I sent this to nettime in response to a pointer to an opinon piece in The Guardian, “America feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover,” by Francine Prose.
Just a few minutes ago I wrote:
The same fools who enabled this catastrophe with their interminable [arendtsplaining](neological things) and pedantic denialism expect us to attend to their interminable babbling about how wrong they were. They should step aside and give their bully pulpits to people who were right when it mattered.
These postmature antifascists, as I like to call them, are a dime a dozen and best ignored. Francine Prose is a reasonably distinguished person, deeply intelligent and clearly of good faith — she plays on our team, so to speak. But anyone who’d write now that the US “feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover” should be read with some skepticism, because the US is far past that brink.
We’ve watched the prestigious institutions of one sector after another — national governments abroad and government entities at home, national and even transnational corporations, mighty universities, major media outlets, pillars of civil society, and on and on — quailing before Trump & Co. It’s perfectly understandable why they’d do so, and even a rational choice; I’m not one of those left-identified bombasts who naively believes the president of Harvard should risk the entire university’s existence for the fleeting glory of “speaking truth to power.” But even so, to spend the last year watching this happen and then argue the US is “on the brink”? WTF criteria would the country need for even the most prudent person to say we’ve gone over the brink?!
Prose’s own words are “our country is on the brink,” but The Guardian’s editors changed that to “feels like” for their headline out of journalistic caution. But that subtle shift, from fact to subjective impression, is in keeping with Prose’s own piece. It spends more time on the space cynical sysadmins used call PEBKAC, for Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. If you read her essay, most of it‘s concerned with phones screens, snow, media, robins, etc — novelistic detail that puts us in the shoes, and chair, of a Serious Person.
My comment above about pedantic denialists was prompted by a piece by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic — “Yes, It’s Fascism,” with the subhead “Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.” He too spends much of his time maundering on about his subjective process, then he conjures up one of those ‘best practice’–style lists cribbed from a melange of Authorities on Authoritarianism — Snyder, Eco, Paxton, etc — of criteria needed for anointing something Officially Fascist. He introduces the list with a choice bit of rhetoric that doffs its hat to some sort of ‘methodology’ but ultimately affirms his own capricious authority: “Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.” A decade too late, but who’s counting?
Well, I am, actually. Not so much the exact number of years have passes since I argued that Trump would need be forcibly removed from the White House (ten), but more the qualitative sense of time that permeates people’s thinking and enables their passivity. When you say we’re on the brink, you’re saying it hasn’t “really” happened yet, which justifies passivity. Arguing it isn’t “really” fascism achieves the same effect by slightly different means, by focusing on discernment. Saying of something evil that “this is what _______ looks like” — fascism, authoritarianism, whatever, it doesn’t matter because it’s all just content for a mad lib — does it as well, but with a semiotic twist: it may or may not not actually be _____ but it “looks like” it. And, of course, protestation like “this isn’t who we are” and “we’re better than this” do the same, but in still other ways. The list of these rhetorical sleights of hand could go on and on.
I have to make clear that the people saying these things should be assumed to be acting in good faith, caring for the public interest, and all those other warm-fuzzy things. I don’t mean to speak poorly of them as individuals. But as a class they’re pretty problematic, because the sum total of their efforts is to postpone the venerable question what is to be done? And in much the same way that they are, by their own admission, postmature antifascists, we should assume that, given the chance, they’d be among the first to prematurely declare victory over the fascists — because that’s when liberals would have to ask the much rougher question what is to be done with these fascists?