Echoes of Italian fascism cannot be accidental for Stephen Miller and Donald Trump
Just over a century ago, in January 1925, Benito Mussolini laid out the vision for his emerging dictatorship to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies. “When two irreducible elements are locked in a struggle, the only solution is force,” he said.
Mussolini, like Donald J. Trump, was long derided as a buffoon before he seized power. But he knew how effective brutality could be.
Mussolini had risen with the help of the “squadristi,” paramilitary outfits also known as Blackshirts, who terrorized cities, such as Bologna, where socialists had been elected. “Town after town was taken over by fascist thugs,” according to the Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism. “Local democratic institutions fell, one by one. Once towns were taken over, control and obedience was maintained through torture and terror.”
Are we seeing a revival of Mussolini’s approach today?
Is it reappearing by way of Stephen Miller, an adviser to Trump who seems to have the president’s ear on everything from anti-immigrant efforts to foreign policy? “But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world,” Miller said in a CNN interview.
It seems hardly accidental that Miller is parroting the long-dead dictator. Certainly, Miller, through his influence on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is normalizing squadristi-like practices on American streets. Brutality seems to be his point.
Consider this Stateline report:
“Violence in immigration enforcement is on the rise. A federal immigration agent’s killing of Renee Good in Minnesota on Jan. 7 was one of half a dozen shootings since December. An immigrant’s death in a Texas detention facility this month was ruled a homicide. And detention deaths last year totaled at least 31, a two-decade peak and more than the previous four years combined.
“There also have been dozens of cases in the past year of agents using dangerous and federally banned arrest maneuvers, such as chokeholds, that can stop breathing.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and tactical vests have been recorded firing pepper spray into the faces of protesters, shattering car windows with little warning, punching and kneeing people pinned face down on the ground, using battering rams on front doors, and questioning people of color about their identities.”
And give some thought to the phrasing in this November ruling by a federal judge in Illinois: “While defendants argue that they used less lethal force as a de-escalation technique to reduce the risk of harm to both agents and the public, plaintiffs have marshaled ample evidence that agents intended to cause protesters harm and that no legitimate governmental interest justified their actions.”
Think, for a moment, about these observations by New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall: “In its efforts to triple the number of ICE agents in the field, the administration has adopted recruitment strategies that appear to be designed to appeal to white nationalists and supremacists, including the use of what amounts to an unofficial anthem of theirs, ‘We’ll Have Our Home Again,’ in a recruitment ad.”
“According to numerous reports, the Department of Homeland Security has cut back on new employees’ training about abiding by constraints during potentially hazardous confrontations,” Edsall adds. “In addition, the Trump administration, according to court documents, fails to enforce those rules and regulations in places such as Minneapolis.”
For the squadristi, who celebrated their raids with “alcohol, laughter and song,” and launched them with “[c]heerful photographs transmitting pride and brute-masculinity,” brutality was the point. Is that now the case with the Miller-guided ICE policies?
Certainly, the echoes of Italian Fascism and German Nazism – or at least their appeal to modern white supremacists – are not coincidental.
A writer for Vox, in a mid-January piece titled “The Trump Administration Can’t Stop Winking at White Nationalists,” nailed this.
“The administration opted to associate its immigration agenda with a Nazi slogan: Adolf Hitler’s regime famously advertised its rule with the tagline “One people, one realm, one leader,” Eric Levitz noted. “Three days after Renee Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Labor tweeted, ‘One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.’
Under Trump, he reported, the official accounts of federal agencies have repeatedly referred to white nationalist memes and works.
“On Jan. 9, the Department of Homeland Security posted, ‘We’ll have our home again,’ a lyric from an anthem adopted by the neofascist group the Proud Boys and other white nationalist organizations. This was accompanied by a link where one could sign up to join ICE.
“Last August, D.H.S. shared an ICE recruitment poster beneath the phrase ‘Which way, American man?’ — an apparent reference to the white supremacist tract, “Which Way, Western Man?’ which argues that “race consciousness, and discrimination on the basis of race, are absolutely essential to any race’s survival. … That is why the Jews are so fiercely for it for themselves … and fiercely against it for us, because we are their intended victim.”
“In October, the U.S. Border Patrol posted a video on its Facebook page of agents loading guns and driving through the desert, as a 13-second clip of Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us” plays — specifically, the lines ‘Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, k*ke me.’”
By all appearances, Miller’s ICE and Border Patrol agencies want to recruit the most brutal racist low-lifes they can find.
“The Department of Homeland Security has spoken publicly about its fast-tracked effort to significantly increase ICE’s workforce by hiring more than 10,000 new employees, a surge promoted on social media with calls for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders,” The Washington Post reported. “The agency currently employs more than 20,000 people, according to ICE’s website.”
The type of person DHS wants seems clear, and that is sort who would have fit in well with the squadristi.
“On social media, administration accounts have mixed immigration raid footage with memes from action movies and video games to portray ICE’s mission as a fight against the ‘enemies … at the gates,’ the Post reported. ‘Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?’ one post says. ‘Are you going to cowboy up or just lay there and bleed?’ says another.”
Trump and his aides such as Miller seem to know exactly what they are doing. Trump, a narcissist, craves power and wants more than anything to project “strength.” And Miller – ironically, a Jew – seems to see fascistic approaches as the way to serve his boss best.
Of the two, Miller’s psyche is the more perplexing and, probably, the more dangerous. Someday, perhaps, we’ll fully understand the likely self-hating psychology that animates him.
His hostility to non-white people appears to have begun in high school, but it congealed at Duke University. There, Miller worked with white nationalist classmate Richard Spencer, as members of Duke’s Conservative Union, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The two helped bring white nationalist Peter Brimelow to campus in 2007.
Of course, that doesn’t get to the root of Miller’s pathology. But, we also have some insight from Miller’s uncle, retired neuropsychologist David S. Glosser. In a 2018 piece for Politico, he labeled his nephew an “immigration hypocrite,” saying his family would have been wiped out in Europe if Miller’s approaches to immigration had been adopted a century before.
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” Glosser wrote. “Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions.”
Sadly, Glosser may have been mistaken on one point. Neither Trump nor Miller seem numb to the brutality. Like Mussolini and the Blackshirts, they seem to exult in it.