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Tom Coleman's avatar

Another gem of a column by Ruth. Whatever one wishes to call it, fascism, authoritarianism, etc, it must be stopped. I hope the Democratic controlled congress recognizes that passing the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Acts may be the only thing that can save us from state election nullifications and the loss of our democracy. If not now, when?

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Alexander Chimes's avatar

The many comments inspired by this piece by RBG on the terms "Fascism" and "Fascist" are extremely interesting. They exhibit an impressive level of concern, knowledge, thought, and insight. At the same time, the viewpoints they express seem bewilderingly heterogeneous (much like the stereotypical debate among any group of Democrats).

RBG begins by explaining why she is addressing this topic: "People are often disappointed that I don't call Trump . . . a Fascist." She then describes her treatment of her topic in respect to its two component parts: the term "Fascist" can "perpetuate outdated ideas about how authoritarianism works." That is, first, the term is intrinsically inappropriate because it does not accurately describe the current form of the phenomenon it is being applied to. Second, the term is rhetorically inappropriate because it is likely to mislead the audience to whom it is addressed.

Insisting on accurate terminology is neither pedantic nor removed from reality. You expect your mechanic to know the names of the parts of your car in order to be able to understand the way they work and the complex ways they interact. You expect your medical doctor to know the complex, arcane terminology required to diagnose and treat what ails you, together with the complex medical realities which that terminology describes. In turn, the terminology in every field depends on a valid taxonomy, or system of classification. The term, or name, for a biological organism means little apart from the complex taxonomy of the plant, animal, and fungal kingdoms. It is impossible for a biologist to work without that taxonomy. Similarly, the work of the astronomer cannot be done without the taxonomy of astral bodies; the work of the chemist cannot be done without the periodic table of the elements. The development of each of these taxonomies, together with their terminologies, has been a major intellectual achievement requiring the cooperation of many brilliant individuals over centuries or millennia.

There is no such single, established taxonomy in the field of history. There is no such taxonomy in the field of "authoritarian," "autocratic," or "Fascist" studies. There is no scientifically settled and rigorous field of knowledge concerning "authoritarian," "autocratic," or "Fascist" rulers based on such a taxonomy. A glance at the scholarship in any field of history shows that a great many schools of historical interpretation exist. Studying any historical phenomenon of any era requires recognizing that there will inevitably be many ways of interpreting it, all of them to a greater or lesser extent mutually contradictory.

Nevertheless, there seems to be an unstated and unrecognized assumption here that there is some "correct" terminology, taxonomy and interpretation, or diagnosis, that will "explain" the contemporary political situation in America, if only we work at it a little longer and a little harder, and also a little longer and a little harder at persuading others that our interpretation is correct. This "correct" diagnosis will lead to a prescription for curing our situation. This is magical thinking. If things were that simple, we would not be in this situation in the first place. This magical thinking is produced by the rising panic caused by the recognition that America is already to a significant extent brutally "authoritarian" or "Fascist," and may soon become almost wholly so. If you're diagnosed with a potentially fatal and not-well-understood disease, you naturally wish for a magical cure. But reality will implacably return the answer to you that there is none.

Mario Cuomo, one of the greatest liberal communicators and orators of the second half of the twentieth century, said that first you have to figure out what policy you want to pursue; then you have to "put it into baby-talk." Unfortunately there is no good term from "baby-talk" for referring to the "authoritarianism" or "Fascism" that is rising in contemporary America. It would be self-indulgent and irresponsible for RBG to use a false but gratifyingly inflammatory terminology employing such baby-talk in order to allay our anxieties. As Orwell taught, abuse of language leads directly to abuse in politics. We turn to RBG for the same reason we see a medical doctor when we are sick with a little-understood disease. We cannot expect her to provide a magical cure, but we understand that she, and others like her, possess knowledge, understanding, and wisdom that we do not, and that we profoundly need.

Instead of anxiously making a fetish of terminology, we need to recognize that our first problem is that our own understanding of what ails us is inadequate. America did not suddenly develop its current political pathology in 2016. Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and other voices, censored for decades from the mainstream in a "democratic" America with a supposedly progressive party, have long been shouting into the wind, trying to warn us that we needed to wake up and take action. We did not. Now we spend a lot of time blaming others for our current situation; we need to look in the mirror. We do not properly understand the current political pathology in America in part because we never understood democracy in the first place. We just took it for granted. In order to understand our political pathology, we need to understand democracy for the first time, because "Fascism" and its congeners are diseases of democracy. Solving our problems requires not winning online debates, but educating first ourselves, and then Americans en masse, about the nature of our situation. It is up to those who of us are aware of our present danger, like those who read Lucid, to learn to understand our situation better and more realistically than we do. Then we can try to educate those who are asleep--not just try to wake them up by shouting inflammatory words at them.

Americans are only now, too slowly and in numbers that are too small, awakening from their decades-long slumber, during which reactionaries have been brilliantly executing their coup-in-slow-motion. We can only start from where we are. We need to remember the negative example of the Arab Spring. The Egyptians got rid of the "fascist" Mubarak only to get the "fascist Islamist" Morsi; then they got rid of the "fascist Islamist" Morsi only to get the "fascist" Sisi. Similarly, the failed coup attempt against Erdogan served only as a Reichstag moment that enabled him to consolidate his power even further. It will do us no good to get rid of Donald Trump only to get Tucker Carlson because we didn't know what we were doing. We must recognize the real possibility, as Sarah Kendzior puts it, that a few "generations of martyrs" may soon be required to restore democracy in America. We need to educate ourselves properly now about a historical situation in which an even greater nightmare than we are currently facing is a genuine possibility.

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