Charlottesville, the Republican Party, and the rise of American fascism.
Like most of us, I’ve spent the last few days trying to process the news. Holding onto some semblance of composure as the abject horror, revulsion, and fear roar up through the pit of your stomach to crash against the heart of you is hard. It’s impossible in some cases. You know there’s nothing you can do, no point in giving in — that tears won’t change a thing. You’ve dealt with worse than this, damnit. But they come nonetheless.
Last weekend I wept for my new home. For what might happen to my friends and family. For the dead and wounded in Virginia. And for the ideals this country was founded on, to which it has never quite lived up. I wept for the shared future I can see slipping further from our grasp with every passing day.
The sight of neo-Nazis armed to the teeth and terrorising an American city, beating and murdering antifascist protestors while the police looked on was horrifying. What followed felt somehow worse. When circumstances and citizens alike demanded he decry the fascists killing people in the streets, the President of the United States equivocated. He refused to denounce white supremacists and neo-Nazis, even when directly called upon to do so. Instead, he blamed “many sides”. The Daily Stormer loved it.
That he then followed up two days later with a boilerplate speech calling Nazis and the KKK “thugs” changes nothing. Given his praise of murderous neo-Nazis as “very fine people” the following day in the same breath as he blamed the “alt-left” for the violence visited upon Charlottesville, that speech — late, forced, petulant — rings as hollow as his convictions.
The fascists and the bigots still know Trump’s their man. He instinctively knows it too. It’s why he said what he did. It’s why he continues to do and say what he has. And it’s why he isn’t going to stop. He knows on which side his bread is buttered.
It isn’t just the terrifying roster of racists and literal neo-Nazis peopling his administration — Bannon, Gorka, Miller et al — it’s him. And it’s his party, or at least a significant section of it. That the man who began his Presidential campaign ranting about Mexicans being rapists and drug dealers supports white supremacy shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Yet many Republicans seem utterly taken aback by the racism, the fascism on display both from the man they elected to the highest office in the land and from their base.
They shouldn’t be. This infection has been growing inside their party for decades. Starting with the realignment of the South in the ’60s, and rendered official doctrine with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the Republican Party has made common cause with racists and bigots for half a century. They gave the worst elements of this country a place to grow, even helped them flourish, because doing so helped them win and hold onto political power. Now we all have to pay the price for their shortsighted, craven avarice.
I am not claiming that all Republicans are bigots. I know many personally who aren’t, and I’m sure that applies to elected Republicans as well. But a great number avowedly are. Those who are sickened by the events in Charlottesville and the response — by a President who fanned the flames rather than fighting them — may be asking themselves how this happened. Let me explain.
The Decline and Fall of the Grand Old Party
When Nixon welcomed the Southern Democrats into the Party of Lincoln he fundamentally altered its makeup and ideology. These new Republicans were a far cry from the abolitionists and businessmen who founded and led the party for much of its history. They were the inheritors of the ideology and institutions it was formed to fight.
Representing the rump of the Confederacy, those who governed the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow South (and largely still do today) have been the not-so-silent third party in American politics since the Civil War. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, this third, unofficial party switched camps to the Republicans. Nixon’s 1968 campaign, with its barely-coded appeals to racism and division, completed the transition.
The new bloc gave the Republicans a solid base of political power from which to win Presidential elections, and a near-complete control of the South which persists to this day. But it cost them their soul. Seeing the new direction the Republicans were going, racists and bigots who had been present in both parties slowly but surely filtered from one to the other. This process irrevocably altered the makeup of the party’s electorate, and the policy objectives it pursued. Republican leaders catered to them, grudgingly at first, in order to win primaries and elections.
Thence came the War on Drugs, “welfare queens” and mandatory minimums. The entry of a militant, millennialist, and theocratic species of Christianity into the political mainstream — welcomed with open arms by conservative Republicans who confused fundamentalism with faith. The election of people who take freedom of religion to mean the freedom to do as they like in its name. The obsession with making government just small enough to fit into our bedrooms. Insisting the Constitution be read as “originally written”, despite it being a living document which has been amended seventeen times since it was first put to paper. Rampant voter suppression. I could go on. There were many paving slabs laid on this path to hell.
Following Newt Gingrich’s lead, in the ’90s elected Republicans started appealing to the most virulent and hateful impulses of their voters directly to win elections. They and their new propaganda network at Fox News, along with a host of smaller, newer media outlets, invented enemies and delivered a non-stop stream of threatening Others — LGBT people, people of colour, Muslims — to whip their base into an unthinking frenzy. It worked. It’s much easier to persuade someone to agree with you when they feel threatened.
Make enough people think the barbarians are at the gates and you can justify almost anything by way of response.
Together, Fox News and the Republicans fanned the flames of white resentment, racism, and bigotry. The idea spread among a large minority of the populace that they were under imminent threat, and then constant attack, from anyone who was different to them. The message that you couldn’t be anything other than white, straight, and Christian if you wanted to be a Real American was received loud and clear. This was nothing new in American politics, but its reach and delivery method were. Now they could pipe propaganda directly into people’s living rooms and call it news.
Fox and the burgeoning right-wing media sphere fed the currents of hatred and paranoia which had always permeated the American political landscape and turned them into a torrent. A lot of people made an awful lot of money doing so. The Republicans, who likewise benefited from the fear engendered among their constituents, were silent.
They remained silent as 2008 rolled around and brought the election of Barack Obama, along with an instant and virulently racist reaction among much of the their base. Out of that reaction sprang the Tea Party movement and, less immediately, Donald Trump. Given succour and sustained by the Koch Brothers and other giant corporate interests, the Tea Party swiftly captured primary votes and seats previously commanded by traditional Republicans. Those who didn’t lose their seats had to pander to the new movement in order to keep them.
Once in office, the new crop of legislators’ rhetoric and attempts at policy mirrored the febrile rantings of the right-wing media they consumed. They shared the same sense of resentment towards a changing world and fear of the Other as the voters who put them there, and the ones who didn’t were forced to fake it. Driven purely by a poisoned ideology, tribalism, and that nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror FDR characterised long ago, the policies pursued by these extremists brought Congress to a screeching halt. Forced to focus on nonexistent problems in lieu of dealing with pressing existential threats like climate change or economic inequality, the legislature of the most powerful country on earth remains paralysed as I write.
The extremist takeover of the Republican Party was more or less complete by 2010. Yet even as they have been consumed by it, GOP leaders have banked on being able to control the growing conflagration they fuelled. They very clearly failed. In pursuit of political power the Republicans first ransomed the soul of their party, then the health, metaphorical and literal, of the nation they were elected to serve. They let hucksters and fear-mongerers turn millions of Americans against their fellow citizens in their name, and it has hurt them just as much as it’s hurting the rest of us.
No wonder the party leadership didn’t see Trump coming. While the man who would one day be President latched onto the racist “Birther” conspiracy theory and gained traction with an ever larger section of their base, they were trying to survive the whirlwind he was riding.
The Republicans reaped great short-term rewards, as a party, from that whirlwind. It won them control of congress, most governorships, and a majority of state legislatures. In the end, it won them the White House. These were pyrrhic victories, to say the least.
With the rise of the “alt-right” (rebranded Naziism, with a 4Chan flavour for the kids), and the growth of Breitbart and other propaganda sites, the extremism of the Tea Party was easily converted into outright fascism. A whole class of disaffected, angry, white, young men started becoming much more of a force in right-wing politics. Indoctrinated and internet-savvy, they spread their ideology of hatred and organised via the same social networks which had become so vital to political campaigns. And they were good at it. After decades of fomenting toxicity and fear, the atmosphere on the right was perfect for their message. Fox News and talk radio had done their job all too well.
The Republican Party was utterly, woefully ill-equipped to fight the spread of fascism amongst their base. Their role in creating the conditions for it to flourish destroyed any ability the party leadership might have had to mount an ideological immune response. They’d been poisoning the well for too long. When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President by denouncing Mexicans, and then pursued a campaign of division marked by violence and naked attacks on minorities of all kinds, the party he sought to lead consistently refused to take a stand. They couldn’t, because he is the culmination of a process that they themselves set and kept in motion.
Thus, when an authoritarian fascist supported by hate groups won the Republican Presidential nomination, and subsequently the election, most of the party lined up behind him. Some figured they could hold their noses and vote for tax cuts, some simply liked what he had to say. At this point the difference is moot. When enriching your friends and donors is more important to you as a legislator than the safety and civil rights of your citizens — when you help fascists take over the government to try and push your own agenda — you lose all right to quibble over your role in what happens next.
History does not differentiate between Germans who joined the Nazi Party because they wanted to get ahead in politics and those who wanted to murder millions. If our civilisation survives this intact, scholars a century from now will not spare the people responsible their role in current events either.
What can we do?
The Republican Party has become the party of fascism, hatred, and bigotry. It need not stay that way. Republicans — true conservatives — need to wrest their party away from the extremists who have perverted it to their own foul ends. Americans as a whole can and must do the same for their government.
The fascism of the Confederacy and its descendants was grafted into the GOP in the ’60s. It has since been spread to much of the rest of the party and its base by those who subscribed to it and those who sought to use it for political gain. It is no longer a matter of removing the diseased tissue. That went out the window with the end of Reconstruction.
The ideology of the Confederacy and Jim Crow, from which the Nazis took inspiration for their racial policies, now runs through the veins of much of the American body politic. It is a disease which, as we have seen before, can be fatal if left untreated. Amputation was never really an option. We can, however, enact strategies for treatment, maybe even a cure.
So what can we do to help save the patient? How can any one of us hope to pull this wonderful, weird mess of a country back from the gaping void into which these modern-day Nazis and wannabe slavers seek to drag us? We can’t. Neither individually nor as disparate groups. It’s going to take nearly all of us working together.
I don’t care if you’re conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, left, right, or centre. If you believe the government shouldn’t provide healthcare, for instance, I vehemently disagree with you. But we can argue about that later (and, believe me, we will).
There are Nazis murdering people in the streets of America, and there are more here who agree with them than ever before. Their leader sits in the Oval Office, and they have taken over the administration. However, most people — and most Republicans, for that matter — are not Nazis. And Americans, for good or ill, have never been very good at listening to their government. The majority of us who find fascism and bigotry repulsive, who recognise the grave threat posed to our loved ones and our own lives, must see this moment for the extremely dangerous inflexion point it is. We need to stand up, and stand together. Or we’re sunk.
Take what steps you can. Call your representatives every day demanding they do their duty and protect the Republic and its citizens, whom they serve, against the threat of fascism. Demand impeachment. Demand investigations. Demand respite from the horror.
Republicans: demand your party renounce fascism and bigotry; expel Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers from your organisations and your friend-groups. They are not conservatives. They are fascist extremists and their ideology will prove deadly both to your party and this country. Drive them out. Then join us in the streets.
The rest of us need to keep protesting, marching, and demonstrating the courage of our convictions. Keep standing up to the bullies and the brutes, even in the face of violence. Give them neither platform nor quarter. If there are Nazis marching in your town, go out and oppose them if you’re able — and damn the torpedoes. Our grandparents’ generation risked far worse the last time these fuckers reared their ugly heads. Those of us who aren’t physically capable of doing that need to work however we can to support the fight.
If you’re an artist, help others see what you see. If you’re a writer, tell the truth and inspire to action. If you’re a nurse or doctor, treat the wounded and aid the sick. If you’re an organiser, get people into the streets and polling booths. If you’re an elected official, lead. Whatever skills you have, for the sake of humanity use them to turn back the darkness.
Help those in need. Comfort the distressed. Do what you know to be right.
There are many, many more of us than there are of them. And they know it. So suit up. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
