The Pretend-Fascist
The spectacle is not real, it is a real fake.
It’s election day, and the spectacle is reaching a climax, like a Hollywood movie, lots of irritating music, coups de théâtre, pageantry, nostalgia (time to retire Dixville Notch, folks, really… ). The tension is perfectly artificial, a slew of new polit-celebrities have elbowed their way into the spotlight and are paraded on the channels and their panels to offer hope, suspense, revulsion, anger… as the Great Unwashed, we simply can’t tell them to shut up and talk about something else.
I wrote about Trump and Fascism. Fairly carefully, pointing out the similarities and the differences. The former are in the form, the latter in the content of the personae. Indeed, Trump cannot be compared to the 20th-C dictators directly.
However, defining the man is not that difficult. First and foremost, he is a shady businessman, a scammer, essentially, who has no real goal except to make money without having the hassle of buying and selling. The US is a goldmine for suckers, as PT Barnum knew, and because they come in large numbers, the rewards are high. You can’t do that in Switzerland with a population of about 8 million people. It’s not worth it. At any rate: Once the Evangelicals were on his side, he owned the GOP, who are now his hostages. I wrote about this here.
But there are other groups…. the survivalists, the KuKluxers and their periphery, anti-authoritarian-establishment latter-day hippies, people furious at the Dems for having not punished the folk who caused the 2008-9 recession, people who got sucked into the black hole of conspiracy theories and are so busy moving their mental goal posts around, they can no longer get out. Many, I suspect, have fallen for get-rich-quick schemes that proliferate on You Tube and elsewhere. The huge crowd of patsies has attracted many more grifters, like RFK, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kari Lake, Tucker Carlson, Russel Brand, Alex Jones, etc., trying to get their money’s worth. If Trump goes, they want to have that captive audience to either caress their own egos, or to make money. The former GOP needs them for power.
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Trump has managed to maintain the scam by keeping that base totally isolated. It’s the reason he insisted that there is such a thing as “fake news,” and that everyone else is the enemy, or a lunatic, or vermin, or dishonest. When he suggested we try ingesting bleach during the pandemic, he was actually being coherent within his own system. I think he had heard of some industrial bleach renamed Miracle Mineral Supplement (sodium chlorite) peddled by a fellow in Florida. As per usual, he did no additional research, he did not ask anyone competent to look into it, and he just blurted it out. MMS is in fact a dangerous poison. The guy selling it is another anti-vax salesman making a buck on American Patsies.
But is he actually a genuine fascist? What is closer to the truth, I believe, is that he play-acts the fascist, the “strongman,” the “resolute dictator,” to the hilt. He cultivates this figure carefully, for it is one that gains strength by simply drawing attention. The more people bloviate about him, the more he gains strength. As models, he has the great dictators, among others. In this light, we can interpret the January 6 insurrection as nothing more than Trump’s March on Rome, or Munich Putsch. But on the other side, he is also very much like the wizard of Oz.
Hans-Georg Moeller, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Macau and curator of the YouTube channel Carefree Wandering, uses the term “profilicity” to describe this “technology for shaping (individual or collective) identity through the curation of profiles.” In a “normal” world, we seek our identity by discovering our authentic self, an exercise that French psychologist Jacques Lacan suggested was impossible, since our identity is tied to our ever-changing environment (I am simplifying…).
But authenticity, writes Moeller, “is inherently paradoxical and its inner contradictions have become increasingly evident: if everyone pursues originality, this very pursuit is no longer original. In times of ubiquitous mass and social media, individuals learn how to be authentic by copying images of others whom they perceive to be authentic.”
To closer define profilicity, Moeller tapped into the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann
“[T]he shift from authenticity to profilicity can be described as a shift towards thoroughgoing “second-order observation.” While in authenticity recognition, including self-recognition, is supposed to emanate from authentic selves who see what they see in the mode of individual first-order observation, in profilicity observation is more complex and is fascinated by observing how and what others observe. A paradigmatic example of a profile is a brand. When we observe a commodity in terms of its brand, we do not simply observe the commodity directly, but perceive how the commodity is being perceived in public, e.g., on the market or in advertising. (…) Like avatars in a computer game, profiles are playfully enacted characters that one can adopt, develop, and be personally invested in. They do not represent an original self that precedes them but provide an opportunity to curate and perform individual selfhood.”
The world is a stage, indeed. Once you see Donald J. Trump and many other figures who populate the spectacle in the light of profilicity, it is difficult to take his act seriously. He is not an authentic fascist but rather a performed fascist, and we all, lovers and detractors, are a part of the performance. His voters, see a savior come to rescue them from the nightmares of their own lives or that he has created in them, or a genuine caudillo or Duce or Führer come to overthrow the system. The GOP sees an impostor who has co-opted their preciously cultivated electorate. What his detractors see, is a dangerous, incoherent oaf who would like to tear up the Constitution but who also boosts their own self-imposed moral superiority.
Win or lose, though, he, like Mr Beast and others, is not going away, that is for sure. Because Trump is the first Politician-Influencer, he survives by the enormous reaction from the public and especially from the media, which live in a totally insulated space between us and Trump. We have never been able to communicate with them, and so we were simply showered with anything, mostly gory stuff, likely to keep our attention for the sake of their advertisers… This frustration is visible in the many comments addressed to him that are, ridiculously, in the second person, as if he or anyone else with millions of followers bothered reading them. (Always check out the number of followers v. the number of followed…). The attention economy lets an influencer simply count the clicks, establishing quantity, not quality. Social media are in fact a one-way street. Free speech is not found there.
At any rate: If he wins, I, personally, believe that he is too lazy and distracted to get much of anything done. The one caveat is this: He is showing signs of taking his fascist profile seriously, and he is clearly surrounded by a crowd of far more competent individuals, like Steve Bannon, who plays Leninist-agitator, Stephen Miller, and J. D. Vance, whose genetic make up seems to include “weather vane.” Trump is the perfect sock-puppet for manipulation.
But if Harris wins, she will have her work cut out for her since she will be expected to lead a nation that is coming apart at the seams socially and politically. Her job will be to curate the profile of the “USA brand,” a cloud of ideas, beliefs, and strange, modern myths about industrialists, can-do attitude, etc. that seem to be collapsing in the face of a multilateral world.
As for Trump, if he loses, he will continue curating his profile, even if he gets carted off to jail. In fact, he will have to, because right now, there are a herd of minor Trumps, like Tucker Carlson and JD Vance muscling in on his racket. So, he will remain in our faces until the media stop reporting on his odd performances, until people stop showing up at his rallies, until his Truths no longer receive hearts and reposts. To be frank, I don’t see that happening any time soon.