From 2021, a good reminder that you can't take left wingers seriously when they talk about "fascism":
The Society of Cultural Anthropology’s Campaign to Present American Populism as Fascism
"The Society of Cultural Anthropology (SCA)—a subdivision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)—published a series of essays exploring the topic of American Fascism...
The 18 essays, published on April 15th, explored the concept of fascism in relation to the January 6th United States Capitol attack... the actual contents were intellectually disingenuous, with most authors watering down the definition of fascism in order to fit an identifiably partisan narrative.
As regular Quillette readers will know, the field of anthropology has lost its way in recent years, with scholars now being encouraged to prioritize social-justice imperatives over traditionally rigorous forms of scholarship. Defenders of this radical reform euphemistically sometimes refer to it as “decolonizing” the field. A 2020 American Anthropologist article by Ryan Cecil Jobson of the University of Chicago more bluntly speaks of “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn,” which entails “a call to abandon [the field’s] liberal suppositions” in the service of “confront[ing] the existential threats of climate catastrophe and authoritarian retrenchment.” While this ostensibly well-intentioned critique promises more inclusion and intellectual breadth, it instead had delivered overzealous sponsorship of specific political ideologies.
In the American Fascism call for papers—originally published on January 13th, a week after the Capitol riot—a trio of commissioning editors introduced the linkage between fascism and the events of January 6th as an asserted premise, rather than a subject for open discussion. They then segued to the issue of the Capitol Hill rioters themselves, whom they describe as irredeemable villains...
The Cultural Anthropology editors use a quote from Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi to frame the series. But the use of that quote, taken from a 1974 essay, is instructive, as the Cultural Anthropology editors related it in truncated form: “Every age has its own fascism. And we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will.” These words certainly do lend themselves toward describing a populist mob trying to prevent legislators from counting votes. But in the original text, Levi also added that “There are many ways of reaching [fascism], not just through terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information . ..by paralysing systems of education…and the forced silence of the many.” It is these latter characteristics of fascism that right-wing critics of progressives single out when they make their own (admittedly dubious) claims of fascism lurking in Joe Biden’s Washington...
In his 1932 Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini (who coined the term fascism more than a century ago) emphasized the subsumption of a nation’s economic, corporate, and educational institutions to a centralizing authority. With this framing in mind, it becomes equally arguable to locate secondary and tertiary characteristics of fascism in progressive bastions—notably Silicon Valley and its suppression of, say, stories about Hunter Biden or COVID vaccine misinformation. Of course, American Fascism doesn’t concern itself with these themes...
Fascism is defined as “recognizable partly through its rhetorical modes of acquiring and retaining power,” “exalting ‘nation’ or ‘race’ above the individual,” “an ideology of us-versus-them that unifies adherents against those seen as other,” and “involving nationalistic fervor, rejection of weakness, and radical collective action.” If these definitions strike you as being broad enough to swallow up vast swathes of completely mainstream political and cultural movements, your impression isn’t wrong: If applied wholesale, in fact, the idea of “us-versus-them” could characterize everything from Antifa, to Critical Race Theory, to the incendiary rhetoric often featured in Democratic and Republic political jousting. But in these essays, such generalizations are applied specifically to whites (often conflated with white supremacists in these texts), men, and the “oppressive politics of conservatism.”
In a few cases, the authors go on to the next step, by explicitly describing Trump and his supporters as outright fascists. Columbia University anthropology professor Marilyn Ivy even (ludicrously) describes Trump as an “American führer.” But the other authors who advanced this idea found ways to link Trump supporters with Nazi ideology more surreptitiously. In their essay “We’re So F*cked”: Notes on American Fascism, for instance, Joyce Dalsheim and Gregory Starrett juxtapose religious-themed quotes from rioters (“You have strengthened our resolve to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign”) with Hannah Arendt’s description of Nazism’s (in their words) “invocation of a broad sense of promise.”...
If evoking “a broad sense of promise” is an identifying symptom of Nazi tendencies, then one might equally impugn literally every American politician, Democrat or Republican, stirring up voters with a vision of a brighter national future.
Perhaps the most ambitious logical stretch is provided by Hugh Gusterson of the University of British Columbia in Canada. In his essay, American Fascism and the Storming of the Capitol, Gusterson notes that most of the known riot participants (as of the time of writing) were “small business owners or white collar workers” such as “lawyers, realtors, nurses, software engineers, sales reps, and owners of small businesses such as gyms, hair salons, restaurants, bakeries, and construction companies.” Their status as “petty bourgeois” is damning, Gusterson suggests, because “historically in the West, the petty bourgeoisie has been suspicious of intellectuals, intensely nationalistic, quietly resentful of the privileged, and fearful of falling into the working class. It is the class that produced Margaret Thatcher. And it provided the core support for Hitler’s Nazi Party in Europe.”
It is true that status-threat concerns animated Trump’s political base. But again, this is generally true of many political movements. In fact, it is a cliché of political campaigns that challengers rouse their supporters with claims that they have fallen in wealth or stature under the incumbent regime. (As Ronald Reagan famously put it in a 1980 debate against Jimmy Carter, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”) Moreover, it is possible to denounce the violence of January 6th while also considering the forces that have conspired to impoverish or dispossess many of the Americans who supported Trump. Yet the essay authors treat this issue in a way that can only be described as willfully myopic. Writing mostly from their armchairs, the American Fascism contributors present the rioters in moralizing, two-dimensional terms, as anti-intellectual conspiracy mongers, “evil” racists, and outright fascists—a somewhat shocking abdication of their scholarly anthropological mission to understand the human condition. And it is notable that progressive academics have been rightfully aggrieved when similarly crude moral generalizations were made about those convicted of violent crimes while operating in a radicalized capacity under the banner of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. (It should be noted that this is not the first time the Capitol has been the site of violence. Yet it is notable that the essay series excludes any mention of the 1983 Capitol bombing, a criminal plot enacted by a far-left, female-led, communist sect.)
The Internet is bursting with pundits who are all too happy to frame great swathes of people as “good” or “bad”—us versus them. One might think that scholarly anthropologists would be wary of this tendency. But as American Fascism shows, many academics in this field aren’t interested in providing a check on hot-headed, self-indulgent political punditry, so much as they seek to confer academic legitimacy on the underlying impulses animating one side of the culture war.
Indeed, Knox College anthropology professor Jonah Rubin, one of the contributors to American Fascism, is explicit about his desire to reimagine the scholar’s role as that of an activist...
In another age, Rubin’s suggestion might be challenged by his peers as antithetical to honest, scholarly inquiry. But as the SCA itself tweeted (to much acclaim) in 2018: “All research is political.” At the time, mainstream followers of the SCA might have imagined this to be a tongue in cheek theoretical flourish. Seen in retrospect, it seems like a de facto mission statement. And the content of American Fascism shows us how that mission unfolds."
