Wednesday, September 28, 2022

FASCISM IN AMERICA DOESN'T NEED TO BE REGIONAL, OR EVEN NATIONAL

John Stoehr thinks the fascist threat to America comes primarily from the South:
Our discourse presumes the dividing line between Americans is solely partisan. Over here are Republicans. Over there are Democrats. But a focus on partisanship overlooks geographical differences, particularly the south’s unique historical role in the US.

Where is the highest concentration of politics as war by other means? The south. Where is the highest concentration of politics as problem-solving? The northeast. “American politics is the South’s revenge for the Civil War,” wrote Garry Wills. The south dominates the nation. If it can’t, it goes to war, putting an end to democratic politics. Yet we act as if sectionalism died two centuries ago.
The South has been the epicenter of reactionary politics in America for more than a century -- but I'm not sure it's the epicenter anymore. At this point, the reactionary South is more a state of mind than a fact of geography. It's all over the country. Here's the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania:


During the 2013-14 academic year, Mastriano also posed for a group photo at the Army War College wearing a Confederate uniform.

Also see the work of Robert Pape at the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Threats:
When we look at the counties that the 716 people arrested or charged for storming the Capitol [on January 6, 2021] came from, where they live, what we see is more than half live in counties that Biden won. They do not mainly come from the reddest parts of America. They also come from urban areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Houston, and Dallas. But the key characteristic uniting them is that they come from counties where the white share of the population is declining fastest.
The white panic Stoehr associates with the South? It's in every corner of America.

Stoehr also believes that fascism in America can't appear to be imported.
... fascism is always homegrown. Ours won’t look like Italy’s. Italy’s won’t look like Hungary’s. And so on. Fascisms may resemble each other, but they aren’t copycats. If it seemed imported, it wouldn’t work, wrote Sarah Churchwell: “Fascism’s ultra-nationalism means that it works by normalizing itself, drawing on familiar national customs to insist it is merely conducting political business as usual.”
In 2022, is this still true? I agree that an American fascist movement would need to look American rather than foreign. But these days, when American right-wingers look to other countries, what they often think is: These foreigners share our traditional American values more than a lot of the so-called citizens of our own country. In the past, they've regarded Benjamin Netanyahu and even Tony Blair as standing for Right and Truth against "Islamofascism," while liberals, in their view, were pro-terrorist. These days, they look at Viktor Orban, or Vladimir Putin, and see someone who, unlike American liberals, champions heterosexuality and believes in rigid rules of gender, traditional nuclear families, and Christianity as a state religion, while opposing George Soros and "globalism." And more recently...


And why not? In order to win our favor, Putin, Orban, and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro learned the American right's favorite talking points and parroted them back to us. Italy's next prime minister, the fashy Giorgia Meloni, has consulted with Steve Bannon, and it shows:


If overseas fascists continue talking like American fascists, I imagine our country's right-wingers would be just as happy to see Hungary annex the United States as the other way around.
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