F-Bombing the Donald

Lately I have been busier than I have been in some time. Hopefully, my writing will add up to something like a dissertation. Hopefully my intro to Islam class will have been a constructive pedagogical experience I will be able to move on from.

But the news from the past weeks has been horrible. And it's made me think we need to rethink the whole conversation of religion and political violence at least how academic religionists have been having it. 

There's one term I can pick out in the voluminous noise reacting the to Islamic State-linked terrorism as typified by Donald Trump. It's the f-bomb: fascist.

Trump wants no Muslims coming to US and toyed with the idea of a database registering Muslims here now. He has open contempt for women, other minorities, and people with disabilities. And despite avowing love for "wonderful" Christianity, his ideas about religion are clearly condescending and manipulative.

And since real fascists are gaining significantly in France, middlebrow lefties are indulging their favorite vice of writing think-pieces saying we're going the way of the Volksgemeinschaft. They write these about every kind of leader from Bush to Bloomberg, but this time they're a little shriller.

So why add to the chatter? What is to be gained in this terminological exercise of what the Confucians would call the rectification of names (zheng ming 正名)?

I think the problem with debating fascism or some other alienating political label is that it obscures how natural and comfortable a part of democracies like ours prohibitive and violent xenophobia often is.

To call Trump a fascist puts him on the other side of the Atlantic, where fascism comes from and is becoming more popular. It could even put him on the other side of the Pacific, where exclusion of most immigrants is the norm, and migrant workers can't expect much legal recognition. It certainly puts him on the other side of the year 2000.

What we're saying with the "fascist" label is he's not of us; the problem with him isn't our problem. He doesn't obey the better angels of our country and so on. The White House and Paul Ryan said it. 

You don't have to be a fascist to be part of something wrong. You don't need a rigid totalitarian ideology or the idolization of a belle culture, which we have not had much of here. We can account for Trump as an organic, non-invasive part of our own political history: he's an instance of an endemic American problem. 

Inclusive democracies need a sense of outsiders. Ideas of citizenship for us over here require the non-citizenship of them over there.

The purview over women and slaves in ancient Attica or early America was a part of the idea of the citizen as a public man who could hold himself up among equals in so far as he kept order with what was his: this is nothing new to say.

However, I think democratic political rituals have a different kind of bonding power than those of political forms that demand less of regular people. Now, I realize our daily American ritual of reading bloggers who shout about common issues is not the same kind of bonding as ancient Athenians voting together to execute people or even modern Koreans doing mandatory military service.

Nevertheless societies like ours have a democratic sense of exclusionary propriety. There is a democratic, if unequal, right to say who doesn't belong. This is something citizens hold among each other even, or especially, in the absence of earlier legal privileges that defined belonging to republics like Rome or Venice.

Americans tend to forget about hanging signs that said "no Irish need apply" and Chinese exclusion, whereas European debates about migration evoke the battle of Tours and the siege of Vienna as if they happened last week. However don't memory and forgetting both reflect similar attitudes about what and who belongs to "us"?

As hokey and tired as it is, to call someone a fascist is to say that this person is exceptionally bad and aberrant, it is to raise the possibility of a political emergency situation, . Totalitarianism was an emergency the wealthy countries got themselves into and out of in the mid-20th century and have been congratulating themselves ever since. 

So rather than say the Donald is an unprecedented throwback to the bad old world, we need to understand the wholesomely, ecumenically democratizing forces of which his appeal is part. 

To paraphrase Talal Asad's interpretation of Churchill's dictum: I don't know of a way other than the democratic way. But though using common alarm at Donald Trump or Marine le Pen or Narendra Modi can be a meaningful basis to assert people's rights together, there are deeper and more serious problems than a paean of solidarity can confront.

Democracy how we do it isn't just an ideal with possible different meanings. It involves different ways political practices and forms of recognition build on each other. Confronting claims of exclusion that arise within these practices, and the demagogues who make the claims, involves thinking through what kinds of demands these processes make on us.