whose rule we have been rebelling against a long time, will
always step in to save us from our more terrifying intimate enemy,
contravenes not only what we know from the histories of fascism in
Spain, Italy, Germany, and Argentina, but from our own experiences as
anarchists.
The good news is that this election both signals and generates a huge
crisis of faith in the U.S. government: if we anarchists can provide a
coherent and present alternative, one of peace, camaraderie, and joy in
struggle, we may have more opportunity for realizing a fully different
society than we ever did in more comfortable times. The state is our
enemy, no matter the season… but the different aspects it wears should
inform our tactics. As always, the project is not defeating a particular
enemy or ensuring our own personal comfort, but total freedom and real
possibilities for all. I join the comrade in calling for solidarity
between the oppressed in our struggles; I caution that we do not adopt
the Manichaean perspective of our enemy in so doing. Names are useful;
categories are not real; we are not at war any more than we ever have
been. The struggle continues as always, in our hearts, communities, and
world.