Cabaret faschitude

 The question of whether Trump is a fascist or not holds a fascination with the politically interested professional class. It is as if classifying Trump is like classifying a virus – you know what it is, you can inoculate against it.

Myself, I think there’s a whole lotta diminishing returns in fighting about this question.

On the other hand, I think it takes a rare type of heteronormative white male to wholly ignore the question of style, as if style were some epiphenomena, a “not-real” which we wave away as we do our hardcore comparisons of economic policy between Trump and Mussolini, circa 1930.

This is one of the reasons that the debate seems, on the one hand, so airless, and on the other hand, so frustrating. Because it is the fascitude, my droogs, which we can all see.

It is the style that attracts the boys.

Thus, instead of leafing through Mein Kampf and Ian Kershaw, I’d suggest participants in the Great Fascist Debate watch Cabaret, and in particular, the sequence: Tomorrow belongs to me, here:

Every innovation in media in the twentieth and twenty first century has made style, the fashion for liking things, the fashion of the things liked, an ever more politically potent imitatio drive. Style, as all us post-postians know, is the royal road to substance. While the neolib technocrats celebrated Biden’s push for a change on clause 3 (a) of the amended Taft-Hartley law of 1962 – that will surely touch the heart of the working class and lead to victory for a thousand years! – the style background was in flux all around them – on the one hand, the mobilized college student protests, on the other hand, the dude-ish, reddit rejection of college at all. The style of Trumpism in all its forms is all fascitude. False bravado. And if my Mr. Professional, with a smirk, asks, well, where is the policy – it exists as only a further stage of the right wing paradigm since Reagan.

Within a framework of laws, which is legitimated by the cockeyed idea that nine justices are just gonna run everything through a constitutional test. Eventually, of course, if the rightwing dynamic grows stronger, they will make exceptions, rule some things as constitutionally relevant, and read other things that are literally in the constitution out of the constitution.

My feeling, as an aging pen-pusher, is that the fascitude style is much more important than the classification of Trump’s toybox of policies. And that the Professional flight into the various happy traps they have devised during the last forty years – rational choice, behavioral economics, the whole grab bag – is a flight from what we all see too clearly.

The explainers are failing us.