If the jackboot fits …
Brian Beutler has some thoughts in his latest Big Tent newsletter about the new, focus grouped, “ultra-MAGA” designation the Democrats are trying out It’s a long piece and I urge you to subscribe so you can read the whole thing. It’s excellent. But I’ll provide some excerpts:
I’ve come to appreciate the (possibly unintentional) cleverness of the strategy on an abstract level. If you assume many Republicans will appropriate the term “ultra-MAGA” for themselves (aside: this is why I suspect the cleverness is unintentional) then it makes some sense to roll it out to them, let them all tattoo “ultra-MAGA” on their foreheads. That’s what Elise Stefanik did. It’s what all the MAGA faithful did or will do. And as the radius widens, it’ll encircle more and more Republicans who will be expected to brand themselves the same way. If you’re a frontline Republican, do you want people to think you’re “ultra-MAGA”? Do you want them to know you’re not? Because now you’ll probably have to choose.
All of which is to say, if it was intended as psychological trickery, there’s a kind of elegance to it. My main lingering doubt is with the decision to revert to mind games, instead of tackling the challenge of toxifying the Republican brand more frontally. I don’t really understand the instinct—when confronted with viscerally loathsome people—to ask market researchers to fool those people into admitting something they’re completely unashamed of. It’s a plan that’s just as likely to make wavering Republican voters more comfortable with “MAGA” than it is to make those voters decide they can’t abide by MAGA-branded candidates anymore. Between Biden decrying the GOP agenda as Ultra-MAGA, and Trump, in his best Mel Brooks voice, singing ‘don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the MAGA party,’ who are they going to follow?
He goes on to discuss the Fetterman-Lamb race in Pennsylvania with some tart observations about the establishment-backed Lamb’s theory of how to win with “kitchen-table-issues.” (Those of you who read this blog regularly know what I think about “kitchen table issues” in a time of right wing authoritarianism as an election strategy — not much.)
And then we get to the meat of the matter:
Republicans are of course happy to tell all kinds of egregious lies about their opponents, particularly in the Trump era. But the idea isn’t to just turn the tables. It’s to make voters hear accurate warnings about the modern GOP at least as often as they hear GOP agitprop about socialism or “grooming” or whatever the latest slander is.
And this is why I think simple, forceful, resonant messages will serve Democrats much better than over-researched ones or excessively specific ones. Precision is important for getting tenure but it’s often the enemy of solidarity.
Liberals (because they’re liberals) like to parse the fascism question into dust. Perhaps it’s safer, to avoid the wrath of fact-checking gods, or to play it safe with more all-encompassing terms like authoritarianism, or more refined ones like Christian nationalism. But we are by no means playing a Price is Right-style game where the goal is to lay the GOP bare with as much nuance as possible, without going even $0.01 over the perfectly accurate description. For one thing, there is no perfectly accurate description; for another, pinpointing various shades of fasc-ish authoritarianism makes it hard to convey the critical fact, which is danger: racial supremacy, violence, Orwellian lies, dictatorship.
Christian nationalism is not a good thing, when you know what it is—but if you don’t know what it is, the words don’t convey the horrors Republicans would like to impose on the country. Which explains in part why the far-right is so fond of it: There are a lot of Christians in America, and most Americans don’t have uniformly negative associations with the word nationalism. “Since [Charlottesville], there has been a major shift among far-right groups, white nationalists, and militias toward espousing Christian nationalism, much like the Ku Klux Klan did,” Alexander Reid Ross, a scholar of radical-right movements, told the New Yorker last year. “The tactic has been to use Christian nationalism to cool down the idea of fascism without losing the fascism.”
To me the fair distinction to draw is that while the GOP has fused itself with a fascist movement, and will neither expel nor marginalize its members, not every Republican in Congress uses fascistic rhetoric or seeks fascistic power.
But you don’t have to be particularly silver tongued to say both things. It’s easy to talk about non-ultra-MAGA Republicans without saying they’re all fascists. It’s perfectly fair to observe that almost every Republican in elected office has acted irresponsibly since Donald Trump took over their shop. Some of them, the ones who have gone from Trump-tolerant, to anti-Trump, have even admitted it. To take just one example I think about often, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) kept a foot in both camps until the insurrection, after which he felt free to admit that his vote against Trump’s first impeachment was a shameful error. There are still many Republicans who may feel caught in a collective-action problem, who nevertheless keep making individual choices they know to be immoral. It’s fair to say of them their irresponsibility—whether driven by fear or ambition or both—has included putting party over country.
Not all of them have fully embraced the ethos of fascist slime like Elise Stefanik and Donald Trump and his supplicants; but the time has come for them to take sides. Do they subscribe to the the same ideology as the Nazi who massacred the grocery store or not? Their colleagues are fascists—what are they going to do about it?
Toying around with terms like ultra-MAGA is a way of getting at this same distinction by speaking in code. But after everything we’ve been through, who honestly believes allusion is a more persuasive tactic, a better way to drive narratives, than just shouting screed from the rooftops.
The good news for Democrats, who aren’t typically comfortable politicking outside the material realm, is breaking the F-ceiling wouldn’t entail confining their campaign rhetoric to the realm of naming and shaming. On the other side of abstraction and subjective criticism, they can note that Doug Mastriano will steal elections from voters, and Joshua Shapiro will not; Mastriano will sign a bill banning abortion; Shapiro will veto it. The Republican wants to crush our freedoms to govern ourselves, our bodies, our families. What does that sound like to you?
In the spirit of not falling into the trap that swallowed Conor Lamb, Democrats should wage the election in fighting words, and save the clever tricks and sleights of hand for a better day, when we’re not staring collectively down the barrel of an assault rifle.
Yes.
The word is a hard one to fling around and I’ve been playing with it for six years now, ever since Trump came down the escalator. It’s objectively the right word, but it’s hard to get used to saying it. And I think Beutler doesn’t grapple with the right’s inevitable projection of the term back on the left. They may call us all communists today but fascist will be next, I’m sure. It’s their way.
Still, there is utility in using correct terminology. At least some people will find it easier to understand what you’re talking about! So yes. Why are we pussyfooting around this stuff? It’s happening and it’s very, very threatening.