Let me try to make sense of what’s happening to the right wing in America. It’s as simple as it is chilling. American fascism is now becoming American Nazism. Yes, really. There is a big difference between the two. Fascism is an angry teenager, and Nazism is a bureaucrat organising a mass atrocity. Nazism is what happens when fascism grows up — and that’s what’s happening in America right now. Making matters worse, as I’ll come to, the Dems are fumbling in the background, letting fascism’s embryo reach Nazism’s adulthood with barely a whimper.

Let me try to explain.

A few years ago, when American fascism exploded — just as I’d predicted, as many had — it was just that: a nascent fascist movement. It dabbled with the doing the things fascist movements always dream of, having ascended to having its very own demagogue in the White House. Bans, camps, kids in cages, kids in cages in camps, raids, purges, Gestapos…beatings, disappearances, hate…all culminating a violent coup.

The coup on Jan 6th was a turning point — at least that’s how history will remember it. That’s going unnoticed by Americans, at least liberal Americans. But it was a moment of sudden and sweeping transformation for the Republicans and their base. Violence was legitimized. The Big Lies were acted upon. Brutality was normalized. A head of state allegedly led a violent coup that left five people dead (and counting) to overthrow a democratically elected government by trying to stop the process of vote counting. It’s a minor miracle there wasn’t a massacre.

Why do I say that was a turning point? Because after that, Republicans could have thought “we’ve gone too far.” Or “That was wrong.” Or “that was way too much, and we are on the wrong path.” And to be fair, a few have — a tiny, slender few. That is the exception which proves the rule.

By and large, Republicans — not just leaders, but everyday people — believe the “election was stolen” and therefore “it needed to be taken back,” presumably by any means necessary, right up to paramilitaries storming Congress and hunting down members of Congress to kill. Republican support for Trump has soared after the coup.

The reason that Republican leaders don’t disavow Trump is because they can’t.They’ll lose grass roots support. So they’re caught between a rock and a hard place — at least “moderates,” like Mitt Romney, who, it should be widely understood, are as still as conservative as say fanatical right wingers in Europe. The “moderates” can’t fully attack Trump, because they will lose their positions in the party.

What does that tell you? It should tell you three things, all of which are very, very bad. One, it’s Trump’s party now. Two, it’s Trumpism’s party. And three, Jan 6th was a moment that sealed the American right’s fate and destiny from a nascent fascist movement, to a now aspiring Nazi one.

What’s the difference? A fascist movement is a coalition of social groups. They are still debating goals and purposes. They agree on general philosophical principles, to use that word far too generously. You know the score. It’s the old, old Nietzschean logic: there are the weak and the strong, the weak deserve to perish, the strong to survive, and the strong must prove their strength therefore by dominating the weak. All that is broken down along lines of “race,” which is an artificial construct to begin with (after all, most “white” people are actually pink, and there are no “yellow” or “red” or “black” people at all — those are just boxes we force people into.)

A fascist movement is testing the waters. It’s disseminating this moral logic of the strong subjugating the weak among itself. It is busy developing this logic in mythologies and fairy tales that then go on to provide a real world belief system which justifies oppression and hate. It is toying with creating institutions to turn this abhorrent moral philosophy of strong dominating weak along racial lines into a social and political reality.

A fascist movement is like any other movement in that regard — it is vying for power, its philosophies yet to harden and coalesce, really, into widely held mythologies and symbols and belief systems, which then trickle down further into institutions and norms and values and aspirations and goals.

All that’s a little soft, but do you see the difference? Let me make it clearer. Fascism is Trump challenging the courts with ban after ban. Nazism is a group at CPAC standing on a white-supremacist symbol shaped stage, chanting slogans that are barely even thinly veiled code for fascism anymore.

(By the way, if you’ve been looking at the Runegate controversy, that apparently the CPAC stage is shaped like a literal Nazi symbol, and wondering, “Am I paranoid to think there’s a connection here?” No, of course you’re not paranoid. Symbolism is a huge part of any Nazi movement, and the burden of disproof should always rest on people who espouse openly fascist beliefs. If a Nazi tells you this clearly who they are, believe them.)

Nazism is what happens when a fascist movement unites, hardens, and develops. Develops what? Long term plans. For what? For things like Final Solutions. For “race laws.” When it develops goals and aspirations to seize total control of a society. When it hardens: when violence and brutality, to the point of assassination and murder, become acceptable to the rank and file, in a casual way. When things like violent coups become perfectly legitimate. When it unites: when things like violent coups attain mass support that reaches the level of almost perfect consensus.

Do you see what I mean? Feel a chill, if you did? Think about it carefully. Uniting, hardening, and developing is exactly what is happening on the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Republicans are not divided at all — all that stuff from pundits about a civil war is completely false. Republicans are united in a horrifying way: the vast majority of them support Trump even after what happened on January 6th. The Big Lie that the election was stolen has almost uniform support among the right: that’s unification. And what does “the election was stolen” really mean? That it was stolen from “us,” meaning the chosen people, the pure and true, the “real” Americans, to whom the soil belongs — and will take it back with blood, if necessary.

For just that reason, you see figures like Josh Hawley skyrocketing in fame and popularity. And the truth is that they are way, way more dangerous than Trump. That is because they are politically savvy and organized. Trump was a bumbling incompetent, by comparison. He wasn’t a good enough manager to get a large-scale atrocity done — just an emotive demagogue. Hawley, on the other hand, is ruthless, organized, and determined. He is the GOP hardening into, uniting behind, and developing into Nazism proper.

Hardening, uniting, and developing. I want you to really reflect on those three words.

Because the sad truth is that right about now, the Dems are blowing it. Big time. They caved to a veritable nobody and the minimum wage didn’t pass. They’re back to being what more or less anyone sane feared: putting kids in camps and bombing countries to look tough. When the opposition to fascism is itself pretty fascist — who reopens concentration camps — where can a country really go?

Not away from fascism, that’s for sure. The Democrats are going to lose, fast, at this rate — by 2022 — because their fragile coalition is splintering. Millions of young people and progressives walked away the moment the put kids back in camps, shaking their heads, and millions more will every time they do that, or drop another pointless bomb, or fail to raise the minimum wage. The Democrats are terrible at politics.

Politics is a game that must be played with ruthlessness, courage, and abandon — and the Democrats don’t seem to have the stomach for it. It’s easy to see their fragile coalition of young progressives and minorities plus neoliberals fracturing before your very eyes.

Bang! They’re gone by 2022. What happens then?

Well, meanwhile, the GOP is developing, uniting, and hardening. Behind, around, into proper and very real Nazism. It’s painfully naive to think that by 2022, a party that doesn’t have massive, almost unanimous support for a Big Lie and a fascist coup isn’t going to develop a careful, detailed agenda. To what?

To advance fascism into a hardcore political cause. To do things like camps, bans, raids, purges, Gestapos — but this time, do them right. On a much vaster scale, with far more funding, resources, momentum. A detailed and cohesive agenda to turn America’s institutions and power structures and governing mechanisms fascist. To make all that happen with terror and intimidation and brutality. To ignite another coup — this time, one that succeeds. All that’s Nazism.

Some Americans — white liberals — I imagine will have trouble believing the above. What exactly do you think guys like Josh Hawley and Madison Cawthorn are doing in their off time (apart from allegedly being sexual predators)? Playing pinochle? Taking selfies? They are committed to the cause before them, and that cause is now right out in the open.

The mythologies of modern-day fascism are the stuff of everyday reality — from QAnon and it’s coming “storm,” where the rest of us perish, to “white genocide,” to the bizarre evangelical Christo-fascism that’s taken root alongside older forms of white supremacy. All those have united, hardened, and developed, into mainstream Republican culture, society, norms, values, beliefs. They are just what you live, are immersed in, surrounded by, if you are in that world now.

Turn on Faux News, and you’ll see Stephen Miller talking about the Democrats being cruel by reopening concentration camps — that’s how bad the Dems are at politics. But it’s also how deluded the average right winger in America is now. To them, an architect of mass repression who designed policies of outright supremacy has been legitimized and normalised as a pundit. And after they see him on the news, they log into Facebook and read myths about Hillary Clinton filleting kids faces off to drink their adrenalised blood.

Is it any wonder they support things like coups, violence, supremacy, brutality? American right wingers have been radicalised into becoming the country’s Taliban or ISIS — they believe just the same level of insane myths, back the same kinds of repression and supremacy, which are flipsides, and have the same contempt for democracy and its values of equality and freedom and justice. They are quite happy to back outright violence now to attain power, too.

Average Americans — millions of them — becoming something very much like a Taliban or ISIS are the final nail in the coffin of American collapse. The Dems’ incompetence is helping things along, to be sure, but even so — a society doesn’t often survive huge, huge groups being radicalised in such insanely extreme ways.

There is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind who is a seasoned observe of failed states about this ugly fact. Let me warn you, then, as seriously as I can.

American fascism is becoming American Nazism. That was where it was always going, yes. But to see it happening before our eyes is something else. Something new, frightening, and strange — that bodes ill for the future of an already struggling society.

Umair
February 2021