Are “Trial runs for fascism in full flow?”

You’ll occasionally see a tweet that you think is pretty good emanating from a right, centre-right or at least non-liberal voice on twitter, and you’ll note happily that lots of others seem to have re-tweeted it as well, let’s say two three thousand accounts. That’s not bad, you think – OK, the point was made in the reflexive snarky way native to twitter but it was a funny point that hit its target and people seem to be listening, all good. Then you’ll scroll further down your feed and see the most hysterical Progressive banality on the topic has received twenty or thirty thousand retweets and prompted an Op-Ed in the New York Times and you will be reminded that it’s not just the content creators but the bulk of social media users skew in a very specific political direction.

Fintan O’Toole’s article for the Irish Times, “Trial runs for Fascism are in full flow” is a little like that. It is the most read Irish Times editorial ever and presumably therefore one of the most read pieces of Irish journalism ever. (“Read”, of course, assumes that people aren’t merely churning a link to the article on their social media feeds as a marker without reading it – an easy way of saying “here’s the kind of thing I believe” without doing the hard work of dragging your eyes across the page.) It was said in the past that you would never go broke appealing to the lowest common denominator of taste or intellect. In the current year a content creator can secure media attention for their work as long if they write to the wildest pitch of emotion possible. Fascism may need trial runs, but self-righteous hysteria doesn’t.

Here is his thesis:

To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism… Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

Yes, God forbid we should be careless with the word fascism. But how is this happening? What are we fools missing?

One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections.

While it may be the case that Trump’s election was rigged, if there is conclusive evidence of that I haven’t seen it and neither has Fintan. Certainly none of what’s been proffered so far as “proof” is more conclusive than the proof we have that (say) the 1960 presidential election was rigged in favour of John F. Kennedy. But JFK was a presentable young man with a nice story who occasionally convinced people he was concerned about the right sorts of things, unlike mean old racist uncle Donald, so that wasn’t a trial run for fascism, but this is. Similarly when two Irish referendums on European matters were re-run at the behest of the European Union – because the people, those wretches, had failed to validate the pre-arranged conclusion, and because Ireland isn’t important enough to hold up the whole European show – that wasn’t incipient fascism, but the discovery irregularities in the Brexit campaign is. That’s only fair, because the EU is progressive, open, cosmopolitan, and so on – all the good things in life – and Brexit is reactionary, close-minded, hateful – all the bad. What else have you got Fintan?

Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed… And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.

The first part of this is an arrangement of conspiratorial innuendoes, and less like an editorial than it is a message in a fortune cookie. Yes, people who get elected with 40% of the vote are still the President, if that’s what the electoral system permits. No, the fact that a President has a hardcore support of less than 50%, and lots of the country hates him is not unique to Trump – it’s at least as good a description of Barack Obama’s presidency. That was a presidency of illegal police black sites, child-murder by drone, and unprecedented whistleblower prosecutions – but not fascism; never that. I do agree with Fintan’s disdain for propaganda machines though; I get a look at one every time I log into twitter and check the “recommended in – politics” section. Here’s the haul from the last few days – let me know if you notice a pattern. Bear in mind that most of the people I follow on twitter are not left-wing. This is nevertheless the platform’s attempt to, in Fintan’s words, tailor for me a bespoke universe impervious to unwanted realities:

All of what we have described so far is well within the worst traditions of business as usual in politics – but now we arrive at the endgame. Buckle up friends, as we undertake the final push to fascism.

…there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery… It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees?

“People have to be blooded” – lured into acts of depravity, in thrall to their fascist leader like a rabbit hypnotised by a snake, to use a famous formulation. But is that what happens? Salvini responded to native Italian dissatisfaction with boats of Migrants by promising to end their arrival. That promise proved popular; he was duly (legitimately) elected alongside other parties who promised similar things. Since his election he has tried to do what he promised in relation to the boats, and both he and the measures he employed have grown more popular as a result, enjoying a surprising breadth of support. So between Salvini and the Italian public – who is blooding whom? Who is the hunter and who is the hound? I certainly don’t think it can be argued that the Italian public have been slowly drawn into this position, “parable of the new bridge”-style.

And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch. To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success.

I don’t know of and can’t actually find writing by any individual well-known commentators expressing the opinion that Trump’s border separation policy was a mistake, so I have no idea who is being accused of naivety here. As for the policy being a “trial run” to “see how people feel” – in order for that to be true, the Trump administration would need to have publicised their policy and inivited inspection of its details, which is the literal opposite of what happened. The administration did everything they could to obfuscate and hide it from the public, and once it was discovered great lengths were taken to deny access to the facilities in question and prevent people seeing visual evidence of the policy’s effects. The only pictures of “kids in cages” I know of are either intentionally deceptive or date from the 100%-not-fascist golden age that was the Obama presidency. But hey, maybe that’s the “propoganda machine” with its “alternative facts” that Fintan alluded to earlier.

Immigration is good and we should be in favour of it, and we shouldn’t like how immigrants are being spoken about by Trump and various others. Trump is often repellent and reckless in what he says and does, as a person and as demonstrated through his policies. But the point is not whether these things mentioned in the article are awful or not, but whether they have parallels with events under other recent governments which were not called routinely called out as fascist (they do). If there is a difference in perception between the acts of these regimes, it is not described by the “blooding” process Fintan outlines, because that process simply isn’t happening as he describes it. Politicians, as always, are either committing cruel acts far from the light of day, or doing what the public asks them to in broad daylight.

Second, I don’t think Fintan reflects much more fondly on the counterpoints I have mentioned – European treaties, ballot stuffing in the Kennedy era or occasions of media bias – than I do. But again, that’s not the point. The point is he would never see the equivalent modern events as signs of incipient fascism were they not occurring during the Trump presidency. For opinion-makers, when speaking of an ideologically non-liberal government, everything is always either fascism or about to become fascism. And when we are talking about an ideologically Liberal government either the reverse is true. What determines whether something is a trial run for fascism is not what happens or how, but the taste, style and, let’s be honest, ideology of the perpetrator. Exactly how much difficulty the idea of a rigged election or stolen referendum presents is entirely dependent of the partisan alignment of those doing the theoretical rigging, the stealing, and that of whoever is on the receiving end.

I read somewhere someone commenting on the article, approvingly, by saying “you don’t end up with babies in cages by accident”. What the person meant was, someone invented and enforced this cruelty – they did it on purpose and are responsible, let’s call them to account. It’s a great observation and one which I hope we can apply to events further back along the chain of causation for all these issues. If we can say you don’t end up with “babies in cages” by accident, can we also say you don’t get an 800% increase in asylum applications from Central American countries (with no equivalent deterioration in the status of those countries) by accident? Perhaps we could start the argument there some time, see who is responsible for that, and hold them to account? Whatever else you can say about Salvini and Trump, there were critcial situations at their respective borders not of their creation before they arrived – they wouldn’t have been elected otherwise. “Someone” pulled the pin out of a demographic hand grenade, and tossed it to these reckless men screaming, “watch out, he’s got a bomb, he’s gonna kill us all!” Maybe instead of chasing the fascist phantasms we can go after those people?