From wikipedia.org / © Rob Bogaerts
A follow-on from my previous post…
Elon Musk’s stiff-armed salutes at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 24th – at least, unlike Dr Strangelove, he didn’t address Trump as “Mein Führer!” – inspired me to read again Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.
This begins with Eco reminiscing: “In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject ‘Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?’ My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.” It goes on to describe Eco’s hometown being taken over in 1945 first by the partisans and then by American soldiers (all of whom were African-Americans) and then muses on the nature of Italian fascism, as helmed by Mussolini, and of fascism generally. It ends with Eco identifying 14 key traits that he believes appear in fascist movements and quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
Well, Roosevelt’s words seem sadly ironic now. Under Trump, American democracy appears to be moving backwards as a dying force, and the only citizens whose lot he’s seeking day and night to better are rich, white, straight, male ones. But what about those 14 traits of fascism? How many of them are detectible in Trump’s America at the moment?
Spoilers… A lot.
The American far-right’s modus operandi of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ was a concept originally attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, one of the new Trump-grovellers-in-chief, and is something Trump’s been doing ever since his inauguration three weeks ago: ‘Tariffs!’ / ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ / ‘Invade Greenland!’ / ‘Invade Panama!’ / ‘Make Canada the 51st state!’ / ‘Leave the WHO!’ / ‘Leave the Paris agreement!’ / ‘More tariffs!’ / ‘Abolish DEI!’ / ‘Abolish USAID!’ / ‘Abolish trans-people!’ / ‘Abolish Gaza and turn it into the new Riviera!’ / etc. This obviously corresponds to Eco’s fascist trait number three: “the cult of action for action for action’s sake… Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection.”
Also Trump down to a ‘T’ is trait number four: ‘disagreement is treason’. So too is number five: ‘fear of difference’. I can’t see life in America over the next four years being much fun if you’re different from one of those aforementioned rich, white, straight males. And absolutely so too is number six: “appeal to a frustrated middle class… a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
Number seven is: ‘obsession with a plot’. Yup, Trump has never shut up about the ‘deep state’, whatever that is, being out to get him and he’s happily courted all those delusional QAnon believers and other conspiracy fantasists. Number eight is the belief that one’s ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’? Well, listen to Trump’s speeches and you’ll hear him ranting simultaneously about how shit the US has become in the face of international competition and how it’s still somehow the greatest country on earth.
© Lumen Press
Number nine, the notion that ‘pacifism is trafficking with the enemy… life is permanent warfare’? Well, see what I wrote in my previous post, about how “when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like there’s a crisis, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc. That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives. To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.”
Numbers ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen, which are respectively, ‘contempt for the weak,’ ‘everyone is educated to become a hero’ (heroism is especially easy when your population has ready access to AR-15s), ‘machismo’ (note Trump’s conviction in a civil court in 2023 for sexual abuse) and ‘selective populism’? Tick, tick, tick and tick.
I don’t think Trump’s smart enough to have entertained thoughts about number fourteen, ‘newspeak’, wherein, for example, “Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning”. In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), this was the project that Winston Smith’s colleague Syme was working on at the Ministry of Truth, whittling down the size of dictionaries so that people has less vocabulary to articulate such abstract concepts as free will and self-expression. Mind you, the many social-media platforms now doing Trump’s bidding are infested with so much short, simplistic, soundbite messaging – ranting, basically – that’s there’s little room for critical reasoning in them.
I haven’t mentioned numbers one and two yet, which are the ‘cult of tradition’ and ‘rejection of modernism’, wherein fascists deny the “advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message” and the “Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.” But obviously, that’s written large across Trump and his operation, from his rejection of what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are warning us about, to his efforts to put the anti-vaxxer grifter Robert F. Kennedy in charge of America’s public health, to his lackey Musk getting rid of fact-checking on X and lackey Zuckerberg doing the same on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to the idea that you can turn any untruth into a truth by repeating it often and loudly and brazenly enough: Haitian immigrants are eating pets, vaccines cause autism, DEI policies caused a mid-air collision, USAID supplied condoms to Hamas and so on, and so forth.
And that brings me to another piece of writing I’ve encountered recently. It’s a passage from the book The Demon-Haunted World (1995) by the late, great American astrophysicist and writer Carl Sagan, which I’ve seen quoted on several people’s social-media pages. Sagan’s mid-1990s fears about a near-future America were, shall we say, troublingly prescient.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second soundbites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Awesome technological powers in the hands of a very few… Public representatives unable to grasp the issues… Critical faculties in decline… Dumbing down… Soundbites… Pseudoscience… Superstition… Yes, Carl, you nailed it. I’m glad, though, that you (and Umberto Eco) aren’t around to witness the ultimate, apocalyptic celebration of ignorance that’s erupted with the advent of Trump Mark II.
© Random House
