If Trump and the GOP Are Fascist, This Election Probably Doesn’t Matter Much

 

(CNN)

The debate over whether Donald Trump is a literal fascist has been going on for close to a decade now. It’s one I’ve weighed in on a few times, at first (back in 2015) to argue that he is, then in greater length about half a decade ago, concluding that he’s not a fascist in the academic sense but is in a more casual sense (but that it still may be wise to avoid using that label). I don’t really have any new arguments to make on that front: I still largely agree with what I wrote in 2019.

What I want to discuss here is a particular argument that’s been made with seemingly greater vigor in every election where Trump is on the ballot: that he is, indeed, a fascist, and therefore it’s absolutely crucial to defeat him in this election. If we grant the premise of this argument, it does seem superficially convincing. Fascism is, in fact, very bad — certainly worse than the squishy centrist liberalism the Democrats represent — and it is accordingly very important to keep it from ascending to power. So you should vote for the Democrat, given that they’re the only candidate with a realistic shot of beating the fascist. QED.

The thing is, I think that even if you grant the premise of this argument, the conclusion doesn’t actually follow. In fact, I would argue for the exact opposite conclusion: the outcome of this presidential election (and the last two) probably matters little in the long term and voting Democrat is largely futile if Trump is, indeed, at the head of a genuine fascist movement. 

Calling Trump a fascist is almost by definition to analogize him and his supporters to the major fascist movements of interwar Europe: Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and (debatably) Franco in Spain. So it makes sense to look back the history of these fascist movements and try to take some lessons there. But here’s the thing: people in each of those countries did elect non-fascist (or even anti-fascist) political parties, and it didn’t prevent fascism’s rise to power! 

In the last election before Mussolini marched on Rome, his coalition came in third place and got less than a fifth of the votes cast. When Hitler ran for president of Germany in 1932, he lost soundly, and in Germany’s last free election before World War II the Nazis actually lost seats and ended up with a smaller presence in the Bundestag than the two leading left-wing parties. And in the Spanish election preceding Franco’s coup and the civil war, the left-wing Popular Front came out on top. In each case, the fascists still ended up coming to power. Not shockingly, losing elections didn’t stop the fascists! Franco and Mussolini staged coups and Hitler managed to worm his way into power through political maneuvering that exploited the rivalry between previous chancellors Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. 

One of the centerpieces in the argument that a second Trump term will be worse and more destructive than the first is that he’s assembled a core of operatives who are both competent and loyal enough to put all of his worst plans into effect. But if that’s true, why wouldn’t he use that same cabal to find a non-electoral path to power, like the fascist leaders of old? We’ve spent years hearing about how close we came to… something (I’m never quite sure what) on January 6, 2021. If that “coup attempt” (as it’s been branded) was nearly successful and Trump is now bigger and badder than ever, why would an election loss stop him? 

You could criticize this argument for being defeatist, which is fair enough. So let me qualify it a bit. If you’re voting for Biden just as a dilatory measure, hoping it will buy us some time to implement a long-term plan to keep the fascists at bay, ok. But then what’s the long-term plan? The people most likely to be using this “Trump-is-fascist-so-vote-blue-no-matter-who” argument are (not surprisingly) also pretty likely to argue that Biden’s actually doing an ok job and the Democrats are good already. So what’s your plan, then? If three and a half years of Biden has somehow left us with an even more dangerous, fascist Trump who’s neck and neck with him in national polling, why will four more years of Biden prevent the fascists from coming to power? Sorry to break this one to you, but a broadly unpopular centrist president whose own supporters mostly don’t like him that much sounds like exactly the sort of leader a fascist coup would overthrow. 

As noted, I do not think Trump’s a fascist. I think his brand of racist, socially reactionary conservatism is pretty noxious, but I’m not concerned about this being the last presidential election we ever have (we should be so lucky). However, if I were, my focus probably wouldn’t be on yelling at people online who say they’re not going to vote for Biden. You can blame purity test leftists or the New York Times or Russia for his unpopularity, but even if you’re right, whining isn’t actually a political strategy! And if you really think that the fascists are this close to power in the United States, “vote blue no matter who” really doesn’t cut it as a political strategy, either.

I personally have no intention of voting for Biden. For one thing, I live in a state that Trump carried easily in both 2016 and 2020, and which he’s quite likely to win again, therefore (because of the electoral college) making a vote for Biden totally inconsequential. But even if I lived in a more competitive state I wouldn’t be planning on voting for him. Disgust with his unflagging support of Israel as they decimate Gaza is a strong reason not to, but I also just think Biden’s brand of establishment liberalism has no ability to actually fix problems like climate change and economic inequality, and that (based on election patterns post-WWII) if Biden wins this election some Republican — maybe Trump, maybe someone worse — will win the White House in 2028. 

That being said, I do think there are reasonable arguments you can make in favor of voting for Biden even if they don’t ultimately convince me. It is true that Trump would be as bad or worse on pretty much every issue, certainly including Israel-Palestine, and that on economics Biden probably has the (unimpressive) distinction of being the best president of my lifetime. 

I also think that there’s an argument to be made that the outlook for American democracy, such as it is, is pretty bleak (this argument I happen to wholeheartedly agree with). But Trump is not a fascist who will install himself as president-for-life, and if he were, re-electing Biden would be completely insufficient to stop him. So let’s maybe just take it down a few notches. 

Time Has Proven the Critics Wrong About the Ending of "There Will Be Blood"

(Paramount Vantage via thecinemaarchives.com)

In late 2007, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature-length film premiered: a sprawling, 158-minute epic set during the California oil boom, loosely adapting the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. There Will Be Blood won widespread acclaim for its direction and the performances of leads Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, with Day-Lewis ultimately garnering multiple awards for his portrayal of oil prospector Daniel Plainview. But there was one aspect of the film that earned less than universal appreciation: its finale. Pardon the blatant laziness here but I’m just going to crib a few quotes from Wikipedia’s “reception” section in its article on the movie:

“The scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano ultimately degenerate into a ridiculous burlesque.” (Mick LaSalle in The San Francisco Chronicle)

“There Will Be Blood is not perfect, and in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp.” (Roger Ebert)

“[The final scene] marks the moment when 'There Will Be Blood' stops being a masterpiece and starts being a really good movie. What was grand becomes petty, then overwrought.” (Carla Meyer in the Sacramento Bee)

“[The ending] might not be the very worst scene in the history of recent Oscar-garlanded cinema… but it's perhaps the one most inflated with its own delusional self-importance.“ (Peter Walker in a 2014 blog post in the Guardian looking back on the film)

For those unfamiliar with the movie or just in need of a refresher, I’ll review what actually happens at the end and some necessary background leading up to it (spoilers are inevitable here but also this movie is old enough to drive a car).

Throughout the film, Daniel Plainview has an antagonistic relationship with the less-than-subtly named preacher Eli Sunday (Dano). Plainview purchases the Sunday family’s farm and the area around it (with the exception of William Bandy’s ranch) but reneges on promises to donate money to Eli’s church and let him bless the oil well before drilling began. Later, Bandy agrees to let Plainview’s oil pipeline cross his property on the condition that Plainview repents in Sunday’s church, which offers Sunday the opportunity to humiliate and publicly shame Plainview for his treatment of his deaf son. 

Years later, immediately after Plainview has a final falling out with his now-adult son, Sunday shows up at his mansion as he’s sulking, drunk, in his private bowling alley. Bandy has died, and Sunday offers up the mineral rights to his ranch — the last piece of land in that area left untapped. Before he accepts the offer, Plainview forces Sunday to loudly proclaim that God isn’t real and that he, Eli Sunday, is a false prophet. After Sunday duly completes this self-abasing ritual, Plainview reveals the kicker: he doesn’t want or need the Bandy ranch anymore.

(NB: It’s going to be a little hard to do justice to this final scene in text, but here goes. Or you can just watch it and skip ahead in this blog post a bit). With obvious Schadenfreude, Plainview explains to Sunday that the oil reservoir under the Bandy property has been drained by all the drilling he’s already done on the surrounding land. He then mocks Eli as being just the “afterbirth” to his financially successful twin brother Paul. Sunday, candidly admitting his own desperation, pleads for Plainview to take the lease. Then, in a moment that predictably spawned a million memes and cultural references, a gleeful Daniel Plainview tauntingly compares the situation to if Eli Sunday had a milkshake while Plainview had a straw long enough to reach across the room, summarizing the result thusly: “I… drink… your… milkshake! SRRRRP! I drink it up!”

Like a cat with a mouse, Plainview chases Sunday around the bowling alley, throwing balls that he narrowly dodges. Mockingly (or maybe in a moment of sincere mania), Plainview declares that he is “the Third Revelation… who the Lord has chosen!” Realizing the danger he’s in, Sunday pleads with Plainview to recognize that the two of them are “brothers.” Plainview is unmoved. In a final coup de grace, he clobbers his nemesis to death with a bowling pin. When his butler arrives, Plainview — sitting next to Sunday’s body — tells him simply, “I’m finished.” 

It’s not hard to see why Serious Critics weren’t overly fond of all of this. It is, undoubtedly, over-the-top to the point of being comedic — slapsticky, even. The film’s strange sense of humor (if that’s indeed what it is) makes a few earlier appearances, but Daniel Day-Lewis bellowing about milkshakes and engaging in Tom and Jerry-style antics with Paul Dano is certainly more starkly absurd than anything else in the movie. 

But let’s review what just happened here. Plainview forces Eli Sunday to recant everything he believes in (even if only in front of an empty room), taunts him like a schoolyard bully, toys with him like a predator with its prey, then brutally murders him. This all comes after Plainview has spitefully destroyed his relationship with his only son. It’s an explosive fit of jouissance, to be Lacanian about it: by the end, Sunday may be dead, but Plainview — disheveled, drunk, and caught literally red-handed in the act of murder — seems to have destroyed himself and his own life as well in this act of libidinal violence.  

At first blush, the moral of the story might seem to be the old cliche about how money isn’t everything or something along those lines: if only Daniel Plainview had recognized his relationship with his son was more important and appreciated the spiritual values Eli Sunday preached, he wouldn’t have ended up bitter, alone, and covered in blood in the bowling alley of his cavernous mansion. But this doesn’t really work. Plainview goes out of his way to break off his relationship with his son, even when the latter seems to want them to reconcile. And bashing Eli Sunday’s brains in had nothing to do with money or profit. Plainview could have easily had his cake and eaten it too: patched up his relationship with his now-grown kid and sent Sunday away to deal with his own financial problems, all without losing a cent. Money didn’t drive him to this. So what did?

The answer to that becomes clearer when we understand the system Plainview represents — not simply in an allegorical sense but also the system that he acts as an agent of throughout the story. Daniel Plainview is the archetypal American Capitalist — literally sucking value (in the form of crude oil) out of the world itself and turning it into his own personal fortune through the magic of the marketplace. That in itself is not some groundbreaking insight on my part, of course. The RottenTomatoes consensus for There Will Be Blood describes it as a “sparse and sprawling epic about the underhanded ‘heroes’ of capitalism”.

On the surface, this line of thought might even make it tempting to agree with Carla Meyer, that “the story was so much richer before [the final scenes] – back when it wasn't personal, just business.” But, of course, the idea that there’s some clear line of demarcation between “business” and “personal” is one of those fictions of the capitalist system — a rule that it sets and then constantly violates. 

Daniel Plainview, in fact, consistently violates ostensible tenets of the capitalist order: he attempts to deceive the Sundays by claiming he wants their property for quail hunting, and then fails to pay money that he owes Eli. So much for the sanctity of contract and the prohibition on fraud — two supposed cornerstones of the free market. And, of course, he manages to get the oil out from under the Bandy tract without even bothering to acquire mineral rights for it — legally, perhaps, but in a way that seems to clearly violate the spirit of property ownership if not the letter of it (after all, he himself notoriously analogizes it to stealing Eli Sunday’s milkshake from across the room).

I suppose a True Free Markets™ type libertarian might argue this means Plainview doesn’t really represent capitalism, or rather only represents a corrupted version of it. But if we understand capitalism as a system that is constantly breaking its own rules (wage theft, for instance, dwarfs other forms of robbery), we can see that the corruption is embedded in the system itself. Plainview represents capitalism (particularly in its unvarnished, American form) precisely because he breaks the rules. 

Which brings us back to jouissance. A psychoanalytic term, Encyclopedia Britannica explains it as “an excessive and simultaneously painful kind of enjoyment derived from transgressing the superego’s own prohibitions” — in other words, from breaking your own rules. Capitalism is engaged in a constant game of jouissance then, of transgressing its own prohibitions to extract that extra bit of value — even if it comes with a cost. 

Capitalism is often conceived as a sort of profit-driven machine, devoid of heart or soul. Supporters might call that efficiency, while critics might call it bloodlessness. But Anderson’s film shows us, to the contrary, that There Will Be Blood — not just blood spilt, but all sorts of blood: bad blood, hot blood, cold blood, and in every case, red blood. Which is to say that capitalism is not (only) cold, calculated, and profit-focused. It is also inherently libidinal, driven forward by countless Daniel Plainviews, each with their own god complexes, ambitions, manias, and revenge fantasies.

Eli Sunday, religious charlatan that he may be, does not fit into this capitalist system. His focus on community and heavenly bliss beyond this material world doesn’t jive with the ethic of capitalism (there’s a reason why arch-capitalist Ayn Rand was so hard on religion). His last words, pleading with Plainview to see that the two of them are brothers, show that up to the end he has failed to internalize the worldview of the emerging industrial order. There is no use for a Brotherhood of Man in the marketplace, anymore than the bond between father and son means anything (as we’ve just seen in the previous scene). So Sunday must go, but not before he’s forced to admit that the only god is Mammon. All that is solid melts to air, all that is holy is profaned.

Sunday seals his fate by revealing both weakness and an inability to adapt. Whatever sins he thinks he is confessing to in the exchange that ends with his death, these are the ones that matter. Daniel Plainview, meanwhile, has amassed as great a fortune as he could have dreamt of and drained the Sundays’ property of every drop of crude oil it once stored. The only thing left for him is to engage in an another, final act of destruction, even after it has ceased to be creative. The Daniel Plainview that murders Eli Sunday is the capitalist id, finally untethered completely from its superego: both terrifyingly egomaniacal and cartoonishly over the top, breathtakingly amoral and comedically absurd. Not that we’d ever see anything like this in real life.

(nbcnews.com)

(Side note: this is also why the liberal critiques of Trump fall so flat. You can’t disown the personification of American capitalism while still defending the system itself.)

Did Paul Thomas Anderson have all of this in mind when he made There Will Be Blood? I don’t know. Probably not, but that’s not the point. You don’t need a Lacanian analysis of capitalism to realize there’s something animalistic at its core, no matter how nicely it may be dressed up on the outside.

The same (ultimately self-)destructive tendencies of capitalism are at work all around us. The threat of climate change (both for business and for humanity) hasn’t kept oil from being pumped out of the ground, nor has runaway inequality been stopped in spite of the long-term problems it poses for an economy based on consumer spending. Marx predicted that it would become harder to make money the further capitalism progressed, and history has borne that out. But the appetite of the capitalist beast shows no signs of ebbing. Eventually, destruction — libidinal, gratuitous, and spectacular — will be the only thing left. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bowling pin smashing a human head — forever.

(via Pinterest)