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I've bloviated on this before, so I won't go into it too much, but I have been saddened by the fact that the left sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid and then didn't come to the obvious conclusion that this vigilance must be primarily directed at ourselves, rather than our perceived enemies, because obviously if we are won over by fascism, it will be in a form that we are biased towards, rather than biased against. When I was a youth, there was a pretty well known saying, that "If fascism comes to the United States, it will be wrapped in an American flag," or some variation of the like. This sort of thinking, unfortunately, seems to have led people to thinking that detecting fascism is about detecting the American flag or similar concepts and symbols, rather than the actual point of the line, which is that fascism will be wrapped up in [something we are predisposed to like], with the American flag merely being the example at the time (the culture in which I grew up treated the American flag as an object of derision 99% of the time, but I'm guessing the line was a carryover from the then-recently ended Cold War when the flag probably had higher status).
How do you distinguish vigilance from the more pedestrian infighting that comes from zero-sum status games? It’s possible to view every Bernie Bro, every college cancellation, every instance of a snake eating its own tail as the noble policing of establishment tendencies. Or you can be more cynical, and assume that anything and everything is just signaling; the radical is merely adapting to a different ecological niche, and once he has cleared out the old guard, he will set down roots and promptly become an authoritarian. Realistically, the truth has to be somewhere in between. Sometimes freedom fighters are grifters, and sometimes they’re painfully sincere.
I guess I’m asking—what sort of evidence would make you think “the left” is actually concerned with fascism from the ingroup?
This is a fair point, and certainly it's possible to interpret those in that way, but my perspective is that it's usually easy to distinguish between self-vigilance and pedestrian infighting by observing how the status of oneself or one's own preferred ideology would be affected. Which is to say, if you're not pushing in the direction that leaves you more open to having your status lowered, then you're not applying that vigilance to yourself, you're applying that vigilance to someone else.
For instance, with college cancellations, when Middlebury students mobbed Charles Murray and the professor who invited him to give the guest lecture in one of the earlier high profile cases a lifetime ago now, were those students doing so with the belief that, through their actions, they would be challenging own sets of beliefs, i.e. most likely what we call modern social justice, CRT, idpol, "woke," etc.? Perhaps things played out that way in a certain point of view, but I would argue that it's clear that their vigilance was directed at an "other," i.e. the Murrays of the world who have beliefs about scientific inquiry regarding hereditary differences in intelligence that conflict with their own, not at "themselves," i.e. the people who believe that Murray giving a talk in some official college capacity (unrelated to The Bell Curve, IIRC - I think it was about his more recent book Coming Apart?) would cause harm.
To use a made-up example, if Ibram X Kendi came out and said that he's worried about how people buying into his lessons - and not in the "oh they're misinterpreting it and applying it wrong" kind of way - could lead to a tyrannical (perhaps not literally fascistic) society in which, say, individuals are forced to submit to others based purely on what races they belong to, and as such, he's pushing forward research to figure out these potential harms and how to mitigate them, this would appear to be vigilance towards oneself. Arguably, this would raise his status and that of his ideology, but that would be done by changing his ideology to a better one through corrective actions; the unchanged one would lose status as that older ideology that we no longer use, because we have a better, fixed one now.
On the other hand, if Kendi came out and said that he's worried about how the Democratic party isn't taking his scholarship seriously enough and, as such, they could inadvertently allow the latent white supremacy of the party to recreate Jim Crow in 21st century America or the like, that would appear to be obviously infighting between two different parts of the left. If Kendi got his way in this fictional example, the result wouldn't be that his preferred ideology gets attacked, damaged, and rebirthed into a better version of itself, it would be a peer ideology that did that, while his own just gained more status by becoming more influential in a powerful institution.
I do think there must be edge cases, and there's probably no simple binary test to check, but in most cases, it's not all that ambiguous.
I’ll agree that in most cases, it’s not ambiguous. It is a much cheaper and easier signal to take shots at the outgroup, so we see more of that.
I find the threshold you describe to be overly restrictive. Consider excommunication, where a heretic is explicitly removed from ingroup membership. Even if none of the ingroup are criticized, I’d consider this to be self-vigilance or self-policing, because the alternative is a tacit endorsement.
The political analogy would be—say a major California Democrat suddenly espoused National Socialism. You’d expect a huge scandal. Loss of support from the DNC, cancelled donations, scathing op-eds. It’d be safe to say that the target is a former Democrat rather than a current one. He has been moved to the outgroup. Democrats, then, aren’t criticizing their own. They aren’t taking a risk with their status, either; this is strictly safer and more politically valuable than continuing to endorse the guy. And yet, I’d still describe this action as self-vigilant.
For a more realistic example, look at the Hillary/Bernie split, which featured accusations that Hillary was a DNC stooge. That was obviously status-jockeying, because the two blocs were at odds, and only one could actually get the candidacy. Competition between peer ideologies. But it was also exactly what you’d expect from healthy ideological vigilance within the general category of Democrats. Now the risks are aligned. It’s exactly the kind of situation you describe with Kendi, where personal preference is risked to strengthen the overall project.
These are scenarios where peer competition on one scale parses as self-policing on the higher level. I think that’s true whenever the marketplace of ideas is working as intended. I’ll go as far as to say this is usually true within the United States! It’s just so adaptive as long as you’re trying to win the next competition up. Me vs. my brother, me and my brother vs. the Hillaryites, me and the Hillaroids vs. the Republicans, me and America vs. the world.
I think in your made-up example, the relevant detail is that it was Nazism, an openly fascistic ideology, that the California Democrat was espousing, rather than that this was a case of excommunicating a heretic. But also, I wouldn't really describe that as "vigilance," though trivially it is, I suppose. When I think about some group of people being "vigilant" in watching out for the rise of fascism, I'm thinking of behavior that's beyond just noticing someone saying "I'm a fascist" and telling them, "Okay, bye."
I don't think there's a "general case" of excommunication of heretics, but I'd say that, very very imprecisely speaking, it seems unlikely to be aiding in vigilance against one's own ideology turning towards fascism, because detecting heretics tends to involve checking if someone is sufficiently submitting to whatever ideology our team likes and then expelling them if they fall short, which is the type of behavior more in-line with fascists than against them. But the specific details matter way too much to say more than that.
In terms of the IRL example, I do agree that what we saw in 2016 was evidence of some sort of ideological vigilance within the Democratic party (dunno if it was "healthy" given that we lost - but without it, perhaps Trump would've won in a landslide instead of merely edging by?). I do think the left in general and the Democratic party in particular has its share of such forms of vigilance, and I'd even guess that it does it better than the right and the Republican party, though my judgment is too biased to be meaningful in that regard.
But when it comes to being vigilant against fascism, I don't think something like "this big tent ideology that I and almost half the electorate follow have lots of sub-ideologies that are in healthy competition with each other" really counts as such vigilance, since that's largely a consequence of the mostly free society and culture in which we live, rather than a specific way to manage the ideology or party. Rather, it's about watching for the ideas that you specifically like and you specifically believe will bring forth a better future; because, for you, it's that ideology that is your metaphorical "American flag" that will wrap up the fascism that you will inadvertently push and bring forth.
If a Bernie Bro (which I was in 2016) said, "By pushing for Bernie to defeat Hillary in the primaries, I am being vigilant about fascism taking over the USA, because this is part of the healthy ideological diversity within our Democratic party by having multiple competing factions attacking one another," I would consider that deluded. That's not vigilance, that's just plain old picking a side, which is perfectly cromulent but not much more*. If he said, "I'm pushing for Bernie, but I'm concerned that if he does gain power, all the great ideas that I want him to implement will lead us towards fascism in ways that I and all his supporters didn't anticipate, and so when Hillary or Trump call him out, I'll listen and investigate," I would consider that at least a significant meaningful gesture towards maintaining vigilance against fascism.
* I think there's a version of this which is vigilance against fascism; if someone with control over the DNC pushed to make it so Bernie and the other underdogs of the world had a better shot, so as to increase the viciousness of within-party competition of ideologies, that seems to be a form of vigilance against fascism. Perhaps even in the case that it's just a DNC voter who is ambivalent about the choice but errs towards Bernie because they figure that bringing up an underdog will help to prevent ossification of ideas within the party. This would have to be balanced against the possibility of allowing an uber-charismatic
TrumpHitler-like figure coming in and stealing the party from under us, which is the kind of thing you would expect to lead more towards fascism, but the opposite could be the case, of course, and the specific details likely matter a great deal here.More options
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