The Political “Center” Between Fascism and Democracy Is Fascism

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posted Aug 12 @ 09:58 AM by Jason Kottke · gift link

The Political “Center” Between Fascism and Democracy Is Fascism

What “Center” Is That, Exactly? A.R. Moxon on the continuing pleas from political “centrists” for the Democratic Party to find common ground with a party dedicated to extremist white Christian nationalism and whose party members joyously brandish MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs at party conventions.

It must be a center that exists between two points one of which pretty clearly reads MASS DEPORTATION NOW, and I suppose Chait would have it that the other point is apparently so far to the right of basic acts of governance like feeding hungry schoolchildren that such acts don’t appear in between. The center is apparently now a cruel enough place that decency doesn’t live there, and Chait, who has never believed that Democrats should ever do anything other than seek the votes of those who hate decency, now believes that Democrats should once again run away from decency, as a strategic matter.

So maybe “the center” isn’t a position. Maybe it’s an alignment, one that sees unity as a constant and never-changing agreement with supremacists, a certification that supremacists and only supremacists are part of “us,” and any attempt to make common cause with unwanted groups that supremacists consider to be their enemies represents polarization and disunity, in a way that supremacist violence itself never will.

Maybe “the center” is just whatever no-man’s land currently happens to occupy the space between the worst atrocities we can imagine, and however far we’ve travelled toward those committing them to try to get them on our side, a journey we undertook so that we won’t have to do the work of opposing them.

I think it might be that.

Such a center is a center that will make itself comfortable with any atrocity, because comfort is its only goal.

Moxon is echoing Rebecca Solnit here, who wrote On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway back in November 2020.

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

Comments 1

Jason KottkeMOD 2024-08-12T14:31:19Z

Like Moxon, I too have been thinking about those MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs and the people holding them, almost every day since the RNC. I also think about the women forced to be pregnant and being left to die because they cannot choose what to do with their own bodies. In his interview with Ezra Klein, Tim Walz made a point of separating Republican leadership from Republican voters...they are good people and his friends, family, and neighbors. E.g.:

This is where I take offense to JD Vance and "Hillbilly Elegy." Those are my people. I come from a town of 400 — 24 kids in a class, 12 cousins, farming, those types of things. And I know they're not weird. I know they're not Donald Trump.

The thing is, we have to get them away from what he's trying to sell because that's not who they are. Just picture in your mind Donald Trump coming home after a day of work and picking up a Frisbee and throwing it. And his dog catches it, and the dog runs over, and he gives him a good belly rub because he's a good boy. That's what I do. And that's what those rallygoers do. That is exactly who they are, and they're going through the same things all of our families are.

Imagining that your family, friends, and neighbors aren't bad people actively trying to harm or kill you is perhaps a laudable goal. But my question for Walz, a Holocaust & genocide scholar, is: at what point do these rallygoers go from being duped by Republican leadership to being active participants? Walz himself from a 2008 NY Times article:

"The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time," Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. "Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.

"The problem is," he continued, "that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why."

I think about the MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs and wonder about my gun-owning neighbors with Trump signs in their yards.

Like Moxon, I too have been thinking about those MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs and the people holding them, almost every day since the RNC. I also think about the women forced to be pregnant and being left to die because they cannot choose what to do with their own bodies. In his interview with Ezra Klein, Tim Walz made a point of separating Republican leadership from Republican voters...they are good people and his friends, family, and neighbors. E.g.:

This is where I take offense to JD Vance and "Hillbilly Elegy." Those are my people. I come from a town of 400 — 24 kids in a class, 12 cousins, farming, those types of things. And I know they're not weird. I know they're not Donald Trump.

The thing is, we have to get them away from what he's trying to sell because that's not who they are. Just picture in your mind Donald Trump coming home after a day of work and picking up a Frisbee and throwing it. And his dog catches it, and the dog runs over, and he gives him a good belly rub because he's a good boy. That's what I do. And that's what those rallygoers do. That is exactly who they are, and they're going through the same things all of our families are.

Imagining that your family, friends, and neighbors aren't bad people actively trying to harm or kill you is perhaps a laudable goal. But my question for Walz, a Holocaust & genocide scholar, is: at what point do these rallygoers go from being duped by Republican leadership to being active participants? Walz himself from a 2008 NY Times article:

"The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time," Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. "Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.

"The problem is," he continued, "that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why."

I think about the MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs and wonder about my gun-owning neighbors with Trump signs in their yards.

This thread is closed for new comments & replies. Thanks to everyone for participating!