Get Me My Smelling Salts! Apparently, We Are Not Permitted to Call Fascists Fascists
For some reason, people become squeamish about calling out extreme political views (or, more specifically, right-wing political views). Admirable self-awareness -- "Am I being fair here?" -- becomes a crippling habit of refusing to say that something terrible should be condemned. When I was coaching a college debate team, the ultimate moment came when one of my students said (sincerely): "Well, what Hitler did could have been right for Hitler." There is a gray area between intellectual modesty and depraved moral relativism, but the existence of difficult line-drawing problems cannot mean that we lack the ability or the right to say when things are wrong.
This problem is relevant today because of the tendency of too many people to say that it is beyond the pale to accurately describing Donald Trump's encouragement (or at least ex post justification) of political violence as fascistic. Even beyond his embrace of violence, Trump has revealed himself, over and over and over again, to be a fascist. That is what he is. The example du jour is his repeated "enemies from within" descriptions of the people whom he sees as "evil, fascist, communist, Marxist, thugs" (or any combination of those words, see below). Even then, however, he cannot help himself, saying that such people should be punished by the national guard or the US military -- in other words, responding to political disagreement through retributive violence. His supplicants give him every opportunity to walk back the most extreme things that he has said, but he steadfastly refuses to do so.
As I noted last week, the mainstream media in the US continues to pretend that Democrats and Republicans are on the same moral (or immoral) plane, most recently including a weirdly critical column about Tim Walz's supposed "gaffe" of saying that maybe the Electoral College is a bad idea. That anodyne "kerfuffle" occupies prominent media space, even as the press ignores or quickly moves past Trump's "poisoning the blood of our country," or "radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," or "Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world ... to prey upon innocent American citizens" comments.
The moral relativism problem has become impossible to ignore. Yes, people can have reasonable differences of opinion. Yes, some people might think -- not only against all evidence but in the face of Trump's own repeated promises -- that this will not lead to more violence and greater tragedy. But as much as we try to convince ourselves to be open-minded about who is right and who is wrong, we have no problem every day with drawing conclusions and making moral judgments in other areas of life. A person who is guilty of murder is guilty of murder, and if he says that "you seem awfully interested in this murder, so maybe you did it," we have no problem saying: "Yeah, right, but the evidence says that you did it." Sometimes we are wrong, but the idea that we must hesitate to say what it true in order to be "fair" is simply absurd.
Even though these observations are responsive to the general gestalt of US politics in 2024, I bring them up specifically in response to an op-ed in today's Washington Post, in which a British columnist identified as "a comedian and ... author" turned George Orwell upside down in an effort to claim that both sides of the current political discourse have gone too far with their political invective. It is an astonishing accomplishment, turning Orwell's most important ideas into an excuse to give a pass to everyone, no matter how openly fascistic they have become.
After I finished reading that op-ed, I searched the Dorf on Law archives and was surprised to discover that only once in the eighteen years of this blog's existence have I mentioned the wonderful scene in John Cleese's comedy "A Fish Called Wanda" that lampoons the pretensions of people who claim to have read great literary works. In 2012, I recounted the key exchange between Jamie Lee Curtis's Wanda and Kevin Kline's obtuse, loud, stupid, and violent American CIA agent Otto:
Otto: "Don't call me stupid."
Wanda: "Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?"
Otto: "Apes don't read philosophy."
Wanda: "Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it."
Although I have already made light of the "to be fair" trope, let us be fair to poor Otto. In the movie, he has pretensions of having read Aristotle (who, he has to be told, was not Belgian) and Buddha. But those guys' ideas were at least dense. Kant and Nietzsche are difficult, too! But what made Orwell so important is that he was clear. In fact, that was not only his stock in trade but his mission as a writer. He argued that clarity and good ideas were a two-way street, that is, that the common excuse that "that guy's very smart, but he just doesn't express himself well" is nonsense. A person who cannot express a good idea, Orwell argued emphatically, does not in fact have a good idea (or even know what his idea is).
So getting Orwell wrong is a bit of an achievement. Yet our sincere comedian is convinced that Orwell would be appalled by people today who look at Trump and Trumpists and see fascism. After all, Orwell once wrote (as the op-ed reminds us) in his essential essay "Politics and the English Language" that the word fascism "now [has] no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.'" That was surely true in 1946 (when Orwell published those words in the immediate aftermath of the Allies' military defeat of fascist dictatorships), and in some contexts it might be true today, but that does not mean that the word's original definition is not still meaningful.
Being clear about the meaning of fascism is not going to get the op-ed's author where he wants to go, however, so instead he writes this:
Legitimate criticism of Trump has been undermined by overwrought claims that he is a “fascist.” The June cover of the New Republic even featured a composite image of Hitler and Trump along with the title “American fascism.” Needless to say, Trump is similarly prone to this kind of absurd hyperbole: Not only has he branded Kamala Harris a “fascist,” but he has also termed his rival “a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.”
See how fair and balanced our correspondent is? Trump does it, too! But other than saying that people calling Trump a fascist are being "overwrought," where is this going? He goes on to denounce the "histrionic discourse" on the left and a supposed "resort to boilerplate in lieu of effective argument." He tips his hand, however, by causally taking as given "the intolerance reflected by 21st-century 'cancel culture,'" which is about as Orwellian an empty phrase as one can find.
But again, the supposed sin here is that people have listened to Trump and reacted to his oft-stated plans to violently deport millions of people -- not even based on their legal immigration status but on the fact that they are not the kind of people that Trump thinks deserve to be in the country -- by saying that he is a fascist. We are told that "[t]he comparison of mainstream viewpoints to an ideology that drove authoritarian mass murder in the past century is unhelpful and historically illiterate." Under that logic, however, what should people have said about Hitler and Mussolini before they carried out their planned mass murders (but had made their intentions crystal clear)?
Trump's explicit statements, moreover, are not "mainstream viewpoints," unless we define that vague term simply by saying that millions of people agree with those extreme viewpoints. But guess what other viewpoints became mainstream when fascists made them so?
What is most amusing (but truly not at all amusing) about all of this is that Orwell offered one of the clearest "rules" possible to those who want to communicate through language. After ending his 1946 essay with what at first looks to be a handy list of simple rules for good writing (the second being "Never use a long word where a short one will do."), he ends with this: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
Again, even though people have over- and misused the word "fascist," fascists are still fascists. Orwell was indeed quite clear. It is barbarous to claim, as Hitler did, that "[a]ll great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning." It is also barbarous to sneer at those who accurately describe Trump as a fascist because of his repeated invocations of Hitler's ideas.