Essay: “Encampments” on my Free Patreon Blog
Encampments
Speaking personally, one of the greatest difficulties I’ve found in writing about fascism for a mixed left wing radical and left-leaning FDR liberal audience is bridging the vast divide between what each of these groups do and do not consider relevant to the current rise of globalized Amerikkkan fascism.
Generally, the radical left (correctly, in my opinion) see swine emperor Trump as a mere symptom of a long-running and still ongoing American embrace of fascist principles – a position that might best be summed up with the statement that “Donald Trump cannot bring fascism to a country that was already fascist long before he even ran for office.”
As a history student, I don’t think anyone who has actually done the reading with a critical eye can credible argue that the radical left’s position on American fascism isn’t categorically true. Indeed, one of the most radicalizing revelations I’ve experienced in my own life was the realization that every time I thought I’d finally put my finger on the “beginning” of fascism in America, I would soon read another historical account that shattered my argument and placed the origin point much further in the past; America has been fascist longer than the violent, reactionary right has been calling themselves fascists. Frankly this realization has informed much of my writing about reactionary American revanchism since, as I briefly explore on my “Amerikan Musik: Fascism Ascendant in the USA” splash page:
“As most leftists, pinkos and anarchists are no doubt already aware, the simple truth is that the United States has always readily incorporated fascist ideals into the overall gestalt of American nationalism/patriotism; a process that was simply accelerated by integrating key Nazi officers into the already proto-fascist US government to serve as weapons in “the fight against communism” at the start of the Cold War. This then presents two somewhat related problems when creating a complete archive of the articles I’ve written about the “rise” of American fascism:
If America has always incorporated what we would now recognize as fascist ideology into its political system, talking about the “rise” of American fascism is fundamentally a question of which “rise” you mean; are we talking about the fascist ideology of the Founding Fathers, the ethno-nationalism of the Confederate States or the 1930’s rise of the American Bund? How about George Wallace’s “Silent White Majority” or the Goldwater conservative movement that eventually spawned Reaganism? Richard Nixon? Paleoconservatism? The American Tea Party? Please don’t think I’m just picking on Republicans here; in addition to Wallace, Third Way Democratic administrations under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did every bit as much to help drag the US closer to overt fascism as a guy like George W Bush. The simple truth is that swine emperor Trump himself didn’t bring fascism to America; rather he is the ultimate expression of the American fascist virus that has been growing inside its host country since before the War of Independence.
In light of the fact that there is a fascist undercurrent (expressed as American nationalism or patriotism) running throughout virtually every aspect of what a reasonable person might call “the American mindset” technically every single thing I write about the United States, is in some small way about the rise of American fascism; including our increasingly neo-fuedalist economy, the failures of mainstream liberalism to sufficiently resist fascism and the imperialist American war machine that specializes in installing and supporting fascist regimes abroad.”
This truth remains a constant whether you start measuring the progress of what we now call fascism with genocidal colonization, slavery both at home and abroad, an American Revolution conducted primarily in the service of white-supremacist elite capital, the cowardly failure of post-Civil War Reconstruction, America’s open conversion to a colonial empire under Teddy Roosevelt, the criminalization of labor class dissent with the first Red Scare backed by the Espionage Act as well as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the attempted extermination of socialist thought with the post-WII anti-communist consensus, McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, neo-colonialism and the Vietnam War, Nixonian politics, the entrenchment and enrichment of a corrupt corporate Oligarchy under presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, the inverted totalitarianism of Bush II’s secret prisons, Torture Program and “War on Terror” police state, or former President Obama’s expansion and validation of perpetual war, routine assassination and a global mass surveillance Panopticon as exposed in the Snowden leaks. In other words – the tankies are right; this problem is deeper than Trump.
Unfortunately, being right is not necessarily always the same thing as winning and in terms of the fight against modern American fascism; historical reality has struggled to survive contact with popular opinion in two important ways:
- Firstly, a corporate media wholly subservient to the needs of elite (and often reactionary) capital has purposely obscured much of the historical record of America’s embrace of far right reactionary ideology in the service of capitalism; to the point that many liberals over the age of fifty consider the very concept that “America has always been fascist” to be so ridiculous as to end the conversation immediately. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this idea seems far less toxic and disagreeable to younger observers who have grown up in the shadow of the U.S. War on Terror – at least in my personal experience.
- Additionally, the (again, absolutely correct) argument that America has always been fascist can easily be manipulated by various bad faith actors (liberals, right wing reactionaries, crypto-fascist Strasserists, etc) to demobilize resistance; after all, if Trump is simply a byproduct of all that previous fascism, where is the urgency in fighting him or his agenda? Won’t things basically work out the same as they always have? While that question will undoubtedly seem absurd to any anti-fascist reading it, the simple truth is that we wouldn’t be in the perilous situation we find ourselves in today if the majority of people were already anti-fascists.
By contrast the FDR-inspired liberals, Social Democrats and even some Democratic Socialists largely tend to regard the election of Trump as a tipping point between neoliberalism and fascism, if not a genuine “Black Swan” event in U.S. history.
As the previous few paragraphs demonstrate, I personally regard this position as largely incorrect with a few caveats I’ll discuss in a moment. Furthermore I understand why the American radical left is fundamentally resistant to the formulation that Trump brought the fascism; because it implies that returning to the wise technocratic management of the neoliberals who delivered us into the arms of the Pork Reich represents a real solution. Clearly, it does not.
By that same measure however, isn’t there something entirely myopic about subtly denying that the tenor of America’s relationship with fascism has clearly changed since the election of Trump? Even if we’re arguing that Trump proudly does in the open what previous fascist American presidents have done with little publicity, doesn’t the fact that the reactionary right no longer feels the need to operate in secret represent an acceleration of fascism in its own right? Isn’t it entirely possible, even plausible that Trump could at once represent an existential fascist threat while also being the byproduct of a decades-long “fascist creep” in American ideology? Looking at the available evidence, one truth does not seem to preclude the other; a concept I tried to touch on when writing the “Amerikan Musik” splash page and again, in a recent Media Madness article:
“Despite the position of pedantic absolutists however, I have always theorized that fascism itself is a multi-stage virus and as such there are degrees or “levels” of fascist totalitarianism based entirely on the current ability of a given fascist government to ignore and or crush political dissent; in the end all fascist regimes are headed towards the same place (total control) but the specific flavor of totalitarianism will often be heavily influenced by how long fascism has had to worm its way past a society’s defenses. At this precise moment in time, I believe the United States is experiencing a rapid shift towards overt fascism, which when combined with the latent white supremacy that remains at the very foundation of a significant percentage of American political discourse, will almost certainly result in a worst case (Nazi Germany and concentration camps) type scenario.”
“Before we can plot a course to the future, it is important to be completely honest with ourselves about where we stand today across the Pig Empire. We are observing the terrifying global rise of an Americanized brand of modern fascism that has been facilitated by decades, if not centuries of reactionary ideas, policies and abuses promoted by elite capital, the mainstream media establishment and the Western ruling class.
In the United States, this movement has taken the form of an unholy alliance between reactionary billionaire families, Wall Street criminals, lobbyists, the fossil fuel industry, wealthy Christian fundamentalists, the Republican Party, right wing media, opportunistic political grifters, hatemongers and various nationalist street gang style organizations. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration are at once both a natural byproduct of this reactionary fascist movement and also a catalyst for a transformative shift from poorly concealed hyper-capitalist police states posing as liberal democracies, to overt fascist oligarchies here in the West.
Our society has largely stood by as our corrupt institutions, unenforceable political norms and compromised regulatory bodies have fallen to the reactionary right one by one, in country after country throughout the entire Pig Empire. Finally, even as you read this significant if not overwhelming portions of our ruling aristocracy, mainstream media and corporate class are happily punching left and silencing dissent while openly collaborating with and normalizing fascists for personal gain.
In other words, our time to react has grown short and the situation is alarmingly bleak.”
Of course the perilous nature of this moment in American history is further tainted and obscured by the cynical appropriation of antifascist terminology for a milquetoast centrist anti-Trump movement, otherwise known as “The Resistance” – to say nothing of the mad Bircher fever dream that is the “Russia” part of “Russiagate.” While mainstream neoliberal politicians and corporate media in the Pig Empire have been happy to trade off the idea that Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy, you can tell that they don’t mean it by their actions and repeated attempts to demobilize effective anti-fascist direct action in favor of fascist-enabling “civility.”
In short, it’s awfully hard to talk about the rise of an Americanized, global fascism and the need for a corresponding global antifascist movement, when nobody can agree on what any of that means and even prominent figures on the American left are openly discouraging the activities necessary to effectively oppose the fascist creep.
Personally, I have often found myself feeling beset on all sides over the course of the past three years and change that I’ve spent writing about identifying and opposing this uniquely American brand of fascism:
- I first identified Donald Trump as an outright fascist in an article published on June 6th, 2016, although I had already been hinting at it on Twitter for quite some time by then.
- By February 14th, 2017 I had spoken out in defense of anti-fascist direct action and by March 1st, 2017 I’d called for the ostracism and social rejection of those who continued to support Trump as fascist sympathizers.
- Throughout that same time period, I wrote about the growing fascist implications of the Trump administration’s immigration policy and brazen attempts to criminalize legitimate journalism under the Espionage Act; while exploring the openly reactionary and revanchist nature of Downmarket Mussolini’s nightmare government.
- After months of deliberation, I ultimately wrote what I still consider the most important essay of my life thus far on August 30th, 2017: “Antifa, Arpaio and Donald Trump’s All-American Reichstag Fire.” In this piece, I gathered literally hundreds of available strands of evidence to forecast where this fascist reactionary movement appeared to be heading – key topics included the criminalization of media criticism, demonizing political opposition and cracking down on public dissent, the disturbing sympathies and synergies between fascist street gangs and U.S. law enforcement, the erosion of the rule of law and Trump’s tacit support of concentration camps as well as the mainstream establishment’s complicity in enabling an increasingly likely dystopian fascist nightmare in America’s very near future.
While the cast of characters has now changed a little bit, in the time since I wrote the “All-American Reichstag Fire” article, the expanding body of evidence that we are in the middle of an overt fascist takeover has only grown more convincing – as I detailed in my recent “Active Measures” essay:
“What was it that finally made you decide that you could tolerate no more of this naked malice, greed and inhumanity? Was it the criminality, corruption and contempt for the law? Was it the bald-faced racism? Was it the creation of a white nationalist government, the swine emperor’s open embrace of violent reactionary thugs or the growing number of innocent people murdered by neo-nazis the Amerikkkan Injustice Department no longer bothers to monitor? Was it trading arms sales for support of a genocidal client-state dictatorship lead by a man who we know ordered the murder of a Washington Post journalist in cold blood? Was it the Republican Party’s war on women, the LGBT community and non-white minorities? Was it the Klepto Kaiser’s scorched earth assault on freedom of the press, the DoJ’s unlawful crackdown on political dissent or the Supreme Court’s blessing for authorities to harass activists and protesters? Was it when you realized the president is probably a rapist? Was it the way the system bent over backwards to protect billionaire pre-teen rapist Jeff Epstein? Was it when you noticed that these cracker reactionaries were trying to get a couple of Muslim freshmen Congresswomen murdered? Was it the habitual lying, the virulent Islamophobia or perhaps the open nepotism? Was it when the Trump administration decided to help Israel starve Palestinian refugees out of existence? Was it the concentration camps, the stolen brown babies and the growing number of imprisoned migrants our government has murdered? Was it the potential destruction of all life on this planet? Was it when Trump’s imperialist cronies started maneuvering America towards up to three wars all at once? Was it halfway through this article when you realized voting the fascists out might soon be impossible? Or was it some other monstrous atrocity the people around you have already forgotten as we all fall further under the yoke of reactionary tyranny?”
Look, we can argue until we’re blue in the face with disingenuous collaborators, rich “civility” liberals and misinformed rubes about the definition of the term concentration camps or whether or not a Jewish fascist can actually be a white nationalist, but at some point you have to accept the obvious reality in front of your eyes. Yes, it’s fascism and yes this problem is at once bigger than, and yet also accelerated by, swine emperor Donald Trump and the billionaire crook donors, Cabinet minions and GOP enablers who form the larger far right movement exploiting the Trump presidency to check off their rich nazi wish-list of post-climate collapse tyranny.
You don’t need a political science degree to figure out that when a reactionary white supremacist movement works to rig elections, intimidate and criminalize the free press while protecting fascist foreign allies who murdered a journalist working at an American newspaper, stack the courts with revanchists, strip civil liberties and legal protections from women and the marginalized, threaten political opposition, arbitrarily attempt to lengthen sentences for political protest, tighten the Pig Empire’s grip on Latin America and draw the country into another forever war, protect neonazi street gangs, ignore growing white nationalist violence, purposely confine and torture migrants, including children, in horrifying concentration camps with a rapidly increasing body count, obstruct justice, openly flout the few limits on its President’s power, all while threatening to ignore “rigged” election results or arbitrarily extend the swine emperor’s term and empowering politically generous fossil fuel companies to literally destroy life on earth, it’s high past time to break out the word “fascism.”
Nazi Germany didn’t spring up out of nowhere. The tyrannical fascist movements that dominated Italy and Japan took years to achieve their full horrifying inhumanity. Installing genocidal fascism is a process that takes potentially over a decade to reach full fruition and it’s a process that’s clearly now occurring in full public view here in the Pig Empire. If you won’t name the beast and speak the words of accusation now, when even mainstream liberals seem to be grasping the reality (if not the implications) of our dire situation, then you won’t be prepared to call it fascism until we’re digging mass graves for Muslims and Latino migrants – and that makes you part of the problem, not the solution.
No these atrocities are not unique to Trump and yes, it would have been a good idea to oppose American fascism in a more nascent form while dangerous reactionaries were normalizing fascist ideology and pushing the Overton Window towards this very outcome. Unfortunately, while we may have the people, we don’t have a time machine. You need to ask yourself if, as the Trump administration kicks off Downmarket Mussolini’s carnival fun house re-election campaign with a promise to conduct a national migrant “family” roundup that’ll make the Palmer Raids look like a game of tag, you are prepared to sit by silently because FDR ordered the internment of Japanese Americans, Bill Clinton accelerated racialized mass incarceration and Barack Obama also built concentration camps while deporting a record number of undocumented migrants? Do you believe those excuses and your efforts to remain “neutral” help you sleep at night after the ethnic cleansing starts?
No innocent person chooses to live in a time of bloodthirsty, tyrannical fascism and we are all, each and everyone one of us, victims of the decisions made by evil men who have walked before us. The only choices we the common people are offered is will you collaborate, or will you resist? Do you choose submission to inhumanity or do you refuse to go gently into that dark night? Will you wait for fascism to come for you, or will you come for fascism first and by opposing, destroy it before it’s too late – because by the time we’re all in agreement that these are death camps and it is genocide, it will in fact be far too late.
I know what I choose; what about you?
“It’s okay Willie… Swing heil.”
– nina illingworth
