Donald Trump took the anxieties of millions and forged them into a fascist subculture. It will destroy everything if we fail to stop them.
Our job is supporting democracy defender AND keeping Trump & his followers out of power.
Virgil wrote an epic called the Aeneid. It is a long poem like the Iliad and the Odyssey, tracking the founding of Rome after the fall of ancient Troy. He wrote the epic not only to give the new empire its own epic creation story, but to show the world that Romans, and the Latin language they spoke, could match the cultural achievements of the Greeks who came before.
At one point the hero, Aeneas, has to go to the underworld, the world of the dead, to get some information from a soul there. But Aeneas does not know how to get through the gates. So, he asks one of the dead souls hanging about. The ghost teases him with the obvious: getting in is easy, everyone eventually does it. But getting out? Hoc opus, hic labor est. This is the work, this is the labor.
My cousin Rachel reminded me of this story. Like all great literature, it can be read in ways far beyond its literal meaning. In all our lives we sometimes find ourselves at the doors of spiritual death, of great grief, of despair that feels like death. And now, collectively many of us feel our society and our democracy trapped and descending in a swirling whirlpool.
Finding ourselves at the gates of hell wasn’t very hard. Getting out of here? hoc opus, hic labor est.
But to get out, we need to see more clearly how we came here, and where here actually is.
American trauma
Our country, our people, are carrying the burden of enormous trauma. A generation of stagnant incomes robbed much of America of its optimism. We turned a blind eye impact of gun violence in our cities. The opioid epidemic was far deeper and more destructive than we have allowed ourselves to see. What we do see is a nation shaped more and more by a small group of the fabulously wealthy. At the same time, with respect to traditional minority populations, we see increasing equality, which paradoxically, terrifies those who have seen their own reasons for optimism grow dim.
As Professor William Howell at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, and author of Presidents, Populism, and the crisis of Democracy, carefully explained to me, the past thirty years saw globalization, immigration, and technological change bring enormous benefits to America. But, those forces, unleashed in part by government policy, also created concentrated costs we either ignored or mishandled. Over time, our failure to address these costs created the anxieties that a skilled populist like Donald Trump could prey upon.
Prey upon them he did. With catastrophic results.
The Guardian has begun to publish data from the Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST). Even after many of those who participated in the January 6th attack went to prison, 12 million Americans, 4.4 percent of the adult population, believe violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the White House. Fully 20 percent of Americans say the believe the election was stolen. This is real distrust in our democracy. 25 percent believe in the great replacement theory. While these numbers hardly make up a majority, they form the corps of the modern Republican Party.
There are many ways to understand all of this. But one thing is clear, Donald Trump took the anxieties of millions and forged them into a fascist subculture that will destroy everything if we fail to stop them. And by stopping them, I mean both keeping them out of power and addressing the underlying anxieties so they can once again participate constructively in our democracy.
American Fascism, as explained by Umberto Eco
Now it does no good to throw around words like fascism without talking about what we mean. For that I turned to a wonderful piece written in 1995 and published in the New York Review of Books by the great Italian author and thinker Umberto Eco.
He titled the piece Ur-fascism, and attempted to find the traits that would endure in any instance of fascism. He described thirteen. They are all relevant to our current moment. I urge you to read his whole piece (linked above). For now, let us look at just a few.
First is a cult of tradition. And not just one tradition. Eco says the tradition is usually syncretic- a fusion of different traditions in the name of an ultimate and ancient truth. In our time, we have the fusion of an evangelical Christian tradition with the idea of manifest destiny- the idea that white men were destined to conquer the American continent which justified westward expansion in America’s first 150 years. The result is a new Christian Nationalism, with its own version history. You can read that in the appalling work of Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission. This fusion of faith and false history forms a gospel for today’s right, and any differing view is treated as heresy- complete with book banning and legislative censorship.
Another point is an obsession with a plot. Followers, Eco says, “need to feel besieged.” They need a common enemy. He expected that would mean an appeal to Xenophobia. Jews make a nice target. But back in 1995 he called out Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order as an example of seeking a good plot to rally a base. In our time, these plots have multiplied. Q and the 10 percent who think the government is run by pedophiles don’t begin to capture the variety of plots generated and circulated in this cohort.
Later in his list is permanent warfare. Eco says, “there is no struggle for life. Life is lived for struggle.” Bi-partisanship is weakness. Compromise is treason. The other guys just need to be destroyed and the golden age will commence. America will be made great again.
In fascist societies, he says, people stand ready to do their share, and a heroic death is a great honor. So go ahead, storm the Capitol. Or take a governor hostage. That’s why Mr. Trump says about vigilantes, your hearts are full of love.
But not everybody is willing to die for the cause, so there needs to be substitute. That’s machismo. Tucker’s crazy naked man video, Trump’s grabbing women in the crotch, DeSantis’ never back down… all part of the same thing.
Eco describes collective elitism. Now this one is tricky because fascists hate so-called elites. But they create their own. It’s a group elitism: Mine are the best people, they say. Very good people. Sound familiar?
Related to the idea of collective elitism is the substitution of group rule or for individual choices. There are no individual rights because individuals don’t matter. What matters is the collective will of the people, and only the leader can interpret what that is. Leaders speak to crowds, obsess about crowds, and equate their crowds with a national mandate. That’s why Trump lied about the size of his inaugural crowd.
There is also what Orwell called newspeak. This is the dumbing down of language into a pile of slogans. “Running dog lackies,” was a Soviet favorite. Groomers and CRT appear to be the more compact choices in today’s fascist circles.
Forgive me for not having done justice to Eco’s careful thought or to his precise language. But just consider his warning to us at the end of this essay:
Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lives of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
Or, as Virgil put it, hoc opus, hic labor est.