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Oct. 25, 2023 - Straight White American Jesus
27:48
Fascism is Our New Normal III: Red Caesar
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Axis Mundi Axis Mundi.
What's up, y'all?
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today, we're continuing our series, Fascism is Our New Normal.
It's not a cheery topic, but it is one I think is important.
Before we get going today, let me just tell you about a couple of things.
One, we have a new series running from Access Moondi Media.
Access Moondi Media is a research-based podcast network that we at Straight White American Jesus have launched.
This month we are running On God's Campus.
It's a show that chronicles the ways that religious universities have marginalized students over time despite receiving taxpayer-funded money.
So what that means is taxpayer-funded money is going to institutions that historically have not allowed black students.
Or today will not allow gay or non-binary or trans students on their campuses as students or will expel them because of their parents or so on and so forth.
So it's a deep dive.
It's made by the great folks at the Religious Exemption Accountability Project.
You should check it out.
If you're interested in the histories that go from Bob Jones in the 1960s all the way to the present.
If you want to hear about Title IX, if you want to hear about class action lawsuits, if you want to hear from students who are fighting back, check out the series.
The next thing is we have our October recommended book list.
You can check that out in the show notes.
We have a couple of great titles.
Some of them you'll have heard about, others not.
One of them is When Religion Hurts You by our friend Laura Anderson.
It's all about religious trauma and healing from it.
Another is about Ronald Reagan's evangelical vision for America in the 1980s.
Another is about the history of the NRA.
So check those out.
And as always, check out our merch as well.
All right.
Let's get into it.
All right, y'all.
So last week I talked about fascism as our new normal, and I used Hannah Arendt's idea of the banality of evil to discuss someone like Greg Gutfield, who's on Fox, and some other figures who are kind of in the ether as talking heads on the American right.
And I want to continue that today.
And I want to kind of continue to go upstream.
So we started this series with some comments made by Donald Trump about executing his political enemies or his political opponents or General Milley or anyone else.
And it really prompted this idea that we have just normalized fascism.
Well, last week, I talked about the very ordinary people who are propagating fascist ideas on the American right.
And today I want to go upstream a little bit.
So if Gutfield is a talking head on Fox, I want to go to some of the people who are considered intellectuals on the American right and kind of provide a look upstream, right?
If you think about, you know, a swimming hole and you're in the summertime and you're swimming, there's a little waterfall or a stream or something.
You know, if you go upstream to the source, you start to see where the water's coming from.
Is it a spring?
Is it a natural source?
Whatever.
Is it melting snow?
Whatever.
Well, I want to go upstream a little bit to members of the American right who are really filtering some of these ideas downward to the talking heads like Gutfield and others.
And a lot of this starts at the Claremont Institute.
Now, you might be familiar with the Claremont Institute as a think tank, a right wing think tank.
It's been in the news a lot because of John Eastman.
John Eastman is, of course, the lawyer who really helped Trump and his administration construct the idea of using January 6th, the certification of the election, and Mike Pence and the fake electors and all of that to keep Trump in power.
Now, Eastman is now under fire.
He's indicted, the whole thing.
He's in a lot of legal trouble.
He was a law professor at Chapman University, which is about 10 minutes from where I grew up in Orange County.
The Claremont Institute is where Eastman is affiliated.
Eastman is not a lone figure there.
It's not like he was rogue and they're just now embarrassed.
The Claremont Institute is a place where these ideas have really been flowing from during the Trump presidency and afterward.
One of the people at the Claremont Institute who's been most influential about this is a guy named Michael Anton.
Anton, you might be familiar, wrote this essay called the Flight 93 Essay, going back to 9-11 and the people who took down the terrorists who were flying one of the planes.
For Anton, the election of Trump in 2020 It was supposedly the Flight 93 election.
It was the time when the United States had one last chance to save itself from assured ruin.
Now, I want to stop for a minute and give you my thesis for today.
If last week the idea was that, you know, evil and the normalization of fascism happen through ordinary people, people who are not extraordinary, who are not special, who are not geniuses.
Well, today I want to talk about this.
Fascism needs crisis.
It needs catastrophe.
And it often constructs it, synthesizes it out of thin air in order to convince a portion of the electorate, a portion of the citizenry, That things are so bad, things are so catastrophic, that elections and democracy will not work.
We saw this last week.
I played for you the clip from Gutfield.
Gutfield said, elections don't work.
We need war.
I mean, he said it out loud on national television.
Nobody blinked.
Nobody looked up.
Nobody called for Fox News to say sorry.
He said democracy doesn't work.
He's not alone there.
The trick for fascism is to convince you that things are so bad.
They are so catastrophic.
They are so in decline.
They are so emergency oriented that if you don't act now, It will all go bad.
I have spoken all over the country about this when it comes to Christian nationalism.
That if you invent a crisis, you can get people so afraid that they will willingly give up their freedoms and give up their ideals of democracy in order for a strong man to come and save them.
Well, Michael Anton from the Claremont Institute, the same place as John Eastman, has been one of the forerunners in the intellectual American right, trying to convince you that the country is so bad that the only way that one can think about saving it might be through the institution of a strongman.
Now, this is where we get the idea of a Red Caesar.
Some of you might've been online the last couple of weeks.
Some of you might've been on Twitter or on Instagram or wherever, hearing all the jokes about men thinking about the Roman Empire.
This is where this comes from.
People like Michael Anton and others on the American, these intellectuals that think tanks in other places, Hillsdale College, I'll get to them in a minute.
They have started to think about the Roman Empire and specifically Caesar as a model for what they want.
Now you're thinking, well, why Caesar?
Why not just point to, you know, uh, uh, uh, Ordinary old dictator.
Why don't we just talk about, you know, Franco or Pol Pot or someone else?
Well, here's how they use Caesar to ease themselves into a government under the control of one man.
And it is a man.
Here's how they do it.
They're going to tell you that Caesar took over the Roman Empire when the Republic was in such decline, its institutions in such disrepair, That it could no longer function.
That Caesar was not somebody who wanted to just be an authoritarian madman.
We can see those in history.
There's authoritarian madmen running around thirsty for power and domination.
No, no, no, no.
Caesar had a much different approach.
What he wanted was something like a benevolent dad saving kids from themselves.
A monarch who doesn't let the Republic go to ruin despite itself.
So he steps in.
He takes over.
Sure, you gotta give up a lot of freedoms.
No more democracy.
No more will of the people.
But this is not a king.
I mean, he's not in charge because he was born into some family.
He's not a part of a royal lineage.
I mean, it's not like that.
He's a really Good guy who just wants to save you from yourself.
So when did we start to need that?
Well, let's ask Michael Anton.
Here's what he says in his book, The Stakes.
He says in a section called The Sixties.
He says, The Sixties are here understood broadly to include all the lefty trends that originated as countercultural in that era, but now are the culture.
He goes on in this section to basically say that the 1960s are where the country lost its way.
That it is the place where the country really began to decline.
Now, sorry, there's so much to say here.
I've been talking about this for a long time.
I talk about it a lot in my book.
My book is right behind me, Preparing for War, that in the 1960s, people, American Evangelicals, white Christian nationalists, white landowning men, white male Catholics, they began to see a country that they said was in ruin.
Now, my argument is, why was it in ruin?
Well, it was in ruin in their mind because so many of the people who didn't deserve to be in charge started to find voice and representation and equality.
I can go through them all if you'd like.
I've been over this a million times.
If you don't believe me, buy my book.
Check it out.
What happens in the 1960s?
Civil Rights Act.
Voting Rights Act.
The end of Jim Crow.
Immigration reform.
Women's liberation.
The feminine mystique.
No-fault divorce.
The Loving Case makes interracial marriage legal in all 50 states.
Stonewall.
Large-scale movements of queer liberation.
Protesting the Vietnam War.
I could go on and on and on and on and on.
What did I just say?
Women, people of color, immigrants, queer folks, all saying, this is our country just like it's yours.
We have a voice.
We have a vote.
We have rights.
That's the 60s.
Now, if you fast forward, okay, for Anton, what you get from the 60s until now, is a country that is not just not doing great, or kind of in decline, or yeah, it could be better.
I mean, look, you want to get a cup of coffee and ask me what could be better in this country?
I'll tell you a lot of things.
There's a lot of things that could be better.
But if you read Anton's, uh, Michael Anton, this guy from the Claremont Institute, if you read his essay in a book called Up from Conservatism, Revitalizing the Right, um, What he talks about there is a country that is so bad that guess what?
Just like Ray Gutfield said, elections don't work.
He's not sure anything will work except for a red Caesar.
He says that we've been trending down for two generations.
He said, I mean, I'm going to read you some of the headings in his essay, in this book.
The Constitution is all but dead.
The security state has been weaponized.
We have two-track justice.
Now, I'm totally happy to talk about that, but probably in a different way than him.
We can't even punish or deter normal crime.
We're so blinkered by ideology that we can't or won't apply obvious solutions to simple problems.
We prioritize diversity over mission and performance.
Our military doesn't win.
He literally wrote that in a section title.
Our military doesn't win.
Another section title is Nothing Works Anymore.
If I were grading this paper, I'd say, please be more specific, but OK.
He also says this, that people are corrupt.
Now, I'll stop there.
I'm not going to give you every title in this essay, every section title.
The people are corrupt.
This is how you justify fascism, or this is how you justify the Red Caesar, as I've been talking about today, or this is how Gray Gutfield justifies Civil War.
The people are corrupt.
It's all so bad that not even the people can be trusted.
Let me put it this way.
I love the people, but they can't be trusted to save themselves, so I have to save them by way of a one-man government.
If you tell me that from the 1960s till now the country is in such bad shape, Gutfield said it last week, schools, borders, here we see Anton saying it all over the place when it comes to military, when it comes to diversity, when it comes to nothing works anymore, when it comes to, he says in another place, religious faith is all but dead, marriage and other social bonds are desiccated.
I'm going to have to break the news to my wife later that marriage and other social bonds are desiccated.
She's going to be upset with me.
Birth rates have cratered.
Young people face dim prospects.
Again, we can talk about these things.
I agree.
I don't want to talk to my kids about the climate crisis.
It's terrible.
But there's a difference between that and saying things are so bad.
Things are so catastrophic that the only way out is for us to have a red Caesar.
But that's what he's arguing.
Damon Linker is a lecturer at UPenn, and he's written a lot about the American right.
And he's a pretty good voice on these things.
He told The Guardian this a while back about Anton and others from the Claremont Institute and this whole kind of intellectual American right.
They've convinced themselves thoroughly that the current order is decadent, corrupt, and far removed from the proper admirable origins of American government.
Trump's loss in 2020 radicalized a lot of these people.
It occurred to them that they might not win a proper election again.
That would mean that they're shit out of luck unless there's some other path to power.
That's where Caesarism comes in.
So, you know, Linker's basically saying they realize we can't win an election because most people, I don't know, women, people of color, Gen Z, folks who have immigration stories in their family's history, queer folks, I don't know.
They're not buying Christian nationalism.
They're not buying an ideology that demonizes them, dehumanizes them.
So we may not win an election again.
So?
Let's make it out like this.
Life is so bad.
Life is so bad.
The country is in such a state that we need a red Caesar.
There's another person I'd like to highlight today, and that is Kevin Slack.
And he wrote a book called War on the American Republic.
He is a history professor at Hillsdale College.
Hillsdale College is a notorious right-wing evangelical college that produces much of this kind of material.
So here we see the very like explicit tie-in with Christian nationalism.
Okay.
And here's what Slack says in an excerpt from his book.
Small Republican communities may have little power against an insulated national bureaucracy, the deep state, the bureaucrats, blah, blah, blah.
But perhaps the new right's own cultural revolution is the fertile soil for political revolution, either as autonomous islands of Republican civilization in increasingly fragmenting order, or the bulwark for, you guessed it friends, you ready?
A Caesar.
At some point in the decline of every empire, it's nice that he's admitting the United States is an empire.
That's a whole other discussion we could have.
With its dissolute senators, it finally dawns on a truly great leader, one born of the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle, hey, I could run this thing.
The new right now often discusses a red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-constitutional rule, stop, what?
Post-constitutional rule, openly saying, maybe we need post-constitution.
Maybe we need an America after the Constitution.
Who's post-constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.
There it is.
Caesar's not about Caesar.
He just wants to restore the strength of his people by taking all the rights and voting abilities from the people.
That's it.
I just want to help the people by taking the freedom of the people so they can know what's actually best for them.
I continue.
Viewing the government as a series of industrial complexes, the ambitious man who desires glory need only figure out how to pull the strings in a few of them, and he will have the keys to the Washington D.C.
castle.
The kleptocrats have already set the precedent of purges in the bureaucracy and military.
They use the state to arrest political dissidents, even as they refuse to indict their own minions for federal crimes.
So that, to me, seems like a reference of you arrest, I don't know, J6 rioters, but you won't arrest every last person of the Biden family because of, who knows, made up conspiratorial, we don't have the evidence, even though we've tried and we have the smoking gun, but it went away kind of presentations from the House of Representatives every week.
Here's the last part that really gets me.
What they do not truly consider is that the public arrests, trials, humiliations, subjugations, and terminations they have created may be reserved for them.
So now it's about retribution, y'all.
The deportations and mass dislocations they promised for their own enemies may be used on themselves.
The corporations they use for despotism may be nationalized, redistributed, or smashed.
The lengthier stalks of kleptocratic wheat may be the harvest of righteous fury.
So here's a man from a Christian college, a historian, saying that Caesar is the answer in order to save the people from themselves in a post-constitutional America.
He sees that the kleptocrats have already set the precedent.
Look, they did it first.
They were purging people and mass dislocations.
I don't know what that's referring to.
What they haven't considered is that the arrests, trials, and humiliations might be reserved for them.
We're going to get revenge.
Caesar's going to get revenge.
So think about what's happening now.
Caesar's going to save the people, but only the real people.
You know how Dan Miller always talks about populism?
Populism is about the real people and all the non-real people.
All the immigrants, the others, the foreigners, all the people that don't belong, all the like non-humans, the people that are less than human, right?
They are the ones that are going to be outside looking in when Caesar comes into power, saves the Republic for the people, but perhaps gets rid of, arrests something, the non-citizens, the non-real people.
Now, the thing I want to close with today is that this is not something that is isolated to right-wing intellectuals at think tanks who are just on podcasts and You know, kind of doing what they're doing.
It's not just history professors at Hillsdale College.
This is the third episode I've talked about fascism.
Fascism is our new normal.
So we heard from Donald Trump.
All right.
That's Donald Trump.
And y'all are very familiar with that.
OK.
Last week we heard from Greg Gutfield.
Fox News.
Saying it out loud.
And here's my contention about Gutfield.
Gutfield's not special.
Gutfield's not especially smart.
He's just repeating things that he hears from people he thinks are smart.
People he thinks have good ideas.
People he trusts.
People he thinks are intellectuals.
People he thinks are quite knowledgeable.
We all do this.
Friends, we all do this.
Right.
I know some things about Christian nationalism.
That's what I do.
Great.
Some people listen to me.
Wonderful.
You know what?
I know nothing about so many things.
I have this like very amateur interest in quantum physics, in cosmology, and I read things.
And look, it takes me a long time to kind of figure out who to trust.
There's some really tantalizing ideas in those fields.
And when I read, I think I'm not a specialist here.
I don't actually know in a scholarly way what's up.
I like all kinds of things.
It could be from what camping gear to buy.
It could be where to go on vacation.
It could be what wine to drink.
Whatever.
Here's the point.
When we meet people who seem to have a depth of knowledge, sometimes we trust them and we repeat what they say because we're like, yeah, that's smart.
That sounds right to me.
Well, Gutfield's that.
Gutfield's not that.
Brilliant.
I don't think he's ever had an original thought.
But people like Michael Anton, people like Kevin Slack, They're feeding this into the stream and down the river, Gutfield picks it up.
But they're not alone.
You might have heard me on this show or on another podcast talk about Stephen Wolfe and his book, The Case for Christian Nationalism.
In that book, he calls for a Christian prince.
Who would be at the top of a hierarchy of Christian magistrates.
He talks about putting atheists in jail for blasphemy.
He talks about legislating the Sabbath and its laws.
He wants to make it so that if you don't go to church on Sunday, the government might put you in jail.
Okay.
There's other people out there.
There's a guy named Charles Heywood, and I might come back to him in this series.
Heywood is somebody who runs a kind of secretive fraternal lodge, according to the Guardian.
He likes to think of himself as a warlord.
So if you think about parts of the world where there are warlords who control certain territories or who have certain, you know, pieces of land or regions that they kind of control, well, Heywood's kind of that in the United States.
And he has this whole compound with armed guards and the whole thing.
And you know what he says about this whole idea of the Red Caesar?
Caesarism and its time-legitimated successor, monarchy, is a natural, realism-based system under which civilization can flourish.
These folks are so scared of you.
They're so scared of the people, people that don't agree with them.
They're so afraid of living in a world with folks that don't look like them, don't believe like them, whose bodies don't conform to their image, that they're willing to say that monarchy, one king, is natural.
Friends, if you think about the least American idea there is, it is monarchy.
The least American thing you can come up with is a king.
I mean, we can do American history, and I would love to, I'd love talking about American history from places other than, right, colonial New England.
But you want to talk about the Constitution?
You want to talk about the Bill of Rights?
The whole idea was this.
We don't have a king.
We don't have a monarch.
Now you can try and finagle me and say, well, we just need one like a Caesar, like temporarily just because the Republicans such bad place.
He just needs to take over.
Emergency powers from day one.
I mean, if Trump's elected in 2024, just let him have emergency powers until things are kind of good again.
And then we'll see what happens.
You could try to like lie to me or trick me.
This is fascism normalized.
This is an ideology that says, look like us, believe like us, act like us, or you're not a welcome.
You're not part of the people.
And we'll deal with you when the time comes.
This is all ground setting in my mind.
OK?
It's all ground setting.
Preparing the ground for when things like this are brought up.
And we can all think about 2024 and Donald Trump.
But I'd love to think about Wisconsin and the Supreme Court or North Carolina or Arizona.
I'd love to think about cases that are local, your school board, your local representative, the state of Texas and the idea of school vouchers and so on and so forth.
When people start to think that democracy doesn't work, when that becomes normalized, Then we're in a place where democracy can go away and we might just watch it pass us in the night.
Sounds kind of hyperbolic, I know.
A lot of you listening or watching are like, Brad, I know all this stuff.
It's scary.
I get it.
So I'm not here to like preach to you.
I'm just here to say we can trace these things.
We can see them in our ether.
And I guess for me, it's just a matter of I'm not going to not notice.
I'm going to not not call it out.
I'm going to not get numb.
I'm not going to say, well, yeah, I'm bored.
Let's go find a new topic.
Not going to do it.
Not if we're going to continue to have something like a gesture toward the idea of a democracy, however unfulfilled, however unjust, however unequal.
Not going to do it.
Going to keep calling attention to it.
In the coming weeks, I'm going to have interviews with some great people to talk about this.
One of them is Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
That's going to come out in December.
I have interviews with Diane Winston about Ronald Reagan and his vision for America.
I have one on Republican and right-wing student organizers in the sixties to the present day and how they have perpetuated much of the ideology I'm talking about now.
Have some interviews on the ways that evangelicals have rewritten the Bible to say what they want it to say and so on.
So going to be talking with other experts on this.
I promise it won't just be me yelling into the mic every week, but I'm just not going to not notice because this stuff is really, really important.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for watching.
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