I HAVE BEEN struggling to write a piece about a segment of one of Marilynne Robinson's essays for the past two days. Then I saw this from RawStory. The original intention was to answer an objection to me saying that anything that didn't base politics in the commandment that you are to do unto others as you would have them do unto you is not only not democracy but it is on the continuum of gangster government that is the only alternative to it, what fascism and its ilk are the inevitable end unless corrected.
The Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas was a sign of a troubling fascist direction being chosen by American conservatives.
"Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban won over the crowd at CPAC Texas on Thursday, arguing that his nationalist agenda in Hungary aligns with the goals of the American conservative movement – and sounding a lot like the conference’s upcoming Saturday keynote speaker, former President Donald Trump," CNN reported Thursday. "The right-wing European leader hit guaranteed applause lines – including telling the Texas crowd that 'Hungary is the Lone Star State of Europe' – and criticizing liberals, the news media and the Democratic Party."
During his speech, Orban said he predicted tomorrow's headlines in America would declare, "Far-Right, European Racist and Anti-Semite, Strongman, Trojan Horse of Putin, Holds Speech at Conservative Conference.
MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan described it as fascism and displayed a list of ten Republican election deniers on the ballot.
"They do not believe in liberal democracy," Hasan said. "And so today, in 2022, I'm sorry to say the Republican playbook is Viktor Orban playbook, and you can call that what you want, but I'm going to continue to call it fascism.
Anne Applebaum, author of the 2003 book Gulag: A History and the 2020 book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, posted to Twitter four reasons that CPAC "admires" Orban.
"He bent the rules, changing his constitution and altering voting laws in order to remain in power, indefinitely," Applebaum wrote. "He destroyed the independent media; nothing remains but a few websites."
"He doesn't keep his homophobia, his anti-semitism or his racism a secret," Applebaum continued. "He moves, walks and talks like a Ruritanian dictator from a movie."
NYU Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of the book Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, noted that Fox News host Tucker Carlson traveled to Hungary in 2021 to hype Orban.
"Orban's appearance today at CPAC is the outcome of a carefully cultivated relationship," she said. "He can be the Big Man mentoring the GOP in how to wreck a democracy."
In May, after CPAC held a summit in Budapest, Ben-Ghiat wrote, "we can also see Orban's impact on things like the rollback of reproductive rights in the U.S. Former Vice President Mike Pence previewed the Supreme Court opinion in Budapest last fall as a speaker at Orban’s 'Summit for Democracy' where 'pro-family' agendas, meant to increase the 'right' kinds of births (white, Christian births) twinned with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ platforms."
Stuart Stevens, the Lincoln Project strategist who has worked on five GOP presidential campaigns, posted, without attribution, “This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”
"That’s not David Duke, it’s Viktor Orban, the star of CPAC, the new darling of American conservatism," Stevens noted. "Bathrooms, bedrooms & race. That’s who they are."
Reflecting on the embrace of Orban by the far-right, civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill noted, "over 400,000 Americans were killed in WWII-a war in which 88% of the soldiers were white. And yet we see so many Americans (mostly white) so readily defile the sacrifice of their grandparents and forbears who fought in WWII and defeated fascism, by embracing the rise of fascism here."
Here is the segment from the essay, unfortunately taken from an excerpt online, I can't find the book containing the original in my movings to and back this year:
Complexity is powerfully stripped away by half-informed or uninformed aversion. Why should people so often feel what amounts to contempt for figures, even entire populations, about whom they know nothing and will learn nothing on the grounds of this same aversion? The word Orwellian has been worked nearly to death because it is so very useful. Consensus really ought not to trump reason or preclude it, though it does, routinely. And reason always tells us that human beings and their societies and histories are mingled—that is, never only to be condemned, sometimes ingratiating or admirable. Decent mutual respect depends on an awareness of this fact, that is, on good history.
A conscious strategy currently favored for excluding complication, usually on the pretext of acknowledging complexity, is cynicism. The tsar had his own motives. True enough. People do. No doubt he had a number of them. This really does not neutralize the fact that the British and French had their motives, too. By the blunt measure of their potential impact on human lives, these were, at best, far inferior. We have brought home from our wars, cold and hot, this habit of impervious antagonism, antagonism as loyalty, which dovetails neatly with our version of cynicism, better called intellectual lassitude. We have allowed ourselves to become bitterly factionalized, and truth has lost its power to resolve or to persuade.
There is a mystery in the fact that by means of these truth-excluding encapsulations, besides making our society foolish and vulnerable, and in some ways ineducable, we do preserve, very effectively, negative beliefs about ourselves. My earliest memories take up after World War II, when movie theaters still ran ads about the need to relieve hunger and poverty in war-torn Europe. The camera dwelt on a little boy in short pants and bare legs alone in a dark, narrow street. I remember a German immigrant neighbor, an older woman who scolded my mother as if from a moral height for the inadequacies of her knitting, for her buying soap when she ought to have been making it. Her houseplants, she said, were a disgrace. My mother was impressed, even deferential, though not to the point of making soap. The neighbor was a product of her moment, a priestess in the cult of Heimat, but we would not have known. There were a number of freshly arrived Europeans then. I remember an old man who practically lived at the mayor’s office, and who scolded whomever was polite and could spare a minute with the fact that democracy was wasted on Americans. More generally, I was educated to the belief that this country was an awkward attempt at a civilization, a crude imitation of something profound and elegant and intrinsically elsewhere. Objectively speaking, this is remarkable, considering what was then the very recent history of Europe. Be that as it may, the admiration for things European, whether in any instance it was justified or not, came paired with the implication that nothing so excellent or so profound would be possible here. I’ve read a good deal of Fascist literature over the years, and I know it was believed and taught and spun into philosophy and philology all over the Continent that mingled and rootless people who spoke an adopted language could never even know how utterly they fell short—of profundity, of authenticity, both important terms of the time. By these lights such people were a corruption, a threat to the organic integrity of any true culture. A splinter in the flesh, Hitler said. In our deference to European thought we applied this thinking to our hapless selves and kind, never reflecting on the uses that had been made of it in Europe or the biases it legitimized here.
I have never admired deference. I was dosed with Sartre and Artaud, as any college girl then would have been. I felt their nausea. It made an Americanist of me.
But for those whose tolerances were different from mine, figures like these defined the future. It was not a very interesting or habitable future, but in the short term it opened the way to study abroad. Juniors returned knowing better how to hold a fork or a cigarette. They had heightened social confidence—they had checked an important box. None of this ends with adolescence. Or this adolescence never ends. It seems to be true now that there is no Europe of the kind to potentially unleash new literary trends or to make us line up around the block for a new French or Italian movie. Without any particular object of emulation to measure our deficiencies by, the sense of deficiency is at least as strong as ever.
It is absurd that the products of a civilization as old and solid as this one should forever be such colonials, feeling sophisticated in the fact that they have and confess such deeply internalized prejudices against themselves. A few years ago I was seated near an American couple at one of those dinners they have at Oxford before a lecture. The Americans were doing something I see very often. They were saying that in the States there were no such events as these, that intellectualism was held in contempt there, and so on. They were earnest and insistent, even a little bit loud. I said, That might be an overstatement. They reacted, again predictably, as if the fact were plain and must be faced. When they were told that I was the lecturer, they were irritated. Not only had they been interrupted mid-kowtow. They had come out for an evening of stimulation among their betters and they had found me instead. Why do so many otherwise presentable people think they can ingratiate themselves with foreigners by talking this way? I take ingratiation to be part of the motive behind it, or the hope. A small thing in the great scheme, granted. But it enacts as much as it expresses that internalized prejudice. Put aside the notion of country and imagine 320 million souls who happen to be passing their mortal time on this continent. Why should we discourage them from major aspiration? Say 15 percent are black, 51 percent are women. Is it at all consistent with their aspirations to be told that whatever their gifts, an ultimate mediocrity awaits them? I don’t know how damaging this really is. I certainly felt the weight of it when I was young. I see students who seem to think they are excused from the kind of effort they might make by the belief that there is no audience in this country for serious literary work, for ideas. Some first-rate writing is being done here now, and finding a readership. Still, I hear again and again that Americans hate books and ideas, that demanding novels don’t find publishers. This gloom, which is mutual condescension, is unshakably in love with its certitudes.
Then there is the matter of our press, our public discourse, which looks more and more like self-parody. The purport of all the jeering and slurring and scaring seems to be that democracy is indeed wasted on Americans.
Well, democracy is my aesthetics and my ethics and more or less my religion. I am very grateful that my life has passed in a society where the influence of a democratic ideal is sometimes great, sometimes decisive. A thing I have long regretted, though, is that I have been significantly distracted from this privilege, and from the experience of my life and the lives around me, by generalizations about us all that are meager and belittling at best. When I was still vulnerable to those unanchored comparisons that are always made of us and that we seem always to welcome as truth, I thought we as a culture might be especially materialistic, especially intolerant, especially violence-prone, especially indifferent to the finer things. Now as I watch this supposed populism that invites some part of the public to identify with all these things as indeed American, as the voice that really is great within us, a sort of utterly corrupted Whitmanism, I fall to wondering how the grand experiment has been brought to such a pass. And this brings me back to history.
I will have more to say on this after I find the book but I needed to post this right away.
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