If your anti-fascism persists between election seasons, you could be at risk of serious political issues such as blacklisting and internment; be sure to consult your nearest White evangelical church.
Great piece. I shouldn't get so pissed off about it as I do, since there are so many worse things in the world. But it still gets my goat that the conservative pundits like Nichols who eventually acknowledge obvious truths, do so only by way of laughable verbal gymnastics that still somehow claim their superior wisdom. They will do anything to avoid saying, "golly, turns out the left was right about this." Not on Iraq. Not on climate change. Not on the MAGA dumpster fire that has the nation in flames.
Even in 2023 you will still find pundits who, despite owning up to the fact that Trump is a dangerous disaster, *still* trot out the risible rhetoric about how the rough treatment of Romney as a presidential candidate is the reason Republicans embraced Trump's thuggishness. Or who complain about the way the media and the left never gave Trump a fair chance, and just opposed him so reflexively that he had no motivation to follow norms and laws.
That bullshit shows they still share the MAGA conviction (or projection) that people are the left are so degenerate that they can't possible be right about anything. In other words, at bottom they are just as reactionary as the most thoughtless Carlson fan or Bannonite.
There is a reason millions of us peacefully demonstrated right after Trump was elected (and would *not* have similarly demonstrated if Romney had won in 2008). We listened to Trump during his campaign and we knew very well that this man would put us and our loved ones at risk of very serious harm.
"...eventually acknowledge obvious truths, do so only by way of laughable verbal gymnastics that still somehow claim their superior wisdom...."
Atrios at Eschaton has covered this phenomenon before. The line of the establishment pundits is always, "sure, I admit that you were right and I was wrong. But you smelly hippies were right for all of the wrong reasons, whereas we sane and sober men of reason were wrong for all of the right reasons."
I dread the day Nichols discovers climate change. And blames premature scientists and other alarmists for crying wolf for decades before Nichols got caught in a flood and applied his immense intellect to the issue...
I skimmed Nichols's book for something I thought I was going to write and it sucked so much worse than I had even imagined. The sentence that made me flip from irritation to murderous rage was this one: "Experienced law enforcement officers often have an instinct for trouble that their younger colleagues miss, an intuition they can explain only as a sense that something ‘isn’t right.’”
I'm sure that they do have such an intuition, and I am sure that it suffers from a very high false-positive rate.
Or at least, other people suffer from their very high false-positive rate -- they themselves probably suffer no ill consequences from their own over-reactions and escalations.
I mean really: what is the point in talking about anyone's "intuitions" unless you go on to quantify how reliable they are? I have "intuitions" about whether the market will go up or down, and I still cannot afford to retire.
Exactly. There's been some research on this with cops already (which Nichols, that fan of expertise, conveniently ignores); someone needs to do the same thing with prosecutors and their "hunches"
It would not be too hard to draw a straight line from the premise of that article to the Trumpian/Fascist mindset we are dealing with today.
I'm embarrassed to admit I used to subscribe to the Atlantic, but too many of their articles over the last few years became veiled apologies for the behavior of technocrats and fascists, and how actually, if you think about it, the real problem is the "woke-left." Tom Nichols sits snugly in their overall editorial decision making.
Yeah. It's often hard for me to believe the Atlantic used to publish Ta-Nehisi regularly - not just the perspective but the level of rigor is so different
I've been calling Trump a fascist since the Central Park 5 days. He hasn't changed, but faced with the a real possibility that he will be President again, the mainstream media is finally willing to admit that he might actually be dangerous. Of course "journalistic ethics" will require them to dutifully remind us hysterical lefties that some people thought FDR was a dictator and Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus.
I'm willing to eat my crow: I was skeptical of the fascism thesis, though mostly because I thought of fascism as a much more historically contingent thing. Your writing got me more open to the idea before November 2019-January 2020 convinced me I had been wrong.
It is not an analogous situation, but the way you paint Nichols in this piece heavily reminded me of one of the interlocutors in this cartoon: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
Thanks for this. I read Nichols piece and wondered, what's this guys problem? Our problem is that the lesson of the rise of actually existing fascism in history is that we're required as a matter of strategy to say, "welcome to the big tent." But it's healing to grumble a bit.
For me, the smoking gun on the GOP as a whole was elder statesman Newt Gingrich saying 'we are in a culture war' in 2016, and I still can't believe people ignored that.
As to his argument, it's the same 'Joe Biden is responsible for college kids saying stupid shit while right-wing mass murderers who right manifestos were just mentally ill lone wolves' shit-eating grin as always. They can frame it; they get the platform. Don't make Daddy mad with your 'chosen family' heresy (ironically enough, for people who think Jonny McGovern of Nazareth lives among us fighting Satan).
"One of the books sold by Brave Books is “Elephants Are Not Birds” by Ashley St. Clair. The book, which sells for $22.99, follows an elephant named Kevin “as he learns that even though he can sing, he is not a bird.” The villain of the story, a “vulture named Culture,” “gives [the] elephant a beak and a set of fake wings and watches as he plummets out of a tree.” Culture is a recurring character in the books set on Freedom Island who, according to Politico, “tries to poison innocent animals with progressive ideas.” In an interview with the New York Post, St. Clair described the book as “an unapologetic rebuke of transgender acceptance and the growing number of young people identifying as trans.”
Can’t be a premature anti-fascist til it’s clear to center-lib pundits and journalists that democracy is in fact imperiled. Which is now, more or less.
A related question, though, is just how democratic the nation actually has been the last couple of decades during which neither party has had much interest in serving the majority of the nation’s people. The DNC has been far more interested in serving the same monied special interests who own the GOP. An echo, not a choice to paraphrase Goldwater.
That said, step one has to be voting the GOP out of power. (Yes, I know, easier said than done but there’s no practical alternative.)
Ultimately, it does come down to public opinion, in the sense of people actually disrupting the 'disruptors' and the obvious not-good guys.
The technological revolution we are living through hasn't shown up in extreme economic changes; it largely resulted in Dems taking some wins on social issues while tyrants got iPhones to build their empires. We're living through the backlash to that social progress from the voters whose leaders weren't allowed to sexually harass or say the N word anymore.
The question is whether all our social networking is going to actually lead to people power and socioeconomic revolution, which is right there for the taking and every competent and intelligent Dem knows it, or if we're living in various Orwell/Vonnegut/take your pick novels while climate wars start in impoverished areas in the rest of the world.
I think it's a little simpler than that, even if it's a bit vanguardist.
The fascistic network sucks compared to ours in terms of things like common decency and empathy. They are 'malignant' and the eventual outcome is decay and hollowing out to the point of collapse. The question is whether they will succeed in a hostile takeover (y i k e s) of the country first and bring the reputation of liberal democracy not to mention the rest of this country's inhabitants down with them.
They are going to continue to look like a clown show if you pay attention. And I do trust the institutional Dems to portray them as such. The Univision thing is terrifying but it's not the end-all and be-all of the federal races.
Is Trump going to actually end up in jail before the election? If so, the Republican party is going to shit bricks and Dems will probably reclaim both houses amidst bursts of Republican terrorist violence.
And it's tough for me to be skeptical about what the Dems can accomplish federally given that Joe Biden actually got us kinda sorta halfway towards climate change being dealt with as an issue in his first term. I fucking loathe the idea of President Buttigieg, but I think a large number of other influential Dems are very on board with dealing with climate change and health care and gun control and and and, even if I'm queasy about what SCOTUS will do about it.
BUT the most important thing for the common people to do is actually getting involved in either activist organizations or Dem organizations. It's not going to change the way the powers that be operate, but it's what can be done to influence outcomes for the better. Let's try to keep our democracy?
Congratulations! You too have been reclassified as a premature anti-fascist.
As the nephew (by marriage) of a certified premature anti-fascist, Spanish Civil War vintage, I approve of this message.
If your anti-fascism persists between election seasons, you could be at risk of serious political issues such as blacklisting and internment; be sure to consult your nearest White evangelical church.
"....you could be at risk of serious political issues...."
Right, but it may be worth the risk if it treats your electile dysfunction.
Great piece. I shouldn't get so pissed off about it as I do, since there are so many worse things in the world. But it still gets my goat that the conservative pundits like Nichols who eventually acknowledge obvious truths, do so only by way of laughable verbal gymnastics that still somehow claim their superior wisdom. They will do anything to avoid saying, "golly, turns out the left was right about this." Not on Iraq. Not on climate change. Not on the MAGA dumpster fire that has the nation in flames.
Even in 2023 you will still find pundits who, despite owning up to the fact that Trump is a dangerous disaster, *still* trot out the risible rhetoric about how the rough treatment of Romney as a presidential candidate is the reason Republicans embraced Trump's thuggishness. Or who complain about the way the media and the left never gave Trump a fair chance, and just opposed him so reflexively that he had no motivation to follow norms and laws.
That bullshit shows they still share the MAGA conviction (or projection) that people are the left are so degenerate that they can't possible be right about anything. In other words, at bottom they are just as reactionary as the most thoughtless Carlson fan or Bannonite.
There is a reason millions of us peacefully demonstrated right after Trump was elected (and would *not* have similarly demonstrated if Romney had won in 2008). We listened to Trump during his campaign and we knew very well that this man would put us and our loved ones at risk of very serious harm.
"...eventually acknowledge obvious truths, do so only by way of laughable verbal gymnastics that still somehow claim their superior wisdom...."
Atrios at Eschaton has covered this phenomenon before. The line of the establishment pundits is always, "sure, I admit that you were right and I was wrong. But you smelly hippies were right for all of the wrong reasons, whereas we sane and sober men of reason were wrong for all of the right reasons."
I dread the day Nichols discovers climate change. And blames premature scientists and other alarmists for crying wolf for decades before Nichols got caught in a flood and applied his immense intellect to the issue...
I skimmed Nichols's book for something I thought I was going to write and it sucked so much worse than I had even imagined. The sentence that made me flip from irritation to murderous rage was this one: "Experienced law enforcement officers often have an instinct for trouble that their younger colleagues miss, an intuition they can explain only as a sense that something ‘isn’t right.’”
I'm sure that they do have such an intuition, and I am sure that it suffers from a very high false-positive rate.
Or at least, other people suffer from their very high false-positive rate -- they themselves probably suffer no ill consequences from their own over-reactions and escalations.
I mean really: what is the point in talking about anyone's "intuitions" unless you go on to quantify how reliable they are? I have "intuitions" about whether the market will go up or down, and I still cannot afford to retire.
Exactly. There's been some research on this with cops already (which Nichols, that fan of expertise, conveniently ignores); someone needs to do the same thing with prosecutors and their "hunches"
Don't forget The Atlantic published this great piece on policing back in the early 80's: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/
It would not be too hard to draw a straight line from the premise of that article to the Trumpian/Fascist mindset we are dealing with today.
I'm embarrassed to admit I used to subscribe to the Atlantic, but too many of their articles over the last few years became veiled apologies for the behavior of technocrats and fascists, and how actually, if you think about it, the real problem is the "woke-left." Tom Nichols sits snugly in their overall editorial decision making.
Whenever I feel the temptation to subscribe to the Atlantic something like this pops up and I am reminded why I don't. It's the same with the FTFNYT.
Yeah. It's often hard for me to believe the Atlantic used to publish Ta-Nehisi regularly - not just the perspective but the level of rigor is so different
Wow. Just wow. What a tool.
I've been calling Trump a fascist since the Central Park 5 days. He hasn't changed, but faced with the a real possibility that he will be President again, the mainstream media is finally willing to admit that he might actually be dangerous. Of course "journalistic ethics" will require them to dutifully remind us hysterical lefties that some people thought FDR was a dictator and Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus.
I'm willing to eat my crow: I was skeptical of the fascism thesis, though mostly because I thought of fascism as a much more historically contingent thing. Your writing got me more open to the idea before November 2019-January 2020 convinced me I had been wrong.
It is not an analogous situation, but the way you paint Nichols in this piece heavily reminded me of one of the interlocutors in this cartoon: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
Thanks for this. I read Nichols piece and wondered, what's this guys problem? Our problem is that the lesson of the rise of actually existing fascism in history is that we're required as a matter of strategy to say, "welcome to the big tent." But it's healing to grumble a bit.
For me, the smoking gun on the GOP as a whole was elder statesman Newt Gingrich saying 'we are in a culture war' in 2016, and I still can't believe people ignored that.
As to his argument, it's the same 'Joe Biden is responsible for college kids saying stupid shit while right-wing mass murderers who right manifestos were just mentally ill lone wolves' shit-eating grin as always. They can frame it; they get the platform. Don't make Daddy mad with your 'chosen family' heresy (ironically enough, for people who think Jonny McGovern of Nazareth lives among us fighting Satan).
Please enjoy the best parody I've seen about calling out fascism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgZtdmyKlI
Remember, whenever you hear the phrase "culture war," for us it's about the culture, for them it's about the war.
Gawd, you're not kidding.
"One of the books sold by Brave Books is “Elephants Are Not Birds” by Ashley St. Clair. The book, which sells for $22.99, follows an elephant named Kevin “as he learns that even though he can sing, he is not a bird.” The villain of the story, a “vulture named Culture,” “gives [the] elephant a beak and a set of fake wings and watches as he plummets out of a tree.” Culture is a recurring character in the books set on Freedom Island who, according to Politico, “tries to poison innocent animals with progressive ideas.” In an interview with the New York Post, St. Clair described the book as “an unapologetic rebuke of transgender acceptance and the growing number of young people identifying as trans.”
https://digbysblog.net/2023/11/30/every-accusation-is-a-confession/
Can’t be a premature anti-fascist til it’s clear to center-lib pundits and journalists that democracy is in fact imperiled. Which is now, more or less.
A related question, though, is just how democratic the nation actually has been the last couple of decades during which neither party has had much interest in serving the majority of the nation’s people. The DNC has been far more interested in serving the same monied special interests who own the GOP. An echo, not a choice to paraphrase Goldwater.
That said, step one has to be voting the GOP out of power. (Yes, I know, easier said than done but there’s no practical alternative.)
Ultimately, it does come down to public opinion, in the sense of people actually disrupting the 'disruptors' and the obvious not-good guys.
The technological revolution we are living through hasn't shown up in extreme economic changes; it largely resulted in Dems taking some wins on social issues while tyrants got iPhones to build their empires. We're living through the backlash to that social progress from the voters whose leaders weren't allowed to sexually harass or say the N word anymore.
The question is whether all our social networking is going to actually lead to people power and socioeconomic revolution, which is right there for the taking and every competent and intelligent Dem knows it, or if we're living in various Orwell/Vonnegut/take your pick novels while climate wars start in impoverished areas in the rest of the world.
Social media haven’t done the job. The mass media plays down what we’re facing as much as possible.
Those are two huge headwinds in trying to to get voters adequately informed IYKWIM.
I think it's a little simpler than that, even if it's a bit vanguardist.
The fascistic network sucks compared to ours in terms of things like common decency and empathy. They are 'malignant' and the eventual outcome is decay and hollowing out to the point of collapse. The question is whether they will succeed in a hostile takeover (y i k e s) of the country first and bring the reputation of liberal democracy not to mention the rest of this country's inhabitants down with them.
They are going to continue to look like a clown show if you pay attention. And I do trust the institutional Dems to portray them as such. The Univision thing is terrifying but it's not the end-all and be-all of the federal races.
Is Trump going to actually end up in jail before the election? If so, the Republican party is going to shit bricks and Dems will probably reclaim both houses amidst bursts of Republican terrorist violence.
And it's tough for me to be skeptical about what the Dems can accomplish federally given that Joe Biden actually got us kinda sorta halfway towards climate change being dealt with as an issue in his first term. I fucking loathe the idea of President Buttigieg, but I think a large number of other influential Dems are very on board with dealing with climate change and health care and gun control and and and, even if I'm queasy about what SCOTUS will do about it.
BUT the most important thing for the common people to do is actually getting involved in either activist organizations or Dem organizations. It's not going to change the way the powers that be operate, but it's what can be done to influence outcomes for the better. Let's try to keep our democracy?
Just nauseating how many liberals are enamored by that putrid turd.
God damn, that was some smoking great riffs on Tom Nichols. Well said all around!
unpopular front indeed!
Yeah, buggering is the one true weakness of white moderates/savvy conservatives. They prefer to leave their heads up their asses.