Some People-- Say 37% Of American Registered Voters-- Are Comforted By Fascism's Orderly Nature... And The F Scale

"Making the trains run on time" has long been a kind of excuse for supporting the neatness of authoritarian rule. There were-- until Pearl Harbor-- lots of Americans who enthusiastically and openly supported fascism. In 1933 a Nazi from organization, Friends of New Germany, was active in New York and Chicago, spreading fascist propaganda. Two years later it morphed into the German American Bund, led by Fritz Julius Kuhn, a nationalized American-- like Trump's grandfather. It was most active in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It is most famous for a giant rally that filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 where FDR was referred to as "Frank D. Rosenfeld" and the New Deal was called the Jew Deal. It was very appealing to Republicans of German descent. My father was an FBI agent at the time and the Bund was his beat-- especially after it dissolved when the U.S. and Germany went to war and fascists were rounded up and jailed.

When I was in elementary school a decade after the war, I used to ask my father about what kind of Americans would be-- could possibly be-- Nazis. That's when I first heard about trains running on time (as well as about anti-Semitism). And about Republicans. We didn't really have any in our Brooklyn neighborhood-- no Nazis, no Republicans. [I'm mortified that my old neighborhood-- filled with Russian Jewish immigrants today-- was New York's biggest bastion of Trump support outside of Staten Island in 2016. I guess that answers the age-old question of whether or not there were Jews in the 1930s who voted for Hitler... before being carted off to be made into soap and lampshades.] My dad told me about something he called the authoritarian personality type-- characterized by an ability to find comfort in unquestioned obedience and even submission to authority.

I recall a few years later being in Berlin. It was after midnight and there were no cars in the street at all. I came to a corner with a red light. It was crowded with people, mostly college-aged like myself, many drunk. But all waiting for the light to turn green. This seemed odd to me. I crossed the street. The crowd was mortified... angry. They didn't turn violent... but almost. Lucky the didn't know I was a Jew or gay. People who revel in their own submission to authority often delight in oppressing "the other."

In college I had learned about Erich Fromm's work on the oppressive authoritarian personality-- a strict superego controlling a weak ego unable to deal with the strong impulses of the id. These are the most conventional of people-- conservatives... Republicans, Blue Dogs, New Dems, Trumpists. They are rigid and judgmental and extremely anti-intellectual. They hate people and have a psychological need to weld power over others-- and have power yielded over themselves. How lucky was my father that he got to hunt them down and throw them in prison-- but only the ones from Germany, like the Trumps.





The fascists in the GOP will not tolerate a messy convention next year. The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump campaign agents "have concluded a months-long effort to tighten the rules for choosing delegates to the Republican National Convention, all but ensuring there are no dissenting speeches at the gathering of party officials in Charlotte next year. In 37 states and territories, there have been changes to the rules that will all but stamp out the possibility of any raucous divide on the convention floor. Those kinds of schisms have plagued party conventions in years when a Republican incumbent went on to lose his re-election bid, Republican officials said. Mr. Trump himself confronted an effort to strip him of delegates in 2016."

In 1977, the early U.K. punk band, The Damned, released their debut album (on Stiff Records), Damned, Damned, Damned and put out their classic (second) single, "Neat Neat Neat" the same day. Take a little break from all this ego and superego and id stuff and listen before we get to into the South Carolina Republican Party:





Is the South Carolina GOP a bastion of fascist authoritarianism? Well... absolutely, positively. And yesterday we found out that a firmer big shot within the party, ex-Congressman Bob Inglis is suing it for being fascist. Actually he's suing "over its decision to cancel its GOP presidential primary next year," so not specifically over fascism per se.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in state court in Richland County, alleges the party scrapped its 2020 election contest illegally and violated party rules and state election law.

The suit further contends the near-unanimous decision made by the party’s Executive Committee deprives Inglis, of Greenville, and fellow plaintiff Frank Heindel of Mount Pleasant, of their right to vote for the candidate of their choosing in a primary.

“Instead, the State Executive Committee has chosen which candidate to support by fiat, and in doing so, excluded Republican voters from the process entirely-- in violation of the law and its own rules,” the lawsuit states.

The suit comes after the Executive Committee met Sept. 7 in Columbia and voted to forgo a presidential primary. The move effectively cleared the way for Republican incumbent President Donald Trump to receive all of the state’s nominating delegates without contest.

S.C. GOP Chairman Drew McKissick, who is named in the suit, cited the public cost of the primary as a top reason for nixing the vote. The State Election Commission estimated it would cost $1.2 million to hold a Republican presidential preference primary.

The 26-page suit, however, alleges the party broke its own rules. The complaint cites Rule 11(b)(1), which states that “Unless decided otherwise by the state party convention within two years prior to each presidential election year, the... party shall conduct a statewide presidential preference primary on a date selected by the chairman of the party and this date must be within two weeks after the New Hampshire Republican Primary, or earlier if necessary to preserve South Carolina’s ‘First in the South’ status.”

When Republicans met for their state convention in March, they did not vote on holding a presidential primary.

The lawsuit additionally alleges Republicans broke state law that requires political parties to follow their own rules.

The suit also cites a 2014 state party resolution that warned “anything other than a fair and legitimate primary” could irrevocably damage not only the primary process but also the state’s First in the South standing.

Inglis and Heindel are being represented by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan Washington-based nonprofit that has filed more than 50 legal actions to protect democratic institutions, according to their website.

A couple years ago, writing for Psychology Today, Dr. Timothy Pytell noted that he vividly recalled when he "first realized that fascism has a genuine populist base. As a beginning graduate student at NYU in 1987 I had located an old school barber shop that cut hair for $5. The shop was located between City Hall and West Broadway, and was popular for young Wall Streeters working in the so-called white collar sweat shops. The barbers were universally Italians out of Brooklyn and for about a year “George” regularly cut my hair. I always left with a high and tight military cut which fit my job as a fitness trainer for executives, but left me on the outside with NYU’s bohemian history graduate students. When I asked George how he learned to cut hair he described how as a very young man he had been brought to Nazi Germany on a work train. Since he could cut hair he was assigned as a barber for the SS. He described how he shaved them with a straight razor while a machine gun was trained on him. I immediately realized the origins of the high and tight haircut! As we talked about the past I queried him about growing up in fascist Italy, but he always demurred. I could tell he wasn’t comfortable speaking on the subject surrounded by his Italian friends. I pestered him though and finally one day he leaned in and whispered in my ear “Mussolini?, Mussolini was a great man-- it was just that pact with Hitler that ruined everything.” Stunned by the realization of unrepentant fascist was cutting my hair, I have never overcome how uneasy it made me feel.

...I am slowly succumbing to the disturbing conclusion there is a fascist lurking in all of us. It seems to me the politics of fascism are endemic to democracy and in times of social crisis (prevalent in capitalism!) emerge in the political arena as “Neither Left nor Right” according to the historian Zeev Sternhell’s diagnosis of Italian fascism... In the end, Fascist impulses appear not to be something of the past and explained by the social crisis of the inter war period-- but endemic to western democracies that originated with the advent of participatory politics after 1789. Modernity as it is conceived has unleashed untold human energies that are deeply liberating for the individual; however, in times of social crisis, third path movements of nationalism and socialism or will and responsibility mobilize democratic political cultures in authoritarian/fascist direction."

Now... why was Walt Disney the most dangerous man in America? How can anyone possibly understand the Republican Party and the people who vote for it-- and Trump-- without understanding sociologist Theodor Adorno?