An impressive amount of light is being shed on the current presidential candidates, and Donald Trump in particular, revealing the ugly face of fascism in the US. In late June, the most popular US neo-Nazi news website, The Daily Stormer, fully endorsed Trump. Editor of The Daily Stormer Andrew Anglin writes, “[Trump] is certainly going to be a positive influence on the Republican debates, as the modern Fox News Republican has basically accepted the idea that there is no going back from mass immigration, and Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: it’s time to deport these people. He is also willing to call them out as criminal rapists, murderers and drug dealers… I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President.” A particularly high amount of attention has been placed on the fact that someone in the audience shouted “White power!” at Trump’s recent speech in Alabama, but what did Trump actually say during that speech?
To the tune of “Sweet Home Alabama,” Trump struts to the stage at the stadium in the majority-black city of Mobile—a Northern businessman in one of the major port cities in the Gulf of Mexico with a significant Civil War history. He seems to handle himself with all the bravado it takes for a white man from Queens, New York, who the Nation has likened to an oligarch, to ramble through what seemed like a largely ad-libbed speech for fifty minutes before an all-white crowd of an anticipated 40,000 Southerners.
The speech begins with Trump comparing himself to Billy Graham, a leader of the Moral Majority who took cues from the infamous “Jayhawk Nazi,” Gerald Winrod. By minute two of his speech, Trump declares that just last week, a 66 year-old woman was “raped, sodomized, tortured, and killed by an illegal immigrant. We have to do it. We have to do something. We have to do something.” The crowd erupts in enthusiastic applause. The US, according to Trump, is immediately beset on all sites by immigrants who pose a clear and present danger to the security of each and every white, God-fearing American citizen—“The people that built this country. Great people.”
In true populist fashion, Trump calls himself a “non-politician,” insisting that he served jury duty recently, and refused to put “politician” as his occupation. He is an outsider, the common man like us. “I know the game,” he tells us. He doesn’t rely on lobbyists, because he’s “built a great business.” Trump shifts his focus to a celebration of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who walks onto the platform for a cameo appearance with his very own “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. Those hats are “hotter than pistols,” speaketh the Trump (“They’re made in America,” he reassures us). Sessions has declared that the opinions of climate scientists offend him, so in Trump’s world, he’s one of the good guys. Trump, however, is an unconventional leader, not a politician. In his speech, he calls for expedited elections. “Can we do that?” And then in his best manbaby impression: “I don’t wanna wait!”
When told that the two Boston men who urinated and beat a houseless Latino man with a metal pole were inspired by his words (“Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported”), Trump responded, “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.” He later tweeted that “We need energy and passion, but we must treat each other with respect. I would never condone violence.”
Although he claims to disavow violence, Trump’s repeated calls for exceptions from the ordinary juridical order echo the famous fascist “state of exception.” He calls on the crowd to support his impulse for extra-parliamentary aims, such as holding the elections early or not even holding elections at all, because “We are tired of the nice people.” Regarding the Fourteenth Amendment, he insists that we can “do something fast.” These impulses, matched with his personalization of economic policy, mark an important kind of leadership principle focused on his own gimmick of “deal making,” which only “the smartest, toughest, meanest, in many cases the most horrible human beings on earth” can understand. Trump would replace the incompetent “political hacks, diplomats” currently in power with his own energetic, vigorous, and ruthless crew. This rhetoric is mirrored by the words of important early fascists like Giovanni Papini—“those who hold power are of three types: the old, the incapable, the charlatans.” Trump’s people are virile and impressive, like Trump, himself. They evoke “blood coming out of her eyes from hatred.” And most of all: they want to help “make America great again.”
Holy Palingenesis, Batman!
Although there are numerous characteristics of fascism, many of which are contradictory, a minimal definition is provided by Roger Griffin: palingenetic ultra-nationalist populism. In lay terms, that means a kind of ultra-nationalist politics that calls for a rebirth of a former glory of the State. If “make America great again” holds as its referents the following:
1) Xenophobic focus on high immigrant birth rates and roving migrants raping and sodomizing elderly women; 2) Anti-Asian economic stance calling forth the image of intelligent-but-thieving Asian nations; 3) Anti-Civil Rights position decrying the unconstitutional burden of the Fourteenth Amendment; 4) A strange focus on genetic, familial heritage; 5) Anti-plutocratic politics coming from an oligarch; 6) Militaristic protectionism masquerading as liberalism; and 7) A political rhetoric devoted to energy and coming “back from the dead”
then it lands quite clearly in the tradition of ultra-nationalism known as “Americanism.” Each of these reference played its own special role during the 1960s backlash against the Civil Rights and labor movements, which after the election of Richard Nixon moved from political participation through the Wallace campaign of 1968 into various critical fascist organizations like the National Alliance and Liberty Lobby.
Is Trump a paleo- or neo-conservative? Not really. Is he a leftist? Absolutely not. But in his syncretic platform, he takes planks from both sides, from economic protectionism and anti-plutocracy to anti-immigrant and anti-civil rights rhetoric. Is he nostalgic for a bygone era? Yes, he is expressly nostalgic for that era that passed away with the Fourteenth Amendment and Reconstruction. Trump does not so much have an ideological position as a position of personal force and energy. He seeks “passion” for a new regime to beat the stale one and fill the existing system with renewed energy by eliminating the specter of rapist migrants given carte blanche by civil rights, and of course, making great deals.
Hence, while noting the complexity of fascist movements throughout history, it would be accurate to characterize Trump’s candidacy as lying within the “Americanist” tradition of fascism. Americanism began with the “America First” anti-interventionist group whose spokesperson was Charles Lindbergh, and continued through the American National Socialist Party under the leadership of George Lincoln Rockwell. While the American Nazi Party wore armbands, carried swastikas, and looked like brownshirts, the Americanist movement moved into a more astute appraisal of US politics forwarded by William Pierce and Willis Carto after the 1968 Wallace Campaign. America and Americans First has since been the banner of multifarious fascist groupuscles in the US, including JT Ready’s National Socialist Movement in Arizona. Although he may be stumping for this tendency without being fully aware of it, Trump may just be the most quintessentially “White Power” candidate that the Republican Party has seen for some time.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything." -Malcolm X
Matthew Lyons’s recent piece on the blog Three Way Fight condemns the stream of reports linking current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to fascism. Joining with Chip Berlet, who published a similar piece in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Lyons declares that Trump is a right-wing populist, not a fascist, per se. For those of a different opinion, Lyons reserves blunt reprove, accusing them in the title of “Stale Social Science.” Since he links to my article, “Trump the Fascist,” published in Counterpunch on the same day David Duke commended the Don, I find his article merits response.
Firstly, my article’s title is a broad stroke, which perhaps may have undermined a careful reading of the actual article, itself. In the article, I note that Trump’s campaign has presented “the ugly face of fascism in the US”—a relatively uncontroversial claim given the amount of neo-fascists who make up his base. My conclusion is that Trump is a manifestation of the ideology of Americanism, which I position as developing from the merger of old-school, Klan-style US conservatism with the fascist America Firsters and anti-interventionists during the 1930s.
I agree with Lyons and Berlet, co-authors of the straight-forward and righteous work, Right Wing Populism in America, that the Don is a populist. In my own article, which Lyons cites, I use Cas Mudde’s definition of the “populist radical right party” to tackle a general definition of Trump’s ideology, inclusive of authoritarianism, populism, and nativism. Berlet seems to agree with me, bringing in precisely the same scholarly description (although he does not mention my article).
To define Trump in the current of Americanism, however, I use Roger Griffin’s generic formula of fascism: palingenenetic ultrantionalism. In other words, Trump maintains a kind of ultranationalist platform that rejects in certain ways the present nationalist condition, and seeks a rebirth of a “new man” based on the formulations of historical myths. These myths include the unreconstructed US of the Klan’s dreams and our nightmares, evoked through an anti-democratic propaganda campaign against the 14th Amendment.
Berlet and Lyons position Trump closer to “neo-populism,” the “radical right,” or “authoritarian” populists (respectively). Berlet lists Zhirinovsky in Russia and the Danish People’s Party, and they both list Jean-Marie Le Pen. Other journalists who have made this comparison to Le Pen include Ishaan Tharoor and Cas Mudde with the Washington Post, Paul Vale with the Huffington Post, Jake Flanagin with Quartz, Bernie Quigley with The Hill, and even Anne Deysine with the French mainstay Le Figaro. However, given all the comparisons to Zhirinovsky and Le Pen, it seems awkward that such harsh words would be reserved for those likening “Trumpism” to fascism.
For his part, Zhirinovsky was called the “Russian Hitler” by Bild, and expert Stephen Shefield describes his platform as “a nationalist and imperialist ideology of a composite liberal-fascist character.” Le Pen, himself, was not only a former newspaper vendor for pro-Nazi Action Française during WWII, but an anti-communist street fighter, and in the 1960s even owned a publishing house that hawked Nazi memorabilia, speeches, records, etc. Le Pen’s party, Front National (FN), was originally founded by a core neo-fascist groupuscle called New Order (ON), which attempted to develop in the early 1970s an alternative to both “Social Movement” Strasserism and neo-fascist, Evola-inspired terrorism. The ON decided to create a populist political party, which they called the “National Front,” in order to attract conservatives to their fascist/neo-fascist idea by focusing on the common fight against immigration. Quite literally, Le Pen’s FN was founded by a front group started by fascists, and its numerous international imitations, whether consciously or unconsciously, repeat the same fascist strategy. Scholar David Renton has no problem calling Le Pen’s FN a fascist group.
As Le Pen rose through the ranks of the FN but failed to gain electoral success, members of the ON began an internal struggle to remove him. His apartment was bombed, and then in what some have indicated was a reprisal, his main opponent in the FN, François Duprat, an important fascist, met his own violent death in a car bomb that also paralyzed his wife. With Le Pen securely in the lead, the FN developed successful intersections with the Nouvelle Droit, a crew of neo-fascist intellectuals, which modified their leadership and ideology throughout the 1980s and 90s (although they also have their serious disagreements). Among Le Pen’s most famous aphorisms is his promise to “bring together the fasces of our national forces so that the voice of France is heard once more, strong and free.” As the FN marches through electoral victory after electoral victory, the quaint, cozy notion that Trump is simply one of their types does little to comfort a sense of fascism on the move.
Just as it was not uncommon for leftists to denounce the so-called “Popular Front” policy developed by the Comintern in 1935 as “Stalinist”, due to the fact that it was devised as Stalin’s principle strategy, for a long time, it was not uncommon to denounce the “National Front” as a fascist organization using precisely the same logic. Cas Mudde seems to point to the change in recent years in a quotation cited by Berlet: “The terms neo-Nazism and to a lesser extent neo-fascism are now used exclusively for parties and groups that explicitly state a desire to restore the Third Reich (in the case of neo-fascism the Italian Social Republic) or quote historical National Socialism (fascism) as their ideological influence.” Indeed, the creation of a clear, crisp distinction between “radical right” or authoritarian populist parties like the FN and neo-fascism is somewhat recent. In 1996, for instance, one of the main thinkers in the modern school of “fascist studies,” Roger Eatwell, had no problem discussing Berlusconi’s Forza Italia!, Le Pen’s FN, the British NF, and Germany’s Republicans in relation to post-war fascism. In 2002, J Sakai could write about “new populist neo-fascists in the wealthy imperialist metropolis, such as Jorg Haider in Austria or the rapidly growing British National Party (BNP).”
Jorg Haider’s FPÖ, the BNP, and Greece’s Golden Dawn—all called “radical right populist parties” by Cas Mudde—have been implicated in recent “conservative revolution” conferences with known fascist organizations like Roberto Fiore’s Forza Nuova, the Romanian New Right, the Polish Falange, and a number of other insidious vectors. This isn’t just because they have similar aims, but because they are populist parties established by fascists with a fascist strategy.
The founder of the FPÖ, Anton Reinthaller was an official in the Nazi Party of Austria before Anschluss, and then made a come-back, serving in the Reichstag. The BNP was created by John Tyndall, who had previously co-founded the National Socialist Movement in England. The Golden Dawn was formed out of a confluence of military coupsters and fascists, has a kind of a swastika on their flag, sings a version of the Nazi Horst Wessel anthem, and has been known to shout “Heil Hitler” in Greek parliament. Yet the analytical field is confused by their formation of populist fronts, as well as the switch in rhetoric toward “conservative/national revolutionaries.” We should not be fooled, however. Much if not most of the European populist radical right is firmly rooted in fascist strategy, and it isn’t going anywhere.
In his article, Lyons speaks out against the content of the shift in analysis where fascism has come to be delimited so strictly, stating that it obstructs an understanding of changing forms and discourses of fascism. He’s right. The disfunction in today’s approach comes from the so-called “Historians’ Debate” (Historikerstreit) of the 1970s, during which some prominent scholars of fascism began to promote revisionist theories on the Holocaust while significantly changing and delimiting the way fascism was perceived. While the idea of revisionism would be strictly rejected by the entire field of “fascism studies,” the Historikerstreit had an important conservatist affect, forcing the discourse more generally away from its prior threshold on the left.
Some showed this movement more than others. The great historian Stanley Payne, for instance, while a brilliant scholar, would end up denying that Nazi Germany was actually fascist. If we are to claim that Hitler’s Germany was merely an issuance of populist radical right or authoritarian right as thematically and historically distinct from fascism, we are avoiding historical reality and preparing to make historic mistakes. The strategy of the National Front was developed in Spain by the fascist José Antonio shortly before the Civil War, and it should come as no surprise that Payne also cannot describe the Spanish national front that came to power through Franco as fascist.
This raises a question. If a fascist group creates a populist part explicitly to distance itself from accusations of fascism—as with the FN, National Front, and so on—should it be treated as a totally distinct phenomenon from fascism? Should it be treated as totally fascist? Or, is it more important to note the ways in which the two intersect on a generic level?
Mudde’s models of the “populist radical right” and “neo-fascist” should be amended to allow for a general understanding of how the former in many cases emerged from the latter in a deliberate attempt to disassociate from the negative connotations of fascism. While the comparisons to the radical right groups like the FN should raise alarm bells immediately, Trump’s candidacy should also be analyzed in real terms of the fascist/neo-fascist trends of US history. In the next chapter, I will review some of Trump’s key networks, and how they intertwine with the history of US Americanism and fascism.
“Whatever” / Sarah Levy
Alexander Reid Ross is a moderator of the Earth First! Newswire, a contributor to Life During Wartime: Resisting Counter-Insurgency and author of the forthcoming book Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press)
According to historian Mai Ngai, "the project was conceived and executed as though it was a military operation," with 800 immigration agents fanning out across the Southwest, apprehending as many as 3,000 immigrants a day at roadblocks and in raids on homes, farms and factories. Front-page Los Angeles Times headlines from that time touted the operation in demeaning language. "Wetbacks Herded at Nogales Camp," reads one.
The “f-word” has nearly vanished from everyday political discussion in America, and for good reason. It’s become the kind of epithet that stops thought instead of enhancing it. But serious people used to talk about the relevance of the German experience to American politics. In 1964, Philip Rahv, a founding editor of the marquee intellectual journal Partisan Review, wrote that the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater for president represented “a recrudescence on American soil of precisely those super-nationalistic and right-wing trends that were finally defeated in Europe at the cost of a great war, untold misery, and many millions dead.”
But within a couple of years, when student protesters were closing down universities through violence and the threat of violence, people like Ronald Reagan said that was exactly what fascists did, so he deployed National Guardsmen to keep campuses open––which student protesters called fascist in turn.
By the end of the 1960s both sides were throwing the f-word at one another with abandon. But in current American politics, the word has survived via the abject stupidity of many thousands of right-wing readers of one of the worst books ever published, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism (2008), which made much of the fact that both Hitler and a heck of a lot of liberals were vegetarians.
The usage also survives among a considerably smaller number of only slightly less perfervid liberals. These folks borrow from the scholarship of outstanding historians like Roger Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism, and Robert Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism, and bastardize it into “checklists,” the most widely circulated from an obscure political scientist about whom I could find nothing else––Lawrence Britt––who would have us believe that when a politician checks off enough boxes like “rampant sexism” and “obsession with national security,” America will suddenly find itself locked into a totalitarian nightmare from which there is no escape except all-out war.
But this confuses a historically specific description with a usefully predictive model. It treats political development as a biological process, fascism as something nations “descend” into––the natural entropy of failed national institutions.
It’s a devolution to an older style of political thinking that felt perfectly logical in the 1950s and early 1960s, among writers for whom civilization’s descent into blood-soaked barbarism was recent memory. The writing that followed it was either explicitly or implicitly rooted in a Marxist style of thinking, which is to say a Hegelian style of thinking: if history was “supposed” to develop in a certain direction (toward socialism; toward liberal democracy), how, then, to account for the hard-right turn no one had predicted? The process of strong men taking advantage of weak men, with the strongman, his victims, and their willing executioners produced by the neuroses attending the breakdown of traditional ways of life, seemed to be encoded within modernity itself.
Asked if he would repudiate the endorsement of erstwhile Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Trump’s response was less than resounding: “Sure, I would if that would make you feel better.”
And some of this story still rings so very true. Fascist leaders promise national rebirth, the merging of a mystically perfect past and a transcendent future from a present fatally compromised by wickedness. (Niftily, the scholarly term for that, as if nodding to John McCain’s 2008 running mate, is “palingenetic ultranationalism.”)
But lots of political movements do that. And history is not a biological process; there’s no reason to believe that the alienation we see all around us need devolve into violent nationalism with its end state. Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, and Chile, to cite the major cases, in the peculiar moments when their strong men arose, suffered weaknesses in their institutions that are just about unimaginable in the United States. For instance, it is hard to imagine a President Trump turning America into a one-party state. (Isn’t it?)
Over the last few years, antifascists have watched as a young new face has come from the “radical traditionalist” milieu. Matthew Heimbach, who is only 25 at this point, started by organizing a chapter of the ultra-conservative Youth for Western Civilization at Townson University before forming the White Student Union. After graduating he helped to form the Traditionalist Youth Network, which organized white nationalist “youths” on a range of cultural issues. He is closely associated with the usual suspects, including organizing with and speaking at the conferences of the League of the South, Council of Conservative Citizens, Stormfront, and the American Freedom Party. He began touring around the country, then around Europe, meeting with far-right groups, neo-Nazi skinheads, KKK locals, and nationalist parties. In a lot of ways, he is a sort of “jack of all fascism,” where he is bringing a Southern flare back to the “alt right.”
His fiery style, big smiles, and lack of a filter has also made him enemies, and not just of the anti-racist crowd. At the recent National Policy Institute conference, Heimbach was banned entry because of his publicly repulsive statements about homosexuality. The bright new face of nationalism is more friendly(which still isn’t very friendly) to queer people, and they did not want to insult the one gay speaker on their line-up. He still made it to DC to hang out with the crowd, but this was certainly a blow.
At the same moment, he was officially banned from entering the United Kingdom for his racist views, which he feigned glee over since it gave him some racist “street cred.” The letter the Homeland Department’s Theresa May said that he violated the Unacceptable Behavior Policy. His claims that homosexuality is a “deviant lifestyle” and needed re-education camps is what got him removed from both NPI and the Britain border, which says something about the level of reactionary he has become. His upcoming trip to England was to speak at a private Southport lunch event that is held by organizing white nationalists in the area, all of which have been confronted so thoroughly by Antifa that they have to hold their events in hiding. Heimbach has been challenged regularly by anti-fascist organizers in places like Bloomington, Indiana, which is right near the home he shares with his wife and her father.
It is not the first time that Heimbach has been kicked out of his own movement. In 2013 he was seen fist clenched at a National Socialist Movement event, smiling that dopey grin in front of an emblazoned swastika. This got him dropped from the League of the South temporarily, but he is now training to become their new director. After a confrontation with anti-racists where he used a large, wooden crucifix to savagely beat a protester, his Orthodox Church booted both him and his father-in-law, Matt Parrot. Conservative Orthodox Christianity is central to Heimbach’s identity, where he especially aligns himself with Eastern and Russian Orthodox churches that maintain support for regional nationalism, deep homophobia, and implicit anti-Semitism(though this is not monolithic in these Orthodox regions.).
This picture of Heimbach attacking anti-fascist protesters got him excommunicated from the Orthodox Church. The Traditionalist Youth Network then turned it into an Internet meme.
Heimbach has steadily moved to the right over his time as an organizer for white nationalism. He started as a “patriot” type who was a strong supporter of Israel, yet today if you were to check his social media it would be filled with the most vile anti-Semitism and support for fascist killers. The Traditionalist Youth Network has just started an electoral wing, the Traditionalist Workers Party, which is surprising since Heimbach has stated over and over again that revolution is the only solution. This could be simply an attempt to gain a larger platform for street-based fascism, which was successful for the National Front and British National Party. None the less, Heimbach is one of the more successful targets for Anti-Fascist Action as he wears his hate on his sleeve yet acts as an entry point to the more “suit and tie” fascist organizations.
Geez between this guy and the four arrested for the BLM protest shootings...I guess, if it's any consolation, the face of young neo Nazi extremism seems to be more basement gamer Reddit nerd looking than big scary skinhead type.
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
8bitagent » Mon Nov 30, 2015 11:31 pm wrote:Geez between this guy and the four arrested for the BLM protest shootings...I guess, if it's any consolation, the face of young neo Nazi extremism seems to be more basement gamer Reddit nerd looking than big scary skinhead type.
And isn't it interesting that, centuries after the gun and decades after the atomic bomb, we still reflexively evaluate threats in terms of whether or not we could beat them up in a fight.
8bitagent » Mon Nov 30, 2015 11:31 pm wrote:Geez between this guy and the four arrested for the BLM protest shootings...I guess, if it's any consolation, the face of young neo Nazi extremism seems to be more basement gamer Reddit nerd looking than big scary skinhead type.
And isn't it interesting that, centuries after the gun and decades after the atomic bomb, we still reflexively evaluate threats in terms of whether or not we could beat them up in a fight.
The New Neo-Nazis: How Matthew Heimbach is Building a Racist Network Across the US
September 13, 2015
“The best form of government, I would say, at least in the interim, would be some form of fascist government.” – Matthew Heimbach, 2014
Originally posted to It’s Going Down
When Matthew Heimbach takes the stage, he always has a smile on his face, generally his shirt is tucked in or he wears a motorcycle-club like vest, and he starts his talks not with cries of “ZEEK HAIL!,” but instead by telling you a little bit about himself. In an articulate and confident voice, Heimbach discusses how he came from a small Maryland town “without a traffic light,” into the big city to attend college. But quickly his discussion treads into waters commonly discussed in white nationalist and fascist circles: notions of a large-scale Jewish conspiracy, the extinction of a ‘white race,’ and the need for a revolutionary group to create an all white State.
Heimbach has clear links to white-power groups, but he represents a new breed of white nationalist that is different from the Klan, racist militia movement, and the Neo-Nazi skinheads that have dominated the racist Right for the last several decades. Although Heimbach is only in his mid-20s, he has become a leading light in the white racist scene which has grown under Obama’s presidency and the continuing economic crisis.
As evident in the recent Presidential run of billionaire Donald Trump who has campaigned on an anti-immigration platform, many white workers are disaffected with the current system and are swinging towards the Right. In many ways, white nationalists like Heimbach represent the revolutionary potential of this reactionary and racist shift that hopes to create a fascist government by seizing the reigns of this one. Heimbach, who has also drawn scorn from the old guard of the racist Right for his revolutionary approach, stated in one talk:
We need to be getting away from symbols, like the American Flag. This is the symbol of our occupation, this is the symbol of our genocide, this is the symbol of the nation, that has already said that they will use drones to drop missiles on political dissidents. Do any of us think, sitting in this room, we’re not considered political dissidents?… We are at war with this system, and if you think for two seconds that George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan would be friendlier to us than Barack Obama is then you have not been reading your history.
While attending college, Heimbach organized and headed a variety of white nationalist groups before founding the Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) and its political wing, the Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP). Currently, the party is in the process of running their first candidate, while Heimbach is busy trying to put together a network of white nationalists across the United States based upon the lessons learned from Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech. and other European Neo-Nazi and openly fascist parities, which Heimbach has visited with and has ties to. As one white nationalist blog wrote:
It is no secret that shortly after his graduation, Mr. Heimbach, though unemployed, traveled extensively around the Country, coast to coast, going from Group to Group in an attempt to forge some sort of “Nationalist Confederacy.”
Heimbach goes on to describe his desire to network US based racist nationalists with those in Europe:
Uniting under the same banner to help one another, fund one another and fight together is the future, and I hope and pray that this first meeting of nationalists in Russia will lead to a full scale alliance between the various factions of Tradition that are spread around the world. Hail the coming of the Traditionalist International and hail our victory for God will it!
The rallying cry of the Traditionalist Youth Network of “Faith, Folk, and Family” echos a chord with much of middle America and their organizing attempts represent a grave threat to the possibilities for multi-racial action against the capitalist State system. Much of this can be seen in Heimbach’s recent appearances and speeches at various ‘mainstream’ rallies to preserve the Confederate flag.
In his 2002 book Fascist Ideology, scholar Aristotle A. Kallis presciently wrote, “[Mussolini’s] only programme was to govern and make Italy great again, both domestically and internationally.” That is precisely the rhetoric Trump is grabbing at, as is obvious by the title of his new book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. The notion of returning to health, energy, vigor after being hobbled by injury and suffering in degeneracy and decadence is a hallmark of fascist ideology, and Trump’s ridiculing of people with disabilities highlights his sick perception of what vitality might mean to him.
The critique from the left that focusing on Trump gives Hillary a pass seems to miss the fact that recognition of the enemy remains paramount: we can identify Hillary as a neoliberal, because that’s always what she’s represented. Trump is a different beast, and should be analyzed as the kind of figure the US hasn’t seen in popular politics since George Wallace in the 1960s—and even then, Wallace represented traditional conservative politics, which strives to maintain an existing status quo, while Trump and his followers perceive themselves amidst a world of terrible decay that must be set to rights through violence.
Trump’s followers see an epidemic spreading over whiteness, with the white working class stumbling to find a kind of rebirth or new life. Suicides, cancer, drugs, despair is sweeping a white world that in the Reagan years prided itself on humble family values. It would appear to the left that, after decades of the ravages of the big box economy that signaled the gutting of middle America, this bloc of voters would begin acting in “their own class interests,” but the problem is that they do—and that’s what Trump represents.
Class interests are always defined on a complex terrain of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual politics. To unite with other workers in opposition to the ruling class would actually imperil the traditional interests of many white workers, who seem themselves as belonging in a natural, patriotic hierarchy of God and flag. Class interests then take the form of racism and anti-Semitism where privileges enjoyed by white workers over others signal a kind of status elevation, a dignity manifest in tired slogans Trump drags around the country, like “You built this country!”
The image Trump projects is not simply of recovery, but revenge. In the perspicuous words of Sakai, “To the increasing mass of rootless men fallen or ripped out of productive classes—whether the peasantry or the salariat—[fascism] offers not mere working class jobs but the vision of payback. Of a land for real men, where they and not the bourgeois will be the ones giving orders at gunpoint and living off of others.” With his “mad as hell” rhetoric against Wall Street, his promise to deport 12 million people, and halt immigration of Muslims, Trump promises an official satisfaction for the feelings of resentment and animus of the white working class. His other promises at mollification lead to his position as the only Republican candidate supporting unions and promising to maintain Social Security, placing Trump’s campaign at a junction point between poor whites and a middle class afraid of losing its privileges.
Trump’s prescription for greatness is a kind of economic gangsterism. The promise of Trumpism for those who believe is a militarized economic jolt that will shock the world. He will use the military to “make great deals,” effectively extorting money out of countries like Saudi Arabia and South Korea in exchange for protection. Of course, this is a long standing racket (often called the Mafia Doctrine), but politicians are usually more coy. Trump’s affective economic demagoguery is all the more intense for “Middle-American Radicals” (MARS), bringing about a mixture of middle-class anxiety and raging radical right politics. Instead of telling Middle America that a “belt-tightening” is in their future, as with neoliberals since the 1980s, he seems more intent on the rhetoric of warmongering. The most extreme side of the MARS movement in the US, represented by Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, has called Trump “our last chance“; its avant-garde represented by neo-reactionary RamZPaul, who commends Trump’s “glorious” policy against Muslim immigration, exclaiming, “Hail Trump!”
Making the Deal
It is worth while to investigate the reasons Trump was jeered for using the traditional anti-Semitic figure of the Jew as consumate haggler in his address to the Republican Jewish Coalition. Presumably the audience rightfully observed that Trump’s anti-Semitic rhetoric could simply take on the shade of hatred after his victory. In inter-war Austria, for example, the idea of the Jew as haggler was associated with the Ostjuden, or Jew immigrating from the East (Poland or Hungary, for instance) . Although there were very few Jews in Austria, comparatively speaking, the common nationalist narrative under Austrofascism insisted that these foreigners moved into Austrian cities and undersold their competitors, so that even local Jews were being forced out of business. Likewise, in inter-war France, the Jew was considered a kind of invader who would weaken the interests of the working class with their skills of negotiation. Not only does the anti-Semitic idea of the Jew-as-bargainer brings back painful memories of blaming the victim of dire poverty, but Trump’s image of a “negotiator” in this case bears the implications of a gangster with whom the audience doubtless would rather not have association.
Trump’s attitude of aggressive bargaining power matches what Else Frenkel-Brunswick tracks in a survey of men in The Authoritarian Personality. One man seemed to sum up a trend, she wrote, of “successful techniques of ‘driving sharp bargains.’ ‘Certain ordinary ways of doing business,’ he said, ‘are too damn slow for me.’” She concludes, “Being successful by outsmarting others in the competitive struggle is part of the ego-ideal of the prejudiced man.” That Trump projects these traits onto Jews who may be employed in any number of occupations that do not require negotiating (doctors, scientists, musicians, or writers, for instance), speaks volumes to the emptiness of his own powers. It was recently revealed that, had Trump decided not to play the role of a negotiator and simply invested his father’s money in index funds, his fortune would in fact have been far greater than it is today. Perhaps Trump’s own insecurities as a man are the source of his macho, casino-style “deal making” bravado, his misogyny, as well as his prejudicial attitude toward people of other backgrounds, religions, races, and ethnicities.
While Frenkel-Brunswick and associates have been accused of providing an overly-flexible definition of what they call “the pre-fascist personality,” in more concrete terms, the important observations of scholar Zeev Sternhell show that the kind of economic thinking underlying fascism and corporatism does not fight capitalism, but the functionaries, plutocrats, and middlemen seen as clogging and distorting the machine. It represents the will to power and the great “new man” who knows how and when to act. Indeed, numerous early fascists, like Hitler, José Antonio, and Oswald Mosley, were either aristocrats, themselves, or received generous subvention from nobles. The notion that fascism is exclusively consigned to revolutionary strategies of coups and putsches overlooks groups like the Estonian Association of Freedom Fighters, who attained a majority of the electoral vote, as well as the designs of neo-Nazi politicians and organizers like David Duke and Willis Carto to attain victory through the electoral system.
Although scholar Roger Griffin has contradicted this point in his recent writings, I would argue that Trump’s form of populism is what Griffin called in his magnum opus The Nature of Fascism, “elitist populism” specific to fascism: “In a mystic version of direct democracy, the representation of the people’s general will in a fascist society would mean entrusting authority to an elite or (especially in its inter-war versions) a leader whose mission it is to safeguard the supra-individual interests and destiny of the people to whom it (or he) claims to be linked by a metaphysical bond of a common nationhood.” This elitism, or “populism from above,” as some call it, is essential to the sense of planning and heroic enterprise ideated by Trump.
In late November we published an article about a group trying to establish itself in a number of Canadian and American universities and colleges. While Students For Western Civilization may or may not be a hoax, we still consider the topic to be of some interest in that some previously unnamed individuals who we've been looking at for a few years have popped up in relation to the group.
When VICE published an article on this movement back in September, we began to focus on some of the people who were posting in the comments section. Two in particular jumped out at us:
"Tyler" Malenfant (actually Marc Malenfant) from Toronto was one of the more active participants in the exchanges that took place in the comments section:
Malenfant and this blog's lead author also had a rather enlightening exchange in which he admits a friendship (albeit a Facebook friendship) with Matthew Heimbach who's association with Students For Western Civilization has been featured in Heidi Loney's article, "The Mainstreaming of White Pride":
Sticking a feather in their tinfoil hats, the Students for Western Civilisation argue against “cultural Marxism”, an archaic term that the hard right have towed out of obscurity thanks to American paleo-conservatives William Lind and Pat Buchanan. The conspiracy theory that is “cultural Marxism” argues that a small group of mainly Jewish philosophers, originating from the Frankfurt School in Germany, were exiled to this side of the pond after World War II. Proponents of the theory argue that these “Marxists” set out to destroy and dismantle traditional western values by infiltrating our university campuses and places of higher learning. In turn, they are responsible for the growth of feminism, political correctness, multi-culturalism, gay rights, and atheism.
Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik twisted the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory to meet his own ideology. Breivik “killed young social democrats because he believed that their party was involved in a cultural Marxist plot to undermine traditional European values by means of mass immigration from the Islamic world.”
Matthew Heimbach’s recent Facebook image of taken at Towson University
Former student Matthew Heimbach founded one of seven campus chapters at Towson University near Baltimore, Maryland. In an article for the YWC website, in defending his organisations right to exist, Heimbach hurled insults at the “radical left-wing elements” of the “terrorist front organizations like the Muslim Student Association, ferociously angry gay groups of “tolerance” like the Queer Student Union, and the disease ridden degenerates also known as Occupy Towson”, “left-wing Stalinists”, “campus Marxists”, and the “rabid multicultural organization…the Center for Student Diversity”.
His chapter eventually lost its status back in 2012 when the group “chalked messages that included the words ‘White Pride’ at several locations on campus, including the Student Union and Freedom Square”.[vii] Heimbach didn’t see the problem with the chalking, a long held tradition on the campus, arguing that “White pride is no different than gay pride or black pride.”
Facebook image of Kevin DeAnna with the Wolves of Vinland
In 2012, Kevin DeAnna announced that he was leaving YWC, perhaps from the accusations of racism (not surprising, considering DeAnna almost started a riot when he invited honorary chairman and Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo and White Nationalist Richard Spencer to speak at YWC chapters) or because he was having difficulty getting new chapters approved.
After taking job opportunities at WorldNetDaily and Leadership Institute, DeAnna converted to Ásatrú, a type of Norse paganism. DeAnna was last seen in 2014 down in Virginia with a “Fight Club” folkish group, the Wolves of Vinland with two more white nationalists, Vinland founder Paul Waggener and men’s rights activist and anti-gay culture author Jack Donovan. Perhaps they are preparing for the eventual clash of civilization. (Side note #2: National Anarchist (?) Kevin O’Keeffe scrubbed Donovan’s Wikipedia page clean on October 19th. All traces of Donovan’s satanic past – he was an ordained priest in the Church of Satan for several years – and associations with white nationalists are gone.)
The “Little Führer” gets more radical
Back at Towson University, Matthew Heimbach started a White Student’s Union, stating in a VICE documentary that, “you’re never going to get anywhere in America waving a swastika banner.” Heimbach believes his white intellect and IQ falls below that of Jews, who he understands are intellectually superior. Heimbach invited racist Jared Taylor to the Towson campus, who I shit you not, lectures on this very subject.
As depicted in the VICE documentary, Heimbach drives his silver Toyota Corolla festooned with the bumper stickers “No Amnesty” and Ron Paul and a 13 star US flag (after having a few beers) before doing campus patrols to protect Towson students from “black on white” campus crime. (This despite Towson University being the safest university in the state of Maryland). After a night of patrols, back at the pub, Heimbach digs into a brownie dessert joking, “See? The big, bad racists can’t be all the bad. We eat ice cream just like everybody else.”
White Nationalist Matthew Heimbach at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre thinks Heimbach is no laughing matter. They currently lists him under their extremist files on their website, stating that he is “considered by many to be the face of a new generation of white nationalists.” This is not surprising, given Heimbach’s most recent trip to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum where he shows his denial of the holocaust. In one photo, while standing under the quote from Elie Wiesel, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness,” a fully bearded Heimbach grins at the camera while holding up white cardstock with the following statement scribbled in black Sharpie: “6 million? More like 271,301* Int. Red Cross”
Along with a host of homegrown and foreign neo-nazi types like London, Ontario’s Tomasz Winnicki, Heimbach posted a comment on September 22nd on the Students for Western Civilisation Facebook page, “Keep up the fight comrades”. Most recently, hacktivist group Anonymous listed Heimbach as a current member of the KKK.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre also lists white nationalist Richard B. Spencer, a kind of Alex P. Keaton of white supremacy, under their extremist files. Spencer, “advocates for an Aryan homeland for the supposedly dispossessed white race and calls for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of European culture.”[viii] A few weeks after the SWC white student union posters were torn down, Spencer wrote a hasty blogpost on Radix Journal stating “Toronto’s Students For Western Civilization blows away the imposters and the losers. I only wish this was going on while I was living in the city.”
So why the concern north of the Border?
The Missouri based the Council of Conservative Citizens, a rabid hate group who advocates for white nationalism and separatism, inspired Dylann Roof’s alleged shooting at a Charleston church in June 2015, who now faces hate crime charges in the killing of nine African Americans and the wounding of three others. Roof had read “pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders,” on the Council of Conservative Citizens website. Roof had hoped to start a race war.
Mississauga’s Paul Fromm is the international director of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Fromm is “a disgraced former teacher who was fired from the Ontario College of Teachers in 1997 for links to neo-Nazi groups”[ix]. He earned a master’s degree in English from the University of Toronto in the seventies and co-founded the ultra-conservative, anti-communist on-campus student group Edmund Burke Society (EBS). By their own account, the group had said of their violent clashes with the campus leftists in ‘71, “Our members distinguished themselves as true sons of Western civilization. When attacked, Strike Back! None of the cowardly turn-the-other-cheek rubbish thrown at us by liberal moralists of today. It’s amazing what a beating the reds took.”[x]
In 2014, Canadian professor, York University graduate and SWC mentor Ricardo Duchesne founded the blog Council of European Canadians. While Duchense was born in Puerto Rico and himself an immigrant, he is also a critic of multi-culturalism and political correctness.
On Duchense’s blog dated September 19th, contributor Obimbola Chibuzo (most likely a pseudonym) defends the SWC’s white student union stating, “Ryerson, York, University of Toronto were all created by Whites; in fact, universities are a singularly Western invention and all the disciplines taught at them, physics, chemistry, history, anthropology, biology, sociology, philosophy etc. — are fields of research invented by Whites.”
Chibuzo concludes the article with this: “Once Whites are educated properly to see through the fog of ignorance and anti-White teaching at our universities, they will see that forming White or Eurocanadian unions, groups and associations, even political parties, is consistent with the principles of liberalism, free association and freedom of speech. It is also consistent with our natural disposition to prefer our own ethnic groups and race”. The same article was reblogged a week later on Fromm’s site, the Canadian Association for Free Expression.
In a Global News report, The Canadian connection to the ‘white supremacist’ group that influenced Dylann Roof, Alan Dutton, the national director of the Canadian Anti-racism Education and Research Society, states that he is “critical of how Canada regards right-wing hate groups and the way in which the legal system deals with them.”
“‘We don’t address it in terms of radicalization’… The government has focused on ‘one aspect of domestic terrorism and radicalization of youth’ — activity motivated or inspired by Islamist groups such as ISIS or al-Shabab — and isn’t ‘looking at the broader picture that has been developing for generations.’”
And thanks to Prime Minster Harper (or no thanks) with the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act in 2013, the part that covers hate speech, (and fought so hard against by strange bedfellows Ezra Levant and Paul Fromm) there’s little chance that even the most hard-core white supremacist will ever be charged with internet hate crime anytime soon. That is unless our new government restores it to its rightful place.
The lady doth protest too much, me thinks
The Students for Western Civilisation, while arguing on the one hand that they are not a racist group, endorse the motives of white supremacists and neo-nazis by not responding or deleting the posts on their Facebook page. Furthermore, the SWC have borrowed heavily from their southern US counterparts with their chosen name, union, motto and their chosen language while keeping silent in the face of hate groups and individuals supporting their cause.
Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of America’s DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars – particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.
Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg Race Laws were modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler was “passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." And indeed it was.
Despite the long-running presence of these elements, though, America has never yet given way to fascism. No doubt some of this, in the past half-century at least, was primarily fueled by the natural human recoil that occurred when we got to witness the end result of these tendencies when given the chance to rule by someone like Hitler – namely, the Holocaust. We learned to be appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism, because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced, and fled in terror.
Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon: in one sense, it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s comprised of a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence and importance rise and fall according to the stages of development it goes through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human id upon the rest of humankind.
That’s where Donald Trump comes in.
In many ways, Trump’s fascistic-seeming presidential campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is the one component that has been utterly missing previously in American forms of fascism: the charismatic leader around whom the fascist troops can rally, the one who voices their frustrations and garners followers like flies.
Scholars of fascist politics have remarked previously that America has been fortunate for most of its history not to have had such a figure rise out of the ranks of their fascist movements. And in the case of Donald Trump, that remains true – he has no background or history as a white supremacist or proto-fascist, nor does he actually express their ideologies.
Rather, what he is doing is mustering the latent fascist tendencies in American politics – some of it overtly white supremacist, while the majority of it is the structural racism and white privilege that springs from the nation’s extensive white-supremacist historical foundations – on his own behalf. He is merrily leading us down the path towards a fascist state even without being himself an overt fascist...
Stanley Payne, in Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980): A. The Fascist Negations: -- Antiliberalism -- Anticommunism -- Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly with the right)
B. Ideology and Goals: -- Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on traditional principles or models -- Organization of some new kind of regulated, multiclass, integrated national economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or national syndicalist -- The goal of empire or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with other powers -- Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the attempt to realize a new form of modern, self-determined, secular culture
C. Style and Organization: -- Emphasis on esthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political choreography, stressing romantic and mystical aspects -- Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and with the goal of a mass party militia -- Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence -- Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing the organic view of society -- Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation -- Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Paxton's nine "mobilizing passions" of fascism:
-- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
-- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it;
-- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies, both internal and external;
-- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
-- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
-- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;
-- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;
-- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;
-- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle.
Roger Griffin:
Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.
To these I would add one other important component, taken from Harald Oftstad’s Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values – And Our Own (1989), namely, the logical extension of the Darwinian struggle against the “lesser” that pervades so much fascist literature: the deep-seated hatred and contempt in which all persons deemed “weaker” (be this ethnic, racial, medical, genetic, or otherwise) are held, and the desire to eliminate them entirely that it fuels.
In Hitler’s own words:
The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.
… [We will try to] “save” even the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature and her will continues. [Mein Kampf]
Taking a careful look at Trump’s campaign, the fascist traits immediately emerge:
1. Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign – the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race, poll-wise, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters – was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans – labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease – is classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination.
Trump’s appeal in this regard ultimately is about forming a “purer” community, and it has been relentless and expansive: When an audience member asked him at a town-hall-style appearance when and how he was going to “get rid of all the Muslims,” he responded that “we’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.” He now also claims that if elected, he will send back all the refugees from Syria who have arrived in the United States: “If I win, they’re going back,” he told one of his approval-roaring campaign crowds. And shortly before he encouraged a crowd that “maybe should have roughed up” a Black Lives Matter protester, he told an interviewer that the movement is “looking for trouble.” Most recently, he tweeted out a graphic taken from a neo-Nazi website purporting to demonstrate (falsely) that black people commit most murders in America (though he later claimed that he hadn’t endorsed the graphic). 2. The palingenetic ultranationalism. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: "The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We're going to make America great again."
That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis – that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but are the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.
3. Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
4. Trump constantly proclaims America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world, and proclaims that this has occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicianss.
5. He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
6. Trump’s contempt for weakness is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his recent mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability.
This list could probably go on all day. But eventually, as we consider the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy.
Fascists have, in the past, always relied upon an independent, movement-driven paramilitary force capable of enacting various forms of thuggery on their opponents (as in the Italian Blackshirts, aka the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, and the German Brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung). Trump, however, has no such force at his disposal.
What Trump does have is the avid support not only of various white-supremacist organizations, as well as that of very real paramilitary organizations in the form of the Oath Keepers and the “III Percent” movement, many of whose members are avid Trump backers, but neither of which have explicitly endorsed him. Moreover, Trump has never referenced any desire to form an alliance or to make use of such paramilitary forces.
What Trump has done is wink, nudge, and generally encouraged spontaneous violence as a response to his critics. This includes his winking and nudging at those “enthusiastic supporters” who committed anti-Latino hate crimes, his encouragement of the people at a campaign appearance who assaulted a Latino protester, and most recently, his endorsement of the people who “maybe should have roughed up” the “disgusting” Black Lives Matter protester who interrupted his speech.
That’s a clearly fascistic response. It also helps us understand why Trump is an extraordinarily dangerous right-wing populist demagogue, and not a genuine, in-the-flesh fascist.
A serious fascist would have called upon not just the crowd to respond with violence, but also his paramilitary allies to respond with retaliatory strikes. Trump didn’t do that.
That, in a tiny nutshell, is an example of the problem with Trump’s fascism: He is not really an ideologue, acting out of a rigid adherence to a consistent worldview, as all fascists are. Trump’s only real ideology is the Worship of the Donald, and he will do and say anything that appeals to the lowest common denominator of the American body politic in order to attract their support – the nation’s id, the near-feral segment that breathes and lives on fear and paranoia and hatred.
There’s no question these supporters bring a singular, visceral energy to the limited universe of the GOP primary, though I don’t know anyone who expects that such a campaign can survive the oxygen and exposure of a general election. Indeed, it is in many signs an indication of the doom that is descending upon a Republican Party in freefall, flailing about in a death spiral, that it is finally resorting to a campaign as nakedly fascistic as Trump’s in its attempts to secure the presidency.
This is why Trump has never called upon the shock troops of a paramilitary wing for support, and why he has always kept an arm’s-length distance from the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who have become some of his most enthusiastic backers. He isn’t really one of them.
What he is, as Berlet has explained elsewhere, is a classic right-wing nativist populist demagogue: “His ideology and rhetoric are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism and populism.”
Of course, it’s also important to understand that fascism, in fact, is a subspecies of right-wing populism, very similar to the Klan in nature – that is, its malignant, metastasized version, crazed in its insatiable lust for power, fueled by fear and hatred, and fed by the blood of its vulnerable targets.
Trump is not fascist primarily because he lacks any kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology. What he represents instead is the kind of id-driven feral politics common to the radical right, a sort of gut-level reactionarism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism.
That does not, however, mean he is any less dangerous to American democracy. Indeed, he may be more dangerous than an outright fascist, who would in reality be far less appealing and far less likely to succeed in the current milieu. What Trump is doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, is making the large and growing body of proto-fascists in America larger and even more vicious – that is, he is creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially irrevocable outbreak of fascism.
Recall, if you will, the lessons of Milton Mayer in his book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 – namely, the way these changes happen not overnight, but incrementally, like the legendary slow boiling of frogs:
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
… "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.
And this is what has been happening to America – in particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party – for a very long time. Donald Trump represents the apotheosis of this, the culmination of a very long-growing trend that really began in the 1990s.
That was when we first saw the popular rise of eliminationist hate talk, wielded with thoughtless glee and great regularity by an increasingly rabid set of right-wing pundits led by Rush Limbaugh, and then deeply codified by the talking heads who have subsequently marched across the sound stages at Fox News. It rose to the surface with the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin in 2008, followed immediately, in reaction to the election of Barack Obama, by the birth of the Tea Party, which is perhaps the single most significant manifestation of right-wing populism in the nation’s history.
Trump aligned himself very early with the Tea Party elements, remarking in 2011 that “I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party.” And indeed he does – in particular, with its obeisance to the captains of industry and their untrammeled right to make profits at the expense of everyone else.
This is a phenomenon known as Producerism, and it is one of the hallmarks of right-wing populism. It's accurately defined in Wikipedia as:
a syncretic ideology of populist economic nationalism which holds that the productive forces of society - the ordinary worker, the small businessman, and the entrepreneur, are being held back by parasitical elements at both the top and bottom of the social structure.
... Producerism sees society's strength being "drained from both ends"--from the top by the machinations of globalized financial capital and the large, politically connected corporations which together conspire to restrict free enterprise, avoid taxes and destroy the fortunes of the honest businessman, and from the bottom by members of the underclass and illegal immigrants whose reliance on welfare and government benefits drains the strength of the nation. Consequently, nativist rhetoric is central to modern Producerism. Illegal immigrants are viewed as a threat to the prosperity of the middle class, a drain on social services, and as a vanguard of globalization that threatens to destroy national identities and sovereignty. Some advocates of producerism go further, taking a similar position on legal immigration.
In the United States, Producerists are distrustful of both major political parties. The Republican Party is rejected for its support of corrupt Big Business and the Democratic Party for its advocacy of the unproductive lazy waiting for their entitlement handouts (Kazin, Stock, Berlet & Lyons).
Berlet has written extensively about the long historical association of producerism with oppressive right-wing movements and regimes:
Producerism begins in the U.S. with the Jacksonians, who wove together intra-elite factionalism and lower-class Whites’ double-edged resentments. Producerism became a staple of repressive populist ideology. Producerism sought to rally the middle strata together with certain sections of the elite. Specifically, it championed the so-called producing classes (including White farmers, laborers, artisans, slaveowning planters, and “productive” capitalists) against “unproductive” bankers, speculators, and monopolists above—and people of color below. After the Jacksonian era, producerism was a central tenet of the anti-Chinese crusade in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews.
The Producerist narrative is why Henry Ford – who, as the ostensible author of The International Jew, a 1920 conspiracist tome that inspired Hitler’s paranoia, and whose capital later helped build the Nazi war machine in the 1930s, was also (and not coincidentally) perhaps the ultimate American enabler of fascism – is such a seminal figure for American right-wing populists, both as a leader in the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as a figure of reverence today. (Glenn Beck, in fact, on several occasions on his old Fox News show referenced Ford as something of a holy figure for his efforts to resist FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s.) The same narrative is also why, in today’s context, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged – a tendentious novel speculating on the disasters that would befall the world if its great industrial leaders suddenly chose to stop producing – are so important in their mythology.
Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too can someday become rich and famous -- because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It's all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.
The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be called "sucker populism."
Nonetheless, right-wing populists have long been part of the larger conservative movement – though largely relegated to its fringes. Some of the more virulent expressions of this populism, including the Posse Comitatus movement, Willis Carto’s Populist Party, and the “Patriot”/militia movement of the 1990s, have been largely relegated to fringe status. However, there have been periods in America’s past when right-wing populism was not thoroughly mainstream but also politically ascendant. Probably the most exemplary of these was during the wave of Ku Klux Klan revival between 1915 and 1930. This Klan crumbled in the late 1920s under the weight of internal political warfare and corruption; many of its field organizers later turned up in William Dudley Pelley’s overtly fascist Silver Shirts organization of the 1930s. After World War II, most of these groups – as well as the renowned anti-Semite radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, and lingering American fascist groups like George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party – were fully relegated to fringe status. So, too, were subsequent attempts at reviving right-wing populism, embodied by Willis Carto and his Populist Party, as well as other forms of right-wing populism that cropped up in the latter half of the century, from Robert DePugh’s vigilante/domestic terrorist organization The Minutemen in the 1960s, to the Posse Comitatus and “constitutionalist” tax protesters in the 1970s and ‘80s, to the “militia”/Patriot movement of the 1990s. As it had been since at least the 1920s, this brand of populism was riddled with conspiracist paranoia, xenophobic white tribalism, and a propensity for extreme violence.
Yet beginning in the 1990s, as mainstream conservatives built more and more ideological bridges with this sector – reflected in the increasing adoption of far-right rhetoric within the mainstream – the strands of populism became more and more imbedded in mainstream-conservative dogma, particularly the deep, visceral, and often irrational hatred of the federal government. One of the more popular "mainstream" figures among this bloc in the 1990s was Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. And so when he created something of a sensation with his campaign for the Republican nomination in 2008, it meant that these ideas and agendas started receiving widespread circulation among the mainstream Right -- and with it, an increasing number of conservatives who called themselves "libertarians", when what they really meant was "populists."
But if Ron Paul opened the door for right-wing populism, though, he scarcely could have anticipated the overnight political star who would, in short order, come waltzing through it to great fanfare – namely, Sarah Palin. Hers is a somewhat different, more mainstream-friendly brand of right-wing populism – and as a result, it was embraced by a significantly greater portion of the American electorate.
Her populism emerged for national view shortly after John McCain announced her as his running mate. It was more than just the aggressive, McCarthyite attacks on Obama as a “radical” who “palled around with terrorists” and the paranoid bashing of “liberal elites” -- most of all, there was the incessant suggestion that she and McCain represented “real Americans” and were all about standing up for “the people.”
Populism, yes, but indisputably right-wing, too: socially and fiscally conservative, business-friendly, and hostile to progressive causes. The Producerist narrative was a constant current in Palin’s speeches, particularly when she would get the crowd chanting, “Drill, baby, drill!” The populism whipped up by Palin’s candidacy became manifest as a national movement in short order with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. Indeed, not only was the Tea Party overtly a right-wing populist movement, it soon became a major conduit for a revival of the 1990s version of this populism, the “Patriot”/militia movement. Many of these Tea Partiers are now the same Oath Keepers and “III Percenters” whose members widely support Trump’s candidacy.
Of course, most of these extremists are only one step removed, ideologically speaking, from the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists of the racist right, and both of those segments of the right lean heavily on nativist and authoritarian rhetoric. And there really is no other good word for Trump’s rhetoric, and the behavior of many of his followers, than “fascistic.” So it’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism – they are, after all, not just kissing cousins, but more akin to siblings. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist.
All of which underscores the central fact: Donald Trump may not be a fascist, but his vicious brand of right-wing populism is not just empowering the latent fascist elements in America, he is leading a whole nation of followers merrily down a path that leads directly to fascism.
Consider, if you will, what did occur in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s remarks about “roughing up” Black Lives Matter protesters: Two nights later, a trio of white supremacists in Minneapolis invaded a Black Lives Matter protest there and shot five people, in an act that had been carefully planned and networked through the Internet.
What this powerfully implies is that Trump has achieved that kind of twilight-zone level of influence where he can simply demonize a target with rhetoric suggestive of violent retribution and his admirers will act out that very suggestion. It’s only a step removed from the fascist leader who calls out his paramilitary thugs to engage in violence.
America, thanks to Trump, has now reached that fork in the road where it must choose down which path its future lies – with democracy and its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism. For myself, I remain confident that Americans will choose the former and demolish the latter – that Trump’s candidacy will founder, and the tide of right-wing populism will reach its high-water mark under him and then recede with him.
What is most troubling, though, is the momentum that Trump’s candidacy has given that tide. He may not himself lack any real ideological footing, but he has laid the groundwork for a fascist groundswell that could someday be ridden to power by a similarly charismatic successor who is himself more in the mold of an ideological fascist. And it doesn’t take a very long look down the roll of 2016 Republican candidates to find a couple of candidates who might fit that mold.
Trump may not be fascist, but he is empowering their existing elements in American society; even more dangerously, his Tea Party brand of right-wing populism is helping them grow their ranks, along with their potential to recruit, by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making all this thuggery and ugliness seem normal. And that IS a serious problem.
In some ways it doesn’t matter whether we call Donald Trump a fascist or “just” a right-wing populist. However we categorize him, his presidential campaign represents a serious danger. Whatever direction he takes in the future, whatever happens to his presidential fortunes, Trump is galvanizing organized white supremacists and fueling racist and Islamophobic bigotry and violence across the United States. Trump’s campaign has to be seen in context — it grows out of long-term developments in the Republican Party and the U.S. political system as a whole — but it has become a destructive force in its own right.
Two months ago, I argued that calling Donald Trump a fascist distorts our understanding of fascism and obscures his demagoguery’s roots in mainstream U.S. politics. Criticizing scholarly definitions of fascism that remain stuck in the 1940s, I also highlighted the divide between rightists who remain loyal to the U.S. political system and far rightists who want to overthrow it -- including many but not all white nationalists as well as Christian theocrats and others. That tension is pivotal for understanding Trump's relationship with fascism.
However we categorize Trump, opposing his poison is not about defending democracy. The United States is not and never has been a democracy. It’s a mix of pluralistic openness and repression, an oppressive, hierarchical society where most political power is held by representatives of a tiny capitalist elite, but where there is real political space for some people and some ideas that would not be permitted in a wholly authoritarian system, including opportunities to organize, debate, participate in electoral politics, and criticize those in power. This space has been won through struggle and it’s important and worth defending, but it’s not democracy. One of the reasons the U.S. political system has been so durable and successful (at serving those in power) is that it's really good at shifting between openness and authoritarianism. Even anti-fascism itself can become a rationale for some of the most serious repression, as Japanese Americans know well. Someone like Trump can push very far in the authoritarian direction without challenging the system on any sort of basic level.
Given the danger Trump poses, some people have asked: does it really matter whether he fits somebody’s definition of fascist or not? Is this question useful, or is it just an abstract intellectual debate? I think it does matter, because it can help us understand the danger more clearly: not just his politics but also his relationship with — and capacity to mobilize — organized white nationalist far rightists. Saying it doesn’t matter whether Trump is a right-wing populist or a fascist is like saying it doesn’t matter whether Bernie Sanders is a social democrat or a communist. I think we should apply the same kind of intelligent analysis to the right as we do to the left, because it’s just as important for us to understand our enemies as it is to understand our (would-be) allies.
Radicals facing major candidates, left and right Let’s stay with the Bernie Sanders analogy for a moment. In this presidential race, U.S. radicals — people who advocate a fundamental transformation of the socio-economic order — are faced with a major party candidate who breaks a serious political taboo by calling himself a socialist, says some of the things we think are important, and is generating new interest in socialist politics. On the other hand, a lot of have serious problems with some of his positions, he works within the existing system, and he has a long history that shows he’s really not a radical. What should we do? Some people who consider themselves radicals support him, others reject him as an apologist for U.S. capitalism and empire, and others are conflicted. People may say it’s pointless to get behind him because he couldn’t make meaningful change as president even if he wanted to, or they may say his campaign is raising important issues and could be a stepping stone to genuinely radical initiatives.
If somebody said, “Sanders says a lot of the things communists say, so he must be a communist,” or “he may not be a full-blown communist now, but his kind of politics inherently leads to communism,” most leftists would not take this very seriously. Whether we support Sanders or not, we would recognize this as sloppy analysis, if not McCarthyite smear-mongering. (Predictably, some rightists have taken this very approach. The Libertarian Republic called Sanders a “communist sympathizer,” while FrontPage Mag just called him a communist, as of course did Donald Trump.)
The Sanders analogy doesn’t prove anything one way or another about Donald Trump and fascism, but I hope it offers a useful perspective on the question and how we think about it. While Trump is not Sanders’s mirror image, some of the issues he poses for far rightists are similar. A lot of white nationalist far rightists — who believe that racial renewal demands a radical break with the established social and political order, and who draw on traditions of both homegrown white supremacy and European fascism — are very interested in Trump’s candidacy, because he’s defying the political establishment, saying a lot of the things they believe, and generating new interest in their politics. But they’re also clear that he’s not one of them, they disagree with some of what he says and some of what he’s done, and they’re skeptical about how much they can trust him. So they have to decide how they want to respond. Some of them reject his campaign while many others have welcomed it. They generally don’t think he’s going to bring the kind of far-reaching change they want, but many of them see him as raising important issues and as a possible bridge toward more radical initiatives.
The specifics are worth a look. Michael Hill of the neo-Confederate League of the South commented, “I love to see somebody like Donald Trump come along. Not that I believe anything that he says. But he is stirring up chaos in the G.O.P. and for us that is good.” David Duke praised Trump’s call to deport all undocumented immigrants but cautioned that Trump is “1,000 percent dedicated to Israel, so how much is left over for America?” Brad Griffin, who blogs at Occidental Dissent under the name Hunter Wallace, complained that unlike Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, “Trump wants to keep the US Empire,” but added “there is no one else running who isn’t far worse… I’m kinda hoping he wins the primary and provokes a fatal split that topples the GOP.” And the Traditionalist Youth Network characterized Trump’s candidacy as follows:
“While Donald Trump is neither a Traditionalist nor a White nationalist, he is a threat to the economic and social powers of the international Jew. For this reason alone as long as Trump stands strong on deportation and immigration enforcement we should support his candidacy insofar as we can use it to push more hardcore positions on immigration and Identity. Donald Trump is not the savior of Whites in America, he is however a booming salvo across the bow of the Left and Jewish power to tell them that White America is awakening, and we are tired of business as usual.
“The march to victory will not be won by Donald Trump in 2016, but this could be the stepping stone we need to then radicalize millions of White working and middle class families to the call to truly begin a struggle for Faith, family and folk. For this reason alone I will campaign for Donald Trump because as the saying goes ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and that is doubly true if that person is viewed as an enemy by the International Jew.”
As these quotes suggest, even those far rightists who welcome Donald Trump’s campaign have serious reservations about him. This ambivalence is politically important and we should try to understand it. To do that, it’s important to delineate fascism clearly from other forms of right-wing authoritarianism and racism — and also to see them as interconnected.
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