The right makes an overt case for U.S. fascism | Will Bunch Newsletter

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One of the things about building a right-wing populist movement in the 21st century, with an increasingly authoritarian bent, is that no one expects a lot of intellectual heft. It’s hard, after all, to launch a scholarly journal or become a thought leader in a crusade where the deepest thoughts seem to be “Build the wall!” and “Lock her up!”

That’s why so few people paid attention in the homestretch of the 2016 election when a writer named Michael Anton wrote an essay for a then-obscure right-wing think tank called the Claremont Institute that called the showdown between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton “The Flight 93 Election.” At a time when most of America’s conservative talking heads were still rejecting what they saw as the extremist craziness of the Trump campaign, Anton sought to explain why millions felt compelled to vote for such a whackadoodle candidate.

Anton’s analogy — albeit larded with half-truths and disinformation, unsurprisingly — was that liberals (presumably “woke” ones, but that wasn’t yet a thing in 2016) had hijacked the jetliner of American society back in the 1960s, and at this point the only way for conservative-minded voters to avoid cultural catastrophe was to grab the steering wheel and possibly crash the 757 of U.S. democracy into the ground, through Trump’s election. Much like the passengers who stormed the cockpit of United Flight 93 on 9/11 were hoping to do.

“You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane,” Anton conceded, but the right-wing writer claimed that risk was better than the certain death that would result from a left-leaning America at the steering wheel. Today, Anton’s essay is seen as a kind of Rosetta Stone for interpreting why Trump got nearly 63 million votes on Nov. 8, 2016, and won the Electoral College. The center-left writer Jonathan Chait in 2020 argued that the essay “defined the Trump era.”

A lot has happened in the six years since then. Trump served in the White House for four years, and maybe didn’t crash the plane but he sure clipped some high-tension wires and a few skyscrapers on his zig-zagging flight through two impeachments, a failed coup attempt, and unprecedented corruption. But as the 2022 midterm election nears, Trump’s former (and perhaps future) passengers have mapped out a new itinerary.

Crashing the plane of democracy with Trumpian chaos was a first instinct, but maybe in hindsight a dumb idea. Today’s right wing wants to control the flight from takeoff — democracy be damned — and bomb their liberal adversaries back to the Stone Age.

The new essay that may well define this latter (or post) Trump era is entitled “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives.” It was written for The Federalist — a leading online outlet for right-wing “thought,” often a flood of disinformation — by its senior editor, John Daniel Davidson. He argues that old-timey, freedom-loving, free-market conservatives have been rendered worthless by woke liberals winning the culture wars to the point where there’s nothing worth conserving.

Flipping the words of Ronald Reagan and even Bill Clinton on their head, Davidson argues the era of small government is over for the political right. It is time, he says, for a powerful government — one that is not afraid to smash its enemies.

In the critical passage, he writes that the people formerly known as conservatives “need to be getting used to wielding power, not despising it...The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about ‘small government.’ The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.”

What would that look like? Davidson argues for cutting off public funding for universities to punish their liberalism, demolishing Big Tech giants, and trying to save families by ending no-fault divorce while subsidizing parents with young children. Acts like abortion should not be regulated but criminalized, as part of “a dramatic expansion of the criminal code.” In the most incendiary passage, he writes “that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.”

What to call this movement that exercises so much state power over citizens’ lives, if it is no longer conservatism? Davidson posits that movement members “start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries.” I’m here to argue that we label their counterrevolution for what it truly is: fascism.

And although his views are contemptible, in a weird way, you’ve got to hand it to the Federalist writer for saying out loud the increasingly-less-quiet-part of the right’s drive toward power in the 2022 midterms. We’ve seen this brand of fascism play out in symbolism — the bizarre, QAnon-inspired finger wags and creepy music at Trump rallies, a Nazi-style salute in support of the Pennsylvania extremist Doug Mastriano. We’ve seen it in the substance of increasingly overt calls for Christian dominion over our now-secular society, and armed men intimidating voters who are about to cast their ballots while decent election officials and poll-watchers are forced out by harassment. Davidson’s draconian proposals are only a few degrees harsher than what leading 2022 candidates like Florida incumbent governor Ron DeSantis are already doing in the classroom and to wayward corporations.

Davidson’s essay — much like the Anton “Flight 93″ piece at the dawn of the Trump era — seeks to apply a quasi-intellectual veneer to what we are really seeing in heartland election precincts: a fear-based, emotional reaction to preserve the old orders of patriarchy, Christianity, and white privilege. The voters who seem poised to elect a reactionary, GOP-led House in two weeks are fearful of a multi-cultural democracy in which the majority will become non-white and not-religious by the mid-21st century.

These clarifying words in the Federalist are one more article of proof that the initial embrace of Trump’s chaotic narcissism — that hijacked plane, in Anton’s analogy — is giving way to what many of us feared would come next: A full-on rejection of democracy and a move towards ruthless, autocratic terror — a dictatorship over their movement’s perceived enemies. Your vote on Nov. 8 might be your last real chance to stop them in the voting booth.

Question: What’s the bigger risk to democracy in the U.S. — the rise of the Hard Right at the state or national level? — Via Garfield’s Ghost (@Occamsreznor) on Twitter

Answer: Great question (and by the way, you deserved a much longer presidency) that I’ve been pondering myself. The public’s focus, as usual, tends to be on the federal election, and there’s no doubt that a GOP Congress would be a nightmare on every level from ending aid to Ukraine to the all-but-certain impeachment of President Biden — but their worst instincts will be thwarted by Biden’s veto pen. The states — as David Pepper pointed out in his recent book Laboratories of Autocracy — are where the real damage could take place in 2023 and 2024, from abortion bans to changes in election law to curtail democracy for the next presidential election, to worse things we’re not even thinking about yet. That’s why it’s so critical that voters not only turn out in November but take those races like state legislature as seriously as the big-ticket House and Senate elections.

The very first edition of this newsletter went out on April 14, 2020 — yes, those worst, fearful early moments of the COVID-19 pandemic — and I sought to signal my intention to spotlight America’s important but neglected stories in my weekly report by focusing on what I think is maybe the most abused spot in the nation. That is Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” along the mighty Mississippi River from Baton Rouge down past New Orleans, lined with polluting chemical plants and oil refineries. I noted that the coronavirus was ravaging that region’s low-income, predominantly Black residents, with their respiratory systems already compromised by decades of breathing toxic air. A subtext in that politically fraught year was that things were unlikely to improve along “Cancer Alley” under the climate-change-denying Trump administration.

Flash forward exactly two-and-a-half years, and different folks with a different outlook are running key federal agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This month, the EPA told the state of Louisiana’s historically lax, pro-industry environmental regulators that they must consider the long-term health of the region’s Black residents — who in the worst neighborhoods face a cancer risk calculated at 47 times the “acceptable” level — in determining whether to permit new polluting facilities along the Mississippi. “What’s remarkable is that EPA, for the first time in a long time, is speaking the truth around environmental racism and willing to put civil rights enforcement tools out there,” Monique Harden of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice told ProPublica. The letter gives powerful ammunition to local activists who’ve been fighting to close or prevent two facilities — Denka’s synthetic rubber factory and a proposed Formosa plastics plant — linked to both toxic air pollution and greenhouse gases that accelerate climate change.

The letter is also one more reminder of what needs to be first and foremost on everyone’s mind these next 14 days: Elections matter. Needless to say, a second-term Trump EPA would not have issued this letter, and a GOP-led Congress in 2023 will aggressively seek to cut funding for environmental enforcement. A lot of people in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” — who’ve already suffered way too much from environmental racism — are also counting on your vote.