ByPaul Mattick <https://brooklynrail.org/contributor/paul-mattick>
One might have thought that Trump’s departure from the White House would put an end to the constant worry—and not just on the part of left-leaning pundits—that he represented a rebirth of fascism.^1 In any event, the typically bizarre way in which he dealt with his electoral defeat led to a surge of worry about the black- or brown-shirted specter from the past. Historian Timothy Snyder, writing for the/New York Times Magazine/, recoiled before “The American Abyss” opened by Trump’s disdain for electoral democracy: “It was clear to me in October,” Snyder wrote, “that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup…”^2 The behavior he had in mind was above all Trump’s propensity for lying, and his attendant description of information sources that contradict him as “fake.” In his account, the heart of fascism is the “Big Lie”: “So long as [Trump] was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live or die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.” For Snyder, that bridge was crossed with the president’s insistence that he had won the election by a landslide, and his call for his supporters to march on the Capitol to prevent the certification of the fake victory of his opponent.
It's hard to grapple with the insipidity of these ideas. Fascism, a politics aimed at harnessing national energy in the struggle for political-economic power, is reduced to a propensity for telling tall tales; the notion that “when we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place,”^3 pretends that the power of the ruling class actually rests on the consent of the governed. In the end, even Snyder has to accept the fact that there was no coup, and to defer the real danger to the next election. Still, it’s easy to see why those who really run things—the corporate CEOs who are for the moment cutting their contributions to Republican PACs, the “two billionaires from California” who “did what legions of politicians, prosecutors and power brokers had tried and failed to do for years,” shutting Trump up by blocking his Facebook and Twitter accounts^4 —are appalled by the demonstration at the Capitol. The disaffection from social stability as defined by the norms of American electoral democracy is just as disturbing to the official devisers of ideology, in the press and in the academy, who are discovering how far disregard for their conceptual authority has gone.
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