Fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio in the front seat of an Ansaldo SVA biplane, getting ready to bomb Vienna. Trieste, 1918.
Left: Stop taking children from their parents!
Right: But Obama started it!
Left: I don’t think that’s true, but it’s irrelevant right now. It’s happening NOW.
Right: It’s been happening for years!
Left: Okay, so its about time to stop it, right?
Right: But you didn’t complain about it six years ago.
Left: Either I didn’t know about it, or it wasn’t happening. Either way, can we please stop taking children away from their parents now! We can argue about who to blame for it later.–Anonymous Meme
It was the war upon hypocrisy that transformed Robespierre’s dictatorship into the Reign of Terror.
–Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
Me ne frego è il nostro motto (I don’t care is our motto)
–Line from ‘me ne frego’ song, circa 1920
This past week I started researching a long-planned blog article on the concept of governance–specifically a piece on recent trends in democratic governance and their implications.
But there are certain weeks since the election of Donald J. Trump that take on the character of a watershed moment. Charlottesville, August 2017 was such a moment. The eruption of a political crisis around DHS policy directives for the handling of migrant families at the southern border is clearly another such.
In response to this significant watershed moment, I am here actively resisting the temptation to write a post about immigration policy and the values that I think should inform it. In writing such a post, I would have already silently accepted a key liberal assumption—namely that this past week in the Trump administration is best understood as a complete failure of good governance instead of just more grist for the mill in the ongoing “culture wars” and a test marketing trial run for worse things yet to come.
Trump isn’t failing at crafting coherent immigration policy (and in so doing minimizing disruption, cost, or God forbid, affronts to human dignity). In fact, he isn’t trying to “solve a problem” in any way.
For those of us accustomed to thinking of some version of “good governance” as a yardstick for the success or failure of leadership in a democratic republic, and especially for an administration blessed with majority party control over both houses of Congress, it is really hard to find fault with wanting to frame a (self-inflicted) political and humanitarian crisis this way. When you’re in power “you own it”—with the caveat that in a democracy fixing it generally means addressing social issues in a manner that respects the laws, rules, norms and customs that make up our democratic process of governance.
On June 23rd, CNN reporter Kevin Liptak wrote a piece entitled, “Trump’s Go-It-Alone Immigration Strategy Ends in Chaos, Confusion,” providing a lot of good ammunition for this reading. Liptak’s piece walks us through the botched fallout stage: How on Tuesday, June 19th, Trump told Republicans that he was “1000% behind them” in their attempts to pass an immigration bill; how by Friday, he had dismissed this effort as a waste of time; how he initially said that it wasn’t something he could fix through an executive order, and then five days later claimed to have fixed it by signing one; how once he had signed it, white house and agency officials burned midnight oil, feverishly trying to figure out how to square it with zero tolerance; how none of this thrashing about provided any indication about how and when to reunite separated families, etc.
With all this in mind, I understand why it’s hard for liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives not to think that this horrifying spectacle is a demonstration of a disqualifying lack of compassion married to rank incompetence, and as clear evidence that the authoritarian, Trumpian cult of personality and its associated shoot-from-the-hip style of governance can only lead to disaster. Even as recently as Sunday morning, June 24th, Dan Rather was writing on his News&Guts site, grumping about a lack of basic competence.
But of course, this is not the way Trump and the MAGA crowd see it. There’s no point trying to make nuanced distinctions such as illegal immigration versus legal, refugee and asylum-seeker applications vs. drug-running MS-13 gangs, etc. because it really isn’t about crafting updated policy and figuring out how to implement it within applicable law. Once again, it’s mostly all about renewing the conservative contempt for the “out of touch liberal crocodile tears” and ginning up the “whataboutism” steam engine so that it is chugging furiously. Its about seeing the extent to which they can “get away with it” without political cost or penalty.
Trump isn’t failing at crafting coherent immigration policy (and in so doing, minimizing disruption, cost, or God forbid, affronts to human dignity). In fact, he isn’t trying to “solve a problem” in any way that good governance folks could possibly understand. It’s for this reason that Trump could still optimistically proclaim at the end of the week that the immigration issue is going to play well for him in the midterms.
Even among we “failure of good governance” folks, some sense of this nevertheless also starts to sink in. In the CNN piece, Liptak referred to the fallout over family separations as a “high stakes experiment for how Trump can operate outside the normal guardrails of the presidency.” And at the end of the article, he notes that in a private meeting this week, “Trump cast the immigration issue as a political one, likening it to a culture war matter akin to kneeling NFL players or Confederate statues.”
A Fistful of “isms” for Your Consideration
As you might have guessed by now, this post is not going to be my piece on democratic governance per se, and how Trumpism’s style of governmentality has pervasive contempt for it. Instead my aim here is to look at some things that came up this week in in the course of the family separations crisis to try to highlight the contour of this contempt as such.
Whataboutism:
When the migrant detention center photos of separated children started making their way into the press, there actually weren’t too many outraged “Fake News!” outbursts (a few Trump shills tried to insist that they were child actors, however). Instead, as previously mentioned, the President and his defenders cranked up the heat on the “whataboutism,” insisting, for example that family separation was also administration policy under Obama (a claim rated as at best highly misleading on factcheck.org).
Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “Allah cake? What the fuck is an Allah cake?
Perhaps you have not yet been exposed to the term whataboutism, although the tactic is well-known to all, since it has been the preferred argumentative strategy of the extreme right for some time now, especially during and since the 2016 election cycle. “What about Antifa?” What about Vince Foster? What about those deleted emails? What about…BENGHAZI!!! These are Clinton focused ones, but there is a nearly inexhaustible supply of these responses ready-baked by the right-wing talk empire.
My all-time favorite actually came to me recently from a friend, who reported on a conversation she had with a family member about the SCOTUS Christian cake-baking decision: “I bet if someone asked for an Allah cake at a Muslim-owned bakery, and the owner said no, the fake media wouldn’t even report it.” This one completely threw me for a loop, I must admit. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “Allah cake? What the fuck is an Allah cake?” As I was mentally sorting through all things about this scenario that didn’t make sense, my friend rescued me by simply saying, “Look, the only sort of person who would request an Allah cake at a Muslim-owned bakery is an asshole.”
As should be clear, the beating heart of whataboutism is the charge of hypocrisy. In logic, Whataboutism resolves to what is referred to as the informal fallacy “tu quoque” (latin for you also). Tu quoque is quite disarming because it has two simultaneous aspects to it that cause the interlocutor to be thrown off balance. There is the element of “red herring” or misdirection away from the original issue at hand; and there is the aspect of ad hominem, or personal attack. Attacking the person rather than the argument is of course, argumentative bad faith. But where the attack made is the specific counter-charge of hypocrisy, there is something else going on here, something more than just garden variety case of ad hominem.
Whataboutism is especially pernicious because it misdirects through demoralization. It says, “who are you to accuse me, you with your own faults and misdeeds? Not only are you not worthy to make your claim, but you know that it is true, and your sense of injury is actually feigned. You act like you are all that, but you are no better than me.” It is for this reason that the fallacy tu quoque is also called the fallacy of false moral equivalence. The general characteristic here is the tendency to say that two similar actions are morally the same, even where the moral actors in the two situations have admitted to having very different motivational structures.
As a misdirection for purposes of counter-charging hypocrisy, whataboutism can only end up in a race to the bottom, in a death spiral of demoralizing mutual accusation. Whataboutism thus usually appears prominently in the most persistent and violent conflicts, such as between Irish Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Whataboutism actually has its contemporary origins in communist-era Russia, where it was a favorite official tactic for deflecting Western human rights criticisms of the Soviet Union. While the practice waned a bit after the civil rights movement in the US, it became a favorite of Vladimir Putin in the post-Soviet era. Under Putin, the emphasis has been on avoiding internal reflection upon external criticisms by emphasizing other states’ wrongdoings and insisting that dubious Russian actions have been necessary responses to western provocations. Where this isn’t an option, Putin simply asserts that the reporting of independent media is false. Putin thus pioneered whataboutism plus disinformation and active measures.
Whataboutism is thus part of the story, both told and untold, of the role of Russia and Russian influence in the 2016 US election.
The problem here is that “only God can know the human heart” (Kings 8:39), as Arendt reminds us.
It is also worth mentioning in closing here that the dynamics of this “boundless hunt for hypocrites,” per Hannah Arendt, was also the very thing that turned the French Revolution’s Jacobin state of emergency into the Reign of Terror. In her 1963 book On Revolution, Arendt actually spends over fifty pages marveling at the “momentous role that hypocrisy and the passion for its unmasking” played in the revolution’s later stages.
Why should hypocrisy, one of the minor vices, become “the vice of all vices?” Why should it be hated most of all, she asks, even more than the more substantial vices it tries to hide? Is hypocrisy then such a monster? Arendt goes on to explain this remarkable happening by saying that in the French Revolution, which followed Rousseau, public virtue came to be almost exclusively identified with the passions, specifically with a profound pity for “les misérables,” (the suffering masses) or “les malheureux,” (the unfortunate ones).
Bu where the source of public virtue becomes identified so closely with the quality of the heart, with the sincerity of the âme déchirée, (the torn soul) Arendt writes, it makes sense that one would then start to find “intrigue and calumny, treachery and hypocrisy,” everywhere one looked. In this way the focus of the revolutionary project of political emancipation shifts away from a primary political concern over forms of government and the people as “citizens of the republic” to a preoccupation with people as “the suffering masses.” Where there is this sort of shift from the political to the social question, justice and the rule of law tend to take a beating.
There is certainly nothing wrong with having compassion (although these days pity is not what it used to be). The central problem here is that “only God can know the human heart” (Kings 8:39), as Arendt reminds us. Since we can’t be sure of even our own innermost motivations, and have to sometimes raise suspicion even against ourselves, the political demand that everyone should display in public his or her innermost motivations effectively transforms all social actors (i.e., everybody) into hypocrites, because to do as demanded is essentially impossible. In the end, there is nobody left who does not stand accused, and the revolution consumes itself.
Nobodyism:
Perhaps conspicuous whataboutism is not enough to convince you that reflection upon failures of good democratic governance this week did not extend very far beyond the headshaking of establishment liberals. If so, then maybe Masha Gessen’s piece in the New Yorker on how the family separations “enforces the rule of nobody” might help do the trick.
For most of us good governance folks, the spectacle of Trump, Nielsen, and Sessions all giving wildly differing accounts about why family separations were occurring fed right into the story that this was a terrible week for the White House. At least until Gessen pointed out that the major yield of the week was not that the Rethuglicans couldn’t get on the same page, but rather that they were going to “get away with it” without penalty, and without paying any particular or immediate price.
As Gessen wrote, “When Trump blames the cruelty at the border on the Democrats; when Sessions says that God made him enforce the law indiscriminately; or when Nielsen, claims, in effect, to be just following orders, the nation’s top officials are not merely lying; they are de-personalizing the perpetrators.” Not only are they refusing to be held accountable, Gessen says, they are saying that nobody will be accountable for it.
Rather than a bad week that displayed ineptitude at solving a problem and managing a self-made crisis, therefore, the week was a great success in that it confirmed that this tactic, this “deflection technique” (right out of Putin’s playbook, by the way) could be deployed here successfully.
It was Hannah Arendt, Gessen writes, who pointed out in On Violence that “in a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted…she called bureaucracy the rule by Nobody.”
So along with whataboutism, we can add nobodyism to our contour of contempt for democratic good governance.
Idontcareism:
Finally, as exhibit C, I give you the “I don’t care” jacket. I first heard about it on Facebook, where a friend posted that Melania had worn it on her trip down to the detention center. The assertion was immediately met with cries of “Fake News!” But as we all found out, it was true.
There can be little doubt that Melania Knauss, as an Italian-speaking Slovenian from what had been a fascist-held village, knows very well what it is all about.
What was the meaning of this message? Was it just an unfortunate high fashion word salad thing? What did it mean, and to whom was it directed? The most compelling (and chilling) account to emerge came from an Italian blogger named named Giovanni Tiso, who published a piece on Overland.com called, “A Brief Fascist History of ‘I Don’t Care.’
Tiso says that I don’t care is a translation of the early fascist era slogan, ‘me ne frego’ that went on to become the emblem of the fascist lifestyle (menefreghismo, Idontcareism) after Mussolini came to power in 1922. There is a direct line of connection between Mussolini and the pro-WWI “arditi” (daring ones) with their me ne frego songs (I don’t care if I die fighting), songs sung to hail the fascist poet-soldier-adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Black Squads that entered Rome with Il Duce wearing menefrego lapel pins and other such emblems.
But menefreghismo was more than just an emblem of the esprit de corps of pro-fascist partisans. As Tiso writes, Mussolini explicitly elevated it to the philosophy of his regime. So what was and is Idontcareism? Per Tiso, it stood for “a kind of detached self-reliance, or moral autocracy.” Just as Italy broke with its former allies and charted a stubborn path to the ruin and devastation of the second world war, Tiso says, “so too was the fascist citizen encouraged to reject the judgments of others and look straight ahead…Ignorance and a proclivity to violence were applauded as desirable qualities.”
Any of this sounding strangely familiar? Maybe you can see it in the faces of Trump supporters who will not be dissuaded from worshiping the man who is going to take away their health care, and who believe all of his dark fantasies despite overwhelming evidence that they are, just so, fantasies.
Tiso is careful not come out and say that Melania Trump chose the jacket in order to send a coded message, even though he also shows, in the closing paragraphs of the article, that me ne frego is well known throughout the international neo-fascist movement and has a good deal of currency as a signifier of ideological nostalgia. There can be little doubt that Melania Knauss, as an Italian-speaking Slovenian from what had been a fascist-held village, knows very well what it is all about.
Democratic Governance & the Contour of Pervasive Contempt
While Democrats, appalled values voters, and liberal media focused earnestly on the policy problem of immigration (and how to accommodate the nasty president while yet cleaving to some notion of good democratic governance) it was just another day in the culture wars conducted by an incumbent and his party that control mostly everything. When significant numbers of people appeared to blanche, they fired up the whataboutism steam engine. When it was clear that along with the poorly-planned rollout of zero tolerance, the fallout stage had also been botched, they test-marketed their nobodyism. And when some of us concluded that they weren’t going to be able to completely quiet the furor on this one, they unfurled their Idontcareism. Because they really don’t.
