On Hypocrisy:

Last night Biden gave a speech that more or less called out the MAGA wing of the republican party as fascists. Immediately, Republicans responded as if Biden had announced a program to start rounding up the Red Hats and sending them to camps. The thing is Biden was right. The MAGA wing of the republican party is fascist. The reason he was right was accidentally elucidated by the trove of libs setting out to defend Biden by pointing out the hypocrisy of a political movement that would decry Biden's words as needlessly divisive and grossly insulting to millions of Americans who voted for Trump…..and also fervently supports Trump. 

The people calling Biden evil, divisive, and deranged for suggesting that, at the very least, they are anti-democratic are the same people who call LGBTQ mentally ill child predators for merely existing around children. They are the same people who believe the mere fact of one being targeted by police makes one a criminal worthy of inhumane treatment, while also believing the FBI is part of a grand conspiracy to eliminate their beloved leader. They believe the state has no right to mandate mask use or vaccines in the middle of a pandemic but the state does have the right to legislate a person's pregnancy. Free speech is a sacrosanct principle unless it's the speech of  LGBTQ educators or people supporting the BDS movement in Israel/Palestine.

Here’s the thing though. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s fascism. 

The most well-known trait of fascist political projects is the formation of in-groups positioned in an eternal conflict with delineated out-groups. These out-groups must be perceived as simultaneously weak and ineffectual while also possessing an entrenched power that is used to persecute the in-group. Like, I dunno, taking away their social media accounts or something like that. 

From there a second defining trait of fascism arises. The application of social norms and laws so that they only apply to and are enforced upon the out-group. This appears hypocritical. Parents taking their kids to a drag show is definitionally child abuse but Trump’s well-documented association with a child sex trafficker is just a smear job. Hypocrisy implies a shallow disregard for the logic of one's argument. How can conservative Christians demand a religious presence at schools while fear-mongering over the presence of Sharia law in areas with significant Muslim populations? Calling it hypocrisy implies that conservatives are somewhat stupid, lacking the thoughtfulness to formulate intellectually consistent arguments. But this isn’t correct. Hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug. 

And here is where Biden got it somewhat wrong. The president tried to make clear that his remarks were directed at the MAGA wing of the party as if there was some separate Republican faction that rejects the anti-democratic tenor of Trump's most loyal advocates and followers. Practically we know that far more Democratic voters were more than willing to reject the populist but ultimately milquetoast democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders than Republicans were willing to reject Trump’s incoherent proto-fascist ramblings. The vocally anti-Trump sector of the conservative commentariat has been rendered all but irrelevant and most of them have either found a new home in centrist liberal discourse or embraced the Trump of it all. 

Because at the end of the day, the kind of fascistic positioning on issues that presents as hypocrisy predates Trump as a political figure by a wide margin. Conservative Christians have been doing this since reconstruction. Fiscal conservatives continue to argue (with zero real evidence) that giving money to poor people is irresponsible while giving money to wealthy capitalists is the entire function of federal fiscal policy.  Or as composer Frank Whihoit once famously put it:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

That modern movement conservatism shares this trait with fascism is not insignificant. Conservatives were the ones most against interfering in WWII, some were sympathetic if not outright supportive of Hitler. The rhetoric and tactics employed by Hitler and the Nazis were greatly influenced by American racism, eugenics, and settler colonialism. After the war was over and the Nazis were defeated, the conservative anti-communist elements of the American deep state were more than willing to welcome the services of Nazi scientists and collaborators. This history informs the evolution of movement conservatism and culminates in the emergence of Trump. A figure who can signify all the anti-democratic, in-group/out-group inclinations of a political project whose ultimate goal is the establishment and preservation of rigid natural hierarchies. 

My conservative acquaintances will be quick to point out that republicans don’t have a monopoly on hypocrisy. It’s been posted to death the contradiction of liberals who proudly proclaim “my body my choice” and also support mask mandates and vaccination requirements. Republicans view such state actions with the goal of public health and safety as authoritarian. They view culturally specific pedagogies and non-hegemonic histories being taught in schools as indoctrination and a nefarious plot to destabilize America. Liberals are the real fascists. 

There are a few problems with this. For one thing, when conservatives talk about America as under threat, they aren’t talking about the totality of America or Americans. They are talking about their specific conception of America, they are talking about their ingroup. As evidenced by Democratic politicians' continued pleas for a sane Republican party to emerge from the smoldering ashes of Trumpism, liberals foundationally believe that conservatism is a necessary element for a functioning body politic. Liberals also position their ingroup against an antagonistic outgroup, but unlike conservatives, liberals don’t view the outgroup as ontologically oppositional. They view them as stupid or gullible for sure, but ultimately they see the outgroup as victims of bad information presented by bad faith actors. The outgroup, in the liberal estimation, is there to be reformed. Dragged kicking and screaming into a better life. For conservatives the out-group is to be eliminated entirely, to have their ideology completely eradicated or if failing that, the removal of persons holding that ideology. 

The other problem with comparisons of liberal and conservative hypocrisy vis a vis fascism is the existence of a third important trait of fascist political expression. The call to a return to a mythic past. Conservatives are obsessed with deriving moral certitude from history. Whether it be ancient Greek and Roman ideas of manliness, enlightenment era reason, or the very founding of America, conservatives are always trying to return to what they believe was a more civilized and moral time in human development. It's the thing that conservatives are trying to conserve. America was once great and we need to make it great again. How do we do that? By removing all the elements that are impeding its greatness.

Some of this has its origins in turn of the century mysticism and spiritualism with callbacks to Voltaire and the idea of diffusionism. A deep dive into the mythology of QAnon will reveal striking similarities to Helena Blavatsky’s ideas in the late 1800s about a covert war between light and dark. And sure enough, early proto-Nazi organizing in Germany and elsewhere was conducted under the cover of spiritualist groups. I’m saying that the new age mysticism heavily present in today's alt-right is not a coincidence. For all of its myriad flaws, liberalism is fundamentally a forward-looking ideology. The past is to be improved upon, not returned to. That is an important difference. 

Liberals need to understand this before it is too late…again. It's not enough to label MAGA as a fascist project. We need to understand the basic mechanics of fascism. Today most people will reject the term fascist but that’s a distinction of convenience. Most rank and file Nazis joined the party not of a strong ideological conviction, but out of convenience. Figures like Erick Erickson, Kevin McCarthy, Rod Dreher, J.D. Vance, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, all accused Biden of adopting an irreconcilable stance of division, marking his political opponents as enemies of the state. MTG straight-up called the man Hitler. It’s easy to peruse these people's prior stances and words and cry hypocrisy as if that is a useful argument to convince people of their status as bad faith actors. 

But it’s not hypocrisy we are seeing here. It’s the expression of the fascistic impulse to construct rules that apply to thee and not to me. It’s a signal to take them seriously at the aims of their political project. It’s a warning that if and when conservatives hold a significant amount of power, they will not hold themselves to the same standards they hold liberals to. Conservatives don’t actually oppose state power or the demonization of political enemies. They oppose pluralist state power that treats all groups as equals. They don’t support the rule of law, they support laws that defend their natural right to rule.  

The problem isn’t MAGA conservatives, it's conservatism. And the solution isn’t de-platforming or SNL sketches depicting them as stupid, it’s deconstructing the conditions that make in-group/out-group political formations appealing. This means building a populist political formation that speaks to people's needs and addresses them directly, without the needed expertise of elite administrators. This doesn’t mean merely identifying bad actors, but deconstructing the systems that allow bad actors to gain outsized amounts of power over others. The greatest threat to fascism was never liberalism. It was socialism. The idea that we are not in competition with each other to secure the greatest amount of the pie we can accumulate, but rather that each and every one of us is vital to the act of production and continued human advancement. 

Solidarity Forever.