Indignity Vol. 2, No. 73: How fully serious can semi-fascism get?

HISTORICAL FRICTION DEP'T.

U.S. Marines on the march in Haiti, where their early campaigns of 1915 and 1917 are now only a memory, after nineteen years of service in that republic. Practically all of the military activities of the country are now performed by the Garde d'Haiti, or native police, trained by the Marines to take over the work of policing the country after they leave on August 15th. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

Talking With Jonathan M. Katz: What Does the United States Even Know About Coups, Really? 

WHEN JOE BIDEN declared that Donald Trump's core supporters were "semi-fascist," then followed it up with a prime-time address about how the MAGA movement is a threat to democracy, a chorus of not just right-wingers but self-appointed scrupulous centrists began wringing its hands over the notion that the president could say such a thing about his political opponents. "This is not a good look from Biden," the professional scold Shadi Hamid tweeted, adding "Also, what exactly is 'semi-fascism'? It's not even a thing." 

What does it mean to be a little bit fascist? How will we know when democracy in the United States is in real trouble? Earlier this year, the journalist Jonathan M. Katz published the book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire, which looks back at, among other things, decades of American coups and coup attempts, abroad and at home. 

Gangsters of Capitalism tells the story of the Marine general Smedley Butler—a congressman's son from Philadelphia's Main Line and a devout enough Quaker to fill his letters home with "thee" and "thou"—who heeded his nation's call, when he was a teenager, to help rescue the oppressed people of Cuba from Spanish tyranny. That intervention launched a military career that would put Butler at the spearpoint of U.S.-backed, or U.S.-led, warfare and oppression from the Caribbean to China and back again: subjugating the Philippines, severing Panama and its future canal zone from Colombia, imposing a new constitution on Haiti at actual gunpoint. In a break from military service, Butler dabbled in home-front counterinsurgency tactics against bootleggers as the police commissioner of Philadelphia. 

Later in life, Butler would turn against his military achievements, publishing the book War Is a Racket and a series of magazine articles in which he denounced his globe-spanning, medal-winning work with the Marines as "being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers." He would also tell investigators from the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities about being approached by a group of people who offered him thousands of dollars in cash and told him that, with the backing of an assortment of powerful bankers and business leaders, they wanted him to lead a mob of hundreds of thousands of veterans in a coup to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The reality of the so-called Business Plot was hotly disavowed at the time, and the investigation was summarily dropped, but Butler stood by his testimony. 

I called Katz—who is also the author of the firsthand account of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and its aftermath, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, and who writes the newsletter The Racket—to talk about what it takes to overthrow a democratic government, how we interpret the past and the present, and when a shambles of plotting can become reality.