It's a good essay. As I indicated in 2015, "Mr. H" is the one that sounds to me most like myself; the one who "has never doubted his own authentic Americanism for one instant" because "this is his country, and he knows it"; whose "ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and in all the wars since," as did mine. He is both intellectual and practical, and one of two men in the room who will certainly pick up a gun to fight if necessary.
While it's worth considering all this from time to time, it's interesting to see it come up in the present moment. There's a lot of talk about Trump supporters being fascists, even Nazis, but it is mostly ridiculous. Fascists believe in the state as the absolute center of human life, the definer of all values in the post-religious age, with which all churches and families must align, and nothing can be allowed to oppose. The centrality of the state is total: as Mussolini put it, "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."
A movement built around slashing the government so that it exercises less control over individuals and families is certainly not fascist in any sense of the word.
The current SECDEF is proposing to cut the military budget by ~40%(!!!).* This is not the rising militarism associated with Nazi Germany or Fascist Anywhere. Pushback from within the Republican party is that there's no way it will happen, not because they have designs on conquest but because Congress won't agree to spend that much less.
The Trump administration has also got another sense of meaning and rightness that isn't just state dictates. Rightly or wrongly, they interpret sex according to nature, and want the state to comply with that external natural order.
There may be fascists in America somewhere, but they aren't at the Daytona 500.
Trump's ideas may be ill-advised or outright wrong in some places -- the Gaza plan is madness, for example. They may be ill-executed by the team of outsiders and amateurs he's putting together even when they're good ideas. What they are doing may cause unintended harms as well as the intended goods of debt reduction and a more sustainable government structure. There are lots of fair criticisms to raise and entertain.
But fascism? Nazi? Completely ridiculous.
* SECDEF Hegseth clarified the next day that he is proposing to reassign 8% of the annual budget each year for five years. He does not anticipate cutting it by 8% each year for five years as reported by CNN at the link.
1 comment:
One small aside: What they are doing may cause unintended harms as well as the intended goods of debt reduction and a more sustainable government structure.
I'm not that concerned about the unintended harms, per se, only that they be kept to some minimum.
The proper goal of any conflict, whether kinetic or political or economic (which is, at its heart, political when it's international economic conflict), is to win the conflict. Minimize the unintended/collateral damage as much as can be, but never to do that at the expense of winning.
In fact, too, the only unintended harm of the DOGE effort is the interruption of some useful foreign aid programs while all of them are reviewed and brought into the State Department where they belong, anyway.
Regarding OP, it seems to me that the drumbeat of "Fascist" and "Nazi" and "Hitler(-ian)" from some circles are just those in those circles projecting, not from any psychological order but from their arrogant assumption that because they would do such things, everyone else would do them.
Eric Hines
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