The Color Out of Spite

Fascism can be hard to explain, but racism isn't

The state of the national government being what is, you may not want to hear anybody’s analysis or “take” or anything else about it. I can’t blame you.

Let me say, though, that I’m not here to exponentiate your dread. I really believe all that old mush about the future being unwritten; history is full of surprises and, ours being a relatively enlightened age overall, we have resources that may help us climb out of this tailspin. So this perspective, like others I’ve offered, may contain unpleasant facts, but the clarity I hope it offers may come in handy as we try to get level.

I guess you’ve noticed that, after a long period of denial, when we say that Tubby and his movement are fascists we’re not hearing a lot of indignant dissension anymore from anyone whose paycheck doesn’t count on pretending otherwise. Now that Trump and his minions are shutting down government agencies and payments and daring anyone to stop them, all the “sparkling authoritarianism” jokes have pretty much lost their savor. If it ain’t exactly Hitler or Mussolini or Franco, it’s in the same ballpark, and when we survive this onslaught we’ll be comparing the Trump variant to theirs.

Now that it’s a given, it’s worth asking what we mean by it. I’m not going to run the full checklist, but all the greatest hits — contempt for consent of the governed, plainly illegal actions as policy, weaponized scapegoating, strongman politics etc. — are there for all to see.

Each fash variant has its own signature features, but there’s plenty of overlap. Trump, like the Nazis, flouts law and democracy, uses Dolchstoßlegende to countervail reason and justify his excesses, etc.

Also they’re all bigots. We know the Nazis punished other out-groups but their crowning achievement in that regard was their antisemitism — they took that ignoble centuries-old European tradition, one always ripe for exploitation, and really perfected it.

Are Trump and his crew antisemites? I’m sure some of them are. But remember, like the Nazis they’re really focused on leveraging hatreds that are popular and potent in their own time and place. Jews are a little further down the list this time.

We all know who’s at the top.

I don’t think anyone besides Prestige Press editors is confused by the whole DEI thing, and if you didn’t see that long before Trump blamed it for the Reagan Airport crash, you just ain’t looking.

We know Trump’s racist history. We also know, from simple observation and the political theories of Lee Atwater, the importance of racism to the Republican Party since the Southern Strategy era. For years both Trump and the GOP relied on dog whistles to put it over, but the synthesis reaction of their union, plus Trump’s disinhibition owing to his lame duck status, senility, and Trump v. U.S., has made it a lot louder.

Thus, the absurd Trump DEI purges, not only of public employees in DEI-specific roles but also people who attended diversity training; thus, the pressure on private employers to do likewise, which has already led several of them to drop their diversity programs; thus, the ominous hit lists.

Thus, also, Trump’s weird insistence (well, maybe not so weird, considering his alliance with Elon Musk) that post-apartheid South Africa has been “treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY” and threats to cut off their U.S. funding. Of course, we expect their funding will be cut anyway as Trump is fully at war with USAID — which gives life-saving support to a lot of non-white people around the world — and has charged his SOS lickspittle Marco Rubio with killing the foreign aid program entirely.

The Trump tone has been carried forward by his minions outside the government. Musk’s racist ravings are well known. And his fellow broligarch Marc Andreesen’s firm has just hired a new analyst: Daniel Penny, whose primary qualification is having famously murdered an unarmed black man in the New York City subway.

We can roll Trump’s too-obvious-for-remark hatred of brown people up with his hatred of black people — the main thing for him and his minions is that they’re not white. He exploits misogyny and gender panic, too — basically, anyone outside the white-cis-male in-group.

But the color marker is his most effective weapon, for a lot of reasons but mainly because the Civil Rights movement and its victories in the mid-20th Century have been his grudge for years — and he knows that not only a bunch of other honkies, but also, really, the whole conservative movement, feel it as least as keenly as he does, and that’s why he calls to them.

They’re living proof of the saying about the privileged experiencing equality as oppression, and now, at the height of their powers, they see their chance to reverse it all, to make white supremacy not only the implicit but the explicit law of the land. You can not only see it, you can feel it — that shiver of sudden disinhibition behind all these boldly corrupt acts:

Here's why this is important to note: You may have, for obvious reasons, a reduced opinion of many of your fellow Americans since the last election, and of the whole American project. But I know, and I think you know, too, that most of them do not feel the same way the sick people running our government do. They may not understand separation of powers or federal procurement laws or tariffs. And some of them have some attitudes that fancy folks like us would consider retrograde. But they are not down for this. And when they see it, especially as it gets more obvious (because the fascists can’t restrain themselves), the situation may become as clear to them as it is to us. That’s grounds for hope.