"What's Happening Here"

My Chicago lecture and a great question

Dear Readers,

Here is the raw audio of my talk “What’s Happening Here: Fascism as Past and Prologue” at the University of Chicago. A big thank you once again to professors John McCormick and Lisa Wedeen, the program in Letters, Law, and Society, and the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Thank you also to Ryan Eykholt for the A/V.

Keep in mind, this is my first public lecture of any length, so please forgive the lack of polish. The 3CT program will have an edited video up soon, and I’ll share that as well.

Nic Johnson, a fellow at Law, Letters, and Society, who attended the talk, sent me a very compelling question, which I’ll try to answer now:

I was going to ask about the international political economy of MAGA fascism, and the parallels to the interwar species. I take from Tooze’s book *The Deluge* that a major motivating factor for these guys was the sense that after WWI, the Anglo-American powers had set up a liberal world order that was impossible to break out of and favored them. The naval treaties that gave the US right to have more ships than everyone, the international financial system reconstructed on the Gold Exchange Standard with sterling and the dollar playing the roles of key currencies, etc. Not to mention the German war debts. So this Anglo-American liberal world system would keep Germans down forever, it made Italy a “proletarian nation” exploited by the “capitalist nations.” And the only way to break out of it was fascism--need to smash liberalism through war and colonization. It is essentially a geopolitically revisionist kind of politics. What’s bizarre (to me) about MAGA fascism is that they seem to have the same kind of analysis, but *as Americans* of the *current American system*! Trump also doesn’t like America’s system of military bases everywhere, wants to back out of NATO, reneg on security promises to Ukraine and let other great powers have their “spheres of influence.” And he doesn’t like the global dollar system either! He wants to weaken the dollar and maybe doesn’t like that its a reserve currency? So MAGA is also a geopolitically revisionist movement that hates the American liberal world order. But from within America. I don’t know how to make sense of that or why that’s happened, but it does strangely line up with the interwar fascism analogy, so I wondered if you had any more insight

The only thing that makes sense to me is that somehow its global posture is derivative of resentments and theories it has about the world of domestic politics. First they have a culture war against domestic liberalism, and then they take aim at its internationalization. But like psychoanalysis that’s sort of a “cheat code” theory

So, I think one of the biggest problems for left-wing analysis of Trumpism and its incomprehension of the fascism thesis revolves around the issue of American global hegemony and MAGA’s revisionism, as you put it. Critics of the fascism analogy have always said it breaks down precisely at this point: they say America is not a second-rate power bidding for dominance; it is already in the driver’s seat. But as you correctly put it, MAGA and Trumpism, like fascism, is also a movements of geopolitical revision, but seemingly within an already hegemonic power. There are several ways to explain this. One is that they see America’s power as slipping, and so it must be radically reasserted. Also, they see participation in the liberal world order, the international agreements, organizations, and systems of alliances—NATO, the UN, WTO—the very institutions that left-wing analysis traditionally sees as ways the US exercises economic and military power—as not particularly American at all, br rather as “globalist” ways in which a cosmopolitan elite takes advantage of real American interests. To use the analogy from the 1930s, they think the US is the “proletarian nation” exploited by free riding “allies” and foreign aid recipients. They think that the US loses out in a free trade world and is taken advantage of by countries that adopt protectionist policies. Now, some of this certainly comes from viewing the world through an ideological prism, but there is some material basis as well.

Remember that MAGA’s base of support comes from those parts of the country and those social classes and regions that actually did lose out or never gained from the international system. Its bourgeoisie is mostly from the heartland, not from the coasts. Its intellectual class, or clerisy, is drawn from those who could not achieve the first rank under the old “meritocratic” system, who couldn’t fully enter the cosmopolitan elite, or decided to defect from its ranks opportunistically to gain pride of place in the new movement. You also have to connect this material or structural account to the political traditions of the US, which I must say the European left is sometimes very ignorant about. This fear, hatred, and envy of the cosmopolitan elite, this anti-Atlanticist, anti-globalist current, sometimes called “isolationism,” but more correctly called sovereigntism or even just nationalism, is a longstanding constellation of ideas in American politics, and, for much of the latter half of the twentieth century, it was minor, associated with the dominated fraction of the conservative coalition, like the group that called themselves “paleoconservatives.” Those voices on the right always portrayed themselves as tribunes of neglected middle-American interests. Now, of course, the MAGA coalition is joined by an international section of capital, Silicon Valley, but they saw where the wind was blowing and saw nationalism as beneficial for their interests in several ways.

You can fit this all in within my “crisis of hegemony” account of Trumpism: the international-facing elite faced a drastic loss in legitimacy after deindustrialization, the 2008 crash, the Iraq War failure, and then what I’ve called the “abortive social democracy” of Biden and his foreign policy debacles. The account of the world given by MAGA just rings truer to many.

The next part is somewhat speculative, so bear with me. The great irony is that MAGA is directed at globalism and foreign corruption, but because it is not integrated within the developed system of philanthropy of either liberalism or the old conservative movement, and is made up largely of arriviste freebooters rather eager to get theirs, it’s particularly vulnerable to the lures of foreign corruption. Major funding and support for MAGA-aligned figures and organizations comes either from Israel or its US-based backers or the Emirate of Qatar. This is a big fault line in the movement, with the officer class accusing one another of being in the pay of one or the other power. (Of course, the really smart people probably take from both.) I think, as the ceasefire agreement and Trump’s pleading on behalf of Netanyahu before the Knesset shows, international kleptocratic collaboration is the new regime’s replacement for the elite school chumminess of old diplomacy.

To return to the question, I think one can see how MAGA is a kind of mobocratic assault on a brittle international system in similar ways to the classical fascist movements. It just wants to replace America with another America, a “Real America.”