I have been around for a good long time, having entered political activism in the early 1960s when I was in graduate school. In those heady days of demonstrations, mainly against the Vietnam War then raging, the term ‘fascism’ was tossed around rather loosely, I thought. Everyone who did not oppose the war or who voted for it or screamed at us demonstrators as we marched (usually hard-hat construction workers), was characterized as ‘fascist.’ We said it and wrote it all the time, but for myself at least, it was a mostly rhetorical device. It was really the retort to all those shouts of ‘commie,’ ‘pinko,’ ‘queer’ that we were routinely met with. For what is the opposite of ‘commie’? Why ‘fascist ‘of course. And I think that’s the way most of us used it and thought of it. We called Johnson a fascist. And Nixon a fascist. And McNamara a fascist. And General Westmoreland a fascist. And the police fascists.
It’s different now. With fifty more years of nonstop police brutality aimed mostly at Blacks, with militias armed to the teeth stoking and hoping for a race war, with the President of the United States lauding people in Nazi gear as “fine people,” with the President’s supporters impervious to reason or even facts—including the videotaped police shootings of unarmed black men, often in the back—with the majority of the Republican Party finding 180,000 deaths (half of whom are minorities) from Covid-19 as “acceptable,” and with major media figures like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter praising the 17-year-old cop lover who gunned down three protesters in Kenosha Wisconsin as a hero who should be president, and the police simply letting that same gunman walk away with his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder in plain sight while they, the same police, attack unarmed protesters screaming that this kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, had just shot three people, two of whom were dead—with all this and more, fascism appears no longer to be a rhetorical device. The threat of fascism taking over in this nation, in some form or another, is now very real indeed. As Allen Ginsberg once wrote: “America, this is quite serious.”
And that’s how I’m feeling now. Outraged and disgusted and incredulous that such a large percentage of Americans (including many of my distant relatives) actually believe this serial liar and fraud and sexual deviant and serial bankrupt and money launderer and illiterate piece of narcissistic excrement who now sits in the White House. They actually believe him; believe that he is their savior; believe that he has brought them protection and safety from the hordes of “others” he says are out there seeking to take everything away from them; those hordes enabled, they believe, by the coastal elites, who see them as beneath contempt. And in a way, it is true. They are contemptible. For being so gullible that they can’t see through the con, can’t see they are being manipulated in the same way southern plantation owners once manipulated poor whites in the South: by offering them the freed slaves to look down upon; by showing them that no matter how poor or illiterate they were, they were still white and therefore several steps above the bottom dwellers, forever superior to those freed black slaves. In short, fed them a steady diet of white supremacy. The same has been done to many of the ethnic groups like my own, Italian Americans, who were racialized and scorned when they first arrived around the turn of the 20th century, when they were said to be another race, closer to Africans then Italians. Unfit to be Americans, they were said to be; the detritus of Europe; fit only to be sterilized and work in sewers. But after a couple of generations, and much toil, they, most of them, have been granted that unassailable ticket to Americanism—whiteness. The price for the ticket being the age-old one in America: to become racist. Which must have seemed a fair price to pay for that one privilege: to be above, no matter what your earnings or position has been, and, regardless of your heritage, able to look down upon those people of color who occupy, and must always occupy the bottom rungs of the social ladder. And that is what is at stake for most of them, the Trump lovers. Staying at least that one rung above the bottom, retaining that hard-won place that now seems threatened by the darkening of America. And they are right. Their unquestioned place is indeed threatened; because America is, in fact, turning into a nation where people of color will soon, if they don’t already, outnumber “whites.” Which to me, is a good thing, long long overdue. Not to them. To them it looms like an ‘existential threat.’
It is a truism, at least, that when people are threatened, they will resort to any scheme, any rationale to prevent and fend off the perceived threat. Germans in the thirties are a type case. In the face of their defeat in WWI, and the draconian reparations that bankrupted their nation, and rocketing inflation, they were putty in the hands of the Nazis who both gave them an age-old threat to focus on—the Jews in their midst—and a promise of a return to the glory they loved to see as their heritage—their dominance over all of Europe and the world. And so they succumbed to the madman who was also a great conman. And it took only a few years for their nation, along with the flower of their youth, to be destroyed, utterly. Now we are going to see if the same fate is in store for the United States of America. For the conman is, unbelievably to many, in power. And he has harped on and hinted at and exaggerated the threat, which is, in some senses, real. It is the threat outlined above: that the privileged place of whiteness, long the linchpin of our entire Republic and enshrined in our Constitution, is in danger of giving way. And the demographics bear this out. And the unquenchable nostalgia for the days when the perks of whiteness were not just in place but unchallenged, the days before the Civil War for some, the days before the equal rights amendments and the Civil Rights laws for most, and before Brown v. Board of Education and mixed-race marriages and the right to sit and eat and live and play and go to school together with ‘those’ people—the days before all that liberal claptrap, might come again. And though it is manifestly a pipe dream, it still seems to have power for too many. And it is that power—Make America Great Again, which is to say, white again—that holds the promise, or should I say the threat, of fascism.
Now, with the Black Lives Matter movement galvanized by the police murder in plain sight of George Floyd, and most recently with Officer Rusten Shesky’s shooting in the back, also on video, of the unarmed Jacob Blake as he was trying to enter his car containing his three young children while Shesky, holding onto his shirt, fired seven bullets into him; and with the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse of no less than three protesters of the Blake shooting (two of whom died), and being allowed by those same police to walk away without even a question about the AR-15 he was carrying (this young white boy was apparently earlier given a bottle of water, together with his white militia buddies, as a token of the policemen’s thanks for “helping out”), and allowed to travel twenty miles to his home in Illinois before being arrested the next day; and with the Kenosha police chief essentially blaming the victims for their own deaths because they were out “protesting” in the first place; and with news at the same time that this coziness between cops and militias is not at all unusual since many other police forces in this nation have forged ties with these same vigilante militias (see “White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US: a former FBI agent has documented links between serving officers and racist militant activities in more than a dozen states,” The Guardian, Aug. 27, 2020.), with many cops signing on as actual militia members—now it appears that law enforcement and its apparent animosity towards black and brown people is no accident perpetrated by a few ‘bad actors,’ but rather, looks to be built in. Racism left over from the original slave patrols that tracked down escaped slaves, and returned this “property” to their masters; in time morphing into what we in white America now take to be ‘neutral’ police protecting American lives and property; but still with that racist origin pervading much of what we call “law enforcement.”
I can still remember the surprise of us mostly white protesters demonstrating against the war, and suddenly realizing that here, in our American streets, the situation had changed; the relationship with law enforcement had changed. It was no longer the friendly cop on the beat chatting with the neighbors and looking out for the kids. Now they were armed, in riot gear, and threatening to those very same grown-up kids. Now they seemed eager, especially in Chicago, to beat on those kids with billy clubs and tear gas, white or not. Commies. Pinkos. Queers. Disrespecting the flag and the government and the troops fighting so you cowards have the right to exercise your damn constitutional rights. And we suddenly understood what our black brothers had warned all along: watch out for cops. They’ll kill you. Even so, we knew, most of us, that we were armed with that invisible shield: whiteness. And also that there are large portions of the American public who are not so armed and have never, in over 400 years, been so armed; and the recent fight has erupted, once again, over their promised access to simple justice.
Nor is it only over black and brown equality either. Now it’s over equality, or rather mass inequality, period. Over the obscene spectacle in the United States of a few billionaires like Gates and Bezos and Buffet not only controlling more wealth than half the population, but growing unbelievably richer as the Covid-19 virus devastates and impoverishes the rest of the population, especially, most viciously and disproportionately, those same people of color who are dying at a rate as obscene as is the wealth of the mandarins. And many people, particularly among the younger generations but including this aging writer, are finding this grossly unequal access to privilege, to the basics of life itself, too nauseating to stomach any longer.
It is too nauseating to see police shooting an unarmed black man in the back, while allowing a white kid armed to the teeth to simply walk away. To see that the difference, in the eyes of the police, is the one distinction that always matters in America, the color of a person’s skin. To see that if you are black or brown, any encounter with the police, no matter how mild, no matter one’s cultural status or wealth, can result in death. Which means, unequivocally, that the entire sordid history of race enters every police confrontation in this country, and that that history often dictates that a black man might well walk away or try to escape rather than put himself at the mercy of a cop liable to be carrying that history in a way that incites either fear or loathing and, ultimately, the firing of his/her weapon with lethal effect. It happened to Trayvon Martin. To Breonna Taylor. To twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. To Jacob Blake and to countless others in recent years, and going on back to routine lynchings and burnings throughout the nation, and with the same purpose: intimidation. Don’t get too uppity or you’ll die. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be at the hands of the police. It could well be, now, with the encouragement of the police themselves, and of the current President, death at the hands of some 17-year-old kid who thinks it’s cool to join a militia and go hunting for “those” people.
Yes, we seem to be at a tipping point in this America. And the protests in the streets are only one visible part of it. There’s also this virus raging, and the same people who think it might be cool to gun down protesters, are also joining with this unhinged president in their own protest—against the universally-prescribed cautions from medical experts that the way to prevent the virus’s spread is to wear masks—to protect others, not oneself—and maintain social distance. Very simple, and apparently commonsensical. Instead, the militia types, the ones who love to shout about their “freedoms,” characterize mask wearing and social distancing as violations of those American rights. Refusing to wear masks like their President, they prefer sometimes violent confrontations with clerks and service workers who try to implement those safety codes. As if nowhere in America are there any rules that these ‘free spirits’ have to obey to keep others safe. Ditto with rules to prevent pollution of the environment, or initiatives by the global community to bring arguably the greatest threat to humanity in history—global warming—under at least minimal control. Fuck that, they say. Fuck that, says their heroic president. Fuck that, say the big oil companies who hide their mercenary reasons behind the rubric of “rights.” We’re free and independent; we have rights; we can do anything we want. And the world burns. And the president piles gasoline on the flames.
Perhaps most relevant to this discussion are the recent moves, authoritarian to their core, by Drumpf to throw gasoline on the most fundamental act in any democracy—voting. Even above and beyond the traditional Republican attempts to discourage and prevent minorities in urban areas from voting, such as gerrymandering and poll closings and voter ID laws, are this president’s moves to steal the 2020 election—the preeminent initial move of every fascist regime. Appointing one of his biggest donors to be Postmaster General (done at a time when it had become clear that mail-in voting would be a preference for many people not wanting to risk contagion from Covid-19 by traditional in-person voting), the President apparently hoped, with this move, to discourage and disable voters from mailing in the ballots that would certainly favor his opponent. And new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was happy to oblige, ordering post offices to stop allowing overtime to ensure that the day’s mail was delivered, removing mail boxes in target states, and dismantling dozens of automatic mail-sorting machines. This sabotage of the postal system has been defended by DeJoy as part of his “cost-cutting” measures to “save” the service, when everyone knows of the long-running project of conservatives to privatize this most valued governmental service, not to mention Drumpf’s naked attempt to tip the election in his favor. But that’s not all. This fascist wannabe has speculated about suspending the election (because of the virus he scorns, of course) and pre-emptively tweets that even if the election goes off on time, even if the intimidating tactic of sending police to polling stations doesn’t reduce turnout in cities, all mail-in ballots will be corrupt, as will the whole election, and might not be settled for “months or even years.” Which sounds like a way of signaling that he will not accept the election results if he loses; and/or a way of signaling to his militia minions that they should be prepared to contest the election armed with their “right to carry” weapons in full view. And it seems to be working, at least among Republicans who, two-thirds of them, tell pollsters that “they don’t have confidence in the fairness of the election” (Sarah Abramsky, Truthout.org, Aug. 29, 2020).
So what do we have? The stage is being set for a portion of the public to find the 2020 presidential election “fraudulent,” and for the President to reject the results, and to blame his loss on “anarchists and left-wing extremists” who he alleges have taken control of the Democratic Party and its weak nominee, the “socialist” Joe Biden. Who, we are told, intends to impose Bolshevism and communism on the entire nation in order to “destroy our second amendment, attack the right to life, and replace American freedom with left wing fascism” (Drumpf, as quoted by Paul Street, Counterpunch, Aug. 28, 2020). Yes, the current president of the United States and his surrogates have said all this and more, screaming maniacally at their recent convention that our “sacred” American way of life, our freedoms, are now under attack not only by anarchists in the streets, but by the other party as well. With the implication that concerned Americans—the Kenosha Guard and the Proud Boys and the hundreds of armed militia “patriots” documented by the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right as having intimidated protesters in more than 300 counties this summer alone (see Financial Times, Aug. 28), including the fully-armed militia-types who occupied the gallery of the Idaho State House in Boise recently to protest the state order to wear masks and, like Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, got away without so much as a parking ticket because, according to Idaho State Police spokeswoman, Lynn Hightower “Idaho State Police personnel determined they could not have made arrests on the spot without elevating the potential for violence” (NPR.org, Aug. 25, 2020)—especially concerned Americans with guns, the President implied, ought to take action in the event of his defeat.
Now whether it will be Trump—which may seem doubtful given his deficiency in brain cells and courage—or one of his more smooth-talking, dangerous successors like Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo, or even some unknown nut case from Q-Anon, the conspiracy theorists who claim to have evidence of left-wing liberals and Hollywood types engaging in demonic child sex rituals and even eating babies—the stage has been set for some sort of authoritarian rejection of our weak-kneed democracy, and its replacement by a strong man to root out the alleged evil. Several nations around the world—Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, India, Brazil—have already gone this route. But can it happen here? Only time will tell. But unless the American public—the public still in possession of its faculties and a rudimentary sense of truth and ethics, that is—comes out en masse in November to reject in a landslide such a takeover, it very well could. Some form of fascism could, that is, given the multiple stresses on the nation and its increasingly frightened populace seeking a simple solution, happen here. And considering the racist history of this nation, and the immense threats for humanity stemming from the ignorant dismissal of the real crises, and the inclination of many toward those simple-minded solutions, we’re all going to need more than a shrink, or a few pills, or even the friendly glance of the almighty, if it does.
Lawrence DiStasi
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