A number of years ago, a cartoon in the New York Times
by Paul Noth has a flock of sheep staring at a billboard for a political
candidate. The picture of the candidate, who is a wolf, lies next to text
saying, “I am going to eat you.” One of the sheep looking at it turns to
another sheep and says, “He tells it like it is.”
Many members of this community have publicly expressed shock and dismay
that the election result wasn’t a landslide for Joe Biden. They look at the
last four years and despair that over sixty million people could vote for four
more years of the same. They thought that the 2016 election was an aberration,
that Donald Trump was elected because Hillary Clinton arrogantly didn’t visit
key states, because she called half the electorate a basket of deplorables,
because the FBI dropped a bombshell only days before the election or because
Russia hacked the election. These things all certainly contributed, but this
most recent election has seemingly confirmed that which many people believe –
that there has for a long time been an authoritarian, anti-democratic movement
in this country that continues to grow in strength. Despite believing that it
had defeated authoritarianism once and for all in the 1940s with the military
defeat of Nazism, this recent election is a rude awakening to many liberal
Americans that authoritarianism is on the rise in America, and despite the fact
that its rise to prominence has seemingly been temporarily halted, unless we
address its root causes, it has the potential to overwhelm this country in the
future.
The start of the 2006 book American Fascists – the Christian Right and the
War on America, by Chris Hedges, contains an essay by Umberto Eco called
“Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.” Of the fourteen
ways that Eco explains, at least seven could be applied to the Trump administration.
To be clear, I am not saying that the 45th President of the United
States was a fascist – all experts on fascism agree that that’s not true,
despite a growing number of similarities. I’m not saying that the tens of
millions of people who voted for him are fascists – of course they aren’t. I am
saying, though, that what we have seen over the last five years by Donald Trump’s
campaign and subsequent administration, culminating in this week’s denial of
the democratic process by a sitting President, has been clearly authoritarian
and has bordered dangerously close to fascism, and that we need to understand
where this comes from in order to avoid it in the future.
In Umberto Eco’s essay, the reliance of tradition and the fact that there
can be no advancement of learning is the first way that leads to fascism, and we
have seen that in recent years by the open and consistent refutation of science
not only regarding climate change but also regarding the current pandemic. The
second way that leads to fascism is the rejection of modernism and the
embracing of irrationalism, as made evident by the explosive growth in QAnon
followers, one of whom has now just been elected to serve in Congress. The
third way is similar – the belief that thinking is a form of emasculation and
that the intellectual world cannot be trusted. We saw that in the President talking
about climate scientists following political agendas. The fourth way is the
belief that disagreement is treason. We have certainly seen in the last four
years the rejection of valid peaceful protests and the vilification of
protestors such as Colin Kaepernick as un-American or even anti-American. Eco
says that for the fascist disagreement is a sign of diversity but “the first
appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the
intruders.” Again, we have openly seen the Trump administration try everything
they could to block what they saw as intruders from Muslim countries. It is
points 6 and 7 in that essay that I believe are essential to understanding this
election. Eco says “Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.
That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal
to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or
feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower
social groups.” When members of our community don’t understand why tens of
millions of people could vote for Trump, it’s very possibly because they don’t
understand the depth of despair and feelings of futility felt by vast swathes
of people in this country whose jobs were either automated or outsourced to
other countries by corporations who were supported by the political class on
both sides of the aisle. When Trump promised to drain the swamp, that promise
wasn’t against all forms of corruption – clearly - but specifically against the
corruption that brought poverty to predominantly white manufacturing workers.
And when those jobs were outsourced who did they go to? To people of color
worldwide. This is the direct consequence of free trade agreements that say
that they’re opening up markets but are actually locking individuals worldwide
into a form of contemporary serfdom by only providing employment to those who
pay the least and who provide the least protection for the workers and their
environment (see Hedges, p.136). This capitalistic global race to the bottom
has devastated vast areas of America and left countless millions of Americans
feeling betrayed by the political class, the intellectuals who failed to make
life better for the electorate and who didn’t suffer from the global recession
as they did. Despair turned to rage, and when white American jobs went to
people of color abroad, that rage turned into overt racism. Despite the
pandemic having killed nearly a quarter of a million Americans in less than a
year, despite the clear evidence of systemic racism, despite the continued
subversion of the democratic process, despite pending environmental
catastrophe, still, despite all those things, the leading issue for voters in
this election was overwhelmingly the economy. When you cannot feed your family,
when you cannot afford the payments on your home, when you cannot afford your
healthcare, then the issues of race that affect black people in cities miles
away and the issues of environment that affect polar bears in the arctic become
irrelevant to an enormous number of voters. That is the inevitable
manifestation of the radical individualism of American society that defines the
American dream as personal, and not communal, success, as well as the
inevitable product of decades of the erosion of the economic safety nets that
are essential to so many Americans.
Umberto Eco adds that “to people who feel deprived of a clear social
identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to
be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the
only ones who can provide identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the
root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot,
possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.” Think of the
so-called War on Christmas, the claims of Christian persecution in America, the
conspiracy theories, the unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud even four years
ago when trump won the election (!), the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanting
“the Jews will not replace us,” the claims of paid crisis actors and paid
protestors, the need to constantly talk of the fake news media plotting to undo
the Presidency. To those invested in the narrative of a subversive plot, the
impeachment of Donald Trump only became more proof that there was a plot
against him and his supporters. Regardless of clear evidence of impropriety,
the act of impeachment reinforced the narrative of persecution and thus
profoundly strengthened the base for this election. Why do so many people buy
into that plot, into that feeling of persecution? Because modernity has
undermined the social structures upon which such people hang their psychological
existence. In that world view, there are men and women and there’s nothing in
between. The dismantling of basic concepts of gender has a huge effect on
patriarchal America because it leaves the men in particular feeling totally
lost and unable to identify themselves. They claim to be worried about physical
violence in bathroom stalls by transgender individuals despite no evidence of that
happening but it’s not physical violence that they actually fear, it’s violence
to their patriarchal norms. It’s violence to everything their society is based
on. They fear psychological violence from modernity, and vote against it.
Those patriarchal norms are constantly reinforced in this country by the
evangelical right-wing church whose most prominent leaders have since the
beginning of this election campaign spewed the most shocking bile as they
concoct sinister plot after sinister plot by the liberals. The fundamentalist
church has for decades been working to infiltrate the American political scene,
and has unquestionably succeeded in its mission because it knew that if
modernity continued, it would be rendered irrelevant. The lavish lifestyles of
its clergy would have to come to an end. It has, therefore, seized upon the
dismantling of patriarchal norms by the secular state – the encouragement for
women to work and to have their own voice, the permission for same-sex
marriage, the permission for transgender surgery, and more – and reframed them
as a war against God Himself – the source of ultimate morality. It has provided
comfort to countless millions whose traditional views were being dismantled, by
framing those who would dismantle them as working for the Devil. And nowhere
has that strategy been more successful than in the abortion debate, where it
has succeeded in framing the discussion to be about when life begins as opposed
to when personhood begins. It has thus been able to convince millions of people
that abortion is murder and that the woman who carries the fetus loses all
right to her body as soon as she becomes pregnant because she is now a vessel
for another person and not a person in her own right. The deliberate confusion
of life with personhood is why we have repeatedly heard the accusation of
Democrats being “baby killers” or “murderers,” especially in recent months. It
is because where the secular state views morality as an ongoing democratic
process that is determined at the ballot box, the religious fundamentalist
refers to Scripture for morality and claims that it is unchanging. In that
claim, they totally reject the post-modern concept that every text exists in
relationship to its reader and that everything is therefore interpretation. No
amount of relativity, or evolution of thought, may come into this mindset –
there is simply truth and lie. This conflict of religious fundamentalism against
the secular state in this country claimed an important public win for the
fundamentalists in the Scopes Trial of 1925 in which a high school teacher,
John Scopes, was found guilty of teaching evolution despite Tennessee’s Butler
Act which specifically prohibited it. Although the verdict was overturned on a
technicality, the win was empowering for religious fundamentalists in America.
They have for a hundred years since then deliberately reached out with their
monolithic truth claims to the economically disenfranchised and socially
displaced, they have comforted those people by framing their malaise as
persecution by globalist elites – read Jews – who do not care for them, and they
have helped form a mass social identity of opposition to democracy which has
failed the blue-collar masses. Just as that religious fundamentalism is deeply
patriarchal and anti-democratic within its own community, so too it manifests
itself in anti-democratic norms. Thus, denying Merrick Garland a place on the
Supreme Court or denying the validity of an election becomes in their eyes not
only a moral position, but a Divinely supported position.
There is another narrative that must be included in any analysis of this
election, which is the narrative of race. To millions of white Americans,
totally removed from the reality of life for African Americans and Native
Americans in particular, there is no racism in America. To them, racism was segregation
and that was decades ago. In their minds, all that holds African-Americans back
is their failure to manifest their own success – as we saw recently by Jared
Kushner’s extraordinary statement that his father-in-law can’t want African-Americans
to be successful more than they do. In that way of thinking, their lack of
success is nothing to do with systemically racist structures but is their own
fault. To such people who have no experience of systemic racism, it doesn’t
exist. In fact, many of those white Americans genuinely blame President Obama
for bringing racism back where, as far as they believed, it had been resolved! The
dismantling of the American dream narrative, which was always a white
narrative, coupled with the dismantling of other social narratives upon which
so many white Americans had hung their own identities, had to be rejected for
their own mental wellbeing. Segregation is not something from the distant past,
though – at least one member of our community was arrested for sitting at a
lunch counter with a black man. We can see how prevalent racism is in the
so-called justice system in this country. We see it in employment figures. We
see it in how devastating the pandemic has been in African American and Native
American communities compared with the white population. But for those who have
no contact with such things, the Black Lives Matter movement becomes just another
attempt to undermine the profoundly American narrative of white normalcy.
It is important to clarify that I am in no way saying that everyone who
voted for Trump in this election is an economically marginalized, distrusting,
racist, white blue-collar Christian fundamentalist. I am absolutely not saying
that. There are a multitude of reasons why people in this country vote for
candidates from differing perspectives on gun control to voting rights to taxation
to regulation and more. But what I am saying is that a now sizeable percentage
of the American electorate is, indeed, made up of economically marginalized,
authority-distrusting, white blue-collar citizens who unite with a massive
voting bloc of misogynistic, democracy-denying, modernity-refuting Christian
fundamentalists. Indeed, Christian evangelicals make up nearly 20% of the American
electorate, and 75% of them voted for Trump this time. These are people who unite
behind charismatic white, straight male figures. Together, they intimidate
through fear of spiritual or physical violence, which is the hallmark of fascism.
Indeed, this united group fan the flames of physical violence with chants of
locking up opponents, with failing to condemn racial violence, and then turn to
an authoritarian figure to resolve it through draconian law-and-order measures,
like whisking away civilians in unmarked vans, or praising armed nationalists
who walk the streets after civil unrest. They do everything they can to “own
the libs” because the ultimate goal is the suppression of the new social
narrative. They therefore even support what they know to be open lies as an act
of defiance against the new social narrative and as a way to bring about a
transformed American society that returns them to the time when they alone felt
valued, which almost always meant privileged. Make American Great Again is the
clarion call of this movement. From a logical perspective, Make America Great Again
Again - a call which was made at least twice in this election campaign - is
clearly nonsensical. But it actually reveals the deep insecurity of so many Americans
who have lost their economic and social privilege and who will do anything they
can to get it back. As Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise, wrote two
days ago, “It’s clear now that far too many of Trump’s voters don’t care about
policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power.” As Hadley Freeman
recently wrote of Trump, “His white working-class supporters saw in him their
own aggrievement at not being accepted by elites who rigged the game; [and] the
elites saw a fellow plutocrat who would protect their fortunes.” She quotes John
W Dean and Bob Altemeyer’s book “Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his
Followers” in saying that there is no defeating Trumpism as so many people
thought might happen in this election. There is no defeating Trumpism because
it doesn’t exist – it’s not a consistent thought pattern. It is, she says,
nothing more than a mere reflection of his followers and their own
psychological predispositions. “They look at him,” she says, “and see what they
want to see: themselves.” The impulse to authoritarianism, to control, to
power, will never be fully slain because it is an all-too human impulse.
Donald Trump is just one head of the hydra. Defeating Donald Trump at the
ballot box won’t end the authoritarian impulses of a growing number of despairing
people in the American electorate, just as defeating Hitler militarily didn’t
end Nazism as an ideology. Without constant care, democracy can easily slip toward
hero-worship and authoritariansm, something the American electorate is now only
just realizing. Authoritarianism isn’t timebound, and it is only suppressed,
never fully defeated. When a crass twice-time divorced man who openly brags
about sexually assaulting women and who cannot even quote from the Bible during
interviews is held aloft by white evangelicals as the second Divine incarnation,
the underlying issue for that vast section of the American electorate is not
religious – it is about power… white male-dominated hierarchical power with
Divine mandate. It is about the external threat to that power perpetuated in a narrative
of persecution that can only be redeemed by a savior figure. The dismantling of
that narrative is therefore crucial to the continued existence of American
democracy.
Chris
Hedges writes (ibid. p.47) that, “not all who fall into despair turn to
the Christian Right” but “despair … is the fuel of the movement.” If we are to avoid
such close elections in the future, we need to honestly address despair within
all sections of American society. We will need to help people across the
country not try to seize power to compensate for their own feelings of
abandonment. This will not be a conversation of the brain solved by logic, but
of the heart, solved by love of the other.
We will also need to address the sources of despair, particularly economic
sources of despair. We need to help people feel validated, seen, respected, valued
for their contribution to society. Finally, we need to show the benefits of
modernity to those who feel threatened by it and to those who think that they have
the most to lose by it. The new President-elect can and will talk of the
equality of all people, of being the President for all Americans. Karl Popper
once wrote, “To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal.
But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells
them they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them.” (The
Open Society and Its Enemies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, 1:96)
It is a firm Jewish principle that we are all descended from the same first
being so we are all equal. The reality, though, is that not all people in this
country are equal. Millions who were in positions of economic and social
privilege have lost that privilege and now feel threatened. They do not care
for the real systemic inequality in this country that affects others beyond their
view and they will do anything to return to their position of privilege, even
if it means subverting democratic norms. They will attach themselves to savior
figures to do it, and will ignore everything that those figures say or do in
order to regain their own feelings of power. They will be like the sheep
looking at the billboard, thankful for the honesty of their savior without
considering the harm of that savior’s message.
Healing America, then, avoiding authoritarianism, necessitates profoundly
changing the American narrative. It means providing economic stability for all
in the face of multinational corporations who do not care for American citizens
and in the face of the irreversible automation of manual labor. It means speaking
to the heart and not just the brain of those who feel threatened by modernity.
It means unravelling the personal narrative of the American dream and replacing
it with a communal narrative of the American dream. It means abandoning radical
individualism. It means that if we are to dismantle systemic patriarchy and racism,
we must do so in a way that helps those who benefited from it to learn what we
all gain by that dismantling, so that they do not rise up in violent reaction
to what must necessarily happen for humanity to progress.
The urge to authoritarianism is real. It is fed by despair and by
anti-intellectualism, particularly by white men who wish to protect their own
power and hierarchical sense of identity. It is fed by those who cannot see their
own persecution of others and who instead see themselves instead as victims
demanding a savior. It is not one man, it is a latent seed in the heart of man.
On this Shabbat, we rest. We celebrate the fact that millions more people
sought a democratic society than those who tolerated an authoritarian one. We
rest. We breathe. We gather our strength. We unify. We thank God for giving us
the ability to express our voice at the ballot box. And then after Shabbat, we
start the work of protecting democracy, of helping the vulnerable, of dismantling
the narratives of privilege and hierarchy in ways that show the benefit of that
work to all. We see the pain of the other, and help to remove it, for the
benefit of all. We do so because our understanding of religion, of God’s call,
is inclusive, loving and empowering. We do so because all of us are made b’zelem
Elohim – in the image of God. We do so because the work of helping the
other is the work of tikkun olam – of global and spiritual reunification,
the core of the Jew. And let us say, Amen.
