“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.” — George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”
I’ve rarely been taken to task, by friends or readers, for the kind of maudlin, low-rent patriotism that fuels alt-right pseudo-populism and spawns grotesque politicians like Donald Trump. Trying to think of an image that makes me even sicker than the ones of Trump against a waving backdrop of American flags, all I could come up with was a news service photograph of emaciated, starving Sudanese children holding out their food bowls.
I’m afraid I’ve been schooled in the skepticism of H.L. Mencken. He never hesitated to point out that nationalism and religion have caused more pain, in terms of wars, deaths, persecution and displaced populations, than any other forces in the history of the human race.
It was Samuel Johnson who said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Accurate as that may be, I like to think Dr. Johnson was making a point about scoundrels, not about patriotism. Every native—-and every naturalized citizen who believes he’s chosen wisely—-has moments when that familiar flag, and the music that goes with it, brings a lump in the throat. One such moment was a concert by the Castine, Maine, town band, on the centuries-old village green under a towering ancestral elm. The band always plays “America the Beautiful” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and next to the big flag that flies behind its audience is the bronze statue of a Union soldier from the Civil War. The very one, we’ve been told, that inspired the poem “For the Union Dead” by the Yankee poet Robert Lowell, whose home was in the northwest corner of the Castine Common.
This softened me up, I guess, for an image on television the next day, the beautiful, superhuman, gravity-scorning gymnast Simone Biles literally wrapping herself in the American flag after winning another gold medal at the Paris Olympics. You can get a little too much of nationalism at the Olympics, while war and terrorism rage across the globe, but there are moments only the hardest heart can resist. I couldn’t help rooting for Americans or grinning while the flag-wrapped medalists were interviewed. But the next day Lt. William Calley’s obituary was in the paper, and all of us Olympic patriots were reminded of the My Lai massacre and the dreadful things that have been done in the name of that same star-spangled banner. In the same week’s news was a depressing story about a thousand Native American children who died while they were being forcibly assimilated at U.S. government boarding schools. And other stories about the concentration-camp internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, and the government-sponsored syphilis study that made guinea pigs of Black Americans doomed to die untreated.
Not to mention slavery, or a hundred years of Jim Crow. No nation’s unedited history is a pretty one. Imagine being a German. If the USA has more to be proud of than most nations, and arguably we do, it has so much to be ashamed of as well. The patriotism of denial, the kind that tries to censor textbooks that tell the truth, is the patriotism of Dr. Johnson’s scoundrels and the fools who follow them. The path of wisdom, which so few of us follow, is to save our loyalty for good people—-and maybe good ideas? We waste too much precious allegiance on our schools, teams, communities, states, ethnic and fraternal groups and yes, even the nations that issue our passports.
Yet patriotism persists in nearly all of us, a stubborn residue from a lifetime of flags and songs and Memorial Day parades. I’m still surprised when a disillusioned liberal swears he’ll move to Portugal if Donald Trump wins the presidency. I couldn’t do that, for some reason other than my advanced age. The burning question, in this election year of stark contrasts and critical decisions, is “How do I make the best use of this patriotism I can’t seem to set aside?” This is the year the United States of America needs all the love and concern you’ve got to share.
The creeping fascism that has ensnared the Republican Party is a particularly nasty strain, and one that in this digital age of fragmented media is painfully resistant to the truth. Journalists of previous generations — like mine — were raised on an almost religious belief that the truth was out there somewhere, that it could be found and shared, and that it would set us free. The internet with its social media, which have turned every idiot with a keyboard into a pundit with a bullhorn, have to be held responsible for cults like MAGA, for millions of citizens who will believe, manufacture and circulate damn near anything. Where the search for facts once held sway, there’s little now but a scorched landscape of lies, propaganda, “memes” and preposterous conspiracies.
Journalists grapple with despair, faced with the reality that nothing they write or print could change the minds of the MAGA faithful, even if it reached them. The art of persuasion, in a nation so spectacularly polarized, has become a thing of the past. From a sprawling smorgasbord of truculence and nonsense, digital slaves savor their favorite bits and swallow things that turkey vultures wouldn’t touch. Outrageous conspiracy theories abound and thrive. But it would be hard to find one more insane and indigestible than “Pizzagate,” which accused elite Democrats including the Clintons of Satanism, pedophilia and torturing children in the basement of a Washington pizzeria. One of the prominent lunatics who circulated that one is named Jack Posobiec, a fugitive from the outer reaches of the psychedelic Right. And he’s back in the news.
According to Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, Posobiec and a ghostwriter have published a book titled “Unhumans” which relegates everyone to the left of the authors—-that would be you, me, and I hope 98% of the human race — to a loathsome subhuman “subdivision” of creatures who must be deported or annihilated before they destroy everything “good and decent.” The heroes of this revised human history include Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the fascist dictators Francisco Franco of Spain and Augusto Pinochet of Chile, “great men of means” who disposed of democracy and eliminated pesky “unhumans” by force. This is, of course, neo-fascism at its most naked, conjuring Brownshirts, Blackshirts and the click of jackboots on cobblestones.
Goldberg claims that this brand of reactionary drivel is not uncommon in the “dank corners” of the internet. It’s depressing that a Posobiec can find a publisher when so many talented writers struggle to attract one. But what’s most frightening about “Unhumans” is its foreword and the endorsements on its dustjacket. The foreword is by Steve Bannon, America’s favorite out-of-the-closet fascist and onetime chief strategist for Donald Trump. And the jacket blurbs? One from the peculiar vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, one from the clown prince Donald Trump Jr, and one from the freelance media Nazi Tucker Carlson, who was too toxic even for Fox News.
You couldn’t assemble a quartet with closer connections to Donald J. Trump, all endorsing a book that expresses open contempt for democracy. Has American fascism stopped creeping and started sprinting? “Fascist” is a word used too loosely by American politicians, in the tradition of candidate Trump who calls his adversaries both fascists and communists because he doesn’t know the difference, only that they’re bad things to be. He also calls rivals pedophiles or terrorists when the mood strikes him, or even things like “liar,” “cheater” or “fraud” that reflect his own bursting catalog of sins. But genuine fascism, as maniacs like Posobiec know and approve, is a perverted nationalism that declares some citizens “real” Americans (or Italians or Germans) and all the rest undesirable. And it relies on an authoritarian leader, a dictator/warlord like Mussolini or Franco, to decide who’s real and who’s disposable.
This is Chapter One in the fascist playbook. In the immortally appalling words of Benito Mussolini, “In every society there is a need for a part of the citizens who must be hated. Substitute immigrants, “woke” liberals and homosexuals for Jews and gypsies and you see that current Republican rhetoric offers a disturbing echo of Joseph Goebbels and the Third Reich. It contradicts everything tolerant and egalitarian, everything that Americans could claim with legitimate pride. It effectively brings down the curtain on the American experiment and the dreams of the Founders. There’s been so much drama and chaos in the past few weeks of this presidential year — the cruel defenestration of the aging President Biden, the near-assassination of the aging Donald Trump, the emergence of Kamala Harris — that we need to be reminded again of what’s actually at stake, of the historic dimensions of the choice American voters are being asked to make.
It’s tedious repeating what everyone knows about candidate Trump. Nearly every Republican with face-to-face experience of this psychopath, including half his cabinet when he was president, has already published a book warning us that Trump is “deranged,” “unhinged,” “a sleaze,” “a moron,” etc. His own nephew wrote one calling Uncle Donald “atomic crazy.” His niece, a psychologist, wrote another subtitled “How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” His late sister, a federal judge, declared herself stunned by the recklessness of his lies. From his August press conference alone, NPR tallied 162 lies and distortions, a drop in the bucket compared to the 30,000 the Washington Post counted when he was in office.
He’s a multiply convicted felon, a sexual predator, a credibly accused rapist. And so on. How did a major political party sink to this? And now his anointed successor, Sen. J.D. Vance, is someone who holds hands with fascists like Jack Posobiec? Vance seems to be an alarmingly odd man, a human weathervane who never knew who he was or wanted to be, except that it should be important. Tim Walz’s controversial response to Vance and the Republican ticket — “weird” — seems honest and appropriate to me. A second Trump administration would be manned entirely by sycophantic flunkies and parasites, drawn to the rank smell of power, who know that Trump is nuts—-and by eager fascist fanatics who are glad that he is. Who else would benefit from a MAGA restoration? The nation’s most urgent crises are global warming and gun violence, and candidate Trump has already pledged his undying loyalty to the NRA (“I’m the most pro-gun president in history”) and to Big Oil and the fossil fuel lobby. There’s a suicidal element to the Republican agenda. I’m not sure why the media have failed to press the irony that Trump was shot in the head by the same assault rifle so dear to his friends at the NRA.
I’m aware that a Republican will dismiss anything I write as a partisan screed, in spite of my chronic exasperation when the “woke” left crusades to close all the prisons or celebrates Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters. But the habit of rational argument dies hard. Does anyone actually buy Donald Trump as the savior of blue-collar America? Does the working class really think educated “elites” are contemptuous of poor people? The ones I know are only contemptuous of people who buy what Trump is selling. Do less educated Americans really like him because, as one man told a reporter, “He talks like us.”? Does that mean these people are proud to speak like boors, bigots and bullies?
My questions will be answered, I guess, on Nov. 5. If you have any doubt about how you’ll vote, I can offer you one piece of non-partisan advice that might save this or any democracy:
Never cede power to anyone who seems to want it too much.
In the meantime, if your patriotism was accelerated by all those flag-wrapped athletes in Paris, you can put that to good use in the next two months. Uncle Sam needs you, as the recruiting posters used to say. It’s time for us “unhumans” to take a stand. Put up Harris/Walz signs. Turn your car into a free taxi, your family into taxi drivers, and make sure all the students, outcasts and invalids who might not vote can make it to the polls. Volunteer to speak at schools, book clubs, retirement communities. Embrace your “unhumanism.” Tell the truth. Pray. The stakes are overwhelming.
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. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2024
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