EP. 672: ONE OF US IS THE KILLER: ONLINE MEDIA & NEOLIBERAL REALISM b/w WHY TRUMP ISN'T A FASCIST ft. Ben Burgis

One of Us Is the Killer & Why Trump Isn’t a Fascist

Some weeks ago, we dropped the fourth issue of The Crisis Papers on TIR, a collection of essays addressing diverse topics, available for free to all patrons. In this latest issue, we examine the futility of online outrage, particularly directed at what I’ve termed political “opinionists.”

The inspiration for this paper came from a clip I posted of a rant on the phenomena of media “heel turns,” the overuse of the term “grift,” and the impotence of the online mob. The modern practice of “stan’ing” a celebrity or media figure has always unsettled me. While the term has declined in popularity, I don’t believe this signals a decrease in fandom. Rather, fandom has adapted, reflecting a broader trend of managed allegiance in our digital age.

In the article, we explore how the relationship between fandom and celebrity, particularly in leftist digital spaces, often substitutes symbolic gestures for substantive political action. Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, recently critiqued this shift, describing fandom as a “toxic” force, transforming admiration into fundamentalism and vendettas. Moore warns that this echo chamber, driven by strict orthodoxy, fosters ideological purges that many mistake for genuine activism—a digital gulag maintained by what could be called a cyber-Stalinist regime.

From the article: 

This strained relationship between fandom and celebrity, especially within left-leaning digital spaces, exemplifies the illusion of political participation in the absence of real structural change. As Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen, recently argued, "fandom has toxified the world.” In an interview with The Guardian Moore explains how fandom now manifests as a mechanism for obsessive control, often spilling over into vendettas against the creators they once admired. "We’ve reached a point where fandom has begun to resemble religious fundamentalism," Moore suggests, where adherence to a narrow orthodoxy defines the worth of creators and personalities alike. This environment creates an echo chamber where any slight deviation from a perceived leftist consensus is seen as ideological treason, worthy of condemnation and social media shaming—a ritual that many mistake for genuine political activism. The virtual gulag is the destination that the cyber Stalinist regime is campaigning for.

Beyond the article, which our guest helped edit, we’ll discuss his most recent piece in Damage magazine titled, “Is Trump Hitler or Just Woodrow Wilson?”. In the article our guest Ben Burgis lays out a coherent argument on why the fascist argument about Donald Trump obscures his actual goals with administration, and how the fascism framework in liberal circles is designed to engage true leftists away from the fight for redistribution of wealth, building a strong workers movement, into the war against Trump..whatever that may be.

Burgis writes:

First, hysteria serves no one. And it certainly doesn’t serve a long-term project like patiently rebuilding the workers’ movement and constituting the kind of Left that could actually contest for power in as deeply anti-socialist a country as the United States.

Second, the implicit logic of fascism analogies in intra-left discourse is nearly always to encourage leftists to put aside our battles with the neoliberal center over economic questions in favor of a procedural defense of democracy against what’s postulated as an urgent common threat. This amounts to telling socialists to endorse pretty much the same “build the broadest possible front around the most minimal possible basis of agreement” strategy that Democrats and Never Trump Republicans have been doggedly pursuing since Trump first came down the escalator in 2015. The abject failure of the Harris campaign to lean into an economically populist message is precisely what led to an unprecedented level of working-class support for the “fascist” Trump. Endlessly relitigating January 6th and constantly reminding voters of how sensible people across the political spectrum were supporting Harris (everyone, as she and her surrogates often said, “from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney”) simply didn’t move ordinary Americans. 

So join us today as we engage in what I think will be an interesting conversation. Please welcome my friend, editor and neighbor, Ben Burgis

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