John Michael Greer wrote a blog post a while back on his notion of ‘thoughtstoppers’, which he defined thus:
“a word, phrase, or short sentence that keeps people from thinking. A good thoughtstopper is brief, crisp, memorable, and packed with strong emotion. It’s also either absurd, self-contradictory, or irrelevant to the subject to which it’s meant to apply.”
One of his main examples of a thoughtstopper is the notion that Donald Trump is a fascist, and I think he has a point. It’s easy to apply the word ‘fascist’ to people as a dismissive epithet that prevents further thought or analysis, rather than opening it up. So, being the kind of person who finds it pretty easy to dismiss Trump as a fascist I think it’s useful to bear in mind the thoughtstopping dangers of doing so and try to offer a more elevated level of analysis. Of course, the same applies to those on the right inclined to accuse left-wingers of fascism, thereby further emptying the term of its residual meaning.
But a problem arises. It seems like Greer’s post has been very successful, and the notion that it’s a ‘thoughtstopper’ to identify Trump with fascism has become so ubiquitous that it’s pretty much become a thoughtstopper itself. There are, after all, some obvious parallels between the political and economic conundrums of the early 20th century and those of the present, and some obvious parallels between politicians of the right then and now in how they seek to articulate them. To deliberately avoid trying to understand present political dynamics by comparing, yes certainly their differences, but also their similarities, with past ones strikes me as another way to keep oneself from thinking.
Greer wrote “it’s absurd, in any but a purely thoughtstopping sense, to insist that Donald Trump is a fascist. Fascism, like Communism, is a specific, tightly defined political and economic philosophy, and…it’s not at all hard to look up what exactly Fascism was, what specific economic policies it pursued, and so on. Do that and you’ll find that Donald Trump is not a fascist; he’s an authoritarian populist of the classic sort, which is not at all the same thing.”
The problem is, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, politics isn’t a matter of tight formal definition by authoritative sources that enables you to determine correct or incorrect usage any more than consulting a dictionary enables you to use language ‘correctly’ in its living contexts. Sure, it would be easy to come up with definitions of fascism in its early 20th century guises that the Trump regime clearly wouldn’t fit, but more revealing to trace more genealogically the often surprising ways that political ideologies exert webs of influence, get changed and reconfigured, fade from the scene and then come roaring back.
I’ve made a few attempts to draft a post that does that in the case of the Trump/fascism nexus. It’s not too hard to do in relation to obvious waymarks like extolling physical violence against journalists committed by politicians from his party, or enthusing about the regimes of murderous strongmen abroad and about far-right mobs at home. But I haven’t come up with something that really satisfies me, I’m some distance from the action, and ultimately there’s little I can add to Gary Younge’s despairing comment: “The venality is so baroque, the vulgarity so ostentatious, the inconsistencies so stark, the incompetence so epic and the lies so brazen, it leaves you speechless. His vanity is without guile and the scandals that embroil him without end.”
In other words, the greatest thoughtstopper of all is probably Donald Trump himself – perhaps along with commentators like Greer who seem to think that Trump is a genuine champion of that much-mythologized category, the ‘white working class’. Instead I’d go with Tony Schwartz “About the only thing Trump truly has in common with his base is that he feels every bit as aggrieved as they do, despite his endless privilege.”
So perhaps I should turn my political scrutiny closer to my home in Britain. When newspapers call judges asking for democratic oversight of constitutional decisions “enemies of the people”, MPs write to universities asking for information on curriculum content in controversial topics, and former Conservative party leaders suggest that now might be a good time to start a war with Spain, perhaps I’d be better off attending to the sprouts of fascism in my own country.
Nah, I can’t summon the enthusiasm even for that just now. Tell you what – I’ll go even closer to home and scrutinize my own politics for its fascist content. And as my guide, I’ll draw from Melissa Harrison’s interesting novel All Among The Barley (Bloomsbury, 2018) set in a farm community in 1930s England, which has the incipient rural fascism of that time and setting as a major sub-theme. Harrison writes in an afterword that “in febrile, depression-hit 1930s Britain dozens of…groups, large and small, sprang up in town and country, many with openly fascist agendas and beliefs”. Then she helpfully provides a list of what she calls the ‘murky broth’ of these agendas and beliefs, against which I propose to test myself. It goes as follows:
Nationalism: nope, I think I’m clear on that score.
Anti-Semitism: ditto.
Nativism: ditto again.
Protectionism: well now, here it gets complicated. I do support protectionism, though not of the Donald Trump “I win – you lose” variety. That kind of neo-mercantilism propelled the early 20th century world into war, and much as I oppose aspects of the global ‘freeing’ of markets that followed, I think the latter is better than the former. But better still is local economic protectionism within a wider framework of economic amity – we protect our industry, you protect yours, and then let’s see what friendly economic exchanges might mutually work for us. This approach, however, is incompatible with capitalism – whereas fascism is not.
Anti-immigration sentiment: I shall be writing in more detail about this soon, but a quick summary of my position would be, again, nope – clear on that score.
Economic autarky: yes, count me in – see ‘Protectionism’ above. More generally, I think a fundamental reboot of the economy is needed, grounded in the local potentialities of the land and the environment and building from there. I’m not averse to a little trade and interchange, but I think it needs to be kept on a tight rein.
Secessionism: another complex one. Generally, I’m in favor of localist political arrangements, but I don’t see them as a panacea or an easy way to achieve sustainable human wellbeing (in fact there’s no easy way to achieve that), as I’ve tried to outline in my writings on civic republicanism. Scope for a further post on this, I think.
Militarism: I can generally report a clean bill of health on this one. Uniforms, weaponry and marching tunes don’t stir my blood. But the need for a militia to defend the republic might.
Anti-Europeanism: again, I’m in the clear. If Brexit politics in Britain had been able to articulate a pro-European secessionism I might have supported it, but the subtleties of such a position seem beyond the cadres of idiotic Brextremists that we currently suffer under. In fact, avoiding the petty nationalisms and militarisms that have plagued modern Europe is the main reason why I support pan-European politics, despite its shortcomings. I’d accept that the EU has been its own worst enemy on this front in many ways – though Britain has scarcely been in the firing line, so its anti-Europeanism makes little sense in that context.
Rural revivalism: Yes, by God.
Nature worship: Well, I find it hard to worship anything and I’m fine with that. But if I had to worship something, then ‘nature’ would probably top my list. An issue I need to work through some more, perhaps.
Organicism: this could mean several things beyond a taste for sowing clover-rich grass leys. But when it comes to human affairs, I’d generally count myself out. Yes, everything is connected as part of a vast cosmic mystery. No, this wider truth is not a good basis for organizing human politics. Assume disconnection and build from there.
Landscape mysticism: see ‘nature worship’ and ‘organicism’.
Distrust of big business – particularly international finance: in early 20th century politics this was often a coded reference to Jews, feeding the aforementioned anti-Semitism. For my part, I don’t distrust Jews. But I do distrust big business – particularly international finance.
So, by my reckoning I score 4½ out of 14 on Harrison’s fascist-finding ticklist. Perhaps not enough to count as a person of interest in the enquiry, but not quite in the clear. It just goes to show, as I said above, how political ideologies merge into one another, become reconfigured, and generally can’t be screwed down into tight little definitional boxes. A ‘murky broth’ indeed.
There are a couple of aspects of fascism that Harrison doesn’t deal with so well. The first is that in the early 20th century a big impetus for it was the fear that communism would take hold of the working classes and bring down capitalism – fascism was but the most extreme manifestation of wider attempts to find ways of incorporating the working classes into an anti-communist and pro-capitalist politics. To be fair, Harrison does touch on this in her novel without really paying it much attention. The wider question today on this point is why a politics with many features of the earlier fascisms seems to be resurgent when there’s so little threat of communism or even anything especially leftist in many of the places where it’s occurring. Though perhaps I’m just revealing my own political biases here. After all, some people think Barack Obama is a radical leftist.
The other problem with Harrison’s treatment of fascism is that she seems to think of it as some kind of movement for conservative restoration opposed to social change. She puts these words into the mouth of one of her characters as he discourses against fascism: “we cannot set our faces against change: it don’t do, it never has….we must have change – we must have it! For the past is gone, and that’s just the way of it. Change allus comes, and all that falls to a man to decide is whether he’ll be part of it or not”.
I think this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of fascism, which though it drew on nationalist ideologies of deep-seated rural culture and honest peasant toil actually had very little interest in preserving traditional moral economies or any such thing. Despite its organicism and history-mongering it was a movement deeply engaged with the state-industry-warfare nexus in entirely modernist terms. I’m not sure that it ever commanded huge support anywhere, but in troubled times it commanded enough support in some places to take hold and cause endless suffering and misery. I don’t think I’m being too Spenglerian to express the fear that in present troubled times, when the modernist state-industry-warfare nexus is manifestly unraveling, something similar could easily take hold again and do the same. And that, I submit, is a thoughtstarter, not a thoughtstopper.
