“One by one in recent years, objections to describing militant Trumpism as fascist have fallen away.” —Jeff Sharlet, “The Undertow”
A few years ago I was empaneled at Duke University with a formidable pair of writers, the Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu, who was then teaching at Louisiana State University, and the Chilean novelist/playwright Ariel Dorfman, a Duke professor. I’m embarrassed to admit that I no longer remember who sponsored this event or exactly what we were attempting to resolve. I know we discussed politics and geopolitics. Dorfman and Codrescu owed some of their political gravitas, of course, to the long shadows of the dictators who had seized their native countries. Dorfman had written eloquently about the bloody Pinochet years in Chile, and Codrescu’s history with the Ceausescu regime in Romania had made him NPR’s resident critic of authoritarian government.
I remember joking that my own defense of democracy was limited to my disparagement of North Carolina’s Neanderthal Senator Jesse Helms, a relatively harmless old ogre compared to their jackboot dictators. At the time I think we all agreed that nothing quite as frightening as Pinochet or Ceausescu could ever happen in a mature democracy like America’s,
I’m no longer confident of that, and it’s no longer a joking matter. For years, everyone positioned to the left of center prudently avoided the word “fascist” and comparisons to Nazi Germany when the latest Republican outrage reduced us to tears.
One loaded word, when everyone hears it, can have serious consequences in politics. The conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton damaged her campaign in 2016 when she referred to the Trump base as “deplorables.” This was supposed to be an instance of a pedigreed Wellesley/Yale graduate’s sneering condescension to less-educated and less-fortunate Americans. But we’re no longer in doubt about which “deplorables” she actually had in mind — we saw them storming the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, spurred on by an orange-faced baboon who still refers to Jan. 6 as “a beautiful day.”
Avoiding words like “Hitler” and “Nazi” was rhetorically wise and showed admirable restraint, while Trump and his Far-Right chorus line held a monopoly on reckless exaggeration and hate-triggering name calling. An odd thing I’ve learned in a half-century of public discourse is that the very worst people invariably accuse their antagonists of the things of which they themselves are most guilty. When they call you a thief or a liar or a pedophile, you can be almost certain that they’re lying and stealing, or worse. Listen carefully to Donald Trump if you think I’m wrong. In his Mother’s Day message he calls Democrats “fascists” and “lunatics.”
We stomached the contempt for the rule of law, and for most norms and precedents, we recoiled from the mindless, belligerent patriotism that anchors every right-wing movement (how is “MAGA” so different from “Deutschland Uber Alles”?). We saw swastikas in Charlottesville and on the steps of the Capitol, and still most responsible voices on the Left held their fire, avoiding historical references to Kristallnacht and the Beer Hall Putsch.
But now, I see that this era of well-bred, dignified progressive restraint is coming to an end. The Republicans’ fiercest and most reliable critics have begun to take their gloves off. The former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, writing in The Progressive Populist, offered a stark but in no sense excessive warning: “The Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. It is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.” Picking up Reich’s challenge, Thom Hartmann cut right to the chase, the inevitable comparison between Germany in 1933 and America 90 years later. “The parallels to today’s America are startling,” Hartmann writes, also in The Progressive Populist. He goes on to list and explain them — the racism, anti-semitism and homophobia, the book bans, the captive party media, the censorship of school curricula, the contempt for artists and intellectuals. But Hartmann’s most important point — familiar to journalists but unclear to most Americans — is that the current Republican Party, like the National Socialist Party, is an unlikely but lethally potent coalition of the most cynical plutocrats and a furious, gullible underclass eager to scapegoat minorities for its failures.
Even Hitler, we learn, had his friendly billionaires. And Donald Trump’s claim that he’s the champion (“I am your warrior,” no less) of America’s struggling underdog is right out of Hitler’s playbook, right out of “Mein Kampf.” So are Trump’s apocalyptic warnings, varying only from “Our country is dying” to “Our country is dead.” Then and now, demagogues’ soundtracks are interchangeable. It’s highly unlikely that a reelected President Trump would be loading Jews and homosexuals into boxcars. Didn’t his daughter convert to Judaism? But the threat of mob violence like the kind that exploded in Washington on Jan. 6 was a key to the intimidation of “good Germans” in the 1930s, and when Trump said the goons who sacked the Capitol “were there with love in their hearts” I was nearly driven to violence myself.
The parallels are ample and disturbing. But one great difference between Germany in the 1930s and America today — and between America and any nation, at any time — is our frightening distribution of firearms among civilians. Any non-American who reads that there are more than 400 million guns in a nation of 330 million people is struck speechless. Add that one-third of our citizens own all of them and you realize you’re staring at an armed paranoid minority that could start a world war of its own. Little wonder, really, that we’ve suffered more than 200 mass shootings in the first four months of 2023. “I’m sticking close to home these days because, right now, humanity scares me,” Brian Broome wrote in the Washington Post. “This country scares me.”
Me too, buddy. Maybe the most horrible consequence of the arming of America is that the irrational paranoia anchoring our gun cult is becoming rational fear, for many people in many places. When every driver on the highway may be locked and loaded and every pedestrian packing, human nature guarantees a regular diet of mayhem. Of course not all of these concealed-carry lunatics are MAGA Republicans. Well, not all of them. But the state legislatures that are trying to EASE restrictions on gun ownership in the face of these constant massacres — I’m ashamed to admit that North Carolina’s legislature is one of them — are all red-state and Republican-controlled. President Biden’s crusade to ban assault rifles, a minor concession to sanity, is being blocked by the NRA-owned-and-emasculated Republicans who control the House of Representatives.
A wide selection of Republican candidates have had themselves photographed flaunting their AR-15s, including congresswomen Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Georgia’s wild-eyed war-mom Marjorie Taylor Greene (who said something like “We don’t hunt animals, we hunt tyrants.”???). In the neo-fascist era we’re entering, there’s nothing in the political ecosystem more frightening than Republican women.
GOP Nazis didn’t invent the gun cult or motiveless mass shootings, which have evolved from a deep, dark place in the American psyche. The novelist Paul Auster has published a new book, “Bloodbath Nation,” which traces this pathology all the way back to the Indian wars and attempts to answer the simple question “What makes us the most violent country in the Western world?” But there’s no question that the NRA and its captive legislators, no less than the storm troopers, who call themselves things like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, are a big part of the MAGA juggernaut and the looming fascist threat. Gun violence has already turned the USA into an undesirable destination, with Amnesty International warning foreign travelers to “exercise caution” within our borders. Trump’s reelection — or even his failure and refusal to accept it — might unleash unprecedented chaos.
We no longer have a safe place to hide from armed fanatics. Even a Democratic sweep of the White House and both houses of Congress would barely cool the fascist fever that seems to be burning in the Heartland. Journalist Jeff Sharlet, who specializes in exposing the hypocrisy of MAGA Christians, has just published “The Undertow,” which represents years of face-to-face conversations with Americans who have voted, and will vote, for Trump. His reports from the field are bone-chilling. His subjects, according to Joseph O’Neill’s review in the New York Times, “reveal themselves in their full intransigence, menace and delusional mindset. Sharlet leaves the scene feeling more shaken up and pessimistic than ever.” QAnon craziness and the widespread belief that the Clintons are child-eating pedophiles didn’t shake the reporter as much as the militias and the obvious preparation for violence. Sharlet concluded that what he was witnessing was “the undertow of civil war.”
The GOP has lurched so far to the Right than any Republican president will represent a body blow to democracy. Donald Trump is not the founder, or even the linchpin of the American neo-fascist movement. He’s more like the famous face on the cereal box. But he is a special case. Here’s a man who was elected president with no experience, or even knowledge of government, a fool who thought he’d been crowned King of America and performed as expected, like Ubu Roi. Stupid, ignorant, amoral and now indisputably demented, he’s back on the campaign trail, a clown with a spray-painted face, a yard-long necktie and a slapstick act that’s an insult to the political process. “Unhinged” is the word used most often by people who’ve experienced him close-up. He’s been indicted for financial crimes by a grand jury, and found liable for sexual assault by a civil jury in New York. Does that mean he’ll have to register as a sex offender in Florida? Will his Mar-a-Lago neighbors protest that he’s dragging down the neighborhood?
This sad act should be playing to empty houses everywhere. To a reasonable person, it seems impossible that any voter, even one, would still consider Donald Trump presidential material. Yet here’s a headline that reads “Biden’s Approval Numbers Are Bleak,” and shows Trump leading both Biden and his Republican rival Ron DeSantis in the latest polls. A post-indictment poll indicated that 70% of the Republican Party was sticking with Trump. Many of those voters complained that Joe Biden is too old to be president. Of course he is, and so is Trump, and so am I. But Biden sure looks a lot healthier than Doughboy Donald. And 90% of what he says makes sense and passes fact-checking, while 100% of Trump’s outbursts fail both tests. I see Joe Biden as the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike that holds back the fascists — a hero, in my opinion.
Trump remains an enigma. People exploit him for their own purposes, but no one likes him or even struggles to understand him. None of the principal strains of American fascism explain his haunting career — not the bigotry he embraces, the harsh authoritarianism he admires or the violence he flirts with. He is a one-off. He’s the chief beneficiary of the willful blindness, uniquely American, that terrified Jeff Sharlet. Trump’s adherents, in their astonishing numbers, seem to be people who resist reality, who don’t want to think. What they want is to believe. Trumpism stands outside political calculations — his converts are the kind of people who fall prey to suicide cults, to religious charlatans, to false messiahs. They’re ready to drink the Kool-aid.
Remember Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven’ Gate cult, Jim Jones in Jonestown, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco? They were megalomaniacs, messianic narcissists who painted on the large canvas and never betrayed the slightest doubt. Their true believers followed them to the grave. Americans who follow Donald Trump to the end of the line aren’t going to fare much better, believe me. We can only pray that they don’t take the rest of us with them.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Reach him by email at delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2023
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