The Tuesday essay, titled “This is no culture war: Republicans are waging a war on democracy,” was penned by Salon politics staff writer Chauncey DeVega, who charges that today’s Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement are “waging a fascist war against multiracial pluralist democracy and human freedom.”
DeVega begins by arguing that the inability to comprehend how the “so-called culture war is actually a fascist war against American democracy is to almost ensure being rolled over by those evil forces.”
Claiming the “roots of this fascist and authoritarian campaign” go back to America’s “native forms of fascism,” exhibited by “Jim and Jane Crow, white-on-black chattel slavery, genocide against First Nations peoples and white settler colonialism,” the author charges that “neofascism and the Age of Trump are properly understood as being but the most current manifestation of much older birth defects in American democracy and society.”
He then cites Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley who “highlights how the Republican fascist thought crime laws in Florida and other parts of the country targeting the teaching of African-American history (and the country’s real history more generally) are examples of a much larger Orwellian project.”
According to DeVega, the American mainstream media and political class have misunderstood the true nature of the “culture war” because they still possess a “normalcy” bias:
Moreover, he clarifies, “the idea that America is experiencing a culture war instead of a fascist war on democracy and freedom fits neatly into a narrative framework of momentary troubles that will soon pass and not an existential crisis that will fundamentally change the order of things in the country.”
Describing the political class and mainstream news media as “self-limiting,” DeVega reasons that any admission that “the Republican Party and ‘conservative’ movement are neofascists who reject multiracial democracy would involve a type of paradigm shift that the news media and political class would a priori reject.”
“Careerists and others who are successful in those spheres of influence know what the rules are and adhere to them closely lest they be punished or perhaps even exiled,” he explains.
DeVega accuses the mainstream news media and political class of a “failure of imagination” as well as being possessed by “intellectual laziness” in the face of an “epistemic crisis” ascendant from “neofascism.”
“By comparison, and like other more sophisticated thinkers on the left, the Republican fascists and other members of the global right correctly understand that culture, emotions, material concerns and ‘serious politics’ are all part of a larger struggle to win and keep political power across society,” he writes.
“While too many Democrats and mainstream liberals and progressives (and others committed to the liberal democratic project in America) tend to silo off questions of politics and culture, the neofascists are engaged in a revolutionary project that does not make that error in thinking,” he added.
The author insists that in the context of “the culture wars,” Republican “fascists and their forces” are waging war against “Black and brown people, women, the LGBTQ community, and other disadvantaged and marginalized groups,” leading to people’s lives “literally being imperiled, be it from direct violence such as hate crimes or taking away civil and human rights and bodily autonomy.”
DeVega, taking aim at the terminology he believes distorts public perception, asserts that the American mainstream news media and political class “cannot understand the true nature and scope of the country’s democracy crisis because ‘culture war’ is language that limits their capacity to fully understand political reality.”
He concludes by calling for a “recalibration” and “rethinking” of the approach to “conceptualizing, theorizing, communicating, and responding to the country’s democracy crisis and its deep origins.”
The Salon writer has a history of expressing radical anti-white and anti-Republican rhetoric.
In June, DeVega claimed “white America,” which is “too comfortable” with the suffering of black people, needs to be “purged” of its “allegiance to white supremacy,” as he accused the GOP of being a “de facto terrorist organization” as well as the “world’s largest white supremacist” group.
Last year, he said Democrats don’t want unity with the GOP “fascists,” as he accused Republicans of seeking to create a society in which black people “have no rights the white man is bound to respect.”
The senior politics writer also claimed the GOP has morphed from an “evil insect” into a full-blown “terrorist organization,” while accusing Republicans and Trump supporters of seeking a war against American democracy, encouraging widescale violence against the left and minorities, and using “stochastic terrorism” to achieve their aims.
Previously, a shockingly anti-white and anti-Christian Salon piece by DeVega referred to “the Republican fascist movement” as “objectively evil,” hoping that “people of color” die out in the battle against “multiracial democracy,” while accusing “white Christians” of embracing lies, terrorism, white supremacy, and fascism.
In another essay penned by DeVega, the left-wing writer accused Republicans of resembling “good Germans” of the Nazi era — wishing to believe they are decent people while hiding behind “fictions of plausible deniability for the evils committed by their leader,” as he described today’s conservatism as seeking “friendly fascism” masked in an appeal to return to “traditional values.”
