The Joke is on Us

The retreat into satirical attacks on Trump and his supporters fuels the solidification of fascism.

We are the Joke - by Mr. Fish

The buffoons who orchestrate fascism, with its quack science, idiocy, penchant for violence and grotesque hypermasculinity, are ripe for satire. It is easy, as late-night comics do — and as the cabarets did for the Nazis in Berlin — to pillory the goons, misfits and mediocrities who hold power and spew fascist bile. But this form of satire blinds opponents to its destructive power and murderous core. It ignores the real centers of power. It does not engender resistance. It engenders disdain and cynicism. It furthers the social and political divide between us, the “enlightened” and “educated” elite, and them, the despised and ridiculed “basket of deplorables.”

There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass. It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.

Antonio Gramsci warned that elitist satire is counterproductive. He called for a “passionate sarcasm,” which targets the machinery of power. Satire, he wrote, must excoriate the dominant myths and ideologies which buttress capitalism and fascism. It must expose not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism, but acknowledge the legitimate grievances of those under its spell. It must focus on the institutions that perpetuate injustice and social inequality.

“Trump has also been necessary to expose the plastic progressives, the liberal anti-Trump imperialists who, in their opposition to Trump’s deal with Iran, can only look like warmongering imperial psychopaths,” writes Nate Bear. “From all those sharing memes on social media about surrender, from the Democrats and CNN talking heads decrying the deal, to Jimmy Fallon dragging Trump for giving Iran back the money the US stole, there is no articulation of an alternative to endlessly bombing Iran. There’s no anger from liberals over dead Iranians, or at the imperial state, at Zionism or the embedded death machinery that made this violence possible. No, they’re just embarrassed for empire. And they don’t want to recognise the limits of that empire.”

Elitist satire — whether on “Saturday Night Live” or other late-night shows — punches down. It seduces liberals into believing that the thugs and grifters who have taken power are too stupid and too inept to last. There are millions of political exiles who understand how this self-delusion, this failure to take fascists seriously, is the great facilitator of fascism. They too once dismissed the goons who now run their countries as a joke.

The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran, driven into exile by the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in her book “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century,” lays out the familiar pattern:

It begins with a movement that divides society into two: the ‘real people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’, and with a leader who insists they alone embody the ‘real’ people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritisation of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long-standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness. The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal. As the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule, universal values — human dignity and the rule of law — are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history. Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of who counts as ‘us’ grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.

As Temelkuran warns, Americans, like those in other nations that have been down this path, “...soothe their fears by repeating the same illusionary line, ‘The institutions will hold.’ They do not yet dare to recognize their future country, and soon, they will not be recognized as citizens unless they follow the new rules in Trump’s America.”

Comedians such as Kimmel function like the cabaret star, Fritz Grünbaum, who during Nazism, once quipped when the power went out during a performance: “I can’t see a thing, not a single thing; I must have stumbled into National Socialist culture.” Grünbaum would eventually find himself in the Dachau concentration camp — along with other actors, performers and satirists — where he died of tuberculosis.

The Nazis moved swiftly to close the cabarets — along with all institutions that defied Nazi control — and replaced them with mindless variety shows. They hated mockery as much as Trump, who after Stephen Colbert’s final show, gloated that Colbert was “finished” and called him a “total jerk.” Trump also shared an AI-generated video of himself throwing Colbert into a dumpster, slamming down the lid and dancing. Trump wrote that Colbert’s exit was the “beginning of the end” for other late night hosts.

Jokes about dictators in totalitarian regimes are a criminal offense. Satire is permissible in fascist states only when employed to mock political opponents and demonized minorities. It is not permissible when directed at centers of power. As Gramsci pointed out, the consolidation of power by fascists requires them to win the “cultural battle,” by dominating the public discourse, policing language — including satire — and redefining social, cultural and political norms.

Elitist satire is a pressure-release valve. But because it refuses to confront the roots of our political, social and cultural degeneration — which preceded the Trump presidency — it solidifies the fascist project it seeks to destroy. It reduces the catastrophe to the clown show around Trump: the sycophantic cabinet secretaries, ICE Barbie or Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s bizarre war on medical science. It does not address our failed democratic institutions — the academy, elections, courts, Congress, or the media. It deflects attention from the billionaires and corporations that have slashed regulation, imposed austerity and deindustrialization and distorted the economic and political system to facilitate the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history. It does not address the murderous war industry or the domestic security apparatus that makes us the most watched, monitored, spied upon, tracked and photographed population in human history.

This elitist satire simplifies the complex social, economic and political forces we must dismantle. It ignores or pays deference to the subterranean forces that created Trump. Gramsci’s “passionate sarcasm” is too revolutionary and too truthful to be broadcast on media conglomerates such as CBS.

“Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted in “Humor and Faith.” “Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life.”

“There is no laughter in the holy of holies,” Niebuhr continued. “There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith.”

When satire is the end point, it is deleterious. It masks what is coming. It must be, as Niebuhr pointed out, the entry point. It must push us, as Gramsci understood, into hard analysis and the organization of mass movements that alone can save us from tyranny. It must cease to play into the hands of a polarized nation, one where opposing factions write each other off as irredeemable. It must acknowledge that given the gravity before us, laughter is not enough.