Trump and the Hell's Angels

 This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson:  In Hell’s Angels, the gonzo journalist wrote about left-behind people motivated only by “an ethic of total retaliation.” Sound familiar?
By Susan McWilliams

What’s truly shocking about reading [Hell's Angels] today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind.

Fascism and violence

It's important to understand fascism in its historical context. Mussolini and Hitler used a complex of political, social, cultural, and economic ideas to seize and maintain state power. David Neiwert has done a lot of historical work on precisely what they did and how they did it.

But in another sense, I think it's important to analyze not just what fascism is or was, but what precisely we don't like about fascism. To no small extent, the specific ideas that the fascists promoted are historically contingent. They did what they did because material conditions in Italy and Germany in the 1930s made those specific ideas especially useful and effective. But it is no longer the 1930s, and the United States is not Italy or Germany, so we could relax some of the specifics of what fascism was, and concentrate on what was more generally bad about fascism.

So, for example, one element of fascism is subordinating the ordinary individual to the state, and the state to the Great Leader. If we're going to define fascism as the more-or-less "essential" elements of what Mussolini and Hitler did, this kind of subordination is pretty essential, and if someone we don't like doesn't have it, whatever they are, they're not fascists.

And on the other side, I personally don't want to subordinate myself to the state, but if that's what people want, why shouldn't they have it? Human individuality is at some basic level ineluctable, so if people were to individually choose to think of themselves as elements of the state, they are still actually individuals.

But what if the masses of Germans and Italians didn't actually choose to be good fascist citizens? Then our criticism wouldn't be that people chose some way to live that we personally don't like, but because the fascists violated the more general principle that people should exercise substantial freedom of choice. I'm not an historian, and I haven't studied the history of 1930s/1940s Italy and Germany in any detail, but from my cursory readings, it does seem that Italians and Germans didn't really choose to be fascists, but were intimidated into tolerating it.

And thus we can drill down into what's really bad about fascism in a more general way: legitimization of state power directly by violence. A regime is "fascist" in this sense to the degree that it maintains its legitimacy directly by its ability to perpetrate violence against its subjects, and not by its promise (even insincere) to maximize the well-being of its citizens. "We are the legitimate state," says the fascist, "because if you don't call us legitimate, we will beat you up or kill you." Such a state is a real state, it has legitimacy, but perhaps that's not the sort of legitimacy that we want.

Note that "legitimacy" in this sense is not the idea that some regime is legitimate by virtue of being the first unconstrained choice of almost all of its subjects; a state is legitimate to the extent that its subjects do not organize to oppose the state's monopoly on violence.

This idea subtly differs from the idea that the a state may legitimately use violence. Fascism is not the use or threat of state violence, but the establishment of legitimacy by means of violence. It is possible for a state to use considerable violence on its subjects — e.g. to punish unacceptably deviant behavior — so long as the mass of citizens legitimize that use on a non-violent basis. For example, people still murder their neighbors, and the state violently captures and punishes these people, but the prohibition on murder, and the state's legitimate use of violence to enforce that prohibition, is established morally and socially, not violently.

In this sense, then, a regime can be fascist to a greater or lesser degree, and can be more or less fascist towards different subsets of its population. So, for example, the American South* was absolutely fascist towards the black slaves, obtaining its legitimacy exclusively by its ability to perpetrate horrific violence against the slaves without organized opposition, and quite fascist against many white people, willing to use quite a lot of violence against white people who even hinted at opposition to slavery. In the South, slavery and the slave state was legitimate because any organized opposition to slavery was suppressed by violence.

*With the usual disclaimer that I'm not an historian of the antebellum South.

To a certain extent, it doesn't even matter that, in a climate of legitimacy-by-violence, some subjects will internalize what is supported by violence. Presumably, if the vast majority of citizens support some idea, it is unnecessary to use violence against a few idiosyncratic opponents. We do not, for example, presently hunt down and kill people who advocate biblical theocracy, despite this idea being completely contrary to our notions of a democratic republic. Thus we can infer that either opposition to slavery in the South was actually a majority*, or that allowing a minority to express opposition to slavery threatened the legitimacy of the Southern regime. Hence the South was strongly fascist.

*Of white people; we can confidently assume that almost every black person was opposed.

And too, the present neoliberal regime is quite fascist towards black people. At every level from local to federal, black people know that to effectively oppose state oppression of black people in any way means death. Organized opposition to racism is thus suppressed directly by violence. Organizations such as Black Lives Matter are tolerated only to the extent that they are ineffective. If BLM were to actually threaten the racist state, their leaders would be jailed or assassinated and their membership dispersed or slaughtered. (Most likely, BLM will be co-opted, their leaders inducted as junior members of the servants of the neoliberal ruling class, and the fascist violence against ordinary working-class black people will continue unabated.)

So too could socialists become fascists in this sense. A socialist state would be fascist to the degree that its legitimacy were established and maintained directly by violence. One of the core principles, therefore, of socialism should be that its legitimacy should never be established by violence, that socialism is absolutely anti-fascist. We must persuade the great mass of people that socialism is better, not that we have the soldiers and bullets to make people socialist, like it or not.

The inevitable rise of fascism

What we currently have is often called "neoliberalism": the second Gilded Age with fiat money instead of a gold standard; government of the bourgeoisie, by the bourgeoisie, for the bourgeoisie; as little as possible thrown to the proletariat to keep them from revolting, and always by charity, not by right or merit.

Neoliberalism has given us almost a decade of economic depression, economic insecurity, mass incarceration, police murder, wars of aggression, assassination and torture.

Clinton is not just a neoliberal, she is one of the architects of neoliberalism.

The problem with neoliberalism is that if you're not a tenured professor at Rutgers, it has been "incrementally" sucking harder every year since 1980, and by now it sucks pretty damn hard.

Neoliberalism has managed to alienate the vast majority of the population, and neoliberals no longer seek anything but the barest veneer of popular legitimacy.

The best argument the neoliberals can come up with is that There Is No Alternative.

But of course there are alternatives.

There's socialism and communism, of course. Y'all know how I feel about that. (If you're new, I'm all for it.)

Another alternative is "progressivism." Keep the system of private property and the private ownership of the means of production, but use state power not as an organ of the bourgeoisie, but as a counterpoise to its power.

Progressivism is not logically impossible: the welfare state capitalism of the United States from 1945 to 1980, and of Europe, which has not yet completely unravelled, show that it can happen.

Bernie Sanders is a progressive. Elizabeth Warren is a progressive. I would have counted Paul Krugman as a progressive, but his full-throated support for Clinton shows he's just another neoliberal. Sad. But that's where his paycheck comes from, so whaddya expect?

The problem with progressivism, as Marx could have pointed out in his sleep, is that it does not emerge from capitalist relations of production. Progressivism is unstable, and a few missteps — a war in Vietnam here, stagflation there — and the whole thing collapses like a Jenga tower.

Other than socialism and communism, I have sympathy for and common cause with progressives. As noted above, I think they are mistaken, but I would be happy to be proven wrong. And no only are they just the enemy of my enemy, but they also share substantive goals with socialists like me, the welfare of the people.

Yet another alternative is fascism. The strong man (and it's always a man). The subsumption of the the individual to the Glory of the State. The absolute polarization of Us versus Them. Force as the highest good.

Fascism is popular. It requires no theory, no thought. We are good! We are strong! We will crush our enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of their women! That is best!

Yes, fascism is worse than neoliberalism, despite the neoliberals' efforts to give the fascists a good fight in the evil department. At least neoliberals have the decency to be hypocritical about their evil.

I don't think the bourgeoisie created fascism, but they certainly have seen its uses. Tolerate a little fascism but brutally suppress even a hint of socialism, and The Only Alternative to neoliberalism is fascism. Thus, when black people exercise their Second Amendment rights — and read Mao, and hang out with Bob Avakian — the neoliberals (and "progressives") murder them, imprison them, and utterly break them. When white supremacists and Christian fascists exercise their Second Amendment rights, the neoliberals keep an eye on them, but mostly leave them alone.

It's a good plan. Millions of people who hate neoliberalism are going to vote for Clinton, because Trump really is worse: at best he's a buffoon; at worst he's a fascist or a harbinger of fascism.

I don't blame them. Progressivism is a nice idea, but it failed almost forty years ago. It's a dead end.

Socialism has been utterly destroyed. There are no functioning, effective socialist institutions left in the world. The Soviet Union fell to the mafia; the People's Republic of China fell to the capitalists. The socialist parties and organizations in the West have devolved into squabbling mutual masturbation societies. Marx remains as relevant as ever, but the bourgeoisie have read Marx too, and will not again be caught napping as they were in 1929.

As the neoliberal bourgeoisie becomes more and more divorced from the common good, as the population becomes economically, politically, and socially alienated alienated, people will search for an alternative, any alternative. The only space they have allowed for opposition is fascism, so that's what people will find. Because the fascists are not (yet) in power, they can make no mistakes, and they can attribute every social problem (even in themselves) to the corruption and decadence of the neoliberals. (Meanwhile making common cause with the bourgeoisie behind closed doors for the extirpation of their common enemy, the socialists.)

The fascists are not stupid: unlike the socialists, who really will eliminate (in a political sense) the bourgeoisie, the fascists will allow the bourgeoisie to retain considerable power. Neither are the bourgeoisie stupid: if the fascists allow the bourgeoisie any power, the bourgeoisie will — with the weight of economics on their side — eventually regain absolute power.

For the bourgeoisie, socialism is doom, but fascism is just a strategic retreat.

Clinton will win, Trump will lose. Neoliberalism will limp on for another eight years. The locus of neoliberal power will move to the Democratic party, and the Sanders/Warren "progressives" will be bought off and their supporters suppressed. Any "left" alternative will be fragmented and factionalized into competing identity-politics groups fighting each other for the bourgeoisie's scraps.

The Republican party will continue to move towards fascism. As the neoliberals continue to make the world worse, they will eventually gain power. It's just a matter of time.

Hopefully, I'll be dead by then. As for y'all, good luck.

Garbage and gravitas

Garbage and Gravitas: Ayn Rand was a melodramatist of the moral life: the battle is between the producer and the moochers, and it must end in life or death.

The chief conflict in Rand’s novels, then, is not between the individual and the masses. It is between the demigod-creator and all those unproductive elements of society—the intellectuals, bureaucrats and middlemen—that stand between him and the masses. Aesthetically, this makes for kitsch; politically, it bends toward fascism.