Los Angeles, Tehran, and DC

The always interesting John Ganz has some thoughts on a particularly eventful 24 hours:

These times are extremely challenging for someone who tries to make a living commenting on politics: the sheer volume of news and the overload of information make parsing the situation feel nearly impossible. It seems with the explosion of war and the wave of domestic repression that now includes elected officials, we have made a vertiginous drop into the abyss. But I believe that a series of recent setbacks and declining popularity has made the Trump administration look quite weak, including his very public falling out with Elon Musk, and has directly contributed to this dangerous turn of events. We don’t know what role exactly Trump played in Israel’s strikes on Iran, but now that they look successful, he has embraced them. I think it’s quite likely that he was waiting to see: in case of an Israeli fizzle and a strong Iranian response, he would’ve then bleated about dealmaking and the importance of negotiation.

But behind Los Angeles and Iran and the D.C. parade lies a single unifying logic of Trump’s moves: a superficial and gaudy rhetoric of power. Uniforms, troops, tanks, planes, drones, bombs—anything that reads “strength” and “control”—are to be employed. This is done to fill in a void of actual consent and political strength. They make the mistake of assuming that “violence = power,” which it does not: power comes from the consent of the governed. As Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence, “‘[E]very decrease of power is an open invitation to violence only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands… have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to use substitute violence for it.” (In this light, we also should keep in mind the fact that Netanyahu barely sneaked by a no-confidence vote in Israel.)

And while we should not make violence for power, we should not make the opposite mistake of assuming that the employment of repression and war themselves cannot generate power, and the rhetoric will do its job and restore the flagging fortunes of these regimes. Unfortunately, in the case of war with Iran, Trump is moving with the previous consensus: the foreign policy establishment and the media are always friendly to bombing. There is less likelihood that Trump will be framed as an erratic madman leading the country off the edge if Israel’s gambit results in a spectacular defeat for Iran, as it looks at this moment. Again, Trump will try to make it his victory. I believe, in the long run, this attempt to ride the whirlwind of events will result in collapse, but who knows how long?

Some sort of almost self-parodic display of masculine-coded strength has always been at the core of fascist ideology and aesthetics, which is the through line that connects the thuggish attacks on a senator and the city government of Los Angeles, the North Korean-style military parade scheduled for Trump’s birthday celebration on Saturday, and the parasitic glomming on to Israel’s assassination of much of the Iranian regime’s leadership.

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values. . . .

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

“Ur-Fascism, “Umberto Eco, June 22, 1995