Media Criticism
Liberals now have official permission to use the "F" word
On January 26, The Atlantic let its readers know how to identify fascism; and that the Trump regime is fascist. Jonathan Rauch’s article apparently convinced Boston-based media commentator, former Globie, and current FB digital creator, Dan Kennedy. While he fancies himself a media critic, Kennedy’s approach has been to comfortably situate his object of inquiry inside a bourgeois framing.
Interesting essay by Jonathan Rauch on why he’s concluded that Trump is an actual fascist. I’ve been calling Trump an authoritarian for a long time, and a racist hate-monger for even longer, but I wasn’t quite sure how you’d go about defining fascism. [Emphasis added]
Dan Kennedy is an educated and experienced man, so it is absurd to believe he would not have been certain how to identify fascism, until he read this article. That is what I mean by the “bourgeois framework” from which he critiques media: Pretend to be stupid enough not to have an opinion of your own.
Fascism is the political expression of the philosophies of capitalist corporatism, exercised upon populations; so far, via the nation-state. It involves a private-public partnership where the minority owning class utilizes the state as an instrument to exact class-centered discipline and violence upon the population residing within its hegemon. The state becomes aligned with the private authority of the owning class over the working class, across the society as a whole. This expansion of private authority must expand to the totality of social life; as the state takes on the character of the mode and relations of production. Like Capital, fascism is dictatorial and totalitarian. The bourgeois framing makes it difficult to critique the politics of fascism without implicating the mode of production, but liberal media imagines a fascism that somehow stands alone.
Where we are today in the U.S. makes a lot more sense if we can connect the dots between social class and state practices.
Since the rise of Robber Barons in the Progressive Era, America has always been drawn toward the private-public power matrix that marks fascism. The National Guard was literally brought in to kill striking workers, at the dawn of the Labor Movement. When the state is used violently, as a tool by the Bourgeoisie over the Proletariat, we see fascism in practice.
The post-WWII Red Scare, that drew private industry (communications, especially) to serve state purposes was another. Hollywood was at once attacked for harboring Communists, while its lifeblood, publicity, was used to convey the message that Communism is a danger to Freedom.
The Drug War combined Madison Avenue’s Partnership for a Drug-Free America with surveillance by urinalysis at the place of laboring, and police and cameras in High-Intensity (urban) Drug-Trafficking Areas that resulted in a massive slave-labor army, driven from locations with low employment to private prisons, where there was a job for everyone. The prison corporation made money in two directions, first through contracts with the state that guaranteed laborers (the new, mandatory minimum sentences addressed a staffing matter), and then from transnational corporations that bought the slave labor for below the federal minimum wage. A large portion of nonviolent Drug War prisoners hyper-fed state-subsidized profits to a selection of corporate owners, and still do.
Take seventeen years of the Reagan Drug War and suddenly expand it to international and domestic surveillance of phone calls and online communications, under the hastily-passed (but not hastily assembled) 2001 PATRIOT Act. How much surveillance? Well, Edward Snowden saw something & said something, and was exiled for it. As happened with the Drug War, a new category of criminal was invented: the “Enemy Combatant.” This new criminal category allowed the indefinite suspension of habeas corpus, the summary extradition to Black Sites, and “enhanced interrogation techniques,” because “torture” is a moral offense and the United States tries to maintain moral purity.
After these social panics created this private-public partnership for surveilling and disciplining the populous, have we seen much for suggesting we take a step back from any of it?
There has been one that comes to my mind. Joe Biden ended the cocaine sentencing disparities he was instrumental in creating. He also got a rescheduling of marijuana in the works, that Trump has claimed credit for. Policy recommendations are to be determined, but there will be no “Free, legal, backyard marijuana,” regardless of the particulars.
There has not been a peep about fixing our omnibus federal drug policy that literally criminalizes “drug abuse” (of some drugs), without ever defining it. It is useful for a fascist state to characterize vague criminalities: Drugs; Terror; Immigrants: our latest War.
Trump and company won’t give it the name it deserves, but that doesn’t make it much different. The surveillance DOGE pulled off across federal bureaus certainly aided in identifying targets among the population, and when it came time to fund ICE, no one asked why a federal police force designated to apprehend people committing non-violent misdemeanors would need night vision scopes on AR-15’s, or chemical munitions for crowd control.
Crowds need to be motivated to form; and that is part of ICE’s new purpose—create unrest to frame further violence against the population.
Just as ICE was secretly trained to ignore the fourth amendment, and barge into domiciles without search warrants, they are likely to also be secretly engaged in other activities. From the fascist playbook, you arm your allies. Not just officially, through ICE, but also by diverting weapons and ammunition to “Freedom Fighters” found in right-wing militias, in heavily-wooded states with Governors whom Trump holds a vendetta against.
While Dan Kennedy claims to have needed a writer from The Atlantic to confirm his suspicions, readers of “Practicing Sociology Without a License” have always been presented with a material, historical perspective that does not see fascism as a sudden aberration, but instead as an ongoing practice with increasing degrees of intensity, since 1984, especially.
This is the same perspective that informs my thinking about the upcoming Democratic cave-in on funding the American Gestapo into the future. Despite a couple weeks where those Senators who promised to “reform” ICE have shifted to threatening to defund it, Trump’s high-profile removal of the Heinrich Himmler mini-me wannabe, Greg Bovino, should prove enough cover for them to keep ICE uber-funded, when they vote later this week.
The Democrats represent the bourgeois, too. Directly, since the early 1990’s and more openly since Citizens United declared no limits on the volume of money spent narrowing democratic choices to (self-funded) billionaires and their sponsored operatives. A political cartel’s monopoly over the electoral process is turning the federal government into a purely disciplinary tool, to be used against its own people.
Don’t get caught up in individualizing this. Trump is merely the representative of the moment. They have already institutionalized the hold on elections, and in six months they will be crowing about “Freedom” and “Taking America Back.” Even if Trump is still cogent enough for an impeachment, the Democrats are not going to propose any real steps back from the fascistic controls that have already been established.
There is literally only one way to end fascism, since the fascists don’t give anyone else the chance to rule.