The New American NatC Party

Last night, as many of you may have seen circulating, the RNC printed out signs for their delegates to hold up that, alongside "Make America Strong Again" said "Mass Deportation Now!", "Strength Through Peace" and "American Oil From American Soil".

While the newspeak "Strength Through Peace" might be a throwback to Reagan, I think it takes its proper context surrounded by the direct calls for ethnic cleansing and blood and soil economics.

There is nothing left to be said with regard to their intentions. The Republican Party has gone full Nazi. They even call themselves Nazis, or at least, NatCs, National Conservatives (which, we are assured, is very different from National Socialists, very different indeed).

There is nothing left to debate or argue or parse. This is not some wing nut at a Trump rally with a homemade sign, or a Discord server full of neo-nazi goons, this is the mass produced message designed for the cameras of the world's press. Their platform calls for concentration camps, the death penalty for drug users (and therefore the unhoused), full presidential criminal immunity, total deregulation of corporate power, official climate denial, etc. etc. etc. They have gone fully mask off, there is no quiet part anymore. They are rolling the dice on full dictatorship and they are gambling it all on this particular swing, in November.

Whether or not going full Nazi is a winning electoral strategy remains to be seen, although the media and the Dems will do whatever they can to massage their message into some more reasonable and palatable shape. But it does mean that we should calibrate our understanding of what is legitimate and reasonable to do in response to the Republican Party and its leaders accordingly. There is no electoral answer to the violence of fascism.

The last few weeks I've been hypervigilant with the news, nearly obsessive, as though something new was going to break through and change what was going on. I remember this affect from 2016-2020. Constant fight or flight. Everything is so high stakes, and everything forgotten so quickly.

This did not help then. This did not make me a better antifascist, or a happier person, or more able to resist. Sometimes it gave me some insights and some tactics, but mostly it just exhausted me, made me angry and frustrated. With the dropping of the mask, however, with the end of any attempt at legitimacy, once they've gone full NatC, even this hypervigilance will lack objects. There is nothing to see here that we haven't already seen. The stakes are plain.

The path forward is less so, but I think it is imperative to move our focus away from what they are saying, what the media is saying, and begin to build outside the spaces of discursive political maneuver. The fascists are living in a fully hallucinatory space of fabulism and myth. They genuinely have trouble distinguishing between Nancy Pelosi and Assata Shakur. They have fully destabilized their regime of meaning, shattered any consensus reality, which makes them impossible to fight on the discursive terrain, but they've done it to themselves first, so they are deeply confused.

This doesn't mean to abandon education, writing, thinking or analysis, but it does ask us to think about our audiences and our intentions. Are we spontaneously and reflexively aiming our analyses toward a broad national dialogue and mass cultural sphere that no longer exists?

This collapse of discursive common ground gives them strength in the realm of the spectacle but it is a tremendous weakness on the ground, and gives us loads of space to move in the shadows, to build, be ready, and counter organize. To get strong without notice. To build networks and relationships capable of struggling against a Trumpian Gestapo or a Harris FBI.

I am pretty optimistic that these clowns have showed their hand far too early to do anything but bleed support. Most of the country isn't full of bloodthirsty groyper anti-semites like JD Vance. But then white boomer settlers in a combined Pandemic-Climate Collapse death spiral might be even more gleefully nihilistic than I can anticipate.

In some ways it doesn't matter. Win or lose a vote count, succeed or fail with a coup, these people aren't going to go away until we smash them. Doing that will require building real counterpower capable of disrupting their bases of power and their organizations, but it will also involve caring for one another in ways that make their legal maneuvering and police tactics unable to take anything really valuable away from us. Whatever most worries you about a potential Trump victory, start thinking about what you could do in your life to make those effects negligible, even meaningless. Play out the tape: what will happen? What steps will be involved, what steps will the state and the powers that be take? Will they send out goons into the community? Will they demand people voluntarily register? Will they go on a hiring or building spree?

How can you and your community be prepared, ready, and able to defend or outmaneuver these steps? If Trump loses, you'll still have built the basis for real community counterpower, regardless of what the state does.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them. And act accordingly.