A Clear and Present Danger

W ill the real semi-fascist please stand up?

President Joe Biden, advocate of what he has the temerity to call the “Unity Agenda” — not a unity agenda, but the Unity Agenda, which says all you need to know about that — has given a stupid, irresponsible, and intentionally provocative speech in which he declared Donald Trump and his supporters a “clear and present danger” to the United States, having earlier described them as practitioners of “semi-fascism.”

Of course the Trump movement is semi-fascist — and for many of its most enthusiastic foot-soldiers and lieutenants, you could strike the “semi” bit. You can run the fascism checklist: Nationalism? Check. Authoritarianism? Check. Cult of action? Check. Contempt for liberal norms, procedures, and institutions? Check. Propensity for political violence? Check. Anti-individualism? Check. The replacement of black shirts by red hats is only a matter of stagecraft, which presumably comes naturally to a super-virile he-man whose staff plays him showtunes from Cats and other Broadway shows to soothe him when he’s feeling a little verklempt.

But, on the question of semi-fascism: J’accuse, Mr. President.

Begin with President Biden’s irresponsible and foolish invocation of the phrase “clear and present danger,” which is not only the title of a Tom Clancy novel, but also a legal rationale — one invoked in order to permit the federal government to abrogate Americans’ civil rights in the face of a public emergency. It is a doctrine that has been cited in order to permit the state to imprison war protesters — and even war critics — or to arrest a man for making a speech at a political rally. The phrase “clear and present danger” comes to us from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the Schenck decision, which also gave us that nonsense about “shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” In Schenck, war protesters were distributing flyers advising draftees of their options for resisting induction into the military, and for this they were jailed, ultimately with the blessing of the Supreme Court.

The notion that the state — or some political messiah not yet in control of the state — must act through some extraordinary means to meet an extraordinary threat to the political order is not limited to fascism per se. It is a tenet of streitbare Demokratie, a general European principle of German origin under which illiberal and antidemocratic actions are permitted to the state when deemed necessary to address fundamental threats to liberalism and democracy themselves. This is the principle under which Germany prohibits certain political parties from competing in elections and under which Austria criminalizes the sale of certain books; the laws against so-called hate speech in Canada and elsewhere are based upon a similar rationale, with Canadians’ civil rights being subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

A classic fascist strategy is provoking — or simply inventing — an existential emergency in order to justify suppressing political enemies on national-security grounds. The Reichstag fire of 1933, which the Nazis used as a pretext for the abolition of certain German constitutional rights, is the textbook example of this. An invented or exaggerated crisis is not the only brick in the wall of fascism — sometimes, an invented or exaggerated crisis is merely an instrument of bad and destructive policy, such as the so-called War on Drugs: There is a world of difference between the Reichstag fire and Reefer Madness.

If Biden were trying to provoke the Trumpists — and I assume that he is, though they do not seem to require much in the way of provocation — this would be the way to do it. To have the president spelling out a constitutional rationale for the suppression of civil liberties while Mark Zuckerberg is explaining how the FBI leaned on his company to suppress New York Post reporting inconvenient to the Biden campaign, Democratic politicians work to drive Fox News off the air and abuse their powers to criminalize political disagreement, the IRS engages in retaliation against Democratic political opponents, etc., is grossly irresponsible, even by contemporary Democratic standards.

Biden isn’t taking on the Trumpists — he is imitating them.

There is a real, urgent crisis in the assault on the legitimacy of American elections — and that assault is bipartisan, Democrats having rejected the legitimacy of the 2000 and 2016 elections even if they did so without the drama the Republicans managed on January 6, 2021. There is also the ongoing issue of the Democratic disinclination to stem the actual election fraud that persists in their rotten boroughs, from Philadelphia to Mexia, Texas. President Biden, rather than address any of these concerns in a substantive way, is making things worse, hoping to intensify the atmosphere of crisis in order to benefit politically from it.

Fascism-adjacent language comes naturally to American politicians for some ungodly reason. President Biden’s recent proclamation that “without unity, there’s no peace” is straight-up axe-in-a-bundle-of-reeds stuff, völkische nonsense, as is most “unity” talk. The superstition that the state is the nation — that it is the source or instrument of our identity as a people, and that the chief executive of the national government is a provider or guarantor of national meaning or unity or some other metaphysical good — is the very foundation of fascism. The American people, in their hundreds of millions, do not require unity as some sort of patron’s donation from Washington — what we require from Washington is only liberty, the rule of law, and competent government. Given that Washington cannot reliably provide any of those three, perhaps the ladies and gentlemen of the capital city should abandon their spiritual pretenses.

We are not going to get scrupulous and intelligent government from the Biden administration any more than we got it from the Trump administration. What the Biden administration is offering is more chaos, and more opportunism arising from that chaos. It may not be a Reichstag fire, but one cannot help smelling the smoke.

So, who’s the real semi-fascist here? This isn’t To Tell the Truth, where the host asks, “Will the real John Smith please stand up?” and one person rises. This is more like an Olympic dais: Just because you didn’t take the gold in this particular quadrennium, that doesn’t mean you aren’t in the game.