(an image of the fasces unbound, from T. Corey Brennan, “The Fasces: Ancient Rome’s Most Dangerous Symbol,” in Antigone: An Open Forum for the Classics, July 2023).
Good day.
I want to begin with an argument that all of us on the American Left have faced, namely that we have become blinded to the dangers of Trump. To our liberal critics, the cries for a cease-fire and an end to genocide in Gaza are a both a cognitive and political failure; this is part of the strange view that the current administration represents a kind of liberal katechon or restrainer who holds back an even worse state of affairs.
There is much about this view that is untenable, but it gets one thing right: a Trump administration would be a disaster. At least three things could happen, as I want to suggest below. I want to use a highly specific image to characterize this very real state of peril. At the same time, I want to argue against liberal doomers by taking-up a position most often occupied by analytical philosophers (!), and which is often identified with David Hume. A full and rich statement of the facts as they are — even as part of a speech-act that is clearly a warning — does not commit us in a direct way to a course of action. Or rather, it often does, but that connection is contingent, a matter of convention, and in exceptional circumstances like our own, it needs careful reexamination. Put differently, we shouldn’t connect a descriptive “is” with a political/prescriptive “ought.” Understanding the threat represented by Trump — and what follows here will be a grim picture indeed — doesn’t necessarily put us into the electoral box carefully crafted by liberal centrists.
Part I: Description
(MAGA fan art?)
Trump has made no secret of his plans. With his re-election, at least three things could happen. First, we should expect an almost immediate suspension of liberal norms and practices, encoded as they are in the so-called rule of law. We should expect an immediate state of exception, with a purge of so-called deep state actors and their replacement by loyalists. This in turn opens an opportunity for the second possibility, which is an aggressive refashioning of the military apparatus to quash various forms of domestic dissent. The resulting punitive complex of cops and soldiers will be trained to think of opposition as enmity, which will lead to very real and perhaps even existential peril for those of us engaged in Left “subversion.” Third, we should expect ugly and violent elements in civil society to be unleashed; I make this prediction in part based on the rise of a new generation of guns rights activists who no longer couch their “defense” based on delusions of “well-regulated militias,” but openly speak of using their private armories to promote their ideals of things like private property, family, gender, and so on. In short, we should expect a state of affairs where all the forces of government and weaponized right-wing citizenry will bear down on us, with potentially deadly force. The Biden/Blinken wing of the Democratic party has charged us with being naïve. Does this description sound naïve? If so, consider the image I am about to use.
Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, added historical weight and expanded levels of meaning to the new name (Fascisti) with a banner headline on October 25, 1919: “The fascist emblem signifies unity, force, and justice!” As Brennan astutely notes, the depiction of the Roman fasces below those words shows the bundle’s leather thong undone at one end, undermining the idea of unity and implying instead that the beatings were not far off: ‘The clear implication is that the kit is in the process of being readied for punitive use.’ (my emphasis)1
By referring to this image, I don’t want to reawaken the long and tedious debate about whether MAGA is in fact fascist, crypto-fascist, quasi-fascist or something else entirely. Nor am I suggesting that the actual fascists — self-identified ones who love cryptic and esoteric symbols — are beginning to use the unbound bundle as a symbol for their hopes and expectations of Trump’s return. I am simply détourning the unbound fasces as a matter of provocation, in a sense to do what the liberals have also done: to provide a warning about what could happen. In this case, the fasces unbound can be unpacked and understood semiotically to convey two messages related to the three points I made above: the axe in the middle of the bundle represents the violence of the state, and the rods represent the threat of fellow citizens, armed and primed to think of domestic dissenters as Others/enemies. The unbinding is in preparation for Trump’s second term. This is without question the way MAGA views the moment, whether or not they use Mussolini’s language and imagery or not.
Part II: A Prolepsis
I will get to the prescriptive part of this essay in the second installment, but as a kind of foretelling of what I want to argue there, I want to begin by saying again that the conventional leap from is to ought needs to be the focus of our interrogation. Describing things in the way I have done is often part of an urgent imperative to “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” and so on. This point is tedious, so apologies are in order: there is in fact another way, in fact there is a manifest plethora of other ways ahead of us if we keep the threatening image of the fasces unbound in mind. In other words, a warning of the kind I have just tried to articulate — one where we seem to be on the cusp of a clearly post-liberal, even authoritarian order — doesn’t suggest that existing institutions or leaders are capable of protecting our material interests, or even protecting us. Biden hasn’t proven himself on this ground. If the Democratic party claims to be the liberal katechon, then in a Hobbesian sense if it loses the next election it will have failed its purpose. This isn’t the same as saying we will have returned to a state of nature, but MAGA has made it clear that we will have entered a qualitatively different period: a state of exception, very likely a condition of political/legal impunity with regard to extrajudicial violence. We have to ask whether whatever remains of legal protections will be enough to protect vulnerable members of our society, or whether more robust protections — and here we can speak of material/economic conditions — will be necessary. We will also be forced to ask whether electoral means will be the best way to get there.2 In short, a whole host of new questions, new situations will arise, unfortunately very likely as a result of confrontations with new (and newly-empowered) right-wing coalitions of bad actors. As the fasces unbound suggests, this will be a perilous world. We must be up to this challenge, and we must realize that liberals won’t protect us any more than they are protecting Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.
From James Romm, “Authoritarianism’s Emblem,” in New York Review of Books, November 23, 2023, pp. 47-48. The banner from the Il Popolo article is in the image above.
I raise this issue in part as a retort to those who automatically move from these kinds of discussions to “debates” about third parties in the US electoral system. We had best avoid that road to nowhere.
A couple typos here, which I will fix !