The election of Donald J. Trump not only means that the United States lost the Cold War but it invalidates America’s victory in World War II – at least the victory in Europe.
Russia took revenge for its defeat in the Cold War not only by blatantly tampering with the US elections in a variety of already known and yet undiscovered ways but, more importantly, by making Americans betray the ideals and principles for which the conflict was waged. The death of Castro is the fitting end to this chapter: Fidel has lived to see America embark on an accelerating downward spiral to a banana republic.
As to fascism, it has come triumphantly to Washington in 2016 exactly as it did to Berlin in 1933 – through the ballot box, on the shoulders of willfully ignorant voters and with the connivance of unprincipled or corrupt officials.
In 1963, Hannah Arendt published her account of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, in which she introduced her famous observation about the banality of evil. Unrelated to her book, two years later Soviet director Mikhail Romm made a documentary titled “Ordinary Fascism.”
Both Arendt and Romm were Jews, which is significant, and Arendt was not only a refugee from the Nazis but she studied with and was a lover of philosopher Martin Heidegger, a Nazi sympathizer. At the time, the received opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially among the Jews, was that since Nazi crimes were indisputably monstrous, then the Nazis themselves had to be exceptionally monstrous as well. People weren’t prepared to accept the claim that fascism was an everyday reality or that, as Arendt claimed, evil was a workaday phenomenon, as common as the job of an accountant, requiring the cooperation, connivance or indifference of many people, including its victims.
Today the assertion that evil is a banality has itself become a banality. Fascism is what Trump rallies were all about, and they were attended by perfectly nice, honest, hard-working Americans who bring home-baked cookies to the new family in town and invite a lonely neighbor to a Thanksgiving dinner, by car mechanics and fire fighters and yes, by accountants. They’re by no means bloodthirsty and would bridle at being called fascists.
And yet they are. Trump, far from creating fascism in America, merely rode the wave of hatred and resentment, acting as their mouthpiece. He’s an opportunist, not an ideologue.
In general, fascism is not an ideology. As many commentators – including most notably Umberto Eco – have observed, fascism is a reaction against modernity. It is an attempt to hide from the multilayer complexity of modern society with its multiculturalism, racial and religious diversity, overpopulation, limits on development, esoteric science and advanced technology in the simplicity of some invented or idealized age in the past. Mussolini sought to rebuild the imaginary Roman Empire. Hitler looked back to Germanic purity. The Bolshevik revolution was a reaction against rapidly expanding modernization and Stalin, while talking about building new society, took the Soviet Union back into a kind of perverted feudal past, abolishing capitalism and a money-based economy and reviving not just serfdom but slavery, too. Putin’s Russia is at pains to recapture a hybrid between the Russian Empire and the USSR. Finally, Trump is promising to recapture a neverland America as a hybrid between Henry Ford and Norman Rockwell.
Liberal democracy, which came into existence at the dawn of the modern era, attempts to deal with modernity by acknowledging and assimilating its complexities and accommodating diversity. It uses a variety of tools: universal suffrage, extension of citizenship, individual freedoms, protection of minority rights, stake-holding in the economy, political correctness, etc. Relations between groups are mediated through political parties, elected institutions and non-government organizations. Liberal democracy acknowledges the primacy of the law. It is a system that allows many different people to live together without oppressing, banning or expelling various groups.
Fascism, on the other hand, harks back to a pre-modern homogenous society. It says: we’re all Germans, Italians, proletarians or white, lower middle-class small-town Americans. We can always understand each other and come to an agreement. We don’t need institutions to come between us, since we’re all family.
This vision of society inevitably creates leader-worship. A society organized as a harmonious family needs a father figure to tells it what to do. He is kind, he loves his obedient children and is motivated exclusively by their welfare. He doesn’t need mediation between himself and his children – all those political parties, courts, parliaments. Non-government organizations and civil society are also a nuisance at best and enemies at worst. He needs the media not to criticize but to glorify.
It is always a narcissistic sociopath with a huge inferiority complex – because no other person would be willing or able to play this ridiculous role. And thus fascist leaders is a gallery of case studies in pathology: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Putin, the Kims, Trump and a bunch of others.
Fascism is a reactionary movement pining for the lost paradise. There has to be betrayal involved as well as enemies – foreign, domestic or both – who destroyed the idyllic world of the past. Hitler blamed the Jews, in Putin’s Russia it’s the Anglo-Americans, and in Trump’s America, as we have just seen, it is the liberals who flooded the country with immigrants, encouraged uppity blacks and permitted gays and lesbians to flaunt their sinful sexuality. Just as sappy visions of the past are an integral part of fascism, so is resentment and hatred in the present. The Orwellian Two Minutes of Hate is what binds the fascist crowd together – and what made Trump rallies such a resounding success.
Fascism is a flexible system capable of accommodating various ideologies. Mussolini wanted Italians to rule over the known world, just like the Romans. Hitler saw history as a life-and-death struggle between Jews and Arians. Stalin’s fascism lived for decades under the guise of Marxist ideology. Fascism can even do without ideology. Putin has built a fascist state and destroyed Russia’s nascent democratic institutions for the sole purpose of preserving his wealth and power.
Trump, it seems, has learned his lessons from Putin. He has already reneged on most of his grandiose promises and, even before being sworn in, has started to turn America into a kleptocracy. Note also how unerringly he is subverting civil society by attacking the media. It has to be admitted, however, that even before he was elected the process of hollowing out America’s liberal democracy had been under way for the past eight years, courtesy of Republicans in Congress.
Fascism promises its believers a return to paradise. But it can’t be done any more than astronomy can be returned to its Ptolemaic version or technology brought back to steam power. Trump’s promises to make America great again are lies. America is already great for him and his billionaire buddies – and he’s only going to make it greater still for them at the expense of the suckers who voted for him.
Whose fault will it be that, despite Trump’s election, America still won’t be that great for the average Joe? Why, the liberals of course. So don’t harbor any hopes that Trump’s version of Ordinary Fascism will be any more vegetarian than that of his predecessors. His Two Minutes of Hate will one day soon become actual repression once his promises won’t come true and his voters start asking uncomfortable questions.
