Fascists Among Us Read online

  In the United States, for instance, the Tea Party arose out of right-wing opposition to the Obama administration’s subsidy package for homeowners facing foreclosure. Though initially backed by major conservative advocacy organisations, it came to express a broader dissatisfaction with politics-as-usual, with one Washington Post survey showing that, while 92 per cent opposed Obama, 87 per cent were also dissatisfied with Republican leaders.37

  Yet this anti-establishment sentiment was very much shaped by Islamophobia and the eliminationist rhetoric promoted by talk radio and, in particular, Fox News. The early Tea Party grew, in part, from the 9/12 Project, a group launched by Fox presenter Glenn Beck. Beck had previously warned of the Federal Emergency Management Agency detaining patriots in camps, denounced the United Nations for seeking to install a One World government, and attacked Obama as a black militant working in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood to bring down America.38

  But despite the racism of most outsider anti-elitists, it would be wrong to label them as fascist. Genuine fascists sought to destroy democracy, so as to create an authoritarian regime based on supposed natural hierarchies. The centrality of violence to their program meant that fascist organisations usually formed a street-fighting force or militia.

  By contrast, national populists presented themselves as expanding democracy to the ‘plain people’. They did not, for the most part, campaign on the extra-legal suppression of their enemies. They wanted to replace an elite they depicted as morally corrupt and plotting against the populace, but they sought to do so through electoral politics.39 Despite its conspiratorial and almost insurrectionary rhetoric, the Tea Party, for instance, concentrated in practice on supporting the preselection of socially conservative or populist Republicans. It did not organise fights in the streets.

  Nevertheless, the boundary lines between outsider anti-elitism and genuine fascism could become difficult to discern, as the 2016 US presidential election would prove.

  3

  ‘HAIL TRUMP!’

  FASCIST MEMES

  At the end of 2016, the Merriam-Webster dictionary site reported that readers had searched for ‘fascism’ more than any other word except ‘surreal’.1

  For many, the election of Donald Trump in America signalled an epochal shift — the arrival of the first fascist president. Trump had campaigned, after all, on banning Muslims from entering the US and on building a wall to keep out Mexicans (whom he described as ‘rapists’ involved in ‘drugs’ and ‘crime’).2 He had used slogans, such as ‘America First’, associated with historical far-right movements. He had boasted about sexually assaulting women, he had mocked disabled and female reporters, and he had revelled in flouting the conventions of high office.

  During the 2016 campaign, and even more so after it, a long list of politicians and commentators described the US president as a ‘fascist’ (or at least ‘fascistic’).

  ‘Trump is a fascist,’ tweeted Max Boot. ‘And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it.’3

  Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal called Trump’s proposal for a ‘Muslim registry’ ‘fascism, plain and simple’; the former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore accused Trump of engaging in ‘fascist talk’.4

  ‘I’m still not sure it’s 100 per cent clear that Donald Trump really understands that he’s a neo-fascist,’ wrote Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast.5

  Similar comments came from Madeleine Albright, Matt Yglesias, Timothy Snyder, Jamelle Bouie, Chauncey DeVega, and many others.

  Clearly, Trump was not a conventional politician. But a comparison of him with genuine fascists reveals obvious differences. Trump did not, after all, enrol his supporters in a mass movement based on suppressing ‘traitors’ or the ethnically impure. He presented his racist policies as dependent upon his electoral victory. His crassness and abuse of opponents reflected his background in reality TV rather than any experience of street oration; he showed no interest in staging real-world confrontations with his enemies.

  The post-9/11 era saw all political tendencies shift to the right, with social democracy and the mainstream right embracing xenophobia and anti-Muslim racism, even as disaffection with the parties created new populist forces. Trump might be understood as a merger between two previously distinct traditions: the conservatism of the Republican Party right and the outsider anti-elitism of the Tea Party.

  Take, for instance, the speech that Trump gave to his supporters in early 2016:

  Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends, and her donors. This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system.6

  This was not the conventional rhetoric of a Republican. If the comments were not, in and of themselves, racist, they reprised a traditional racist trope — the notion of a sinister clique shaping history in secret — and allowed listeners to draw their own conclusions as to whom exactly (Jews? Muslims? The Illuminati?) the ‘special interests’ might be.

  The speech reflected the influence of outsider anti-elitism on the political mainstream, with the conspiratorial logic underpinning ‘Eurabia’ or ‘The Great Replacement’ manifesting not on cable TV but in the stump speech of a presidential candidate.

  Again, while Trump did lead his supporters in chants of ‘lock her up’, his campaign did not embrace the violence so central to fascism. His response to hecklers, often cited as evidence of his fascistic inclinations, actually showed the difference between a populist like Trump and a fascist like Mosley.

  ‘If you see somebody with a tomato, knock the crap out of them,’ Trump told supporters in Iowa, in a typical incident.7 On another occasion, Trump explained that his opponent might be removed from office by those he called ‘the Second Amendment people’ (that is, gun owners).8 The rhetoric was deliberately ugly, intended — as with populist eliminationism more generally — to outrage liberals.

  But, unlike Mosley, Trump hadn’t organised a specially trained group of supporters to attack protesters, nor did he stage the carefully calibrated display of brutality choreographed by the British Union. His statements more resembled the quips of an O’Reilly or a Coulter: a reflection of a coarsened, debased political culture, certainly, but provocations rather than real calls for action.

  Trump’s victory should more properly be understood as the culmination of a long process by which a racist populism had entered the mainstream and blended into the long-standing right-wing traditions of the Republican Party. Which does not mean that his election was not meaningful for the far right.

  ‘Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!’ said the fascist leader Richard Spencer at a November 2016 meeting of the so-called alt-right, as his listeners responded with Nazi salutes.9

  The sudden prominence of Spencer, and a score of other more-or-less overt fascists, reflected, among other factors, the new media environment of the twenty-first century, with the internet in general — and social media in particular — providing an ideal medium for the dissemination of fascist ideas.

  To understand the advantages of the digital environment to fascists, one need only recall the experience of the far right in the late twentieth century: a period in which would-be recruits often struggled to access fascist texts, let alone connect with others who shared their ideas.

  In his memoirs, David Greason (one of the founders of a tiny Australian fascist groupuscle in the 1970s) discusses his struggles to locate a copy of The Protocols of Zion. Eventually, he found one in the offices of the League of Rights, a longstanding organisation of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists:

  Three poky rooms, two walls of books, a tatty curtain, an old man and an old woman. There may have been a picture of the Queen somewhere; I
can’t remember … The bookshop doubled as a storeroom for dust. Volumes that hadn’t been disturbed for centuries were stacked up to the ceiling. Wonky old parcels of booklets, some with their wonky old contents spilling out, were perched on shelves like booby traps.10

  By contrast, in his manifesto, Person X gives readers a simple answer to the question of where he researched and developed his beliefs: ‘The internet, of course.’11

  As early as 1996, a would-be fascist could log onto Stormfront, the site described by the Anti-Defamation League as ‘a veritable supermarket of online hate, stocking its shelves with many forms of anti-Semitism and racism’. By 2005, Stormfront ranked in the top 1 per cent of sites on the World Wide Web;12 by 2008, it was attracting 40,000 unique users a day.13

  Support for fascism was often dispersed geographically, with the far right typically strongest in small towns, rural areas, or the outskirts of cities. In the past, even if a fascist group maintained an office in such places, potential recruits felt, understandably, embarrassed to be seen inside it.

  The forums on Stormfront and similar sites could, however, be accessed anonymously by anyone from anywhere. The internet encouraged visitors to discuss posts, so that casual browsers quickly found themselves debating other readers in the comment threads.

  It might even be said that the structure of the internet — interactive yet undemocratic — replicated the characteristic fascist organisational form. A site like Stormfront remained entirely under the control of its moderator who, like the traditional fascist leader, relied on dictates to keep an atomised membership together. Yet individuals could feel, through their involvement in the forums, a sense of belonging, a feeling of participation in something bigger than themselves. By facilitating debates (in comments threads or elsewhere), a fascist page could foster the development of cadres, as participants became more confident in their arguments.

  Online interactivity provided a substitute for the real-life meetings that fascists often found difficult to stage. The Islamophobia and xenophobia circulating in the mainstream could be concentrated and intensified in the strange semi-privacy of a web forum, since individuals who might hesitate about joining a racist street march could denounce Muslim refugees in a digital discussion with much less fear of condemnation. As the Australian academic Andrew Jakubowicz noted, the online environment enhanced the ‘psychological dimensions of anonymity, disengagement and dis-inhibition’, which gave activists far more latitude to suggest physical violence against ethnic minorities and ‘traitors’.14

  In other words, the internet allowed activists of the far right to dissolve the distinction between right-wing populism and genuine fascism. The emergence of social media intensified the process, simply by making an equivalent functionality an everyday part of ordinary people’s lives. With the normalisation of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, fascists no longer needed supporters to seek out exotic destinations like Stormfront: the far right could present its content on platforms that their recruits were already using.

  Furthermore, fascists began to incorporate the distinctive sensibility of troll culture.

  Most commentators associate trolling with 4chan, a forum launched in 2003 ostensibly for enthusiasts of anime, comics, games, and similar pursuits. The 4chan users developed meming and many other now-ubiquitous facets of internet culture, but they also created a cruel humour directed at those judged to have transgressed the unwritten codes of online behaviour.15

  4chan was not, at first, particularly political. Its anonymous members (known as ‘anons’) sought ‘lulz’ — the knowing laughter produced by adolescent pranks. But, perhaps inevitably, those lulz often came at the expense of conventional targets such as women, people of colour, and gays.

  Trolling had always involved transgression, with anons priding themselves on their indifference to the sentiments of normies. To take a particularly grotesque example, an early campaign centred on systematic harassment of a suicide victim’s parents.16 Because of the emphasis on flouting social and political taboos, the 4chan boards filled with porn (including child porn), racial slurs, violent imagery, and the like. An indifference to conventional ethics or etiquette bonded anons, as Richard Seymour noted, over a kind of collective, escalating glee, on the basis that ‘none of us is as cruel as all of us’.17

  The opportunities that troll culture presented for ideological fascists might best be illustrated by the success of The Daily Stormer, a Nazi site that took the Stormfront idea into the twenty-first century. Its editor, a man called Andrew Anglin, set out, as one journalist explained, to ‘make hate fun’ by adopting 4chan’s sensibilities.18

  A Daily Stormer style guide leaked to The Huffington Post outlined the project. ‘The tone of the site should be light,’ Anglin told his potential contributors:

  The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor — I am a racist making fun of stereotype [sic] of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.19

  Where, for instance, Stormfront presented itself with po-faced solemnity, The Daily Stormer used, for a while, a header in which Pokemon characters gambolled alongside Hitler. According to O’Brien, Anglin distributed Nazi memes through 4chan (and its replacement, 8chan) — and then watched as they dispersed ‘to a more “mainstream” conservative readership, often through transfer points such as Breitbart’.20 The disinhibition fostered by sites like 8chan eroded revulsion at the Holocaust or fascism more generally, with gags celebrating the Nazis circulating as simply another source of ironic lulz.

  But, of course, they weren’t. As one 8chan user explained, ‘At some point, shit went from, “I’m just pretending to be a racist psycho,” to “I actually am a white nationalist lunatic.”’21

  At its peak, The Daily Stormer reached something like 2 million readers a month. Yet online influence was not the same as real-world popularity. For fascism to re-emerge as a mainstream political current, its ideologues needed to bring their supporters out from their computers and onto the streets.

  In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, the far right’s swollen online presence made that seem a genuine possibility. Trump had appointed Breitbart’s Steve Bannon (an admirer of the Italian ‘esoteric’ fascist Julius Evola)22 as the White House chief strategist, and Sebastian Gorka (a supporter of the fascist Hungarian Guard)23 as his deputy assistant. His victory had brought considerable attention to the alt-right, with many of its leaders suddenly thrust into the international spotlight to hold forth on their racial theories.

  The most important attempt to transform internet traffic into street activism came via the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville in August 2017. The protest, ostensibly against the removal of a statue honouring the confederate leader Robert E Lee, received the imprimatur of fascist organisations throughout America, including the Traditionalist Worker Party, Identity Evropa, and long-standing hate groups like the KKK and the National Socialist Movement. But most of the energy for the event came from the new celebrities of the alt-right. The key organiser was a white supremacist, Jason Kessler; the advertised speakers included Richard Spencer, Matthew Heimbach from the fascist Traditionalist Worker Party, the Holocaust denier ‘Augustus Invictus’, the racist podcaster Mike Enoch (producer of The Daily Shoah), the anti-Semitic online activist Tim Gionet (known as ‘Baked Alaska’), the neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell, and others.24

  Andrew Anglin from The Daily Stormer described what was at stake: ‘Although the rally was initially planned in support of the Lee Monument … it has become something much bigger than that. It is now an historic rally, which will serve as a rallying point and battle cry for the rising Alt-Right movement.’

  At first, the Unite the Right organisers believed th
ey’d staged a triumph, as they gathered to chant fascist slogans like ‘Blood and Soil’ and ‘Jews Will Not Replace Us!’. On its live blog of the event, The Daily Stormer crowed, ‘We have an army! This is the beginning of a war!’25

  Donald Trump’s lackadaisical response blaming ‘many sides’ for the death of the anti-racist Heather Heyer emboldened the fascists further, with Anglin’s publication declaring that ‘Trump comments were good’.

  Yet, rather than translating online popularity into ongoing real-world activism, Unite the Right exposed the contradictions that the internet had papered over.

  In the desperate 1930s — in societies gripped by political and economic turmoil — fascist violence had appealed to the middle class both as a means and an end. Street battles provided meaning and solidarity in a time of chaos, while the ‘revolutionary’ aims of fascism promised salvation to despairing people.

  But America in 2017 was not Weimar Germany, no matter how the effects of the Global Financial Crisis lingered. Unite the Right did not appeal to the Tea Party crowd or Fox News viewers, or other populists mobilised behind Trump. Such folk might have believed that Muslims were introducing sharia by stealth, and that rapists and gangbangers were entering the country across the Mexican border. But they were not desperate enough to enlist in The Daily Stormer’s war, and did not feel impelled to join the few hundred (mostly younger) activists who rallied in Charlottesville behind the fascist banners.

  Nor was there a section of the ruling elite prepared to back street fighters in the way that Lord Rothermere had briefly supported Mosley. The militant union movement that Rothermere had feared did not exist in 2017, with industrial disputation so much in decline as to render a paramilitary anti-labour force entirely superfluous, even for the most paranoid industrialist.