There Was Never Any "Fascism Debate"

They Refused to Engage

A number of my interlocutors in the fascism debate have reversed their positions since witnessing the full extent of the Trump regime’s willingness and ability to employ political repression against its enemies. Samuel Moyn, professor of law at Yale University, tweeted that the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil that “It is indeed a big and flagrant step towards fascism.” Corey Robin, distinguished professor of political science at CUNY, told WNYC’s Brooke Gladstone when asked about the fascism question, “I have since turned out to be wrong. They have set off multiple conflagrations. And I have been shaken out of my skepticism.” I have not been following the statements of the more junior scholars that fill out the ranks of that party, but I wonder if they will have the intellectual honesty of their mentors and change course.

I have mixed feelings about all this. I realize that it takes a certain degree of courage to admit one has changed one’s mind publicly—they are opening themselves up to ridicule, so part of me admires the willingness to no longer dodge or prevaricate. On the other hand, the facts are sort of undeniable now so it would be more ridiculous to persevere. Also, the fight was very bitter and personal. Not one of the main figures in it directly engaged with my arguments, or for that matter, with the arguments of others that shared these views. They relied on caricatured and strawmanned versions of it. They also resorted freely to ridicule, insults, and pathologization. We in the “It’s fascism” camp were made out to be hysterics, neurotic children, useful idiots for devious Cold War liberals and neocons; one called us “ambulance chasers,” another called me “half-educated” and mocked my “undergraduate” education. For my part, I gave as good as I got and called them a bunch of names, too: posers, little bureaucrats, and much worse. But, in fairness, I also dealt with their arguments and written words at some considerable length: I don’t think there is a single person on that side of the question about whose work I haven’t written.

Granted, it can sound more than a little petty to harp on this now. I have never claimed to be otherwise: one just hopes one’s pique and vanity ultimately is in service of some greater goal. We’re now in a massive social and political crisis. What does it matter who was right or who was wrong? What do these intellectual debates really about other than the egos of the participants? Also, this is not a debate I particularly relish being correct about: it’s an awful thing. Do I want a medal or something? Well, yes, a little, but I guess I think that there’s a bigger lesson here. There’s a lot of talk about a crisis of institutions these days. In a small way, it was replicated in this debate. Although it happened within academia: a lot of the loudest voices on the “pro-” side of the question were not in the academy; they were labeled “sub-intellectuals.” Sometimes it seemed to be about gatekeeping: who had the right to produce knowledge and the academics were absolutely determined to hold on to their monopoly, come what may. For my part, I didn’t dispute the overall claims of academia’s authority: I deeply respected the scholarship produced by it, relied heavily upon it, and felt many people were not reading it correctly or carefully. In some cases, I felt like they were deliberately misconstruing it. When distinguished scholars from within the academy echoed the concerns of those without, they were essentially ignored, as in the case of Geoff Eley, or minimized as having an emotional outburst, as in the case of Robert Paxton. Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder were treated as rank popularizers. I’m guilty there, too: I wasn’t crazy about their mode of expression and believed its stridency hurt our side’s case, but that seems a small consideration now.

If I could give these distinguished lecturers a lecture of my own I would say, “Why don’t you actually pay attention to what’s going on and what others are saying instead of insisting on your own constructs to the end?” It often seemed to me like the fascism-deniers were insisting that it couldn’t possibly be because serious people don’t really say such things. Screaming about fascism seemed vulgar to them. And I thought they were the real vulgarians for being snobs and just going along with the received wisdom of their caste. It turned out that reality itself was vulgar. It’s an advantage in such circumstances to not be such a serious person, I guess!

But this lesson goes for me, too. Adorno’s lesson is that thought always goes beyond its object; it can never fully coincide with it. The concept of fascism is “wrong” in that actual reality never fully accords with our concepts. This is a necesssary and unavoidable part of intellectual activity: it’s always speculative and imaginative work. The temptation now will be to take the fascism analogy too literally and insist on its absolute validity. But this was never really my contention. Analogies are always imperfect and need to be refined. I ultimately thought the fascism thesis was what the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a “progressive research programme:” that is to say, it could make certain strong interpretations and even predictions about what was going on and it had a fairly good track record in that regard. There are other frameworks for understanding the present that might be more subtle, more sophisticated, and more accurate. But I do believe that this idea has earned its place in any serious consideration of the present. The work will now be to synthesize it into a broader horizon.