Editor's note: to put it bluntly, I've spent the past ten or so days watching Downmarket Mussolini flail around in his own dogsh*t while punting (what must at this point be recognized as) the singularly most poorly-planned and executed fascist coup in the history of modern mankind. As my podcast partner noted, the shades of Bolivia and their reactionary right's similarly failed takeover on election night, were impossible to overlook.
Unfortunately the slow-motion disintegration of Trump's ambitions and the confusion this has caused in the larger American fascist movement had locked me into kind of a holding pattern; I've got a lot of ground to analyze and put into context, but it really would be much easier for me to do so if I was sure Trump wasn't about to touch off a wave of stochastic terrorism all across the U.S. at any given moment. Furthermore there is quite frankly so much bullsh*t going on in our media and politics, simultaneously, that I'm having more than a little trouble trying to plan out all the things I want to discuss in some sort of coherent order; for those of you waiting with bated breath for the fifth and final part of the No Fugazi Podcast examination of modern fascism, it finally dropped this week. In terms of ordering my thoughts into some sort of coherent narrative for my post-election writing however, I've basically been forced to give up - if I haven't figured it out after seven days of surreal political chaos in America, I'm probably not going to figure it out after seven more, and the beast is always hungry for more content.
As such, I'm just going to bang out pieces I consider relevant in whatever order they strike me and there might be a brief focus on "micro-analysis" snippets like the one I'm going to publish below. At some point of course I'll get a handle on a larger narrative and we can go back to the normal type of writing I do, but right now my choices feel like "accept the flow of information and ideas as they come to me" or "do nothing, paralyzed by the possibilities of the very near future" - and obviously, the latter choice isn't much of a choice at all.
No Magic Man
The following snippet of analysis is taken from the Twitter account of Luke O'Neil, a left-leaning semi-independent analyst who has appeared frequently in some fairly major publications like Esquire, and The Guardian - you can find his substack newsletter, "Welcome to Hellworld" here.
In case it's not already clear, let me just start by saying that I like Luke well enough and I'm very fond of at least some of his work; in particular he's recently written a couple of articles about American fascism, one significantly pre-election, and one immediately before ballot day, that I think are both very insightful and worth highlighting here as a way of demonstrating why I don't think this guy is another standardized Masshole media chowderhead. Typically when I write one of these pieces focused on stray Twitter analysis, I'm taking the piss out of some corporate media minion who is babbling disingenuous nonsense and hoping the lack of editorial oversight inherent to social media will let their self-serving ravings "shape the discourse." That is not my intention here, but alas I still must pick a bone with Luke's analysis for the purposes of elaborating on a larger discussion our society is currently having in that same "discourse."
Now, I think a rather large part of what O'Neil is talking about here (in a humorous way) is the longstanding portion of Trump's personal mythology that revolves around his supposed machismo and hyper-masculinity; which is indeed attractive to many fascists in the movement we know today as Trumpism - as astounding as that may seem to folks who (rightfully, in my opinion) don't perceive the Klepto Kaiser an avatar of either quality, except perhaps in the most negative and destructive possible conceptions of those values.
While I won't waste too much time quibbling with Luke's implied understanding that it's awful hard to build a fascist movement or political coalition without a cult of masculinity, I would like to remind him that virtually every successful fascist leader I'm aware of simply defined themselves as the pinnacle of masculinity as they stood in the moment - including Trump. I mean we're talking about a vain, shrieking manchild who defines success by his "ratings" while openly obsessing about his lighting, his makeup, his awful hair transplant and even the perceived size of his fingers. Frankly, Hitler didn't have to be a strapping six foot two Aryan super soldier to epitomize masculinity for the Nazi movement in Germany, and neither will whichever reactionary muppet the billionaires and ruling-class ideologues behind this fascist wave dredge up to replace Trump as we go forward. Tom Cotton may not appear to "fuck" as Luke so eloquently puts it, but by the time the fascist propagandists who turned Trump of all people into a symbol of American masculinity are through a couple rounds of narrative building, every red-blooded fascist in the country is going to want to get fucked by Tom Cotton's quiet, militant masculinity and that's really all that matters to the capitalist bozos running this nazi clown convention.
Furthermore, to whittle the masculine imagery baked into Trumpism down to the movement's sense that Trump has a lot of sex, is to in some ways misunderstand why fascism requires the embrace of toxic masculinity in the first place. Hitler never really tried to give the impression he fucked, in fact quite the opposite - his masculinity was portrayed as an austere, divine and almost alienating quality; although the idea that every woman in Germany wanted to have sex with him was still widely circulated by propagandists. What really matters to the organization of a fascist movement historically is clearly that the leader figure merely represent an idea of unrestrained masculine authority - the exact contours of that definition can and do change with every fascist leader, from Mussolini to Modi and so on; all without causing a significant suspension of disbelief in the fascist base. Indeed, one might argue that the fascist definition of manhood is largely synonymous with a fascist's understanding of their own ideology and beliefs; ergo, a fascist leader becomes manly in the eyes of the base simply by espousing fascist ideology, policies and politics - after all, those ideas, policies and political tactics are indeed rooted in patriarchal authority as a matter of course.
Frankly however, what really bothers me most about Luke's analysis here is the way it subtly plays into the idea that there is something magical, or otherwise special about Trump and as such, he himself can be perceived as a cause, rather than effect, of wholly Americanized modern fascism that's sweeping across most of the Pig Empire as we speak - an issue made all the more perplexing because having read Luke's writing about about the larger American political situation, I'm not really sure he actually even agrees with that idea.
As observers of my work who've listened to the recent five part No Fugazi Podcast series on the historical origins of American fascism will undoubtedly be aware, I also reject this framing entirely because quite frankly, I don't think Donald Trump is all that special and I don't think fascist movements have historically demonstrated that their leaders even have to be. As I noted in a recent Facebook Journal:
"The simple truth is that Donald Trump's coup failed because while Trump is definitely a fascist, he's also an incompetent boob whose success as a politician has been driven almost entirely by institutional support from a larger, preexisting fascist movement inside American politics. Left to his own devices, Trump is the guy who kicked off his 2016 campaign in front of an escalator surrounded by random hired supporters carrying generic homemade signs, he's the guy who was well on his way to losing to Hillary Clinton until the Mercer family sent him Steve Bannon and a small army of digital technicians to run his online campaign and yes, he's the kind of idiot who drops a bunch of all caps tweets and then goes golfing while expecting Rudy Giuliani to inspire a chud uprising on his behalf.
I mean we are after all talking about a man who couldn't successfully repeal the Affordable Care Act, despite having a Republican super-majority – Trump was never some kind of tactical genius, and without the support of fascist billionaires, a fascist political party and a wholly in-pocket fascist conservative media onslaught, he's just a fat fascist baby flailing around in his own pigsh*t. Trump's coup failed because after handing over a 20% corporate tax cut and a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court, guys like Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch and yes, Mitch McConnell, didn't need Trump anymore – or at least didn't need him enough to justify being associated with an actual fascist coup in America.
In other words, Trump became a liability to the very fascist movement he rode to power in 2016 and the guys running it decided to cut him loose while betting they could retain control over his 72 million some odd voters; and on the whole, I strongly suspect they're correct in that position – the swine emperor's “dark charisma” has always been massively overstated and the truth is, these folks just really like fascism, white nationalism and the idea of purging their political enemies by a variety of means."
Look, I'll concede that Trump's status as a second tier celebrity, his deep association with the racist anti-Obama "Birther" conspiracy movement and the fact that he's the kind of crass billionaire windbag that can still plausibly appear in professional wrestling shows, were all crucial factors in helping Trump get his foot through the door of the 2016 GOP primary contest. By that same measure however, none of the principles O'Neil listed, nor a guy like Tucker Carlson will have any problem whatsoever generating enough in-party name recognition to get on the ballot and allow the fascist GOP machine and a corporate media apparatus that literally cannot help itself, to carry their words and ideas to the larger base. Nor frankly, is there a whole lot of evidence right now that the Republican Party and its media machinery actually can turn away from fascist politics at this point, even if they wanted to.
The plain truth of it is that Trump didn't exploit a choose-your-own-adventure media environment to create a purely astroturfed far-right "independent" media megaphone spitting out fascist ideology every waking hour of the day, that was reactionary vampire billionaires like Bob Mercer. Nor did Trump spend every election since Nixon lost to Kennedy aggressively courting white voters with nativist, white supremacist and explicitly fascist ideas and ideology, that was the larger Republican Party and ghouls like Pat Buchanan. With or without Trump, the Proud Boys aren't going anywhere, the militias aren't going anywhere and the Alex Jones-fueled larger reactionary conspiracy movement isn't going anywhere. At the end of the day, Donald Trump, who is again a man who doesn't know how to close an umbrella, was just an actor, playing Führer for this larger network of rich American fascists and reactionaries. They can and will get a new one; and in the meantime, they'll keep riling up the seventy-five or so million folks who knowingly pulled the lever for Downmarket Mussolini into something that looks a lot like a more violent, more reactionary and more dangerous version of the Tea Party.
The show after all must go on even if it kills us all, and it's not like the reasons rich dudes are pushing fascist ideology in the face of climate catastrophe, have changed, or will change - it's capitalism, or a planet that supports eight billion people and the capitalists aren't interested in letting us vote on which path our species is going to take.
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
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