Timothy Snyder has just published an important new book On Freedom. Attached is a short essay introducing thinking about Freedom: ‘Fantasy-Impotence-Fascism’.   T

Fantasy-Impotence-Fascism

The Trump-Vance Political Theory

Timothy Snyder

September 22, 2024

A lady in Springfield, Ohio lost her cat and found it, and Trump and Vance have made this the centerpiece of their campaign. This might seem mysterious or just stupid.  But Trump and Vance are intelligent and talented politicians, and their actions make sense within their political theory.

Though alien to most Americans, the worldview is important to understand, because it forecasts how America would be ruled should these men come to power.  It has three elements: fantasy, impotence, and fascism.

1.  Fantasy. There is no true and false.  There is no such thing as lying.  There are just “stories,” as Vance says.  So in one world (let’s call it the real world, for old-time’s sake), a cat disappeared for a moment, as cats will, and then reappeared, as cats will, in the basement.  In another world, the Trump-Vance fantasy world, that cat was eaten by Haitians, as part of a general trend of pet consumption, one which justifies their deportation and our outrage etc.

What does a story like this bring to the Trump-Vance campaign?  It clearly brings something: let’s remember 2016, the last time Trump ran from outside the White House.  Halloween-season fantasies of a similar kind, generally originating in Russia, saved his campaign.  But how does this work?  To answer, we need to consider the other two parts of the political theory.

2.  Impotence.  Central to the Trump-Vance campaign is a politics of impotence.  The government cannot actually do anything for the average citizen.  (In the background, of course, a smaller, dysfunctional government creates a void filled by the oligarchs, which is the practical implication of this theory).  In elaborating the cats-and-dogs fantasy about his home state, Vance is revealing to us his theory of federal power.

Here it is: the power of the the federal government is to be used to find a cat which is not in fact lost.  That’s it.  Nothing more.  That is what the average citizen can expect from a Trump-Vance regime.  Project 2025 expels the civil servants who know what to do, nothing works anymore except for oligarchs and pals of the president, and the rest of us get Schrödinger’s Cat.

A person holding a position of authority and responsibility in the federal government has no other role than to talk about things that are not true and pass on responsibility for the untruth to the media, as Vance does.  Remember: Vance is a United States Senator representing Ohio.  If there were some actual problem in Ohio he could propose to address it with legislation.  But he cannot and will not do so, not only because there is no actual problem, but because he must personify impotent government.

3.  Fascism. In the Trump-Vance political theory, government acts not in the normal way, by laws, but as an instrument of the fury of the people.  There is no legal basis, or indeed any basis at all, to call for the Haitian population of Springfield, Ohio to be deported.  The people in question are here legally, as Trump and Vance know, and did nothing, as Trump and Vance also know.

In fascism, the government becomes the will of the people, or rather the race, as embodied in a single person.  A fantasy of evil done by others is deliberately invoked to create a sense of us and them. Government exercises power by taking revenge on groups, for example by deporting them (the first large-scale action of Hitler’s SS, by the way, was deporting immigrants).

Such a mass deportation would be complicated and bloody, would require collaboration from citizens, and would set Americans against one another.  We see a foretaste of this in Springfield, Ohio, with all the bomb threats.

Us-and-them then becomes the normal form of politics, with us becoming complicit in ever more terrible actions, which incidentally make traditional government harder and our expectations of government lower.  The government becomes impotent in the sense of protecting or supporting citizens, with politics now transferred to the battles on the streets.

And then the people in power think up the the next fantasy.  And the government becomes more impotent, leaving space for the oligarchs and generating more reasons for Americans to fight one another.

That’s the political theory.  Fantasy-Impotence-Fascism.  And it can become, as we are seeing, political practice.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/fantasy-impotence-fascism