Well, it finally happened: that most cautious and indirect of modern US presidents, Joe Biden, came, more or less, straight to the flashpoint of modern politics: the f-bomb. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.”
It’s a rare gift awarded to the US president, the ability to reset global politics with a word or phrase. Biden will be hoping he’s pulled it off this time. Supporters of democracy should hope so, too.
He followed up his apparently unscripted comments with a major prime-time presentation about the Trumpian threat to democracy. Perhaps fearful he’d drop the f-bomb again, the major networks declined to televise it live.
The network’s caution showed the nerve Biden had hit. On Fox, commentators took it as well as you’d expect: “That’s essentially a declaration of war against half of the country. What do we do to them? We kill them,” spluttered Fox’s star Tucker Carlson.
It gave the vapours, too, to the centrist elite among the country’s leading opinionistas: “Not helpful … not befitting the office of president”, according to CNN’s John Avlon; “To Defend Democracy, Don’t Call Trump a Semi-Fascist”, headlined Bloomberg.
There was a fair bit of over-educated sniffing about just what “fascism” means, particularly when it comes with that “semi-” qualifier. In proof, if needed, of Faulkner’s ”The past is never dead. It’s not even past”, a not insignificant part of the online debate has turned on whether Hungary’s inter-war dictator Miklós Horthy was a fascist or just another illiberal authoritarian. Meanwhile, Hungary’s neo-fascist Our Homeland party was marking its election to Parliament by installing Horthy’s bust in the building.
Time for media and commentators to get serious. Biden’s follow-up answer to a “please explain” question was surprisingly clear: “You know what I mean.” Yes, Joe. We do. Now, what should we do about it?
The response equally from centrist elites and right-wing propagandists tells us everything we need to know about the deep power that the word retains and why Biden’s use of it is a game-changer.
Biden’s “You know what I mean” is not far from the recently much-referenced explainer from George Orwell (of course) that underneath all the emotional power of “fascist” lies “a kind of buried meaning” that ordinary people quickly grasp: “roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class … almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘fascist’”.
Orwell was writing in 1944, in the midst of the last big shooting struggle between democracy and fascism. Not the time, he said, for a detailed doctrinal exegesis. Since then, there’s been plenty of work trying to nail down just what is (or is not) fascism, not least the all-but-real-time work of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
But it remains a political weapon, a short-hand tool to be used, certainly with circumspection (Orwell, again), but ready at hand when, as Biden seems to think, it’s needed to shock us into recognising what’s in front of us: the mobilisation of an openly exclusionary ethno-nationalism to tear down democracy, by fraud if possible and by violence if necessary.
The roots of Europe’s rising post-fascist parties in Italy, France, Spain and now Sweden and the mafia-states in the former Soviet bloc make the danger to democracy easy to recognise.
If anything, Trumpism should make it clearer still with its adaption of fascism’s traditional rhetorical devices of national rebirth (that’s the “Again” part of MAGA, after all), the leader worship, the “fake news” attacks on the lying press, the degradation of liberal institutions — and the January 6 insurrection.
Trouble is, Trump’s media collaborators have been over-eager to obfuscate what we saw on our screens, to talk the failed coup down to an over-enthusiastic crowd of patriots on a day out.
And too much of the rest of the media — including here in Australia — have been happy to take the talk-down as the given. How happy? Happy enough for CNN’s new management to embark on a cleanout of presenters and journalists who insist on continually lifting the January 6 lid to show what’s underneath.
Now, suddenly, Biden’s f-bomb has blown a way through — if we’re ready to walk through it.
