Unfolding in real time: Donald Trump’s relentless attack on liberal norms, principles, the rule of law and election integrity. With each new step, Fox News repeats and reinforces Trump’s assertions and actions, and many people will discard their past principles and positions with breathtaking speed and not look back. The key question: despite some pushback is Trump succeeding? For those opposing Trump is it one step forward then three steps back?
It’s sometimes painful, but surely important to see things as they really are. The last couple of weeks in American politics have been helpful in that respect. They’ve made it harder to miss seeing the stunning depth and breadth of the Trump administration’s illiberalism.
Actually, “illiberalism” is too mild. As Robert Kagan has explained, what we’re seeing is not so much illiberalism as anti-liberalism. It’s not that Trumpists don’t quite understand the case for liberalism, or that they’ve unwittingly deviated from liberal norms or principles. It’s a frontal assault on liberalism in the broad sense of the word—on democracy, on the rule of law, on civil and political liberties, on limited government, on pluralism, on honesty and decency. That assault has been purposeful. It now spreads across the entire Trump administration and permeates its ranks. For all of Trump’s erraticness and unpredictability, for all of his administration’s misfires and clownishness and zigs and zags, Trumpism has an animating spirit, and the Trump administration has a coherent project.
And:
As Orwell famously wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The speech will claim to be based on new “intelligence” assembled by Bill Pulte, Trump’s current acting director of national intelligence. And it’s part of a series of claims Trump has been making of widespread rigging of elections in the United States—not just of the 2020 contest. All of this is, in turn, undergirds a broad-based effort by his administration to lay the groundwork for an attempt to subvert free and fair elections in 2026 and especially in 2028, and if necessary for not abiding by the results.
It was also yesterday that Trump reversed the announcement by his Department of Homeland Security that it would suspend most vehicle stops in light of the killings of innocent men by government agents within the last week. Trump was caught unaware by the decision, and immediately overturned it. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” the president wrote. Trump cares more about maintaining the all-out assault on immigrants than even pretending to make obviously reasonable reforms. Meanwhile, an unprecedented number of individuals are not just being killed on the streets by ICE but are dying in ICE’s custody.
The more one looks at the mass deportation agenda and the fervor of its embrace by Trump and Trumpists, the more one is reminded of Umberto Eco’s observation in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism”:
Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. 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….
…And one can easily look beyond DOJ and ODNI and DHS for evidence of the assault on liberal norms and principles. From the weightiest matters, such as Trump’s renewed threat to commit possible war crimes by targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran, to the more symbolic ones, like the attempt to reshape the history told in our national parks and the Smithsonian, the assault on liberalism is a whole-of-government effort.
Dare one apply to that project Eco’s term, Ur-Fascism? It can sound extreme or overwrought. But read Eco’s essay. And look at the Trump administration, with its assortment of diligent apparatchiks, crazed fanatics, eager enablers, slimy opportunists, and, yes, performative clowns pushing more or less in the same direction. Look at the spirit of the political movement that impels it. This is in fact what many fascist and proto-fascist governments and movements have looked like. Trumpism looks and sounds and behaves like ur-fascism. It can be unpleasant to see things for what they are. But it’s important to do so.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.