American Fascism: Author and scholar John Ganz on how Europe's interwar period informs the present

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-24-american-fascism-john-ganz/



When Timothy Snyder’s slim volume On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century was rocketing up the best-seller charts in 2017, I noticed an interesting fact: The most illuminating analysts of America’s frightening recent political turn were turning out to be scholars specializing in Europe. When Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, or Richard Steigmann-Gall noticed phenomena in America’s past or present that resembled something in the right-wing movements they studied in Germany, Italy, or elsewhere, they just said so—blithely indifferent to what every graduate student in American history learns, and what New York Times reporters shout from the rooftops, that America is supposed to be “exceptional.”

The most interesting voice thinking about the connections between interwar Europe and the present-day U.S. happens to be a scholar of both. John Ganz’s forthcoming book When the Clock Broke illuminates the exceedingly odd politics of the U.S. in 1992—including some haunting harbingers of America’s Trumpian turn. The most fascinating posts on his Substack Unpopular Front are deeply learned perambulations through the 20th-century European right. Their most important lesson: Fascism is always less simple than we think it is.

“We have this image in our heads—and this is really hard to get out of people’s heads—of the fascist rise to power that comes from fascist propaganda,” Ganz explains. The stereotype is thugs marching into the seat of government with truncheons, then marching out having seized state power. “It is much more political than that. It has much more to do with negotiations between established political factions and elites … None of these movements were destined to succeed. There was a lot of luck, and there were a lot of contingencies.”

Most fascist parties and movements—Ganz knows their names, and repeats them often, as a reminder of that contingency—never seized any power. They were footnotes. That’s an important insight to address to observers who cite the sheer ridiculousness, abundant incompetence, and outright insanity within Donald Trump’s movement, and have a hard time placing it in the same universe with the movement that almost conquered Europe. After all, if Hitler’s little gang of beer hall brawlers had failed to achieve power, they surely would have looked precisely as ridiculous as all that. As Ganz puts it, “Everything kind of looks farcical until it doesn’t.”

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[SoFlaBro]

1. Orange Bastard is a piss-soaked sack of rat shit.

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Shocking. Sickening. Sad.

From the American Prospect:

The conceit is similar to what Bill Clinton felt about allowing China into the World Trade Organization: If you bring a radical outlier within the political system, they will act rationally and moderate their worst impulses. Mainstream conservatives in Italy and Germany repeatedly claimed Mussolini and Hitler would turn out to be responsible actors, once they occupied positions of responsibility. American elites followed suit with the absurd refrain, on occasions when Trump managed to act normal for 15 seconds: “He became president of the United States in that moment, period.”

That was CNN’s Van Jones, when Trump paid tribute to a military widow in his first address to a joint session of Congress. Venerable pundit Karen Tumulty still thinks this a reasonable thing to believe. As she wrote in The Washington Post a few weeks back, “In 2016, it was still possible to believe that Trump would grow and change under the weightiness of the office.”