Right wing attempt to assassinate America’s second-most important politician not considered that big a deal by American mainstream media

Here’s the current electronic headline of the below the fold story in the Paper of Record: “Nancy Pelosi’s Husband is Seriously Injured in Hammer Attack by Intruder.”

Well that’s one way to put it. Putting it that way obscures that the attack was:

(a) An attempt to murder the Speaker of the House

(b) Carried out by a right wing would-be assassin

(c) A classic predictable and predicted consequence of the cumulative radicalization of the Republican party.

Stochastic terrorism is an essential element of fascism as it fights to seize political power. The Republican party is about 75% of the way to becoming an all but explicit fascist party (naturally fascist parties no longer call themselves fascist, for reasons that have nothing to with fascism itself and everything to do with how Don Draper made a handsome living on Madison Avenue), and a healthy political system would recognize this.

Our system does not recognize this, at all, and one symptom of that is how the assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi by a right wing extremist and Trump supporter is being handled by the media: as an isolated incident carried out by a lone wolf lunatic.

It’s not isolated, and David DePape is not a lone wolf: he’s a member of violent right wing movement that’s trying to destroy this country’s democratic institutions and create a one-party state. And not just any old one party state, but one that is the end result of:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

The institutional manifestation of that form of political behavior in the United States in 2022 is the all but explicitly fascist wing of the Republican party.

Robert Paxton’s five stages of fascism are:

(1) Creation of a movement

(2) Rooting of that movement in the political system

(3) Seizure of power

(4) Exercise of power

(5) Further radicalization or entropy

Historically, very few fascist movements get to stage (2) let alone (3), but the United States in late 2022 is currently very much in the middle of stage (3). Stage (4) is reached when the fascists have both taken over the government and have asserted their dominance over their inevitable coalition partners, the pre-existing conservative parties and institutions of the pre-fascist state. In the United States in 2022, the institutional manifestation of those coalition partners is what still remains of the non-fascist wing of the Republican party.

What’s idiosyncratic about the variety of fascism that arose in America in the early decades of the 21st century is that it did not end up involving the creation of a new fascist party, which then contended for power with the existing political parties. Instead, a social movement and the cult of personality that formed around that movement’s leader took over one of the nation’s two existing major political parties, first gradually then suddenly. In this sense, American neo-fascism is not exactly like the classic historical varieties. But fascism is nothing if not idiosyncratic, as it is mostly non-ideological, and therefore cannily adaptive to local cultural and political conditions.

Stage (5) will involve following a path like that of Germany after 1938 or, more commonly, Spain after the early 1940s, when Franco’s initially fascist movement morphed into a more traditional right wing authoritarian regime, that shed most of its distinctively fascist elements.

In the fight to keep stage (3) from being completed successfully, it helps to recognize that this is what is actually happening here and now, not somewhere far away and long ago.