WRITING THESE LITTLE FASCISMS
Scott Esposito is correct in asserting that it is the writer's duty to bear witness to history as it reveals itself in the present:
A writer’s duty is to see as much of the truth as possible of the society he or she inhabits, and often this is dangerous. Not simply dangerous in the sense of journalists like Ben Jacobs, who in May 2017 was assaulted by a candidate for Congress he was covering, or the many other journalists who have been threatened by Trump and terrorized by his supporters at his rallies—I mean dangerous in the sense of having to get close enough to the darkest sides of a society that it begins to infect your mind. This is precisely what Bolaño did, and anyone who has read his literature knows that it left a profound impact.
We are torn between our hopes, beliefs, and repugnance. As Milan Kundera notes in his essay "Emnity and Friendship," people learn to subordinate friendship and intimacy to "convictions" out of a sense of moral righteousness, a desire to be on the side of what is right. He argues that the mature position is more open to ambiguity--"the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited mins can declare to be a certainty or truth."
And so we discover the tension between tone-policing and community-building, free speech rights and collaboration with xenophobia, speaking truth to power and consolidating alt-right racism. There are no easy answers in the Pepe morass. I think bearing witness is the best we can do--the minimum and the duty.
A KINDER, GENTLER, MORE ANTI-IMMIGRANT KLAN
Speaking of bearing witness, I don't think the rise of neo-fascism is a disputable phenomenon, and I have little patience for those that wish to say the KKK is harmless and historical.
Re-reading Rick Bragg's journalism for the NYT, I came across his reporting on the lynching murder of a black man in Jasper, Texas in 1998, where Bragg observed the rise of a new Ku Klux Klan, a Klan espousing benign catchwords like "white pride" certainly recognizable in the current administration:
While gruesome killings may be every bit as much a part of the Klan's identity as is racial hatred, Mr. Lowe said that was the old Klan. His Klan, the one assembling in Jasper, is a Klan with a national platform.
''We believe that all immigration should be stopped in America for 10 years,'' he said, ''until there are enough jobs to support our working force in America. We do not believe in spending billions of dollars overseas to nations who do not care for us in the first place. We could be spending it on our inner cities. We do not believe that anyone should just be allowed to move plants'' out of the country. Overseas expansion is fine, he said, but ''they should not be allowed to just shut their doors here, putting Americans out of a job.''
''The Klan is not just racial,'' Mr. Lowe went on, but he said that whites in Jasper had been smeared by the crime and that the Klan rally was also in support of them.
Here we have it: in 1998, the Klan's simple anti-immigration platform. Embraced, cultivated, and elucidated by Trump and his Bannonite apostles.
As for the response from mainstream liberals, well, I think many have failed to distinguish themselves when it comes to protecting or honoring the human rights of non-voting residents. Addressing the passage of two anti-immigration bills in the House, Sonali Kolhatkar writes:
But neither Democrats nor many progressives in the party’s base seem to care very much about these two immigration bills. A report in The Hill explained why 24 House Democrats voted for the bills—because “House Democratic leaders said they wouldn’t twist arms to get their members to oppose the legislation.” Unlike the discipline Democrats have shown on preserving the Affordable Care Act against Republican assault, the more liberal party seems willing to throw immigrant communities under the bus. Outside of immigrant rights organizations and civil rights groups, there has been little protest from major social justice groups. “It’s really disappointing,” Altman said of the lack of attention from liberals and progressives.
“This legislation goes hand-in-hand with a coordinated effort by the administration to paint all immigrants as criminal just by nature of their immigration status,” Altman said, “and that allows this administration to normalize their goal of mass detention and deportation of immigrants.”
Red State Resistance in Alabama this week.
THE FUTURE MAY BE RED
Those who wish to conflate the rise of neo-fascism with populism would do well to consider alternative forms of resistance emerging from the left. Take Redneck Revolt, for example, "a nationwide organization of armed political activists from rural, working-class backgrounds who strive to reclaim the term “redneck” and promote active anti-racism":
It is not an exclusively white group, though it does take a special interest in the particular travails of the white poor. The organization’s principles are distinctly left-wing: against white supremacy, against capitalism and the nation-state, in support of the marginalized.
In 2009, Dave Strano, a member of the John Brown Gun Club, a firearms training project originally based in Kansas, noticed a deep "contradiction" in the burgeoning Tea Party movement:
Many Tea Party activists were fellow working-class people who had endured significant hardships as a result of the 2008 economic crisis which, in his eyes, had been caused by the very wealthy. And yet, Tea Partiers were now flocking in great numbers to rallies funded by the 1%. By supporting economically conservative politicians, Strano thought, they would only be further manipulated to benefit the already rich.
“The history of the white working class has been a history of being an exploited people,” he wrote. “However, we’ve been an exploited people that further exploits other exploited people. While we’ve been living in tenements and slums for centuries, we’ve also been used by the rich to attack our neighbors, coworkers, and friends of different colors, religions and nationalities.”
Hosted at the online Anarchist Library, Strano's philosophical ponderments are clearly anarcho-socialist in nature, though closer to post-USSR-visit Emma Goldman than Francois Fanon. He writes:
Thousands of white working people, people who rely on foodstamps, unemployment payments, and even welfare checks, fill the ranks at demonstrations calling for an end to social services. White working people, full of fear about socialism and an attack on “liberty” (in this case, an attack on the property rights of the rich) turn against their own interests and sell out their own needs to fight the new socialism.
The unpleasant reality for working class and poor people who have participated and still participate in this new movement, is that we’re being used by these rich leaders within the movement to protect their interests, not ours. But that’s nothing new.
I'm going to quote Strano more fully here because his position is an interesting resting point between neo-liberalism, Labour, and what Bernie Sanders has tried to represent. Strano goes on to elucidate a systemic critique of second-stage capitalism that straddles the tension between protectionism and globalism:
Our allegiances to these leaders, to people like Ron Paul, to people like Alex Jones, our acceptance of their white populist talk, our willingness to attack migrants, to disrupt attempts to provide healthcare to working class people, our willingness to cling to these ideas of the “other” liberty, the protection of property and not of people, are the biggest reasons that we are doomed to continue to live this way. We will continue to live paycheck to paycheck (at least those of us that have jobs) and in constant fear of eviction or foreclosure. We will continue to have to choose between new schoolbooks for our kids or dinner for the whole family. We will continue to see our retirement funds looted, our world destroyed, and our family members being killed in wars. And we will continue to not be able to do anything about it, unless we change our strategy and direction.
Dave Strano (image source)
The basis for Strano's critique is a Marxist (I say this non-pejoratively) understanding of class, one that becomes increasingly relevant as professions and careers give way to shift-work and perma-temp employment. It's difficult to argue with Strano when he draws a wide circle and focuses on intersectional social harm rather than exclusivist narratives of suffering:
Migrants and blacks are not our enemies. White rich people are not our friends. We must reverse this paradigm and start to work alongside movements of nonwhite working people against all predatory political, economic, and social systems. This means not just working against the state, but also working against capitalism. The state and capitalism are two faces of the same coin, a coin that must be thrown away.
We also must work actively against white supremacy in all its incarnations. Our future depends on this. If we as white working people want to enjoy freedom, then we must not be used by the rich to deny it to others and ourselves. The more we act as footsoldiers for the rich, the more we ensure that our freedom is also unattainable.
Historically, we as white working people have seen our allegiance become an allegiance to whiteness, to being white. We can relate to other white people, no matter how poor or rich. They’re white like us, and that’s something we can identify with, come to terms with. So of course, our natural enemies become nonwhite peoples.
The only problem with this idea is that we’ve had it wrong for centuries. We’ve been kept blind to the true nature of what is afoot here, as to what’s really going on. Look around us. Who fills the trailer parks with us? Who works in the factories or fast food restaurants with us? Who is beside us working in the fields, picking produce that we’ll never really be able to afford? Is it rich people, especially rich white people? Hell no, it isn’t. It’s brown people, black people, yellow people. It’s people who have different shades of skin than us. They are the people that are in similar situations to us, living paycheck to paycheck, suffering like we do. So why then would we view them as our enemy?
Allegiances, traditionally, are made amongst people who have common interests. In an historical sense, white skinned working people have overwhelmingly believed that our interests are based on skin color. We have to work for the betterment of the race, for our culture, for our identity. The truth, however, could never be further away. Whose interests do these beliefs really serve? White workers? In some sense, the answer may be “yes”. Working for the advancement of the white race at the cost of other races does buy us relative privileges and even some luxuries. In the end, however, we’re still poor, we’re still being used to make other people money. And those people aren’t non-white working people.
We have a stake in creating a new social paradigm and movement that goes beyond the idea of liberty being a protection for property ownership. We have a direct interest in fighting white supremacy, the state, and capitalism. Our freedom is intimately woven into the freedom of all working people. Until we are free as a working class, we will never be free as individuals, no matter what skin color we are.
More in this interview with Strano by the Hampton Institute....
As for the tiny fascisms of the present, we must write what we see, in all its ambivalence and ambiguity. Rather than gloss over the injustices committed by friends, we should include all the gray, all the benign and practical xenophobias--and leave history to be the final judge.
