-
All that is Wrong with Gilt
It’s the apocalypse season, when the media revs into high gear predicting the end of democracy, the outbreak of fascism, maybe a civil war, even outright Nazism. While the instant framing device is the midterm elections, which they expect President Donald Trump to cancel, nullify, buy or steal, the drumbeat has been steady. Because if not the midterms it is the Reflecting Pool, or the ballroom, or the arch, or the Gulf of America. They are used as shorthand for Hitlerian self-aggrandizement, of all that is wrong with gilt.
The National Review plain out just says: “Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État.” A high-ranking Biden-era defense official calls for the military to disobey any crazy Trump orders ahead of the midterms. A “legal icon” writes “Trump Plans To ‘Wage The Final Battle’ Against Democracy.” A lot of people seem in favor of fighting back; 59 percent of Democratic poll respondents said they would feel “very positive” or “somewhat positive” if they learned a junta removed Trump and seized control of the American government (hyped-up rhetoric can have real-world impact). Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin even warns “President Trump’s clearly expressed desire is to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections. November 3 could be a defining test for the rule of law in this country, and both our democracy and our prosperity are on the line.”
More bad news as another column declares the Republican Party has a fascism problem in its ranks. Nobel prize-winner Paul Krugman predicts Trump will issue a Hitlerian “Nero Degree” if the Republicans lose the midterms, ordering American monuments like the Kennedy Center burned. Jittery Tom Friedman of the New York Times is worried because “the future of democracy” is on the line come November 3. Friedman is still recovering from the infamous January 6, which he said reminded him of the Beirut he covered as a cub reporter. Friedman’s newspaper loves to cite whatever thing is happening at the moment (ICE, some Army general fired) as a new Reichstag moment, loving those Nazi call-outs. However, if you prefer your fascism night terrors as fiction (or is it?) two new books chronicle with a straight face the coming Blue-Red civil war and subsequent AOC presidency. Meanwhile, another new book, purported to be a straight history, 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy, hits all the familiar notes, and throws in that Hitler, too, had coarse manners and sought to build a ballroom extension onto the Reichstag building itself.
One of the really sad cases is Art Spiegelman, who of all people should know better. Spiegelman wrote the comic novel Maus some forty years ago, summing up his father’s recollections of the Holocaust. He portrayed the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, and those who remained silent as pigs. Spiegelman warns there are too many touch points between what happened then and what is happening now, citing ICE as an outgrowth of creeping fascism. He claims Trump has “very effectively dismantled” the country’s democratic ideals. He feels the president “is cutting off civil liberties and using his powers to squelch dissent” and he finds himself watching in alarm as ordinary Americans suffer a “new indignity every day”. He has no hesitation in describing the administration as fascist, and so demands a justified “counter revolution” to take down Trump. “This is worse than most things I know,” Spiegelman concludes about America. “I just don’t see how we get out of this.”
It is all disanalogy taken out to a singularity. People have become hysterical and it clouds their judgement even as it fills their wallet. Politics today can sound like a thriller novel where institutions collapse spectacularly on page one to set the story in motion. Every headline not supporting your own beliefs becomes evidence “democracy is dying.” It is a helluva lead-in to the midterms.
So are they right? Is it 1930s Germany out there?
No. Germany in the 1930s was a very different place from America 2026. The nation was ravaged by the First World War, reparations, and the hyperinflation of 1923. The Great Depression brought mass unemployment, banking failures, and political paralysis. The Nazi “democratic” election to power was preceded by years of political violence, Brownshirts in the streets, busting up rival parties’ meetings and beating Jews. Hitler was never elected dictator. He was appointed chancellor by President Hindenburg after conservative politicians decided they could use him to achieve their own goals. Germany had already crossed from political crisis into systematic suspension of civil liberties and the destruction of opposition parties. Hitler, as we are famously told, dismantled the Weimar Republic in just 53 days. American journalists have been predicting the equivalent over multiple administrations.
Reality aside, there is still that word, fascism, which is thrown around too casually. ICE abuse, however tragic, or a court decision you do not agree with does not make them stepping stones to fascism. People used to instead use perfectly workable terms like illiberal, populist, expansion of executive power, objectionable or constitutionally aggressive. Today “fascism” is a synonym for them all and as with all faux prophecies everything is a sign.
So what is behind the pre-midterm media juggernaut to proclaim the end of us? To be certain a large amount of the fear mongering is simply the economics of attention. Nazi stuff generates clicks and likes. “Democracy is dying” is a shocking headline. The problem is once you go full Nazi there is nowhere else to go rhetorically. You end up digging in, trying to defend a bad position, knowing you can’t top yourself but still have a podcast to fill. Where once a top-line media outlet could run a balanced piece headlined “American institutions continue to function, but several norms are under pressure,” it now has to go all Chicken Little to get anyone’s attention. The words have lost their shock value.
Another possibility is the media is using fear to motivate voters for their own political agenda. While their Op-Eds often focus on Trump’s slump in support, they ignore the contempt with which many voters hold the Democratic Party over the cultural storm clouds of the Biden years. Media red lights flashing about democracy collide with voters’ entirely different assessments of what government has done badly. The assumption that fear of Trump will automatically translate into Democratic votes is condescending toward voters. The idea seems to be as long as enough voters can be scared enough, they’ll at least reluctantly vote Democrat. If a population can be made to believe the other side is not merely wrong but an existential threat to democracy, voting Democrat becomes a moral obligation and the voter a patriot. It is a very cynical trick being played.
We are not in the early days of fascism. Democracy has never been the absence of ugly politics, the expansion of executive power, corruption or even bad presidents. Democracy is a system for surviving and correcting those things. The media needs to back off the scare tactics and have a little faith in the people.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Maus Trap: Progressives Hate Free Speech
No book should be banned. But it is important to point out the predominant reason classic books are now banned in U.S. schools is progressive angst over “racism/N-word” so all those in heat over Maus should check their hate and hypocrisy.By now the world and beyond has heard that McMinn County, Tennessee voted to remove Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum. The Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in recounting the author’s parents’ experience during the Holocaust. It is a magnificent telling of a nightmare and should be read by everyone. Progressives are in full rabid mode over Maus and Tennessee in general, cranking up their Nazi-era meme-o-generators and extrapolating the ban on Maus is another step towards the end of democracy, already scheduled for November 2024. The ignore their own underlying hypocrisy of “our banning stuff is good, yours’ is fascism” is not at all new, and I am typing quickly for fear the Maus meme will fade before I’m finished (this space was last week occupied by Neil Young’s attempt to delete Joe Rogan from Spotify, Dan Bongino and YouTube before that, and so on…)Like most “banned” books in American schools, Maus is not really banned. Banning a book means making it illegal to own, or impossible to obtain. Instead, Maus was removed from McMinn’s eighth-grade curriculum. In the near infinity of books that exist, only a handful can be taught in a school year, and so every school in America ignores most books to the exclusion of a few. They might call it curating, or even making a syllabus. But banning works better for Tennessee because it instantly summons up the Nazi-era comparisons progressives so dearly love. Expect someone on Twitter to call McGinn city hall the Reichstag before the week is over.The issue of course is always why a specific book is left out of a curriculum. Of the top 10 “banned” books, progressive definitions of racism/n-word is the reason for half of them, to include Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Lord of the Flies. Most of the other bans deal with olde-timey standards on sexuality and profanity, such as The Color Purple, and those books usually just migrate up a few grade levels to take care of that. Some on the McMinn schoolboard have even suggested Maus might work in an upper grade. Such thinking seems a tad more thoughtful than progressives throwing away a classic tale because of the antiquated way Huck refers to his black friend.So what is the problem with Maus in Tennessee? According to the school board, the book contained inappropriate curse words and a depiction of a naked character. It does seem that strikes pretty close to the same reasons progressive schools ban Huck Finn, only the words and images are, you know, different. Of course progressives don’t believe the good people of Tennessee when they say they object to words, knowing for sure those red necked inbred country cousins are at their black hearts anti-Semites. Nobody with an Oberlin degree wants to say a Nazi using the word kike to show Aryan superiority is anywhere close to Piggy in Lord of the Flies, representing British imperialism, using the n-word to refer to savages as a show of white superiority. They also don’t want to talk about why we can say kike instead of “the k-word.” So it’s a safe bet schools banning Lord of the Flies are even now adding Maus to their curricula.People in McMinn County seem to take their education seriously. Their list of approved textbooks is posted online, though not the novels read in lit classes. American history is taught around standard edition history omnibus volumes from controversy-avoidance educational publishers McGraw and Pearson. The county is predominantly white and Baptist, something of a sin itself these days, and has exactly zero known Jews. The E.G. Fisher Public Library, which serves the area, has multiple copies of Maus available. So for all the knuckleheads’ on social media setting up GoFundMe’s to send copies of Maus to McMinn, relax, it’s already there (imagine some conservative group flooding Loudon County with Huck Finn.) In fact, the McMinn library has multiple copies of all of the books on the top 10 most banned in American schools list. They do not have a copy of Protocols of the Elders of Zion, however.The progressive lust for banning books they dislike while supporting the banning of others’ is not confined to fiction. Progressives have been running a campaign to ban a book by Abigail Shrier called Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100 percent a hill I will die on,” tweeted ACLU’s Chase Strangio. And when Joe Rogan hosted Shrier to discuss the book, employees at Spotify demanded it take the interview off its platform.When the classic To Kill a Mockingbird and other books about racial issues were banned from the curriculum in the Burbank Unified School District, the LA Times characterized it not as the work of a Nazi Sondereinsatzkommando but merely as a “debate” over how to teach anti-racism. The same school also banned Huck Finn and Of Mice and Men for their racist content and use of the n-word. The banned book action was draped around spurious claims a 15-year-old learned the n-word from one of the now off-limits books before using it against another student, plus concern that if reading aloud a white teacher might utter the full text written decades ago of what we are now required to call the n-word.As if rising to a hold my beer challenge, the New York Times allowed not a single comment in its online reporting about the Maus crisis supporting the school board’s decision. They did allow comments such as “It’s Tennessee. You have to let them go. I know it’s hard, but red states are another country in most ways,” “Tennessee! Well what do you expect, they are lost somewhere in the 15th century,” and remarks about how kids in Tennessee don’t read no ‘good anyways. The NYT also reminded readers McMinn County is just a short drive from Dayton, Tennessee, the center of conflict for the famous Scopes monkey trial, as if the two were somehow related.So the conclusion is both sides ban books, right, what’s the rub here? A school district says they don’t like a book. In progressive America if that results in Huck not being taught, earnest white people embrace it as progress. Take the same blunt tool and point it at Maus and it is a sign of fascism, because those same NPR supporters who want tolerance and anti-racism taught hate the fact that a white Baptist community even exists, and cannot see past their own hypocrisy. Their hate spirals from McMinn County bans a book to McMinn County are anti-Semites to McMinn County votes Republican to McMinn County will help re-elect Trump to McMinn County is modern day fascism and must be stopped by any means necessary. It reeks of theocracy even though it sounds nice enough phrased as “choices that reflect our values.” It’s just that simple. Hatred of others always is. Not a lot of self-reflection in Mein Kampf; the Nazis were certain in their righteousness, too.As with any challenge to free speech, the correct answer is more free speech, not less. Do not ban words. Do not ban books. Teach people to understand context, to understand how words change over time, and to learn to recognize bad things not by hiding them but by exposing them. Let school children learn about hate, whether from Lord of the Flies or Maus. Progressives, if you are frightened by words, they are not the threat, you are.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
