Antifascism 104A: Why America?

This third thing is not a sentiment but a belief: a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others. I once ventured to say to an old clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, ‘But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?’ He replied with total gravity—he could not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar—‘Yes, but in England it’s true.’ To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It can, however, produce asses that kick and bite. On the lunatic fringe, it may shade off into that popular racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid. 

… If our nation is really so much better than others it may be held to have either the duties or the rights of a superior being towards them. In the nineteenth century, the English became very conscious of such duties: the ‘white man’s burden.’ What we called natives were our wards and we their self-appointed guardians. … And yet this showed the sense of superiority working at its best. Some nations who have also felt it have stressed the rights, not the duties. 

—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

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But why is this even happening? How is it fascism, of all ideologies, getting a comeback tour? Weren't the upsets of Fascist Italy in 1943, Nazi Germany in 1945, and Nationalist Spain in 1974, enough to establish that this is a political dead-end?

Honestly, no—for a mixture of reasons, some more thoroughly unflattering than others. In this post I will begin to address just two of the relevant culprits. One is the nature of fascism, and the other is the history of American politics.

Let's start with that second one first. We all know, in a vague and general way, that the U.S., like a child who has thrown up only once, is not done getting racism out of its system. Our almost-definable right, infighting-riddled left, and aggressively shapeless center all insincerely and equivocally agree about that. What our various factions disagree about is what racism consists in, how it manifests itself, and how to correct it; so, most things. Two rough models of what an American might mean by racism can be described. I’ll refer to these models as the Whig and the Jacobin, because I feel like it. Most self-described conservatives in this country use the Whig model, and most self-described liberals, the Jacobin.

The Whig model defines racism as being primarily an issue of personal arrogance, prejudice, and dislike, and thus as a primarily moral issue. Racial bigotry and spite are acknowledged to be real problems and (by Christian Whigs) serious sins, but insofar as the problem is a moral one of individual attitudes, a systemic solution is neither called for nor helpful, on this view—and most Whigs, while they will allow that government interventions are occasionally necessary, maintain that the government is even less to be trusted than the individual and that its interventions (whether political or judicial) are to be avoided accordingly.

By contrast, the Jacobin model defines racism as being primarily an issue of power dynamics among groups of people. (The groups in question may be socially constructed, and so in a sense artificial, but this does not make them fake, any more than the fact that a house is a construct rather than an organic growth means the house is fake.) Racism is, primarily, a tool for keeping racial minorities—black, brown, red, or yellow—at a group-wide disadvantage as compared to whites; the occasional excelling minority person is not a threat to this system, because it is precisely occasional and exceptional. Reform of these diseased systems is therefore both necessary and appropriate as a response.

Thus you can have a Republican (Whig model) arguing with a Democrat (Jacobin model), or a Green (Jacobin model) arguing with an Independent (Whig model), and they can all be agreeing that racism is bad and yet coming away from the discussion each thinking the other is a total idiot. I don’t know that I personally have ever met a Republican who didn’t admit both that the South is pretty racist, and that that was a serious problem; but they’re basing that belief on the stereotype (fair or not) that more Southerners are personally disdainful of black people than elsewhere in the country, not that the South has more egregious systemic problems. Even if the latter were true, and acknowledged to be true by the Republicans I’ve met, it wouldn’t enter into their calculations of racism (although it might enter into their view of a society’s general healthiness, independent of its political structure). A shared term with a disputed definition is worthless. [1]

It’s no secret that I think both the Whig and the Jacobin approaches, insofar as they can be reconciled, are right; and I think they can be reconciled a lot more than many of their proponents think. Any social and political system is more than the sum of its parts, and having laws and systems that encourage (even if they cannot compel) a just outcome is desirable: that is the Jacobin side. But it must also be recognized that every system is constructed and enforced by individual people, individuals who aren’t necessarily better than anybody they’re drafting laws and policies for: that is the Whig side. I don’t consider this problem totally insoluble—but it’s a genuine problem.

But here’s the thing. American history has a lot of systemic keeping-the-coloreds-down shit in our history, quite apart from slavery. Segregation is the ur-example: ‘separate but equal’ was the mantra, but it was obvious to anyone who wanted to look that the separation was into two flagrantly unequal segments of the populace, and anyway, why have a separation in the first place if we’re equal citizens? Or there’s the Muskogee syphilis experiments, or the Japanese-American internment camps of the 1940s, or the current US policy of ripping families apart for requesting asylum (something that can only be done on US soil). The US treatment of First Nations is an equally egregious: one of the less-publicized facts about the Dakota Access Pipeline that caused so much controversy in 2016 and 2017, was the fact that it violated the territorial sovereignty of the Sioux tribes in the area, which the US had guaranteed by multiple treaties. A white-centric idea of America may have arisen from individual prejudices first; it is surely not something that can be totally eradicated by law, because laws aren’t perfect; but it is something that’s incarnated in our history, our habits, and even our laws—not just a phenomenon of individually awful human beings.

Fascist ethnonationalism plays to this. Not many people would want to go to bat for everything the US government has ever done, but not many people would want to go through and repent of all of it, either. The exercise would be exhausting. And fascism offers a way around it, a way to define all those whiny brown and black and yellow and red people as Somebody Else: as critics of America rather than wronged Americans, people whom we therefore don’t have to listen to—because who can really blame any nation for looking after itself? It’s what we have nations for, isn’t it? All of these Other People should go to their own nations if they want to complain about it!

By defining itself in terms of ethnicity and appealing to a colonial history defined by whites, modern fascism makes itself instantly appealing to people who are bothered by a sense of socio-historical guilt, but aren’t sure what to do with it, or resent it, or just find the people who talk about it insufferable. (To be fair, many people who talk about socio-historical guilt are insufferable: being right does not make a person pleasant.) It’s pretty natural that this should become appealing at some point following the early successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. If anything, it’s something of a miracle that it took this long to do so.

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[1] Of the two definitions, I’ll confess to having more sympathy with the Whig one, partly because it’s the understanding I grew up with, and partly because it does often seem to animate the use of the term by leftists and liberals. I mean, when a journalist or a politician calls somebody a racist, I doubt they even frequently mean ‘You participate in a system that disfavors nonwhite racial groups!’, nor would that term be very useful if they did, since (on Jacobin principles) that described basically everyone in the US. Rather, what I take them to mean is closer to ‘You’re bigoted against people of nonwhite races!’ And while we can never be completely certain of that charge, we can be certain enough to make the term a useful one.

Nonetheless, the thing that the Jacobin usage defines as racism is a real thing, and merits a term to denote it. I don’t know that I have a good alternative; ‘systemic bias,’ maybe?