Magical Thinking will NOT Stop Fascism

 

By magical thinking I here intend the colloquial sense not the historical sense I have discussed previously in my ruminations on animism in the Renaissance. Each day as I scan progressive publications like the Salon or Guardian I increasingly get the impression that progressives (and in particular American ones) have run out of real options for fighting fascism and are turning increasingly to magical ones. You can tell this is the case because they propose that we fight fascism by striking poses or attitudes that have no relation to any actual policy and can have no other predictable result than to reinforce fascists in their mad convictions. Thus, we have Clintonite Chauncey DeVega (https://www.salon.com/2021/09/22/hillary-clinton-tried-to-warn-us--and-paid-the-price-lets-at-least-call-what-they-are/) who fights fascism by declaring to all and sundry that he is so DONE with Trumpists and their whining.[1] We have Amanda Marcotte who says that, after all, it is all down to personal vice and virtue. (https://www.salon.com/2021/12/22/why-they-hate-him-dr-fauci-triggers-the-right-because-he-reveals-their-deepest-insecurities/).The reason we can’t have nice things is that people are not open minded and educated like she and her friends are.[2] We have Rebecca Solnit pushing (yet again) the liberal fantasy of demographic triumph.  (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/20/rightwingers-us-social-change-coming?fbclid=IwAR1uXDkXg-JJIECxbv-UFAJJCJoi58zg4xn8SszLil0gGbQ3cwlJhZzn_WM) Once the rednecks all die off and WE are the majority we shall have a “dazzling” new renaissance that will dwarf the old![3] Then there are the usual things trotted out to make the right just go away. There is, for example, ‘making racists afraid again’ as if fear were not the underlying problem. Plus, we have been too nice. If only we criticize right wing people harshly enough they will internalize this critique and go away. If we just say loudly enough that they SUCK they will realize they SUCK and leave us alone. Above all we must OPPOSE fascism even though fascism, of its very nature, THRIVES off the energy of opposition, indeed, exactly the kind of opposition we reflexively offer it.[4]  All of this is magical thinking because none of these attitudes address the main issue or set up any practical, achievable result. What are we supposed to DO if people are simply crazy, irrational, close minded or stubbornly and aboriginally evil? Kill them? Neo-liberalism has shredded the idea of society (as Reagan and Thatcher intended). It is neo-liberalism (not dark and inherent evil or inveterate ignorance) that has fostered extremism. Our current shift to what Chris Hedges calls ‘poisoned solidarity’ is simply a logical and utterly predictable reaction to basic facts about the world. It is NOT grounded in a personal failure to be open minded. It is NOT grounded in people being spoiled whiners or in their being obstructionists who hate progress. Especially, it is NOT grounded in ignorance but is simply an accurate reading of the intentionality underlying the brutal economic structures we have built.   

I can see why this kind of magic thinking is tempting as we watch the Biden administration in the U.S. fail to do what we half hoped it might do: enact the bare minimum of social policy necessary to save the system from itself. Biden, it is now painfully apparent, is too old and too decrepit even to do this. This is why he has turned to ‘fighting fascism’ by handing out more goodies to oil and gas companies.  I take this as pretty much the end of centrism as a political option where the U.S. is concerned. American Progressives, especially now, need to stop moralizing and stop fantasizing about the eschaton. They must stop being “dazzled” by imagined futures. The solution to their problem is, as I have said elsewhere, dismantling neo-liberalism by giving people money even if those people are ignorant and dislike anal sex. It involves giving people money even if they do not deserve it. Progressives must forget about REVENGE or VINDICATION whether personal or cultural. They must bribe their enemies with GBI, debt relief, health care and other goodies and forget about the satisfaction of trying to rub their noses in the dirt of their own folly and ignorance. This is the problem especially with Americans: it is never enough to simply solve a problem. The solution must also be the vindication and triumph of some empty abstract signifier like ‘progress’ or ‘freedom’.  One hopeful thing is that deep down, beneath their moralizing, the people cited above know this. They know from bitter experience that they can’t reason or hector Trumpists into giving up and, with apologies to Mr. DeVega, some of them even recognize that a subset of Trumpists would have supported Bernie Sanders had he been on the ticket. Personally, I think Sanders would have caught a bullet from within his own party if he had gotten anywhere close to the presidency but it is, at least, a lesson for the future.  

At any rate politics is not a form of catharsis. Even progressive politics is about one thing and one thing only: reducing the institutional cruelties that add to the ordinary unhappiness of the human condition. It is not about the eschatological triumph of good over evil or producing a new renaissance (as if THAT was somehow necessary to justify what we are doing). If Progressives cannot do this under the current system (and it looks like they cannot) they must break it up into smaller components which are more manageable. Probably this needs to happen in the U.K. as well though with Canada, knock on wood, the jury is still out. States who still insist on neo-liberal austerity SHOULD face secessionist movements if that is the alternative to their policies. This gets around the problem of American progressives which is that they need to deliver on the ONE thing their current system makes impossible: redistribution of wealth and services. Plus, and make no mistake about it, it is AMERICAN progressives who must do the heavy lifting here because of the capacity of the U.S. to pass on its own chaos to the rest of the Anglo-sphere and to CANADA especially where right wing parties parrot Republican talking points without even altering them for a Canadian audience! Such, alas, is the power of U.S. media that Canadian conservatives think WE have a problem with MS 13 and a Muslim prime minister (at least they don’t call him PRESIDENT Trudeau- yet). Many of them think of Trump as THEIR legitimate leader instead of the phony, illegitimate Trudeau. There is no progressive solution in Canada if there is not one in the U.S. though timid centrism may linger a bit longer here due to basic differences of national character.

Frankly, and I don’t know if this makes me progressive or post progressive, the only message that is a winning message here, as far as I can tell, is faith, family, country (terms that can be suitably and progressively nuanced) and GIVING PEOPLE LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY so they don’t act out by embracing fascism or extremism. That will net you the largest concentration of voters; enough to put electoral success for Fascists out of reach. We need to wrap the redistribution of wealth and services in language currently alienated, insecure or fearful persons will respond to. That or we can pat our own backs while going down in flames. This, of course, means abandoning what I call the ‘Don Lemon’ thesis: that our problem is culture in abstraction from economics. If people are acting out nastily that is because their lives are precarious even if they seem outwardly prosperous. In the U.S. especially even the outwardly prosperous are over leveraged and one serious illness from economic calamity. Elsewhere the middle class is stagnating even with socialized medicine and better benefits. The bases of a strong middle class are unions and a robust public sector that forces private corporations to compete for skilled labor. This short-circuits the tendency of ‘free’ labor markets to induce a race to the bottom in wages and benefits. Neo-Liberalism reduces society to winners and losers who have only themselves to blame. Guess what losers or people who live in terror of the consequences of being losers do? They decide the system under which they lost or could lose in the future stinks: Trump’s election whining is just one special case of this broader phenomenon. People will cheat if it costs too much to lose. They will turn to poisonous ideas of racial or religious solidarity as an anchor in an insane world. They turn to a daddy who will keep them safe! Above all they will refuse to play the game by its current rules.     

Before anyone objects I must point out that, yes indeed, eliminating precarity (which is not quite the same thing as poverty) will not suddenly turn people into progressive saints. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to keep people from smoldering obsession over things like race or culture by giving them other things to think about and reducing their overall level of resentment and insecurity. They may remain jerks but they will be less troublesome and nakedly subversive jerks. If they feel more secure in their own position they might be more inclined to live with social transformations they do not like and can’t be forced to like. The problem with the progressive authors mentioned above is that they want ALWAYS to set up the win/lose scenario rather than a win/ win scenario. They cannot bear the idea of offering their enemies a face saving retreat even though Sun Tzu said that that is how you ACTUALLY win the battle. They want the eschaton and the apocalyptic victory of reason and light over superstition and primitive darkness. This dialectic of winner and loser is of course the very essence of the neo-liberal paradigm which has here colonized their thinking. The thing they actually need to do is trade material benefits for social progress. Again, politics is NOT about catharsis or vindication. It is about making sausage in the best way sausage can be made. The way sausage is made is to grant recognition to the losers so they don’t feel like the losers. In fact, recognition is the crucial term that links economic and cultural issues and overcomes their supposed opposition. As Hegel said the recognition of the other is the moment in which we appropriate our own subjectivity. I come to myself as a subject in relation to another subject. I say Hegel but the same insight is old as the Epic of Gilgamesh and is extensively modelled in the theology of the Trinity. This why we ALL seek recognition as the primary social  good and will even exchange monetary benefits for it.  Neo-liberalism renders recognition scarce and contested. As DeVega puts it, you CAN”T empathize with Trump supporters AND their victims because recognition granted one MUST be denied the other (no wonder he is so fond of the neo-liberal Clinton!). The result of this is, as Hobbes showed long ago, the war of each against all which can be a metaphorical ‘culture war’ or, taken to its logical limit, a shooting one.[5] My argument here is that we must drop this metaphor and this framing and deny the zero sum logic of capitalism according to which I can only win at the other’s expense. We need a logic that allows the losers of the game to buy into the game because there are compensations even for the loser. That or we CAN fulfill the fever dream of a final showdown between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ (a false dichotomy but that is another essay) in which the good finally route the evil. Then we have the Thirty Years War which was the original impetus for doctrines of tolerance and sharing the pie where recognition was concerned. If we go that route, and we may be too far gone to go any other route, the Amish and the Mennonites can pick up the pieces and start over which may not be the worst thing.           

 

 

 

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[1] Mr DeVega seems to think the problem boils down to the fact that we grant too much legitimacy to the socio-economic concerns of Trumpists. As to why he thinks denying empathy or concern to Trumpists will make them change their attitudes and behavior I confess myself at a loss. Really though, he is expressing an (understandable) emotional reaction as if that emotional reaction were also, somehow, a basis for policy. Alas what follows, practically, from denying ANY person concern or empathy? What follows from saying the deplorables really, really are the deplorables and that Hilary was SOOO right? As far as I can see a momentary catharsis or, if pushed to its final, logical conclusion, war.

 

[2] Marcotte seems to think that what the world needs is more anal sex on the grounds that those who loosen up sexually will necessarily and inevitably loosen up politically. All I can say of this is that it does not seem to have worked for the Weimar republic. At any rate, the evidence that puritan moralism dies hard is that people even apply it to sexual transgression. Those who are not sexually transgressive in the approved ways are leading stale and conventional lives as are those who devote themselves to things like traditional families, gender roles or religions. They are failing in their moral and civic duty to be iconoclasts! Of course, according to this script, the instant we shame someone on this score they will immediately reward us with their votes. How could they react in any other way? The trap for progressives is that they do not usually convey this sort of message consciously. THAT is why they need to talk to people outside their immediate community. The necessity of pluralism, even unpleasant pluralism, is grounded in the constitutional, even transcendental occlusion of the totalization inherent in our own discourse. This is especially the case when we speak of ‘smashing’ or ‘destroying some binary or other concept we dislike but some other person has invested in. This is, to our own ears, simple common sense and goodness which is why need the other to tell us what it sounds like to them (i.e. implicit or explicit erasure). As I have said over and over a fish CANNOT see water and this applies to ALL people from ALL points on the political spectrum. We cannot know ourselves in abstraction from the other.           

 

[3] Solnit seems to be an old fashioned kind of believer. What sustains her hope for a better future is the ‘necessity of ultimate victory’. What sustains the ‘necessity of ultimate victory’ is the necessary arc of progress which no one can stop because it is the necessary arc of progress. Outside the special context of theistic belief, there is, of course no ‘necessary arc’ of anything. Nor will the magic of majoritarianism turn society progressive because, as a quick glance at history will tell us, it is powerful and entrenched minorities who determine what does and does not happen. The right knows this better than the left, it seems, for they are giving up on elections and other such ‘majoritarian’ procedures. At any rate, the gulf between me and such believers becomes evident when I consider the following sentiment “if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling.” I can assure anyone curious that for the vast majority of people the ‘possibilities’ will never be anything but ordinary and THAT, to be real for a moment, is exactly what the vast majority want. At any rate, Solnit’s response to the people who chant ‘you will not replace us’ is ‘yes, in fact, we WILL replace you’ which may well be true and even desirable but is, to be bluntly pragmatic for a moment, a losing message under the current configuration of power.

    

[4] Why do Trumpists say more and more outrageous and stupid things? The answer is that they seek confirmation bias. They seek to push the liberal to the point where the liberal has no choice but to call them a fool or deny them empathy or recognition. Then they can go off satisfied that the liberal is EXACTLY the smug, arrogant individual they always suspected. This is one small way in which a fascist mentality thrives off the resistance offered to it. The same is true with the way progressives use a specialized vocabulary to enforce in-group/out-group distinctions. Magic words of power will not stop fascism any more than other forms of magic. Thus, the liberal (who seeks his own confirmation bias btw) refers to ‘privilege’ fully knowing that his will interlocutor will reply that he is not privileged in the least. Here is his moment of triumph for now he can point out that of course, he is not using the word ‘privilege’ in its vulgar demotic sense! Well, to the ordinary person using words like ‘privilege’ (as in white privilege) or ‘defund’ (as in defund the police) in senses other than the demotic is a jerk move meant to put them in their place. This is true no matter how sincere and innocent the intentions of the person using them: in communication as in politics it is perception that matters not intent. Thus, when we speak of ‘white privilege’ or ‘defunding the police’ and get angry if others do not understand the specialized senses in which we are using those terms we are failing communication 101. Of course, if we are seeking confirmation of our bad opinion of others then I suppose these terms are succeeding brilliantly in their aim: to provoke a negative reaction that reminds us yet again of the ignorance of the ignorant or the hatefulness of the hateful. It is a hard thing to say but people in historically oppressed groups sometimes engage in just this kind of confirmation bias; a thing brilliantly satirized by David Sedaris in his story Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter, the unfortunate protagonist of which spends all his efforts provoking the exact negative reactions from people that confirm his miserable opinion of them.

[5] One group of people who get this are conservative Christians. Perennially dismissed as stupid rubes they are on this point quite possibly correct. They fear that if they cede power to non-white, non-Christian groups they will be subject to the same exclusion and discrimination they have imposed on others. They may be perfectly right about this. Since Thucydides and his modern disciple Hobbes this has been the correct, ‘realist’ reading of human nature. People will exercise their power to the point where some external obstacle stops them. If we are dealing with the will to revenge this is all the more true. Certain progressives have a visceral contempt for the only two things that ever stand in the way of the will to revenge: formal civil liberties and a procedural state. At any rate I have talked to enough Canadian and American progressives to know that they hold Evangelical Christians to be outside the circle of normal human concern. This excommunication seems mutual which bodes ill for the future to say the least.