#9. Rise of the Premature Profascists
Far-right extremists winning GOP primaries could be a blessing in disguise come November, or else America is about to buy another fleet of Demolition Derby cars from this pair of grifters.
The epithet “premature antifascist”
was coined by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the early 1940s to discredit US soldiers and other Americans who had actively opposed Nazism “too soon” — i.e. before the US officially entered the war after Pearl Harbor.
That label was specifically applied to some 3,000 US progressives who joined the newly-formed Abraham Lincoln Brigade and went to Spain to fight on the side of democracy in the brutal 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. More than 1,000 of them died.
Franco’s murderous fascist rebels prevailed (with major assists from Hitler and Mussolini) in what was effectively the first skirmish of World War Two.
The brilliant classics professor Bernard Knox, founding director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, nearly died of wounds suffered in Spain as part of the Lincoln Brigade, before joining the US Army and serving as a liaison to French and later Italian resistance fighters throughout the war.
As Knox told the Los Angeles Times in 2001:
Premature antifascist was an FBI code word for Communist. It was the label affixed to the dossiers of those Americans who had fought in the Brigades when, after Pearl Harbor (and some of them before), they enlisted in the U.S. Army. It was the signal to assign them to noncombat units or inactive fronts and to deny them the promotions they deserved.
Once bureaucratically stamped, this official mark of shame followed these people into their postwar lives and careers, no matter that they had served their country honorably and often valiantly in battle. Premature antifascist was thus the immediate precursor of the loyalty oaths, Hollywood blacklist, House Unamerican Activities Committee, and other effluvia of McCarthyism.
What a difference 80 years makes. In contrast to America’s official neutrality in the Spanish Civil War — and our decidedly checkered record of military interventions before and since — the US today seems firmly committed to democracy in Ukraine, providing billions of public dollars in aid, along with advanced weaponry, training, intelligence data, and diplomatic and political cover.
There is even a contemporary version of the Lincoln Brigades. More than 4,000 Americans are volunteering with Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, most of them US combat veterans.
Meanwhile, back in the USA
I sketch this brief history because the cancer of creeping fascism isn’t just looming again in Europe, but also mounting an unprecedented threat to the American body politic.
Although still in a larval state, it has already found a willing host and absorbed one of our two major political parties. Now it’s boring deep into our electoral system and attempting to metastasize.
Trump’s ultraMAGA fanatics are America’s new “premature profascists.” Eight decades later the shoe is on the other foot. We’re the ones under attack and the enemy is within.
The related term protofascism is defined as “the direct predecessor ideologies that influenced and formed the basis of [European] fascism.”
Or better yet, this updated definition from Urban Dictionary:
Protofascism is the earliest form of a fascist ideology, marked by an obviously amoral leader, with delusions of grandeur, performing illegal or unconstitutional acts, constantly lying, and spreading propaganda.
A protofascist movement will exhibit the hallmarks of a cult, including head-spinning denial of obvious and easily-proven facts, gaslighting, obstruction of justice, and extreme whataboutism psychosis.
Sound familiar?
For those of you with strong stomachs, and who wish to voyage to the belly of the beast, I recommend listening directly to Steve Bannon’s insufferable, influential, and widely distributed War Room broadcasts and podcasts.
I just spent a week visiting that vomitorium, and it’s not for nothing that Media Matters awarded Bannon the dubious title of “Misinformer of the Year” in 2021. [Note: John Whitehouse, Justin Horowitz, Madeline Peltz and the rest of the Media Matters crew deserve combat pay and many mental health days off for the service they provide to American democracy.]
Bannon’s podcasts are a nonstop gusher of vile, dangerous lunacy by “Stephen K” and his rotating crew of pols, pundits, and purported experts, including multiple disgraced officials of the previous Administration. The whole affair is shot through with outright lies, topped with a sprinkling of irrelevant factoids and misleading statistics.
Bannon said the quiet part out loud in a 2018 interview with journalist and author Michael Lewis:
Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls. The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.
You are certainly succeeding at that, Stephen K. We are just five months away from the Congressional midterm elections and the parade of superfluous bullshit is both distracting and unyielding, leaving precious little space to even bring up serious issues, let alone speak the truth persuasively.
This is what passes for political process these days.
My remaining faith is predicated on the notion that they have gone a little too far, too soon. The American people are going to smell a rat and leave the Senate in Democratic hands, our losses in the House somewhat manageable, and downballot results on the mend.
If that happens, we get two more years to fight off this festering infection. If not, the Demolition Derby of Democracy begins.
On that optimistic note, I truly hope that you and yours are doing well and staying safe.
— Art
Ha! "A nonstop gusher of vile, dangerous lunacy" indeed.