Uneasy but effective collaboration

The endless arguments over the past decade regarding whether Donald Trump was “really” a fascist and/or whether Trumpism was genuinely a fascist movement, now seem painfully jejune. Fascism isn’t a single discrete thing: it’s a a group of political movements that share certain strong family resemblances, despite the differences between them.

Robert Paxton’s concise definition captures the essence of the phenomenon:

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 restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

The reason so many otherwise disparate right-wing movements end up checking off all of these boxes — as Trumpism is now so clearly in the process of doing — is that the central logic of reactionary ethno-nationalsm compels such movements to adopt all of these characteristics. Political reaction is by definition about purported community decline. Ethno-nationalism is about the poisoning of the blood of the nation by internal and external enemies. Violent resistance to this is entailed both by reactionary ideology more generally, and by the racist ideology which is always at the very core of reactionary ethno-nationalism.

Trump and Trump’s movement became fascist for roughly the same reason water flows downhill: reactionary ethno-nationalism, to the extent it has political success, will eventually morph recognizably into some form of fascism, because what else can it do, given its ideological and psychological roots?

Here are a couple of milestones on that road:

Josh Marshall has a thread on the significance of Donald Trump’s attack on big prestigious national law firms like Covington and Burling and Perkins Coie. These firms haven’t been accused of doing anything illegal or even improper, except of course that in a nascent fascist regime, political opposition to the regime is wrong, and eventually illegal, as a matter of definition.

Yale Law School has suspended (gift link) an Iranian Muslim scholar who studies the legal situation of Palestinians, on the basis of nothing more than an accusation from an A.I.-powered website that she has some vague connection to a group that has been accused by the US government of helping a terrorist organization (no humans seem to have been involved in the curation of the “news” that produced the accusation).

The article about Dr. Doutaghi was published on March 2 on Jewish Onliner. On its website and on Substack, Jewish Onliner says it is “empowered by A.I. capabilities.” It does not identify any reporters on its site.

An effort to reach Jewish Onliner for comment elicited a response from “JO,” which identified itself as an A.I. assistant developed by Jewish Onliner. Later, emails from the site said that, while it uses A.I. to enhance research, fact-checking and rapid content creation, the final edits are done by humans.

The point here is that powerful institutions knuckle under very rapidly under fascist conditions, because some of them are in Paxton’s group of “traditional elites” who offer “uneasy but effective collaboration,” and some of them because they are simply afraid of the costs of any kind of resistance.

This is where we are, it’s getting worse rapidly, and effective resistance means refusal to go along with any of this, which is why any temporizing about Chuck Schumer & Co.’s shameful performance this week is a radical misunderstanding of the moment.