"How Far Will Americas Fascists Go?" Umair Haque
America’s fascists didn’t give up. They hardened. They’re angrier. More committed. Better organized. There they are, screaming at school board meetings, restricting voting rights, believing fervently in Big Lies, threatening to blow up democracy…and they mean it.
American fascism hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still very much alive, and in many ways healthier than ever. In case you think I’m kidding, the percentage of Republicans who want Trump to run in 2024 has risen by 12 points, to 78%, since May.
So the question is: what do America’s fascists want?
In one respect, this is an easy question to answer — but only in a superficial sense. The easy answer goes like this. America’s fascists want…fascism. They want a scapegoat to demonise for their woes, the woes of the pure of blood and true of faith. That scapegoat is, like it always in in fascist collapses, the most powerless groups in society. In Nazi Germany it was Jews, in the Muslim World it’s anyone impure of faith, and in America, it’s Mexicans and Muslims and gay people and everyone else at the bottom of the social ladder of purity and faith.
America’s fascists want fascism. But that only elides the question. That question then becomes: how far will they go? When I put it that way, maybe you begin to see what I mean a little bit. Four scenarios come to mind, and none of them are good.
The first scenario is segregation. You might think that’s a stretch, especially if you’re a white liberal. But the fact is that the attack on voting rights taking place across America, at the hands of Trumpist fanatics, whether state legislatures or local officials, is already being called Jim Crow 2.0. That attack on voting rights has one goal — to make it next to impossible for minorities to vote, thus locking in the power of the Trumpist base in crucial states like Arizona and Georgia.
It might not be apparent now, but that attack on voting rights is a form of segregation, and paves the way for further forms of segregation. Once the Trumpists can pervert democracy and take control as a minority, then of course they are likely to put in place a full legislative agenda. That agenda might just go all the way back to full blown segregation proper, considering that Trumpists seem to actively revel in making minorities second class citizens, which appears to be the minimum of what Trumpists really want.
It won’t be called segregation. But such an agenda would probably include things like laws, mirroring Nazi Germany, which persecute minorities of all kinds — and which exonerate the Trumpist base for abusing them. Think I exaggerate? A simple example you can already see is the way that the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse case won’t allow the people he allegedly shot and killed to be called…victims.
The agenda that’s likely to pass in states controlled by Trumpists is likely to begin with the erosion of basic freedoms for minorities — you can already see this in effect with regard to women in Texas. Women in Texas don’t have rights to privacy, association, speech, or expression anymore. Anyone can become a bounty hunter who gets paid a healthy sum for suing women for exercising their rights, which means said rights don’t exist. Texas is now effectively a segregated society for women, who enjoy a lesser set of rights than men do now. They can’t speak out loud in public. Really — even expressing an intention to “aid or abet” an abortion could result in being bounty hunted. So women now can’t express themselves — not like men can.
Now imagine that taken just a tiny step further. You say something about “critical race theory” that isn’t an attack on it. In fact, you think it’s insightful. Someone at the next table at the cafe overhears you. Uh oh. They’re a self-styled “bounty hunter,” who sues you, and bankrupts you. You have a friend who’s a minority of some kind, and now it’s illegal to help or aid minorities in their rights to expression or association. Maybe they say “I wish gay marriage was legal again.” Bang. You’re overheard, bounty hunted, sued, bankrupted.
These kinds of erosions of basic rights are already on the cards. You can see the Trumpist agenda heading in this direction plainly now, because that is the mildest form of fascism of all — to persecute and scapegoat those at the bottom for the woes of the pure and true. But it could get much, much worse than all that.
That brings me to the second scenario: ethnic cleansing. It’s again frankly pretty obvious to see that America’s fascists want an ethnically purified state. That was the desire at the core of Trumpism — it was the rationale for everything from concentration camps to “family separations” to the “Muslim ban” to “build the wall” and so forth.
But how bad will it get? Right about now, America’s experiencing a lull, the eye of the storm. The Democrats are in power — even if they’re not accomplishing much — while the fascists are consolidating and regrouping. But as the fascists do that, their attacks are likely to redouble.
Ethnic cleansing is of course a hallmark of failed states. See a failed state, see a society where minorities are being cleansed away, to give the majority something to feel good and proud and strong about. It’s happening all over the globe right about now. India’s ethnically cleansing Muslims, Britain’s cleansing itself of hated Europeans.
And as America’s fascists resurge, they are likely to accelerate and intensify their campaign of ethnic cleansing. Let me put this in perspective, too. Republican state legislatures have made it a felony to vote in the wrong way. That means you get sent to jail and your life ruined. Who’s being targeted, watched, surveilled for this “crime”? Minorities, of course. That, too, is a soft form of ethnic cleansing — you get taken out of society for exercising your rights, over some technicality.
But that’s likely to be the tip of the iceberg. As the fascists consolidate power locally, this time, instead of federally, they’re likely to try everything Trump did — only at the local level. That means concentration camps, kids being separated, minorities hunted in the streets, ethnic bans, and so forth — only this time, at the state or municipal level.
If you think that’s not going to happen, let me remind you that right about now, America’s a failed state precisely because checks and balances don’t exist. The Supreme Court didn’t stop Texas from blatantly unconstitutionally taking womens’ rights away. A precedent has been set. It has shown that it is capable of looking the other way while fascists abuse power — the judiciary’s been captured. But that also means that when some abusive fascist mayor or governor or whatnot in Texas or some other Trumpist bastion decides to open concentration camps, or take kids away, or ban ethnicities…it’s likely nobody’s going to stop them.
In other words, the Trumpists are hardening because they know they can get away with it. The judiciary doesn’t exist as a check on their abuses anymore — and the Democrats are too weak to stop them. Hence, the growing wave of consolidation of power by Trumpists, at the local level. Right now, that power is being accumulated. It is being gathered up and centralized, among legislatures and bodies and officials who are loyal to the fascist cause. The next step is to use it.
It’s a virtual certainty that ethnic cleansing is coming to America, precisely because you will almost never see a failed state without ethnic cleansing campaigns. The only question is how and when it will happen (again, remember, it did during the Trump years.) Will local legislatures begin building their own little concentration camps in Trumpist towns and cities in 2022? Will Trump’s re-election in 2024 set the stage for a far more vicious ethnic cleansing campaign? Those questions are details — what’s certain is that America’s fascists are committed to ethnic cleansing, and they are easily willing to go far enough to do it.
Is that statement unfair? I don’t think so. Remember, Trump’s base actively supported minorities being put in camps and kids being separated from families —an actual form of genocide — and ethnicities banned and minorities hunted in the streets. They applauded and cheered it. Not just the fanatics — but the base. Trump’s base of imploded middle and working class white Americans really does blame minorities for its woes, in the same way that Weimar Germans blamed Jews for theirs. Now consider that Trump’s support is growing rapidly at the moment, and that that very same base believes even more ardently in Big Lies like “the election was stolen from us.” Us? Then who’s “them”? It’s not just “Democrats” — it’s Black people, Jews, gay people, and so forth. And “us” means the imploding white middle and working class. I think all that’s such a strong possibility I’d put money on it, frankly.
That brings me to the third scenario. Civil war and holocaust. Will Trumpists go that far? Well, if you think about, America’s already in what my Twitter commenters, far smarter than me, call a cold civil war. Trumpists are attacking, like we’ve discussed, the rudiments of democracy — from Nazi salutes at school board meetings to purging legislature and offices of those considered disloyal to Trump because they didn’t support the coup.
Trumpists aren’t interested in democracy. They are interested in authoritarian power. The question then is will they go all the way to civil war — for the purpose of holocaust?
Nobody knows the answer to that question. Let me share with you my feeling. I think that they will. Why? Well, there’s the abundant evidence already. Trumpists think violence is perfectly justified: the majority of Republicans support the coup attempt of Jan 6th. They don’t think it was a bad thing, even though blood was spilled at the Capitol. They think of it as perfectly legitimate and even peaceful. But if what happened on Jan 6th was peaceful…then what’s violent?
Trumpists thus appear to have a very different line of violence than sane and thoughtful people do. They don’t think of, for example, Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shooting innocent people in cold blood with a machine gun as violent — they think of it, like the judge in the case, as justified and honourable. That they don’t see Jan 6th as violent — but peaceful— reveals that to them, bloodshed and mayhem that sane people find repellent…doesn’t bother them at all.
In other words, Trumpworld has developed by now the deeply corrosive values that it takes to start a civil war. They don’t just disdain democracy — they have contempt for peace. They don’t see brutality and bloodshed as violence, but as necessary punishments. What counts for them as real violence is something even worse than concentration camps or innocent people being shot to death with machine guns or the coup of Jan 6th. These are exactly the norms that society after society which has imploded into civil war — from Lebanon to Iran to Nazi Germany — has developed. Let me sum them up: the lust for authoritarian power, contempt for the rule of law, the normalisation of violence as peacefulness, the escalation of brutality, and indifference to bloodshed, and a simmering desire to use harder and harder forms of violence to attain authoritarian power.
There’s a certain feeling which comes over societies just before a civil war. It’s a hard one to explain — you have to have lived through it. A strange, cold feeling. Nothing seems to matter, and violence seems to be everywhere, rising. People’s eyes go blank, and their faces blister with rage. A chill settles over society. There is a calm before the storm erupts. Trumpists openly call it “the storm.”
What do they mean? Well, they don’t mean sitting down at a table and hashing out their differences. They mean it the way the Nazis did. Storm as in storm trooper, as in blitzkrieg, “lightning strike,” as in Final Solution. Trumpists casually refer to “the storm” having learned that parlance through the argot and conceptual apparatus of extremist white supremacy. And that storm which white supremacists have long been agitating for is civil war. For the purposes of holocaust, meaning, a society in which everyone vaguely different is annihilated, and only the pure and true are left.
I think in the end that is what Trumpists really want. No, not “all of them.” But certainly enough of them. And probably all of them, too, at some level they won’t even admit to themselves. I’d bet that most Trumpists get an illicit thrill, a rush of blood, thinking about “the storm” — even if some don’t want to. Every fascist movement is dedicated to an apocalypse, after which its world is remade anew, purified with the sacrament of ultraviolence.
That apocalypse hasn’t happened yet in America. Trump’s first term was just the warm up. But — I can’t help but feel it more strongly every day now, watching how America’s fascists grow more openly violent, bloodthirsty, enraged, and committed, every single day — it’s going to.
Umair
October 2021
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