Fascism and Other Matters

Miscellaneous campaign notes

It's amazing how much Republicans (I don't mean people who "identify" as Republicans, I mean party cadres, the activists who do the work and enjoy the rewards, ideological and material, because that's the kind of party the GOP is now) despise their voters.

While both sides have been criticized for misleading fundraising tactics, “[t]he Republican fundraising machine has been subject to more than 800 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission since 2022 — nearly seven times more than the number of complaints lodged against the other side,” they report.

One sad example: “One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.”

"I love the poorly educated," said Trump, but I think his understanding of "love" is a relationship where he gets a lot more out of it than he puts in, if you know what I mean.

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This is so embarrassing on CNN's part:

CNN — 

Kamala Harris lifted language from a Republican attorney when she testified in front of Congress in 2007, a CNN review of her testimony finds.

Experts CNN spoke with said that the instance, first reported by conservative news outlet the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday, raises concern but does not constitute a serious example of plagiarism.

The instance occurred when Harris was district attorney of San Francisco. She testified at the time before the House Judiciary Committee in support of the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007, which would have created a student loan repayment program for state and local prosecutors and public defenders.

Her prepared testimony lifted paragraphs from the prepared testimony of Paul Logli, then a Republican state’s attorney from Illinois and chairman of the board of the National District Attorneys Association, who testified before the Senate two months earlier. The paragraphs use the same survey and nearly identical language to each other.

It's not an example of plagiarism at all, serious or otherwise! It doesn't raise any legitimate concern of any kind! Whatever the "Washington Free Beacon" may think or pretend to think. Congressional testimony isn't graded for originality of language. You're not expected to try to be creative. You're not expected to make it personal, unless it is your personal testimony.

You're supposed to testify as accurately as possible, and it's a good idea to go over it with some lawyers to make sure it says what you want it to say. If some lawyers have already written it up well, there's no reason to rewrite it. Since Harris and Logli were both doing the same job in front of different committees, she in the House and he in the Senate advocating for this perfectly good bill (even though Logli is a Republican). 

There was nothing personal about it, though I'm sure both agreed paying off student loans for prosecutors and public defenders was a good idea, which it is. Both were representing not themselves but the organization they both belonged to, which supported the legislation, speaking on its behalf. Do they think Harris should have written a poem for it? Do they think Logli was hoping to sell his deathless prose to The New Yorker, or maybe McSweeney's, and get a Pulitzer, and Harris spoiled his plan by taking credit for it?

What it is, and I don't think there can be any serious doubt about this, is a product of Christopher Rufo's factory for discrediting distinguished Black women. 

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I'm not crazy about the "Trump is a fascist" discourse dominating the last two weeks of the Harris campaign, if that's what's happening—a good part of it seems to have been The Times getting the John Kelly story and Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg adding to it, so that Anderson Cooper had little choice but to ask Harris the question at the Town Hall, or she but to answer it as forthrightly as she could.

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I don't know what the word "fascist" means to the vast American public, or if it means anything at all. (When I was a student in Germany, long ago, I had an Israeli roommate, who spoke the most beautiful German, practically, of anyone I ever met there that year, and he used to use "Faschist" as a swearword, like, you know, if he dropped something on his foot—"Faschist noch mal!"—but of course he really knew what it means.) Mussolini, the man who coined the word out of imperial Roman history, isn't as famous as Hitler, Hitler's second banana in the popular war history, and the picture of the fasces, a bundle of rods tied around a battle axe and representing bellicose unity, which was represented on the reverse of the American dime before 1945 (nobody thought of getting rid of it until they were creating a new design in tribute to the dead FDR), doesn't scream the way the swastika does.

1938 dime, via Numismatic News.

The word in my time belonged to the self-identified international left, like my roommate in Germany and me, aware of it as the historical enemy of socialism, and casually used to describe the imperial war regime in our own time (though I think Noam Chomsky preferred going straight for "Nazi" for that), reflected in our own smaller-scale lives in America's fanatical nationalism and implacable hostility to crimes like potsmoking and hitchhiking, not exactly fascist in any technical sense, though certainly oppressive. A more thoughtful use was connected to the Frankfurt thinking known to the hippies through the English books of Marcuse and Fromm—Theodor Adorno was among the first to compile one of those lists of the characteristics of fascism. 

But I don't think ordinary people used the word at all beyond the most elementary historical sense, to name the thing that lost World War II (even though Franco continued to rule Spain and Chiang Kai-shek Taiwan and so forth, in pockets often funded by the US and warmly approved by the National Review and eventually paying Paul Manafort for political advice, all around the world), and I don't think they do now. Trump himself clearly doesn't know what it means at all, and uses it as a synonym for "Marxist" and "liberal", often all in the same sentence, even as he keeps modeling Mussolini explicitly with the scowl he puts on for photographers. And I'm not sure what good it's going to do if Harris does as David Kurtz/TPM said she will do

Vice President Kamala Harris appears set to close her presidential campaign with a rousing defense of American democracy and a withering indictment of Donald Trump’s fascistic inclinations.

starting with her speech on Tuesday at the Ellipse between the White House and the National Mall, as a kind of symbolic counterpoint to Trump's technically very fascist speech there of January 6, 2021, when he urged an enormous mob to follow his organized militia groups to the Capitol to try frightening the vice president and Congress into surrendering to his desire to hold on to the presidential power in spite of his election loss.

When Trump is reported as saying, "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had," the press is very outraged, of course, because he said a bad thing, because everybody knows Hitler was a bad person, so that shows Trump had a bad thought. And then of course the smarter ones are very amused, because in reality Hitler had nothing but trouble with the Wehrmacht general staff, whose members fairly frequently tried to kill him and Trump is so stupid he couldn't even absorb that widely known fact from a movie plot. 

But that tends to minimize the properly fascist import of what he's saying about his own presidency, which is that he doesn't have the generals he feels he needs in his characters "out of central casting", James "Mad Dog" Mattis (Republicans loved him when they only knew him by his stupid nickname) as secretary of defense and John Kelly as DHS secretary, then chief of staff, and eventually Mark Milley, because they continually worked to frustrate him and thwart his will, even to block him from using nuclear weapons. Stupid as he is, he does aspire to being a dictator enjoying the blind obedience of the military not in 1944 but in 2017 and now, and that's the fact Harris needs to convey.

I guess what I hope is that she will express that reality, of Trump's own intentions and those of his minions (the rest of Harris’s answer to Cooper, moving from the topic of fascism to other awful things Kelly has reported on Trump, the bit on our dead soldiers being “suckers and losers”, may have helped in that regard), and their actual historical record in the last round, of the Muslim ban and the semi-secret partnership with Putin, and the concentration camps on the Mexican border, and the threats to our traditional security alliances while Trump flirted with notorious dictators, and the attacks on renewable energy, and his unconstitutional efforts especially during the immigration crises and Black Lives Matter protests  2019-20 to put the US under military occupation, and his current promises to arrest and prosecute those who tried to prosecute him, to deport millions of undocumented immigrants who have been living here peacefully harvesting our food and building our homes for the last 30 years, to "denaturalize" citizens he regards as offensive (Pastor Niemöller's second sentence should have been, "Then they came for the intellectuals who were not as politically passive as I was," those who went abroad in 1933-34 and whose citizenship was canceled and property confiscated), to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants and replace them with party cadres selected by the Heritage Foundation (that's reminiscent of Mao Zedong, but it's still fascist), in the Schedule F plan he ordered in October 2020 but never implemented—he and the minions were preparing the next administration that they intended to install in January 2021, whether or not Trump won the election.

It's not that "he likes Hitler". It's that he intends to be Mussolini, without even having any clear idea who Mussolini was. It's his instinct, and those of the cadres, not some ideological model. Don't spend more time quoting his stupid words than you do citing his record. If it's helpful to call it "fascist", go ahead, but don't expect the word to do all the work. 

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Some readers might like a piece at my Blogspot, on Wordle and larger issues of artificial intelligence, scavenged out of a thread originally posted in the Notes here (Bot Not For Me).