This HAS To Be Normal
This HAS To Be Normal
Normalization in a time of madness, on behalf of a population dedicated to not knowing terrible things. Bearing witness in a supremacist nation on the verge of a Nazi takeover.
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Nazism is on the ballot this year, and people who consider themselves Nazis know it, even if so many of the rest of us seem not to want to. So it came to pass that Nazis came to the pro-Trump boat parade in Jupiter, Florida last week.
There are only a few weeks until the election, so I suppose if I want to write about the election as a thing yet to happen, I only have a couple more weeks to do so. Want to is an open question, because any statement of any position one makes regarding an election is often taken as a direct attack on one's own position, requiring either a defense or a counter-attack, or else as an invitation to pose as pundit and propound upon one's own electoral strategy as the only path to victory, and these sorts of things don't seem to be to much purpose. But I guess I'm going to write about the election this week and probably next week too, because frankly I'm terrified for my country and all the lovely people who live in it, and writing is the tool I have, and I believe that witness to the truth is the antidote to ignorance, especially the deliberate and manufactured ignorance favored by our dominant spiritual tradition of American supremacy.
It's entirely possible that we're on the verge of a total Nazi takeover of the U.S. government, is the thing.
I know somebody will read these words and think that I'm being radically divisive or alarmist, or perhaps that, in my alarm about the dangers posed by Republicans (who some years ago I called a hate group and now I believe we must think of as a Nazi party), I'm diminishing and whitewashing the failures and dangers of the Democratic Party. I suppose maybe so. Maybe I'm kidding myself, or maybe I'm fooled by the flood of bullshit I'm subjected to each day. I sure wouldn't be alone.
Anyway. The Nazis came to the pro-Trump boat parade in Jupiter, Florida last week. They flew their swastikas and delivered the usual Nazi slogans and salutes and slurs. I guess they have a more honest version of the Trump hat that they sell, which says MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN. There aren't a ton of stories about it. "Ho-hum, Nazis at a Trump event" is the thinking I suppose. The story I linked to is at pains to point out that this was only one boat among hundreds that was flying Nazi gear, and that the parade organizer called the Nazis "scum," so if you want to believe that this event was a one-off sort of oddity of an otherwise normal politician, you're invited by the story to do so.
In order to accept the story's invitation though, you'll have to ignore the fact that Nazi support for Trump (and vice versa) runs broad and deep throughout Trump's political career, and you'll have to ignore all the other similar incidents of Nazi/Republican adjacency and alignment over the years, and you'll have to ignore the fact that Trump and his party are literally demonizing racial minorities as subhuman vermin, using vile lies in order to foment violence against them as an entrée to fomenting much more violence against many more people on the basis of even worse lies, and you'll have to ignore the fact that Trump's rhetoric and policy positions have always been near to Nazism and now (with the introduction of proposals like using the U.S. military against "the enemy within" or deploying white supremacist paramilitary gangs to purge the ethnic minorities "poisoning the blood" of the country, or enacting mass deportation of over 10 million people) are completely indistinguishable from Nazism, even if it's going to be called something else. And you'll have to ignore many other things, too many to list.
If you want to ignore those things, the story has got your back. It largely ignores them, too, and leads off and closes with rationales for minimizing the implications.
Now, if you're somebody who isn't into ignorance, you might find it odd that anyone organizing a pro-Trump boat parade would object to the presence of Nazis at a rally in support of a clearly Nazi-aligned candidate for the presidency. You might find it interesting that any news story would take pains to explain that it was only one Nazi boat at a floating rally in support of a Nazi, when the truth is that at any Trump event the open Nazis are the people being most honest about certain rather important things like what it is they are supporting and why exactly they are excited to support it, and all the people they believe are not humans but are actually despicable vermin and infectious diseases (as Republican-appointed Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, once called the most powerful unelected figure in Texas politics, recently referred to immigrants), and who they expect to see suffer and die, etc.
It's almost like most people in our media and many in our country are more committed to telling comforting fictions than to observing the actual swastika that's actually flapping around. It's almost as if people are more interested in finding a way to not know things that are difficult to ignore than they are in simply looking around and knowing.
Yesterday Donald Trump, whose brain is actively melting like a slice of Velveeta atop an Arizona Cybertruck, went out in front of a crowd and waxed rhapsodic about Arnold Palmer's apparently giant penis, which isn't the most lunatic thing he's done this month, it's just the most recent. Trump's brain resembles an accordion blind door in that it was never hinged in the first place, but he's observably batshit now, and millions and millions of people seem to not know or care. Those who don't know might be forgiven. There's a serious effort in headlines and stories to sanewash these sorts of things, with headlines like "Trump seems energetic in a scattered speech" and lines like "Trump told the crowd golf stories."
Years ago FOX News host Laura Ingraham gave a Nazi salute to end her speech in favor of Trump at the Republican National Convention. The story that was written afterward informed us that even though it did resemble a Nazi salute in the video and photographs to some, it couldn't be a Nazi salute, because it couldn't. And I've had it often explained to me that if it had been a Nazi salute, Laura Ingraham would have lost her job. Since she didn't lose her job, it wasn't a Nazi salute. The idea that maybe FOX News would not fire somebody for a Nazi salute doesn't seem to be on the table. Whenever I bring this moment up, somebody tells me similar things. Sometimes they even cite the story.
It's like we're all just playing pretend.
Maybe you don't like the we. I get it. Maybe you’re not playing pretend. Maybe you're a person of awareness, and good for you if you are. Or maybe you're somebody under threat, for whom the supremacist luxury of ignorance isn't offered, in which case you know far more about this than I do. You’re not who I'm going to mean when I say we in this essay. The more I learn about American supremacy, the more I realize how deeply internal it is, how inside it is. I don't trust my own motivations and assumptions well enough to exclude myself from the we of our national delusions. Let’s focus and just allow that the subject today is our country in aggregate.
Many of us are playing pretend.
They’re all around, the pretenders, the not-knowers. They’re we too.
And boy howdy does this world we live in have their—our—back.
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Kamala Harris sat for an interview on CBS' news program 60 Minutes the other day, as is traditional. Donald Trump skipped it, as is not traditional. CBS took great pains to use the time to make Trump and his propositions (which are menace and harm and brutality and cruelty when they aren't just anecdotes about Arnold Palmer's cock and the rest of the undifferentiated pink slurry that's falling out of what's left of his mind) and his followers seem as normal as possible, and Harris and her propositions and policies (some of which are very good and some of which are very bad but all of which are actually propositions and policies) and her followers seem as abnormal as possible.
This exchange caught my notice.
Bill Whitaker: You have accused Donald Trump of using racist tropes when it comes to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, when it comes to birtherism, when it comes to Charlottesville. In fact, you have called him a racist and divisive. Yet Donald Trump has the support of millions and millions of Americans. How do you explain that?
Vice President Kamala Harris: I am glad you're pointing these comments out that he has made, that have resulted in a response by most reasonable people to say, "It's just wrong. It's just wrong."
Bill Whitaker: With so many people supporting Donald Trump, a man you have called a racist. How do you bridge that seemingly unbridgeable gap?
Vice President Kamala Harris: I believe that the people of America want a leader who's not tryin' to divide us and demean. I believe that the American people recognize that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it's based on who you lift up.
Now this is extraordinary for a lot of reasons.
There is the idea that Donald Trump, who is clearly a virulent racist, isn't a racist, no no—he has been accused of using racist tropes. The normal one here is Donald Trump, who is framed not as a racist, but somebody under attack from accusations of racism, accusations that are entirely baffling despite a laundry list of relevant examples. The one who has to explain themselves is anyone suggesting that the obvious racist is a racist.
There's CBS's decision to render Harris' pronunciation of "trying" phonetically in their transcript—tryin', with a dropped "g"—which may or may not be a sop to people who in certain company never drop the "r," but is a bizarre choice in any case. (The wonderful thing about racism in a racist land, I think, is that you'll never really know about the subtle manifestations, not when the most overt examples of racism are still being framed as "accusations of racist tropes.")
And then there's this idea that Donald Trump can't possibly be racist, not if millions and millions of people support him. The premise I guess being it would be impossible for millions and millions of people to support a racist, because that would suggest that millions and millions of people are racist, or at least are willing to overlook racism to support a clear and obvious racist. The idea that millions of millions of Americans are racist and love racism and respond enthusiastically to racism is not ever on the table, even as the evidence that this happens to be true is overwhelming and inescapable. And it's never asked, is it, that since millions and millions of Americans hate Donald Trump, that Harris is actually in touch rather than out of touch? Supremacist Americans are normal, is the unspoken frame, and whoever they support must be normal, too. If somebody fails to appeal to them, then that is a failure to connect with the real people.
What's extraordinary about this is that it's all just assumed. Republicanism or American Nazism or white supremacy or whatever you want to call it is normal because it has to be normal, because if it wasn't normal than we'd have to say it wasn't, and then we'd have a lot of things to unpack and fix and solve, and that might get us into time and money. If millions and millions of the American people are racist, then America might be a supremacist nation, and if we started saying that America was a supremacist nation, then we would have to deal with that fact.
So, the syllogism passes unremarked: If Trump was a racist, then he wouldn't have support of millions and millions of Americans. Since he does have the support of millions and millions of Americans, he can't be racist, no matter how overtly racist he becomes. He can become (as he has) a full-blown Nazi and the idea of his racism will always remain an accusation, here in the land of the normalized supremacist.
Not long after the 60 Minutes interview, Harris went onto the fascist propaganda platform Fox News for an interview, and the syllogism reared its deliberately ignorant head again. Fox is itself an institutional embodiment of the syllogism. Harris was there because everyone pretends that Fox is a news network even though it recently had to pay out $787 million for lying in an attempt to try to help Trump overturn the last election, and even though everyone knows that it is a propaganda network founded by far-right shitbeans Rupert Murdock and Roger Ailes specifically to launder Republican lies. And I know somebody will tell me that Harris has to go on Fox or she'll be seen as ducking the tough questions, and they're probably right, and that disturbs me even more if it is true than if it is not, because it means that after a brief moment of clarity, conservatives have regained their exclusive ownership over the notion of normalcy and gotten the dominant narrative to agree with them.
Anyway, during the interview, "network" anchor and aging chia pet Brett Baier asked Harris this.
Baier: "Are they misguided, the 50%" that are supporting Trump? "Are they stupid? What is it?"
Harris: "Oh god, I would never say that about the American people." Trump "is the one who tends to demean and belittle."
The 50% number when talking about the Trump cult is interesting, mostly because it’s not anything like 50%. A much smaller percentage of the population has fallen into the cult, though their numbers are significant, and they are likely voters and enthusiastic ones. But Republicans aren't even 50% of voters, or anyway 50% is a threshold that Trump's never managed and Republicans in general haven't crossed since 2004.
But again the syllogism passes unremarked: Because Trump has the support of a large percentage of the electorate, he cannot be the sort of terrible person that he manifestly is, because it would be impossible apparently for an aspiring Nazi dictator to gain the support of a large and racially aggrieved percentage of a population. Harris meanwhile also enjoys the support of a large percentage of the electorate, but this support doesn't confer similar immunity. Only supremacists are real Americans. Only their support confers morality.
Trump's deranged ramblings are energetic if scattered, because they have to be.
Laura Ingraham didn't give a Nazi salute back in 2016, even though she did, because she can't have.
The Nazis at the boat parade are an outlier and an unwelcome fringe, even though they aren't, because they have to be.
Donald Trump isn't a racist, even though he is, because he can't be. The same goes for his corruption, his criminality, the proved fact that he is a rapist, his bullying, his profound ignorance and his repugnant cruelty, his unsuitability for office, his traitorous dealings with foreign enemies, his attempt to overthrow democracy, his threats, his love of and aspiration to dictatorship, his lies, his lies, his lies, his lies.
And so many of the rest of us—not MAGA, not even Republican—would rather not deal with it either. All these abnormal tumors that American white supremacy grows out of the national body have to be normal, because if they weren't we'd have to treat them, and treatment ... well. Treatment is radical.
We're like patients who would rather let the tumor spread than hear the diagnosis.
It's like many of us—so many—are just playing pretend.
All of this is normal, even though it isn't. It has to be normal.
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Again the reason I say we instead of they is that American supremacy goes deep, to the very roots. It’s inside. One thing that awareness has taught me is that it often hurts, exactly in the place ignorance numbs; that ignorance is itself one of the fundamental advantages of supremacy, and so, whenever I realize I have the option to not know, it is a clue to me of how near to supremacy I still remain.
Trump and the Republican Party in all its malice and corruption and hatred and grotesquerie have been made normal in the eyes of our institutions and in the eyes of our population. But think of what else gets treated as normal. Not just by the MAGA cult, but by the rest of us.
Think of all the other things that are political dynamite. It's "impossible" to say that the police are a militarized authoritarian instrument of racist brutality and should be defunded and the money distributed to programs that would provide actual solutions. It's "impossible" to say that immigrants are not a danger but a great strength, and that our goal should be borders as open as it is possible to make them, not just for the sake of hospitality but for the sake of economic thriving and global safety. It's "impossible" to say that our militarized mission of empire is not only murderous but counterproductive, a danger to us all, and should be drawn down, defunded, and minimized. It's "impossible" to say that sending bombs and "ironclad" political support to enable Israel's horrific ethnic cleansing in the Middle East represents a moral catastrophe of almost unimaginable ramifications. It's "impossible" to say that the United States is a country founded in genocide and slavery, and remains a supremacist nation.
Is it impossible to say to say such things? I don't know. It seems likely. I know that most Democrats seem to find it impossible. I am often told that they can't say these things, because portions of the Democratic base won't accept them, and we'll lose the independent votes we need to win.
I don't argue much these days, even if I have my skepticisms about the efficacy of winning support by not differentiating from the alternatives. I'm not a campaign strategist, and I'm shit at interpreting polls, and I've been wrong enough times about election results to no longer engage in our national pasttime of confidently proclaiming my predicted outcomes as accomplished facts. But I will say that if this is correct—if the only correct math for Harris to defeat Trump is bloody math—then it is even more dispiriting than the fact that Democrats support such things, because it suggests that far more of my fellow citizens are still in the spiritual death of foundational American supremacy than I would have hoped. I know I wish it weren't true if it is true. I know many Democrats don't even seem to want to say these impossible things to say, so I don't think political strategy is the only preventing factor.
And I know some will conclude that my critiques of Democrats means I want Trump to win. These are the risks, I suppose.
But still I speak my criticisms of Democrats, who I hope will defeat Republicans, because I think it is desperately important to witness to the whole truth. This witness to the wrong I see allows me access to the other side of witness, which is to the good I see. Despite my criticisms, Democrats do often move in the direction of truth, if and when enough people start speaking that truth. And Democrats also do spend a lot of time actually talking about addressing actual problems that actually do affect actual people, and actually fixing things that actually are broken, and have actual proposals for solving those problems that might actually help people deal with those problems. I suppose this is why the accusation that Democrats in general and Harris specifically are radical socialists remains so damnably hard to shake, no matter how much evidence to the contrary she and they provide.
And I know that some will conclude that because of my witness of these truths, and because of my belief that the danger of Republicanism is unique and horrifying, I have failed to be horrified by our nation's bipartisan complicity in authoritarian capitalism and empire and genocide, and wish to see them all continue to expand. These are the risks, I suppose.
Enough.
Let me allow the very likely premise that it is currently politically impossible to speak these truths about American supremacy.
If it's impossible, it's because punishment and authority make so many of us feel safe. It's because of that little conservative inside us, the one we have to oppress.
Recently Barack Obama was on the stump blasting Trump and he came close to saying an unsayable truth. He spoke of Trump's bullying and the great weakness that bullying represents. He talked about Trump's repugnant narcissism and greed, and his damnable lies and deliberate attempts to deceive, including even harmful and malicious lies about the government's response to recent hurricanes.
"When did that become okay?" Obama asked.
I suspect Obama knows the answer, just as I suspect Harris knows the answer to Bill Whittaker and Brett Baier's questions. If they know, I suspect it's true that neither can speak those answers in public—not because isn't true, but precisely because it is.
When did that become OK? For people that supremacy favors in this supremacist nation, it's always been OK, and Trump stands as the incontrovertible proof. I think it's true that Obama can't say something true like "of course there are Nazis at a Trump boat parade. Trump is a Nazi, and Nazism is pretty popular in this country. Every Trump boat parade is a Nazi boat parade." If he had said this, it would be absolutely true, and also would be seen as radical and unacceptable and abnormal and divisive in a way that being an openly Nazi candidate simply is not.
Are they misguided or stupid? Of course they are. "Yes, many of them are ignorant, and that ignorance is very often deliberately chosen, and yes, many of them are misguided, often because they like where being misguided takes them, but also a lot of them are just open bigots and they like open bigotry, which is why they support a bigot like Donald Trump." If Harris had said this, it would be absolutely true, and also would be radical and unacceptable and abnormal in a way that supporting an openly Nazi candidate simply is not.
In a land that values ignorance, truth becomes the greatest crime. And indeed it does seem politically catastrophic to speak certain truths, not because we have millions and millions of enthusiastic white supremacists—even though we do—but because so many of the rest of us are committed to not knowing that truth, because knowing it is too personally costly and painful.
There's little doubt that there is a cost to bear for suggesting these truths. Politicians don't speak them, and even still they—especially if they are not white, or men, or conservative—get barraged from all sides with questions about how they—who are at pains to not denigrate half the American population—would denigrate half the American population (even though it is a cohort that actually represents far less than half of the American population), by suggesting that this cohort’s chosen leader, who is a menace and a danger to us all (and actually is denigrating over half the American population), might be a menace and a danger to us all.
And so, perhaps in part because so many of us find the truth radical, politicians don't speak these truths. Maybe they're being savvy. Maybe they're being cowards.
Either way, we should be able to speak these "impossible" things. We aren't running for office; we don't need to be savvy to win over an electorate. Our only excuse can be cowardice.
We should be able to say that a privileged large minority of the American population—mostly white, mostly male, mostly straight, mostly Christian—responds enthusiastically to the popular and traditional Americanized version of supremacy, the version that a century ago inspired the German kind. Not only do they respond positively but with unshakeable loyalty, a loyalty that abrogates all other loyalties—even the loyalty we have to observable reality, even the loyalty we bear to the report of our eyes and ears. We should be able to say that a party that espouses Nazi beliefs and worships a Nazi as their leader is a Nazi Party.
What, then, do we do?
We do the thing that makes it more possible to say true things, which is to start saying them ourselves.
We start by witnessing to the truth, and continuing into conviction and hope. We start by believing that things can get better, and that we bear responsibility for making it so. We start by being willing to pay the price to make it happen, even if it costs us the unearned advantages that supremacy brings.
And we may pay a price for saying it, because in a nation dedicated to ignorance, truth is the primary crime. Radical. Dangerous.
We should bear witness to what is obvious, and do so as much as possible, as publicly as possible.
Many of us—so many—are just playing pretend. Making things normal because they have to be normal.
Some—a lot, I think—play pretend because we know that pretending the rising tide of American Nazism isn't happening is how you bring American Nazism into reality.
Some play pretend because we don't want to have to deal with knowledge, because it's too painful and costly to know.
Some play pretend because we don't like the other costs: who we'd have to work with to prevent it, or the work we'd have to do, or the advantages of privilege and reputation we'd lose.
In the same speech previously mentioned, Obama said this:
Real strength is about taking responsibility for your actions, and telling the truth, even when it's inconvenient. Real strength is about helping people who need it, and standing up for those who can't always stand up for themselves.
I think that's true. Let's do that.
Let us pay the main cost of knowledge, which is the loss of ignorance.
Let us witness, and be radicals for the uncomfortable truth, and in so doing, let us help make things that are currently politically impossible to say natural and commonplace.
No matter how the election goes, I think witness and radical truth will be needed, precisely because they are so "impossible" now.
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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which you can learn about how to support right here. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He fought the law and the law won.