What you're groping for, I think, is the modern term 'kayfabe' which neatly illustrated what trump's entire schtick as a candidateis: he and his supporters are playing parts in an elaborate communal fantasy...mostly harmeless when it was about professional wrestling, catastrophic when it is applied to the real world Presidency.
Trump’s fascism is all about kayfabe because that’s where he’s coming from. As you remember, he believed in pro wrestling at a pretty advanced age, and got very emotional when Vince McMahon was “killed” in a WWE plotline. Other fascists have different cultural coordinates—Hitler’s was Wagner operas.
Today's is a really thought-provoking post. Fascism as people playing a role, in the theatrical sense. You stand up and say lines you don't believe personally -- but in the moment of saying them, you do! And your reward is that you then belong to this tight little family. Any former drama kid can tell you what a rush that is. You don't excoriate yourself over the morality of your character, you cherish how fun it was to play.
A few nights ago I saw an old black and white movie, and in the lobby after, a lady said, "Oh it was pure camp." It seemed to me to be sincere and quite subtle by the artifice of its era, and I could not quite parse whether "camp" applied. It hit me, though, that MAGA is camp. You wear a hat, you profess craziness without thinking much about it -- it's fun to perform! A love of country and self in exaggerated shape. Going fake to empower truth. You might know this while you do it, or you might only feel it as catharsis. EDIT: The idea that the Nazis were camp is not original to me, but I am not sure where I picked it up.
I was going to drop by, put on a few airs, be both hoity toity and high falutin, drop a little Clement Greenberg and go back to the greenhouse where I belong. I was looking for a copy of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and I found this wonderful creation .
It's the best thing ever. Go spend 5 minutes with this video.
If you google"Avant -Garde etc." several different free PDFs come up. You should read the essay. There's some problems with Greenberg but he writes really well. It's not as good as the cartoon but then I was raised on Rocky and Bullwinkle and Bugs Bunny.
No, the cartoon is definitely better than the essay. Also, Mussolini loved the Futurists, who were definitely not kitsch, though they were certainly sexist.
This is way, way above my pay grade, but I think the effort to quantify fascism with some sort of checklist or set of axioms can be accurate while missing a point. The checkboxes and axioms list manipulation techniques that work on given populations. It's not so much what they are but how they work that gets closer to the appeal. That's why there's no recepie or manual for Fascism for Dummies, each community/nation has its own buttons to push based on its history and mythology. I think I'm saying you need to look more at the followers and their fears than the leaders manipulating them to "understand" fascism.
I think of it as the Mississippification of America. Harris wants America to be California and Trump wants it to be Mississippi. A land of poverty and inequality where the municipal water system doesn't work in the state capital, population ages and declines, but power stays in the hands of the propertied few.
This is true but not quite correct. What Trump "wants" is acknowledgement of the greater glory of Donald J. Trump. Whether it comes from Mississippi or California is largely irrelevant (though CA bending the knee would be so much the sweeter). The poverty and inequality is just a side-effect of the looting, incompetence, and gratuitous cruelty in excercising power. He's not interested in the hoi polloi enough to want them to suffer as a goal itself.
Trump was so rich from birth and insulated I don't think he has any idea beyond his own greater glory, and no idea of or interest in how ordinary people live at all. His economist advisors like Stephen Moore favor inequality indirectly (even as they pretend to worry about it https://inequality.org/research/deep-heart-texas-equality/), because their main aim is regressive tax policy they like, enriching the already rich, and relevant immiseration of the non-rich, to the extent it happens, is just a side effect (which will go away just as soon as this trickle down gets started). Same as for the last 45 years, and I don't think they're faking it. Fascist advisors like Stephen Miller don't do economics. They aim to hurt people of color and foreignness, and they just don't care if policies hit hillbillies and white Rust Belt losers too.
Increasing wealth at the top is their "growing the economy". As LGM summarized Paul Ryan's economic plan so long ago, the one focus groups refused to believe was official GOP policy
Not the hoi polloi, no, but the propertied few that Arthur mentions. The guy whose family going back three generations has owned all four car dealerships in the poor county. Few people want others to suffer -- at least, other white people. What they do want, in this national Mississippi, is the preservation of their status forever. The looting and general destruction of federal power are aimed at that. Immiseration of most white people is collateral damage. But don't worry, poor whites'll keep voting GOP as long as we keep telling em that the Socialists want to destroy their way of life.
Clearly I'm in a minority insisting immiseration is not a goal to keep control of the population. I think they believe they can control the population with propaganda and regular applications of random terror and abuse. The propertied few are peers and allies and of course exempt, regardless of their past, as long as they are down with the program and don't get greedy or ambitious. Poor whites are foot soldiers and cannon fodder and treated accordingly. When they get above their raisin' is what the random terror and abuse are for.
I should pontificate a bit. What the GOP wants is America circa 1910. There's currently 2 main branches. The old school wants to dismantle the regulatory state and drill baby drill. Eliminate every cabinet position other than Defense, Homeland Security, State, and maybe Treasury (the IRS needs to understand who's in charge here). Unleash Free Enterprise. The theocrats want the State to enforce their moral philosophy on the general public (not them though. Forced birth for thee, flights to Switzerland for my mistress). What's left are hustlers and idiots going along for a buck and a taste of power. Other than the theocrats, none of these people have any grand design. They don't want to hurt the lower classes, they just don't care about them. The theocrats need sinners to punish but that's a separate kink.
I'm sure you're right about what immiseration isn't. I've taken to thinking of the libertarians and theocrats as not in conflict, but working in separate spheres of the Wilhoit picture: libertarians focused on protecting and unbinding the ingroup and theocrats on binding and punishing the outgroup.
Exactomundo. Their interests are parallel and complimentary enough. Each believes they would hold the whip hand against the other, which is where the post-revolution fun starts.
I was with you and Grommet til the hoi & the polloi. I mean, how does one square them with the hoity, the toity And the high AND the falutin! Why, I've struggled mightily for years to achieve even rudimentary falutin without even getting past the ankles of hoity. It's impossible, is what I'm sayin'...Hoi polloi!
Yes, this. And once we start to think in terms of performance, we have to recognize that all performance has its origins in ritual. Participation in the ritual defines your membership in the group and your affirmation of its hierarchy and cosmology. It is also a form of submission, one that largely goes unacknowledged among the aggressively heterosexual men who constitute so much of Trump's base.
“That's my idea, anyhow, of where a definition of fascism ought to begin: with the idea of a post-political politics”
This is interesting…I’ve always believed fascism was more a *post-religion* politics or maybe “politics as religion” - one that’s born of a much more dysfunctional attempt to deal with death of God than Nietzsche had imagined.
Every item on the fascism checklist reads like a function historically performed by insular religions or cults.
Could fascism (of either the German or the Trump variety) just be a morbid “festival of atonement”, a grotesque take on “invented sacred games”?
Violent fantasies, made whole and reconstituted as policy. Funded by the Great Slosh, the back scratchin', plot hatchin', pelf snatchin' program known as the federal budget process alla the playas envision winning, bigly...
What you're groping for, I think, is the modern term 'kayfabe' which neatly illustrated what trump's entire schtick as a candidateis: he and his supporters are playing parts in an elaborate communal fantasy...mostly harmeless when it was about professional wrestling, catastrophic when it is applied to the real world Presidency.
Trump’s fascism is all about kayfabe because that’s where he’s coming from. As you remember, he believed in pro wrestling at a pretty advanced age, and got very emotional when Vince McMahon was “killed” in a WWE plotline. Other fascists have different cultural coordinates—Hitler’s was Wagner operas.
Today's is a really thought-provoking post. Fascism as people playing a role, in the theatrical sense. You stand up and say lines you don't believe personally -- but in the moment of saying them, you do! And your reward is that you then belong to this tight little family. Any former drama kid can tell you what a rush that is. You don't excoriate yourself over the morality of your character, you cherish how fun it was to play.
A few nights ago I saw an old black and white movie, and in the lobby after, a lady said, "Oh it was pure camp." It seemed to me to be sincere and quite subtle by the artifice of its era, and I could not quite parse whether "camp" applied. It hit me, though, that MAGA is camp. You wear a hat, you profess craziness without thinking much about it -- it's fun to perform! A love of country and self in exaggerated shape. Going fake to empower truth. You might know this while you do it, or you might only feel it as catharsis. EDIT: The idea that the Nazis were camp is not original to me, but I am not sure where I picked it up.
Dunno. Thoughts provoked! Thanks.
I was going to drop by, put on a few airs, be both hoity toity and high falutin, drop a little Clement Greenberg and go back to the greenhouse where I belong. I was looking for a copy of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and I found this wonderful creation .
https://youtu.be/3zozMksqnYk?si=DGcbs9bfa-BSa0Zm
It's the best thing ever. Go spend 5 minutes with this video.
If you google"Avant -Garde etc." several different free PDFs come up. You should read the essay. There's some problems with Greenberg but he writes really well. It's not as good as the cartoon but then I was raised on Rocky and Bullwinkle and Bugs Bunny.
Nice essay Yaz!
No, the cartoon is definitely better than the essay. Also, Mussolini loved the Futurists, who were definitely not kitsch, though they were certainly sexist.
And their buildings. Big, manly buildings.
They’re definitely kitsch, especially the fake imperial Rome monuments.
This is way, way above my pay grade, but I think the effort to quantify fascism with some sort of checklist or set of axioms can be accurate while missing a point. The checkboxes and axioms list manipulation techniques that work on given populations. It's not so much what they are but how they work that gets closer to the appeal. That's why there's no recepie or manual for Fascism for Dummies, each community/nation has its own buttons to push based on its history and mythology. I think I'm saying you need to look more at the followers and their fears than the leaders manipulating them to "understand" fascism.
The followers need to be studied in a different way, ethnographically I guess. I’m sure there are researchers doing that, too.
I think of it as the Mississippification of America. Harris wants America to be California and Trump wants it to be Mississippi. A land of poverty and inequality where the municipal water system doesn't work in the state capital, population ages and declines, but power stays in the hands of the propertied few.
This is true but not quite correct. What Trump "wants" is acknowledgement of the greater glory of Donald J. Trump. Whether it comes from Mississippi or California is largely irrelevant (though CA bending the knee would be so much the sweeter). The poverty and inequality is just a side-effect of the looting, incompetence, and gratuitous cruelty in excercising power. He's not interested in the hoi polloi enough to want them to suffer as a goal itself.
Trump was so rich from birth and insulated I don't think he has any idea beyond his own greater glory, and no idea of or interest in how ordinary people live at all. His economist advisors like Stephen Moore favor inequality indirectly (even as they pretend to worry about it https://inequality.org/research/deep-heart-texas-equality/), because their main aim is regressive tax policy they like, enriching the already rich, and relevant immiseration of the non-rich, to the extent it happens, is just a side effect (which will go away just as soon as this trickle down gets started). Same as for the last 45 years, and I don't think they're faking it. Fascist advisors like Stephen Miller don't do economics. They aim to hurt people of color and foreignness, and they just don't care if policies hit hillbillies and white Rust Belt losers too.
Increasing wealth at the top is their "growing the economy". As LGM summarized Paul Ryan's economic plan so long ago, the one focus groups refused to believe was official GOP policy
1: More money for us
2: Fuck you
Not the hoi polloi, no, but the propertied few that Arthur mentions. The guy whose family going back three generations has owned all four car dealerships in the poor county. Few people want others to suffer -- at least, other white people. What they do want, in this national Mississippi, is the preservation of their status forever. The looting and general destruction of federal power are aimed at that. Immiseration of most white people is collateral damage. But don't worry, poor whites'll keep voting GOP as long as we keep telling em that the Socialists want to destroy their way of life.
Clearly I'm in a minority insisting immiseration is not a goal to keep control of the population. I think they believe they can control the population with propaganda and regular applications of random terror and abuse. The propertied few are peers and allies and of course exempt, regardless of their past, as long as they are down with the program and don't get greedy or ambitious. Poor whites are foot soldiers and cannon fodder and treated accordingly. When they get above their raisin' is what the random terror and abuse are for.
I should pontificate a bit. What the GOP wants is America circa 1910. There's currently 2 main branches. The old school wants to dismantle the regulatory state and drill baby drill. Eliminate every cabinet position other than Defense, Homeland Security, State, and maybe Treasury (the IRS needs to understand who's in charge here). Unleash Free Enterprise. The theocrats want the State to enforce their moral philosophy on the general public (not them though. Forced birth for thee, flights to Switzerland for my mistress). What's left are hustlers and idiots going along for a buck and a taste of power. Other than the theocrats, none of these people have any grand design. They don't want to hurt the lower classes, they just don't care about them. The theocrats need sinners to punish but that's a separate kink.
I'm sure you're right about what immiseration isn't. I've taken to thinking of the libertarians and theocrats as not in conflict, but working in separate spheres of the Wilhoit picture: libertarians focused on protecting and unbinding the ingroup and theocrats on binding and punishing the outgroup.
Exactomundo. Their interests are parallel and complimentary enough. Each believes they would hold the whip hand against the other, which is where the post-revolution fun starts.
I was with you and Grommet til the hoi & the polloi. I mean, how does one square them with the hoity, the toity And the high AND the falutin! Why, I've struggled mightily for years to achieve even rudimentary falutin without even getting past the ankles of hoity. It's impossible, is what I'm sayin'...Hoi polloi!
Yes, this. And once we start to think in terms of performance, we have to recognize that all performance has its origins in ritual. Participation in the ritual defines your membership in the group and your affirmation of its hierarchy and cosmology. It is also a form of submission, one that largely goes unacknowledged among the aggressively heterosexual men who constitute so much of Trump's base.
YMCA is for them, too...
“That's my idea, anyhow, of where a definition of fascism ought to begin: with the idea of a post-political politics”
This is interesting…I’ve always believed fascism was more a *post-religion* politics or maybe “politics as religion” - one that’s born of a much more dysfunctional attempt to deal with death of God than Nietzsche had imagined.
Every item on the fascism checklist reads like a function historically performed by insular religions or cults.
Could fascism (of either the German or the Trump variety) just be a morbid “festival of atonement”, a grotesque take on “invented sacred games”?
Violent fantasies, made whole and reconstituted as policy. Funded by the Great Slosh, the back scratchin', plot hatchin', pelf snatchin' program known as the federal budget process alla the playas envision winning, bigly...