Fascism is a Moral Failing

Not (just) an intellectual one

Jonathan Greenblatt, 2024

As I’ve mentioned a time or two, the ADL has disgraced itself by falling to its knees before fascist oligarch Elon Musk. After Musk gave a Nazi salute at the inauguration, the ADL issued a statement claiming that the Nazi salute was not a Nazi salute but just “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.”

I’ve explained at some length why Musk is in fact a Nazi piece of shit. Just as some have claimed that Musk didn’t know what he was doing when he sieg heiled, some argue that the ADL acquiescence means that they, and their CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, have been fooled or made fools of. The ADL has been tricked or hoodwinked by MAGA and by Musk; they cannot see what is right in front of them.

The ADL’s statement was certainly foolish. And Jonathan Greenblatt appears to have roughly the intellectual heft of a rotten cabbage infested with some toxic mix of fungus and worms. At the same time, I do not think it’s exactly right to say that the ADL was fooled, just as it’s not exactly right to say that people, in general, voted for Trump because they were fooled by algorithms or by fascist propaganda.

Or, to put it another way, when people are fooled by transparent fascist nonsense, the failing is not (just) intellectual. It is moral. People listen to fascists because they want to; they believe fascist propaganda because they think doing so is advantageous, or because they want an excuse to embrace their worst selves. We should be angry at liars, and we should have compassion for people who are fooled by liars and scammers. But providing cover for Elon Musk, or voting for Trump—that’s not being bamboozled. That’s being a collaborator.

—

I rely on your support to be able to write articles like this one. Please consider becoming a subscriber; it’s $5/month, $50/year.

—

The ADL knows that Nazis also hate Palestinians

The ADL’s position here was clarified by corrupt genocidal war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who rushed to defend Musk. Netanyahu regularly evokes the memory of the Holocaust to justify Israeli war crimes, but when confronted with an actual Nazi salute, he insisted he was unconcerned. “Elon is a great friend of Israel,” Netanyahu said, his voice muffled as he worked his tongue into the leather of Musk’s jackboots. He added, that anything Musk did, up to and including a sieg heil, was fine, since he had “repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists.”

Nazis don’t like Jewish people. But they also hate brown people. Many on the far right have found common ground with Israel in their loathing of Palestinians, as well as in their broad support for ethnonationalism, for massive colonial violence, and for apartheid disenfranchisement of marginalized populations. Musk and Trump have promised to give Israel a free hand in ethnic cleansing on the West Bank. That’s all Netanyahu really cares about; there’s no reason to think he would even blink if Musk personally executed every left anti-Zionist Jew in the US.

The ADL has also taken a hard right turn in the last few years, and especially since the October 7 Hamas attack and massacre, and the subsequent Israeli mass slaughter of Gazans. Greenblatt, and his donors, have decided that they no longer care about the organization’s historic mission of tracking and fighting far right organizing in the US. To the horror of many staffers, the org appears to now believe (like Netanyahu) that its only enemies are on the left, and that the only real antisemitism is criticism of Israel.

The ADL is committed to a narrative in which Musk is harmless. Greenblatt doesn’t want to believe that Musk is a bad actor, because he wants to work with Musk and Trump to pursue genocide and ethnic cleansing abroad and to silence leftists at home.

Greenblatt is willing to occasionally and gently chide Musk for not being sufficiently serious about the Holocaust, as in his recent pushback when Musk posted a series of Nazi puns. But Greenblatt has a deep and abiding interest in pretending that Musk is not a violent far right antisemite. And so, when Musk sieg heils, Greenblatt scurries around to throw sand in his own eyes. Musk hasn’t fooled him. He has fooled himself, because he wants to work with Nazis to do Nazi stuff—like murdering Palestinians and crushing the left.

Trump voters knew what they were voting for

By the same token, Trump voters at this point know what they are getting with Trump. He has spent the last decade constantly vomiting out racist, sexist bilge. He was convicted of 34 felonies. He was held liable for a violent sexual assault. He led a coup. The major story of the last week of the campaign was about a comedian at his rally referring to Puerto Rico as “garbage.”

Obviously, Fox News and online outlets downplayed these issues, or tried to convince people that they were unimportant compared to inflation (which had largely receded by the election.) But Trump’s unfitness is so overwhelming that I don’t think you can exactly be fooled into not seeing it. As with the ADL and Musk, the issue isn’t that people failed to understand that Trump was hateful. The issue is that they like the hatefulness, or find it congenial. Trump promised to hurt marginalized people, and a lot of Americans—like Musk, like the ADL—really like the idea of hurting marginalized people.

Many Americans, perhaps, listened to media telling them that Trump and Biden were equally corrupt, or that prosecution of Trump was all a partisan game. But they listened because they wanted to. And they wanted to because, like many Americans in the past, they found hatred congenial, exciting, fun, even sexy. They like being told they are entitled to hurt others; they like being told that they are part of a righteous mob. They fantasize about violence, murder, rage, revenge, cruelty, and fascism.

I’m not saying that all Trump voters are unpersuadable. I’m not even saying that the ADL is a permanent part of a fascist coalition. People (and for that matter institutions) are complicated and vacillating; when the leopards start eating their faces, they may well reassess.

I think there is often an impulse, though, to insist that the American voter is fundamentally decent. Voters, we like to imagine, can be fooled by bad actors, but are not bad actors themselves. If they call for pogroms, or demand cruelty, they are simply and tragically misled. The corollary is that we need to focus on the information environment, first and foremost. And we need to carefully calibrate our criticism of MAGA by, for example, insisting that though their policies are wrong, their grievances are reasonable. They are, we are constantly told, right to be angry; they just don’t know who to be angry at.

Certain kinds of not knowing, though, are culpable. If you refuse to let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, and your left hand is strangling kittens—well, you’re still responsible for strangling the kittens. Fascists love motivated reasoning, that atrocity-denying impunity of the psyche. The ADL understands what it is not letting itself understand. Trump voters do as well.