Fascism is a Play-Dough Vibe of Bad Men's Feelings
I was having a nice morning on Saturday and minding my business when someone in my life sent me an email telling me that I didn’t have the courage to read Buck Sexton’s forthcoming book Manufacturing Delusion: How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination, and Propaganda Against You.
The marketing email includes these arguments, with this formatting:
If I looked you in the eye and told you the Rocky Mountains don’t exist, you’d think I was crazy.
But give me time, and I could make you believe it.
I wouldn’t need threats or force. I wouldn’t really even need a good argument.
All I’d need is steady, confident repetition. The kind that comes from the voices you already trust.
And the “delusion” in the title comes in here:
For years, people have been told certain problems simply don’t exist and that the “mountains” rising out of our national landscape are illusions.
You know the list: The border isn’t wide open, crime is down, failing schools are fine, our cities are flourishing. Nothing is wrong with the country’s direction.
Millions of people have accepted these claims not because they’ve verified them, but because they’ve heard them repeated endlessly by institutions they once trusted.
And when the evidence becomes undeniable, their instinct isn’t to reconsider…
It’s to rage.
This is Manufactured Mass Hysteria.
The idea is actually kind of exciting. Imagine that the left might be so powerful as to create and enforce mass delusion! Here we are out in the streets resorting to ancient technology—literal whistles—to warn against ICE. We don’t have a massive coms infrastructure.
But I digress. Do you have Manufactured Mass Hysteria? Check and see!
There are grown adults — not children, not teenagers, adults — who lose sleep because they’ve convinced themselves climate change is going to make humanity extinct.
People who sincerely believe there is a “genocide” against trans people because we don’t think a 200-pound bearded man should be competing in girls’ athletics.The Russia-collusion hoaxThe endless prosecutionsThe Epstein insinuations.The constant, coordinated lies.
Is “the constant, coordinated lies” an appropriate entry in that bulleted list? Doesn’t it more appropriately sit as an unbulleted summary after the list? Okay, focus!
What’s interesting to me is that this argument about mass delusion is sort of a mash-up of several critiques of Fox News mixed with a parroting of Bandy X. Lee’s incredible work, which I wrote about in a past post. The only difference is that there’s no evidence. Instead a psychotherapist, Jonathan Alpert, is quoted. He went onto Fox News to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome:
a mass psychosis that has been manufactured using similar tactics to what you would expect from authoritarian regimes like communist China, North Korea or the former U.S.S.R.
This is the terrain of my book — and the results are in plain sight…
People aren’t simply opposed to Trump. They are obsessive. Clinically obsessive.
It all sounds vaguely familiar… but flipped. This continues a long tradition of fascism taking the language of the left because it cannot make its own. Facts stubbornly refuse to cohere to support their feelings.
Nazism was great at stealing ideas from the left and saying, “No, that’s us!” As Roderick Stackelberg writes in a book review, “Since its founding in 1919 ostensibly as a ‘workers’ party’ dedicated to weaning the working class from its attachment to socialism, the Nazis consistently appropriated the vocabulary of socialism (and the color red as well as the May 1 holiday) both to deceive and recruit potential supporters.”(1) And Matt McManus wrote in In These Times last year about
the Right’s great skill in appropriating historically Left terms about fighting the ruling class to defend the retrenchment of old hierarchies or the establishment of entirely new ones. In this way, the Right can achieve a kind of pseudo-populist aesthetic that mimics speaking truth to power even as its leaders include a billionaire like Trump and one of the world’s richest men in Elon Musk. (2)
It’s an aesthetic. It’s not an argument. It’s a vibe.
How is it possible to make people content with the absence of an argument, and why does this appropriation satisfy some people? Because it’s easy and can be broken up into single sentences that sound dramatic while being basically free of content.
Julie Fellmayer writes, “Justice requires care, a willingness to embrace ambiguity, and demands ‘individuals to question, think, analyze and hold power accountable’ (Giroux, Threat of Fascism). Meanwhile, as ‘false appeals’ have no real interest in justice, they can make blanket accusations regarding the corruption of the left and the authenticity of the initiatives of the right.” (3)
I think Fellmayer’s point is subtle and important, especially in light of recent statements by various folks that we need our own Joe Rogan/whoever. To put Fellmayer’s point it in simple terms, we care about complicated things, including people, who are complex. Simplifying reality into broad, bombastic statements itself breaks people’s brains and dehumanizes them. So to have our own Joe Rogan would be doing the opposite of what we believe.
All this got me thinking about Buck Sexton (born in Manhattan, educated at Amherst College, real name James Buckton Sexton. Honestly.) and his lack of sources. The single sentences on separate lines create a rhythm and the appearance of reflection because the timing creates a vibe of an argument. It feels important and smart. But with zero engagement with reality. It’s all… feelings. Rage, anger, hate: feelings. Desire for personal acclaim: feeling.
Fascist men have big feelings, and they’ve been spraying them all over all of us.
This connects to a recent curious event that took place at the White House, where NYC Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani went to engage with Trump, and Trump did a very weird thing that makes sense in his world. He sprayed feelings all over Mamdani, first a desire to intimidate, and then a desire to charm. Mamdani found no intellectual engagement with the issues that concern him. Joe Lowndes, writer, political commentator, and professor of Politics at Hunter College-CUNY, shared this analysis on Facebook on Friday:
As George Bataille argued in 1933, fascism thrives on heterogeneity, on the mobilization of contradictions and difference from which it draws energy.
At the press conference following the meeting between Trump and Mamdani, the media in the room anxiously struggled to keep up, shouting questions to reaffirm the distance between the two. Trump ate it up, commenting on how excited the press was about the meeting, how much more energy there was for this than for foreign leaders coming to visit.
A reporter asked Mamdani if he still considered Trump a fascist. When he began to answer, Trump patted his arm and said, “That’s ok. You can just say yes.” An affable meeting with Mamdani in no way reduced Trump’s own sense of himself as an authoritarian. It enhanced it.
Fascism is a mess of contradictions, a goo, like play dough. Like Trump in the Oval Office with Mamdani, and like play dough when you drop it on the kitchen floor, everything sticks to it, and it appropriates everything. The nonsense is its organizing structure. It isn’t intellectually rigorous in any way. It doesn’t like sources because reality is a hard thing, and fascism is a soft thing, a feelings thing, that that takes the shape of whatever container it is in. It’s nothing more than bad men’s feelings.
I do empathize with one part of Buck’s screed about his book. It was so hard to write!
It took two years to write — in part, because it had to go through the same clearance process that every former intelligence officer faces.
Two whole years to write a book? That’s entirely too much time. It took me eight years to write a book about socialism and Nazism in Germany using primary sources in German, interviews, and visits to archives. Buck, you must be so tired.
- Reviewed Work(s): The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light by Hermann Beck. Reviewed by Roderick Stackelberg in Central European History, September 2009, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 571-574 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40600800
- Matt McManus, “Trump, Vance, and the Right-Wing Counter-Revoluntionaries,” In These Times, August 4, 2024.
- Julie Fellmayer, “Reclaiming the Language of Radical Morality: The Fight Against Right-Wing Appropriation of Social Justice Language.” McMaster University Public Intellectuals Project, April 23, 2023. “
