Semi-Fascists or Simple Fanatics?

And why it matters.

The recent reference by President Biden to a growing danger of “semi-fascists” in America was an exceptional moment in our nation’s history. Clearly, the president was concerned to somehow convey the seriousness and nature of a threat that has grown within the Republican Party and that has not been well articulated to date and so is not fully appreciated by many Americans. It was Joe being Joe.

The biggest problem in getting people to understand what has happened within the Republican Party is that, until now, Democratic leaders have not sounded much of an alarm or acted with an urgency that would signal the extent of the threat. If the threat is a type of fascism rather than a moment of cultish fanaticism, then the American people would expect that our leadership would respond in ways appropriate to that level of threat.

And it’s not just Biden and other non-MAGA political leaders who have mostly failed to sound the alarm. The main stream media and most of the scribes of SubStackia and other pundits and public intellectuals, too, have failed to urgently and accurately contextualize and describe this “extreme” development in our politics.

. . . [T]his is an organized, well-funded authoritarian insurrection. And, for the uninitiated, “semi-fascism” doesn’t begin to capture it.

Bottom line: This is not somehow just a quirk or hiccup in our body politic. This is not a passing political fad or fanatical outburst. It’s not simply the unexpected, stunning election of an “outsider” as president, or the emergence of a singular pathological personality that unleashed a spontaneous and widespread rush to burn down the establishment and to embrace racism and bigotry. Instead, this is an organized, well-funded authoritarian insurrection. And, for the uninitiated, “semi-fascism” doesn’t begin to capture it.

This is a movement that has been actively and intentionally developed over many years, even decades. It has a large, broadly distributed group of leaders and strategists; many quiet, largely hidden long-term funders (mostly extremely wealthy right-wing elites); a well-developed long-term strategy that has driven the extensive penetration of major institutions of society and the development of coordinated, organizational capacities; as well as many allies (both domestic and foreign -- In fact this movement is so confident of its power and trajectory that it has openly embraced the Hungarian dictator, Orban, and his example of using the “color of democracy” to seize and consolidate dictatorial power).

All of this has been assembled for the singular purpose of taking control of our nation’s electoral, legal, and governing institutions and processes and replacing democratic “liberal” politics with the will and power of a dictatorial ruler.

As long as we all continue to treat this insurrectionary movement and its many facets and tendrils as simply an exceptional, unfortunate, singular personality-driven “cultish” moment in our politics, we will fail to treat this effectively as the well-organized and extremely dangerous rebellion that it is.

Biden’s reference to “semi-fascists” was, likely, a spontaneous attempt to articulate something he doesn’t yet fully understand or appreciate — or at least talk about in public — but that he knows is extremely dangerous. And despite the initial, elaborate coup attempt on January 6, 2001 (so well investigated so far by the Jan 6th Committee), and even though insurrectionary leaders like Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Green, Republican leadership in the Congress and throughout the states, and so many others are being very explicit about how, once they win the next elections, they are going to use strong-arm intimidation, violence, and the imposition of a new rule of dictatorial law to dismantle the liberal state and suppress our freedoms in everything from what is allowed to be learned in schools and valued in corporate culture, to the conduct of fair elections, to the efforts to ensure that Black lives matter and that women have agency over their own bodies and so much more — even with all of this — Biden’s almost reluctant reference to our homegrown authoritarian movement is broadly treated as wildly inappropriate and divisive.

This is about as far down in the sand that the MSM and pundit class can possibly put their heads. And, frankly, it’s irresponsible verging on dangerously — even fatally — delusional.

Our urgent goal now must be to help our president define the threat, not, as you say, by angsting and arguing over some unpleasant and unexpectedly fraught thoughts and words, but instead, by doing the investigative and public intellectual work to understand and describe this movement -- so that the non-MAGA American mainstream actually can understand what is going on: a rebellion against the American democratic “experiment” perhaps no less serious that what led us into the Civil War.

In this case, if we can act more swiftly to suppress and put down this rebellion, we can do so far short of a civil war. But it means having the courage and convictions to expose all of the main aspects and players behind this long-brewing and organized insurrection, including the wealthy funders who, like Trump -- since the end of the Civil War -- seem to have been granted a separate political/legal realm to inhabit where they can expect to never finally be held accountable for their transgressions against our laws and against the very foundations and future of our democratic institutions and aspirations.

We are being overtaken by an organized “semi-fascist” rebellion that we have so far found every excuse not to face or even to acknowledge. We have been unwittingly sleepwalking into a preventable national catastrophe. It is time to identify this insurrection for what it says and has shown that it is, and to treat it as an existential threat that must be forcefully opposed and defeated.