Performing Punditry, Part 2
Sorry!—Can't Let It Go.
I am sorry to keep harping on this, but I have a few more points to make in my spat with Shadi Hamid. First of all, the fact of the matter is that I was terribly rude to Hamid on Twitter and it’s totally fair for him to not want to engage with me: no one has to put up with people who aren’t respectful. But rather than just say, “Look, this person is just not someone I’m gonna deal with, end of story,” Hamid has continued to make rather sore snipes at me, and one’s that I feel actually justify my harsh comments. Either engage or don’t engage!
Unfortunately, I am a bit more familiar with Shadi’s writing than he supposes and that’s the reason I formed the judgment of him that I have. To begin with, this is a bullshit point and is exactly the kind of evasiveness I identified previously as intellectually dishonest. I was responding to the specific argument made in the post, that the notion of “semi-fascism” was both nonsensical and inappropriate. I believe I showed it was neither using a number of examples. Now you can still disagree with its application in this or that case, but it’s clear it’s neither a term wholly without precedent or a totally preposterous idea. Not being deeply acquainted the rest of someone’s work does not disqualify you from disputing a particular argument they made. That’s an absurd stipulation.
But I decided to take up Shadi up on his challenge here and read his other “engagement” with the fascism debate over the years. What I was able to turn up was an October 25, 2020 Atlantic essay entitled “Americans Are Losing Sight of What Fascism Means—Many Americans who brand Trump and his allies as fascists are paying too little attention to abuses in Hong Kong and cultural genocide in Xinjiang.” (I actually had read this when it came out.) He was responding in part to an article by Michelle Goldberg, where she labeled Tom Cotton’s call for the Army to be used against the George Floyd protests “fascist.” (In point of fact, she called it “proto-fascist”—the headline said it was fascist, and we all know writers don’t write their headlines.) Now you can argue that mere state repression is not always fascist or that Cotton is just a conservative, but Goldberg makes a more sophisticated case than Hamid gives her credit for: Cotton’s call was part and parcel of a certain type of political imagination that went beyond mere desire for law and order and contained a mere prurient relationship to the use of violence. In fact, it is Hamid’s use of fascist in the piece that’s imprecise and vague.
Hamid labels the Chinese Communist Party’s repressions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong “fascist.” Everyone knows it’s possible for regimes to be genocidal, highly-repressive, even totalitarian, without being “fascist.” As the fascism-skeptics remind us constantly it refers to a particular type of politics: it is not to be used as synonym for nasty authoritarianism in general. Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China were not fascist. So if we’re supposed to use these words carefully, how come Hamid has license to apply it willy-nilly in this case? The point seems to be to just scold other elites as unserious, while he of course is more sensible and serious. I’m sorry, but this is cocktail party patter, not rigorous argument.
Hamid, with characteristic hauteur, dismissed all the talk about fascism in the States as so much hysteria, not dealing with the any evidence or arguments:
Today, the United States is consumed by internal divisions, which means that the flow of ideas is the reverse of what it otherwise might be. Instead of solving problems through the very democratic institutions that once gave inspiration abroad, we now import foreign notions from Europe’s dark past in an attempt to comprehend what seems incomprehensible here in our own country. Donald Trump’s election led to a whole cottage industry of thinking that fascism is near, right here at home. It has grown steadily, reaching its culmination in the lead-up to the November election. In the past month alone, readers have seen Mussolini comparisons from eminent historians, explainers on what it’s like to live through a civil war, and an endless stream of warnings about Reichstag fires and a “fascist coup.” Here, Trump deserves some of the blame. He has a knack for bringing out the worst in his opponents, giving them license to use the very hyperbole and distortion that they criticize in others. This is one of many reasons to hope he is voted out of office.
But in between October 25, 2020 and the present day occurred January 6, 2021. As farcical or doomed to failure as it may have been, that episode indeed validate some of the fears Hamid talks about. The philosopher of science Imre Lakatos defined a “progressive research programme” as one that could predict novel phenomena and not merely explain away their appearance. Even the crudest fascist analogizing about Trumpism postulated something like January 6 happening, some desperate extra-constitutional move, some violent attempt on democratic rule, but critics of the fascism thesis like Hamid said it was absurd to imagine such a thing. In fact, the real danger in Hamid’s mind seems to have been that it was Democrats would not be able to accept the results of the election. In order to keep their theory in place, the critics of the fascism thesis have to constantly downplay the seriousness of events and doubt evidence. Of course, Trumpism is not exactly like fascism of the 1930s—nothing is exactly like the past and as I’ve said, semi-fascism seems to be a pretty good label, but it’s clear now that research into fascism and its antecedents is potentially fruitful.
Hamid is fond of citing a 1944 Orwell quote that goes:
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
But the full quote is more instructive:
Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
Scholarship has advanced a great deal since 1944, and we can now call on it. Also, I believe my use is with far more circumspection than Hamid’s, who applies it to the CCP as a kind of polemical term for nasty authoritarianism, not a specific style of politics or form of regime.
A key part of Hamid’s gambit here is to just treat the whole idea as so absurd on its face it doesn’t warrant real consideration. So far as I can tell, his main “engagement” has been with Jason Stanley, who I also have grown to dislike personally for the wildly inverse proportion of his ego to his contributions and whose definition of what constitutes fascism is sophomoric at best and sometimes can appear so elastic as to contain nearly any political expression to the right of, say, Hillary Clinton. I sincerely believe Stanley’s weak definitions of fascism, as well as his tiresome posturing and self-aggrandizement, has done my side of this debate a great disservice. Stanley is not a historian, but a philosopher of language and he does not deal with either the political nature or the social basis of Trump’s movement, just its rhetorical appeals. And, no offense to philosophers, but I do not consider “philosophy of language” to possess special insights into the nature of rhetoric that can’t be had through education in the humanities and social sciences in general. In my opinion, Stanley has not produced anything on the topic that has not been said in better ways by many other social theorists, historians, and sociologists before him.
As I’ve said, Hamid is under no obligation to respond to me. In fact, my writing is not very original: it’s all based on reading historical scholarship. And if Hamid doesn’t want to deal with me, he might deal with serious scholars of fascism, like Robert Paxton, who changed his mind about Trump. Or Geoff Eley, who wrote a very strongly-argued essay on the topic last year.
In a way, I do regret insulting Hamid. Not because I feel what I said was wrong; No, I am not sorry for that and will not apologize. But it gives him an excuse to write it off. So, I wish I had held my temper, but none of us are perfect.
You know, some part of me is kind of sympathetic to this issue of credentialing. (Should say up front here that I am professionally in academia and acknowledge the perspectival warping that probably produces.) Reading, say, some of the books by n+1 authors, like Nikhil Saval's "Cubed," I remember thinking, what the fuck is this? It's not by a trained historian, so there's no substantive research, and it's not by a political or cultural theorist, so there's no real scope of argument--it, and others like it, just read like diligent papers by "A" students. It really feels like there's just this deskilling of intellectual labor, even in contexts where there is genuine debate and disagreement, like say on the Catholic right. I mean, Ross Douthat, Michael Brendan Doherty--not exactly Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. (Can't think of any Catholic intelletuals of the top of my head here.)
Academia, of course, has the opposite problem, in that extreme specialization, the focus on questions of methodology and argument, and just a deficiency in writing ability means that everything that comes out of there is parochial and boring. So I think the stuff I gravitate toward tends to be general audience academic stuff, like, say in the New Left Review. Hence the all-around excitement, I think, about those Perry Anderson mega-articles a two years back?
On the other other hand, here I am, following your Twitter and reading your Substack with great enthusiasm. It seems to me that social media just instantiates a very different audience-public intellectual relationship that previously existed, where individual writers become little public spheres onto themselves. There's this parasocial effect I guess I really like here, in that you (and the people who comment here) remind me of my friends from high school and college, and the conversation is kind of a formalized version of the informal conversations we used to have--more of a friend sharing stuff with you to think about, than a public intellectual taking stances, though, of course, it's also that, since you have a real readership, and will soon have a book. The problem here seems to be on Hamid's side, for puffing himself up and not recognizing the more intangible, informal nature of the interaction?
Not that it matters, I’m just a rando, but, I feel, man—it is difficult to deal with haughty people who care, or feign to care, more about decorum than substance, especially after being outrageous or denigrating themselves in what they think is ‘genteel’ enough a way. That you’re still substantive even while salty is kinda great!