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 below. 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.

From Telos 192 (Fall 2020):

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

Mark G. E. Kelly

Last year, I was invited to speak at a symposium on state theory in Turkey.^[1] The theme I was given to speak on invoked “authoritarian, totalitarian, fascist states,” for reasons that will be obvious to anyone familiar with the political situation in Turkey: there is at least a very serious danger of the appearance of a fascist state form there today, though Turkish colleagues debate the precision of the application of the term “fascist” to the Erdoğan government. This careful consideration provided a jarring contrast with the ease with which contemporary commentators in the West, most particularly in and on America, are willing to diagnose fascism as already present in their midst. What I opted perversely to speak about then—providing the genesis of the present essay—was the extent to which the situation in the West was fundamentally different from that in Turkey, despite insistent, shrill warnings to the contrary. I cannot remember a time in the last thirty years when voices on the left were not warning of an incipient “rise of the right” in Europe. More recently, since 2015 at least, there has been a consistent and insistent clarion discourse asserting that Donald Trump’s political presence represented the emergence of a new “fascism.” This shows no sign of abating. As I was editing the reflections below during 2019, there came a stream of fresh accusations of fascism directed at Trump from high-profile figures: first the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, then the congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. As I am finalizing this article in 2020, fresh accusations are being made in relation to the deployment of federal agents to defend federal buildings from rioters in Portland, Oregon. Such accusations are by now so multitudinous that I won’t try to comprehensively list or analyze them, though I will deal with the most prominent claims.

Of course the word “fascist” has been used for almost as long as it has existed as a way of deprecating the political right. Yet claims that Trump is a fascist have not merely been a matter of careless or informal invective, but have also taken the form of apparently serious scholarship. Following Trump’s election, several books were published by eminent North American academics who argued that America in the age of Trump is becoming fascist: Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism, by William E. Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University; How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University; and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, by Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University.^[2] These books represent the relatively rational tip of an iceberg of mass hysteria among the urbane left in reaction to the election of the boorish chauvinist Trump.

It is difficult to assess these claims without first defining fascism, but the question of what constitutes fascism is so vexed that any attempt to define it would necessarily become the focus of this essay. My alternative—which doubtless is not entirely satisfactory but I think propaedeutically appropriate—is simply to assert that no facets of the Trump phenomenon are signally fascist. This is not to say that there is nothing in it that is compatible with fascism, but only that the features of it called “fascist” either are also commonly found in non-fascist political formations or alternatively are genuine novelties not found in any other situations, whether fascist or not. Ultimately, I will suggest that the claim that Trump is a fascist is based primarily on analyses of Trump’s rhetoric, which is a peculiarly inapt locus to search for signs of fascism and, in any case, contains few traces of fascism sensu stricto.

Many learned commentators on Trump—including John Bellamy Foster, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Connolly—take pains to distinguish his “new” or “neo-” fascism from fascism tout court.^[3] To this, I would suggest that for even such a qualified appellation of fascism to make sense, there must be at least some similarity to historic fascism. Butler bases her accusation of fascism against Trump on the claim that he “acts as if he has the sole power to decide.”^[4] This conflates fascism with dictatorship, conflates appearances with actions (since “acting as if” is a matter of appearance and not of the action itself), and also interprets his statements in the most extreme way possible, such that any proposal of Trump’s that might be deemed unconstitutional implies that Trump means to completely disregard the constitutional order. Undergirding all of this is the idea that language can itself be fascist or at least an indicator of fascism. Language has been privileged by Trump’s critics, academic and non-, from the center-right all the way to the far left, in a way that mistakes rhetoric for the primary ground of politics. Connolly posits “a tendency in the professoriate to downplay the role of rhetoric in politics.”^[5] I contend on the contrary that approximately the opposite tendency is hegemonic, especially but not exclusively in academe. While it might be true that politicians’ rhetoric is understudied, academics tend systematically to overstate the political importance of their own discourses. By this I do not mean to imply that language is politically unimportant; my position is rather that it has a limited political import that needs to be carefully delimited.

My point in arguing that Trump is not a fascist is not to suggest that he is by contrast good, or conventional, or left-wing, or even harmless. It is rather that such unwarranted pejorative designations cannot ground serious analysis of politics, and rather constitute at best partisan interventions concerned with producing a motivational mythos for those who oppose something. My purpose is not to exculpate Trump but to deflate claims that his presidency represents an ominous novelty. Particularly central here is the question of racism in America, since it is Trump’s racism that is usually taken immediately to betoken fascism. My concern with this reflex is that it tends to obscure the real coordinates of historic American racism and to suggest that this perennial feature of American political society is somehow novel. I claim that to the extent Trump represents a break with the past, he is almost entirely ineffectual (certainly to the extent that he might be said to incline in a “fascist” direction—his economic protectionism is clearly a break with recent U.S. trade policy), and that on the contrary Trump’s presidency has seen the continuation of preexisting dangerous tendencies in a rather different direction, which I will call “techno-neoliberalism.”

This then is the eponymous “main danger” I am positing here. Michel Foucault said that “everything is dangerous,”^[6] but this dangerousness is very variable in its severity. The trick, of course, as Foucault says, is precisely to say what the primary danger is.^[7] I will argue that although Trump certainly is dangerous, the misdiagnosis of Trump as fascist means missing and indeed to some extent abetting a greater danger that we should be attending to.

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Notes

1. The International Taner Yelkenci Symposium on the Theory of State and Law, May 17, 2019, İzmit, Turkey. I thank the organizers and participants—in particular my Turkish translator, Utku Özmakas, and the interpreters of my talk—for their extraordinary hospitality and a standard of robust and open discussion that I rarely encounter now in the West. Having to defend and explain my thesis in this forum sharpened it considerably.

2. William E. Connolly, Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2017); Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018); Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (San Francisco: City Lights, 2018). Incredibly this last work is not the first book entitled American Nightmare to associate Trump with fascism, an earlier one having been Douglas Kellner, American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism (Rotterdam: Sense, 2016).

3. Alain Badiou, Trump (Cambridge: Polity, 2019); John Bellamy Foster, “Neofascism in the White House,” Monthly Review 68, no. 11 (2017): 1–30; Judith Butler, “Reflections on Trump,” Fieldsights, January 18, 2017, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/reflections-on-trump; William E. Connolly, “Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric,” Theory & Event 20, no. 1 (2017): 23–37.

4. Butler’s “Reflections” are to be sure undertheorized, more or less spontaneous, and largely amount to stating what people in her milieu more generally had been saying, being presented explicitly as a “distillation” of an interview. This spontaneity in fact makes this account particularly telling, however.

5. Connolly, Aspirational Fascism, p. 26.

6. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 231.

7. Ibid., p. 232.