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A Brief Note about Fascism, Antifa, and President Trump
There’s a little checklist making the rounds on social media and purporting to list “characteristics of fascists.” As lists go it isn’t a very good one, in that it oddly omits the sine qua non, the single essential aspect, of fascism, which is the blunt use of government authority to completely control the economy and the people.
That, after all, is what fascism is, so it seems worth mentioning.
It omits that important detail because its purpose is to sell the idea that President Trump is a fascist. And that’s a problem, because the current administration isn’t authoritarian and doesn’t seek to control the economy and the people.
On the contrary, the Trump administration is famous — or infamous, if you’re on the left — for deregulation, for trying to remove controls imposed by government on the economy and the citizen. (Folks on the left really don’t like deregulation.)
The Trump administration is also famous — or infamous, as we’re about to witness again — for appointing judges who are known to support Constitutional ideas about limited and restrained government. (And folks on the left really don’t like judges who support Constitutional ideas about limited and restrained government.)
These are exactly the opposite of the things fascists do.
So this leaves our friends on the left with a couple of problems. First, they want to call the President a fascist, even though he doesn’t act like one. Secondly, they’d like to defend Antifa, who actually do act like fascists, because Antifa shares their goals and ambitions.
Antifa and folks on the left have something in common: they both want more government authority over the economy and our day-to-day lives. They both want a vastly larger government with vastly more regulatory authority. Antifa folks call it communism; our friends on the left call it the Green New Deal and a bunch of other happy names for Big Big Government. What they have in common is that they want more regulation, more control of the economy, more restrictions. (“For our own good, of course.” “Yes, of course.”)
What a conundrum! What does a Man of The Left do, when the people acting like authoritarian goons are actually on his own side and share his vision of Endless Government Organized on Eco-Friendly Scientific Socialist Principles?
Relax, Man Of The Left! You have a powerful ally in the press.
Since most people don’t know anything about Antifa, and since most of our mainstream media is effectively a branch of the Democratic Party and so not interested in talking about Antifa except in happy, fanciful terms, most people don’t know that the Antifa clowns are violent, ignorant, intolerant, hard-left goons who like to beat people up for expressing the wrong ideas. That leaves our friends on the left free to talk up Antifa as the good guys, and to sell us a story that it’s “the police” and “white supremacists” who are causing all the violence, looting, arson, murder, etc., that’s currently afflicting our cities.
Antifa, of course, was wearing masks long before the coronavirus hit; masks were their trademark, that and beating people up. Antifa thinks it’s okay to intimidate and hurt people who express ideas Antifa doesn’t like. That’s what Antifa does. It’s also what fascists do.
That’s what authoritarianism looks like.
What fascism and authoritarianism don’t look like is deregulation, reducing the federal government’s control of local schools, lowering taxes, appointing judges who want to limit government authority, and supporting free speech and free markets.
This is a very inconvenient truth, if you’re a liberal fascist.
Published in Elections
Some people out there seem to be using it as an instruction manual.
About time someone expressed this truth so clearly.
I disagree. I think the #1 key factor for a fascist state is the supremacy of the executive branch of government. In a fascist state, the executive has unfettered power to overrule the legislative and judicial branches. The whole idea of fascism is to emulate Imperial Rome.
The economic system implemented by a state is of secondary concern to the definition of fascism, IMHO. This was, in fact, a Stalinist redefinition of fascism, employed to explain why Hitler and Mussolini weren’t “real” socialists.
Miss Theocracy, I think you’re picking nits.
I said the essential aspect of fascism is the blunt use of government authority to completely control the country. You say it’s the unchecked authority of the executive branch. I don’t care which branch of government has unlimited power; it’s the unlimited power that’s the essential aspect of a fascist state.
It isn’t a fascist state if the people are free to go about their business unrestrained by their government.
Disagree.
People can theoretically be free in a fascist state if the executive branch is extremely vigilant about restraining itself. It’s simply that the incentives make it massively unlikely for the executive branch to actually do so. Consider the lives of ordinary Romans during the rule of the vanishingly few “good” emperors, or the lives of ordinary people living under the rule of the few “good” European monarchs. There are moments in history where people have enjoyed something that was at least akin to freedom under the rule of leaders whose power was constitutionally unlimited. It’s simply that the examples are so vanishingly rare that such a constitution shouldn’t be considered as preferable by anybody with an iota of concern for individual liberty.
By contrast, in a socialist/communist state the people literally cannot be free, because individual freedom is anathema to the system by definition. (And, of course, a state can be both fascist and socialist/communist, but it’s not necessarily so.)
Meanwhile, a constitution in which the judiciary is supreme is usually called a kritarchy or kritocracy. A constitution where the legislature is supreme is usually called parliamentarism. And, of course, American-style Republicanism is a constitution whereby no branch of government is supreme because every branch is subject to veto by the other branches and/or by the states.
Any of these constitutions can theoretically result in oppression/socialism/totalitarianism, but that in and of itself does not make them fascist by definition.
This is a great post.
That seems a rather fanciful scenario, but let’s run with it.
What if we’re equally fanciful here, and imagine that the people, every last single one of them, embrace the ideals of socialism/communism and pursue them voluntarily and with great enthusiasm?
Wouldn’t that mean that people living in socialist/communist states can also be free, given your reasoning?
That’s interesting. I’ve heard parliamentarism used as a reasoning against multiple party systems. But your definition puts those two concepts as exclusive of one another, not definitional.
I would agree that they are exclusive of one another, not definitional. Prior to the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights, the UK government was parliamentarist since Westminster technically had the power to overrule the judiciary and to depose the Crown. At the same time, the USSR was (and China is) also nominally parliamentarist. Even Stalin was nominally subject to the Supreme Soviet according to the Constitution of the USSR (though not, of course, in practice).
I think that’s more of a philosophical question than a political one. If one voluntarily subscribes to any code of conduct that limits one’s freedom of action, can one truly be considered free?
It’s not fanciful if it actually happened.
Isn’t this what Christianity teaches?
And I’d say “yes”.
Don’t we all subscribe to codes of conduct that limit our freedom of action? Are you suggesting that no one can truly be considered free?
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2o8bhc
Started LOLing out loud at North Malden. ;)
That episode had other North Malden segments that weren’t included with the excerpt about Sartre etc.
I remember. I’ve seen them all, and memorized most of them. Great stuff.
Where did you see them? In the more recent airings, PBS was showing edited/modified versions that you wouldn’t notice unless you were – as I am – quite familiar with them. For example, they had the “old ladies” in The Penguin On The TV sketch edited to be half-singing “I dream of Genie” rather than “Girl from Ipanema.” (And probably in the Sartre sketch too, but I don’t remember for sure, offhand.) The usual idiocy about music royalties or something, I suppose.
And when I got the DVD box set a while back, I found that those were the edited/modified versions too.
Fortunately I was able to record them all in their original glory from IFC, in the days before IFC started running commercials DURING shows and movies, not just in between. The Monty Python episodes were not laid out for commercial breaks.
Another favorite:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hwqnq
And perhaps the best one ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRxjqOcvxoE