Saturday, July 8, 2023:  Republican Politics: Fascism At Work – The Mythic Past
Last month I said I would concentrate on highlighting some of the key points in a book by Jason Stanley titled "How Fascism Works" and how we are seeing fascism play out across the globe, but more importantly, right here in the old U.S. of A. I will try and take each key element of political fascism presented by Stanley, and related that to the actions of the Republican Party and their supporters who are currently using fascist politics to undermine our democracy.

The first foundational element of political fascism is the creation of a "mythic past". A "mythic past" is a catalyst needed to change the present. The "mythic past" has certain attributes. First and foremost, the mythic past is patriarchal. In fascism, gender defines roles. The dogma of inequality between the sexes is immutable and since men dominated much of history, patriarchal based gender roles are an integral part of the "mythic past".

So how do you enforce patriarchy on a liberal society? Well, it is a version of the old keep women "barefoot in the winter and pregnant in the summer" strategy. So you suppress women's wages, you take away their right to control their own body, and you keep them out of the highest positions in politics and religion.

Let's look at some recent events. The first thing that happened after the Supreme Court over turned Roe, was for a myriad of conservative states to pass anti-abortion legislation, effectively closing off access to gynecological health care to women in their state and some have stated openly, that they want to outlaw birth control.

There is a common thread that underpins their arguments which is that encroaching liberal ideals threaten this mythic patriarchal past. They want to create a sense of panic in men at the loss of hierarchal status. Just look at the composition of the torch carrying Nazis who marched in Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. It was a bunch of relatively young white males.

The "mythic past" is also a construction of history that erases the inconvenient realities of the actual past. Confederate monuments were erected well after the Civil War to memorialize a mythic history of a heroic southern past and ignore the horrors of slavery. Trump denounced the task of connecting the mythic southern past to slavery as an attempt to victimize white Americans who were only celebrating their "heritage." By erasing the real past, it allows the creation of an ethnically pure, virtuous past "mythic" nation. The U.S. Republican Party is working to harness white resentment and votes by denouncing accurate historical scholarship about the brutality of slavery as simply a way to victimize American whites.

The MAGA movement has as its core, is the current U.S. version of a "mythic past." It is the "Great Again" part that reflects the "mythic past" thinking that is embedded in the Trump adherents. David French talks about it in a New York Times, July 6, 2023, OpEd. "The MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called "mean" or "cruel." Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they're the same people they've always been — it's just that they finally understand how bad you are. And by "you," again, they often mean the caricatures of people they've never met." The MAGA minions see themselves as the current manifestation of the "mythic past".