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Well, gang, today’s the day—who’s excited to hear from the hot new RFK Jr.-approved Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices whether we’re still going to be giving babies their hep B shots? Stay tuned for all the latest remarkable developments in the field of cutting-edge vaccine science. Happy Thursday.
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We’re Gonna Call It What It Is
by William Kristol
JD Vance is outraged. How dare some people use the term “fascist” to describe the man to whom he has pledged fealty? How dare they apply the term to the movement to which he has hitched his star?
Very few individuals have seen President Donald Trump as close-up as John F. Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served for nearly a year and a half as White House chief of staff during Trump’s first term.
Kelly was and is a staunch conservative. In an interview with the New York Times shortly before the 2024 election, he explained that, “In many cases, I would agree with some of his policies.”
In that same interview, Kelly was asked whether he thought Trump was a fascist. Kelly answered by reading aloud a definition of fascism that he’d found online.
Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.
Kelly then commented:
Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. . . . He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.
Unlike Vance, who saw in Trump a wagon to which to hitch his star, Kelly was at the end of a distinguished career when he joined the Trump administration. He meant to serve his country, not himself. He found that he was working for a fascist.
As for the movement which Vance aspires to lead once Trump leaves the scene, it too has many features of fascism.
In 1995, the Italian novelist and critic Umberto Eco perceived a “ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world).” That ghost was fascism.
Eco explained that “fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas.” Nonetheless he argued that “in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism.”
Among the elements of Ur-Fascism:
“The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition,” he writes, which implies “the rejection of the modern world.”
“Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
“For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.”
“Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.”
“Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.”
“At the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
“The Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo. . . . Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
“Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Sound familiar?
Twenty years before MAGA came into existence, Eco captured it perfectly. He was able to do so because he had a deep understanding of so many elements of fascism. (His essay is extraordinarily rich and perceptive, and the summary quotations above can’t do it justice. Do read the whole thing!)
Let me end where I began, with JD Vance. Vance asked: “What is it that you want them to do when you call them ‘fascist’?”
We want our fellow citizens to open their eyes to what is happening.
More particularly:
If you’re a MAGA supporter: Rethink your attachment to a movement to which, for various reasons, you became attracted. Its fascist elements—even its fascist core—are now evident. It’s not something of which you should want to be a part. Leave it.
If you’re a MAGA fellow traveler: Stop rationalizing, stop justifying, stop enabling