Enough With the 1930s Analogies! The Durham Report is in, and it's Sober Reading
Let's Expand Our Historical Vocabulary Beyond 'Sharks and Nazis'.
“Sharks and Nazis”, quipped Ricky Gervais. These are the self-professed areas of expertise that the man has acquired from years of zoning out in front of the History and Discovery channels. How right he is! So many of the history programs that have been piped in via cable media over the lifetime of most millennials are fixated on the interwar period of European history viewed through the prism of Hitler and his Henchmen. For decades now we have been subjected to endless documentaries on Nazi Germany, as though the 12 years of the 1,000 year Reich condense all we need to know about the past. If this were not bad enough, a whole range of cultural productions have re-enforced this historical framework. The story arc of the Star Wars prequels couldn’t be more on the nose!
On top of this, formal history curricula have acted hand in glove with the edutainment industry. At least since the 1990s, high school (US) and A-level (UK) history classes have zeroed in on the Hitler regime and its rise under the Weimar governments, which has been by far the most popular choice to teach teenagers about the past. Most of these kids are unlikely to study any other history in their lives, and consequently a single narrative structure of European history in the 1930s has been imprinted on the minds of a generation (or two).
What is the problem with learning about interwar fascism? Nothing in itself. Like many young lads of my age, I have been prone to a fascination with Weimar-Nazi Germany and WWII since I was in short trousers. I still am. But I at least have taken an interest in other areas of history from the ecclesiastical history of the Reformation, through the colonization of the Americas, to the social history of early industrialization and the avant-garde art movements of the fin-de-siècle. Few bother with this kind of boring shite, and they therefore end up with a horribly limited historical vocabulary. The result is predictable. When you are looking for a framework of historical analogy for understanding what is happening today, but you are bereft of the appropriate tools, you reach for what you know, which is why everything today seems to be ‘like the Nazis’.
This brings us to the Durham Report, which has finally confirmed the shocking extent and depth of the Trump-Russia collusion fabrication. The Report reveals how deeply state institutions have cooperated with media and party political organizations to propagate what was known by the protagonists at the time to be a fiction, in order to achieve one end: to keep Donald Trump out of the White House at all costs.
After four years of scrutinizing the Trump-Russia collusion allegations, Special Council John Durham’s assessment of the FBI’s investigation (Crossfire Hurricane) into the allegations is now in. Durham describes his own conclusions and findings as ‘sobering’.1
Indeed, based on the evidence gathered in the multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation (p. 8).
Durham then goes on to detail the unfolding story of Hurricane Crossfire, weaving in a variety of party political, media, security state, and executive branch players in a tale of willful malpractice and civil service activism for the cause of a bald political objective – to prevent the election of Donald Trump.
Durham’s Summary Conclusion is damning.
Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the [Justice] Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report (p. 17).
Some specifics highlighted in the Summary Conclusion…
“… former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith committed a criminal offense by fabricating language in an email that was material to the FBI obtaining a FISA surveillance order” (p. 17).
“FBI personnel working on that same FISA application displayed, at best, a cavalier attitude towards accuracy and completeness” (p. 17).
“Our investigation also revealed that senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities. This information in part triggered and sustained Crossfire Hurricane and contributed to the subsequent need for Special Counsel Mueller's investigation. In particular, there was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump's political opponents.” (p. 18).
The take-home is chilling and could not be more explicit.
In light of the foregoing, there is a continuing need for the FBI and the [Justice] Department to recognize that lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents caused investigators to fail to adequately consider alternative hypotheses and to act without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power. Although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time.
The question, of course, is not why state agencies and organizations close to the establishment might wish to keep Trump from executive office (or show “bias” or an “over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents”). Their political reasons for opposing populists of all stripes are fairly clear. The key question is how could they think that such egregious and undemocratic actions were justifiable. The answer of course is “Sharks and Nazis”.
It must be remembered that the Trump-Russia allegations, constantly iterated in the usual mainstream media spaces, have been foundational for the ongoing presentation of Trump as an anti-democratic, Putinesque, dictatorial threat to the constitutional republic. Since his election as president in 2016, the narrative has therefore been pushed consistently that Trump is a fascist, that we are living in a post-industrial 1930s redux, and that all and any measures to stop the Nazis from ‘seizing power’ are justifiable. Repeated impeachments, FBI raids, and the Alvin Bragg indictments in New York, all have drawn on the narrative. It has proven so powerful that even relatively sober minds have been drawn under its spell. Sam Harris’ explicit statement to this effect comes instantly to mind. Whether we call this phenomenon Trump derangement, hysteria of the chattering classes, or whatever, the conventional narrative elements of the 1930s redux have been rolled out one by one.
Example: The January 6th protest-cum-riot evidently was acted out without any kind of plan or organized objective by an out-of-control crowd that was nevertheless totally unarmed (firearms) in the face of history’s most heavily armed security state and among a population with the World’s easiest access to personal firearms. Hardly the indications of a concerted and premeditated coup-d’état against the constituted government. However, this has not stopped the shocking scenes at the Capitol on that day being fitted neatly by legacy media and governmental agencies into the Reichstag Fire and Enabling Act trope.
Likewise, Trump’s ‘demagogic’ oratory is instantly likened to the podium posturing of Hitler (though they actually share very little in terms of style and content, other than their rhetorical effectiveness). It never occurs that there are all sorts of alternative historical orators and public political personae with which to make a comparison (from Pericles through Trotsky to William Jennings Bryan). However, these individuals are as utterly unfamiliar as they are useless for the strategic narrative being pushed. Sharks and Nazis.
The effect of the implicit and persistent historical analogy being pumped down the line to a willing and waiting audience primed by decades of narrative inculcation is to inure the population to a single and simple message: Donald Trump is a fascist, and fascism must be stopped at all costs. The niceties of a free, democratic, and civil society are luxuries in the face of fascism, and so the laws, mores, and norms of democratic politics must be suspended until the danger is destroyed and normal service can be resumed. But there is a problem. What if Trump isn’t a fascist?
The term has reached a point of saturation through over-use. To label Trump a fascist, the definition used would have to be pretty particular. You would have to reach out for the doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist formulation of fascism prevalent in Stalin’s USSR, according to which social democrat Sweden, the reformist parties of the Second International, and the exiled Trotskyists were all labelled (capitalist) ‘fascists’. In our time, the Democratic Party, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, David Cameron, and Keir Starmer would all have to be considered ‘fascists’.
Why then do we reach for the label? Because, after years of anaemic learning, we have no others. If I were to describe Donald-Trump-the-political-figure as a species of ‘Bonapartist’2 grounded in a particularly American compost of ‘Jacksonian populism’,3 people would look at me like I was speaking Cornish. Sharks and Nazis.
People forget that we’ve been here before. It was only back in the 1992 Presidential election that the business tycoon, third-party candidate, and precursor to many Trumpian themes (from protectionism to border control), Ross Perot was called a ‘fascist‘ from within the Pentagon.4 If Perot was a fascist, by virtue of the prospective bundle of big capital and state power that his candidacy represented, then so today are Zuckerberg, Wray, Besos, and Dimon. Do we want to go down that road?
There has been a tempting plausibility to the broadly social 1930s analogy over the last 15 years. There is no shortage of academic social scientists who have drawn the parallel since the 2008 crisis [1929 crash] and Great Recession [Great Depression].5 Many are cheesed off that neither a Roosevelt nor a new New Deal has emerged, so they look instead for the fascist dictator who [according to the rigid narrative] must be waiting in the wings to exploit the moment. But what if history does not repeat itself? Despite the cyclical recurrences, the genuinely familiar patterns, and the ahistorical social scientific structures, what if the script differs in decisive ways from what is now expected as an inevitable unfolding? Then we become the problem. We unleash the dark forces in erroneous expectation of dark forces.
Perhaps the most stinging lines of John Durham’s ‘Executive Summary’ make the consequences crystal clear.
“… the integrity of the people who take an oath to follow the guidelines and policies currently in place, guidelines that date from the time of Attorney General Levi and that are designed to ensure the rule of law is upheld. As such, the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old. The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI's guiding principles of "Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity" are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI' s mission of "Protect[ing] the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States" (pp. 18-19).
Weighty and portentous words indeed.
What has brought the FBI (and other institutions) to a place where they can so easily cross the line into illegality and shame? Behind all this is a psychosocial complex that has not been addressed among those who reach for the only label in the locker, and that is the total inability to acknowledge the reasons why Hillary Clinton lost that election in 2016. It was not because of treasonous collusion with foreign powers on the part of the victor, but because 1) Clinton was the archetypically worst candidate for the Democrats to put forward at that historical conjuncture; and 2) Donald Trump articulated real criticisms of the Clinton-Bush-Obama legacy prevalent and widespread among huge tranches of American society. The inability of the establishment through the Democratic Party to acknowledge this, and the consequent resort to ham-fisted historical cliché and self-serving denialism to exculpate their ignorance and failure, has been devastating for the Republic.
It is time to get away from the 1930s analogies. They are no longer enabling critical analysis or proper consciousness of what is taking place in our political economy or the public spaces of our democratic political process. The imploding scope to our historical vocabulary is sucking us into a kind of mania. The Durham Report should be used, not to score party political points, but to make this point above all else. The fascism projection must come to an end, so that we can properly and intelligently criticize both political parties, the agencies of the security-state, and the real politics of Donald Trump himself.
Beyond the immediacy of party politics and Beltway shenanigans, we have to make a concerted effort to widen our store of historical analogies, and the only way to do this is to get past the obsession with Weimar, the Nazis, and the rise of Hitler. To the extent that ‘fascism’ can exist outside of the historical context of the mid-twentieth century, its 21st century form will defy the historical template that is branded on our minds. Much more likely will be a smooth insinuation of a form that is unfamiliar to us. It is the kind of thing that will sneak up on us as we lose the plot over Trump. It is the kind of thing that will creep into our institutions without us realizing. It is the kind of thing we are reading about in the Durham Report.
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Endnotes
John Durham, “Report on the Matter Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns,” United States Department of Justice, 12 May (2023), p. 8. https://www.justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf
For Marx, "Bonapartism" refers to co-optation of the radicalism of the popular classes, which in so doing preserves and masks the power of a narrower ruling class. See Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1978), pp. 594-617.
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995), p. 305.
Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? (New York: Nation Books, 2016), p. 238; Nancy Frazer, “A Triple Movement?” New Left Review II/81 (2014): pp. 119-132; Robert J. Antonio, “After Neoliberalism,” The American Sociologist (2023)[Online First].
"...which is why everything today seems to be ‘like the Nazis’."
Except the things that are. The same media that writes as if the Nazis were the worst thing possible and happened yesterday have amnesia when it comes to, for example, the communist Pol Pot who, on a per capita basis, murdered more of his population (between 1.5 and 3 million in tiny Cambodia) and more recently. And basically got away with it.