Life under fascism: Franco's Spain and what it tells us about the GOP and conservative voters.
SCOTUS writes a requiem for America's constitutional democracy
The fascist majority on the highest court in the land issued a decision granting official sanction to pure lawlessness by a criminal president and his capos (purely hypothetically of course).
This offers an occasion to revisit something I wrote in September 2020, two months before we used voting to expel a fascist figurehead, and four months before a mob attempted to overthrow our government on the figurehead’s behalf. The mob has allies in a court majority who were installed expressly for just that purpose.
The domestic fascist faction known as the GOP, like all other fascist regimes, is amenable to murder, mass violence, incarceration without recourse, and concentration camps. This is what they do, and they do so without conscience or pangs of remorse. This is who they are.
We cannot appeal to any sense of ‘shared American values’, nor seek out their core of human decency, their moral conscience. We have been encouraged to do this for decades, with platitudes like ‘there’s more than unites us than divides us’, ‘meet them where they’re at, show you understand their concerns’). This has only brought us disastrous results.
I emphasize this to the extent that I do because anyone who wishes to maintain American constitutional democracy, and pursue social, environmental and economic justice, needs to accept that there is no making peace or compromising with fascists. Not even if they are family, friends, neighbors or co-workers.
Understanding fascism and fascists, their motives and modus operandi, is essential if we are to successfully oppose them. Ultimately we are left only with the option of attempting to remove them from participating in the polity, so that they the retain no political influence at any level of government, however long that takes.
This is the only rational outcome we can pursue, if we hope to preserve our democracy and, for many of us, if we want to survive.
An example of the emergence of a fascist dictatorship— one that remained in Europe for thirty years after the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945— is found in Spain under the rule of Francisco Franco. Remembering and reconsidering the events of the Spanish civil war, the subsequent seizure of all political institutions by the fascists, and comprehending the meaning of these events in our present context, is the undertaking of Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realms of Oblivion, which is volume 93 of The History of Warfare.
The editor’s introduction, by Aurora G. Morcillo, elucidates the urgency of connecting past and present, a distant nation to ours:
Repression and terror existed efficiently, administered outside the prison walls in the name of preserving peace and order after the Francoist victory. The administering of misery and starvation is the subject of Óscar Rodríguez Barreira’s chapter “Franco’s Bread: Auxilio Social from Below, 1937–43.” The author reminds us how in the immediate postwar years the dictatorship utilized starvation as a means of repression. Hunger increased significantly in the 1940s, which were known as the “hunger years.” The absolute misery Spaniards had to endure until the early 1950s was the result of the economic policy of “autarchy.” Autarchy was based on two basic pillars: self-sufficiency and authoritarian rule. The chapter tells the story of that hunger and the role of the falangist agency Auxilio Social in the administering of social services. The repressive apparatus deployed by the regime went beyond putting people in prison. Starving them was as effective a tactic as torture behind bars. (pg. 10, emphasis added)
Perhaps it is worth highlighting that in the sham ideology of Conservatism, we find repeated references to the notion of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘self-reliance’ alongside the denigration of government administered social services as ‘socialism’ (the supposed precursor to a left-wing totalitarian state. In 2010, economist Robert Reich delineated how these concepts are integral to GOP social policy:
In the late 19th century it was called Social Darwinism. Only the fittest should survive, and any effort to save the less fit will undermine the moral fiber of society.
Appeals to ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘self-reliance’ aren’t merely comforting fictions for GOP voters to console themselves that they hold the moral high ground— they are necessary conceptual camouflage to render callous indifference to hardship, suffering and needless deaths an acceptable stance within our civil society, when it should be viewed as inherently unacceptable.
The GOP and conservatism is premised on a mythology in which the perpetrators of suffering, violence and death are ‘the real victims’, while those harmed by state sponsored violence and institutionalized depredation are the aggressors:
It shouldn't be surprising that the reality of masks and other pandemic control measures is the precise opposite of the conservative agitprop line. Most masks and lockdown orders are primarily a way to protect others, not just yourself — which you would think would be exactly in line with purported conservative values of traditional masculinity. But facts have never stood in the way of the conservative persecution complex. Nothing gets their blood flowing like playing martyr before imaginary liberal tyranny. Casting oneself as Anne Frank for having to wear a two-dollar cloth mask at Walmart during the worst pandemic in a century would be a stretch for most people in the world, but not American movement conservatives.
The mythology which inverts the reality of who is inflicting harm, and who is being harmed, encompasses every aspect of the conservative agenda:
Conservative pundits and their army of Trolls have adopted the narrative that their values are under attack, even though they are being actively pandered to by every branch of government. Whether it is a heartland gun owner, a pro-life, anti-gay marriage “family advocate”, a “cost sensitive” business owner, or one of the “radical thinkers” whose agendas Bari Weiss eagerly serviced in her recent NYT op-ed, there is a common sentiment that the Left are conniving bullies who seek to erase the Conservative way of life and silence their “dissent”. No one has managed to articulate with any clarity exactly what it is they believe they are dissenting against. As far as I can tell, they are annoyed that their right to free speech doesn’t actually grant them the right to safety against people pushing back against what they have to say and possibly pointing out the flaws in their logic. (emphasis added)
Every GOP voter is aggrieved, must be so in this mythology, so that every action taken by the fascist cabal is justified, it ensures the freedom, and the very way of life and safety of the rank and file. When those actions include violence, discrimination, and disenfranchisement, they are morally acceptable to these Christian moralists because their opponents are monsters who seek to destroy ‘the American way of life’, to subjugate ‘the real Americans’:
There’s almost nothing a conservative politician or pundit can do or say that the GOP's base won’t somehow ignore or justify…
They embraced voter suppression. They flouted the Constitution by refusing even to consider the Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic president, and rubber-stamped a Republican nominee credibly accused of sexual assault. They even found a way to justify ripping migrant children from their parents.
Republicans have done so largely at the bidding of talk radio and TV hosts whose only goal is to build audience share by stoking a narrative of white male victimization, in which hatred of immigrants and minorities and homosexuals and women is the logical correlate…
This is why conservatives are so incredibly defensive, why they are constantly whining that everyone is so condescending to them: because they have created a political culture virtually devoid of accountability.
Compare these contemporary examples of GOP voters as perpetual victims to the conceptual framework Franco’s regime employed against its opponents:
The Francoist narrative about the Civil War was the only one transmitted to the public during the long dictatorship. It was both Manichean and ruthless. It was Manichean because it presented a past of Good (and God)versus Evil, of order and justice fighting and overcoming terror and crime. It was ruthless not only because it treated the vanquished Reds—both the dead and the survivors—as criminals, but also because it denied that they had suffered any violence, negating the possibility of their victim hood. This denial included the deaths of those shot by the Francoists and buried elsewhere, most often in unmarked mass graves. In Franco’s Spain there were no Republican victims and there was no Republican pain. This was in essence the message repeated constantly by the regime and by Franco… (pg. 33, emphasis added)
While overt violence (by police and paramilitary gangs) is a terrifying and immediate threat under any fascist regime, other forms of social and psychological violence are intrinsic elements of imposing the will of the fascist minority:
When most of the population of Andalusia was struggling just to stay alive, fear of an economic penalty became a very efficient weapon. The Francoist regime, with this type of repression, provided itself with an instrument for punishment that was, because of its extension, collective, socially effective, and long-lasting. Moreover, beyond its economic function, it contributed to the marginalization and social exclusion of the defeated, and impinged on the personal and social relations of the postwar period, especially in the small towns where the victims of the reprisals and their families had to live side by side with the informers.43 (pg. 141, emphasis added)
Compare the effects of Francoist policies (intertwined criminal justice, social and economic frameworks) and that of the GOP:
...liberal policies increase growth by boosting wages and perceptions about income security. By contrast, Republican policies slow growth and immiserate the population. The researchers also found that the economy grew even faster when Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the presidency…
...the longer Democrats are in power, the stronger the economic gains for blacks. By contrast, blacks fare worse when Republicans are in office longer. There are similar racial gaps in the criminal justice system. Black and white incarceration rates fell dramatically (a net of 61 fewer arrests per 1,000 residents) under Democratic presidents, while they increased (36 more arrests per 1,000 residents) under Republican leadership.
The GOP of the past sixty years has been grotesquely misogynistic, under the guise of ‘traditional/Christian family values’:
Republicans may not normally wax lyrical about incest over breakfast meetings, but the misogyny and racism that King embodies is very much in the GOP’s DNA. This is the party, after all, of pussy grabbers, perverts and hypocrites. It’s the party of men like Roy Moore, Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump. It’s the party of Muslim bans, detention camps and child separation. It’s the party that tries to force teenage immigrants to have their rapist’s babies. It is the party that wants to prevent women from having any autonomy over their own bodies, but gives rapists parental rights. It is very much Steve King’s party. Don’t let any Republican try and pretend otherwise…
This is a feature shared by fascist regimes generally, as exemplified in Franco’s Spain, which in turn are reflected in the private households inhabited under these regimes:
We may conclude that at the end of the 30s, female sexuality was the perfect excuse for political misogyny and gender violence against women. All those women who broke with the prototype of the “señorita” suffered the stigma of the “new woman”. First, there were the suffragettes, then the militia women and later, the Falangists. A “hot potato” full of contradictions that found in the Civil War enough radicalism to trigger the most primitive revenge: that of a threatened “masculinity”…
There is another aspect of GOP/conservative dogma which is intrinsic to fascist worldview, that of the inerrant beneficence of the market economy (and accordingly, the inherent malevolence of any actor or approach that seeks to constrain how the capitalistic market operates) which needs to be confronted. Prof. Jo Labanyi highlights this in her article Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War:
We might take further this similarity between the rupture which characterizes traumatic narrative (the involuntary blocking out of the past) and that which results from the market economy (based on the requirement to discard the old for the ever-new) and ask whether trauma—beyond its production by specific acts of violence, of which the Holocaust is the extreme example—is endemic to models of modernity that are based on capitalist modernization. To phrase this question differently: does capitalist modernity’s stress on the new and on the obsolescence of the past produce atraumatic relationship to the past, which prevents us from establishing an affiliative relationship with it? If this is the case, there would appear to be a need to redefine modernity in such a way as to produce a non-traumatic relationship to the past, in which we acknowledge that we are its heirs. (pg. 108)
The correlation of GOP/conservative market economic fabulism and fascism has long been identified, if obscured or unacknowledged by the broader political culture:
Trump’s presidency has been treated as a fluke, but it actually represents a very old ideology of capitalism. When Trump became president, the media and liberals became nostalgic for Reagan, saying that Reagan would never do what Trump was doing. In reality, Trump was Reagan’s heir. Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan’s five terms as Chairman included two reappointments by Bill Clinton, which suggests his paradigm was accepted by some Democrats.
Greenspan regularly published with Ayn Rand, the self-proclaimed philosopher and novelist of capitalism. Her economics underlie Reaganism and Trumpism and have a long lineage, going back at least to the British workhouses of the early 1800s and the American gilded age of the late 1800s and early 1900s. She divided the world into two distinct orders of being: creatives and moochers. To defend her when her book "Atlas Shrugged" was badly reviewed, Greenspan wrote in a letter to the New York Times:
Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.
Similar to Trump’s winners, Ayn Rand’s creatives are chosen to rule by some higher, perhaps biological, force and, if unrestricted, will bring progress and prosperity to everyone. They must be motivated with the promise of greater wealth in order to fulfill their productive potential. She was convinced If they are unrestrained in their pursuit of fortune, their riches will “trickle down” and bring affluence for everyone, although, of course, ordinary people will never be as rich as they are. Unfortunately, creatives are often held back by the moochers-similar to Trump’s losers…
I believe we are in the midst of multiple crises that are sufficient to permit the installation of a fascist regime here, while perhaps under the guise of retaining our governmental framework (I suspect, if the GOP/fascist cabal is not prevented from retaining and consolidating such power as it has already acquired, these pretenses of democracy and the rule of law will be dispensed with entirely).
In other words, we are on the precipice of the capture of the American state by a fascist cabal. If lost in November, restoring may take as long or longer than it took Spain to resume halting steps to representative democracy. Or we may never recover it.