What courage will require

I woke up today thinking about how fascists don’t always call themselves fascists. The Republican Party today is no different in this respect from the fascist National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ) of 1920-45. In Italy, in contrast, the fascist party of the same period called itself, straightforwardly, The National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista). Nomenclature was on my mind because I have been writing about Republican Fascism for a while now, using that term. And to the extent that my writing ever draws the attention of the Republican Fascists soon to be in control of the U.S. federal government or the attention of their supporters, they will object to my terminology. I already got a taste of this when I called the U.S. Supreme Court Court Justices in the Dobbs majority rogue and lawless. This flipped out Fox News commentator and George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley who wrote about it for The Hill. (I’m deliberately not linking. You can find his commentary easily). Manhattan Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro complained in the Wall Street Journal about my characterizing the Republican Party as a combination of a cult and criminal syndicate, and thus not a legitimate participant as a political party in U.S. constitutional democracy. (Again, deliberately not linking.)

Turley’s and Shapiro’s efforts to make trouble for me had, as far as I know, no particular effects. But I’m pretty sure that they indicate what is to come. Those of us who publicly call the Republican Party the party of Republican Fascism are going to become targets. Right-wing Judge Edith Jones has already used a public panel supposedly dedicated to intellectual debate to level a fusillade of personal attacks on fellow panelist and Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck - and Vladeck offered more anodyne comment than the ones I have made about rogue and lawless Supreme Court justices, the conversion of a political party into a cultish criminal syndicate, and the utter illegitimacy of the Supreme Court justices Trump appointed in his first term.

All this went through my mind this morning, as I considered my use of the term Republican Fascism to describe the ideology of the people who will head and operate the federal executive branch and control the federal legislature next year. These people include a proposed Secretary of Defense who has already urged violence against “leftists,” who he regards as “domestic enemies.” So, the ramifications of telling it like it is about U.S. courts or the Trump regime could become a lot more severe than the occasional right-winger mouthing off about me in the papers. While there are no jackboots at my door and there may never be, I do not feel safe from physical or economic retaliation from Republican Fascists in and out of government.

This places a new demand on me. I have to be courageous in a way I never anticipated I would have to be. I have to be willing to speak authentically and honestly about politics, law, and the U.S. legal system in the face of a for-now small - but not zero - risk of becoming a particular target of violence or other material interference from the federal government or the supporters of Republican Fascism or both.

The only way I know to gain the courage I now need is to practice it. This means speaking up, in this blog, on Mastodon, and in person at community and government meetings — speaking up in spite of nervousness about retaliation, learning to speak up even when feeling fear I did not anticipate having to feel in this country.