The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?
*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q
Jay Rosen pointed to a PBS documentary a couple of days ago that I didn’t get a chance to watch until last night: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/hannah-arendt-documentary/36135/. I would ask John Quiggen’s naysayers/hedgers to watch it and see if perhaps their optimism survives more comfortably than the remaining shreds of my own. I was left with the overwhelming impression that we are well past the tipping point. SCOTUS, perhaps, just the billboard to grab the attention of those who might have missed it until now.
To one of his commenters on bsky Jay recommended Crisis of the Republic and Human Condition before Origins of Totalitarianism. So, I’d just hit “purchase” on the Amazon order before I saw this and the context for it on CT.
And, it reminds me that I need to see if I can dig out a discourse Corey Robin did on the “banality of evil.” I liked that the documentary allowed Hannah to address that in her own words.
Those of us favored by circumstance are almost never prepared to wake up one morning to find civil war on our doorstep, even when we’ve been charting its approach for decades. That’s to our credit, I suppose, but when that morning does finally arrive it’s a bit disingenuous of us to pretend that we can send the four horsemen on their way merely by showing them our credentials.
And Lordy, what could be more banal than four horsemen named Trunp, Vance, Hegseth and Rubio? I’d argue that if there are grounds for optimism, it lies not in the banality of our evildoers, but in their incompetence. The population of the US is five times what the population of Germany was in 1933. I’m not at all sure our stalwart numbnutsians can even begin to chew what they say they’re going to bite off. If they were as smart as even the dumbest German Nazi was, they wouldn’t be either.
Numbnutsians? Oh, god, WT. LOL. I read that and wondered what odd English word or German permutation you’d tossed at me now. Off to a search engine to discover the etymology of some referent I’ve not encountered in order to respond somewhat intelligently. Only to discover the etymology of this unusual word is numb.nuts. I’m gonna laugh for at least a week. Thanks! Sincerely! I needed that.
More seriously… “charting its approach for decades”…. That was one thing that Arendt seemed attuned to. McCarthy and Watergate really had her attention and what it might portend for the US going forward. Given my own age and history, I share that “awareness” with her, though doubtless those of a WWI era or earlier might have their own “mile markers”.
Guess if we didn’t have crude humor at this point, we wouldn’t have no humor at all. I plead regionalism, although thanks to being an army brat, it’s sometimes hard to remember what region I cribbed any particular usage from. Some are clear, of course. When my Dad described the retreating view of a passing woman in pink pedal pushers circa 1955 as resembling “two shoats in a tow sack,” I knew exactly what region was responsible—for the misogyny as well as the choice of words.
As for the fascism sensors, I think for me it was being in the South at the height of the Civil Rights era—there were sit-ins in the town in Oklahoma I was living in in the early Sixties, and I was enrolled at Memphis State University in 1965 when SCLC, SNCC and CORE were testing the new desegregation laws. The ugliness in the confrontations I witnessed first hand left no doubt in my mind, if there’d ever been any, about the limitations of American democracy, and the size of the probable aryan storm trooper supply if the South ever did succeed in rising again.
And then came Vietnam, working for SDS in Los Angeles, with a brief stint as an outside agitator at UC Berkeley. After that we had the assassinations of King and RFK, Chicago in 1968, Kent State, Jackson State, Hard Hats for Nixon, Watergate. By that time it was clear that the idea of a lasting liberal coalition, let alone anything to the left of Richard J Daley, was utterly delusional.
Good point. I could have simply gone back to the iconic photographs of the facial expressions of those nice white suburban (?) mothers trailing the Little Rock 9 into Little Rock Central High School. The unabashed venom sticks with me in mind’s eye.
I guess Arendt was attentive to the dissolution/capitulation of institutions both in Germany with the ascendancy of Hitler, McCarthy’s witch hunts, and Nixon’s “if the President does it”…. And, I’m really feeling that attentiveness for myself in real time. That we haven’t yet reached Germany’s psychotic moment, so far, inspires little confidence we can’t get there given what I’m watching from our national media. The numbnutsians at least have a narrative, or story, to sell and they are selling it.
It does bother me a bit that Quiggen and others want to point to the difference in unemployment between Germany (’30s) and the US (’24) as a disjuncture. US unemployment numbers may have been low – though I could rant about the absurdity of a “natural rate of unemployment” for hours – but to a person working three jobs to make rent, or to 30 yo’s who can’t afford a home, or a college grad drowning in debt… I’m not sure the precarity isn’t sharply felt in those of both periods. Without actually looking at the data – given the more typical post-war economic experience in the US – I wonder if the two populations might have ‘comparative’ feelings about it.
Our four apocalyptic horsemen may not have the wherewithal to chew what they’re biting off… but I fear things can easily disintegrate to a point where the mob will attempt to chew it for them with varying degrees of success.
Because there’s two parts to it, isn’t there? The institutional piece and the public’s response to institutional externalities (feel like I’m saying this poorly so maybe it’s time to STFU)?
Fascists do always have a narrative don’t they? Nasty, brutish, and short, just like the lives of their followers. If you’re feeling abused, though, they’ll give you a free club, tell you you’re righteous, and point you toward someone you can beat on with the explicit sanction of the new order. Does any American really not know that trans people have been selected to be this regime’s Untermenschen?
You’re also right about the difference between what employment statistics tell the Krugmans and Diamonds about the state of the economy, and what people sliding down the bottom half of the income gradient really experience from day to day. Look at what Amazon or Walmart’s working schedules based on demand do to the anxieties of their employees. Look at what it takes to get any kind of decent healthcare, and how impossible it is to pay for any of it without going broke.
And finally, your two parts: The institutional piece can’t work at all unless it’s structured and maintained by people who act in good faith and have a demonstrable allegiance to the public interest as it used to be understood even by the oligarchs who despised it.
Unfortunately, the public’s response to institutional externalities very often looks like something else altogether. Just one example: say that institutional desegregation requires you to put your kid on a bus at 5:30 AM so he can get to a black school all the way across town before the morning bell at 8:00. Say also that the neighborhood school where you and all your white friends have gone for three generations is only a block away. You then decide throwing a brick through the black city councilman’s office window will show the city government what’s what. RACISM!
Yes, racism, but what if school funding didn’t depend on the property tax? What if the well-funded science magnet school in the black neighborhood all the way across town starts winning national awards and sending its kids to MIT on scholarships and city schools all have open enrollment? Isn’t that more likely to gradually erode racism than to bus six white kids to an all-black school on the other side of town and six black kids to an all-white school in a middle-class white neighborhood whose notions of black people are limited to what Fox News has to say about them?
So, yeah, two parts—and we’ve taken a couple of centuries to mangle both so thoroughly that no one really knows what the arguments are about any more. In times like these, maybe it’s better to be a disgruntled philosopher than a politician. That way you won’t have any illusions about seizing power and making America great again.