Benito Mussolini Combed His Hair
tHiNK aBoUt iT!!!!!!!
We’re overproducing hysterical expert-scolds. I keep finding more of them in social media, loud and weirdly nasty, like feral cats in a hay pile. Here comes a shrewd take from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at NYU who has a highly marketable sideline as an expert on authoritarianism, responding to some genius-level political analysis from a guy with the requisite Ukrainian flag in his profile:
Observation: Marjorie Taylor Greene wore makeup on television.
Analysis: “That’s what Fascists do.”
See, members of Congress usually go on television in just an old pair of gym shorts and a dirty Schlitz Lite t-shirt, but this one particular person is trying to be Literally Adolf Hitler, so she wore a necklace and some lipstick. Textbook fascism!
Meanwhile, the governor of Florida just said that students in schools should put their phones away until recess, so they can focus on learning. This, too, is precisely identical to blackshirts marching on Rome:
Spend five minutes with this person’s social accounts, if you must, because this is what she does. It’s fascinatingly random, like a lady who lives on a bus bench wandering around the neighborhood describing random objects as Nazis. That’s a Nazi tangerine! That scrap lumber invaded Poland! Discarded juice boxes are Francisco Franco!
Eventually, if you make enough completely random angry noise, you get tenure and a book deal.
But Ruth Ben-Ghiat also writes things that get published in actual journals, like an extraordinary analysis of the way that the pandemic revealed the authoritarian instincts of the political class.
You just got wrong-footed, there for a moment, because you think you agree with that argument — but wait until you see how she actually finds authoritarianism in the long moment when Dan Andrews made Melbourne a prison and California arrested paddleboarders:
U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro had just laid the foundations for authoritarian governance when the pandemic came: they discredited the press in their respective countries, used machismo as a strategy of legitimation, and made bargains with cronies, such as rollbacks on environmental protections, in exchange for political support. The two leaders have deployed all of these classic authoritarian tools in their responses to the pandemic. Using misinformation, they have underplayed the severity of the virus, peddled unproven cures, and dismissed experts who would not adopt their messaging. Bolsonaro fired his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, for warning the public to practice social distancing and to stay at home. Trump barely tolerates Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and has retweeted support for the #FireFauci campaign on social media. To sustain the fiction of their omnipotence, Trump and Bolsonaro have refused to wear protective gear and made a point of shaking hands with everyone in sight, as though they were personally immune from harm.
They shook hands with people and didn’t wear protective gear and let people leave their homes and go outside — classic authoritarian fearmongering. And they resisted national lockdowns and mask mandates, and criticized government officials. See, authoritarianism! Because anti-authoritarianism is imprisoning whole countries full of people in their homes, and doing whatever Anthony Fauci orders you to do.
The current iteration of our supposed expert class is more disoriented than an actual psychiatric inpatient.
The Karenocracy could lock us all in cages and still weep about how evil and oppressive we are.
Of course they could never be the authoritarians, because they know how kind and good and loving they are deep in their hearts—and they went to all the right schools, live in the right places, and have all the proper opinions, so they cannot possibly be wrong.
It's like living in a dictatorship run by Kathy Bates in "Misery".
The reframing/rewriting of history here is....shit, it's impressive! I mean it really is. Dumb, wrong, but still, damn impressive.