What To Expect in the Next 2 Years, pt 1

Like most of you, I’ve been struggling a bit with the outcome of the election. It’s taken me some time to collect my thoughts and to find the time to write this post, which will certainly be at least two posts. I don’t really have time to write this–I’m up to my neck in other work right now. But we as a community (both queer and kinky) need to start preparing for what’s going to happen.

The point of this post is to make sure you understand the scope of the problem. And here it is:

The US just elected a Fascist president and gave a Fascist political party a lot more power than they have ever had.

You might be thinking I’m exaggerating, but I assure you I am not. Experts on Fascism generally agree he’s a Fascist, although scholars, being scholars, typically debate the exact characteristics of Fascism. Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Adolf HItler; one of his ex-wives claimed he kept a copy of HItler’s speeches on his nightstand. Trump’s speeches frequently echo Hitler’s language and style. A very simple way to think about Fascism is that it’s what you get when you combine the conservative tendency toward an authoritarian executive with a conservative version of nationalism in its 19th century sense.

The term ‘national’ has evolved a great deal from the 19th to the 21st century. Today we use the word ‘nation’ as a synonym for ‘country’, so that people tend to confuse nationalism with patriotism. But in the 19th century sense of the word, a nation is not a place but a collection of people. 19th century nationalists debated what characteristics a people needed to share to be a nation, but generally speaking a nation had a shared ancestry, shared language, a shared religion, and a shared set of cultural practices and values (such as a style of cooking, clothing, and music). Today, we call people like that an ethnic group. So when 19th century nationalists talked about their nation, they were referring to their ethnic group: Germans, French, Italians, Poles, Norwegians, etc.

Culturally, nationalists wanted the members of their nation to draw their identity from their nation and to align themselves with whatever the nationalists felt characterized their nation. Politically, nationalists wanted a nation-state, a country whose geographic and political boundaries included the whole nation (at least the whole nation in Europe). German nationalists were unhappy that the German nation was splintered into close to three dozen separate states (Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover, ever) and wanted all of those states to merge together to create ‘Germany’; Italian nationalists wanted the same thing for Italians. Other national groups, such as the Hungarians, the Bohemians, and the Poles, wanted their national group to be independent from Austria-Hungary, which was a multi-national state.

What all nationalists wanted was a nation-state for their nation. German nationalists wanted a nation-state that expressed the will and needs of the German nation. Hungarian nationalists objected to the fact that most high government officials in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Germans; they wanted a Hungary for Hungarians, in which Germans would have minimal political rights. The more extreme German nationalists became deeply antisemitic because they identified Jews as a nation and didn’t want them in Germany.

In the United States, things evolved slightly differently. America couldn’t develop pure nationalism because Americans weren’t (and still aren’t) a nation; we don’t have a shared ethnicity, we don’t share a common religion, we don’t all speak English (especially recent immigrants), and we don’t share a common style of food or music. So instead, America developed the idea of the Melting Pot. The Melting Pot said that anyone was welcome to come to the United States, provided that they abandoned their original ethnic identity and adopted a sort of pseudo-British identity; Americans had to use English as their language, they had to be Protestant, and they had to adopt a loose common culture that downplayed things like ethnic cuisines (which is why today ‘American cooking’ and our shared culture tend to be rather bland).

In place of shared ethnicity, American pseudo-nationalists emphasized race. To be American meant being ‘white’. Although Americans are taught that race is biological, it is not. It is entirely an artificial category that is socially determined. And you only have to look at the history of race in the 19th and 20th century to see this. In the 19th century, Irish people weren’t ‘white’ because they were Catholic; whiteness required Protestantism, and in the 1830s and 40s, it was common to insult Irish people by using the N-word and other slurs commonly thrown at Black people. Gradually, however, Irish people ‘became white’ and by the end of the 19th century had generally been accepted as such. Italians didn’t become fully white until the 1970s, because they too were Catholic and they came from Mediterranean Europe rather than more northerly regions. Jews only became white in the 1960s, because they weren’t Christian. Now we debate the extent to which Latinos and Muslims can be ‘white’. Whiteness is a constantly shifting category.

Understanding this is, I think, crucial to understanding what links Trumpian fascism with Nazism. The Nazis rejected Jews as not being members of the German nation, and Trump’s supporters reject Blacks and Latinos for not being white. To be an American nationalist, you have to make race and ‘whiteness’ a central principle. For them, Americans are ‘white’, and only those people deserve a say in government and only they deserve the protections of government.

Fascism As a Ideology

Now that we’ve covered what Fascism is, we need to look at some of its basic characteristics. Fascism rejects rational discourse. For Fascists truth is emotional, not logical. So they reject rational debate and voting as an effective way to run a government. The solution to a country’s problems is not to debate them to find the best answer, but rather to trust that the Leader knows how to solve the problems and that he is in fact the only person who knows how to solve the problems. So he simply needs to be given the power to do whatever he thinks is necessary. Thus for Fascists, democracy is a bad system because it relies on the false assumption that debate and consensus are useful tools for governing, and because it assumes that compromise is good, whereas for Fascists, compromise is bad, because it keeps the Leader from doing whatever is necessary to solve problems. Thus Fascism demands authoritarian rule, and considers all limits on the Leader is illegitimate.

Because Fascists are anti-rational, they rely on emotional arguments. Since truth cannot be determined objectively or rationally, the side that feels more strongly must be right. Consequently, Fascists accept violence as a legitimate way to resolve political disputes; the ultimate test of strong feelings is the willingness to fight. Consequently, Fascists tend to resort to threats of violence in an effort to get their opponents to back down, because backing down means they are acknowledging their wrongness, at least tacitly. Thus violence, intimidating parades and rally, openly carrying weapons, and so on are all entirely legitimate political tactics. Indeed, Hitler says in Mein Kampf that physical terror (i.e. violence) is always successful unless it is countered by equal violence on the other side.

Fascists divide society into an in-group and an out-group. In the case of American Fascists, the in-group is white, heterosexual, Christian, and cis-gendered male. Anyone who does not fit that belongs to the out-group, with the exception of women, who can be accepted in a subordinate position as long as they fully embrace their subordinate position. For Fascists, the in-group has rights, while the out-group only has duties. The law protects the in-group but does not limit them, whereas the law limits the out-group but does not protect them. In a Fascist state, the in-group is free to resort to violence because they know the legal system is unlikely to punish them but will instead punish the out-group when it fights back.

Fascism reveres a stereotypical set of toxic masculine traits–strength, aggression, endurance of suffering without complaint, and sexual dominance. Women are expected to be the opposite of that–weak, passive, comforting and nurturing, and sexually receptive. Fascists are gender complimentarians–men and women are complimentary opposites and there’s nothing in-between. Gender is understood to be fixed, ‘natural’, and, for Christo-fascists, divinely ordained. A person’s gender and gender role are set at birth and cannot be changed.

That means that Fascists cannot accept people who don’t embrace a rigid gender binary. Gays, lesbians, bi/pan people, trans people, non-binary folx, and most kinksters cannot be tolerated because our very existence demonstrates the falsity of the gender binary that is so integral to their belief system. It also means that women who fail to properly embody a ‘real woman’ are also unacceptable and must be forced into their proper role or punished.

Fascists often resort to ‘disgust’ as a rhetorical choice. Disgust is a primal, pre-rational emotion, functionally designed to keep us from consuming things that could make us sick. Because of that, it’s a very powerful rhetorical tool to use to incite violent emotions against an out-group, by comparing them to vermin, rats, bugs, or saying they are diseased, sick, polluted or otherwise infectious or poisonous. This allows them to dehumanize the out-group, making it easier to take extreme or violent actions against them. Thus Jews, immigrants, gays and lesbians, trans people, kinksters, are frequently stigmatized by Fascists as a way to signal that they cannot be tolerated and that they are not really people.

That’s all I have time for today. In my next post I’ll talk about what the political situation that is likely to emerge here in the US, so we understand the scale of the problem.