An Excellent Salon Article By DeVega, Which I Have To Criticize
Chauncey DeVega's latest Salon article and interview (link below) presents some important concepts. I recommend it. There can be no doubt that the current Trump-GOP movement is a Neofascist movement. The interviewee makes some salient points about the appeal of the GOP's " cancel culture" campaign as an appeal to infantilism, nostalgia for childhood, as well as patriarchical authoritarianism and White Supremacy. Also that it's an outlook entirely dependent on conspiracism and victimization, as was the Europeans susceptibility to Fascism after WWI on the basis of the myth that there was a "Jewish/Socialist" conspiracy to take away all of their nice things, or blame them for those things lost.
What is missing from this piece is that they are treating the rise of Fascism as a sociological phenomenon, when in fact it is something different.
Fascist regimes do not emerge out of some political primordial soup as a random reaction to historical events. They are constructed, literally fashioned like the mythical "Golem", a synthetic creation which serves a purpose.
History tells us that the Olympians, meaning those wealthy and powerful old families, interests, and Oligarchs, are basically incompetent in their attempts to manage governments and societies, because by definition they are preoccupied with the benefit of the few. Such policies cause revolutions and unrest. Oligarchs then must create authoritarian regimes to impose economic austerity on the broad mass of people, and enforce conformity and compliance through the creation of unjust laws, corrupt institutions, and a synthetic culture. The political and cultural engineers hired by these Oligarchs invent scapegoats as the method of distracting, diverting, manipulating the various forms of orchestrated popular rage which drive people to embrace authoritarian strongmen.
The question left out of the article is "who are the planners, the organizers, the architects of America's Neofascist movement, those who weaponized and deployed it through the Presidency of Donald Trump"? Trump is just a rich, racist rageball who inspires like minded people to join his state of rage. But intellectually he is a moron and a borderline psychotic. He couldn't organize a Fascist movement by himself anymore than he could cure Covid19 by drinking Bleach.
Some group of people organized and planned this, funded it, designed strategies and shaped the culture from behind the scenes. At no point does the author ask if there are such people, there's no attempt to name names, its left vague as an amorphous blob of "America's racist legacy, the GOP, and Christian Nationalism".
We defeated fascism in WWII. It required a War obviously, and trials afterward. It required re-education of the population to make them understand the full enormity of the crimes committed in their names. The War itself did not end until the Wehrmacht was defeated by the combined armies of the allies and Soviet Union, and the capture/killings of the Nazi command structure. In other words, we identified what and who the enemy was, and defined objectives for defeating them.
The reason Chauncey Devega is a bit cynical is that because he and his interview subjects look at our situation as sociological in nature, meaning "naturally occurring", therefore he has no plan for identifying the adversary, no strategy for destroying their logistics or command structure, disrupting their communications, no plan for putting the actual leaders on trial, or re-educating the manipulated people who support it.
If you don't clearly define your enemy, have no strategy for defeating them, no post-war plan, no means for getting justice for the victims, then what do you have?
It's called a no win war. And that's what wrong and missing from even the best of the opponents of Trumpism and Neofascism today. Hoping that Trump supporters will change because they are happy about their stimulus checks and vaccines is an impotent strategy, doomed to fail, both demoralizing and myopic.
This is a war. Attempting to defeat fascism through an analytical/sociological approach is the equivalent of trying to understand Black Holes in physics by consulting a Proctologist. They are asking the wrong experts, and looking in the wrong hole.
