Reading, Watching 11.03.24
Let's Just Keep Doing This
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
First a little personal news: I’m very pleased to share that When the Clock Broke has been named by Publishers Weekly as one of the Top Ten books of the year! It’s also listed as one of the New York Times’s “Best Books of the Year (So Far.)”
In The New Statesman, I have a fairly short piece on the whole fascism debate, arguing that the term might be an imperfect descriptor of Trump but it’s probably the best theory we have going.
I also had an interesting conversation with Professor Gavriel Rosenfeld at the Center for Jewish History on “Antisemitism as a Pillar of Fascism,” presented by the Leo Baeck Institute.
And speaking of the fascism debate, now to Round 347. In the New Left Review, Anton Jäger has a piece called “Hyperpolitics in America,” applying the concept he calls “hyperpolitics” to the current conjuncture, to use a little NLRese. I’ll let interested readers decide on the usefulness or applicability of that Baudrillard-inspired idea. Still, I’m extremely grateful to Jäger for encapsulating in a few paragraphs the entire style and substance—such that it exists—of Left anti-anti-fascism:
Predictably, this situation has initiated a frantic round of historical analogizing by the coastal intelligentsia. To analysts, the United States is experiencing its own Weimar moment, a return to the Gilded Age, teleporting back to the early Nixon era, or reliving the Old World’s Wars of Religion. Some dominant strands can be sifted here. Since Trump’s éclat in 2016, a host of historians and sub-intellectuals have prophesied the country’s tendential slide into fascism. Stories about terrorized Springfield residents, increased paramilitary activity and exterminationist rhetoric usually make up the argument in question, with the Proud Boys as a return of Freikorps militancy and a party cadre dedicated to Project 2025. Trumpism here presents a contemporary iteration of a far-right threat indigenous to the previous century.
The comparison lacks obvious bite on many fronts. Most of all, it suppresses one of the key elements of any far-right threat throughout the twentieth century: the presence of a left on the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough. Even in the most conventional analyses offered in the Third Period, fascism had to be understood on a dual timeline: an inability of bourgeois classes to stabilize their rule after the Great War, and an increasingly militant proletariat vying for state power. Caught in this limbo, ruling elites invited the parties of frustrated veterans to step in to solve the deadlock by smashing the anti-capitalist threat; fascism expressed both the resolution and repression of the revolutionary intermezzo. None of these features apply to the contemporary American case. What does the fascist heuristic accomplish, then? Its main consequence is to rally the disaffected left behind their lesser-evil capitalist masters—as if Biden’s crimes paled to nothing beside the not-dissimilar ones of Trump.
My my, where to begin? Let’s remark on the general feel. A third-rate Perry Anderson impression, it’s more a gesture of hauteur than an essay, a sneer rather than an argument. Everything is “obvious” and happens “predictably:’ opponents are “the coastal intelligentsia” and even “sub-intellectuals.” (I think we all know who he’s talking about.) The anti-anti position has become this kind of aristocratic pose: a way for those with pretensions of serious intellectualism to differentiate themselves from the dowdy middle-brows. Should I quote Bourdieu? No, I must imagine he is familiar. Like most of the anti-antis, he’s unwilling to reconstruct the arguments of his opponents and just sweeps them aside with a disdainful gesture instead. But then they also have to hide the ball: in the summary of the “argument in question,” there’s no mention of January 6th. (To be fair, it is mentioned elsewhere, but not as a central datum of the fascism thesis.) Both the argumentation and erudition rely on the reader sliding along with its supercilious smugness rather than paying close attention. For instance, what could it possibly mean to write, “Even in the most conventional analyses offered in the Third Period…” The “conventional analyses” of fascism in the Third Period of the Third International were famously obtuse and politically disastrous. So why are they being presented as a baseline of comprehension? Maybe because for all their supposed sophistication, the left critics haven’t advanced far beyond that sloganeering. The Third Period analyses of fascism labeled social democratic parties “social fascist” while minimizing the actual threat of fascism, presenting fixation with it as a bourgeois liberal concern. It feels appropriate that Jäger has abandoned his previous attempts to misuse Dylan Riley’s sociology etc. and has just arrived back at this moronically cynical Stalinist kernel: fascism isn’t a thing, and the libs are the real fascists anyway. For what it’s worth, the idea of an “increasingly militant proletariat” being the condition for fascism was a notorious misapprehension of the Third International theories: in both cases, the revolutionary upsurge had been defeated before the rise to power of the fascist movement. As Martin Kitchen writes:
In fact fascism was an offensive by capitalist forces which followed signiftcant working-class defeats. For all the problems facing capitalist society and the perceptions of danger to the established system from the militant working class, the political crisis within the ranks of the bourgeoisie was combined with an offensive strategy which demonstrated the relative strength of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
This leads us to a logical contradiction in this account. Somehow, there is no left-wing upsurge worthy of fascist reaction, but there’s enough social power in this “disaffected left” that it requires manipulative tactics on the level of shouting “fascism!” to be disciplined. So, the left is both objectively nonexistent and the main target of all political machinations of the center. This sounds almost like a form of pathological narcissism: the left is insignificant and powerless but also the most important target of all political machinations. Even if one considers “fascism” to be a cheap piece of demagoguery, surely then it must abe bigger targets than the tiny and disorganized American left? For instance, the many moderates and conservatives who might be uncomfortable with Trump.