Checking in from not quite two months into Nouveau Stalinism
How you doing out there? Staying hydrated? Getting some exercise? Eating a vegetable once in a while? Not self-medicating too heavily? Sleeping some?
People mutter “Two months” to me and to each other, and shake their heads. It’s impossible to determine from their disbelief if they cannot fathom how long a time this has been going on for, or how little.
So, two months in and we have moved into the realm of unpersoning war heroes, belligerent posturing at our friends and neighbors, banishing people to concentration camps in foreign nations without due process, and abolishing such elements of the reality-based community as, oh, cancer research and vaccine funding. This is fine.
This is all part and parcel of authoritarianism, of course. It’s Stalin; it’s Hitler; it’s Pol Pot.
Specifically, the people in charge of the United States right now, with its vast power and its profound mechanisms of social control and oppression, are unserious people who desperately want to be taken seriously, and that’s what makes them so dangerous. They are exactly analogous to fragile men who, despite their social and physical power, are so terrified of being laughed at by women that they resort to violence to assert their power.
But no matter how they escalate that violence and control, even to the point of murder, it will never be enough for them—because they can make their victims afraid, but they cannot force those victims to respect them. And they know they are scorned.
Trump and his politburo make me afraid. I am absolutely afraid: I am afraid of being violated, silenced, renditioned, ruined, imprisoned, denied medical care, murdered. But they can never make me respect them, because they are fundamentally unserious people and they fundamentally stupid, cruel, and servile.
Being somebody from a marginalized background has always been a series of efforts of courage, merely to exist. That is manifest in America now.
Fascism or Stalinism—the authoritarian impulse whether on the right or on the left—arises from the same thwarted impulse to have respect without earning respect that, frankly, serial murder does. And like serial murder, we glorify authoritarianism in media. We treat it as if it were darkly thrilling and hypnotic, and oh those uniforms, when in fact what it is is squalid and pathetic.
Banal, to use Hannah Arendt’s term.
Elon Musk can spend vast amounts of money to ruin an entire social media platform in defense of his fragility, in order to stop making fun of him. He will unleash his flying monkeys on anybody who dares to disagree with him. But he will never not be risible.
Donald Trump can organize an entire fucking coup while his cowed and servile party claps politely in abrogation of their oaths, and Chuck Schumer bends the knee to tyranny, but he will never not be a word-salad spewing demagogue.
The problem is that these guys deep down know they are not-very-bright trustafarians who would be nobody without rich white guy impunity. And so they cannot stand anybody who has actually earned respect, with dignity, through the exercise of their own skills.
Abusers will beat you. They will gaslight you. They will murder you to try to silence the laughter they hear loudest inside their own heads.
But they will never not be basic, and that’s what they cannot stand.