Our Fascist Moment, Part 1: It’s Not the Beginning Because It Never Ended
On January 6, 2021, US President Donald Trump held a rally on the Ellipse in Washington, DC, where he told a crowd of thousands he would “never concede” the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden. He said he would march with his supporters to the nearby Capitol, where Congress was meeting to certify the election results. Trump exhorted the crowd to “fight like hell” to keep Congress from certifying the election and declaring Biden the winner; “we can’t let that happen,” he said.
After Trump’s address, the crowd marched to the Capitol, where a sizable minority of them began to struggle with Capitol police to gain entry to the building. Rioters eventually broke into the building, killing a police officer in the process. One of the rioters was shot and killed as she tried to jump through a broken window. Members of Congress interrupted their session to dive for cover. Then they were evacuated to safety as rioters rampaged through the building, smearing shit on the walls, stealing mementoes, and screaming, “Where the fuck are they?” At least two of the rioters had brought fistfuls of zip-tie handcuffs with them.
I think it’s clear that this was an attempted coup on behalf of the president. The FBI agrees. “This was not a protest that got out of hand,” the bureau said in a statement. “This was an attempted coup to derail our Constitutional process and intimidate our duly elected leaders through violence.” The coup attempt failed. Three hours later, police officers retook the building, and at 3:45 the next morning Congress finished certifying that Joe Biden had been elected president.
That day and the days since then have presented scenes and events that many Americans have seen in other countries, but not here. On January 12 the Joint Chiefs of Staff released an unprecedented open letter addressed to the armed forces of the United States, affirming that our nation’s military will obey the civil authorities, that Biden will be inaugurated as the president on January 20, and that the military’s primary duty is to protect the Constitution. The letter came as a relief — and on the heels of that relief came a feeling of dismay that we even care where the military stands on a political issue, and that the military leaders felt the need to reassure the political leaders that they would not support a coup.
On January 13 many were captivated by photographs of scores of uniformed National Guardsmen sprawled on marble floors in the Capitol, providing security as the House of Representatives debated a measure to impeach President Trump for inciting an insurrection. That, too, was a relief; and that, too, was followed by dismay. This was the first time troops have bivouacked inside the Capitol since the Civil War. Is this what we’ve come to? Another Civil War?
Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that the troops are there to prevent an insurrection, just as they were in the 1860s; and yes in the sense that some of the pro-Trump mob openly referred to the events of January 6 as a civil war, going so far as to have T-shirts made with those words emblazoned on the front in all capital letters. Also yes in the sense that antigovernment militiamen and neo-Confederates were part of the crowd that protested outside the Capitol and the mob that breached the building. One rioter walked through the Capitol with a large Confederate battle flag on a pole over his shoulder — an event that had never taken place before, not even during the Civil War.
And no in the sense that it’s not “another” Civil War; it’s the same war we’ve been fighting from the beginning, sometimes against others, sometimes among ourselves, and sometimes within our own hearts: Will we defeat the tyrants who seek to oppress us? Will we ourselves be the tyrants, or their willing followers?
The struggle against tyranny is the central plot point of our origin story. In 1776, the American Revolution was ostensibly fought to free the thirteen colonies from the tyranny of King George III of England. The actual reasons behind the war were of course more complicated than that, but the revolution did give rise to a republic founded on ideals of liberty, equality, and the rights of the individual, rather than a monarchy founded on the divine right of kings. This in itself was a revolutionary act at the time — even if the republic so founded fell short of those ideals.
In 1783 a disgruntled colonel in the Continental Army sent George Washington a letter suggesting that America solve its financial woes by becoming a monarchy and installing Washington as its king. Washington’s scathing reply expressed nothing but contempt for the proposal, which he never even considered accepting. Washington had no interest in being a king, but that didn’t stop him from owning enslaved people, as did most of the Founding Fathers. He apparently felt at least somewhat conflicted about the practice, and when he died, he became the only slaveholding Founding Father to free all his slaves.
The nation continued to struggle over this particular form of tyranny until we fought the Civil War to resolve the issue, ending with the defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery in 1865. This war too was fought for a more complicated set of reasons; still, all those reasons revolved around the core issue of slavery, without which the Civil War would not have occurred.
We eradicated slavery in our country, but tyranny survived in the form of white supremacism, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and the only successful coup d’état to ever take place on American soil (so far): the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, when an armed mob of four hundred people murdered dozens, sent hundreds more into hiding, and overthrew the democratically elected mixed-race government of Wilmington, North Carolina, to install committed white supremacists.
In 1922 tyranny took a new form, a uniquely modern — and, at first, European — form, when Benito Mussolini marched about thirty thousand members of his National Fasicst Party into Rome to demand that King Victor Emmanuel name him prime minister. The current prime minister tried to declare martial law so he could mobilize the army to dislodge the fascists from the city; but the king, fearing a civil war, refused to sign the order. The next day he named Mussolini prime minister. Over the next several years, by means legal and otherwise, Mussolini constructed the first fascist dictatorship.
Even though Mussolini and his adherents invented fascism, it fell to a lance corporal from Austria to truly perfect fascism as an instrument of tyranny. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party converted Germany into the ideal fascist state, but that wasn’t enough for him. To obtain more Lebensraum (room to live) for ethnic Germans, Hitler started World War II and murdered six million Jews.
Germany lost the war, and Hitler committed suicide, but his ideas lived on. Even before the war, Nazism, fascism, and anti-Semitism had found many admirers in the United States, such as automaker Henry Ford, a devout anti-Semite who owned a newspaper that published ninety-one issues in the early 1920s running stories about the dangers of international Jewry. Hitler admired Ford so much that he mentioned Ford approvingly in Mein Kampf and awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner. Ford was the only American to receive either of these distinctions.
In 1934, an investigative committee of the US House of Representatives discovered the widespread existence of American chapters of the German Nazi Party, particularly in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. That same year, retired Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler told the committee he had been approached by a member of the American Legion to lead a fascist coup to unseat President Roosevelt. The Legionnaire told Butler this coup effort would have the financial support of some of America’s leading business concerns.
Two years later, William E. Dodd, US ambassador to Germany, wrote to FDR: “A clique of US industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.”
Through much of the 1930s, the most popular radio personality in America was Father Charles Coughlin, who reached up to thirty million listeners with each episode of his weekly show. At first a supporter of FDR and the New Deal, Coughlin later moved to the far right and began to broadcast anti-Semitic slander. Near the end of the decade he used his program to openly advocate fascism as the only remedy for the problems facing America.
After returning from a trip to Germany in 1938, US Senator Robert Reynolds (D-NC) read this testimony into the Congressional Record: “The dictators are doing what is best for their people. I say it is high time we found out how they are doing it and why they are progressing so rapidly. … Hitler has solved the unemployment problem. There is no unemployment in Italy. … Hitler and Mussolini have a date with Destiny. It’s foolish to oppose them, so why not play ball with them?”
Prewar American fascism reached its zenith in 1939, when an organization called the German American Bund held a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden that drew twenty thousand attendees. The audience was treated to the sight of a stage decorated with massive American flags and a giant portrait of George Washington, flanked by banners showing the Bund’s swastika logo.
After the United States entered World War II, the Bund was outlawed, but that was not the end of Nazism, fascism, or white supremacism in the United States. The 1950s saw the foundation of the American Nazi Party; the 1960s and 70s saw the resurgence of the Klan, in opposition to the victories being won by the civil rights movement; the 1980s brought us the anti-government militia movement, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates; the 1990s witnessed the first widespread appearance of racist paganism; and the 2000s and 2010s gave rise to white nationalism (an ideology distinct from the racism of the Klan or the Nazis) and other forms of neofascism, such as the “western chauvinist” Proud Boys, whose leader is of Afro-Cuban descent.
As disparate as these groups and their ideologies are, I believe they all have three key characteristics in common:
• contempt for pluralistic democracy;
• fierce ultranationalism;
• and veneration of authoritarianism.
Before 2016, none of these groups had any hope of wielding significant influence — not on their own, anyway. But then they found a presidential candidate who shared their three key traits and promised to govern accordingly: Donald Trump.
Under Trump, all the many stripes of racists could unite with the antigovernment militias and the ironic neofascists to support the president who seemed to offer them the world they’d always dreamed of. The anti-Semites knew Jared Kushner was Jewish; the white supremacists knew Trump had prominent black staffers and followers; the neo-Confederates knew he was a native New Yorker; the antigovernment types knew Trump sat at the very top of the government. And none of them cared, because he shared the three key traits they all shared. So all the extremists joined forces with the rank-and-file Republicans who would vote for any presidential candidate with an R beside their name, and voters who would never support a pro-choice president, and people who are honestly worried about free-trade deals harming their livelihood, and rich people who know which side their bread is buttered on; and together, they all got him elected, just barely.
But they couldn’t do it twice.
That’s where the three key traits take on even more importance. If you’re an authoritarian ultranationalist who has no use for pluralistic democracy, and your “god-king” (an actual quote from Trump supporters) tells you his landslide election victory was stolen from him, and he tells you the way to reclaim victory is to go down to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” then you’re going to take all your Trump flags and Gadsden flags and Kek flags and Three Percenter flags and Confederate flags down to the Capitol, and all those flagstaffs are going to become blunt instruments that you’ll use to break in windows and break down doors and push people and hit cops until you break into the Capitol and prowl the halls, looking for the traitors who are stealing your country from you.
That’s fascism in action. This time it failed. But sometimes it works.
It worked for Mussolini, when he marched his thirty thousand followers to Rome. It failed for Hitler the first time he tried it, in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. After serving a brief stint in jail, Hitler changed course and decided he would take power electorally. He succeeded in getting himself named chancellor in 1933, but the Nazis were still a minority in the Reichstag, so he resorted to a number of tactics to help the electoral process along: lies, provocation, intimidation, beatings. When he asked the Reichstag to pass legislation granting him “temporary” dictatorial powers, first he had most of his parliamentary opponents detained on trumped-up charges, and he stationed his paramilitary goons inside the parliament chamber during the vote, where they glowered at any legislators who might dare to oppose the Führer.
This was the scene I thought of when I saw rioters clad in tactical gear roaming the Senate chamber with zip-tie handcuffs in their fists.
Hitler’s “temporary” measure passed, and he became a dictator through ostensibly legal means. If Trump or his mob had succeeded in getting Vice President Pence to recount the vote so Biden lost, Trump would have taken power via a coup, again through ostensibly legal means. I’ve seen this scenario referred to as a “coup under color of law,” which sounds correct to me. It also sounds like something a fascist would do.
Not that Donald Trump himself is a fascist. I don’t give him that much credit for having such a coherent theory or philosophy of how to govern or run a country. I see him as a selfish, narcissistic, skilled con man and grifter, born into wealth, who used our culture’s adulation of wealth and celebrity to con his way into the presidency. Yet he does possess the three key traits that our country’s committed fascists possess, along with one more trait: he was willing to be the authoritarian leader they all longed for.
Now Trump is on the way out, but to paraphrase attorney Alan I. Baron, a former special impeachment counsel to the US House of Representatives, the fascist genie is out of the bottle — and it’s not going back in anytime soon. “Trump tapped into and unleashed a fascist element in our society which repudiates and threatens our democracy,” Baron has said, and he’s right. An explicitly fascist element has been present in our society, uninterrupted, since the 1920s; a more purely tyrannical element has been present since the very beginning, when slaveholders stole territory from Native Americans to create the land of the free.
Anyone who thinks our newly emboldened fascists are going to take their defeat graciously is fooling themselves. “We have grave concerns about ongoing and violent threats to our democracy,” the FBI said. Chris Krebs, the recently fired head of the Department of Homeland Security, agrees with them. “There’s going to be more violence,” he said. “This is not over.” Or in the words of photographer Dale Maharidge, after driving all over the country to document America in 2020: “The 2020s are going to be this century’s 1930s. … Fascism was on the rise in the US throughout the Great Depression. It’s something that never went away; it’s part of the American DNA. Many of the 74 million who voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020 would be quite happy with authoritarian leadership. They aren’t going to vanish with the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
In other words, we’re in for a longer struggle. That’s why I’m launching this occasional series of essays, titled “Our Fascist Moment.” I want to spread the word that our fascist moment is here — it’s upon us now — and it’s not going away on January 20, 2021. We can defeat the fascists if we’re brave, smart, strong, and resolute, but we can’t win a battle that we’re not even fighting because we’re too exhausted by the coronavirus pandemic, too relieved that Biden won and 2020 is over and the coup attempt failed. We need to open our eyes and see fascism wherever it is, rather than averting our gaze and hoping it slinks away with its tail between its legs.
I leave you with this quote from philosopher Michel Foucault, which penetrates more deeply into the heart of fascism than anything I’ve ever read:
“The major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. … And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini — which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively — but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
