It Would Be Difficult to Overstate the Gravity of This Moment

In the last post I published on this blog, I discussed a few different approaches to thinking about fascism. I noted that some of the things that tend to characterize fascist movements include a cult of the leader, the idea that some people are inherently superior to others, state-sponsored propaganda, the use of overt and often sadistic violence, and a national identity rooted in victimhood. Fascist movements differ in how much of a threat they pose, but all fascist movements are inherently a threat to everyone to some degree.

As far as I'm aware, fascist movements that gain traction always (or nearly always) do so in countries that are going through some sort of economic or cultural instability that also maintain at least the pretense of democracy. Major economic inequality is a good example of the sort of economic instability that makes a country vulnerable to fascism.

Economic inequality creates a situation where people can become extremely polarized. Those with money have power and privilege, and those without money end up struggling to get by. These differences are especially difficult to manage in a country where people are supposed to have equal rights and access to political influence. People come to feel betrayed by the promise of equality and opportunity they were once offered and grow cynical about their relationship with their government and fellow citizens.

In situations like this, civil society is at great risk of eroding. Angry disagreements about even minor problems take hold. People begin losing trust in the government and the politicians who supposedly represent them. Protests increase in number and intensity, and civil discord grows. Unaddressed in meaningful ways by the government, political violence inevitably begins to spread. This atmosphere is a very fertile breeding ground for fascism. 

If a country is experiencing political violence, one of the ways scholars use to decide whether that violence is fascist is to ask what it looks like. Fascist violence tends to look similar across time and place.

Let's look at an example. 

After World War I ended, conditions in Germany were miserable. A once proud military power had just lost the most catastrophic war in human history. Many in Germany felt contempt for their leaders who had agreed to accept public responsibility for the war and pay reparations. An allied naval blockade remained in place until 1919 leading many to starve. On top of all that, they were experiencing the hardship of a global influenza. 

During this time of incredible instability, the new Social Democratic Party recruited a group of demilitarized soldiers known as the Freikorps to ward off both internal and external threats so that it could maintain power.  

According to an article posted on the National World War II Museum website, a typical Freikorps member was a "man of the Right... He was also a hater. He hated the revolution, hated the new German Republic, hated the Socialists who led it and the Communists trying to replace them. Indeed, he hated civilians in general. He believed that Germany had not lost the war, but had been 'stabbed in the back' by the same pack of traitors now ruling in Berlin."

Known as an antecedent the Nazi Party, the Freikorps relationship with the government was never comfortable. Although they were useful at times for doing the sort of violence the government needed to stay in power, the Freikorps were not always completely under government control. They were notorious for committing massacres, and many of the men within the Freikorps seemed to be there because they felt a need to do violence. By 1921, the Freikorps had become so unruly, the government banned them. Still, they did not disappear from German life. Many went on later to become Nazi Stormtroopers. Others went on campaigns of political violence against government figures they saw as enemies of the German people. 

The history of fascism is a history replete with forces like the Freikorps, from Mussolini's Black Shirts, to Hitler's SA, to the Romanian Iron Guard. As fascist movements mature, these forces begin to forge undemocratic alliances with the regular military and police. At first the relationships may grow slowly, but toward the extreme end of an ultra-fascist state, the distinctions between paramilitary, police, and military lose almost all meaning entirely. As Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 

"Every large-scale shooting action of the Holocaust (more than thirty-three thousand Jews murdered outside Kyiv, more than twenty-eight thousand outside Riga, and on and on) involved the regular German police. All in all, regular policemen murdered more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen [otherwise known as the SS, or paramilitary death squads]. Many of them had no special preparation for this task. They found themselves in an unknown land, they had their orders, and they did not want to look weak. In the rare cases when they refused these order to murder Jews, policemen were not punished."

Of course, not all fascist movements go this far, but we must never forget that it is always a possibility. 

The United States finds itself unquestionably in a moment of extraordinary cultural and economic change. Anti-racist activism is becoming more and more pronounced in popular media, the Me Too movement and movements like it have demanded men acknowledge their abusive behaviors and grow up. The LBGTQ+ movement has won major victories in the past decade. The Great Recession of 2007-2009 left millions of people disillusioned with governments who chose to save investment banks instead of human lives. And we're witnessing levels of income inequality we haven't seen in our country since the Gilded Age of the early twentieth century. 

Are we a potential breeding ground for fascism? Absolutely. Are we seeing a rise in paramilitary activity that is increasingly coordinated with regular police and military forces? Yes.  

On the night of August 25, 2020, the third night of protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin after Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by Kenosha police, witnesses and reporters describe soldiers, police, and white vigilantes patrolling the area near Kenosha's Civic Center Park.

In an article entitled, "'That's the shooter': Witnesses describe the night Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire in Kenosha," by Gina Barton published in USA Today on August 31, Barton wrote that after police in riot gear had forced hundreds of protesters out of the park and onto the street, protesters found themselves blocked by "soldiers and cops" at one end of the road, and "white guys with big guns" at the other. The Chicago Tribune reported on September 8 that "numerous civilians armed with rifles...interjected themselves into the protests..." Moments later, a series of events began that ended with Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old who reportedly drove twenty miles to Kenosha to join other armed men confronting antiracist protests with an AR-15 rifle, having been charged with shooting three people, two of them fatally. 

According to Barton's article, videos later emerged that showed, "a law enforcement officer in an armored vehicle giving bottles of water to a group of armed men that included Rittenhouse. The officer thanks the men for their help, though they are clearly civilians in violation of the city's 8 p.m. curfew."

The officer reportedly tells the armed men, "We appreciate you guys. We really do."

Barton also reports that another video posted to Twitter (and no longer available) shows an unidentified man wearing a ballistic vest saying, "'You know what the cops told us today? They were like, "We're gonna push 'em down by you, 'cause you can deal with 'em and then we're gonna leave."'"

Barton notes that the "Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth has said that he did not deputize citizens and would never do so."

In the moments after Rittenhouse allegedly shot three people, he was also videoed walking toward the police carrying his AR-15 rifle as a crowd yelled at police that Rittenhouse had shot people. The police ignore him and walk by. 

In an article published on August 27 in The Guardian, former FBI Special Agent Michael German, "who has written extensively on the ways that US law enforcement has failed to respond to far-right domestic terror threats," is quoted as saying, "Far-right protestors are allowed to engage in violence and walk away while protestors are met with violent police actions... The most violent elements within these far-right militant groups believe that their conduct is sanctioned by the government. And therefore they're much more willing to come out and engage in acts of violence against protestors." German's work ultimately concluded that, "US law enforcement officials have been tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000, and hundreds of police officers have been caught posting racist and bigoted social media content."

In a video from 2018, Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth made some extraordinarily dangerous public remarks about people he sees as criminals: 

"We have to stop being politically correct, and I don't care what race, I don't care how old they are, if there's a threshold that they cross, these people have to be warehoused. No recreational time in the jails. We put them away. We put them away for the rest of their lives so that the rest of us can be better... In this country, in this community, in this state, we have to get to the point that we no longer will put up with the garbage people that fill our communities, that are cancer to our society... These people just need to flat out go away, and I'm waiting for our lawmakers to really not stand for really what we're living with... Maybe what we gotta do is build warehouses that, after this generation is gone, they've perished in these buildings, we can turn them into something else. Maybe malls, maybe Amazon will buy 'em as warehouses later, but at some point, we have to get rid of this group of people."

I don't know much else about Sheriff David Beth, but whether he thinks of himself as a fascist or not, his remarks are right in line with fascist rhetoric. Over time, and through lots and lots of usage, language like this can come to be seen as part of what counts as legitimate political speech. When that happens, it's a clear sign that the probability of a society committing genocide has increased.

What happened in Kenosha on the night of August 25 was a symptom of a much larger pattern of collaboration and coordination among various white paramilitary groups, regular military, and police officers.

An article in HuffPost by Christopher Mathias published August 30 cites the work of Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the center for the analysis on the Radical Right. According the Ross's work, "White vigilantes and far-right actors have shown up to oppose Black Lives Matter protests at least 497 times this year..." The article goes on to describe a number of disturbing incidents highlighting a degree of coordination and like-minded attitudes among police, vigilantes, and federal forces that should be deeply troubling to anyone concerned with living in a democracy. 

Unfortunately, we have to add to this evidence multiple reports of unidentified federal agents emerging from unidentified vans to apprehend protesters in cities like Portland, Oregon. This was reported in Mother Jones on July 17. An article describing a similar instance with unidentified law enforcement officers in Spokane, Washington was reported in an article originally published by HuffPost on September 4.

As I mentioned above, coordination of police, military, and paramilitary groups is typical of early fascist movements. However, a phenomenon that is also typical of fascism is a leader who positions himself (fascism is inherently patriarchal; I know of no female fascist leaders) as the savior of the nation, and who directs political violence through propaganda. 

It's well-known that Donald Trump ran as an anti-establishment candidate, claiming to be the only person who could solve America's problems, and famously claiming at the 2016 Republican National Convention, "I am your voice."

In On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder writes about Trump in lesson number six: "Be wary of paramilitaries." 

"As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of "USA," and then be forced to leave the rally."

Donald Trump continues to overtly encourage and direct violence and white vigilanteism. In response to antiracist protests against police brutality in Portland, Oregon, Trump referred to the city as "full of anarchists" who "hate our country," and to the situation in the city as "worse than Afghanistan," On behalf of the Trump's Department of Homeland Security, Acting Secretary Chad Wolf released a statement on July 16 saying,

"The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it."

If you know what fascist propaganda sounds like, you know that this is it. This is not simply an example of government lying. That would be much less worrisome. This is a politician using language with the intent to hack the listener's loyalties and emotions. It's using language not to communicate a sense of reality, but to motivate the listener to violence. The Republican National Convention was full of propagandistic language like this.

Trump's comments, and Wolf's comments made on behalf of Trump, appeal to the fascist idea that there is an innocent and brave nation under attack by "violent," "lawless," and hateful outsiders - i.e. the feeling of victimhood. Within this idea is the notion that there is an "us versus them" battle going on within our country, which puts listeners in a state of fear and also opens the possibility for them to go out and confront a foreign threat to all that is good. Put it like that, and the listener is offered the powerful possibility of participating in something deeply meaningful. 

The language invites a form of thinking that is not only black and white in the sense that it inspires an 'us versus them' mentality; in the US context, it's also black and white in the sense that it is dogwhistle racism (or plausibly deniable racism), attempting to goad the listener into literally imagining whiteness under attack by blackness. To Trump and Wolf, the protestors are not part of "our country," but people like Kyle Rittenhouse are. Other than asking you to go back and reread the last sentence, I don't think I otherwise have the language to emphasize enough just how dangerous this is. 

Although Trump didn't know Kyle Rittenhouse on the night of August 25, Rittenhouse was certainly among many of the targets of this type of divisive fascist rhetoric. Rittenhouse was reported by multiple media outlets to have promoted Blue Lives Matter in his social media accounts, and one video on Tik Tok appears to show him in the front row of a Trump rally.

For his part, Donald Trump continued to employ fascist rhetoric in defense of Rittenhouse to suggest that innocent people like the police and Rittenhouse are under attack. In an NPR article entitled, "Trump Defends Kenosha Shooting Suspect," Trump is quoted as saying, "He was trying to get away from them, I guess, it looks like... I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would have been killed." In other words, it's people like Kyle Rittenhouse who are in danger in this country; they're the victims.

Timothy Snyder, again, writing in On Tyranny: 

"When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come."

People who write about the move into autocratic states of government often compare it to boiling a frog. If you turn the heat up slowly enough, the frog doesn't notice anything's changed and remains in the pot until it dies. Similarly, the United States has shown a number of signs of slowly raising the temperature on democracy in the past few decades. We have certainly turned the heat up enough in recent years that any more of an increase might create changes in our system that, for many Americans, are currently unimaginable. 

There are plenty of people who can imagine autocracy in this country, though, and many of them are people who were forced to come here from autocratic regimes. In a piece in Medium published August 29 entitled, "We Don't Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying," Umair Haque writes,

"We survivors of authoritarianism have a terrible, terrible foreboding, because we are experiencing something we should never do: deja vu. Our parents fled from collapsing societies to America. And here, now, in a grim and eerie repeat of history, we see the scenes of our childhoods played out all over again. Only now, in the land that we came to. We see the stories our parents recounted to us happening before our eyes, only this time, in the place they brought us to, to escape from all those horrors, abuses, and depredations."

Nothing is inevitable. There is so much we can do, and there are so many reasons for hope. We can continue to educate ourselves, becoming more aware of what to look for and notice in our politics. This awareness can help us know what to speak back to and how. We can talk to our neighbors more often, make eye contact with strangers and smile. Invest in and pay attention to local media. Be careful not to share information online that you're not able to double check in some way yourself. Donate to charities doing good work.

In working to create the good we want to see in the world, it's helpful to understand the situation we're confronting. We are in a pivotal moment in history. There is a very real and very dangerous threat to our possibility for carrying forward a system of government that not only makes human rights possible, but greatly increases our chances of saving our planet. It's hard to imagine a more important time to practice offering our best gifts and talents to the world.