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The Death of Fascist Irony

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In the rush of initial reportage that followed the horrific slaughter last week of 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, a document surfaced that purported to be the manifesto of the alleged murderer. Thousands of journalists across the globe tore into its contents, seeking the causes behind the slaughter. The manifesto was littered with memes gleaned from the white-supremacist internet, and some journalists urged colleagues not steeped in the argot of that subculture to tread cautiously. Kevin Roose, a veteran of the deeps of the internet, called the manifesto “a booby trap, a joke designed to ensnare unsuspecting people and members of the media into taking it too literally.”  The murders, he said, were “produced entirely within the irony-soaked discourse of modern extremism.”

This analysis was echoed by the venerable internet forensics analysts at Bellingcat: “This manifesto is a trap itself, laid for journalists searching for meaning behind this horrific crime,” wrote Robert Evans. “The entire manifesto is dotted, liberally, with references to memes and internet in-jokes that only the extremely online would get.”

It’s true that the manifesto contained references to memes that would have been familiar to the murderer’s online compatriots. The alleged killer, 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant, claimed that “Spyro the dragon 3 taught me ethno-nationalism”—an ironic reference to a wholesome game about a purple dragon. In claiming that Candace Owens, a conservative commentator for far-right student group Turning Point USA, helped to teach him “violence over meekness,” he was probably not being serious; rather, he was seeking to capitalize on tensions between that group and both the far-right and left.

It’s tempting to treat Tarrant’s story as a cautionary tale of irony gone too far—until even life and death are a joke, to be viewed at a numb remove. It’s tempting to tell a story of a warped humor that grows edgier and edgier, more and more offensive, until its practitioners fall off the edge, into real racism and real violence. It’s tempting, in other words, to emphasize the online elements of the attack—to posit that a sick internet culture has combined with fascist thought to produce a hybrid more monstrous than anything we’ve seen before.

But besides the document’s winks at the slang-riddled discussions of far-right message boards, the manifesto is far from ironic. In fact, for much of its eighty-odd pages, it is a deadly serious screed, promulgating some of white power’s grounding myths and showcasing its most violent consequences. What it reveals is a familiar enemy that, for entirely pragmatic and propagandistic reasons, has dressed itself up in memetic ephemera.

Much of the manifesto—which begins with the line, “It’s the birthrates,” repeated three times—is fixated on reproduction, a classic preoccupation of white supremacist ideology. The author writes about his fear and rage at the thought of “invaders”—anyone nonwhite, but particularly Muslims—outbreeding “Europeans.” He claims, baselessly, that Muslims have preternaturally high birth-rates, and that the disparity between white and nonwhite births will lead to the crisis named in the manifesto’s title: the “Great Replacement,” an ethnic, cultural, and racial erasure. The theory was promulgated by the French racist ideologue Renaud Camus in a 2012 book of the same name; since then, it has spread through an international network of white supremacists.

From its very first page, the manifesto proclaims its ideology in screaming capital letters: “THIS IS WHITE GENOCIDE.” The text crawls with references to historical events and personages glorified by white supremacists, from the Crusades to the Roman emperor Elagabalus. The killer claimed to have been radicalized by the 2017 death of the young Swedish girl Ebba Åkerlund, whose murder by an Uzbek migrant was covered extensively in the far-right press. And the text is sandwiched between images of the Sonnenrad, or Black Sun, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as “one of a number of ancient European symbols appropriated by the Nazis in their attempt to invent an idealized ‘Aryan/Norse’ heritage.”

Throughout the text, it’s clear that the cultural touchstones Tarrant finds most evocative aren’t the fleeting, satire-laced symbols that typify the alt-right, such as Pepe, a cartoon frog adopted by neo-fascists as a satirical mascot. Instead, Tarrant exalts the pure-white past white supremacists have conjured up for Europe, and evokes the maudlin myths of nationalist agitprop. Europe, in his estimation, was once filled with noble white men fighting swarthy interlopers, from Medieval battles against Saracens to the 1683 Turkish siege of Vienna.* The manifesto incorporates poems by Rudyard Kipling and Dylan Thomas. At points, its syntax soars into a kind of faux-Romantic prose: “Accept death,” he advises his audience, “it is as certain as the setting of the sun at evenfall.”

Tarrant was also deeply immersed in the coarser rhetoric of the anonymous message boards 4chan and 8chan, and other online havens of white-supremacist sentiment. In the 8chan post that contained links to both the manifesto and a Facebook livestream of the killings, he wrote: “Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and make a real-life effort post.” (“Shitposting,” in internet-culture slang, is essentially making a ruckus online for the sake of making a ruckus, flooding message boards or social media with low-quality content.) The image he used to accompany his post was a long-circulating 4chan meme depicting an overly online Australian. And his war cry, before opening fire on worshipers, was a reference to a mega-popular YouTuber who goes by PewDiePie.

In Tarrant’s world, two codes—of racist memes and romantic racist ideology, of viral YouTube videos and high-minded nativist myth—intermingle until they are indistinguishable. These two syntaxes coexist in Tarrant’s manifesto, his actions, and even his gun, on which he painted both a reference to the Battle of Tours in 732, in which a Frankish king conquered Spanish Muslim invaders, and “Remove Kebab,” a viral anti-Muslim music video of Serbian origin. There is no ready way to unbraid the former from the latter, because the distance from Pepe the Frog to the ancient Celtic Sonnenrad has been closed.

Tarrant explains their connection himself. “Whilst we may use edgy humour and memes in the vanguard stage, and to attract a young audience, eventually we will need to show the reality of our thoughts and our more serious intents and wishes for the future,” he writes. This is not the first time the playbook of the online far-right has been laid bare, in particular its use of edgy, provocative humor to draw in young audiences who might be alienated by dense ideological screeds. In 2017, HuffPost journalist Ashley Feinberg published the style handbook of the Daily Stormer, an infamous and prominent neo-Nazi website. The style guide mandated a “humorous, snarky style” and noted that “genuine raging vitriol” was a “turnoff.” “The tone of the site should be light,” wrote its founder, Andrew Anglin. “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.”

Two years later, and the “neither here nor there” of white supremacy is everywhere, in mosques, in synagogues, in black churches, in cities overrun by fascist marches. To hammer home the point, a handcuffed Tarrant, in the most widespread picture of him to date, flashed the “OK” sign toward the cameras—a hand signal that has been adopted by white supremacists, but remains common enough outside that subculture that those who use it can retain a winking plausible deniability. It’s perhaps the purest expression of the white-supremacist in-group mentality: For those who understand it, it is an evident sign of affiliation; to all others who protest it, it is a joke. But the joke, in the end, is that there is no joke. The sensibility of the edgelord—who pushes the boundaries of offensive humor—is really one long tumble into the abyss.

*A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Turkish siege of Vienna occurred in 1863. We regret the error.

NFL Players Are Dictating Their Own Terms. Good.

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The idea that NFL players might put themselves before their team is a scary proposition for the league. Because if the players really start understanding their own value, they just might get what they’re actually worth.

The wide receiver Antonio Brown did. After months of friction with the Pittsburgh Steelers, where he was a key piece of the offense, and with the quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, Brown pushed his way out of the team. Last week, the Steelers dealt him to the Oakland Raiders.

For this, Brown has been categorized as selfish and petulant. “To be able to play with an all-time quarterback like he’s able to play with, I don’t think he understands how good he has it,” the respected veteran wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald said at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference earlier this month, before the trade materialized. “It can get tough out there.” The additional $30 million in guaranteed salary that Brown received from his new team has been cast as a reward for abandoning his old one. “Antonio Brown quit on his teammates & exhibited highly erratic behavior,” the NFL analyst Ross Tucker tweeted, “and as a result got a $20M raise with $30M guaranteed. Great lesson for all the kids out there.”

NFL players are expected to sacrifice everything—from their body to their mental health—for the game and for their team. Yet there are more and more signs that players are starting to understand their leverage. Their increased awareness might be born out of professional jealousy. Brown’s contract with the Steelers contained no guaranteed money over the next three seasons. NFL players look over at their NBA brethren and see they have guaranteed contracts—and far more say-so with their teams and in league matters.

[Read: The NFL’s concussion cover-up]

There is also a wide salary disparity between the leagues. In 2019, Detroit Lions quarterback Matt Stafford is slated to make $29.5 million, the highest salary in the NFL. But that’s not even Mike Conley money. Conley, the Memphis Grizzlies point guard is making a little over $30 million this season.

It’s noteworthy that, a few weeks before his trade, Brown appeared on LeBron James’s HBO talk show, “The Shop.” The point of the “The Shop” is to create a keep-it-a-buck vibe; guests like Brown can have candid conversations with other black superstar athletes and entertainers who face similar problems. The most revealing conversations during Brown’s appearance on the show came when Brown, James, rapper 2Chainz, actor Jamie Foxx, and the NBA’s Anthony Davis spoke candidly about realizing their own power.

“As the CEO of my own business, I got the power,” said Davis, who also is dealing with serious criticism after telling his team, the New Orleans Pelicans, in late January that he wished to be traded. “I’m doing what I want to do and not what somebody’s telling me to do,” Davis added.

Davis’s feeling of empowerment owes something to James, who, through the way he’s handled his own free agency, his production company, and other Hollywood ventures, has given this generation of superstar athletes a blueprint for controlling their own careers. NBA players like Davis and James, unlike Brown under his Steelers contract, have what many would call “screw you” money.

“The NFL is different from the NBA because not every guy is making that top dollar,” Brown said on “The Shop.” “So you might get a guy who, he’s a good player, but he’s not getting paid as much. So his opinion doesn’t matter that much because he knows: ‘Shit, I don’t have that much value, so I’m not [about to] fuck up what I got.’”

[Read: The white flight from football]

The way Brown left the Steelers was messy—but justifiable. During the final week of the season, there were reports that Brown didn’t practice following a spat with Roethlisberger. That resulted in the wide receiver being benched for the Steelers’ finale against the Bengals. That, Brown said on “The Shop,” is when he realized that his relationship with the Steelers had permanently changed. And so he acted accordingly, demanding a trade.

Not every player can do what Brown did, because not every player has Brown’s record-breaking abilities. He’s the first player in NFL history to have six straight seasons with 100 receptions or more. His talent all but ensured that another team was going to want him, regardless of his issues in Pittsburgh.

“I was proud of him,” said former NFL star wide receiver Terrell Owens, who had such a vicious contract battle with the Philadelphia Eagles that it resulted in Owens being suspended for multiple games before being ruled inactive for the rest of the 2005 season. “He used his productivity to create leverage.”   

Brown went to extremes, but the fact is: He dictated his own terms, which is something we’re starting to see more of in the NFL. Brown’s former teammate, Le’Veon Bell, sat out the 2018 season because he didn’t want to sign a franchise tag with the Steelers, which would have paid him $14.5 million last season. Bell clearly didn’t want to play for the Steelers anymore, and he also wanted more long-term security. He took a gamble by betting that he was worth more on the open market than what the Steelers were willing to pay.

Last week, Bell signed a four-year, $52.5 million deal with the Jets that comes with $35 million in guaranteed money. He isn’t the highest-paid running back in football, and he’ll be making slightly less next season than what he would have made had he signed Pittsburgh’s franchise tender.

[Read: Why NFL rates are plummeting]

But those who see Bell’s contract as a loss are missing the bigger point. Regardless of the outcome, Bell decided playing another season without a long-term deal wasn’t worth putting additional miles on his body. He openly challenged an NFL financial power structure that routinely exploits players.

Those who have criticized Bell and Brown likely ignored the other big free agency news that happened last week. The Kansas City Chiefs cut their veteran edge rusher Justin Houston halfway through his six-year, $101 million contract. That move was hailed as smart and shrewd, because Houston has been bombarded with injuries the last couple seasons.

Nobody is criticizing the Chiefs for not holding up their end of that deal. Teams usually are applauded for doing what’s in their own best interests, but players aren’t often given the same consideration. Not even by fans, who should be able to relate to a labor force that just wants what’s fair but always seem to side with owners and organizations over the players.

Perhaps that’s why the best course of action for NFL players is to ask for neither permission or forgiveness when it comes to doing what’s in their best for them.

Why a black family kept racist graffiti on their house

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DENVER — In March, someone spray-painted racist graffiti — including the word “nigger” and crude drawings of lynchings — all over the front of the house of a black family in Denver.

But instead of painting over it immediately, the homeowners decided to leave it up — to force their community to have a conversation about hate. For a week, their house became a weird tourist attraction, with people driving for hours to come take pictures and talk to the family.

Homeowner Ken Jenkins said he initially wanted to hide the graffiti from his two sons, age 3 and 9. But he decided that seeing hate sprayed all over their family home would be educational — if painful.

“You won’t change anything if you don’t [show it to them],” he said. “How would your son understand it later, when he deals with it?”

VICE News visited the family to ask how that conversation was going.

This segment originally aired March 12, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

Socialism Curiously Trumps Fascism in U.S. Political Threat Reporting

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

“I Have the Tough People”

Recently Donald Trump, the orange mother of all assholes, said this in an interview with the proto-fascistic alt-right Website Breitbart News:

“You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump–I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Don Veto Trumpleone was saying in not-so veiled ways that efforts to impeach or un-elect him will be met with white police- and military-state violence and carnage from right wing-thugs.  If “the Left” (as FOX News and the Republicans absurdly describe everyone to the portside of Mitch McConnell) tries to remove him from office through constitutional means, Trump was boasting, then forces of repression and right-wing aggression will rightly come to his defense

This warning was consistent with Trump’s toxic history of promoting violence against his political enemies.  It matches his creepy embrace of authoritarian rulers around the world and his longstanding suggestion that any effort to bring an end his presence in the White House would be illegitimate. From the beginning of his presidency, Trump has been using the hoax of immigrant voter fraud to set up a cancellation of the 2020 election or a refusal to recognize its results.

His ugly Ameikaner base will back any such moves..  More than half (52%) of Americans who identify as or lean Republican would support postponing the 2020 election “to ensure that only eligible citizens could vote if it was proposed by President Trump.”  (The mendacious neoliberal warmonger Hillary Clinton wasn’t all wrong when she called the president’s backers “a basket of deplorables.”)

Trump’s “tough people” comment reflected the authoritarian mindset of a wannabe fascist strongman. Trump was only half-joking when he said the United States should consider making the presidency an appointment “for life” — and when he said this about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: “He is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head … He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

“Believe the autocrat,” the Russian-American journalist and dissident Masha Gessen has warned: “He means what he says.”

In some cases, at least, the pathological liar Trump should be believed.

Left Threat Inflation

Who are all the badass lefties who “play it tough,” in Trump’s words? Outside of some dicey Antifa and radical skinhead types, it’s a tiny group – certainly nothing compared to the assault weapon-wielding right-wing militias and other armed and brutish white-nationalists who thrill to Trump’s call to Make America White Again.

Fascism, however, requires the notion that the virtuous and betrayed white Nation is besieged by a big dangerous Left that must be put down by steely-eyed patriots ready to defend the “homeland” by any means necessary. Inflation of the “radical left” threat is a key part of the fascist playbook. It’s why nobody should laugh when they hear Republicans and right-wing media personalities habitually refer to the corporate-neoliberal Democratic Party as “socialist,” “radical,” and “leftist.”

Avoiding the F-Word, Running with the S-Word

I watched a panel of experts discuss Trump’s “play it tough” statement on CNN. A dark-haired female commentator suggested that Trump’s comments were the unhinged ramblings of a big dummy drunk on power. A sharp fellow with a stylish white beard called the president’s remarks authoritarian and dangerous.  A clean-shaven Republican hack found Trump’s comments mild and reasonable.

Neither CNN host Don Lemon nor any of his guests could bring themselves to say the F-word, fascism, in relation to Trump’s latest arch-authoritarian outrage.  Too bad. As I have shown across at least twelve commentaries published in the last three years [1], numerous dreadful strands have intertwined to knit Trumpism into a noxious cloth of creeping 21stcentury-style and  neoliberal-era fascism.  One such strand is Trump’s totalitarian’s recurrent encouragement of extra-legal political violence against his opponents and critics.

Curiously enough, talking heads who can’t properly mouth the F-word when it comes to Trump and his backers love to say the S-word (socialism) when it comes to the Democrats. They are happy to inaccurately call Bernie Sanders’ neo-New Deal progressive populism “socialism” – and to promote the false and perhaps unwittingly fascism-fueling notion that socialism is taking over the Democratic Party.

These narratives are misleading. Yes, Sanders occasionally dons the socialist label. He’s also the Democratic presidential contender to have enjoyed the most impressive 2020 rollout so far.

Another high-profile self-declared socialist, the Republican and FOX News obsession Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), now holds a seat in the U.S. House.

Most remarkably of all, perhaps, 57 percent of the Democratic Party’s voters now say they prefer socialism to capitalism.

But the fact that Sanders calls himself a socialist doesn’t mean he really is one any more than the fact that Trump doesn’t call himself a fascist means the president isn’t a fascist [2]. While Trump wraps his stealth fascism in the flag of American Freedom, Bernie (a social democrat at leftmost) bends over backwards to label his proposals “not radical.”  He doesn’t call for workers to seize control of the means of production, distribution, communication, and investment. He doesn’t advocate the dismantlement of the Pentagon System or the nationalization of the leading financial institutions.

As in 2015 and 2016, Bernie is promising in advance to support the corporate-Democratic candidate, whoever it may be, against the Republican Party. He channels popular energies into the bourgeois masters’ narrow and strictly time-staggered election cycle, focusing on who’s sitting in the White House instead of the more meaningful and radical politics of who’s sitting in the streets, factories, offices, schools, and town halls. He’s no Eugene Debs or Bill Haywood.

At the same time, the Sanders tendency is nowhere close to taking over the Democratic Party. AOC is the only one of the House’s 435 members to identify as a socialist. Sanders is the only one of 100 U.S. Senators to sometimes do the same. The Blue Wave that brought a Democratic majority to the House of Representatives this year was mainly a corporate-Democratic centrist wave, not a lefty-progressive one. That tends to get lost in the flurry of wildly disproportionate attention the media has given to AOC and other “controversial” female and nonwhite progressive House newcomers like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Thalib.

Along with their many friends at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post,  N”P”R, “P”BS, Politico, The Hill, and the Daily Beast,  the “pragmatic” (corporate-neoliberal) wing of the Democratic Party smears progressive Democrats’ calls for decent policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal as “half-baked,” “fantastic,” “unrealistic,” and “pie-in-the-sky” – and as guaranteed to help Trump win a second term.

Never mind that these “radical socialist” proposals have majority popular support and that a Green New Deal is now an existential necessity for the species.  Never mind that Sanders would have defeated Trump running on these proposals in 2016.  Or that Sanders is the candidate most capable of mobilizing enough contested state voters to defeat the Great God Trump in 2020.

And never mind that socialism would be the embodiment of democracy, not a threat to popular self-rule – or that “capitalist democracy” means no real democracy at all.

The Democratic Party isn’t about social and economic justice, democracy, popular self-governance, or ecological survival.  It isn’t even mainly about winning elections.  It’s about serving and colluding with corporate sponsors and climbing the neoliberal global-capitalist oligarchy (think Bill Clinton and Barack Obama). Like Sinclair Lewis’ imagined American fascists in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here (see Endnote 2 below), it is no less dedicated than its Republican counterpart to “government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits.”

Dollar Democrats Prefer Fascism to Socialism

Meanwhile, by contrast with the “threat” posed by “socialism,” the U.S. presidency is now held by a white-nationalist, arch-authoritarian gangster who is at the very least an aspiring fascist leader atop a significantly fascist mass base. Trump’s supporters comprise roughly a third of the U.S. electorate but enjoy wildly outsized political voice thanks to the over-representation of red/Republican districts in the absurdly archaic and undemocratic U.S. system of Congressional apportionment indirect presidential (s)election.

Fascists often get into power peacefully, via the fake-democratic bourgeois electoral process.  They do so thanks to that process’s cringing captivity to concentrated wealth and to the transparent inauthenticity of corporate-bought liberal politicians’ claims to represent ordinary working people and the common good (e.g. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, and Joe Biden).

Fascists stay in power with the help of bourgeois (neo-) “liberals” who inflate the supposedly terrible danger allegedly posed by purported socialism. Listen to the fevered fears of advertising executive and MSNBC commentator Donny Deutsch (net worth $200 million). “I find Donald Trump reprehensible as a human being,” Deutsch recently told MSDNC morning host Joe Scarborough, “but a socialist candidate [Bernie Sanders] is more dangerous to this company, country, as far as the strength and well-being of the country, than Donald Trump.  I would vote for Donald Trump, a despicable human being…I will be so distraught to the point that that could even come out of my mouth, if we have a socialist [presidential candidate or president] because that will take our country so down, and we are not Denmark.  I love Denmark, but that’s not who we are. And if you love who we are and all the great things that still have to have binders put on the side. Please step away from the socialism.” The “liberal” Deutsch, who has likened Trump voters (with no small justice) to Nazis, voiced his readiness to vote for the fascist bigot Trump over anyone who tries to make America more like the happy, social-democratic nation Denmark.

But, of course.  As I’ve been saying for years, the dismal dollar-drenched corporate Democrats prefer losing to the right, even a creeping fascist white-nationalist right, over losing to the left, even the explicitly non-radical social-democratic left in their own party.

That’s why MSDNC and CNN’s liberal chatterboxes go on and on about how “the Democrats have a socialism problem” but continue to step lightly (more than two years into a creeping fascist presidency) around the Republicans’ much more real and genuinely threatening fascism problem.

By falsely inflating the supposed radical menace of “socialism,” corporate neo-“liberal” media personalities help feed the fascist peril they claim to abhor and can’t name.

Gird Your Loins

Trump isn’t just a wacky, thuggish, and “reprehensible human being” (Deutsch).  He’s all of those, but he’s also the aspiring Superpower-heading leader of a global fascist movement whose most recent example is the white-nationalist who recently murdered dozens of Muslims in New Zealand after releasing a manifesto that hailed Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Trump is precisely that for an angry mass of “blood and soil” male Caucasians at home and abroad.

We can be sure that Trump secretly delights in that role. Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer, concluded that Trump is not unlike the Nazis who murdered Cohen’s Jewish ancestors in Europe.  Twenty-nine years ago, we learned from the lawyer of Trump’s first wife Ivana that the future president enjoyed reading from a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which Trump kept close to his bed.

A few weeks ago, Cohen tried to tell Congress and the nation that his former boss probably won’t leave the White House without bloodshed. He’s right about that.  Fascists don’t generally leave head-of-state positions peaceably

Gird your loins and give to your local blood bank, America: getting rid of Orange DumpsterFire&Fury, the nation’s first fascist president, is not going to be pretty.

Endnotes

[1]See: this (“The Donald Can Happen Here,” Counterpunch, March 11, 2016); this (“Trump’s Shock and Awe Campaign,” Truthdig, 2-3-2017); this (“Orange Thing,” Counterpunch, 10-13-2017); this (“An Insubordinate President,” Truthdig, 11-14-2017); this (“American-Style Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump,” Truthdig, 12-22-2017); this (“Trump’s Durable Base,” Counterpunch, 2-2-2018); this (“The Madness of King Don,” Counterpunch, 2-16-2018); this (“Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump’s Durable Base,” Truthdig, 9-5-2018, including an in-depth examination of the leading social science data on the fascist Trump base); this (“‘Male Energy,’ Authoritarian Whiteness, and Creeping Fascism in the Age of Trump,” Counterpunch, 10-19-2018); this (“Trump’s Endless Mendacity and the Dawn of American Fascism,” Truthdig,10-31-2018, with special emphasis on the assault on truth); this (“Signs of Creeping Fascism are All Around Us,” Truthdig,11-14-2018); this (“Barack von Obamenburg and How Fascism Happens,” Counterpunch, 11-16-2018,); this (“Bordering on Fascism,” Counterpunch,1-11-2019); and this (“Cohen’s Overlooked Warning,” Counterpunch, 3-1-2019).

[2]Consistent with Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 warning, contemporary fascists often don’t openly announce their fascist nature. “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” an anonymous mid-20th century American (often but incorrectly said to be Lewis) observed.  No Swastikas, brownshirts in the streets, and “New Man” cults would be required. Lewis wrote in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here that American fascism’s most dangerous promoters were those “who disowned the word ‘fascism’ and preached enslavement to capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native American liberty.” American fascism, Lewis warned, would be cloaked in the Star- Spangled Banner and all about “government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits.” It Can’t Happen Here merits reading 84 years after its publication. It is a biting satirical screed against the comforting notion that “American exceptionalism” inoculated the United States against the disease of fascism.  “The Hell it can’t,” Lewis told us, a bit early in the game, as the United States actually reached its leftmost democratic moment with the rise of the Second New Deal.

 

 

 

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