Various thoughts about authoritarianism

Political news is about the same today as it has been for a while. The presidential election is still too close to call. The situation recently got me to thinking about plausible outcomes where the electoral college elects DJT and the GOP gets control of the Senate. If the GOP also gets control of the house, corrupt authoritarian hell would very likely break loose. Project 2025 makes that clear.

My respect for authorities and ultimate authorities related to politics has decreased a heck of a lot since mid 2016. The NYT published an article about how ultimate fascism authority, Robert Paxton, sees the current mess we are in. I've never heard of the guy. The NYT writes (not paywalled):

[Just after Trump's 1/6/21 coup attempt] an editor at Newsweek reached out to Paxton, he decided to publicly declare a change of mind. In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

Until then, most scholars arguing in favor of the fascism label were not specialists. Paxton was.  

Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,” Paxton said. That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power.  

But fascism does have a specific meaning, and in the last few years the debate has turned on two questions: Is it an accurate description of Trump? And is it useful?

Most commentators fall into one of two categories: a yes to the first and second, or a no to both. Paxton is somewhat unique in staking out a position as yes and no. “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light,” Paxton said as we sat looking out over the Hudson River. “It’s kind of like setting off a paint bomb.”

Whatever promises fascists made early on, Paxton argued, were only distantly related to what they did once they gained and exercised power. As they made the necessary compromises with existing elites to establish dominance, they demonstrated what he called a “contempt for doctrine,” in which they simply ignored their original beliefs and acted “in ways quite contrary to them.”

Paxton has come to the same mindset as me. Yes fascism is accurate. But using the label is not useful. People here convinced me that fascism is not helpful so I stick with authoritarianism.

Do we really need to wait for an ultimate authority like Paxton to tell us what was obvious to some in 2016, e.g., Russian reporter Masha Gessen? I guess for most of the mainstream media the answer is yes. If that is true, can one rationally see it as a fatal weakness in a form of professional journalism that is constrained, subverted and/or neutered by for-profit capitalism. Heck, most of the MSM still routinely calls radical right American authoritarianism "conservative."  

One line of thinking is about the infrastructure of authoritarianism that the radical right has built since the 1960s. Paxton points at a major part of American authoritarianism, namely Trumpism being a mass phenomenon. Without that tribe or cult mindset, or whatever it is, American authoritarianism would still be on the fringes of politics where it used to be limited to. Now American authoritarianism is mainstream with the GOP and about half of the American public.

Other major parts of authoritarian American infrastructure? (i) The radicalized supreme court and its rulings to date, (ii) the entire GOP leadership at both the state and national levels**, (iii) the wealth of some authoritarian elites who are financially backing Trump and MAGA generally, (iv) wealthy American plutocrats and influential Christian nationalist theocrats. Together they are clawing their way toward power, more or less like the early days of Hitler and Mussolini clawing their way toward power.

** Even here in California, the GOP is radicalized and authoritarian.

I wonder how defenders of democracy will respond if things go South. Up their game, capitulate, fumble and stumble around mostly in futility, or something else?

I hope this post isn't TL/DR.