Following the Fascist Playbook, Republicans Openly Court Proud Boys

By Rebecca Onion, Slate

22 October 18

The Proud Boys’ acceptance at a fancy Republican club looks a lot like the courtship between conservatives and fascists before WWII.

ast weekend, the fancy Metropolitan Republican Club, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, hosted the Proud Boys’ Gavin McInnes. The ex-founder of Vice magazine, failed stand-up comic, and current leader of an alt-right “Western chauvinist” group gave what was, according to a witness, a bizarre and disjointed speech. McInnes dressed up as a Japanese assassin who killed a Socialist politician with a sword during a political rally in 1960, re-enacting the event with the help of a fellow Proud Boy.

Afterward, the Proud Boys clashed with antifascist protesters on the street in several fistfights that were caught on video. The NYPD arrested several antifascists, but for days failed to detain any Proud Boys, finally announcing on Monday following public protest that they would seek charges for some members of the group. The club, for its part, issued a statement defending their decision to invite McInnes, saying that his speech celebrating the murder of a socialist was not meant to incite violence.

Some argue that the best way to deal with groups like the Proud Boys, which thrive off the oxygen of publicity, might be to ignore them. But was last weekend’s incident a turning point in the relationship between establishment Republicanism and alt-right neofascists? Shouldn’t we be paying attention on those grounds alone? The Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill and Will Sommer argue that it was, and that the success of the Proud Boys in gaining entrée into places like the Metropolitan Republican Club (as well as past public support from Republican figures like Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, and Devin Nunes) is reminiscent of the way fascism gained power in Europe between World Wars I and II.

Weill and Sommer quote historian Robert Paxton, who wrote in 2004 that if you take 20^th-century European history as a guide, any publicly recognized relationship between the conservative elite and neo-Nazi skinheads (the most fascist-adjacent faction the American fringe had to offer at the time Paxton was writing) would be a warning sign that American fascism was on the rise. So here we are, for the millionth time in the last two years, looking back at the history of interwar European fascism for some lessons.

Fascism used conservatism for its own purposes most effectively in Mussolini’s Italy. In the early 1920s, as Mussolini began his rise to power, the Black Shirts, or squadristi, rampaged through the Northern Italian countryside, perpetrating a campaign of terror. After World War I, many Italian veterans were bitter, chafing at the Allies’ refusal to give the country the land they believed it deserved. With the social order in flux, right-leaning veterans who had joined the National Fascist Party targeted agricultural regions where socialism had recently gained political power, and recently annexed territories that had large numbers of ethnic Slovene and Croat residents.

In these places, where they perceived a threat to their values of true “Italian” purity, the squadristi beat people, burned down houses, threatened families, and destroyed property. In some cases, they fed Socialist political opponents castor oil, and then paraded them around in the backs of trucks, so that they would foul themselves in public and discredit themselves to their followers. Historian Michael R. Ebner estimated in 2010 that this campaign of political terror killed several thousand, and wounded tens of thousands. In its destruction of local socialist movements, it laid the groundwork for Mussolini to take power.

The most important lesson of the squadristi period when looking at the Proud Boys today is that conservative landowners, threatened by their workers’ emergent socialism, supported this widespread Fascist violence as a necessary corrective. Like present-day Republicans who offer legitimacy to the Proud Boys’ theatrics, the conservative powers-that-be in Italy looked the other way while squadristi violence worked to their own benefit. Ebner writes that police often arrested the victims of these attacks while allowing the Fascist perpetrators to “slip away”; “magistrates convicted Socialists at an absurdly higher rate than Fascists.” If any were detained, Fascists would go to the jails and “force” the guards to set their compatriots free. In this way, Ebner writes, “squad political violence started to erode the institutions of the liberal state” even before the Fascists marched on Rome in 1922 to insist Mussolini be put in charge.

The next step of the right-leaning Italian establishment was to help Mussolini into power. Explaining how conservative politicians came to find common cause with Fascists in Italy, historian Martin Blinkhorn wrote in 2000 that Fascists “were often critical of the way capitalism worked, especially on a financial level, but seldom of capitalism itself.” While Mussolini initially opposed established institutions like the monarchy and the Catholic Church, he and his followers changed their tune “as the possibility of power became real and it became necessary to confront the question of how it might actually be achieved.”

The public political violence of the squadristi period, on its own, would not have been enough to install and maintain Mussolini as dictator. Mussolini needed support from the crown, the Vatican, the military, and landowners to seize and retain power, and he got it. The establishment, Blinkhorn wrote, essentially decided “that Fascism deserved the governmental role that Mussolini was now demanding—indeed that a brief administering of ‘Fascist’ muscle might be just the thing that Italian politics and society needed.”

After Fascists murdered the socialist parliamentary deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, a coalition of Socialist, liberal, and Catholic deputies left Parliament en masse in protest. Blinkhorn believed that Mussolini, who was “panic-stricken” by this resistance, might have resigned at this point if the king, Victor Emmanuel III, had demanded it. But the king, and his supporters on the right, thought Mussolini was better than the alternatives—Socialism, or else an explosion of Fascist violence directed at the conservative elite—and believed they could control him. They couldn’t.

In other parts of Europe, conservatives sided with fascists in order to preserve the social status quo. In Germany, the early ascendancy of Hitler was made possible by what Blinkhorn called “the machinations of conservative politicians and generals” and the “complacency” of economic interests. “The German elites who opened the way to Hitler and the Nazis gravely misunderstood and underestimated the force with which they were flirting,” Blinkhorn wrote.

A counterexample is Great Britain, where scattered fascist movements failed to gain political power during the same period, in part because conservative forces did not accept them. Historian John Stevenson argued in 1990 that in Britain, the lack of a true left-wing challenge to conservative hegemony—one that might under other circumstances push those on the right to embrace fascism—denied a real foothold to even the most successful fascist politician, Oswald Mosley. Stevenson noted that the semi-military style of the British Union of Fascists—uniforms, marching in formation—rubbed the establishment the wrong way in the early 1930s. “The combined use of mass meetings, uniformed parades, and the trappings of continental fascism, all at the command of a charismatic leader, had no antecedents in British politics,” Stevenson wrote. In June 1934, when antifascist demonstrators disturbed a meeting of the BUF and clashed with a smaller number of Fascist believers, conservative forces in Britain blamed Mosely and his Fascists for the violence. As Hitler’s regime in Germany got bloodier, the BUF “found itself increasingly alienated from respectable opinion.”

A few promising candidates and a lot of energy aside, we don’t have a real socialist movement in this country, either—certainly not one of the kind that led Italian and German conservative elites, worried about social instability in the wake of an all-consuming war, to embrace the “strong arm” of fascist violence in hopes of keeping their power. But we do have an unreasonable fear on the right of that type of socialist challenge—a fear that is stoked by the president’s rhetoric. Just last week at a rally in Topeka, Kansas, Trump said that Democrats, who are “radical” and “unhinged,” are “too dangerous to govern.” In his USA Today editorial, which also published last week, he wrote: “The new Democrats are radical socialists who want to model America’s economy after Venezuela … If Democrats win control of Congress this November, we will come dangerously closer to socialism in America.”

The president’s refusal to condemn unconditionally the violent alt-right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 felt like a bellwether for conservative acceptance of neofascist alt-right violence. The Proud Boys’ invitation to the Metropolitan Republican Club, and that club’s refusal to apologize for this act of legitimization in the wake of the violence that followed, feels like the next dangerous step.

"The Hate U Give," Reviewed: An Empathetic, Nuanced Portrait of a Teen's Political Awakening

By Richard Brody, The New Yorker

22 October 18

 

here’s no special merit to films that address subjects of urgent political concern, nor to ones that advocate progressive views. Sometimes such movies offer little more than fan service, of a sort that hardly differs from canonical interpretations of superhero stories designed to please hardcore followers. In skewing their drama and characters in order to stoke viewers’ responses in favor of one particular outcome, some political movies dull the emotional experience of watching. Far from advancing and reinforcing the desired view, such numbing movies suggest that the view exacts a price in vitality; viewers will decide for themselves whether the trade-off is worth it. What’s certain is that a narrow view of advocacy and a narrowed emotional range go hand in hand, and that filmmakers, in the grip of their own persuasion, often miss that connection.

“The Hate U Give,” which is in wide release this Friday, does not fall into this trap. It’s an explicitly political movie that advocates a manifestly progressive view of its subjects, but it does so with a varied emotional energy, a set of complex characters in uncertain situations, and a perspective that emphasizes the drama’s open-ended, trouble-filled engagement with society at large. It does so with a sense of balance, of heads-up alertness that suggests a dramatic type of peripheral vision—the director, George Tillman, Jr., seems to know, and to convey that when the camera is on one character or several others are present and potent, whether just out of frame or somewhere out of view but clearly exerting an unseen influence.

It’s the story of a black family living in the predominantly black Georgia neighborhood of Garden Heights and confronting, directly and personally, legally enforced and socially reinforced norms of racism—which is to say, they’re a perfectly ordinary black American family, working and living under circumstances that, as is clear from the start, would be inconceivable for a white family to face. The central character, Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), a sixteen-year-old high-school student, is also the movie’s central consciousness—her presence, her conflicts, and her voice (in the form of a retrospective voice-over) dominate the film from beginning to end. The movie, based on a novel by Angie Thomas, with a screenplay by Audrey Wells (who died earlier this month), opens with Starr’s recollection of “the talk” that her father, Maverick (Russell Hornsby), gave her and her two siblings—about how to behave if stopped by a police officer, in order not to give the officer any excuse to shoot them.

Starr was nine at the time. Her half brother was ten, and his very name, Seven, is relevant to the story’s premise: he was named by Maverick in reference to point No. 7 of the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, which demanded “an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people,” and it’s precisely the police murder of a black person on which the drama of “The Hate U Give” pivots. Maverick, who owns a convenience store, and Starr’s mother, Lisa (Regina Hall), a nurse at a local hospital, arrange for Starr to attend a well-funded, predominantly white high school in a nearby community. (Starr describes the “two versions” of herself—Version One, which is her in her own neighborhood, and Version Two, which she puts forward in her school in order not to be considered “ghetto.”)

Starr Version One goes to a party with black friends in her neighborhood; when shots ring out, one of them, a young man named Khalil (Algee Smith), a lifelong friend, brings her to safety and drives her home. But during a routine traffic stop—ostensibly for a failure to signal a lane change but actually a case of a white cop catching Khalil “driving while black”—he reaches for his hairbrush, which the officer claims to believe is a gun, and shoots Khalil dead. Starr, the only witness, had started recording the arrest on her phone; ordered to put it away, she nonetheless is able to identify the officer by his badge number.

When a grand jury is convened to consider charges against the officer, Starr is asked by an attorney for Khalil’s family named April Ofrah (Issa Rae) to testify. But, as Starr knows, Khalil had been a newbie small-time drug dealer (because his family faced a catastrophic failure of the safety net) and was working for a local kingpin named King (Anthony Mackie), who pressures—and threatens—her not to testify. What’s more, Starr also faces pressure from the local police and their allies not to testify. To complicate matters, Maverick is King’s former “right-hand man.” He served three years in jail for a crime committed by King—the deal being that, after his release, he’d be released from the gang. Maverick wants Starr to testify; Lisa, however, who fears King’s gang (the King Lords), as well as the police, wants to protect Starr above all, and to keep her from testifying.

The drama is sharply delineated, the conflict clearly drawn—but Wells’s script sets them in motion by means of a wide array of complicating subplots and contextualizing incidents, which Tillman balances nimbly, energetically, and perceptively. There’s Starr’s relationship with Chris (K. J. Apa), her boyfriend, a white classmate; her friendships with other classmates, white and Asian; her relationships with her younger brother, Sekani (TJ Wright), with Seven (Lamar Johnson), and with Seven’s other half sister, Kenya (Dominque Fishback); her relationship with her uncle, Carlos (Common), who’s a police officer; and there’s the media factor, which plays a role in all of these relationships. The killing of Khalil is major local news, widely reported on television—though, because she is a minor, Starr’s identity is concealed, including from her friends.

What’s more, these media accounts are themselves a defining aspect of the movie’s societal landscape: the depiction of Khalil, the obsession with his criminal behavior, the depiction of his family, the depiction of protests that erupt after his killing, the representation of the Garden Heights community, the questions posed in interviews by a Barbie-like TV reporter are all implicated in the story. Similarly, attempts by the police to prevent residents from recording officers’ actions are also elements of the drama; so is the oppressive prevalence of gun violence on the part of the drug-dealing gang and the endemic, menacing presence of guns in the homes of law-abiding citizens as well; so is local activism, the urgency of protest, and police repression of it.

There’s also a plethora of social context in the film, regarding both Starr’s personal and familial backstory and the political framework within which Maverick is raising the family. (He instills his children with political ideals by way of a quasi-military but nonthreatening discipline.) Lisa—who nonetheless shares Maverick’s larger ideals—inculcates in the children a practical and fundamentally apolitical route to success. Despite Starr’s painful efforts to meet the unfair expectations of her white classmates, she meets with a wide range of uncomprehending judgments ranging from oblivious to insidious. The vectors of frustration, rage, and despair that rack the black residents of Garden Heights are echoed, wrongly and prejudicially, in the media in ways that only aggravate the hostility that the residents face.

The very title of the film, borrowed from the late Tupac Shakur’s explanation of his album titled “Thug Life”—The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody—highlights the cycle of damage caused by racism. The phrase, like the film, unambiguously asserts that racist practices and attitudes, whether official or merely habitual, are the underlying engine of the movie’s very action. The movie isn’t a bold or bracing work of stylistic originality; rather, it’s one in which a familiar manner is expanded and elevated by way of insight and sensibility. “The Hate U Give” is the rare movie that puts the background into the foreground—that integrates its characters’ personal struggles and dreams with a wide and clearly observed political and historical environment. Its unstinting vigor and empathetic but unsentimental nuance mark it as a distinctive and exceptional political film.