More Shadi Business

He's At It Again, Folks!

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed I’ve been in a bit of bad temper over the past few days and getting into fights with people. (I’m on a little break now.) Among them, was our old friend Shadi Hamid, of the Brookings Institution and The Atlantic No-longer-monthly. You might recall I got into scrap with Hamid a few months ago over the whole “semi-fascism” debate. After being accused of mere rudeness, I replied at some considerable length to Hamid’s arguments—twice. He did not really respond.

As I said at the time, that’s fair, no one has to really put up with invective. He’s totally within his rights to not engage with me. But he made some snipes at me, to wit that it was somehow unseemly or even a bit cracked of me to respond at such length to his work and that I was not familiar with his entire corpus, so therefore any specific rebuttal on my part was “taking his work out of context.” In the first case, he may be correct: It may indeed be a sign of derangement to make such a sustained commentary on his writing, but that hardly speaks favorably of it. Also, if that’s true, only a madman could be expected to read everything he’s written. Well, Shadi, I’m not that crazy. But more seriously, that’s not at all a fair stipulation: When you make a specific argument and it’s refuted, you can’t just say, “Well, if you read my book, you’d understand this better.” That’s an evasion. I would also like to point out that Hamid has evidently not read anything I’ve written on the subject besides my tweets. But, of course, I am not at the Brookings Institution and he is.

But to the point now—Shadi Hamid recently was on Morning Joe arguing with Mehdi Hasan, again about the whole fascism debate. Hamid tweeted out the video, touting his appearance:

Shadi Hamid @shadihamid

I asked @mehdirhasan whether he would accept the election results if Trump or someone like him wins fair and square in 2024. A spirited back-and-forth ensued. Watch the exchange on @Morning_Joe:

Then he followed up with a thread of tweets to supplement his argument. These points I felt were particularly weak and my quote tweets of them caused another little spat with Hamid, where he said I did not engage “substantively.” Well, if you want substance, I’ll give you the substance—again.

This subset of arguments I found to be particularly weak and irritating. First of all, this business of banning the GOP. This line of attack is meant to create a Zugzwang where either his interlocutor must admit a) the Republicans are fascists and therefore must be banned, showing them to be the real authoritarians, or b) well they shouldn’t be banned and therefore aren’t really fascists. Nice try, but ultimately not as clever as he thinks it is. The fact of the matter is in the United States it is neither legal nor politically possible to ban a political party. This hypothetical is not related in any way to real practical possibilities of the situation and therefore not really worth considering. The number of countries that ban extreme right parties is actually quite small, and they have generally done this because of their history with fascism not because of an “imminent fascist threat.”

The only scenario that I can think of that sounds like what Hamid is proposing was the banning of the (semi-fascist) anti-parliamentary leagues by the Popular Front in France after their attack on the Palais Bourbon. They did not ban political parties per se, but what were basically paramilitary formations. This would be the equivalent to banning the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, not the G.O.P. Like those organizations, there was quite a bit of sympathy and contact between the groups outside the parliament and some right wing members of the house. After the ban, one of the leagues, Croix de Feu, changed itself into a conventional political party and had considerable electoral success. This was kind of an ambiguous success of “normalization” for French democracy: on the one hand, they banned these violent groups and reintegrated their energies back into a democratic process, on the other hand, it, well, reintegrated their energies back into the democratic process. The PSF, as it became known, maintained the use of provocative street tactics, arguably remaining semi-fascist. It did not, however, successfully overthrow French democracy. Hitler was needed for that.

In the United States, I doubt we could constitutionally even put a total ban on groups that openly engage in violence. We can however charge their leaders with crimes including sedition and, yes, I support that effort at this point, even when it brings up thorny issues of the right to free association. The point here is to try to limit the temptation of Trump and the G.O.P. to resort to using these groups and to saddle them with the baggage of trying to employ them. In the interest of “turning down the temperature,” we should not just pretend that the Republican party has somehow reverted to being a normal political party in a competitive two-party system. They have not.

But it’s not my intention to use “fascism “ or “semi-fascism” as a club to beat the G.O.P. with. In fact, I’m not sure how useful it is anymore as an insult. Especially, as Hamid makes clear, because no one really remembers or knows what fascism is anymore. It’s like we’re living in an Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue-world where we know these terms but have lost their meaning. Part of being a “serious intellectual” in this world is to reflexively tut-tut when people call things fascist: “That’s what pseudo-intellectuals do, we smart folks know of course it can’t be that.” But they are the ones who are just going on reflex, that are not really thinking, and just relying on things being the same as they’ve always been. Most people has a very cartoonish and caricatured notion about fascism and thinks of it as an abstract bogey rather than a live political possibility. The reason I think fascism is an important context is that it quite literally resembles what we are experiencing, and not in the Hollywood movie Nazi way, in the actual history-of-fascism way.

Once again, let me summarize the political situation and you can see what it sounds like:

Trumpism at its core is a movement fixated on restoring national greatness through the charismatic leadership of a single providential individual who “alone can fix it.” Trump’s campaign began with an assault on the presence of unclean ethnic minorities. The movement is obsessed with national decline and attacking the internal enemies, who it blames for the parlous condition of the country. Although more loosely organized and weaker than those of the classical Fascisms, MAGA also has paramilitary formations that have tried to carry out this project to the point of attempting the overthrow an elected government. He has openly menaced his opponents with the existence of this groups. From the very beginning of his political ascent, he attracted the interest and enthusiasm of the extreme right: he was the kind of thing they’d been looking for for a long time. Perhaps now a disappointment, perhaps now a failure, but certainly a step in the right direction as far as they were concerned and one they have kept faith so far.

From its very start in Birtherism, Trump’s political appeal has been centered on the denigration of the citizenship of his opponents. This culminated in his threat to unilaterally set aside the Fourteenth Amendment. The stolen election myth is also essentially an attack on the citizenship rights of those who oppose Trump, treating their votes as intrinsically fraudulent.

One does not even need to make an argument by historical analogy. There is also a clear historical genealogy. Many of the militia groups that were involved in January 6th can be traced back to the organizing efforts of actual American fascists and to the successor organizations of the Klan, the Silvershirts, and Posse Comitatus. The MAGA Republicans openly embrace the label “America First”, which was, quite literally, a semi-fascist movement, it had a bunch of fascists in it. What Trump has accomplished was the long-hoped-for mainstreaming of their type of politics and they’ve thrown themselves behind him.

To the issue of why it’s important to call it fascism or semi-fascism: The point is not to labeling as such, rather the point is to study these events so as to expand the capacity of one’s imagination so it can deal with the actual potentials of the situation. In other words, so one can form a proper judgment. As I’ve pointed out again and again, even the crudest version of the fascism thesis foresaw something like January 6th happening, some violent attempt on the democracy. The critics of the thesis said it was inconceivable and absurd to imagine such a thing. They were wrong. Like many people in the past few years, their imaginations failed. This is why I believe using fascism as one of a number of historical touchstones does not contribute to the deformation of political judgment of Trumpism, but rather its improvement: The notion that there is something fascist about the Trump phenomenon seems at this point to be the more robust theory of the case.

That does not mean we are destined to end up in a totalitarian nightmare. On the contrary, the actual study of the history of fascism tells how contingent and complex the actual seizure of power of these movements were. There were many “failed fascisms” in Europe that are just as essential to study as the big ones. But it’s informative, for example, to learn how liberals and conservatives in Italy attempted to “normalize” Mussolini, believing they could constructively integrate fascism into the constitutional order and separate it from its most violent side. Suffice it to say, that plan did not work, but it also actually did at some points weaken Mussolini’s support among his most radical followers. If you have the cartoon version of fascism in your head, you think “Oh, the leader just commands and his followers obey blindly.” That’s not how these things actually happened. These were complicated political coalitions that hung together through canny and lucky maneuvering. Learning more about that is going to improve your thinking about politics no matter what happens to be going on in the present.

In one respect at least Hamid is correct. It is actually a big problem for American democracy that there is something resembling a fascist movement afoot in the United States. It is difficult to reconcile political rights with a group that takes advantage of them but also wants to undermine them. It’s again worth pointing out that the two big classical fascisms got into power through perfectly legal constitutional moves. It’s quite conceivable that Trump wins “fair and square,” but it’s also quite conceivable that he makes efforts to cook future elections in his favor or attempts to not leave office, BECAUSE HE’S DONE THAT ALREADY. I don’t quite know how to solve these problems either. But the solution is not to say, “Come now, don’t be silly, not possible.” It is possible. That’s the point: Without catastrophizing, without panicking, we need to cultivate a broader sense of the possible. Especially when it’s right in front of our face.