It's Not Fascism, It's Just Sparkling White Supremacy

 Jon Chait returns from hiatus to dissect some Yale philosopher who wrote a column full of logical fallacies. Chait's point is that saying Republicans are all fascists (when you really mean authoritarian) only accelerates the process of the entire GOP becoming outright authoritarian.

Let's leave aside that argument and address what I've been trying to say for a few years now: Not all authoritarianism is fascism. Fascism is a unique set of institutions coming from the differing forms of humiliation Italy and Germany felt after World War I. There are about as many different forms of authoritarianism as there are authoritarian regimes, so labels only get you so far. I can say that Britain is a parliamentary democracy with a monarchical head of state, but Putin's Russia is really just...Putin's Russia.

Anyhoo, I was finally finishing Sean Wilentz's Rise of American Democracy (as I mentioned the other day), and I keep coming back to Wilentz's term "Master Race democracy." It's not that the Antebellum South was completely resistant to democracy. Noted democrats like Andrew Jackson and James Polk were from the South. The understanding of who got to enjoy democratic privileges, however, was very much restricted to White men. In places like South Carolina, it meant rich White planters. 

Calling the GOP a fascist party is not to understand fascism, and what's more it shows a blindness to our own history. America was a very flawed democracy for much of its existence, even after it adopted the Jacksonian democratic creed. Even after the Civil War, the White South stamped out true democracy in the South by the 1880s, and it only fitfully returned in the 1960s and '70s. 

Of course, the composition of America is much, much different than it was in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed. America is not a lily-white nation anymore. The GOP's embrace of Master Race Democracy, where the only votes that matter are White votes, is just as troubling for our democratic institutions as wild, ahistorical claims of fascism. It is much more grounded in our history and cultural DNA.

Understanding the GOP as a Master Race Democratic party rather than a Fascist party is central to fighting them. You can't defeat what you don't understand.