Two sources published recently about American fascism. A NYT opinion by David Brooks opines:
The Authoritarians Have the Momentum
The central struggle in the world right now is between liberalism and authoritarianism. It’s between those of us who believe in democratic values and those who don’t — whether they are pseudo-authoritarian populists like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdogan or straight-up dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping or theocratic fascists like the men who run Iran and Hamas.
In this contest, we liberals should be wiping the floor with those guys! But we’re not. Trump is leading in the swing states. Modi seems to be on the verge of re-election. Russia and Iran are showing signs of strength.
Over the last two centuries liberalism has evolved into a system that respects human dignity and celebrates individual choice. Democratic liberalism says we don’t judge how you want to define the purpose of your life; we just hope to build fair systems of cooperation so you can freely pursue whatever goals you individually choose. Liberalism tends to be agnostic about the purposes of life and focused on processes and means: rule of law, the separation of powers, free speech, judicial review, free elections and the rules-based international order.
In his stirring and clarifying new book, “Liberalism as a Way of Life,” Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism isn’t merely a set of neutral rules that allow diverse people to live together; liberalism, he writes, has also become a moral ethos, a guiding philosophy of life. As other moral systems, like religion, have withered in many people’s lives, liberalism itself has expanded to fill the hole in people’s souls.
The point I want to make here is about morals. If I recall right, Brooks is one of the very few commentators who directly refers to democracy in terms of competing morals. In fact, I recall no one who has done this. People other than me certainly must have done this long ago and I am either unaware of it, or forgot I saw it.
My ignorance and flawed memory aside, America is clearly faced with competing sets of moral values, authoritarian vs democratic. The reason I firmly believe that secular, tolerant democracy is morally superior comes directly from what most people including most authoritarians say they believe in and live by. Most American authoritarians, roughly, most libertarians, Christian nationalists, plutocrats and supporters of Trump and/or the Republican Party (my guess about 85%), strenuously argue that they believe in and live by fact, truth, sound reasoning and democracy. Many say they believe in majority rule, maybe 60%. In my firm opinion belief in fact, truth, sound reasoning and democracy are core political moral values.
Compared to pro-democracy people, what authoritarian leaders and rank and file collectively have in common is they in fact do not respect live by fact, truth, sound reasoning and democracy nearly as much as most pro-democracy people. From what I can tell, that is true in America, Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea and Hungary. That is probably true for dictatorships and theocracies everywhere. For most of the rank and file (~90% ?), they are deceived by endless dark free speech about their false beliefs. For most authoritarian elites and leaders (~96% ?), they are cynical liars and emotion manipulators who lean heavily on dark free speech to persuade the rank and file to support their self-serving cause, namely more wealth and power for themselves.
Belief in and accepting inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning requires a lot more moral courage than belief in the comforting lies and irrational manipulations of authoritarian elites and leaders. Authoritarians always have the propaganda edge because they are untethered from inconvenient fact, true truth and rational or sound reasoning. Democratic morals generates more cognitive dissonance, i.e., psychological and social discomfort, than morally rotted but comforting authoritarian morals because it is constrained by those same moral values. In my opinion, that is usually or always the main reason why authoritarianism has a major advantage over democracy.
This is why authoritarianism is the rule,
not the exception in human history
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An article The New Republic published poses a great question:
Yes, That’s Right: American FascismWhy waste time debating the extent of Trump’s fascism when we ought to be fighting it instead?“No, no,” some admonish: “Don’t get carried away. Sure, Donald Trump is dangerous, perhaps uniquely so. But … fascist? The need to label him a fascist says more about the labeler than about Trump.” This argument has sprung from certain quarters of the right, which was to be expected, but it has also sprouted from the left, where a point of view has arisen that the “hysterical” invocation of the f-word is as much a danger as Trump.
We have trouble seeing the hysteria. We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”
We unreservedly choose the latter course.
Q: Is he close enough to fascism to fight, or is that idea alarmism, hyperbole and/or crackpottery?
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