A LETTER TO ALL THOSE OF MY FRIENDS WHO ARE CURRENTLY WONDERING WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WORLD
In the next few days, I intend to write a series of short essays, in the form of letters to friends, detailing my view of what your candidate has done wrong, what the man you regard as a public danger has done right, and why we are where we are today. My position is that of one who disliked both candidates equally, if for different reasons, and who never failed to make it clear right from the start. As my conservative friends know, I have been against Trump for ten years now. If I find anything good about his victory, it is only the defeat of what the Biden administration has stood for.
The first mistake in the campaign was an easy one to make. The enormity of what had happened on January 6, 2020, hung over the Democrat imagination like a nightmare, as it did on many others including me. But it meant that the campaign fell into the lethal trap of yelling "Fascism! Fascism!' at the top of their lungs at all Trump manifestations and supporters. That did not work out, because in point of fact there was no Fascism at work. Actual Fascism was born at a unique conjunction of two elements of social crisis: national and class resentment, and the existence of vast masses of veterans with recent experience of war fighting at the highest technical level. Mussolini did not make Fascism; Fascism made itself in the streets of Italy, as the furious, frustrated sons of the middle classes, come home from three years of frozen Hell at the front, found that the Socialist/Communist hard left was rioting and abusing their own people and themselves, that the Slavs on the Yugoslav borders were assaulting and abusing Italians, and that the Allies at Versailles had defrauded Italy of what they, the veterans, felt they had given their blood and their friends’ lives for. Mussolini rode the tiger of the armed nationalist bands to power because he was the only prominent political figure in that position. But he did not found it, any more than Hitler did in Germany.
Fascism is recognizable, and the events of January 6 were indeed as close to Fascism as anything we have seen recently. But they were not effective in any political sense. They were a burp of unorganized and purposeless violence. Real Fascism would have organized an armed occupation of the Capitol, not just indulged in random, carnival displays. And, above all, nothing followed it up (which is what I had actually feared at the time). There was no establishment of party militias, no build up of a party as a power structure, no violence in the streets.
Soon, the events of January 6 were in the past. They were a finished matter, investigated by the judiciary, discussed by historians. They posed no more threat. People knew instinctively that the call of Fascism did not correspond with facts. It was a symptom of a mental laziness that would not engage with the opponent and instead thought that treating them as contemptible and dangerous would make people shy away from them. But even people of the intelligence of Nick Cohen could not speak of anything except the authoritarian, tyrannical, etc etc etc, nature of Trump, and his supposed danger to democratic order. They still are doing so now, and no doubt will go on for the next four years. My advice is for them not to do so any more.
(To be continued...)