We should not indulge in denial, nor deceive ourselves, in other words, we should not look away (i.e. deliberately ignore) from what is before our eyes and ears: the fascism of the cult of Trump is not going away anytime soon; a conclusion that is neither alarmist nor simply reflective of partisan hyperbole. If you believe otherwise, you are not paying sufficient attention. I am—or will be—quite happy to be proven wrong and welcome reasonable arguments that attempt to persuade me that I am indeed mistaken.
In early spring of last year I stated that the so-called Grand Old Party has morphed into a political party of imaginary and delusionary grievance, of crass and cartoonish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and (actual and aspirational) fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy and narcissistic privilege, of Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice mired in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze. It is a politics that lacks any meaningful disposition to truth and evidences no concern whatsoever for either Liberal constitutionalism or democracy. The anti-democratic and now nakedly fascist “Trump effect” shows few signs of going away, despite the surprising if not encouraging defeat in Kansas of the referendum proposal for a state constitutional amendment that would end protections for abortion. Recent primary results in Arizona and Michigan are disappointing for those of us hoping more Republicans would openly disavow the fascist cult of Trump. People still shrink back from characterizing Trump, his ideologues and many if not most of his followers as “fascist,” yet there is abundant evidence testifying to the aptness of this descriptive characterization, one piece of which follows:
“He has extolled the value of racial purity, is vehemently anti-immigration, has cultivated close ties with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and is a speaker at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, in Dallas. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, 59, is widely criticized around the world for systematically dismantling his country’s nascent democracy during his 12 years in power — but that hasn’t stopped him from emerging as a darling of many on the right in America.
Former President Donald Trump and his onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon are also speaking at CPAC, America’s top conservative conference. And both are fans of Orbán’s. Trump endorsed Orbán in January, three months before he was re-elected to a fourth term, and Bannon called the Hungarian leader ‘Trump before Trump’ in a speech in Budapest in 2018.
While Trump was voted out, Orbán, the first European Union leader to speak out in support of Trump’s campaign in 2016, looks unassailable, with control over the media, the legislature and the judiciary in Hungary. Meanwhile, the fractured left-wing, centrist opposition is marginalized.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who has interviewed Orbán and hosted his show from Budapest for a week in 2021, describes Hungary as a ‘small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.’ In January Carlson released a documentary titled ‘Hungary vs. Soros: Fight for Civilization’ — a reference to George Soros, 91, the Hungarian-born Jewish businessman and philanthropist who has become a scapegoat for Orbán and his allies. One Hungarian writer, Balázs Gulyás, said that in praising Orbán, Carlson had depicted Hungary as a ‘conservative Disneyland.’
Ahead of this week’s conference, Trump released a picture of him and Orbán together. ‘Great spending time with my friend,’ Trump said in a press release. ‘We discussed many interesting topics — few people know as much about what is going on in the world today. We were also celebrating his great electoral victory in April.’” — Patrick Smith for NBC News today (Aug. 4, 2022)
Recommended Reading
- Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, revised ed., 1991).
- Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
- Auestad, Lene, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac Books, 2014).
- Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1994).
- Brudner, Alan. Constitutional Goods (Oxford University Press, 2004).
- Cagé, Julia. The Price of Democracy: How Money Shapes Politics and What to Do about It (Harvard University Press, 2020).
- Cassam, Quassim. Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- Coady, C.A.J. Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
- Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded ed., 1970).
- Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (Yale University Press, 1993).
- Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Book of Revelation,” in John J. Collins, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (Continuum, 2000): 384-414.
- Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2nd, 2003).
- Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002).
- Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction (Verso, new ed., 2007).
- Elster, Jon. Ch. 8, “Ideologies,” in Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985): 459-510.
- Fromm, Erich (Barbara Weinberger, tr. and Wolfgang Bonss, ed.) The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Harvard University Press, 1984).
- Glass, James M. Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995).
- Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2016).
- Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
- Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism (Routledge, 1991).
- Griffin, Roger. Fascism (Key Concepts in Political Theory) (Polity Press, 2018).
- Gruen, Arno. The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward an Understanding of Human Destructiveness (Grove Press, 1992).
- Harcourt, Edward, ed. Morality, Reflection and Ideology (Oxford University Press, 2000).
- Hasen, Richard L. Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2020).
- Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
- Hirschman, Albert O. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).
- Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- Jamieson, Dale. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Keane, John. Violence and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- Larrain, Jorge. Marxism and Ideology (Macmillan Press, 1983).
- Lee, Bandy, ed. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, expanded ed., 2017).
- Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (Verso, 1991).
- Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (Verso, 2002).
- Lefebvre, Henri (Gregory Elliott, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Verso, 2005).
- Lernoux, Penny. People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (Viking Penguin, 1989).
- MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking Penguin, 2017).
- Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- Marlin, Randall. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Broadview Press, 2002).
- Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Anchor Books, 2017).
- McGinn, Bernard, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Vol. 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (Continuum, 2000).
- Piketty, Thomas (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
- Przeworski, Adam. Crises of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
- Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011).
- Seidel, Andrew L. The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American (Sterling, 2019).
- Stanley, Jason. How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015).
- Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works (Random House, 2018).
- Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
- Straub, Michael S. Madness is Civilization: When the Diagnosis was Social, 1948-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- Taylor, Gabrielle. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
- Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity Press, 2013).
- Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton University Press, 1998).
- Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Several relevant bibliographies (embedded links):
- After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
- Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
- Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
- Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing – A Reading Guide
- Beyond Punitive Liberal Capitalist Society
- Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
- Constitutionalism
- Democratic Theory and Praxis
- Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
- Elections and Voting
- Global Distributive Justice
- The Great Depression and the New Deal
- Toward Green Democratic Socialism
- Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
- Housing
- Human Rights
- Immigration & Refugees: Ethics, Law, and Politics
- The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
- Marxism
- Marxism and Freudian Psychology
- Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy and Law
- Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
- Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
- Punishment and Prison
- Social Security and the Welfare State
- Sullied Sciences
- Utopian Imagination, Thought, and Praxis
- Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law
Addendum
Please see, “‘Fight the Barbarians’: The MAGA Movement Lays Out a Warpath at CPAC”
By Tim Dickinson, for Rolling Stone, Aug. 6, 2022
First, my brief comment by way of an introduction, followed by highlights from the article.
These “dark, militant speeches” are not “thinly veiled calls for violence,” but the nakedly fascist rhetoric of those calling upon the Right to use violence against Democrats, whom they demonize in the kind of public rhetoric we find in incitement to genocide (which goes beyond ‘hate speech’) wherein in those one disagrees with, one’s political opponents, are characterized in Manichean (demonizing) and dehumanizing terms that place them beyond the pale as it were. This, to put it mildly, it is the anti-Liberal and anti-democratic rhetoric favored by fascists and authoritarians. It is an intensification and militarization of the insurrectionist language that preceded the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. And it is an exquisite exemplar of what psychologists term projection.*
- “Capitol Hill rioters [are] victims of a “Democratic Gulag.”
- “We are at war,” Bannon told the MAGA faithful. “We are in a political and ideological war.” Repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, Bannon insisted that Joe Biden is an “illegitimate imposter.” Calling on Republicans to send “shock troops” to Washington, Bannon promised the crowd they had an opportunity to “shatter the Democratic party as a national political institution.” He alleged that the party has been overrun by “radical, cultural Marxists” and “groomers” who “want to destroy the Republic.” Bannon insisted the GOP must pursue absolute victory over “power-mad and lawless” Democrats, asserting: “There can be no half measures anymore.”
- Orbán — the Hungarian strongman fond of Nazi-style rhetoric against race mixing — received standing ovations for his stark address to the MAGA faithful on Thrusday. Orbán described European parliament and the federal government in Washington as “the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization,” warning, “today, we hold neither of them, yet we need them both.” Orbán called on CPAC attendees and the far-right in Europe to forge a global movement. “We should unite our forces,” Orbán said, to “take back” Washington and Brussels.
- Ted Cruz … inveighed against what he called the “power hungry, abusive totalitarian nitwits” of the Biden administration and the Democratically controlled Congress. Cruz likened his service in the Senate to that of a gladiator: “It’s like the old Roman Colosseum where you slam on a breastplate and you grab a battle axe and you go fight the barbarians,” he said of his Democrat colleagues. “As they say in the military world,” Cruz continued, “it is a target-rich environment.”
- Cruz told the crowd, “We’re on the cusp of something extraordinary in this country … And each of you are the vanguard. You are the dangerous radicals. Like the men who signed the Declaration of Independence … like those who died at the Alamo, you are the courageous heroes,” he insisted, “fighting for liberty in our country.”
- [CPAC] welcomed to its stage Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist recently denounced as a hate extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his ties to “white nationalists, antigovernment extremists, members of the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis.” Posobiec took his turn in the spotlight to promote the New Right (effectively the latest rebranding of the hateful “alt-right”). And he, too, painted the coming conflicts of the culture war in militaristic terms: “Are you ready for new ideas to actually take the fight to the front lines,” he asked, “because that’s where we live and we’re not stopping.”
- “We have an invasion at the border,” Kari Lake [the GOP nominee for governor in Arizona] insisted, referring to undocumented immigrants and refugees. Lake then vowed that, after being sworn in, she would mount a military response, even lacking approval from the Biden administration: “As soon as my hand comes off the Bible, we’re going to send the Arizona National Guard troops to the border,” Lake said. Insisting on the “sovereignty” of the states, she insisted: “We will take the fight to the federal government. We’re not going to be victims of what they’re doing to us.”
- The rhetoric of revolution and frontline confrontation went hand-in-hand with other speakers and presenters who cast the American left as demonic, evil, and destructive — in other words the kind of enemies who deserve to be dealt with harshly.
- In between speeches, CPAC promoted a documentary, hosted by chair Matt Schlapp, called The Culture Killers, which inveighs against a “great desecration” perpetrated by the left. ”Anything that’s good, anything that’s holy, anything that’s truthful is being attacked,” Schlapp insisted on video. The documentary describes America as “under siege from an enemy within,” with one voice insisting, over images of burning cars, “There is no end. These people will never stop, until you stop ’em.”
- [Florida Sen. Rick Scott, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee] railed against Democrats as literally “evil” for pursuing an agenda he described as socialism.
- While damning the Democrats in terms that seemed to encourage political violence, CPAC speakers consistently minimized the actual political violence perpetrated by the MAGA movement on Jan. 6. Avowed “Christian nationalist” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for example, slammed Liz Cheney — chair of the committee investigating the Capitol insurrection — for pushing a “lie about Jan. 6.”
- [A] panel called “You’re Next: The Rise of the Democratic Gulag,” … presented Jan. 6 defendants not as alleged perpetrators of riot and insurrection, but as victims of a rigged judicial system.
- Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) … claimed that Jan 6. defendants have been the recipients of “Soviet-style justice” — alleging without evidence that prosecutors, defense attorneys, and federal judges have been “colluding” to secure predetermined convictions. The congressman insisted that “all of the institutions in the United States have been weaponized, not unlike the former Soviet Union” to create an “American Gulag.”
- [CPAC’s] … latest incarnation has become manifestly dangerous — more fascist than farce. It is holding up alleged perpetrators of political violence as martyrs. It is demonizing its domestic political opponents as diabolical “enemies within.” And it is giving MAGA supporters a militaristic frame for their charge to the “front lines” of America’s culture wars. In short it is playing with fire. But it’s the rest of us who may get burned.
* For brief definitions and more extensive introductions, see the term in Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds., Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (The American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990): 149-150; as well as a more historically and theoretically oriented entry in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.), The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 1988 [Hogarth Press, 1973]): 349-355; and, relatedly, the term “projective identification” in Elizabeth Bott Spillius, et al., The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (based on A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by R.D. Hinshelwood [1991]) (Routledge, 2011): 126-146.
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