Bidenihilism
Culture requires positive assertions. Regime progressive politics are increasingly devoid of them.
As someone who thinks more than he should about burgeoning authoritarianism in the arts, Greg Allen’s Art & Autocracy caught my attention. Why I thought that this might be anything but the usual art-world kvetching, I’m not sure, but soon enough Allen came to this:
The pandemic’s swirling gyre, genocide in Gaza and indifference to it, persistent bigotry and ascendant fascism in the US and beyond—all thwart any attempt to retreat into art.
Upon reading “ascendant fascism,” I scrolled back up to see if the article was written in 2015. There’s nothing in Allen’s catalog of anxieties—so acute that even Vermeer brings no solace, he claims—that someone didn’t already predict would result from the first Trump term.
…freshly exposed political conflicts and staggering leaps in inequality leave an elite subculture of decorative distraction feeling more superficial and complicit than ever.
Mostly, though, it’s the fascism. In this country, Donald Trump and the political party he controls have steadily ratcheted up the specific extremist actions they’ll pursue as soon as they get back in power. The growing list includes stripping reproductive and bodily autonomy; mass incarceration and deportations; deploying the military against citizens; purging and dismantling government agencies; quashing universities, media, and other potential sources of independent critique; enshrining evangelical white male hegemony deeper into law; and intensifying the threat against people of color, LGBTQ+, immigrants, refugees, the disabled, and the poor. So if art’s not hitting quite the same as it used to, maybe that’s part of the reason.
Much of this is premised on an overly high opinion of the current order. There’s nothing particularly independent about the critique emanating from the universities and media. Bodily autonomy would have been shredded had Biden succeeded in his attempt to force-vaccinate 200 million Americans for COVID-19 on pain of losing their jobs, and the related orders around who may gather with whom and under what conditions, another feature of bodily autonomy, made horoscopes look scientifically respectable.1 Whole sectors of the American citizenry are regarded as potential violent extremists by the Biden Department of Justice, including parents skeptical of Critical Race Theory and traditional Catholics.
Yet once again progressives are pushing the idea of Trump’s vaunted fascism. If that was unserious during Trump’s first candidacy, it’s a nonstarter now, four years into the most authoritarian presidency of my lifetime.
More authoritarian than Trump? It’s true that Trump has, or had, a certain strong-leader vibe. I used to call him Tangerine Mussolini. But what if fascism is not a demeanor or an aesthetic, but an ethos of governance which manifests as executive action? Let’s assume that both of these men who should not be president a second time are fascists and see if we can determine the bigger one.
We’ll pretend that we can trust Wikipedia on the subject, which we can’t: “Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.” That provides a checklist by which we might tally a Fascist Index for the current and former presidents.
Trump was only a person of the “far right” by dint of there being no near-right in the leftist imagination. The Fascist Index starts at 1 for Trump, 0 for Biden.
The same goes for “ultranationalist” by dint of progressives recognizing no vanilla flavor of American nationalism.2 Biden is a kind of anti-nationalist, motivated as he is to flood the country with immigrants, currently seven million and counting. That does entail a somewhat fashy drive to remake the country’s racial order, but you can’t call it nationalist. Trump +1 for 2 total, Biden +0 for 0 total.
The whole point of Trump’s (empty!) promise to “drain the swamp” was to defy centralized autocracy. Every executive office has grown under Biden, including an infamous addition of 87,000 staff at the IRS. Trump +0 for 2 total, Biden +1 for 1 total.
Trump was non- and perhaps even anti-militarist. Biden engages in militarism by proxy, throwing American treasure at Ukraine and both sides of the conflict in Gaza. His withdrawal from Afghanistan would count in his favor if he hadn’t left almost a trillion dollars’ worth of military hardware as a housewarming gift for the Taliban, selections of which they will use on 1.7 million returning Afghans as Pakistan forcibly repatriates them.3 Trump +0 for 2 total, Biden +1 for 2 total.
Trump is indifferent regarding “natural social hierarchy” (I am not sure what this means). Biden supports engineered social leveling. Communist, perhaps, but not fascist. +0 for both.
There were no instances of Trump forcibly suppressing opposition. (No, insulting the slobs at CNN doesn’t count.4) What Biden has done on this front is revolting. From the Twitter files to CTIL, executive agencies under Biden including the FBI, CIA, DoD, DHS, CDC, NIH, and the IRS have been implicated in censoring the speech of critics, in partnership with foreign nations around the Anglosphere. The White House encouraged the authoritarian and illegal suppression of peaceful protests in Ottawa by Justin Trudeau. It pressured Amazon not to sell certain books. Trump +0 for 2 total, Biden +1 (he deserves more) for 3 total.
Trump was so enamored of individualism that his critics complained about it. Joe Biden, 1987: “For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. For too long as a nation, we have been lulled by the anthem of self-interest.” Much of the current rhetoric out of the administration reflects that attitude. Trump +0 for 2 total, Biden +1 for 4 total.
Trump seemed to be against regimentation of any kind, much less that of society and the economy; one would not accomplish such regimentation by dismantling government agencies. (Again, his track record of actually doing so is unimpressive.) He is however an economic nationalist who supports interventions, particularly tariffs.5 There is possibly no sector of the economy that Biden hasn’t attempted to manipulate in some way, particularly regarding energy, and he is convinced of the need for the government to do something about corporate greed, which he absurdly blames for inflation caused by his money-printing. Trump +1 and Biden +2, for a grand total Fascism Index score of 3 for Trump and 6 for Biden.
This is hardly scientific and it proves nothing. I mean to point out that the only way to reckon Trump to be a fascist is to regard his center-right politics and America-first nationalism as equivalent to Volksgemeinschaft. Going on behavior, Biden is the bigger fascist. That’s discounting some actions that are dictatorial but along progressive lines.
The use of fascist as an epithet “consists of defining fascism in terms of unpopular ideas, political practices, and personality traits observable in many times and places; then, having cited Hitler’s Nazi movement as fascism’s quintessence, of pinning those deplorable characteristics on the intended targets,” wrote Angelo Codevilla. “This reductio ad Hitlerum aims at no less than to outlaw conservatives.” Or really, any dissidents from progressive orthodoxy. Do you know who else outlawed dissidents? Hitler. As well as many other regimes throughout history, some of whom the United States currently supports. As Eric Hoffer observed in 1951, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”
There’s an immortal line in The Big Lebowski: the Dude explains that he was threatened by nihilists, and Walter Sobchak replies, “Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.”
Neither Trump nor Biden is a proper fascist. But there is a case that the progressivism to which Biden is attached is nihilist. And in certain respects, it makes his hypothetical fascism, or Trump’s, look preferable.
Heather Mac Donald, in her recent Hysterics for Hamas, made a trenchant observation:
Theater requires the willing suspension of disbelief. But to take seriously the narcissistic melodramas played out on campus quads today requires active commitment to untruth—the untruth that the students know enough about the world to deserve attention from adults; the untruth that they are engaged in heroic behavior, when their brightly colored tents resemble nothing so much as childhood forts, well provisioned with cookies and comic books; the untruth that the trespassers and vandals possess any bargaining leverage independent of what the university voluntarily confers on them; the untruth that an American college could have any effect on Middle East politics.
You have to rouse an active commitment to untruth to repeat, as Allen does, the racist lie that Israel is committing genocide, characterize the institutional dissociation from artists who repeat the racist lie as censorship, and lament that German organizations are being overly cautious about Jew-hatred, all while erasing Jewish suffering from your account of current events and accusing “Trump and other Republican politicians” of “mirroring Nazi rhetoric and policies.” I hesitate even to call this worldview progressivism. It’s a macaroni and dog food salad of political impulses.
The contradictions and inconsistencies are possible because the politics are entirely negative. If you hate Israel, and you hate heteronormativity, then the two can combine under the banner of Queers for Palestine because those hatreds don’t contradict one another. It’s only when you try to imagine a culture that synthesizes queer sexuality and theocratic Islam that the idea becomes self-evidently stupid. Culture must contain a core of positive and mutually reinforcing assertions. They need not be explicit, but they have to be. If you add zeroes all day long you end up with zero.
Hoffer, again, would have readily understood what’s going on:
[T]he leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present—for all its stubborn facts and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather…. His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to the fore when the situation becomes desperate. He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender.6
Allen’s piece, a designated Irving Sandler Essay, is neither persuasive nor meant to be. Any Brooklyn Rail reader planning to vote for Trump already knows to stay quiet about it. I’m sorry to see Irving’s name attached to the essay, as I don’t think he would have thought much of it, based on my interview with him. But it wasn’t written for Sandler, it was written for Allen. “Propaganda thus serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others,” wrote Hoffer, “and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.”7
Perhaps not only Allen, though. The essay is a demonstration of how one is supposed to feel about art, according to regime progressivism. All authoritarian movements are impatient with the idea of transcendent orders of being, as it threatens to answer to authority still higher than theirs. Resistance to transcendence is one of the faces of Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism. Nolte meant transcendence in two senses, material and social progress on one hand, and on the other, “reaching out of the mind beyond what exists and what can exist toward an absolute whole.” Allen’s essay implicitly instructs you to resist transcendence in both senses. One, you are to regard the current political order as simultaneously deficient yet preferable to a threatened ascendency of “fascism.” (You shall not consider whether the current order is more autocratic than the threat.) Two, you are to disdain the possibility that some existentially unifying outlook based on love and wonder exists that would relieve the associated anxieties. Again, the negatives combine readily though poisonously.
Most of the artists whom Allen cites favorably, from Käthe Kollwitz to Caetano Veloso, adhered to a vision that transcended the mere art of protest.
Vermeer no longer lends Allen comfort not because of impending fascism, but because of established nihilism, namely that in which he is immersed. The desire to bring something new into the world is the quintessential progressive impulse, and no artist can do without it. Nihilism wearing progressivism as a pelt is not capable of that task. There is art that explored exclusion, rejection, darkness, and hopelessness, but it finally arrived at something, even if it was the form of the art itself. Nihilism, as Nietzsche directed, was a crisis to be overcome. You can’t bring your nihilism to Vermeer and expect Vermeer to give you something in return. It is nihilism that ascends, not fascism, as progressivism embraces ever more negative propositions and falters under the weight of contradictions and untruths.
A couple of weeks ago news broke that Biden had delayed his announcement to halt weapons shipments to Israel until after his speech at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C., in which he proclaimed, “My commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad, even when we disagree.” Nota bene, Biden observed Yom HaShoah by lying brazenly to the Jews. Lee Smith, prompted to wonder why Biden was trying to save Hamas from its deserved destruction, concluded:
The Biden team’s moves to shelter Hamas are best understood in the context of a revolutionary program of domestic initiatives that aim to reconstitute American society on a new basis, and which in turn require the outright rejection of the country’s history and culture, its existing social arrangements, and constitutional order. The current regime has weaponized the security state, labeled its opponents “domestic terrorists,” and waged a third-world-style campaign against the opposition candidate because it’s a revisionist faction. Its political and cultural manifesto is a program for remaking America, whether through social pressure, or censorship, or bureaucratic fiat, or threats of violence, or actual violence.
“It’s not Israel that it’s most keen to grind into dust,” wrote Smith, “but America.”8 Its progressivism is not the one that protects workers and minorities—including minorities of conscience—and invites all into a just order, but a nihilist version that is anti-something-or-other all the way down. “Ve believes in nossing, Lebowski,” says one of the nihilists to the Dude. “Nossing. And tomorrow ve come back and ve cut off your chonson.” The belief in nothing leads to selfish exercises of power, and it is that which animates the regime. Its servants, Allen included, have nothing to gain by allying with it except perhaps self-preservation. But what scrap of selfhood can you hope to preserve once you join Team Zero?
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I realize that Allen is referring to abortion. There will never be broad agreement about abortion, the age of consent, or euthanasia, and I avoid arguments about them. But it seems to me that a woman’s ownership of her person strongly indicates both a right to terminate a pregnancy and a right to refuse an injectable medication. I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer from someone who supports both abortion and vaccine mandates to the question of why a woman’s bloodstream is government property but her uterus is not. By endorsing the Covid policies that they did, progressives blew up the bodily autonomy argument for abortion.
Ukrainian nationalism is another story. “In three years [AICA] went from regarding nationalism as the most dire scourge of the era, to calling for cultural boycotts on behalf of Ukrainian sovereignty and mouthing anti-Russia jingoism that would have made Ronald Reagan feel self-conscious,” I wrote in 2022. Palestinian nationalism, which is what progressives are endorsing when they call for a Palestinian state, is regarded by many of them as a minimal condition of human decency. But American nationalism is an anathema.
Surprise, Gaza is not the biggest human displacement crisis in the Muslim world at the moment. Didn’t hear about it? No Jews, no news.
The joke among conservatives was, “If he’s such a fascist, why can’t he close one goddamn newspaper?” That returned to mind when Zelenskyy nationalized a major TV channel and shut down oppositional news outlets.
So is Bernie Sanders. So is Biden. It’s not an especially conservative impulse.
“Hitler—himself a fanatic—could diagnose with precision the state of mind of the fanatics who plotted against him within the ranks of the National Socialist party. In his order to the newly appointed chief of the SA after the purge of Röhm in 1934 he speaks of those who will not settle down: ‘... without realizing it, [they] have found in nihilism their ultimate confession of faith ... their unrest and disquietude can find satisfaction only in some conspiratorial activity of the mind, in perpetually plotting the disintegration of whatever the set-up of the moment happens to be.’ As was often the case with Hitler, his accusations against antagonists (inside and outside the Reich) were a self-revelation. He, too, particularly in his last days, found in nihilism his ‘ultimate philosophy and valediction.’” Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951).
Almost all of the awards in the arts have devolved into mechanisms for rewarding dutiful progressive tribal signaling, for both the givers and the receivers, and there was no hope of the one named for Sandler surviving as an exception. It’s still a disappointment.
Although Matt Margolis has a simpler explanation: “Joe Biden needs to appease the antisemitic wing of his party if he wants any hope of winning Michigan.”
I can remember cleaving to progressive politics as the one true way to be a compassionate human in the world. Now I can see the lie in that, even setting aside the increased nihilism and tribalism. Inserting that tribalism back in, I can understand how most people can’t give up cleaving to these ideas, whether for loss of support or sense of belonging, or of their own self-concept around being a compassionate human.
My own growth included remediating myself away from nonsensical economic ideas (because they felt good in the heart somehow didn’t make them true), and recognizing how, in my concern for compassion and healing oppression in the world, I was being manipulated into giving up freedom and autonomy not only for myself but for the very vulnerable people I thought I held compassion for.
"Dutiful tribal signaling" is what Allen is doing, and not even adroitly enough to leave any doubt. Of course, that is a relatively tame or anodyne description of the business; there are others.