Techno-Fascism Comes to America

"Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But [Andrea] Molle [poli-sci prof at Chapman] identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top. Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”

Kyle Chayka @ NYer

We're taught capitalism and communism are irreconcilable binaries but in an important sense they are not. I remember trying to explain this to colleague once and they shot back with, 'right, we're a mixed economy,' like what I was saying was obvious and of useless value. But I still think it's useful to remind ourselves of this now and then because when we talk about economic issues this way, which is still the way they are almost without exception discussed in politics, as these abstract, hypothetical, antagonistic binaries, we obscure understanding the really existing economy. Bezos harrumphing this past week that the editorial writing in WaPo, from now on, will be restricted to "personal liberties and free markets," as if the subject of "free" and "unfree" markets in the real economy were clear and obvious to everyone, is a perfect case in point.  

My contention is that it isn't clear-- Bezos' "free markets" may protect his freedom to accumulate wealth but do they increase the freedom of workers to find living wage work? or the freedom to live in a healthy environment? Most importantly, thinking about markets in this strict binary fashion muddles public understanding of economic issues, fostering ideas like all taxes and regulations are bad, when really any large scale market over time is absolutely dependent on rules and regulations and taxes to build the infrastructure that make any really existing large-scale market function and work. Still, living in the antagonistic Cold War binary over the economy we get the random destruction of Leon and his hacker gang rampaging through the government right now, immiserating many and, if not stopped before it's too late, probably crashing the economy. And even then, if the Great Recession is any guide, before the government has even finished bailing out the economy and putting it back together, the free market dogmatists will be blaming the crash on the government. 

But let's back up a little and try to explain how I came to this way of thinking.  

Heterodox economic historian Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) argues both free market capitalism and Marxism are post-Enlightenment utopian schemes. Both rationalizing political-economic orders, claiming to be natural orders and universalizing systems, that in theory put an end to political conflict and class struggle, their carrot, by, in the case of the free marketeers, maximizing market freedoms and human productivity, independent of government intervention (Laissez-faire), or politics, and in the case of communism, by transferring the ownership of the means of production from a few super rich capitalists to all labor as a collective body politic, thereby allowing eventually the withering away of  the state, or politics, again, and everyone fishes in the morning and reads in the afternoons and goes out to shows in the evenings. Utopia! The problem, according to Polanyi, is when put into practice by political power, enforced by governments and the rule of law, these utopian schemes, capitalism or communism, become dystopic, corrosive to human society, principally because they are, in the case of market fundamentalists (and neoliberals), hostile to any democratic claims outside the bottom line economic maximizing profit seeking priorities of big capitalists, like taxes or regulations or living wages, and in the case of communists, or Dictatorships of the Proletariat in communist command societies, they are hostile to political dissent of any kind or any human right that threatens communist party authority. 

It doesn't make it any less threatening or potentially destructive but totalitarian technocratic engineering fantasies like the Muskian one above, which is really just another neoliberal market fantasy, are not entirely a new thing, by any stretch. Musk's grandfather was something of an antisemitic technocracy nut back in the 1950s. I'm sure Leon sees himself as a great world builder and he's gifting society with his fully-automated manufacturing surveillance world geared to escaping the earth and colonizing Mars. But what jumps out at me in his "techno-accelerationist" fantasy, not to mention his efficiencies rampage through the federal government right now, is the reckless contempt for workers, for labor, for others, for the human rights or individual freedoms of anybody but himself. He thinks any part of government that doesn't serve him (28 billion in contracts, or something like that, from what I've heard) is government waste; helping the poor, cancer research, social security, all wasteful inefficiencies. So, again, in the Polanyian sense, another utopian ends up a dystopian; and in this case, even a Neo-Nazi. 

There is that saying about how societal collapses develop slowly in dribs and drabs until everything falls apart all at once. We're in this terribly precarious place where it feels like it is the resiliency of the separation of powers in our system, and the democratic will of the people within that system, by definition procedural and lumberingly disorganized forces, respectively, versus a fascist corporate state ("move fast and break things") for billionaires and bigots backed by state and non-state actor violence. Ack! 

Anyway, if it's any comfort there are no lack of wildly rhyming historical precedents to our troubled tabloid times and they keep coming. I've been pounding on the Nazi parallels, because of Ryback's Takeover. And Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction, which I maybe haven't mentioned as much. Lessons from that book I think worth mentioning here: Don't believe the Nazi economic miracle hype; Albert Speer was a propagandist, foremost. The technocracy in Germany was at odds with the Nazis by 1935 and everything after that, economically, was maximizing total war production and extreme austerity for working people. And the Nazi economists knew by 1937, latest, Germany would not be able to develop anything like parity in military productive strength with the collective force of their enemies before 1945-1950 or later. When Hitler launched Barbarossa, his invasion of Russia in 1941, logistics support was provided by horse drawn carts. In other words, fascist Germany was less an economic miracle than an industrializing state war machine; and one of brutally violent consequence to Jews and gays and communists and Gypsies and disabled people and, really, any non-German speaking people in Poland and Ukraine. Fascist Germany is often credited for its technocratic achievements but what stands out in Tooze's account is how Hitler's racist delusions actually catastrophically undermine Germany's modernizing growth and security. 

Historian Janis Mimuru, as reported by Kyle Chayka in the NY-er, thinks, additionally, the techno-fascist takeover in Japan in the 1930s, in part inspired by German fascism, resembles in ways the hostile government takeover going on now by Leon and his hacker Dogers. Led by engineering and industrial elites, high on their own stash of flattering history books, great world builders in their own minds, Japanese engineers in the 1930s and Tech Bros now think they've got all the technocratic solutions, anything in their way, laws, workers, humans, democratic pressures of any kind are waste, inefficiencies, engineering problems and must be suppressed or "fed into the wood chipper," so to speak; enemies of the people, woke mind virus, etc.  

All of which is to say perhaps some healthy skepticism about the AI/crypto, "animals spirits," "vibes shift" boom hype going on these days might be in order. By one admin account, as related by Ezra Klein on a recent podcast about AGI (artificial general intelligence), Leon is stripping the government down to the studs so as to make way for the AI takeover, for efficiencies' sake of course. Please, note again, the lure here is the fantasy of automating away politics or any democratic claims on capital. The coming austerity with which we will pay for this hype, at any rate, will likely result in many excess deaths and considerable loss of wealth and security for anybody that is not a billionaire oligarch. 

What else strikes me about these comparisons, the Nazis and Imperial Japan, as well, and which is kind of obvious but feels right now like worth repeating, and underlining, is how the Nazis and Imperial Japan were both ultimately desperately doomed examples of national planning. They aren't paragons of rationalizing technocratic achievement. In the end they defy technocratic reason, convinced their cultural survival is at stake, their world beating technocratic arrogance crashes their countries in terrible military crackups.   

But no way Grump & Leon go there, right? I said historical comparisons can be comforting but they aren't always. They can also be grave warnings.   

Political Violence and the Great Disinhibition

"Political violence is a curious and seductive thing. People routinely see aspects of intention and even valor in political violence notionally aimed at values they agree with, even when they don’t condone the violence itself. We can see this in the fanboying (and girling) around Luigi Mangione. And we can see it around the Jan 6th instigators. (No, I don’t think they’re comparable. You don’t see prominent elected officials cheering on Mangione.) My point here isn’t one of trying to figure out whose violence might be more justifiable. It’s that in cases of violence in the service of goals we might feel broadly aligned with we generally tend to see the violence in more linear and literal terms. The culprit believed very deeply in X or Y and was finally driven to violence because traditional means didn’t work. But it’s not necessarily like that. The train of causation and ideation can run in the opposite direction. You’re motivated toward violence and then you find an ideological framework to fit your hunger for violence into.

It’s this more general disinhibition that seems most relevant, a greater social hunger for violence that is worth taking stock of prior to the point it actualizes itself through one political narrative or another."

Josh Marshall @ TPM

Yeah, worth taking stock of the obvious "general disinhibition" towards violence promoted by Grump before electing him again. Anyway, been thinking something along these lines for awhile now. Civil war 2.0, or our national drift in that direction, will be less a territorial dispute, or regional bastions and frontlines, and more random violence and mass murders, where ideological or partisan motivation is an afterthought or twisted together in weird shapes. 

And this isn't to suggest that the urban vs rural/exurban conflict in America today isn't real. Coming from the burbs and then the sticks the divide has never appeared greater to me. But cities need rural agriculture and rural agriculture needs cities; cities are in fact the signal achievement of agricultural civilization. There's a realpolitiks in that that cannot easily be dismissed or broken up. 

Still think, though, Josh underplays in this post the way Grump has activated or accelerated the "general disinhibition" towards violence, or how much that violence skews towards conservative crackpots. There's lots of political violence in American history, sure, KKK, presidential assassinations, but is there any precedent for all the violent threats against public health officials, judges, election workers, and school board members we've seen since 2016, almost all of it republican leaning violent reaction? 

Certainly bigot hostility towards immigrants in US history is hardly new. There was a Red Scare after WWI. McCarthyism in the 1950s. All ugly episodes in American history with more than a whiff of political violence about them. But I'm not sure any of these fit the current situation very well. Today we live in a deeply polarized culture of ambient fascism where deep wells of anger seek outlets for pent up violence. "Because something is happening here and you don't know what it is/Do you Mr. Jones?" Only now Mr. Jones has reached a breaking point. Everything is out of whack. 

And along with fears of civil war people are often puzzling over whether the causes of the current crisis are cultural or economic, cultural divisions or economic inequality. How about it goes like this: the pursuit of economic inequality, Billionaires, monopoly, and generally and relentlessly financializing the economy, otherwise known today as corporate rule or the neoliberal order, has exacerbated cultural divisions, poverty, homelessness, and the othering of victims of the onslaught to a breaking point? And voters just elected a Frankenstein of this historical onslaught to double down on the violent pressures in society. Forgive me if I don't think this is going to go well. 

And, again, Keynes, one of my current intellectual touchstones, was comically imperious and overly ambitious and maybe quite naive about colonialism and definitely an overly complicated theoretician (there really is no "general theory," for instance) but he did call all this out a hundred years ago: i.e., the violence and social conflict that results from the predatory impacts of unfettered capitalism without the necessary stabilizing agency of government. 

 

US War Department of 1943 Endorses Harris/Walz

"Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!” 

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques: 

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.” 

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.” 

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security."

Letters from an American Historian

Anything sound familiar here? You know what to do: vote Harris/Walz and blue-no-matter-who down ballot to defeat the fascist movement in America. And please note how what is to be done is not radical or "communist" or "crazy liberal" but in keeping with the wise counsel of the friggin' War Department during WW2! 

 

Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (2004), defines the fascist form of politics:

“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.”

Post-election America: check, check, check, check, and check. About the only thing that doesn't check is the "external expansion," unless you count increased trade with other kleptocratic states, Russia and Hungary, or if talk resumes about trying to buy Greenland. 

The worst of this, of course, is all the violence and suffering this fascist fever will impose on the Republican's scapegoats, poor migrants, Trans people, liberals, anybody that opposes them, basically. Project 2025 checks a lot of those same fascist boxes and reportedly doesn't have much to say about external expansion either. It is, actually, not just a fascist moral abomination but geo-politically a belly-flop losing strategy in the global energy transition that will define civilization in the 21st century. 

Climate change denialism in US government policy, hostile to industrial policy, obstructing government action for decades, is why Chinese innovation and production in solar and electric cars has blown away the US in the last 15-20 years. Doubling down on this loser's strategy-- Grump promises to reverse all the green new deal industrial policy in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act-- will increasingly isolate the US as a belligerent obstacle to sustainable global economic development. 

And, crucially, global realpolitiks that the republicans seem to have lost entirely, this plutocratic opposition to climate change reforms can slow and obstruct a green transition but they cannot stop the economic challenges climate change presents to the 7 billion people living on earth. Ceding global leadership to China and other great power centers facing these challenges will only further endanger the planet, increasingly marginalize the US and other states that assume this burn-baby-burn posture, and hasten the decline of US influence and power in building for a better future. 

However We Define Fascism Remember Its Essence is Violence

 What is Fascism? 

By Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Trump has long kept the Fascist flame burning in America. He started his 2016 campaign by retweeting a racist meme from the Nazi outlet The Daily Stormer (the publication of neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin).

Trump brought Mussolini admirer and far-right operative Steve Bannon into the White House to launch his own “revolution of reaction.” In 2017 his administration gave Holocaust deniers a big gift: a Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that made no mention of Jews.

The GOP politicians who now feign outrage at Trump's association with Nazis such as Nick Fuentes had no problem with his mainstreaming of extremism, perhaps because some of them are extremists themselves (Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene have appeared with Fuentes).

It’s time to accept that the GOP, which was complicit with Trump's Jan. 6 attempted authoritarian takeover, has become a party that furthers Fascist values and practices. That means the hate crimes that have skyrocketed in America since 2016 will likely continue to expand.

However we define Fascism, remembering that its essence is violence is more important than ever.

More on the history of Trump and MAGA's fascist violence from Heather Cox Richardson: HCR on MAGA Violence.

Local Police and FBI Harass BLM Protesters While Ignoring MAGA Mass Murderer

The Colorado Springs police working with the FBI infiltrates a local social justice, BLM, fair housing community organization with undercover cop that looks like a goofy sex worker. They target peaceful protesters, arresting them for protesting police violence (an officer and possible FBI agent are caught on tape talking about putting a boot in the face of a local college professor participating in a protest march) and unaffordable housing. Basically, the local police and FBI are doing everything they can do to setup criminal dossiers on some unfortunate left liberal protesters, while at the same time dropping the investigation of a local bomb threat by a violent rightwing nutjob who goes on to murder a bunch of people in a MAGA hate-crime a month or so later, 

And then add this to the broader Orange Grump era context of the police and the conservative right: 1) The biggest police unions endorsed Trump in 2016 and again more than a year out from the 2020 election. 2) The Secret Service erased records of their internal communications around the Jan 6 insurrection. 3) There is evidence of cooperation between local police departments (Portland, for example) and violent bigot militia groups. 4) There are a staggering number of instances of police violence against unarmed US citizens and 5) Near total police intransigence against reforms to reduce police violence. This is concerning stuff. The kind of stuff from which fascist police states are made. 

Meanwhile, I gather from local media that the police are Quiet Quitting because of all the overwrought "Defund the Police" rhetoric from shrill, aggressive, overly dramatic BLM protesters and retired school teachers like me. And so "Backing the Blue" means more cops and less oversight or no reform because oversight and reform hurt police morale. It's either suffer the police Quiet Quitting or hire more cops and let them crack heads and do sweeps as they see fit. Local politics probably can't be this stupid but this is how it sounds in the local papers. 

Anyway, amazing story from Democracy Now and Colorado Springs. And reporter Trevor Aaronson and his podcast Alphabet Boys deserves some props too.