Mainstream US culture’s ability to see fascism stops at the 2024 elections
By Everett Acorn
“This is it, comrades[…] after today, everything changes.”
So warned a prescient friend about the looming escalation of events by the far right on August 11th 2017, the day before Heather Heyer was killed by fascists at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.
Although the US paramilitary right has been growing for decades, leftists have warned specifically about a coming onslaught of large-scale rightwing violence since 2016. We have given public presentations, tabled at events, spoken on the radio, and used our personal and group social media platforms to advocate, at the very least, building community – that is, forming systems of dual power in order to take care of each other, especially when bad things happen. We have advocated, as part of this, and if necessary, armed community defense; responses to the latter have included laughter, or incredulity (“are you saying there will be a CIVIL WAR?”), or replies from friends and family criticizing our “pessimism;” most often, responses have included angry condemnations conflating/confusing our advocacy of firearms for community defense with the wash of firearms used in piteous mass shootings… the latter now occurring almost daily in a society gone mad with fear and meaninglessness.
Later, after January 6th – about which we also warned – some people came around to realize how big the threat of rightist violence really is, but public concern (and inquiries to us about training) waned quickly with the apparent return of apparent stability, apparently, via the Biden presidency. Also returned were over-reliance on the electoral process and public complacency about taking direct responsibility for the safety and welfare of our citizenry.
So here we are two years later, waiting for the presidential elections of 2024, and people like me get to read daily columns by Heather Cox Richardson, who, yes, very rightly focuses on the continued threat to “our democracy.”1 Radio host Ian Masters of the show Background Briefing (broadcast every weekday for us in Mid-MO via radio station KOPN) has daily interviews with mostly mainstream academics who speculate about rising US fascism, using terms like “one-party rule” – presumably meaning rule by Republicans in the context of a fascist state. And it seems that even Joe Biden, who reportedly decided to run for president to unify the nation after Charlottesville, understands the threat; this past week, soon after using the term “semi-fascism” to describe the MAGA right, he made a televised speech about the threat of Trumpist Republicans.
It’s great that academics like Heather Cox Richardson are concerned about election subversion and upcoming judicial decisions like Moore vs. Harper – so we should presume that the reasons for their concern are because of what might happen, right? Concerns like these are speculative, because they haven’t happened yet… so if speculation, by its nature, suggests something extrapolative, why not also speculate and extrapolate about what happens after elections are stolen? With few mainstream exceptions, almost nowhere have I heard speculation about rioting, about the likely complicity of local police and the national military in a nationwide breakdown, about community defense or citizen resistance, or, even in very general terms, about what widespread civil disorder might look like.
Maybe the real reason for this is because, as historian Mark Bray said shortly in late 2020, the US media specifically (and mainstream liberal culture generally) lack a framework to consider the way such events might unfold. What he was saying is: we have so much institutional trust and history that we are blinded to see anything outside of the institutions we have grown up with.
Well… I can name one group who has speculated and planned about what things will look like in the aftermath of the 2024 elections: the paramilitary far right, who are armed and ready. How about we speculate on soccer stadiums housing tens of thousands of political enemies, as happened in Pinochet’s Chile; or the 30,000 disappeared in the Argentine Dirty War, or the massacres in 1980s El Salvador, for which some estimates indicate as many as 75,000 murdered; or Syrian government bombings and chemical attacks against citizens in Allepo?
Granted, this kind of speculation is not fun to contemplate; bombed out buildings and soccer stadium concentration camps are pretty grim things to speculate about. But if you knew these things were coming – if you knew that people like Heather Cox Richardson or your favorite NPR and PBS hosts would be arrested and made examples of by the far right because they were part of “the vast liberal conspiracy” – wouldn’t you wish you had done more? Lincoln Mitchell, former faculty of Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, said on Background Briefing last week: “The historians may look back on this and say it was always inevitable. We’re looking at it – so many in America are still looking at it… and still saying it’s unimaginable. And that is preventing us from doing what it takes to stop this from happening.”
If we continue to consider looming threats to “our democracy” as serious and as having such serious consequences, shouldn’t we be speculating – and planning – just a bit harder?
Footnotes
- “Democracy” is a term that I think is exaggerated and glorified in the context of the US, and the US government on its own website categorizes itself otherwise: “With the exception of town meetings, a form of pure democracy, [emphasis mine with a nod to the late Murray Bookchin] we have at the local, state, and national levels a government which is: ‘‘federal’’ because power is shared among these three levels; ‘‘democratic’’ because the people govern themselves and have the means to control the government; and ‘‘republic’’ because the people choose elected delegates by free and secret ballot’ [emphasis mine again].” https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDOC-108hdoc94/pdf/CDOC-108hdoc94.pdf