The real "danger to democracy" may not be the half of the electorate voting for Donald Trump
It may in fact turn out to be the other half prostrating themselves before the "weak gods" of a "middle class upbringing"
As the fateful Presidential election of 2024 draws near, Kamala Harris and many of the Democratic Party elites have shifted from touting the “politics of joy” to warning darkly – once again - that Donald Trump is a “fascist” as well as the most ghastly menace to democracy that has reared up from the political netherworld since Adolph Hitler.
Since we didn’t hear anything at all throughout August or even earlier in the fall about the grim, existential choice we all face in November between a 25K gift card for a new house versus jack-booted MAGA-inflamed NASCAR enthusiasts donning pith helmets and trampling all over our arugula patches, someone who is totally tuned out of all this electoral primal screaming might be tempted to blame it simply on general vibes felt in the runup to Halloween.
But now Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly on prodding by the New York Times has offered the opinion that Trump is indeed a “fascist”. Kamala Harris agrees, and thus it must be so.
Res ipsa loquitur, as those personal injury lawyers with nicknames that sounds like biker gang members might phrase it: “the thing speaks for itself”.
Of course, it really all depends on what one means by such popular, overdetermined “f-word”.
As the Associated Press notes, most people don’t have a clue what it means. In fact, even the “experts” interviewed by the left-leaning AP don’t agree that Trump fits the definition.
Heck, fascists are also supposed to be rabid antisemites, and as we’ve already argued in this space, most of the bilious antisemitism these past months is not emanating from Trump or his minions, but those inured within the growling bowels of the ruling neoliberal knowledge class, i.e., the caffè macchiato forever crowd who violently hate Trump.
As I write this piece the nation of Israel has launched bombing strikes against Iran, and red X - formerly blows-against-the-empire Twitter - is howling that all Jews are indistinguishable from fascists.
Go figure.
In my humble opinion “fascism” is nothing more than a red herring - and a slimy one at that.
It’s merely the go-to expletive for those countless brain-dead n’er-do-wells among the burgeoning academic, media, and political un-intelligentsia who have nothing to say of substance about what really ought to be done to make visible changes in the world, because they don’t really have a thought that is grounded in anything that actually matters.
Ye shall know them by their “middle class upbringing”.
But these militant mainstreaming “morons” – I cite the original, ancient Greek meaning of the word as “slow, dull, foolish, stupid, silly” – and their epigones who know, and care to know, nothing about the nuanced history of genuine fascism did not spring up, as the Beatles song goes, like “nowhere men” from “nowhere land”.
They are the legacy of what Catholic theologian R.R. (“Rusty”) Reno in his trenchant book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West terms the “postwar consensus” – more technically what I, borrowing an expression coined by political theorist Nancy Fraser, refer to as “progressive neoliberalism”.
Reno’s thesis is not only well-evidenced, it is highly plausible.
The problem is not the fantasized resurgence of historical fascism, he writes. It is the self-indulgent obsession of our rudderless and overanxious elites with the irreversibility of our ethically conflicted past, leading to the “relentless pursuit of openness, disenchantment, and weakening”.
Those who have been economically and culturally disenfranchised by this “weakening” of the bonds of social solidarity have been doubly stigmatized, Reno maintains, and are now in revolt.
The consummate danger lies in the rhetoric of those who, like Hillary Clinton, would write them off as a “basket of deplorables”.
Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and other populist challengers are not choirboys or immaculate liberals. But their limitations are not nearly as dangerous to the West as the fanaticism of our leadership class, whose hyper-moralistic sense of mission—either us or Hitler!—prevents us from addressing our economic, demographic, cultural, and political problems. The growth of these problems stokes further discontent and greater polarization, to which our leadership class responds with an amplified anti-fascist or anti-racist rhetoric. Convinced that only they can save the West and beholden to the postwar consensus, the rich and powerful, not populist voters, will shipwreck our nations.
According to Reno, the fear of fascism is only stoking what may be considered an insidious new form of “politically correct” and political intolerant “fascism” that ironically goes by the moniker of anti-fascism.
Consider the secretive group Antifa known for turning peaceful protests into sanguinary melees. “Antifa of course is the short version of “anti-fascism”.
The ideology of the postwar era, which has endured for my own entire lifetime, has in Reno’s estimation had a long, slow debilitating impact on modern society’s ability to function.
Reno comments:
Whether in 1945, 1975, or 2015, the consensus has remained substantially the same. In the postwar era, we’ve been trained to believe that the future of humanity depends upon our ability to drain the enflaming power of traditional truth-claims from public life so that benighted peoples will not rally around old, divisive loyalties. The political imperative has remained constant: We must drive out the strong gods from the West. We do so by relativizing them, putting them into their historical contexts, critiquing their xenophobic, patriarchal, cisgender, and racist legacies, and showing how they are products of a sociobiological process that produces in us a reptilian “tribal mind.” The postwar consensus promises that these therapies of disenchantment will deter the citizens of the West from renewing their fealty to the strong gods.
But the “tribal mind” is far more compelling – and given our genomic makeup, perhaps far viable on an evolutionary scale – than what Reno graphically describes as “flesh-eating dogmas masquerading as the fulfillment of the anti-dogmatic spirit”.
Weak gods are the gods of economic decline, social demoralization, and political chaos. They automatically engender “strong gods”, whether they be those of Calvinism, Nazism, Maoism, Islamism, populism, or – dare we say? – Trumpism.
Fascism was only one highly toxic type of “divine” regimen that metastasized out of unique historical conditions and gave rise to unimaginable suffering. But other painful, albeit less brutal, regimens may prove inevitable, if the health of the body politic is not addressed.
Reno is saying essentially the same thing that long-forgotten intellectual celebrities like Robert Nisbet, Daniel Bell, or Andrew Greeley were saying over a generation ago.
I myself even wrote a book that sounds a lot like Reno’s as far back as 1978.
What makes Reno’s contribution timely is that he is no longer critiquing the “postwar consensus” in its now decadent guise of progressive neoliberal pseudo-capitalism. He is telling us that we are on both intellectual and moral life support, and the reckoning is right around the corner.
“Strong gods” are as necessary to human flourishing as a strong body is to human health health. It’s known as having a common purpose that authorizes the common good.
As Reno puts it, “the strong gods of public life are quite simply the objects of our shared loves. They are whatever arouses in us an ardor to wed our destinies to that which we love”.
That’s, as it turns out, is the diametrical opposite of fascism.
What we have is no longer what President George H.W. Bush, referring to the infinite variation on the public good and the diverse forms of public service during his 1988 Presidential campaign, referred to as “a thousand points of light”.
What we have instead is far more than a thousand pricks of privatized resentments coalescing into a looming class war throughout this land that was once ours to share.
Our hyper-partisanship is not simply irritating background noise to the ongoing pursuit of time-honored political processes. It is wide-open, festering wound that that requires emergency intervention.
As Reno suggests, some kind of “authoritarianism” will take root when even the most flitting markers of transcendental authority are ruthlessly forbidden by the custodians of culture. That “whenever” happens to be now.
That condition is truly what Nietzsche had in mind with his famous aphorism that “God is dead”. Those who flaunt the phrase about the divine demise routinely fail to acknowledge the import of the follow-on sentence: “We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers.”
The virulent and fulsomely fashionable antisemitism that flourishes these days within the academic left and masquerades as “anti-Zionism” is a clear case in point.
The “strong” gods of yesteryear that for a time inspired fantasies of social revolution have proven to be weaker than anyone anticipated.
Thus their sudden and blatant infatuation with terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, not to mention their actual celebration of the hideous Oct. 7 pogrom one year later, only serves to prove the point that human nature abhors a vacuum.
To fill it they will prostrate themselves before the most savage of the strong gods without even a whiff of irony.
As Nietzsche wrote at the end of the Genealogy of Morals, “human beings would rather have the void for meaning than be void of meaning.”