Saturday Commentary and Review #109
Fascism: the F-Word of Choice, Transgender Juggernaut in South Dakota, Houellebecq Tosses Another Grenade, Sick Man Britain, Ancient Roman Tourists and Globalization
Our political culture abounds in empty signifiers, leading to much confusion in the prevailing discourse. “Racism” is the greatest secular sin, but when asked to define it, no one can. In place of precision comes the most loose of definitions, often cancelling each other out, leaving as much room as possible for interpretation by the individual making the charge. This is by design, because to accuse others of mortal sins is to place a moral judgment upon them, effectively eliminating the need to listen to what they are actually saying and ending any potential debate.
We think we know the definition of the term racism, but we are then treated to the most ridiculous charges of it, leaving us wondering how a term that requires precision in definition can be deployed in such a cavalier fashion. We all agree that rounding up a specific racial group due to their membership in that race is racism, but then we are told that asking others where they are from is also racist. The distance between the two is so immense as to make the term all but meaningless….but meaningless does not equate to uselessness. If a moral charge is left ambiguous, a person is under constant threat of violating the moral code that upholds society, leaving one in a constant state of social paranoia. In our society, to be accused of racism is tantamount to being accused of the greatest evil known to Man.
The uses (and abuses) of empty signifiers continue to proliferate precisely because they are so effective. The latest one is ‘transphobia’, another secular sin that simply does not actually exist, but is being forced as a concept on us in a top-down fashion. “Homophobia” is popular one, “Islamophobia” another, sitting next to its more popular relative, “Anti-Semitism”. All of these charges are secular sins in our post-Christian modern world, all deployed well outside of the strict confines of their original meanings.
This opened-ended use of moral judgment isn’t strictly related to perceived biases and prejudices, but is also applicable to worldviews as well. Take the example of the term ‘fascism’, a political philosophy with a very strict definition that is nonetheless applied wholesale to broad swathes of the political spectrum, often hilariously misapplied and indicating the political and historical ignorance of the person tossing out that charge, but still carrying utility regardless. Stanley Payne (author of THE COLLAPSE OF THE SPANISH REPUBLIC: 1933-36) takes a look at the historical illiteracy of the “f-word” hurlers:
Initially, Italian Fascism received a warm reception from many American progressives. Polemical use emerged during the New Deal, and from the start in the 1930s, the f-word was thrown about more widely and indiscriminately than most of us have thought. Aside from Roosevelt himself, the most common lightning rod was Louisiana’s Huey Long, who first called FDR a fascist for the New Deal’s initial effort to coordinate big business and in turn was himself so termed for his radical populism. Then Long even applied the word to himself on a few occasions, though probably tongue-in-cheek. New Dealers applied the epithet to enemies, who hurled the word right back at them. The only common denominator was imprecision and vague polemics.
Since the earlier work of historian John Diggins, scholars have long been aware that Italian Fascism enjoyed a rather favorable press in the United States early on, as indeed it did in much of Europe. Thus, the early application to political rivals, though intended to be alien and denigrating, lacked the demonic connotation of later times. Beginning in 1935, when, as Kuklick accurately puts it, “Hitler contaminates Mussolini,” the word’s connotations became more confusing and extreme.
Fascism came to have some common meaning during and immediately after World War II, when Germany, Italy, and Japan were lumped together as the fascist enemy. This was so even though almost no one was really concerned about Italy; the fact that Japan lacked any fascist movement of consequence was also not considered an obstacle. This focus to a large extent continued for some two decades after the conflict was over.
The f-word as epithet really did stem from Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers, but it did take time to permeate the mainstream for the reasons listed above.
The 60s ushering in a renaissance of f-word flinging:
This “historic era” of discourse on fascism ended with the political and cultural changes of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the rise of the New Left. Renewed imputations of fascism then took wildly divergent forms. This had been presaged by the cultural critique of the acolytes of the Frankfurt School during the 1950s, as they found fascism to be a fundamental danger within the contemporary Western world, especially casting fascism as an ever-present menace within the American system.
All this coincided with the “fascism debate” among professional scholars during the 1960s and ‘70s, which sought to understand historic European fascism more fully, asking whether or not any such thing as a “generic fascism” had ever really existed. This reached a limited consensus and began to peter out before the end of the century, but that discussion isn’t a significant part of this study, since scholarly inquiry had little or no effect on political usage in America.
In fact, as Kuklick suggests, the remarkable thing is how little effect history, historical change, and historical study have ever had on use of the f-word. Never had a major new force in modern times been so quickly and thoroughly defeated as historical fascism by 1945, yet its obliteration had little effect on the prominent place of fascism in political imagination and discourse. Only briefly, during the most intense years of the Cold War, did communism hold an equivalent place, but as the latter conflict stretched out over the decades without producing world war, fascism once more became the dominant menace in the political and rhetorical imaginary, encouraged even further after collapse of the Soviet Union. The neoliberal world domination of the 1990s did little to reduce the trend, while the tensions of the present century have raised it to a new high.
Utility frowns upon specificity:
In the process, the term has lost all specificity. Its usage isn’t merely wildly contradictory, but applied in the most directly and specifically opposite ways. The only entities known to history that were indisputably fascist were the Italian National Fascist Party, founded in 1921, and the Mussolini dictatorship, set up four years later, for they were the inventors of the term and the only notable organizations ever to use it officially. A major problem is that Italian Fascism was one of the more moderate of the major dictatorships of modern times—not given to mass violence or genocide, and for the greater part of its history not prone to military bellicosity or antisemitism. According to common notions, therefore, Italian Fascism was scarcely “fascist.” But all this is irrelevant to the political imaginary, dominated by fantasy and subjectivism and oblivious to empirical reality.
Ass-backward applications:
The current radicalization of American politics, beginning slowly from the shrill denunciation of the second Bush administration after 2004, has naturally encouraged such expression. The candidacy and election of Trump raised it to a new height. Kuklick rejects the idea that Trump was a fascist, pointing to Trump’s aversion to military initiatives and his tendency toward quasi-isolationism rather than expansionism, together with his emphasis on federalism and localism rather than growth of the centralized state.
Payne’s conclusion is satisfying:
To get at the underlying reason for this fixation, Kuklick speculates that Americans are somehow unable to deal with the reality that they live in a huge, complex, imperfectly democratic country that has evolved (or strayed) far from the very delimited constitutional system with which the Founders had sought to discipline majoritarian representation. This is probably too subtle. More likely the reason for the mindless ubiquity of the f-word is simply that the era of World War II focused a polemical “fascism” as the only major destructive political alternative to emerge from within Western civilization itself since the 18th century, while association with Hitlerism and the Holocaust lent it a uniquely demonic connotation. All this serves as a mental and political smokescreen. The “really existing” form of Western proto-authoritarianism doesn’t stem from small, scantily armed “militias” and disoriented “insurrectionists,” nor from a chaotic demagogue such as Trump, but from the state apparatus already functioning. Government by executive decree rather than elected legislatures, politicized intelligence services, and a biased, coercive judiciary are its key constituents. In advanced democracies, such things function more from the inside out than from the outside in.
One problem is that there is no accountability for people misusing terms while in positions of power. In fact, they are encouraged to do so.
“The Business of America is Business” (you have seen me trot this phrase out repeatedly on this Substack, and I will continue to do so because it’s so perfect), and social conservatism is, for now at least, not good for business. What else can explain what has happened in South Dakota, the “3rd most conservative state in the USA”?
The Mount Rushmore state has been at the forefront of medical ‘treatment’ for transgenderism in the USA, despite the GOP consistently winning bicameral majorities there. How did this happen? Simple: business interests, specifically the business interests of the state’s biggest business. The Sanford Research Center is a business behemoth in South Dakota, employing seven times more people than its closest rival. Sanford Research therefore has a lot of clout in the state, and social conservatives are an impediment to its increasing profits.
I like to shit on National Review, but Nate Hochman has done an impressive job in investigating how Sanford has influenced the state GOP over the vocal opposition of socially conservative South Dakotans. Being National Review, I expect “The Conservative Case for Transgender Surgery” to be on the Editor’s desk soon.
But on January 13, the Sanford Research Center in Sioux Falls is scheduled to host just such an event. The “3rd Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit,” billed as an effort to “review the needs of transgender patients in healthcare,” is evidence that a variety of factors have converged to make “cherry-red South Dakota the unlikely epicenter of a transgender uprising on the American Great Plains,” as the Washington Post reported in 2020. The summit is co-hosted by Sanford Health, a Sioux Falls–based health-care conglomerate, and the Transformation Project, a local transgender advocacy group.
Both Sanford and the Transformation Project are representative of the larger forces that are working to bring the transgender movement to the deepest-red corners of the United States — a coordinated, well-funded campaign for which South Dakota has become something of a trial run. That campaign’s influence has reached the Republican-dominated state legislature, where dozens of anti-gender-ideology bills have failed over the past decade. “No one thought South Dakota was a state where this could be stopped,” Libby Skarin, the campaign director for the ACLU of South Dakota, boasted in February. “I think the fact that we have consistently stopped these bills has been a source of hope for folks, like if they can do it in South Dakota, we can do it in our state.”
The marriage of business and “Woke” cultural is a dynamo!
Sanford as instrumental on behalf of transgenderism in the state:
In 2021, a National Review investigation detailed the medical giant’s links to the failure of House Bill 1217, which would have banned males from competing in women’s sports. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem had sparked conservative outrage by vetoing the bill earlier that year — a move that dampened her status as a rising Republican star, even after she hastened to reintroduce an analogous bill at the outset of the next legislative session.
Numerous sources told NR that Sanford’s affiliates had mobilized behind the scenes, including in Noem’s office, to help kill the women’s-sports bill. (In response to a request for comment for this piece, Noem’s office noted that their contract with the Sanford lobbyist involved in that affair had been terminated.) The health-care group’s business interests were heavily implicated in the bill: On the same day that Noem issued her controversial veto, the company announced a $50 million expansion of Sanford Sports Complex — an athletic facility that stood to lose serious revenue if the NCAA pulled its games from the state in protest, as it had in similar situations in the past.
The women’s-sports bill wasn’t the only social-conservative legislation that Sanford had lobbied against — and the sports complex wasn’t its only business interest implicated in transgender debates. The health-care company sells puberty blockers and performs “gender-reassignment” surgery. Its lobbyists appeared at the state legislature to oppose legislative initiatives including conscience rights for medical practitioners who object to performing abortions and sex-change operations, and a ban on puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery for children under 16. Both proposals ultimately failed to pass. “The bill to prevent doctors from giving hormone-blocking drugs to kids — when it failed, that was all Sanford,” John Mills, a Republican lawmaker representing South Dakota’s fourth house district, told NR. “You want to believe it’s not about the profit, but you also witness the reality of what’s happening on the ground and can’t help but wonder.”
You can’t help but wonder.
Sanford works with out-of-state funders too:
Even without taxpayer dollars, left-wing lobbying efforts in South Dakota often benefit from generous out-of-state funding. The Los Angeles–based pop singer Ariana Grande, for example, donated well over $100,000 to the Transformation Project last year as part of her “Protect & Defend Trans Youth Fund” initiative. Another California group, the wayOUT LGBTQ Foundation, dedicated its annual gala in November to raising $145,000 for the South Dakota activist group. At least one of the Transformation Project’s board members, Michaela Seiber, received a two-year Bush Fellowship grant of up to $100,000 “to advance a health equity agenda for LGBTQ people” in South Dakota. Seiber, whose primary job at the time was as a senior researcher at Sanford Health, appeared at the South Dakota legislature to lobby and testify against the proposed ban on medical sex changes for children.
The influence of these well-financed groups in South Dakota — buttressed by Sanford’s own resources, which were valued at $7.5 billion as of 2019 — has frustrated conservative efforts to pass the kinds of anti-gender-ideology measures seen in Republican states such as Florida, Texas, and Arkansas. South Dakotans tend to hold conservative views on the issue: A May 2022 South Dakota State University (SDSU) poll, for example, found that 66 percent of registered voters in the state believed that transgender athletes “should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender,” whereas just 17 percent believed that they “should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity.” But conservative lawmakers have struggled to get any number of social-conservative bills, particularly as they pertain to transgender issues, across the finish line.
Bills that have failed to make it out of the legislature include the expansion of conscience rights for medical practitioners (HB 1247); the prohibition on sex-change surgeries and drugs for children (HB 1057); a ban on changing one’s sex on birth certificates (HB 1076); a bill requiring teachers to inform parents when students express feelings of gender dysphoria (SB 88); mandated reporting of the number of human embryos destroyed in medical facilities (HB 1248); a requirement that students use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their sex (HB 1005); and the establishment of the “fundamental” parental right “to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education and care of a child” (HB 1246). As of February 2021, there had also been seven failed attempts “by South Dakota lawmakers to prevent transgender athletes from competing,” the ACLU said in a press release at the time.
Social conservatives in South Dakota are getting rocked by this juggernaut:
Despite the overwhelmingly Republican composition of South Dakota politics, gender ideology has made inroads in almost every area of the state’s governing institutions. Last month, for example, SDSU drew conservative criticism for hosting a “kid-friendly” drag show, an event that multiple local lawmakers argued could be illegal under the state’s prohibition on “show[s] or other presentation[s]” deemed “harmful to minors.” Elsewhere, the Noem-appointed head of the state’s Department of Corrections signed a new “Management of Gender Dysphoria” policy specifying that state-prison inmates could request transfers to facilities that corresponded with their “gender identity” rather than sex — and be provided with sex-change drugs on the taxpayer dime.
Read the rest of this very thorough investigative piece here.
“The Great Replacement” is a racist conspiracy theory purporting that white peoples in Europe and North America are being purposely replaced by mass migration from the rest of the world. The fact that the decline in percentage of the native peoples in these countries vs. people from non-European backgrounds is celebrated by those who insist that pointing it out is a racist conspiracy theory is immaterial. Facts are an impediment to tolerance, specifically when said tolerance is mandated from above, and deviance from it invites sanction.
The latest deviant is a repeat offender: French novelist (and bomb thrower) Michel Houellebecq. He had the temerity to suggest that the native French do not desire the assimilation of its Muslim immigrant population, but would like them to “stop stealing from them and attacking them”, and if they cannot manage that, to “leave” the country. Such impudence cannot go unpunished, so the Great Mosque of Paris has filed an official complaint against him:
Houellebecq also spoke of a coming civil war due to the spread of Islam in France.
“When entire territories are under Islamist control, I think acts of resistance will take place. There will be attacks and shootings in mosques,” Houellebecq told Onfray. He then went on to add that he predicts “reverse Bataclans” — a reference to the Islamists who killed over 100 French people in the Bataclan nightclub in Paris.
Onfray replied: “You think the civil war is coming, I think it’s already here, quietly.”
Houellebecq has written many great novels, with SUBMISSION one of the best known of his published works. In SUBMISSION, Houellebecq posits a France in which a rigid Islamist party gains power at the national level thanks to an assist from the Socialists who hate their fellow French conservatives and right wingers and are willing to side with a party that rejects the tenets of modern France just to spite them.
Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, appeared last week on BFMTV, and urged for Houellebecq to be prosecuted for his comments and labeled them “dangerous.”
“That he amalgamates terrorism with Islam, I find that unacceptable.” said Hafiz.
A bunch of foreigners show up and you are not allowed to say certain things without fear of state prosecution/persecution.
Houellebecq has been prosecuted for “racial inclement” in 2001 for saying, “And the most stupid religion of all is Islam.” He won the case on appeal.
However, the November interview ranks among the most controversial of his long and rather controversial career, and some argue, marks a turning point in France’s contemporary, cultural history.
During the interview, he discussed the Great Replacement, which describes how Europeans are being replaced by non-Europeans, resulting in demographic displacement in their native countries.
“The Great Replacement, I was shocked it’s called a theory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact,” said Houellebecq. “When it comes to immigration, nobody controls anything, that’s the whole problem. Europe will be swept away by this cataclysm.”
“It’s objectively what the figures say,” added Onfray, who said he thinks that the decline of the West is primarily a demographic decline.
Truth is no defense in the quest for tolerance and equity, it seems.
The sense of malaise that has dominated the UK for some time now has turned into anger, and not just from the lefty set. Conservatives feel absolutely betrayed by the Tories, who, despite delivering #Brexit, have managed to fumble everything else. The UK cannot control its borders when it comes to migration, and housing is becoming insanely expensive (where it was only ridiculously expensive, something that the Brits could sorta live with). As the City of London continues to build Singapore-on-the-Thames, large segments of the UK feel completely left out, seeing no future for themselves whatsoever.
Adam Tooze brings forth some numbers on what many (maybe most) Brits see as their present decline. Is the UK really the sick man of Europe?
Ding-dong exchanges between Brexiteers and Remainers have not helped to clarify the situation. Whilst Brexiteers chase the vanishing dream of “global Britain”, the national economic collapse that, according to “Project Fear”, was supposed to follow Brexit, never arrived either. That is not to say that the economic impact of Brexit will not be severe. The latest predictions are nasty. See for instance the CER. But the Brexit effects have not yet been fully felt.
More importantly for our purposes, the shock of 2016 cannot by itself explain what really ought to alarm us, namely the astonishing stagnation in productivity and real incomes that now stretches back over more than a decade. This stagnation, and this is the essential point, does not fall into the pattern familiar since the 1950s, of stop-start, of repeated currency crises and of more or less disappointing cycles of growth. Though it takes place at a high level of average income, the current stagnation is unlike anything in the last quarter millenium. The prospect of future damage from Brexit, only renders the outlook more bleak. In light of the UK’s situation and its likely future prospects, to indulge in the familiar back and forth between declinism and anti-declinism is to indulge in escapist nostalgia.
The decline is real:
For most of the last 60 years when critics have spoken of decline they have tended to exaggerate the extent of the malaise. GDP and per capita income actually continued to increase. In the 1970s they did so quite buoyantly. By contrast, since 2009 there is nothing exaggerated about declinist talk. For a significant part of the British population real incomes actually fell. The shocking novelty lies in the fact that decline and stagnation are not figures of speech, but a literal reality.
Decoupling:
The extent of Britain’s decoupling from the economic development of other rich countries is well captured by data for median household income per person - a good measure of “average” living standards.
More:
To see how significant a departure this is from Britain’s own trajectory, data from the IFS are telling. Throughout the period between World War II and 2007, for all the back and forth about decline, real household disposable income in the UK grew relentlessly on a logarithmic curve. Since 2007 that is no longer the case.
For those of you into facts and figures, click here to read the rest.
We end this weekend’s Substack with an essay on the first period of globalization: Ancient Rome.
But Greek and Roman tourists tended to reinterpret the colossi through the lens of their own culture. They overlooked its pharaonic roots and instead saw Memnon, the mythical king of Aethiopia, serenaded by his anguished mother Eos, the goddess of dawn. It became a spectacle to behold and commemorate. Some 107 inscriptions have been catalogued at the bases of the statues: 61 in Greek, 45 in Latin, and one bilingual. They were not merely scratched onto the rock but engraved by professional stonecutters; the majority state some variation of ‘I have heard Memnon.’
Visitors were a diverse set, hailing from throughout the Roman Empire: Anatolian, Levantine and Corinthian Greeks, provincial administrators coming upstream from Alexandria, a Gallic soldier, and people from faraway Rome itself. Journeying to the southern extremity of the Empire for many of these visitors was no small feat.
An ancient traveller to Egypt or elsewhere had to consider the sheer investment of time, resources and effort. Yet throughout history, distant horizons and thirst for knowledge of the faraway has had relentless allure. Indeed, the notion that the Roman Empire consisted of isolated, immobile communities has been upended by modern scholarship. Recent examination of the empire’s vast territory, diverse peoples and long history reveals that travel offered adventure, novelty and opportunity for those with the resources or fortitude, making for a cosmopolitan ancient world.
Read the rest here.
Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.
For paid subscribers, we are now testing out the chat feature on both Apple and Android phones. If you want to participate, read here.
Oxford Reference, 2023
Saturday Commentary and Review #109
Hit the like button above to like this entry and use the share button to share this across social media.
Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so (be nice!), and please consider subscribing if you haven't done so already. We are now testing out the chat feature on both Apple and Android phones. Learn more here - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/fisted-by-foucault-subscriber-chat
This one comes out a day early as I will be in the air this weekend heading back to the continent.
If you are in Zurich and you messaged me previously wanting to meet, please contact me again either through email or Twitter DM.