For the Fourth … Another F-word to Ponder
PARADE HAND-SIGNALS through the decades
HAPPY FOURTH TO EVERYONE who might be celebrating this, our nation’s 249th birthday. Conventionally, it can be a day for comfortable platitudes, often a bit self-satisfied in tone, about our American values, even sometimes the country’s so-called exceptionalism. I want today, though, to shift in a less comfortable direction.
Let us tackle head-on, shall we, the F-word? The media in general find it a tricky word, and no wonder. It’s overused, employed in a lax and often merely insulting fashion — and it’s definitely considered “bad form” when published in whatever mainstream medium we might sometimes see or hear it appearing.
I’m talking about Fascism. In the world of grown-up journalism, fascism and fascist are counted high on the list of hot-button terms that are best avoided. They’ve undoubtedly become portmanteau labels of boorish abuse, and as such they’re far from helpful in contexts where serious analysts are trying calmly to be, well, seriously analytical.
You’ll probably know Sinclair Lewis’s famous 1935 novel about fascism taking over America, with the bell-tolling, heavily ironic title “It Can’t Happen Here.” In it, the author marks a signal day in the calendar when fascism’s advance becomes clear to everyone. It’s the Fourth of July, but unceremoniously, the book’s hero-figure, the small-town newspaper editor Doremus Jessup is arrested and sent to one of the concentration camps that form a new incarceration network covering the entire country. The authoritarian leader who has won the White House, by the way, has made his way to victory proclaiming the slogan, “Make America a proud, rich land again.”
So, to turn from fiction to fact, let’s review seriously the present-day symptoms that echo historic fascism, symptoms that might come over as superficial indicators in some cases, or deeply significant in others.
MASKED ICE OFFICERS: a seizure in New York City
We have seen the US Military deployed along with immigration authorities enforcing deportation actions. On our streets and at worksites, unidentifiable ICE officers, masked and in civilian clothes with no badges visible (pictured right) have been snatching people and carrying them off into custody.
ICE has been expanding its contracts with private prison companies to provide more detention center capacity across the country. In the mega spending bill being finalized this week a whopping $45 billion of our tax-dollars will go into creating new detention facilities. And also this week the nation learned of the new facility named with retro cartoonishness “Alligator Alcatraz,” and situated in Florida’s wetlands — the White House gleefully described it as being “surrounded by dangerous wildlife and unforgiving terrain.” The President joked to reporters (I think it was a joke) about any possible escapees being chased by alligators, eaten by them.
When demonstrations were inevitably organized last month to protest against ICE snatching and imprisoning people, we should recall that the military was mobilized for the protests – against the wishes of local and state authorities, in California very notably – though in Texas the rightwing governor there was himself more than willing to deploy his state’s division of the National Guard, in reaction to anti-ICE protests.
And following hard on those sinister developments, our country’s military forces were deployed rather differently, in a very unAmerican manner - that of celebrating with a massive parade the President’s birthday. How unAmerican? In Britain it’s called Trooping the Colour (with color in this case meaning the military’s pennants and flags) … and what does it celebrate? – the King’s birthday. Indeed British soldiers themselves often call it more plainly “The Sovereign's Birthday Parade” – have done since 1748. Let’s be clear that the Washington parade was about an individual, the top man, even while the Army felt obliged to claim it was officially to celebrate two-and-a-half centuries of the armed force’s existence, not Trump reaching seventy-nine. There was also the useful coincidence of it falling on America’s Flag Day, that lesser-known holiday, not always celebrated, twenty days before the Fourth.
It is a hallmark, we can all recognize, of fascist regimes that they will fetishize uniforms and armed forces. And it was downright queasy-making to take in all the jubilation being generated as our massed military hardware rolled past the presidential reviewing stand, and marching solders in their thousands gave and received salutes.
It was of course Benito Mussolini, a great lover of military parades and uniforms (oh, and decidedly demonstrative salutes) who first propagated the very word Fascist in the modern world, when he formed his eponymous Italian Fascist Movement in 1919. The word comes from the Latin Fasces, meaning the bundle of wooden rods, along with an axe-head, that Roman soldiers carried as they marched in formation. The rods and axe were to symbolize power and punitive authority.
Mussolini provided us with more templates – including his paramilitary group, the Blackshirts, whose job was essentially to brutalize and often kill opponents. These came to be copied by a force of thugs in 1930s Britain, led by that country’s putative dictator Oswald Mosley; he called them also Blackshirts, or more formally and very unambiguously the British Union of Fascists. In Germany Adolf Hitler’s first paramilitary force, the SA, wore (and were known as) “Brownshirts” — they were an even more extensive organization than Mussolini’s men in black. In time, too, a separate German group, the SS, more elite than the street-fighting SA, came to be highly trained — and part of it, the Waffen SS, eventually even got somewhat integrated into the country’s traditional, mainstream armed forces.
Now, I know we are constantly told, especially by some of Trump’s supporters, that we should take him seriously but not literally. But I, for one, had to note the very specific words he chose to use, ahead of his big birthday parade, about public protests against him. I quote exactly:
“For those people that want to protest,” he said, “they’re going to be met with very big force.”
That’s decidedly authoritarian language. not that of a consitutional democracy – we need only note that he pointedly did not make the usual (and important) politicians’ distinction between peaceful protest and demonstrations that might turn out less peaceable. Any protest, his language makes clear, has to be met with force.
IN CONSIDERING WHETHER SUCH FASCISTIC traits amount to actual fascism, I’ve had inevitably to turn to the analysis of that magisterial historian, Robert Paxton.
It’s worth stressing Paxton’s credentials. He’s the classic, undisputed expert, an undoubted specialist, the author indeed of a seminal work, “The Anatomy of Fascism” published in 2004. He once cautiously advised all of us this way, quite specifically in the context of Trump’s rise; he said in Harper’s Magazine “We should hesitate before applying this most toxic of labels.”
However … after January 6th 2021 Paxton changed his mind about Trump and fascism. And, mainly because Newsweek magazine asked him, he wrote very fully in a column that the violent invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” And he went on to say that Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable, but necessary.”
Now, more than four years later, Paxton still has reservations about the way that the word “fascism” can be bandied about generally: he hass said “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light”. That’s a quote he gave for a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (which I find to be an underestimated forum for careful, in-depth think-pieces). The interview, and the whole article were by Elisabeth Zerofsky, a writer who in her own words specializes in “the ideas buried behind the swirl of daily politics.”
Paxton chose at certain points in his interview with Zerofsky to use the word “Trumpism” (no doubt to avoid an argument all over again about fascism-as-a-label) and he said: “Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming from below as a mass phenomenon, and leaders are running to keep ahead of it.”
That was certainly how Italian Fascism and Nazism began, he went on to argue — with Mussolini and Hitler capitalizing on mass discontent and a sense of humiliation after World War One.
But again with specific reference to Trump, Paxton said that focusing on the leader is a distraction when trying to understand fascism and its upsurge: his assessment was, “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which the movement grows.” For fascism to take root (he said) there needs to be “an opening in the political system, a loss of traction by the traditional parties.” Now to me, that certainly rings an accurate-sounding and persuasive bell.
Another American historian is gaining media attention besides Professor Paxton, who’s now 92. It’s the considerably younger Heather Cox Richardson (above right) of Boston College. She is very fond of directing students’ and readers’ attention to an extraordinary publication, well worth reading.
It quite strikingly comes from (of all notable organizations) the US Army itself. It was published in 1945 – just at the point when we, the Allies, were about to defeat fascism in World War Two. It was a pamphlet for soldiers, called Army Talk – Orientation Fact Sheet number 64. For several pithy pages it described fascism, how to spot it, how it works, and how to oppose it. I’ll quote in conclusion just three bullet-points (so to speak) from the Army’s message:
One: “Fascism is more apt to come to power at a time of economic crisis”
Next … “It can come to any country”
And then … “We can best combat it by making our democracy work.”