As discussed yesterday, one of the many “hitting the ground running” acts of Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term in office has been to issue executive orders to dismantle a lot of progressives’ favourite policies, and many of them are calling it “fascism”:
Trump-the-Presidency 2.0 has already proved to be rather different from the 1.0 version. It is not merely that this time around he won the US popular vote. It is that he has “hit the ground running” with a whole stack of executive orders.
Watching the reaction to this has become — to put it mildly — a somewhat bifurcated experience. Lots of people, who were relieved at his victory, applaud what they see as a return to common sense; a rejection of censorship; a rejection of a politics intrusive into any and all aspects of life.
Conversely, there are also lots of — typically very online — people who see it as Fascism redux, as the equivalent of the end of Weimar Germany being live-streamed. How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; of removing DEI commissars from the US Federal Government; that includes appointment of women and persons of colour to senior positions; be Fascism redux?
The short answer is: it isn’t. The question then becomes, how can it be seen as such? This is where the long-run consequences of anti-discrimination law kicks in.
Anti-discrimination law creates a legal-bureaucratic structure that operates on the basis that the general citizenry is continually hovering on the edge of wrong think (racism) and wrong act (discrimination). The presumption becomes — without all this active effort — racism and discrimination will be unleashed.
This is nonsense. Anglosphere countries have low levels of racism and anti-discrimination norms have become widely accepted. Where there are discrimination issues, they are mostly problems of cultural distance that have a significant element of practicality from differing expectations between groups.
Nevertheless, it is very much in the interests of the legal-bureaucratic structure that anti-discrimination law sets up that propensities to wrong act and wrong think be seen as real, and endemic. Even better, is if the problem is seen as even larger than originally conceived.
So, we get a double expansion. The first expansion is in the range of protected groups. This provides a broadening of the social ambit of the potential wrong thinking (racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia …) and of the potential wrong acting (who might be discriminated against).
As this moral dimension becomes so elevated—not least because there are so much employment involved, but also as considerable social leverage is created by for those who can set what is, or is not, legitimate action and speech—there is expansion of what constitutes wrong think and wrong act. There is large, indeed expanding, ambit for intellectual and other entrepreneurs to identify new sins of discrimination, new sins of unequal consideration, new ways wrong think propagates, and new ways of signalling one’s rejection of such sins.
It is better still if uttering true things becomes a wrong act, expressing wrong think, for people are prone to do that, to notice things. Of course, if you start trying to shun, shame and punish folk for expressing true things, for noticing things, you are likely to generate quite a lot of resentment. This is useful, for such pushback just further “establishes” the propensity to wrong think and wrong act. Hence Transphobia and Islamophobia becoming such markers of wrong think—there are so many true things to not notice.
There is even a term for someone who notices inconvenient patterns — far right. A term that has become the classic thought-terminating cliché in the service of not noticing.