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Does American fascism exist?
Does American fascism exist?, Daniel Bessner, The New Republic
“Fascism,”...has generally functioned as a so-called floating signifier. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who originated the phrase, a floating signifier is a term “void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning.” At one point or another, every political perspective in the United States has been identified as fascist. In the last two decades alone, Jonah Goldberg railed against “liberal fascism” as Chris Hedges dubbed the “Christian Right” “American fascists.” Dinesh D’Souza claimed that Hillary Clinton was fascist; Paul Krugman said the same about Trump. And even fringe ideologies weren’t safe: Sebastian Gorka linked socialism with fascism, while Nouriel Roubini made similar claims about libertarianism.

The one consistent quality the term “fascism” has retained since the 1930s is its negative valence. Almost no one uses it positively; instead, to borrow Kuklick’s acid description, the term is the verbal equivalent of “throwing a tomato at a speaker at a public event.” “Fascism,” Kuklick shows, “does not so much isolate a thing as it does some stigmatizing.” Indeed, fascism’s power in American discourse comes from the fact that it has no stable meaning—it’s mostly an all-purpose curse word, a highfalutin “fuck this”—which means that the fascism debate, as currently constructed, can never end. [...]

No incident displays the term’s malleability more than an informal 1937 survey undertaken by the social theorist Stuart Chase, who asked almost 100 people “what ‘fascism’ meant to them.” The respondents offered a range of diverse, even antithetical, definitions: A lawyer said “fascism” was “a coercive capitalistic state,” while a housewife identified it as the “same thing as communism”; an author answered that it was “an all-powerful police force,” while a farmer characterized it as “lawlessness”; a social worker described it as “government in the interest of the majority,” while a journalist insisted it was “undesired government of [the] masses by a self-seeking, fanatical minority.” Still, while the respondents provided diverse interpretations of fascism, most agreed that, whatever fascism was, they didn’t like it. Or as a schoolboy put it with youthful bravado, fascism was “something that’s got to be licked.”
City Life, Culture Wars and Conspiracy Theories
City Life, Culture Wars and Conspiracy Theories, Paul Krugman, The New York Times
I’ve noted before that there’s an unwritten rule in American politics that it’s OK for politicians to disparage big cities and their residents in a way that would be considered unforgivable if anyone did the same for rural areas. Trump’s false claims about crime weren’t that unusual. There seems to be a widespread sense that only people living a car-centered lifestyle, or a pickup truck-centered lifestyle, are real Americans.

And this in turn feeds into conspiracy theorizing. Making walkable cities possible requires both loosening and tightening restrictions on urban development: Localities would have to allow more construction of multifamily housing and multistory buildings, while restricting car traffic in certain areas.

Remarkably, the right manages to view both looser and tighter regulation as leftist plots.
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Historical amnesia in the age of capitalist apocalypse — and how to overcome it
Historical amnesia in the age of capitalist apocalypse — and how to overcome it, Henry A. Giroux, Salon
America is becoming a country that can no longer question itself, invest in the public good or imagine a future beyond the dreamscapes of the rich and ruling elite. Apocalyptic fears, uncertainties and anxieties feed a rising tsunami of violence that has become the organizing principle of governance, everyday life and society itself. American society is caught in the daily routines of lies, corruption and manufactured ignorance; one consequence is the withering of individual and social agency along with civic culture and the public imagination. American optimism has turned bleak. In the age of gangster capitalism, people lose their interconnections, community and sense of security. Isolation and anxiety gives way to mass depression and is ripe for expressions of rage and hatred. The guard rails of justice, compassion, the welfare state, politics, democratic values and the institutions that nourish them are under threat of disappearing. Apocalyptic terrors have moved from the realm of fiction into the social fabric of everyday life.

Violence is the essence of authoritarianism; it is the symbolic, material and visceral breeding ground and expression of militarism, lies, hatred, fear and cruelty. It flourishes in societies marked by scandalous inequality, despair, unchecked precarity, lies, hate and cynicism. This is especially true in a society that is armed and militarized, and that embraces a war culture. One index is the epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. As Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund, observes, it represents America as a death machine immersed in a culture and language of senseless brutality; it also represents the emergence of a fascist politics which provides the discourse of hate, bigotry and fear that feed an apocalyptic embrace of violence. The bodies of Black and brown people are no longer viewed as spaces of agency, but as the location of violence, crime and social pathology. There are no safe spaces in America…[...]

In an age of apocalyptic violence, memory is erased, historical consciousness is banished from schools and critical ideas are labeled as unpatriotic. Fear, manufactured ignorance, engineered panics and a paranoid racist politics draped in the language of white nationalism and bigotry are now imposed on schools in the name of "patriotic education." This is the violence of a formative culture that embraces racial cleansing, a white nationalist notion of citizenship and the undermining of the public and civic imagination. Its endpoint is a rebranded fascism.
Florida Takes Aim at the First Amendment
Florida Takes Aim at the First Amendment, Fabio Bertoni, The New Yorker
The actual-malice standard is what the Court held to be the fundamental protection that the First Amendment of the Constitution provides to publishers who are accused of defaming government officials (and, in a later expansion, public figures). A plaintiff has to show that a publisher either knew what it published was false or acted with reckless disregard for falsity—i.e., that the publisher knew it was probably false. (The joke among media lawyers is that actual malice is neither actual nor malice; it’s not about the publisher’s feelings, or malice, toward the subject but about whether the publisher doubts the truth of what it’s publishing.) The First Amendment, the Court held, must protect a free press that is able to report on the conduct of government officials in a manner that, in the famous phrase, is “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” Democracy requires an informed citizenry, and, if the press is too fearful of potentially ruinous libel suits, it will not report on urgent matters of state in the absence of conclusive proof, which may never come—or come years too late.

The Florida bills would drastically restrict the protections provided by the actual-malice standard. The House bill, for example, would require a court hearing a libel case to find actual malice (that is, knowing falsity) if “the defendant willfully failed to validate, corroborate, or otherwise verify the defamatory allegation.” Although journalists routinely try to verify allegations they report on, there are many instances where what’s notable are the allegations themselves. This is often the case with statements made in the course of litigation or official public meetings or government reports. It forms the basis for what’s known as the fair-report privilege, which holds that reporters may freely report the contents of official government documents and proceedings and litigation without independently verifying the underlying truth of each factual assertion. (“Verifying” allegations is often a contested process: it may take weeks, or even years, after the precipitating events occur for government proceedings or investigations to be concluded.)

The bills would also eliminate the benefits of Florida’s anti-slapp (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) law. Many states have some version of this law, which is designed to protect publishers from expensive, frivolous lawsuits. Generally, each side in a defamation suit bears its own legal expenses. But, recognizing that some plaintiffs bring libel suits simply as a means to punish criticism and stifle reporting on matters of public interest, many state legislatures have anti-slapp statutes that provide that, if a publisher can demonstrate that the litigation is baseless, it can recover its attorney’s fees from the plaintiff. The Florida bills would effectively make this impossible. The House bill reverses it altogether, stating that only plaintiffs can recover their legal fees.
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Timid media and GOP figures are again, dangerously, normalizing Trump
Timid media and GOP figures are again, dangerously, normalizing Trump, Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Apparently, neither the media nor supposedly sober Republicans have learned anything from the past. Trump gave a bonkers speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, musing about Russia blowing up NATO headquarters, claiming President Biden had taken the border wall and “put it in a hiding area,” and telling the crowd, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

We do not get headlines acknowledging this is unhinged. Instead, we get from the New York Times: “Trump Says He Would Stay in 2024 Race if Indicted.” And a similar angle from CNN. ABC started its website report this way: “Former President Donald Trump continues to reign supreme over the conservative wing of the Republican Party.” From The Washington Post: “Trump takes victory lap at conservative conference.” [...] From the coverage, you would never understand how incoherent he sounds, how far divorced his statements are from reality, and how entirely abnormal this all is. Talk about burying the lead. [...]

This spectacle is equal parts infuriating and pathetic. Here are Republicans, some of whom are considering runs for the presidency, who somehow expect to get through a campaign without mentioning the single most disqualifying thing about the leader in the race (other than his mental unfitness): He betrayed the country. Such timidity is itself disqualifying for someone seeking the presidency. If these candidates cannot stand up to an ex-president who is currently devoid of power, how can we expect to them to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic?
Will IDF insubordination bring Netanyahu to the negotiating table?
Will IDF insubordination bring Netanyahu to the negotiating table?, JPost Editorial, The Jerusalem Post
Thirty-seven of the 40 reservist fighter pilots from the Israel Air Force’s 69th fighter squadron announced on Sunday that they would not attend training flights this week to protest the government’s proposed judicial overhaul. Instead, they informed their squadron commander in a letter, that they plan to hold a dialogue regarding the issue outside government offices in Jerusalem. […]

Let’s be clear: Refusal to serve in the IDF – including the IDF reserves – for political reasons is not acceptable, legally or morally. The IDF, which represents all Israelis, should be above politics – including the current political fray over a judicial overhaul. But while, in principle, we oppose insubordination, we recognize that the reservist fighter pilots are people who volunteer to protect this country, and they have every right to stand up for their beliefs. In fact, it is chutzpah for political parties that represent haredim (the ultra-Orthodox) – such as Shas and United Torah Judaism – and others who evade military service altogether to speak up on this issue. They haven’t earned that right. Similarly, Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, was out of line when he tweeted, “Just a reminder: refusing service in the reserves is a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment.”

His service, as his former commander Barak Raz reminded in a tweet on Monday, was not exactly something to brag about.

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