Here is Nick Catoggio at The Dispatch:
The modern Republican Party isn’t conservative in any meaningful way. Any lingering doubt about that was extinguished on Saturday.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump declared in a post. It’s not clear where he got that line—some attributed it to Napoleon, apocryphally—but it must be the most overtly fascist thing a U.S. president has ever said. Even so, the official White House Twitter account excitedly promoted the post alongside a photo of Trump’s weird, glowering official portrait. Right-wing influencers celebrated it too, including Shadow President Musk, with some leaning very hard indeed into the Bonaparte analogy.
These people aren’t “conservatives.” They’re not pretending to be conservatives. They’re fascists, and the lengths to which they’re willing to go to implement a fascist agenda will become clearer every hour of every day of the next four years. Trying to shame them into behaving better by holding them to the standards of conservatism will not work. If Trump’s brand of politics stands for anything, it’s the proposition that shame is evidence of weakness and weakness is the only thing stopping you from subduing everyone in your way.
Is there a way to remain patriotic in a country governed by fascists?
I detest nationalists but I appreciate that their sense of patriotism has ideological substance.
They get a bad rap on that point, in fact. Many would caricature nationalists’ notion of patriotism as “my country, right or wrong” but that’s the opposite of true. Have you ever heard Donald Trump sound patriotic when he believes America is doing wrong—i.e., when it’s being governed by someone other than him?
No one trash-talks their own country as ecstatically as a nationalist who’s out of power. To find another cohort as quick to blame the United States for the world’s problems, you need to venture out into the woolly Code Pink fringes of the American left.
Still, and with apologies to Walter Sobchak: Say what you want about the tenets of postliberalism, at least it’s an ethos. Nationalists recognize, reasonably enough, that pride in one’s country should depend on what that country actually stands for. If it’s unconditional, if “my country, right or wrong” is your motto, all you’re doing is rooting for laundry.
“Rooting for laundry” comes from an old Jerry Seinfeld bit about the silliness of sports fandom. We go to the game and cheer boisterously for the players on our team, he noted; then some get traded away, eventually return to town as members of the visiting team, and we boo them lavishly. There’s no substance to our emotions in either case apart from blind loyalty to the home team. What we’re actually cheering for is that team’s uniform—for laundry.
Republican voters have been rooting for laundry since 2015. Most of the “players” have been traded away or retired over the past decade, replaced with ones who openly disdain the postwar liberal order that the GOP defended for 70 years. It didn’t matter: The fans kept going to the games and cheering for the red uniform. Now we have a “conservative” party that’s functionally fascist, earning the same dependable 49 percent or so of the vote in every election.
Rooting for laundry in politics amounts to unconditional support for a political project no matter how malevolent it gets. That political project is now directing the United States government, not just the Republican Party….
Read the entire piece here. It might be behind a paywall.