Hello friends, it’s been a while.
When last we spoke the world was a simpler place. I should say it was relatively simpler and by a matter of degrees. I didn’t mean to take such a long break from OnOne, life got a bit busy and I spent what little writing time I had working on a few pieces for Jacobin Magazine. All #humblebrags aside….
This past week a gunman, clad in body armor, traveled about 200 miles to Buffalo specifically to murder Black people at a supermarket. He had planned his attack out in the open on social media. He left a lengthy manifesto citing “The Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and CRT as the reasons why he needed to murder Black people. He streamed the entire attack on Twitch.
There are many takes to be had. The ease with which an 18-year-old could access guns and ammunition, a year after being investigated and hospitalized for making terroristic threats against his high school, is certainly something to consider. Mental health is also something that people want to discuss after shootings like this, although nobody seems to have even the most barebones plan to increase access to mental health care. And of course, there is the racism of it all. In a context where the Republicans are set to go to political war over critical race theory, someone bought the kool-aid and decided to wage literal war on the concept of Black people.
One of the more depressing aspects of covering politics is when I sit down to write about a current event and realize that I had already written everything I would want to say a year ago. I do want to say that this shooting was not merely the result of Trumpism, or 4chan, 8chan, and online radicalization in general. Yes, all these things shaped and molded the shooter into the agent of hate he became, but they are a product of America refusing to acknowledge its long flirtation with fascism.
We want to believe that fascism is some exotic mental illness, something you’re more likely to catch in eastern Europe than you are stateside. But there is a reason why so many Americans thought highly of Mussolini’s project and even had good things to say about Hitler, at least until the truth about the Holocaust came out. There’s a reason why fascist American businessmen plotted to overthrow the American government and install a military dictatorship and no one went to jail after it was foiled. The dirty secret about the American dream and our conception of freedom is that these ideas aren’t really about the equality of man and the presence of opportunity. It’s more about the freedom to accumulate power. It’s a promise that power will always be available to the right people, the people who are worthy of it.
At least that’s how some see it. For them, their right to power is always under attack by nefarious outside forces. Minorities overstepping their place, women refusing to inhabit their natural inferiority and purpose in producing offspring, alien invaders from other countries and customs seeking to culturally terraform America into something a bit more palatable to their barbarian tastes. These perceived threats have consumed the conservative mind from the very beginning of this country.
The American right has perfected the art of intellectualizing fascism to the point of complete mystification. This is not to say that the entire American conservative movement is a fascist project. I don’t want to get sued. Rather conservatism shares intellectual and emotional underpinnings with fascism. The belief that a culturally homogeneous society is necessary for stability and cultural cohesion and that homogeneity should be enforced by the state. A belief in hierarchies and natural orders. A yearning for a mythic past that has been lost to modernity and the machinations of insidious others.
The august members of the serious conservative commentariat would wholeheartedly reject the notion that they have anything to do with the actions of the Buffalo shooter. They then might go on to speak on the dangers of importing too many non-English speaking immigrants. Or warn of the danger Critical Race Theory poses to the stability of a nominally post-racial America. The Nazis hated trans people too, is all I’m saying.
Godwin's Law has its uses but all too often it’s used as thought-terminating rhetoric. People indeed have a habit of comparing whatever political project they don’t like to that of the Nazis, but to dismiss the comparison simply because it was invoked in the first place isn’t entirely helpful. Fascism was a real thing. While there are different forms of it, just like any other ideology, they all share a basic structure that can be viewed through a critical lens.
And through that lens, we can also view the other side of the coin. Where the opposition to fascism fails when failing to realize the extent and causes of its rise. Capitalist liberal democracies tend to be willfully blind to the ways that the market enforced alienation and inequality creates a fertile ground for fascist elements to grow. Some bristle at the notion that economic precarity is the cause for a resurgence in naked racism, or that tackling economic issues would solve racial prejudice and violence. It’s just not as simple as all that, arguments between race reductionists and class reductionists are immaterial because these two issues cannot be reduced to one single explanation. They feed off each other like an apocalyptic ouroboros.
At the end of the day, fascism is more compatible with capitalism than socialism. America has always seen socialism as the more prescient threat, even as we fought alongside the Red Army against the axis powers. We were amazingly comfortable working with Nazi scientists and collaborating with fascist remnants and organized crime in Europe to prevent socialism from gaining a substantial presence on the world stage. We have sanctioned the death of millions, murdered by authoritarian dictators, for reasons as banal as access to cheap bananas. And this is all after we spent 100 years operating a partial fascist state just for Black people. This is the political morality that allows Tucker Carlson to make the case that The Great Replacement is a bigger threat to America than climate catastrophe.
Fox News didn’t tell the Buffalo shooter to do what he did. Inflation didn’t make him do it. Adam Smith is not directly at fault. This was the individual act of a broken brain, processing the increasingly precarious state of the world like a demented hero fantasy, where the solemn duty to protect the white race (synonymous with America in his imagination) from the subversive elements plotting its doom fell to him. But individual acts are not divorced from historical and cultural contexts. We don’t stumble into history as the product of intellectual abiogenesis, our beliefs and actions aren't the results of a hermetically sealed individual mind. When liberals respond to events like this by proclaiming that “hate has no place here”, they are being disastrously ignorant. Hate absolutely has a place here.
You aren’t going to exercise the hate beating in the heart of America by restricting access to the digital public square or banning certain kinds of scary guns. The only way is to seriously and soberly assess the American project and why this kind of ideology asserts a claim to it. Fascism works when people believe that resources are scarce and some nefarious other is coming to take what little (or a lot) they have. Acknowledging this isn’t letting racists off the hook for racism, it's understanding that racism and fascism are observable human responses to a specific set of social inputs. Social inputs that happen to overlap with what is involved in reproducing hegemonic American capitalism.
The Buffalo shooter doesn’t happen without right-wing extremist radicalization online, online radicalization doesn’t happen without mainstream conservative media outlets and politicians constantly dog-whistling about cultural deficiencies in minority populations, and the dog-whistling doesn’t happen without the need to explain inequalities between races and classes within races, those inequalities don’t happen without capitalism needing to exploit and then dispose of surplus labor. There is no easy way to fix this. There is no hashtag to tweet or tee shirt to buy or march to attend that will stop the next inevitable attack. Our only hope is to slowly unlearn the myth of the American project and start dealing with the reality. We can acknowledge the good where it exists, we don’t need to demonize ourselves in performative penance. But we can’t keep pretending like the bad doesn’t exist and isn’t directly involved in the issues we face today.
CRT has its flaws but fundamentally it’s concerned with this necessary myth-busting. That’s why it’s such a threat to those who see hate as a path to power. That’s why the perception of CRT as an existential threat is cultivated in the austere classical liberal halls of the Manhattan Institute, trickles down through the sewers of the internet picking up the fetid slime of fascism, until it poisons the brains of socially alienated white kids and inspires them to do something about it.
Solidarity with the victims in Buffalo who lost their lives to American homegrown racial terror.
Solidarity forever.
"Only Love can conquer hate" https://youtu.be/H-kA3UtBj4M