Jeff SharletVerified account

I'm not a strategist. I don't know the best way to fight *this* fascism, which is like & also not like those that preceded it. My bet, tho, is that while the differences don't matter to its victims, they do matter to the struggle against it.

Which is why even as we understand that white supremacy is the *heart* of Trumpism I think we must see simultaneously the ways in which it also tells other lies as well. Those other lies are cloaking devices. Rip them away, one by one.

--& recognize that exposing lies won't be enough. The anthropologist Susan Friend Harding writes in her brilliant study The Book of Falwell that many of Falwell Sr's followers knew he was a serial liar. They wanted the lie; they experienced it as an opportunity for collaboration.

I've seen that time & again in my own reporting on the Right. I remember my time spent @ megachurch of Christian Right leader Pastor Ted Haggard, later revealed to be in a meth-addled relationship w/ a male prostitute. Ted's followers liked making fun of their leader's "fibs"...

...because they implicitly saw their leader's lies as an act of storytelling in which *they were given a part*: they made it real by believing. Which is how authoritarian populism tricks followers into believing they're being given democratic agency even as they give it away.

I saw same thing in what until Trumpism was most openly fascistic mass movement I'd seen in US, called Battlecry. Tens of thousands of teens screaming for violence for Jesus. Talk to them individually, they cld dissect it w/ irony. What they loved was *embodying* the fantasy.

Go to a Trump rally & you'll hear same. The believer who screams w/ rage as Trump describes "animals" (immigrants) climbing thru windows to rape a (white) "wife" (property), who later says that might be an exaggeration, but "basically" true. This is an act of choosing the lie.

So ok, many Trumpers *choose* the lie, & experience doing so as a kind of creative collaboration. So exposing the lie isn't going to work w/ them, because they're in it *for* the lie. But the political imagination of democracy is also that of creative collaboration...

Fascism flourishes, we know, when power feels threatened. That threat, experienced by power's beneficiaries & many of its victims as grievance, is its water, its sun. But the soil in which it takes root is that which has been parched of political imagination.

To the argument of whether Trumpism is driven by race or class, this way of looking at it says yes--absent class, ever-present racism surges *&* masks itself (to itself, that is) in class. It's a racist virus with multiple means of infection.

(Need to clarify last. Class is of course never absent, but as a nation we've all been complicit in its erasure from mainstream politics. We're good at pretending class is not a thing, or that if it is it's a sentimental thing we routinely transcend.)

Fascists on a roll are good at telling bad stories. The material is lousy, but their timing is superb. Democracy, meanwhile, is an astonishing story, vast, rich, & unresolved--which makes it hard to tell well. Fascism fills the gap when democracies grow tired of trying.

It doesn't surprise me that Trump flipped Youngstown, OH, a city I reported from on his campaign in '16. That city is exhausted, they tried & still they died--and most of us did not come to their rescue. This does not excuse the fascist choice. But it shows us a way past it.

The political imagination of democracy is ecological. The recognition of interconnectivity & complexity. No bees? No flowers. But we can't "see" that; we need to both learn it & imagine it. Freedom & justice movements do both...

I'm speaking of those movements, such as Black Lives Matter, that reveal, teach, demand, & imagine all at once. Imperfectly, like any movement. Movements that tell not just a "better" story, long a platitude of politics, but a necessarily, definitively, *unfinished* one.

"Make America Great Again" is, on its own racist terms, tautological. A return. A loop. A story the end of which has already been written -- which is to say, it is grotesquely imaginative even as it's anti-imagination, just as it mimics democracy for an anti-democratic end.