By Jason Hirthler
A few weeks ago an image surfaced on social media. It featured three convergent triangles, their central nexus including parts of all three. Each triangle represented a prominent characteristic of what the right call, “Mask Nazis.” The first triangle represented the virtue signaler aspect of this group. Millions of social selfies feature individuals with their masks over their mouths, or lately their arms bandaged after their vaccine shot. The second triangle represented the patronizing element of the group, when they indicate they are “more informed and intelligent” than you. The final triangle represented the martyrdom mentality of the group, in which they claimed to be masking and vaccinating on your behalf, not theirs.
The Backstory
It is admittedly an amorphous and inexact thing to use the word, “right” to describe the community of people that would like the above diagram, versus the community of those who would revile it. But more than ever in modern memory the sides have been starkly divided. It was partially initiated by the Gingrich ‘revolution’ in the late 90s when Republicans adopted an attitude of intransigence and noncompliance toward their Democratic colleagues, an attitude sparked largely by a deep-seated antipathy and animus for Bill Clinton. Clinton had used his ‘triangulation’ model to successfully appropriate Republican policy positions and claim them as his own. This was part of Clinton’s effort to penetrate the deep-pocketed donor class that has previously been the province of the conservative right. It worked and Clinton shifted the Democrats away from a party that at least plausibly represented the working class toward one that served monied constituencies and retained only a patina of pathos for empty-handed workers. This led to the Republican revolt.
The presidency of George Bush further divided a once-collegial Congress and its national segments of popular support. The 2000 election scandal, 9/11, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, the 2004 election, climate change, the collapse of the housing market all provided blistering talking points for liberals and conservatives as they blamed one another for these traumatizing events.
The presidency of Barack Obama further polarized the left from right, when shrieking Tea Party zealots, in an eerie foretaste of resistance liberals, clamored for their guns, sure that the Hawaiian-born Obama was a closet Marxist Muslim scheming to infect America with theocratic socialism. But it was the election of Donald Trump that delivered the hammer blow to any thoughts of reconciliation. The Covid19 pandemic that followed at the end of the Trump era gave the citizenry fuel to continue the partisan bickering once Trump had been ejected from the Oval Office, to the delight of 80 million, the fury of 75 million, and the frustrated resignation of the rest.
Now, Joe Biden has assumed the mantle of power, and opened his presidency by supposedly dashing off 72 revisions to Trump’s egregious policies. It’s all enough to convince even the most cursory observer that the left and the right are eternal enemies.
Perceptions of Fascism and Mutual Complicity
Searching Google’s text corpora through its Ngram Viewer reveals that the usage of the word ‘facism’ has seen a 100 percent rise this century in American English. This will surprise few, but questions of what fascism is and who embodies it will immediately trigger quarreling between left and right. For the liberal and left sides of the spectrum (they are not the same), Donald Trump is the de facto embodiment of modern fascism. For the right and libertarian side of the spectrum (they are not the same), fascism is better represented by censorious tech monopolies and the global public health apparatus that has led the battle against the coronavirus.
Could both sides have a point? Not if you ask either side. A recent poster on leftist Twitter warned of the dangers of dramatically dichotomizing the left/right ideological divide and argued that neither side had a monopoly on truth. Many readers liked a reply that dismissively claimed that “yeah, no, the right is categorically wrong on [just] about everything.”
But might it be true that neoliberalism, a class-based project to dismantle representative government, as described by David Harvey, is fascist at its core and animites Trump Republicans but alo Biden Democrats?
An article by Joshua Briond published by the Hampton Institute makes the interesting observation that, “The misunderstanding of fascism begins with the deliberate political positioning of [neo]liberalism as in opposition or an alternative to the fascist order.” This false opposition expects to see an older, imagined fascist order (principally Nazism or Italian fascism with its telltale nationalistic trappings) rather than what some describe as a corporate fascist order that exists now in less visibly overt fashion.
As Briond continues, “It has never been more apparent that liberal democrats are the stabilizers and upkeepers of fascist rule--who exist to provide an illusion of “opposition” to the material actualities and consequences of liberal democracy, western capital(ism), and the white power structure at-large--while actively upholding the neoliberal fascist order and inhibiting even the slightest possibilities of progress. Left radicals, or anyone who has divested from bourgeois electoralism, are constantly punched down on and condescended to for daring to demand more than mild concessions (“reforms” that’ll just be poked, prodded, weakened and rendered obsolete the moment the next Republican gets into office) and milquetoast, uninspiring, career-imperialist Democrat candidates.”
“The White liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor. And by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political ‘football game’ that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.”
- Malcolm X
Briond here unmasks the quiet complicity of liberals in the stabilizing of corporate fascism. This is partly owing to the fact that Boomer liberals, a huge contingent of the political active, see the values they sometimes bravely supported in the tumult of the Sixties--anti-racism, anti-war, anti-establishment--have been enshrined or otherwise spun by the establishment, cleverly enough to convince most liberals that their original war has been won. After all, we’ve had a black president, the #MeToo movement has outed countless misogynists in positions of power, gay rights are further along than we’d ever have imagined before Stonewall, and a new generation of Social Justice Warriors are manning the barricades of bigotry by the day.
Yet look at the subtlety with which an imperial capitalist establishment has incorporated these elements. Racism is alive and well. Blacks have a penny in a jar for every dollar in the calf-skinned wallet of a white man. Obama was only elected by internalizing the hegemonic ideals of establishment ideology. Jennifer Matsui notes how the #MeToo movement diverts attention from institutional foundations of sexism and retrains our focus on individual cases, which can be profitably resolved without addressing the larger structural barriers to equality of the sexes. Indeed, gays have made progress, but they are embraced by a corporate world that merely sees another wallet to mine. It makes no difference to WalMart whether the man or woman in the checkout line is LGBTQ+ or a racist cis homophobe. A dollar is a dollar.
What we see here is that the imperial establishment will actively co-opt any value set that does not meaningfully threaten its bottom line. If profits are unaffected, or if new revenue streams can be viably pioneered, a popular or trending movement will be absorbed by the corporate facist establishment for just that purpose.
Obscure and Abjure
This co-optation is mirrored in the identitarian politics that fuel the left-right divide and consume so much activist fuel. In the drafts for a lecture series that cultural theorist Mark Fisher was to give before his suicide in 2017, he unearthed the sinister root of the left-right war: it buried class as the bedrock subjugation on which all other forms of oppression were built.
“In disarticulating class from the identitarian struggles of the day, capitalism no longer appeared to be the enemy. We were, instead, all too prone to impotently turning on one another.”
He anticipated the lynch mob mentality of social media whose current dimensions Fisher himself might find unimaginable: “As individuals squabble over who has the most privilege on Twitter, for instance, turning on each other, the true enemy — capitalism itself — is left completely off the hook.”
This regrettable disarticulation of class leads well-intentioned citizens on left and right to battle over identity gains that, while often majestic and necessary, will doubtless founder on the shores of economic inequality. They do not cut into the profit potential of the monolithic imperial system that underpinned the identitarian subjection in the first place.
Undervalued, Overlooked
Briond returns to drive home this point about liberal complicity even as the state undermines the communities it campaigns on behalf of: “The fact that so much state-sanctioned violence, political repression, mishandling and neglect of the most marginalized--especially incarcerated, immigrant, and houseless populations--in the face of COVID-19, an ongoing housing crisis, unemployment, and economic turmoil, is happening in “liberal” cities and cities led by Democrats nationwide, should very much inform our understanding of the situation at hand.”
It is no small thing to point out that liberals typically have what appears to be a naive faith that the government cares about them, prioritizes their health above profits, that Big Pharma does the same (at least in times of crises), and that their cherished mainstream media would not knowingly deceive them. This despite the volumes of evidence that the government and media have wittingly lied to and misled populations for decades. (See Taking the Risk Out of Democracy and Manufacturing Consent for foundational works on media bias in favor of corporate interests.)
This almost surreal and childlike trust in the good intentions of government is reminiscent of Josef K., in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, who when arrested without apparent cause is relieved to finally have an opportunity to address himself to the chief inspector, fully confident this is a reasonable man with whom he will have a reasonable conversation, quickly resolving the misunderstanding of his arrest. The conversation quickly reveals to K. the confounding absurdity of the apparatus in which he is ensnared.
One might suspect this naive faith is the consequence of, as journalist Cory Moringstar has said, the monetization of left-liberal activism since the untutored riot of the Sixties. After which capital rightly surmised that activism ought not to be suppressed but co-opted. Hence the explosion of NGOs and their role as a kind of para-state reifying the conditions of the corporate state. Liberals have too much skin in the game to meaningfully resist. A rhetoric of empathy eases them into compliance.
The Invisible Horizon
Add to this domestic squall the almost incomprehensibly vast horizon of foreign aggressions perpetrated by a U.S. establishment whether led by Democrats or Republicans. Hence a scenario arises with Donald Trump repeating conjuring nationalistic and racist tropes reminiscent of the great fascist scourges of the 20th century, while at the same time the lockdown regimes cheered on by liberals and perpetrated by western governments in the name of public health have come to mirror characteristics of what one might call ‘public health fascism’ or ‘medical tyranny.’ In a further irony, Trump appeared to express a desire to continue to promote imperial hegemony and capitalist exploitation through the less public apparatus of drone war and special forces, much like Democrats have done.
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
- Abraham Lincoln, debate with Stephen Douglas, Sept. 18, 1858
End Games
If both left and right have been in some sense co-opted by the subtle ideology of the neoliberal establishment, is there not now reason to at least temporarily shelve the policy disputes that animate their hatred of one another, in the service of a collective effort to deny the realization of an authoritarian plutocracy as described above? Set aside the horizontal perspective of a left-right war and consider the world from the verticality of a top-down class war, that missing ingredient Fisher perceptively identified.
Yet the human urge to dichotomize and demonize is almost uncontrollable in our modern moment. Each side sees the other as a herd of rule breakers: conservatives break all the pandemic rules established to keep people safe; but in obeying these rules, liberals trash the bill of rights. In spite of, or amplified by, the relentless efforts of advertisers to sound social rallying cries meant to bring people together (while simultaneously opening their wallets), there now exists a continental divide between two halves of the country. It is a yawning crevice not likely to be mended by an American grit Bruce Springsteen Jeep commercial claiming that “the very soil we stand on is common ground,” as though sophomoric platitudes penned by 25-year old copywriters will heal us (but we can dream). Efforts like these only illuminate the abyss.
Violating the Myth
This is this collective void—a void of collective spirit—that Fisher laments. He argues that perhaps the ultimate subjugated group is “group consciousness,” that prevents the collective from seeing the totality of the system at large—capitalism—while at the same time being too divided to propose a full-scale replacement system.
As part of Fisher’s solution, he proposed “implementing a counterlibido to capitalist desire — a postcapitalist desire.” He was principally interested, “in the ways that radical political messages could be smuggled into collective consciousness through popular culture.” Considering that popular culture is where huge swathes of common opinion tend to coalesce around cultural figures and trends, it is an interesting proposition. After all, one simply can’t compete at the level of invective--the assembled armories of the mainstream media are too plentiful, ranged too far and wide, and are too able to actively suppress counter-narratives. And artificial cultural tropes spawned by Madison Avenue only salt the wound.
But what if Michael Jackson had been a communist? What if Elvis had befriended Castro? What if more films smuggled into the cinema the anti-consumerist manifesto of Fight Club? Could a graphic novel whose hero was a BIPOC socialist gain traction? One would expect the blind avarice of corporate capitalism to allow these ideas so long as the product produced significant return on investment. A recent graphic novel called The Ministry of Truth mines the deep vein of discontent with American media-propagated mythologies. It proposes that belief has more to do with reality than fact, a theme that is both comical and somehow true. It makes one think of how much more effective fiction might be than invective in a post-truth world.
Such works are at least potentially profitable avenues of discovery, their potential guided by their profit. (You see how even the language is co-opted.)
Paradoxically it seems to be the hidden factor of class that inhibits social cohesion around a narrative of collective uplift. As author John Steppling (frustratedly) noted on his excellent podcast Aesthetic Resistance, propaganda cuts across class lines. Workers are often hugely skeptical of MSM storylines. Haute bourgeoisie, white, liberal, educated professionals tend to buy the official line uncritically. A large up-from-below shift in consciousness, from individuated consumer desire to a potentially militant desire for collective prosperity, would doubtless frighten the haute bourgeoisie and elite capital into the kind of concessions obtained in the New Deal era. It has often struck me as not categorically necessary to take power--and that often wielding power beyond the official precincts is not a bad place to be. To be pitted against overwhelming odds is also of course the root scenario of great fiction.
Someone whose name I’ve forgotten once perceptively noted that communism out of power is galvanized by a collective vision that has a clear enemy that must be toppled for that vision to be realized. Once they’ve taken power, the original force of will continues for a time and produces great positive change, but as one generation slides into the next, the militancy and urgency of that original class consciousness bleeds out, lacerated by the very surplus it distributed. The material lived experience of the next generations is simply different than the original generation. The revolutionary urgency fades as a kind of bureaucratic and defensive mentality ascends. What is gained must be defended rather than gained.
One sees the same dynamic at work in capitalist societies. Small fledgling entrepreneurial businesses, always a few weeks away from running out of money, produce tremendous innovations in different industries and roar into market share and wealth on the backs of their inventions. But once they are market leaders, their entire attitude changes: they become principally interested in defending and growing market share, not through innovation, but through the mass dissemination of their original invention. They begin to act as border guards, patrolling the limits of their empire, ready to acquire and absorb any entrepreneurial challengers to their dominance. They become the staid, status-quo establishment they once sought to overthrow.
It is the same with politics. The principled antiwar activists and civil rights fighters from the Sixties made inroads into the national consciousness and won concessions from the establishment, but were then absorbed into it, undergoing a transformation that eventually spat out those longhairs and militant marchers as comfortable liberals who merely rehearsed a well-memorized lexicon of labor-friendly rhetoric, while the machinery of exploitation they once abhorred marches on under cover of the co-opted language of progressivism.
And so, staying out of power is perhaps a way to avoid the corruptions of power and retain the power of first principles, a persistent vital threat to authority, which must ultimately acknowledge that its power is, at best, nominal.
In that light, a bottom-up class consciousness aiming at collective prosperity could isolate the fake partisanship of the neoliberal duopoly as a permanent enemy of the people, exerting a permanent pressure and threat against it that would force the kinds of vast concessions necessary for it retain even a semblance of power. It would have to be a permanent threat in a way that taking power undoes. And perhaps that class consciousness is best transfused into the popular mind through scripts rather than screeds, drawn stories instead of funded studies. And best perpetuated by a marginal class far from the precincts of power, not the “rogue” vehicles sold to bourgeois families but rogue narrators wildly at odds with the fictions pumped out of the imperium. Apolitical and peripheral—a strange place to pen an origin story of revolution. But maybe not so strange in a cultural wasteland overrun with mainstream half-truth.
After all, until the war of the top against the bottom is recognized and the diversionary spectacle of right-left combat is set aside, we will continue on a horizontal plane, never climbing in metrics of prosperity or equality. Only by recognizing the ladder of prosperity has been kicked away—supposedly for our benefit—will we begin to invoke the “great weapon” of mass dissent, which is the hinge point of an awakening world.
Jason Hirthler is a writer, social critic, and veteran of the media industry. He has published widely on the progressive left including at Dissident Voice, The Greanville Post, and CounterPunch. His latest essay collection is The Conquest of Reality.
