We need boundaries and a new aspirational consensus

Once upon a time, it used to be possible to assume that most Americans had, if not a considerd opinion, still an instinctive revulsion against Nazis. Those were the bad guys ...

No more. Elon, his incel acolytes, and his fanbase get their jollies from playing at fascism. One has to assume that many of these guys (yes, they are mostly guys) know little of what they are aping, because there's no evidence they know much about anything. Elon may be a deeper case; the South African class and milieu from which he emerged was often authentically fascist as they struggled to hang on to their white European privileges over the nation's Black majority.

Thomas Zimmer is a German, a professor of contemporary history at Georgetown University. He knows a thing or two about fascism. He reports that many in German society are trying to hold the line against resurgent neo-Nazis:

News broke Friday morning that Germany’s domestic intelligence service is now officially classifying the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” group. The decision came after three years of investigating the party and was presented in a 1,100-page report. ...

Zimmer explains carefully that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) can be accurately called "neo-Nazi" by US readers. All the other German political parties, much as they oppose each other, agree not to work with the neo-Nazis which made electing a coalition Chancellor, the Conservative Friedrich Merz, a messy process. But German civil society got it done; for the time being, their neo-Nazis are excluded from power despite winning 20 percent of the vote in the last election.

No surprise -- JD Vance and the MAGAts love them some AfD and disdain Merz.

Zimmer then looks at what the rise of German neo-Nazis might imply about parallel developments in US politics: 

This is a remarkable moment in U.S. history. The fact that a movement that openly embraces the German Far Right, the party of German Neo-Nazis, was able to first take over the Republican Party and then the American government signals the complete dissolution of something we might call an anti-fascist consensus. 

The term is imperfect and perhaps even problematic. There was certainly never a universally shared consensus in America that the key elements of Nazi politics and ideology were bad. But there was nevertheless some agreement across the mainstream political spectrum that America had fought a righteous and noble war against Hitler. American society celebrated and revered its “Greatest Generation” and the soldiers who defeated the Nazis; American popular culture used the Nazis as a representation of ultimate evil. Anyone openly siding against this agreement would have had to expect to pay a price – politically, socially, and culturally. 

In post-1945 America, this was obviously never enough, in and of itself, to turn the nation from a racial caste system to a fully realized multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But it did provide those who desired egalitarian pluralism with a strong argument they could deploy in their struggle against rightwing extremism – it helped police the boundaries of what was considered acceptable within mainstream politics and “respectable” society.

That is evidently no longer the case. MAGA is now in power. This breakdown of boundaries did not happen overnight. It took decades for the most extreme factions to pull the entire “conservative” coalition further and further to the Right – and for the more moderate people, all those who might have objected to the idea of supporting German Neo-Nazis, to be ostracized. 

It will likely take decades to get the country out of this mess, which requires not just political change, but a fundamental reform of political and social culture. If a stable democracy that deserves the name is ever to emerge from this, America will have to restore some boundaries. We need to reimagine an anti-fascist consensus not in service of a purely restorative project, but as a reminder of the nation’s egalitarian aspirations, as a plea to finally defeat those anti-democratic forces in our midst and push America forward. 

You are siding with the German Neo-Nazis? That makes you the bad guys. In a society that cannot hold even that basic line, democracy stands little chance.

I'm up for giving democracy a chance. No more MAGAts and Nazis!