It Can’t Happen Here…or Even Over There

Reflections on Fascism-Denial at Home and Abroad

For years I have made a political commentary sub-career out of mocking the contemptible “It Can’t Happen Here” fascism-denial conducted by mainstream “liberal” media and academia in response to the rise of the transparently fascist Donald Trump and the Trump phenomenon. The fourth chapter of my latest book This Happened Here: Neoliberals, Amerikaners, and the Trumping of America is titled “The Anatomy of Fascism-Denial.”  It is an at once depressing and amusing romp through the various ways US-American pundits and professors found to stick their heads in the sand about the presence of a fascist in the White House between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021.

“Some Wild Resistance”

Perhaps none of these deniers was more laughable than the supercilious New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.  In early October of 2020, Douthat published an Op-Ed  titled “There Will be No Trump Coup.” Arguing that Trump was just a “noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat,” Douthat derided “liberal speculation about what Donald Trump will do if he faces political defeat, whether he will leave power like a normal president or attempt some wild resistance.”

Douthat bet on the “normal” path. Never mind that Trump had been telegraphing his determination to try a coup since the start of his presidency, leading many observers to warn of dreadful events very much like what went down after Biden won in November of 2020.

“Attempt some wild resistance” was an unfortunate choice of words in light of Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s infamous Tweet two months later: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th.  Be there, will be wild!” 

“Wild resistance” indeed, as in a rolling coup attempt that devolved into a mass physical assault on the US Capitol meant to prevent Congressional certification of Biden’s victory.  

“Wild” like that – as predicted by those of us who didn’t spend the (first?) Trump administration with our heads in the sand about the nation’s demented 45th president, his deranged base, and his lethal shock troops.

Full truth told, the Trumpist-fascist resistance to the 2020 election had already gotten “wild” weeks before the Capitol Riot. Prior to the full January 6th meltdown and after the Associated Press declared Biden the next US chief executive, Trump’s Proud Boys – activated like never before by his “Stand Down and Stand By” endorsement the previous September – went on two ugly Washington rampages.  With Trump giving them drive-by and flyover approval, they physically attacked opponents and burned an historic Black church’s Black Lives Matter flag.  They wore t-shirts saying “6MWE” (meaning “six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust wasn’t enough”) and “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” – a reference to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who murdered thousands of leftists after leading a US-backed coup against the democratically elected government of socialist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.

Pathetically enough, a slew of academic so-called fascism experts clung to denying Trump’s fascist essence even after January 6th! (If you don’t believe me, read pages 164-173 in This Happened Here.)

Even Now the F-Word is Oddly “Controversial”

Here we are nearly two years after Douthat’s foolish column. The dreaded and supposedly extreme “F-word” – fascism – looms as large as ever in US politics today. Fueled by the doggedly persistent Big Hitlerian Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, the Republi-fascist Party is moving in deliberate “constitutional” ways not merely to suppress and gerrymander minority votes but to: cancel aggregate state-level popular votes in the 2024 election presidential election; staff the executive and legislative branches with vetted Republi-fascist operatives deep into the federal bureaucracy; impose female-enslaving forced motherhood on a national scale (beyond the near-half of the nation where this criminal policy is being accomplished over public opposition in the wake of the Trump-crafted Supreme Court’s June 24th Dobbs v. Jackson decision); crush liberal and left public assembly and free speech; turn the nation into a Hobbesian shooting gallery; accelerate and amplify ecocide and pandemicide; outlaw the honest teaching of history and current events.

The Republi-fascists have the absurdly powerful and right-wing Court and much of the rest of the judiciary in their pocket. Their shock troops spread mayhem on the ground. Members of the Republi-fascist/Amerikaner base now regularly harass, hound, target, dox, troll, and physically threaten teachers, school officials, nurses, doctors, elected officials, election officials, public health workers, poll workers, librarians, library officials, judges, district attorneys, rabbis, epidemiologists, immunologists, archivists, and other professionals and public workers, including even law enforcement officers.

Trump and his women-hating golf buddy US Senator Lindsey “National Abortion Ban” Graham (Rf, SC) have threatened mass political violence (“riots in the streets”) if Trump is belatedly indicted for criminally absconding with classified and top-secret government documents or for any of the long list of felonies he has committed in connection with his attempts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.  

Trump has now openly identified himself with the neo-Nazi blood-libel conspiracy cult QAnon, which calls for his immediate restoration to power and the televised execution of the “pedophile” Democratic Party “Marxist” leadership. He recently made a veiled death threat against Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, adding racist insults at McConnell’s wide.

Meanwhile, Trump’s fellow paranoid-style QANazi, the malicious Georgia Congressperson  Marjorie Taylor Greene, has gone off the deep end yet again by claiming that “Democrats want Republicans dead and they have already started the killings.” That’s the kind of stuff you say when you are trying to stir up a “cival war” – something nearly half of post-Republicans would like to break out.

   

Despite all this and more terrible to contemplate, it is still strangely considered “controversial,” “excessive,” and “extreme” in mainstream US media and politics culture to properly name the malignant political pathology that is staring the nation in the face. This doggedly persistent skittishness about using the big bad “F-word” was evident when some pundits and talking heads – and not just the Fatherland (I mean FOX) News crowd – recoiled after Joe Biden recently dared to tell some  Democratic donors that “the MAGA Republicans” are proponents of something  “like semi-fascism.”

Because, you know, It Can’t Happen Here – to quote the denial-mocking title of Sinclair Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel portraying a successful fascist coup in the USA. American exceptionalist doctrine, shared across major party lines, means that fascism can never take root and triumph here.  We’re just too “free” and “democratic” for that.   Fascism, like socialism and communism is for other countries, not for “us”/US..

Right.

“No Reason to Panic” Over a Fascist Trump in the Land of Mussoloni

Okay, but why then does the fascism-denial have to be extended to other nations, including the first country to ever to host a fully consolidated fascist regime (Italy)? This question occurred to me last Monday morning while listening to a National “Public” Radio report on the Brazilian presidential election pitting the leftish social democrat Lula da Silva against the openly fascist incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. The N“P”R reporter in Rio de Janeiro blithely portrayed the contest in  bloodless, fascism-normalizing terms as a battle between two “populists,” one on the left and the other on the right.  Never mind the “The Trump of the Tropics’” explicit and virulent racism, soulless genocidalism, vicious sexism, snarling homophobia, trans-bashing, vengeful nationalism, gun worship, ecocidalism, and classism. Or his explicit embrace of political violence and his clearly stated intention not to leave office if he loses the election. 

But that’s still in the Americas. Let’s look at the Old World and the original homeland of classic fascism. Let’s turn to an overseas election already won by a fascist.

There’s something curiously downplayed in US commentary on Giorgia Meloni’s recent election as Italy’s first female prime minster: her, um, well, fascism.  Meloni’s party is the far-right Brothers of Italy, which has dark historical ties to other Italian neofascist parties and movements. It has made recurrent dog-whistle references to the supposed positive legacy of the pioneer fascist Benito Mussolini regime, which ruled Italy for two-plus decades and allied with Hitler’s genocidal Third Reich.

Meloni was a member of the National Alliance from 1995 to 2009, a party spawned by the Italian Social Movement party, heir to onetime fascist dictator Mussolini’s banned National Fascist Party.  As MSNBC’s best and leftmost commentator Medhi Hasan has Tweeted, Meloni “has praised Mussolini, currently echoes Mussolini, and runs a party that both includes Mussolini’s heirs and is itself an heir to the Italian Social Movement, which was formed by supporters of Mussolini in 1946.”

(How haunting that Meloni’s victory comes just one month short of the 100th anniversary of Mussolini’s infamous March on Rome. When fascist marchers and Blackshirt paramilitaries entered the Italian capital on October 28, 1922, Prime Minister Luigi Facta wanted to declare a state of siege.  He was overruled by King Victor Emmanuel III. The next day the King appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister, granting the new dictator and his blood-soaked party  power without an armed conflict.)

Beneath her standard “conservative” policy agenda – the abolition of welfare for the unemployed, the blocking of African immigration, opposition to abortion and LGBT rights – Meloni and her party have wrapped themselves in the symbols and rhetoric of classic fascism while pretending not to. As George Newth, Lecturer in Modern Italian Politics at University of Bath, UK, notes on CounterPunch:

“A Brothers of Italy have deployed campaign slogans first used in the fascist era. [They have] kept the tri-colour flame logo used by its predecessors, the neo-fascist MSI…Meloni …has made explicit references to Europe’s supposed ‘Judeo-Christian’ roots. The latter is a common Islamophobic trope that has long formed a key part of European far-right ideology. Her racism is also evident in a depiction of immigration as an invasion – via calls for a naval blockade and portrayal of ‘undocumented migration’ as a UN plot. This plays willingly on racist ‘great replacement’ narratives.” 

The “great replacement” storyline – common among European far right parties and the Republifascist Party here in the US – traces to classic fascism, which advanced the “them and us” notion that liberal and left globalist elites (unmistakably Jewish in fascist thought) were insidiously diluting the racial purity of white nations and “civilization” with the blood of “swarthy” and “inferior” migrants. As the leading fascism scholars Jason Stanley and Federico Finchelstein noted last May:

“In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote: ‘This pestilential adulteration of the blood… is systematically practiced by the Jew today. Systematically these black parasites in our national body corrupt our innocent blond-haired girls and thus destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world.’ Mussolini, likewise, advocated racial paranoia about the decline and replacement of the ‘white race.’ In 1934, Mussolini wrote that defending the white race was a ‘matter of life or death’ and posed this as a key political issue: ‘It is a question of knowing whether in the face of the progress in number and expansion of the yellow and black races, the civilization of the white man is destined to perish.’ This text laid the ground for the racism and segregation imposed by Italians during the war against Ethiopia in 1935 and later the racist and antisemitic laws of 1938.”

The epidemic of racist white “replacement” rhetoric reflects a chilling neofascist resurgence across Europe: “late fascism” with no mustaches required nearly a half century into the long, democracy-discrediting neoliberal era.

And US-America’s “it can’t happen here” media seems oddly committed to the notion that it can’t really happen over there either. The largely identity-focused US reporting and commentary on the Meloni ascendance has downplayed the fascist roots and essence of “Italy’s first female prime minister.” Consider some of the following headlines and story lines:

The Washington Post: “Italy Shifts to the Right,” atop an essay praising the “post-fascist” Meloni for “sound[ing] a moderate, unifying tone” in her victory speech.  The Post quoted a tepid   academic who says Meloni will have to “moderate” her politics.  In short, nothing to get all “hysterical” about.  

The Atlantic: “Italians Didn’t Exactly Vote for Fascism,” advertised online as “Giorgia Meloni’s Election Win is Not a Vote for Fascism.” The message: chill out.

Financial Times: “Giorgia Meloni’s Conservative Social Agenda Raises Rights Fears in Italy,” headline to an article that reported condescendingly on how skittish “liberals fear that her arch-conservative government will roll back the clock, curb individual rights and social freedoms, and stoke animosity towards those who do not fit neatly into traditional Italian family models.” The message meaning: liberals, please relax, she’s just a “conservative,” not a “fascist.”

A subsequent Financial Times (FT) commentary is titled “Giorgia Meloni’s Victory Merits Concerns but Not Panic.”  Here the FT Editorial Board explains that “the very reasons that propelled a party with roots in the neo-fascist movement to the mainstream — a stagnant economy and a political system where little has changed in 20 years, no matter who is in power — should also constrain Meloni.”  So, take it easy: it’s nothing to get distraught and “wolf-crying” about here.

I particularly enjoyed this line in the second FT reflection: “There are reasons not to panic. Indeed, the financial markets’ reaction has largely been a shrug.” That’s right, world citizens: if the unelected dictatorship of capital isn’t concerned, you don’t need to be either!

The New York Times: “Meloni Wins in Breakthrough for Europe’s Hard Right,” atop an article that portrays Italy’s first female prime minister as a “nationalist” and “populist” friend of Ukraine and a J.R.R. Tolkien fan. Nothing to take to the streets about (actually, thousands of Italian women and feminists did exactly that to defend abortion rights last week).

Politico: “Europe’s Right-Wing Cheers Meloni’s Win as Others Look on Nervously,” atop an article that quoted a Spanish foreign minister on how “populism always ends in disaster.

The Politico report also notes “Sweden’s election from last week, where right-wing parties emerged victorious” (emphasis added).  “Right-wing parties” indeed.  A little background on what happened in “social democratic” Sweden: a fascist organization founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads – the ironically named Sweden Democrats (which Wikipedia can only call “a nationalist and right-wing populist party”) became the largest party in Sweden’s likely governing coalition.

“How About We Stop Whitewashing People Who Say and Do Fascist Things?”

As Mehdi Hasan asked his viewers on MSNBC last Sunday, “Do you notice a trend? It is not as bad as you think. This isn’t really fascism. Stop the hyperbole and hysteria. It will all be fine. I couldn’t help but think that I had seen these hot takes before,” Hasan said, citing the Ross Douthat column I quoted above and mainstream media coverage and commentary before Trump’s 2016 election.

“I have a humble suggestion for many of my colleagues in the, quote, unquote, liberal media,” concluded Hasan. “How about in the year 2022, we stop playing down, minimizing, whitewashing people who literally say or do fascist things? People who want to overturn elections and ban Muslims. People who, as in the case of Italy’s next prime minister, spout great replacement theory, while running a political party that has a direct connection back to Benito Mussolini himself? Can we try doing that? Please?”

Something to think about as the now fully fascitized Republican Party – a stern advocate of fascist replacement theory (FRT) – prepares to likely take back the US House of Representative and as its Christian fascist Supreme Court takes up a case that will permit red (brown?) state legislatures to cancel statewide popular votes in the next presidential election.

I’d like to talk to Hasan about this problem, which I have been writing about for years in great empirical and interpretive depth both in essays and at the book level. Please write him and recommend me as a guest on The Mehdi Hasan Show:  @mehdirhasan (Twitter) and https://www.facebook.com/MrMehdiHasan