Dissident Politics: Conservative, radical right, authoritarian, fascist, tribe, cult

They all loved it and supported it --

now they own the beast and its legacy

The GOP's opinion

What are the best labels for the pro-ex-president wing of the GOP and the less pro-ex-president wing? Today, the GOP tends to refer to itself as moderate to conservative, patriotic, democratic and fully grounded in facts, true truths and sound reasoning. It sees itself as a big tent party and open to competing ideas and internal dissent.

My opinion

Years ago the GOP was generally conservative and moderately tolerant of internal dissent and differing policy choices. After Obama won the election in 2008, the party morphed into a radical right authoritarian tribe, although that process had been underway since the 1980s or maybe even earlier. Obama's election crystallized the transition.

Then on Jan. 6, most of the GOP leadership and rank and file membership supported the coup attempt to keep the ex-president in power. That crossed a line and converted that part of the GOP into a fascist personality cult. Both the radical right authoritarian tribe and the fascist personality cult sharply departed from reliance on facts, truths and sound reasoning. Instead, those phases of the party's evolution turned to full blown embrace of lies, deceit, emotional manipulation, partisan motivated reasoning and fantasy, often including some crackpot conspiracy theory or another.

Upon conversion to the radical right authoritarian variant, the GOP went from moderately or mildly pro-democracy to solidly anti-democratic, e.g., via aggressive voter suppression and constant attacks on the legitimacy and motives of political opposition. It also fully converted to a small tent party with little to no tolerance for dissent or competing ideas. Years of RINO hunts had mostly ideologically cleansed the party of center-right, moderate and liberal republican voters and politicians. The last great RINO hunt is underway now between the remnants of the old radical right authoritarian GOP and the new fascist personality cult GOP. Each side is fighting tooth and claw for total dominance.

Experts opinions

One expert, Robert Paxton, Columbia professor and author of The Anatomy of Fascism who embraced the fascism label for Trump, has this definition of the pro-Trump movement from his book:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Another expert, Sheri Berman, (political science, Barnard College, author of The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century), disagrees:

We should reserve the term “fascism” for leaders or movements that are not merely authoritarian. Fascists were revolutionaries, they aspired to control the state, economy and society (totalitarian vs authoritarian), had large, organized mass movements behind them (which included institutionalized paramilitaries alongside control of the military as well as extensive secret police and intelligence services) and of course came to power after democracy had largely failed. So to my mind Trump (and the Republican party) remain better characterized as pseudo-authoritarian rather than fascist — both because of their particular features/characteristics and because for all its weaknesses and flaws, American democracy (at least thus far) has not deteriorated to the point where constraining institutions no longer operate.

Commentary:

#1: The the ex-president's slogan and ethos of “Make American Great Again” is intended to evoke a sense of national decline, humiliation, and victimhood, particularly on the part of white Americans. And on January 6, at least, the movement attempted to use redemptive violence unchecked by the law to achieve a kind of “internal cleansing,” complete with killings of opposition lawmakers.

But a few caveats: Fascist movements in the 1930s genuinely rejected liberal democracy, not just in practice but as an ideal worth aspiring toward. The de facto position of Trumpists in recent weeks has been to overturn democratic election results, but importantly, that is not what they perceive themselves as doing.

#2: There’s a distinction between more modern forms of authoritarianism and historical fascism. Fascists saw themselves as challengers to elected institutions and democratic forms of government. Hitler and Mussolini canceled elections once they consolidated power; today, regimes like Putin’s in Russia or Erdogan’s in Turkey simply use crackdowns on opposition forces and election rigging to ensure they are not electorally challenged.

The latter model at least pays lip service to constitutional and democratic norms, much as Trump continues to insist that he should be president not because the democratic system is corrupt but because he in fact won according to democratic norms. This approach is no less authoritarian, but for the reasons Berman describes, it’s arguably less fascist.

#3: A dispute over another word — “coup” — can shed some light on if and why the dispute matters. Multiple scholars of international relations who study coups argued in the wake of the riot on January 6 that the term “coup” was inaccurate. One observer wrote this about that:

“At no point did yesterday’s protestors attempt to actually seize control of the levers of state power— nor did anyone watching think these goons were now running the government,” Erica De Bruin, assistant professor of government at Hamilton College and author of How to Prevent Coups d’État, wrote.

To critics, this is splitting hairs. In a pointed meme, sociologist Kieran Healy translated commentators saying, “It’s not a coup because it doesn’t meet the technical conditions of the military branch yadda yadda yadda …” as actually saying, “I have a very comfortable job.”

The split on “fascism” feels akin to the split over “coup,” and both arguments seem to suffer from some confusion over what exactly we’re arguing about. On the one side are academics who value these definitions because they enable better research and analysis. If you study coups, you need to have a clear definition of what a coup is before you start compiling data sets, looking for causes and patterns, etc. And that definition may not perfectly anticipate what people want to call coups in the future.

.... a couple of concerns about whether it’s wise for laypeople to use “fascism” to express alarm and outrage at Trump and Trumpism. The first has to do with the future, and the second has to do with America’s past.

My first concern about using the word “fascism” now is that things could get much, much worse — and at that point, will we have the vocabulary to describe what is happening? I first heard fascism comparisons flying in American politics back in the mid-2000s. I remember an adult I knew from church forwarding me a list of “warning signs of fascism” enumerated by writer Lawrence Britt back in 2003. The list, clearly constructed to evoke aspects of the Bush administration, included items like “religion and ruling elite tied together,” “power of corporations protected,” and “obsession with national security.”

#4: Living in an alternative information ecosystem that has falsely told the ex-president's supporters over and over again that the election was rigged, they view themselves as defenders of the Constitution, protecting America from rampant voter fraud. Their rhetoric suggests that they see their mission as saving constitutional democracy, not undermining it. That’s distinct from, say, Nazism or Mussolini’s fascism, which did not attempt to uphold democracy even in rigged form but rejected it as undesirable.

My technical analysis

At what point does the reality of intentional propaganda that deceives, deludes and enrages people excuse their utterly baseless attempt to overthrow a government by violence in the name of saving it? The Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt was the first time in American history that the transfer of power was violent and bloody, not peaceful. Most of the GOP leadership in congress and some or most red state governments supported it.

What happened on Jan. 6 was an attempted coup by actual fascists. Those people and their supporters in the GOP intended to overthrow the US government by force. They said so. They all claimed to believe that the election was illegitimate, despite not one shred of evidence of widespread vote fraud, vote or vote count cheating, or widespread voter or count irregularity. The only major fraud attempts were by the ex-president, his crackpot liar supporters including the fascists Lou Dobbs, Rudi, Sydney, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marjorie Greene, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy and the ex-president itself.

Clearly, reasonable minds will differ.

The source for this OP: https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/2021/01/27/the-f-word/