VONPAPENISM ÜBER ALLES

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

— Friedrich Hegel

In June 1933, The Financial Times had only nice things to say about Benito Mussolini in a supplement entitled “The Renaissance of Italy: Fascism’s gift of order and progress”. According to the author, the trains were running on time, investment was humming and friction between capital and labor was over. “The country has been remodelled, rather than remade, under the vigorous architecture of its illustrious prime minister, Signor Mussolini,” wrote the FT’s special correspondent.

The failure of American “mainstream media” and the elite classes to recognize Trump for what he is has been highly frustrating to those of us who saw him for the piece of shit he was and is 40 years ago. Seeing the “leadership” of the GOP abase themselves, pulling on their kneepads in public as things like Tim Scott and Elise Stef-a-nack (proof she will not be VP is the inability of Hair Furor to pronounce her name) give performative public blowjobs and praise his “mushroom” in the process, is disgusting.

One could think at the time that it was possible to think differently of the business elite in the wake of January 6, as they published public pledge after public pledge to no longer give donations to those Republicans who voted against accepting Joe Biden’s victory as President. But the truth is that while Big Business knows Trump is an existential threat to democratic norms and is a cancer on the national culture, for them the important point is that he’s good for the bottom-line.

After all the business of business is to pay attention to the bottom line. The trashing of constitutional norms and imposition of dictatorship is simply collateral damage. I.G. Farben had no trouble supplying the SS with Zyklon-B, the gas used at Auschwitz and the other extermination camps in service to the Holocaust, and there is proof the company knew the ultimate use of their product. After the war, I.G. Farben was not broken up and destroyed during de-Nazification; they were a business, not a Nazi organization. The company still does business today, albeit with a carefully-edited history.

And every election-denying House Republican still gets the donations they got before January 6 from the same companies that pledged they would not do so. After all, they make tax policy, and decry the regulation of business that prevents the Masters of the Universe achieving their true greatness.

That failure of these social institutions is a feature of the rise and operation of successful fascist movements.

A 2015 book by historian Despina Stratigakos, “Hitler at Home,” presents examples of publications from around the world dutifully passing on der Führer’s carefully cultivated image as an amiable country squire, a man of whom reasonable things could be expected. For those shocked by the coverage of Trump in the 2024 campaign by the The New York Times, consider the first sentence of the feature that ran in the Nation’s Finest Fishwrap only 11 days before the blitzkrieg of Poland began on September 1, 1939: "High up on his favorite mountain he finds time for politics, solitude and frequent official parties …"

When Jamie Dimon answered the interviewer’s question at Davos last week, where he claimed Trump had “gotten several things right,” and that he was all right with the victory of either Biden or Trump, what he meant was that a Trump Administration would give him what he really wants: the return of business- friendly regulations that will make more money for him personally, for his shareholders, and for his friends. “My company will survive and thrive in both.”

But will they? Really?

As both Trump and Florida’s Ron DeSantis have signaled, there is a ravening appetite on the right for the use of government power to punish ideological dissenters in the private sector - as witness the way The Magic Kingdom found out they weren’t as protected as they thought they were. The Protect Democracy report noted, “Trump made several attempts, with varying degrees of success, to crack down on the media during his first term.”

Recall that Trump ordered a government review of postal rates and publicly urged his postmaster general, Louis De(no)Joy to double shipping rates on Amazon, as part of his campaign to pressure Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos to cover him more favorably in the news.

Running for president in 2016, Trump threatened to block the merger of AT&T and Time-Warner because CNN was “wildly anti-Trump.” After he became president, the Department of Justice challenged the deal. The New Yorker reported Trump ordered his top aides to “get this lawsuit filed…I’ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!”

At least as important to the story of the Rise of Trump are the "responsible conservatives," the establishment figures who made their peace with the strongman, believing he could be controlled.

They recall the aristocrat Franz von Papen - Chancellor of Germany during the “crazy year” of 1932 and architect of the 1933 coalition that brought Hitler to power as chancellor - who said to his comrades: "In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal." Two months later, following the Reichstag Fire, Von Papen - who had accepted the Vice Chancellorship under Hitler in ordeer to “rein him in” - watched the Reichstag pass the Enabling Act that signaled the end of the Weimar Democracy he had hated while using it to promote his own rise in postwar Germany.

Von Papen was unable to claim he had not known what Hitler would do, when he faced justice as a defendant at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Hitler and the other leaders of the Party repeatedly reiterated these views before 1933. Hitler himself pointed out after he came to power that there was no excuse for misinterpreting Nazi intentions:

"When I came to power in 1933, our path lay unmistakably before us. Our internal policy had been exactly defined by our fifteen-year-old struggle. Our program, repeated a thousand times, obligated us to the German people. I should be a man without honor, worthy of being stoned, had I retracted a single step of the program I then enunciated

"My foreign policy had identical aims. My program was to abolish the Treaty of Versailles. It is futile nonsense for the rest of the world to pretend today that I did not reveal this program until 1933 or 1935 or 1937. Instead of listening to the foolish chatter of emigres, these gentlemen would have been wiser to read what I have written thousands of times."

Von Papen not only had the opportunity to observe the early manifestations of Nazi violence and irresponsibility. He fully understood the true character of the Nazi menace before 1933 and publicly condemned it. And despite all that, he was the one who convinced President Hindenburg to offer Hitler the chancellorship and power.

Remember the guy who said in 2015, "You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell." That would be one Lindsey Graham, who later decided he liked Trump just fine, once he started winning.

During their rise to power, the “mainstream conservatives” in Italy and Germany repeatedly claimed Mussolini and Hitler would turn out to be responsible leaders, once they occupied positions of responsibility. American elites followed suit, claiming absurdly - on the occasions when Trump managed to act normal for 15 seconds - "He became president of the United States in that moment, period."

With the slightest knowledge of history from 1918-1939, it sounds crazy that sophisticated people could be that naïve, that late in the game; it took Chamberlain two days of reading reports of what the Wehrmacht was doing in Poland for him to bring himself to finally announce that Britain would stand by its promise to the Poles.

Read or listen now to the reports from Davos: "U.S. industry leaders seem overwhelmingly nonplussed with a second Trump term, while foreign chief executives are terrified." Replied one of the Masters of the Universe, still nonplussed: "I’m not sure Europeans understand how weak executive orders are. We have a justice system … it won’t be the end of the world." Another pronounced Trump "all bark and no bite," that his attempt to toss aside the 2020 election was mere “bloviation.” And as Dimon - Master of the Masters of the Universe - declared: "many of his policies were right."

Hitler and Mussolini had to be very careful about how they used the fascist paramilitaries - the Brownshirts and the Blackshirts - when they made their implicit promise to the elite that the storm troopers could be contained. It was always something they needed in their back pocket, but when it came to where it felt like Ernst Roehm and the real Nazi revolutionaries were giving Hitler more problems than they were worth, he turned the SS loose on the SA in The Night of the Long Knives, and killed them all - while it seemed he was “surrendering” to the corporate leaders, he was actually demonstrating to them that if he would do that to his followers, he would not hesitate to do it to them if they raised the slightest resistance to him.

Trump has never criticized supporters who are willing to commit violence on his behalf because that willingness might eventually be useful to him; thugs were valuable currency to send forth whenever that was what it took to keep power.

Which is what he did on January 6.

That day, for the briefest moment, the Republican congressional von Papens considered cutting him loose, then they thought better of it. Now, when Trump calls his thugs "hostages," few if any Republicans even consider expressing alarm. Some have even turned it into a MAGA term of art. Stef-a-nack has no trouble letting the word fall from her lips with a smile on her fat face.

There are two ways to think about the weak, failed, political establishment, which has been abetted by the sclerosis-inducing nature of our constitutional system. There is the state’s failure to deliver the things it used to: adequate physical infrastructure; an economy providing meaningful work with the protections against firing powerful unions provide; a social safety net to smooth out the rough edges, with increasing moves toward affordable health care. The Right claims they don’t want the government to accomplish these things, but the MAGAts grew quite excited when Trump promised that he alone could restore, provide, or preserve them; it’s why they voted for him.

The other way to think of it involves the demands that no government can deliver: a Christian theocracy many Americans now (wrongly) believe to be their birthright; protection from demographic change; return to a time when America was supposed to have been "great."

Any way you slice it, this cluster of demands coming from civil society, being put on a very weak political establishment, is a basic sociological formula for fascism. That civil society that wants a theocracy is now demanding a dictator because the existing party system is unable to answer the demand. It is the culmination of the demands by the Right since the days of Joe McCarthy: the faith that a true expression of the will of the American people would put paid to the foreign intrusion of liberalism permanently. It was made obvious in 1964 during the Goldwater dampaign by the publication of Phyllis Schlafly’s “A Choice Not an Echo,” in which she argued that if the Republicans would only nominate a true conservative, he would win in a landslide, but the only reason that didn’t happen was that a few "New York kingmakers" manipulated things behind the scenes to make that impossible. The same argument has been made over the 60 years since, to an increasingly-larger audience, through the mass media of Conservatism Inc. As Mike Lindell claimed in his campaign for RNC chairman last year: "This country is 70 percent red. If you remove all the garbage and all the corruption and everything. It’s 70 percent red, and it’s getting redder all the way."

Aspects of fascism have been always present on the American right, though until recently contained and undeveloped, limited to marginal groups and individuals. With the arrival of Trump, the disease burst forth in full flower.

The fantasy that the true nation is already with them were it not for the deep state’s maneuvers was the essence of the MAGA demand on January 6, 2021, when a terrorist named Christopher Alberts - later convicted of bringing a handgun to the Capitol that day - roused the mob: "If the government is no longer for the people, it is your duty to overthrow that government and reinstate a new government, for the people."

The most important thing for the media to cover in this election is not the “horse race,” not how many votes Trump gets, either in the popular total or the Electoral College. Those in his cult of personality have already concluded that if you took a true poll of the American people, swept aside the garbage and the corruption of the kingmakers in the media and the deep state, Donald Trump obviously represents the views of most Americans, making him the only legitimate representative of "the people." The question is: how many in MAGA will be willing to take up arms for this belief, should those whose job is to count the votes come up with the "wrong" answer? Will that be fascism?

I’ll quote Jeff Sharlet, who is named for his uncle - my old comrade from the GI antiwar movement, dead of Agent Blue much too soon - who carries on his uncle’s fight: "One of the mistakes people make is they say, ‘Well, this doesn’t look like European fascism in 1936.’ Well, because it’s American fascism in 2024."

2024 is the most important terrible year of our lives. You can support That’s Another Fine Mess in all this as a paid subscriber - it really helps!

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