The Fools of National Socialism: Thoughts on Antisemitism and the Fight Against Trumpismby Dan Berge

The Fools of National Socialism: Thoughts on Antisemitism and the Fight Against Trumpismby Dan BergerThe emerging opposition to Trumpism has rightly focused on the groups facing the most dire, most violent threats–people facing deportation, exclusion, and mob assault. Within this logic, antisemitism remains a powerful ideological trope that the now-mainstreamed far Right has projected onto its authoritarian platform. From the announcement of Trump’s campaign in June 2015, it was clear that his worldview was shaped by far right conspiracy thinking, in which antisemitism is never far removed: the notion that “Mexico sends their people” is a foolish framing of why and how migration happens. Yet it reveals the antisemitic structure of Trumpian racial logic.Put simply, Trump’s antisemitism is not primarily about Jews. Rather, the antisemitism functions as a structuring apparatus for his racist political outlook. By antisemitism, I mean a right-wing populist ideological framework that is 1) steeped in conspiracy thinking 2) premised on a misplaced anti-elitism against a secretive, racialized cabal that 3) can only be understood in crude, patriarchal nationalist terms. This kind of antisemitism is evident in Steve Bannon’s recent claim that he is not a “white nationalist” but rather an “economic nationalist.” Antisemitism here combines the neoconservative desire for U.S. militarism to fight a global “clash of civilizations” with late-19thcentury tribalist race thinking under the banner of capitalist accumulation. As the independent scholar Chip Berlet wrote in 2012, antisemitism is a racializing logic that, since 9/11, has applied as much to Muslims as to Jews. Whether it is Mexico “sending their people,” Hillary Clinton’s “secret [meetings] with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” (yes, he said that), or a host of other paranoid utterances by the now president-elect, Trump’s worldview is antisemitic. He understands geopolitics as a series of conspiracies that need to be met with violence. Race is his shorthand for describing whether someone is an agent of a global conspiracy or its victim.Read more -- source link
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