But politics generally and especially intra-Republican political battles are really about demonstrating dominance – not policy mastery or polling leads but a series of symbols and actions that mark the dominating from the dominated.
.. But what has really hurt Bush is not so much that Trump is calling him names. It’s that Trump has used these attacks to demonstrate that Jeb is unable or unwilling to defend himself. Trump hits him and Jeb takes it. His responses are hapless and weak and generally meaningless. You probably barely remember them. The impact of this is not tied to Trump calling Bush “weak.” Trump is engineering encounters that show that Bush is weak.
.. He says things that would kill a political mortal (ban members of an entire religion from entering the country) and yet he doesn’t get hurt. Virtually everything Trump has done over the last six months, whether it’s a policy proposal or personal attack, has driven home this basic point: Trump is strong. He does things other people can’t.
.. As I’ve said, this kind of dominance symbolism is pervasive in GOP politics. It’s not new with Trump at all. Most successful Republican politicians speak this language. And yet somehow for most it is nonetheless a second language. Not Trump. It’s his native language.
.. he seems to intuitively get that for this constituency and at this moment just demonstrating that he gets his way, always, is all that really matters. Policy details, protecting the candidate through careful press releases and structured media opportunities … none of that matters.
.. there’s really not even the pretense that there is any real dispute about debate rules or bias or fairness or anything like that at the core of this. There’s not even any there there in Trump’s supposed ‘feud’ with Megyn Kelly. It has all the emotive credibility of a professional wrestling rivalry. It really is more or less openly just him saying I’m going to jack you guys up for the fun of it and make a spectacle of this.
Just to make trouble.
Because I can.
.. But these kinds of antics, really unprecedented in their nature, are less an attack on the ‘establishment’ than a deeper structure of the political system itself.
Facism Test: The F Scale
Fifty years ago, the Authoritarian Personality studies attempted to “construct an instrument that would yield an estimate of fascist receptivity at the personality level.”This online, interactive F Scale presents that instrument in its final form. Additional infomation, including an explanation of the personality variables the F Scale tries to measure, is given below after the questionnaire. So take the F Scale now — or else! And if you want a good definition of fascism (something that somehow eluded the authors of the Authoritarian Personality studies), check out Fascism: The Ultimate Definition.
Umberto Eco’s Lessons on Ur-Fascism
“Ur-Fascism,” wrote the Italian thinker Umberto Eco,
derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois… the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
.. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies.
.. Mussolini himself “did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric.”
.. ordinary people and their values are mocked, especially among bien-pensant elites. And the idea that hard, honest work will yield a comfortable life—the core American idea, if we ever had one—doesn’t feel true anymore. The principle distinction within the middle class is now whether sending your children to college will leave them in severe, or merely moderate, debt peonage. And the intense competition at all levels of education reflects a growing fear that hard-earned success might not help your children enjoy the same. A world of social critique and thwarted ambition is a breeding ground for nihilism in the best and worse in the worst.
.. Eco also saw a “cult of action for action’s sake” in fascism. “Thinking is a form of emasculation…. culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes….the critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism,” the root of the cultural maladies fascism sought to eradicate. In a world of social chaos and murky values, the fascist’s bold measures appear otherworldly, supernatural, as marks of superiority. The fascist acts “before, or without, any previous reflection”—meaning his confidence and clarity are illusions: he knows the right path forward because walking resolutely makes the path right. Thinking before acting, on the other hand, reflects weakness of character, makes someone “low energy”; when they act—if they act at all—it will be in useless half-measures.
.. Truth, for the Ur-Fascist, was revealed “at the dawn of human history,” but was shattered, hidden in a thousand sources, “concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.” The little fragments of the “primeval truth” must be pieced together from a thousand sources, some contradictory. Thus, for example, the fascist world’s weird fascination with archaeology, with Zoroaster, with the Vedas.
.. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction.
.. Yet Eco thought technology could revive the Common Will, that “there is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
.. Mass-scale social media enables us to find a thousand backers for even our oddest opinions; its algorithms, given time, push us to see only those with whom we agree. Ideological monocultures are the new default; finding opposing viewpoints requires constant effort. That is where Eco was wrong: writing before the Internet was social and algorithmically optimized, he could not see that the new Leader, the new interpreter of the Common Will, is the self. The crowd is back, and it is everywhere.
Fascism, Style and Substance
Fascism is a variety of right-wing populism; so is “Trumpism” to the extent that such a thing exists. Trump appeals to the core demographic that animates fascist movements: the less-educated cohorts of the majority demographic group. And his appeal has a fundamental irrationalism to it. Trump plainly plays on and stokes xenophobia in his followers. He invokes a glorious past, blames our current difficulties on presumptively unpatriotic groups, and promises a return to glory if he’s elected. He encourages a cult of personality, fetishizes action, and displays little regard for democratic and liberal norms. So yeah, I get it.