The return of American fascism

[THE_DEVIL]

How a legacy of violent nationalism haunts the republic in the age of Trump.
BY SARAH CHURCHWELL



In 1933 Mussolini Speaks, a “cine-biography of Il Duce,” received its Broadway premiere on 10 March, only five days after the Nazi Party seized control of the Reichstag, and six days after the inauguration of Franklin D Roosevelt as US president. “Who is this modern Caesar?” asked a national advertising campaign for the film; “What is his secret of success?” Mussolini Speaks promised to sell fascism as just another version of the American Dream: “The past does not exist,” said Il Duce, and Americans were ready to listen.
Produced in Hollywood, the film was made with Mussolini’s full cooperation and met with rave reviews. To be sure, it showed “only a glorified Mussolini”, admitted the Boston Globe in representative terms, but, “Mussolini rises above personality. He is a great figure, perhaps one of the greatest in the world today.”
The US greeted Mussolini with widespread enthusiasm in the interwar years; as early as 1926, the nation’s favourite magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, was offering paeans to his “masterfulness” and the “impressive commercial renaissance” fascism had enabled. The cover of the issue offering this panegyric featured a Norman Rockwell painting of Benjamin Franklin signing the Declaration of Independence, but no one seems to have minded that the magazine swerved from celebrating democratic republicanism to applauding fascistic dictatorship with the turn of a page.
The role that patriotic symbolism, mass entertainment and a corporate state might play in an incipient American fascism was clear to astute observers at the time. In Sinclair Lewis’s novel, It Can’t Happen Here (1935), an American fascist dictatorship is brought about by the “Corporatist” party, led by the reactionary populist Buzz Windrip. Windrip takes power by forging alliances with media giants, including Father Prang, a character based on Father Charles Coughlin, whose weekly radio show was listened to by millions of Americans at its height in the mid-1930s. Coughlin was virulently, and conspiratorially, anti-Semitic, disseminating the (fraudulent) Protocols of the Elders of Zion and confirming Nazi accusations of a Jewish-Communist plot for world domination led by a cabal of “international bankers”. Windrip whips his crowds to a frenzy with patriotic music and populist jingles about clearing the “rot” in Washington, taking power thanks to the carnival he’s created. “Great showmanship,” the reporter who serves as Lewis’s resistant voice of liberal democracy observes of Windrip’s performance. “PT Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on a better.”
Or, he might have added, Leni Riefenstahl, whose tour de force of cinematic propaganda, Triumph of the Will, had been released earlier that same year. Decades before reality television, Riefenstahl invented a type of reality cinema for Hitler, admitting that the famed Nuremberg Rally itself was designed to work as a film spectacle: “The preparations for the party congress were made hand in hand with the preparations for the camera work.” Fascist reality was shaped by, and for, the entertainments of mass spectacle.
Whatever one’s opinion of Donald Trump, there is no denying that his political success to date represents its own kind of triumph of the will, one built on a political carnivalesque. Trump’s manifest need for the adoration of his crowd, his desire to exhibit to the world the cheering hordes of his political rallies, may seem like an ersatz copy of the authentic rallies of fascist leaders of yore. The fact that show business is at the heart of Trump’s unstable political project sometimes leads to the argument that Trump isn’t fascist, but merely an entertainer. Fascism was always about entertainment, however: the deep root of its poison was that it made hatred entertaining.
Trump may lack the discipline and grandeur to which the original fascist spectacles aspired, but he doesn’t lack the grandiosity. What makes Trump so clownish is the delusional gap between the claims he makes and the figure he presents. Without discipline, the attempts at impressive bombast collapse into bathetic farce. The first fascists emphasised individual heroism and physical perfection: Trump emphasises it, too, but only in regards to himself. He is his own fascist sublime.https://www.newstatesman.com/international/places/2020/09/return-american-fascism

 

[THE_DEVIL]

Anyone doubting this needs only to consider the iconography he and his family routinely share, such as the photo of Trump’s face superimposed on to the sculpted body of Rocky Balboa, which Trump himself trumpeted on social media. As historians have pointed out, this is fascist imagery, in its glorification of the physical perfection of a mythologised leader. Meanwhile, on 4 July, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, shared a meme of his father’s head Photoshopped on to George Washington’s body, standing in front of the American flag and holding a Minigun and an eagle. Both memes rework images from the entertainment industry, whether it’s Rocky or an image made by the Call of Duty video-game franchise, into neo-fascist propaganda.

The absurdity of this bizarrely entertaining spectacle does not make it less dangerous, but more so. The clownish aspect of both Hitler and Mussolini were often noted at the time – not for nothing did Charlie Chaplin lampoon Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). The Ku Klux Klan was clownish, too, with its pointy hats, its puerile rituals, its risible attempts at occultism. As a historian observed in 1931, the Klan’s “preposterous vocabulary” and “infantile love of hocus-pocus” offered a “chance to dress up the village bigot and let him be a Knight of the Invisible Empire”. That didn’t make the Klan any less murderous.

Public lynchings in the United States, at which thousands sometimes gathered in the early 20th century, functioned as a spectacular display of white power that terrorised the black population and exhilarated white audiences with a sense of their own racial superiority. But they were sold as amusement. Lynchings were often advertised ahead of time in the local press and on neighbourhood flyers, just as a funfair or circus might have been. Sometimes street vendors sold popcorn and other snacks.

Lynchings were the violent obverse of folk traditions such as minstrelsy that had long unified white crowds over the degradation of black people. Whether through ostensibly comic mockery or overtly sadistic violence, both were performed for the pleasure of a crowd enjoying its political dominance by dehumanising other people. The forms that lynching took included not only hangings, but public torture, dismemberment, castration and burning alive, sometimes for hours. Spectators took photographs that circulated openly in the mail as postcards, and collected body parts as souvenirs. It was all just another carnival.

That lynching was a barbaric form of mass entertainment was perfectly clear at the time. The influential journalist HL Mencken observed as early as 1917 that lynchings were a local “sport” that took “the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions” in larger communities.

Within a few years, movie theatres were advertising Westerns with a “special added attraction” of exciting footage showing the “Klu Klux Klan in Action” during a “midnight initiation”. In 1934 the New Yorker published a cartoon that showed a grandmotherly white woman holding up a small girl in a large crowd in front of a burning house while excitedly telling her neighbour: “This is her first lynching.”

Then, as now, groups like the Klan were motivated not purely by racial hostility, but by a sense of economic grievance they had been encouraged to understand in terms of race. In a 1926 pamphlet called “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism”, the Klan’s imperial wizard argued that the organisation’s members were the “average citizen of the old stock” motivated by “economic distress” who found themselves “increasingly uncomfortable and finally deeply distressed” as “the assurance for the future of our children dwindled. We found our great cities and the control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us.” But the Klan was also itself a money-making venture, a pyramid scheme populated by grifters and hucksters, literally setting up stalls at state fairs so that racial violence and economic resentment could make a buck.

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Whether the nativist groups that incited racial violence during the interwar years in the US – with the aim of keeping the nation “one hundred per cent American”, in their words – are properly, or usefully, understood as “fascist” is a question that has exercised historians for decades. More than 100 such groups were identified in the early 1930s by the American Civil Liberties Union, most of which either imitated the European coloured shirt movements (so that by 1934 the US had the Silver Shirts, the White Shirts and Gentile League, the Khaki Shirts, the Gray Shirts, and many others) or formed militant Christian groups, such as “Defenders of the Christian Faith” or the “Christian Front”. Together they declared their hatred of “alien” elements and ideas, including not only other religions (primarily Judaism) and races, but also liberalism, socialism and communism, all of which they lumped together in the name of jingoist nationalism: such groups always declared themselves “pro-American”.

As such groups could originate in economic populism, evangelical Christian nationalism (which could be anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, or both), or in historical white supremacy, some historians have concluded that they represent uniquely American disorders: aberrations created by the nation’s fraught history of the tension between its ideals of liberal democracy for (white male) citizens and the authoritarian systems under which it subjugated everyone else.

 

[THE_DEVIL]

 

[ThorneStockton]

Interesting piece, at least if taken at face value. What's interesting these days, both sides seem to consider the other the fascists. Just another example of the divide in perception of reality based on what you wish to be true and what news you consume.

In a informal setting, fascism seems to just be a harsher term for being a bully/ass.

 

[Titanhawk2]

""fascist goals": the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure and to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture" And you seriously can't make the connection to what the left has been doing the past two decades?

 

[seminole97]

“Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt's Looking Forward. He found "reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices"; and, in another review, this time of Henry Wallace's New Frontiers, Il Duce found the Secretary of Agriculture's program similar to his own corporativism (pp. 23-24).

Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. "'I don't mind telling you in confidence,' FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, 'that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'" (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini's program to modernize Italy: "It's the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious" (p. 32, quoting Tugwell).”

 

[William Bonney]

 

[Titanhawk2]

I thought this was about the special police in NYC