Ironic Fascism

 The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about the Trump administration's growing tendency to attach "jokey," alliterative names to its various new ICE detention camps. It started with "Alligator Alcatraz," and all too quickly became a pattern. To this notorious prison complex in the Florida swamps was soon added other facilities for confining human beings—newly christened with such "cutesy" titles as the "Cornhusker Clink" (in Nebraska) and the "Speedway Slammer" (Indiana). 

As the Times notes, the device is part of the broader tendency on the administration's part to dehumanize their victims by reducing their suffering to a punchline. The people held in these various facilities are of course fathers and mothers. They have families and lives of their own. But the people who are imprisoning them—Trump and his army of trolls—are such fundamentally insincere, trivial-minded, and narcissistic people that the existence of such families and their pain has no reality for them. 

The millennial/Gen Z Trump enthusiasts who now staff the White House press office and DHS communications jobs exist entirely in a world of tweets. Behavior is rewarded if it is provocative enough to elicit attention on social media. If you trolled the libs and "made their heads explode" in outrage today—you have won the game. The fact that there are actually people sleeping tonight on a wet floor in a prison camp, as a result of the policies they are "joking" about, doesn't occur to them. 

The Times notes that most of this "trolling" tone now comes from official government social media accounts—where memes about corn stalks wearing ICE caps alternate with seemingly straight-faced white nationalist propaganda (a picture of a white pioneer family in a covered wagon, above the slogan, "Remember your Homeland's Heritage," e.g.). 

As the Times puts it—with delicate understatement: "The official X accounts of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security make heavy use of the new style — an irreverence synced to the fast-moving ironic currents of the chronically online, detached from concerns about impropriety."

The specter of "ironic" fascism and "jokey" white nationalism may strike people as an especially dystopian postmodern twist on the old far-right formula—something that could only have emerged in the era of reality TV and omnipresent social media. But in truth, this tone of impudent "trolling" has always been an element of fascist propaganda. As Hugh MacDiarmid observed: the speeches of the 1930s fascist dictators were always delivered to the sounds of "loutish laughter" from their followers. 

As Brecht suggests in his Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui—"farce" has always been part of the tone of reactionary populism. Punching down is the watchword of the whole project. But what we can't permit to happen is to lose sight of the reality beneath this mask of "irony." Merely because Trump and his staffers are trivial-minded, empty, unreal people—sending their ephemeral memes into the digital void—that does not mean that the consequences of their policies—the lives they upend—are fake too.

What we need then is to preserve our ability to "see the horror in the heart of farce"—as Brecht wrote in the play's final monologue. And if we could learn to do so—he concluded—perhaps "we wouldn't always end up on our arse." (Tabori trans.)