Crying Wolf about the Return of Fascism: Thirty Years of Theater

Christophe Guilluy is a geographer and observer of French society. Christopher Caldwell comments on his work here. This interview appeared in Le Figaro on November 21, 2021 and is translated with permission by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.

Q: Several months before the presidential election, how do you see the political situation in France?

Christophe Guilluy: Fundamentally nothing much has changed since 2017. I did an interview about the duel between Macron and Le Pen, which I described as a chemically pure cleavage: the popular classes against the professional upper classes, the metropolis against the periphery. None of that has changed at all. The core of Macron’s electoral support is still made up of the bourgeoisies of the right and the left, the boomers, the retirees, people fully integrated into society. And for a good reason: he is the only candidate who defends the economic and cultural model of the past twenty years. Therefore, the electorate willing to follow him is the one that is integrated into this model, that benefits from it or is protected by it, such as the retirees for example. Starting from that, he can count on a hypersolid foundation of those 25%. This has not changed since his election.

On the other hand, there are the disaffected, those no longer integrated economically, those we used to call the middle class.

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The Telos Press Podcast: Mark G. E. Kelly on Trump, Fascism, and the Threat of Techno-Neoliberalism

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Mark G. E. Kelly about his article “Is Fascism the Main Danger Today? Trump and Techno-Neoliberalism,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.

Listen to the podcast here.

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The World Might Be Heading toward a Bloody November and an Even Bloodier Era

As the world becomes increasingly more focused on the second coronavirus wave and the American elections, Erdoğan’s mercenaries and army will most likely invade Northern Syria again in the coming days and weeks.

Erdoğan knows that no regional or global power will seriously challenge him if he occupies the rest of Northern Syria, also known as Rojava. During the last four years, he has seized every opportunity to execute his neo-Ottoman enterprise. He has openly recruited jihadis and occupied three strategic areas in Rojava. As the Syrian Kurds remain the most stubborn obstacle to his regional expansion southward, he has made his intentions to eliminate the semiautonomous administration in Northern Syria abundantly clear.

The Trump administration has little concern for the situation in Syria. Dismissing the Pentagon officials’ strong advice, Trump has given in to Erdoğan’s demands in Northern Syria more than once. Erdoğan secured Trump’s implicit approval to attack the Syrian Kurds about a year ago, during a dubious phone call between the two leaders. Given that things might change under a Biden administration, it is safe to assume that the opportunistic Erdoğan has already planned a devastating strike to knock out this secular, semiautonomous, multiethnic entity in Rojava.

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Trump as Votive Offering

As we near the denouement of the 2020 U.S. general election, the actual in-person one-day ballot—which will surely be less decisive this year than previously, due to the relative prevalence of early voting—Donald J. Trump’s presidency looks doomed. Polling resolutely predicts his demise. Of course, pollsters are cautious this year after almost equally decisive predictions in 2016 proved misguided, and indeed there is still reason to think that Trump might nonetheless triumph (see in particular Isaac Lopez’s recent prediction to this effect in this very blog in his “Why Trump Will Win”).

Trump’s defeat would in a way provide a logical end point to a consistent wailing for his blood from the most vocal sectors of the American public sphere, which began well before he became president. The consistency of the discourse against Trump is nothing short of uncanny—indeed, in some ways it seems unchanged, fossilized, left over from when it was intended to prevent the unthinkable election of Trump from ever taking place. We might read in this determined carrying-on of the rhetorical electioneering of 2016 over the entirety of Trump’s term a kind of denial that Trump’s election ever happened. Indeed, Trump’s election was for urbane liberals so unthinkable that their capitalized “Resistance” to Trump has not been so much a political resistance movement as a reaction of psychological resistance to the very existence of his presidency. From such a perspective, Trump’s defeat might seem to offer a return to sanity and normality, one that will allow “Resisters” to pretend his presidency never happened.

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Is Fascism the Main Danger Today? Trump and Techno-Neoliberalism

Mark G. E. Kelly’s “Is Fascism the Main Danger Today? Trump and Techno-Neoliberalism” appears in Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.

In this article, I argue against the prevalent tendency, both in popular and scholarly discourse, to understand the Trump presidency as representing an incipient American fascism. I point out that Trump’s actual administration has shown no features distinctive of fascism, and that all alleged fascist policies of Trump are deeply in continuity with the pattern of liberal U.S. politics. I further argue that the most extraordinary aspect of Trump’s presidency, his strident rhetoric, while representing a deviation from U.S. politics as usual, is nonetheless not distinctively fascist. Lastly, I point out that, while Trump’s rhetoric and policies have drawn him support from literal fascists, he has little real connection with them and has largely disappointed rather than encouraged them. Instead, I suggest that Trump’s presidency represents the opposite of robust use of state power we associate with fascism, namely, a further decline in federal executive power in favor of the power of corporations. I conclude by suggesting that the increase of the censorious power of Big Tech in particular represents a far greater threat to democracy than Trump, and that the left’s monomaniacal focus on opposing Trump has allowed this tendency to go unchecked.

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Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power

Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.

There is a strong temptation to oppose the idealism of truth to the realism of power in order to criticize and turn away from politics as a base pursuit. Science, facts, and ideals are cited as the objective truths that so often are ignored in favor of ideology, lies, and self-interest by those who wield power. Yet this opposition between truth and power can itself become a dubious tactic, as it is often the speaker who seeks to define an opinion as truth. This situation is complicated by the circumstance that there are three forms of truth that are often merged in such discussions.

First, there are natural scientific truths that even autocrats and totalitarians do not seek to deny, as they are the source of the technological tools that can support any attempt to maintain power. Here, there is certainly no conflict between truth and power. Not only does political power depend on technological achievement, but natural scientific facts cannot be covered up by lies and ideology for long. Consequently, political actors must pay attention to natural scientific and technical knowledge, even if they then instrumentalize it in different ways.

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