The GOP Is Building a Fascist America, One Step at a Time
Why the Furore Over Rewriting the History of Slavery Matters
by umair haque
You might be, having taken it all in, struggling for words. Here’s what Fox News had to say about Ron DeSantis’s latest policy:
Slavery was beneficial to slaves. Like I said, you might be struggling for words. Let me help you find the appropriate ones.
When authoritarians reshape education systems to defend institutions like slavery — that’s textbook fascism.
And it’s the crossing of red, red line, too for a society whose democracy is already at profound peril — not to mention a sign of how serious the struggle for it to live on, in age where the world is turning to the far right, really is. It matters not just for America, but for the world.
Why? Let me offer you some context.
Do you know the words — the phrase — “Arbeit Macht Frei”? You should, if you don’t. A literal translation is: “Work makes you free.” But a more accurate one is: “Slavery is freedom.” If that sounds Orwellian to you, that’s because it is: Orwell’s inspiration for his famous three-phrases that 1984 was about — “Freedom is Slavery” — probably came from this.
“Arbeit Macht Frei” was the slogan that the Nazis placed at the gates of concentration camps. Why? Because before, and while, the Nazis annihilated the Jews (along with many other hated “subhumans”), they enslaved them.
But this was the culmination of a longer effort.
How repellent, how disgusting, how inhuman was it?
That’s a lot of quotes. But I think this point isn’t understood well enough. After practically a decade of figures like you and me warning that fascism was arriving in America, only to be met with the predictable laughter and mockery of establishment, who called us “alarmists,” and only came around, too late, after Jan 6th, an attempted coup — by now, even the establishment uses the phrase “fascism” here and there, if not often enough. But I wonder if they really understand it. Certainly, they don’t teach it well — not nearly well enough.
The Nazis began by expropriating the Jews, and then enslaving them, and then proceeded into annihilation. Now, “slavery” here can be a bit of a contentious term — this wasn’t “chattel slavery,” like in colonial America, where Black people were bought and sold like commodities at markets. It was forced labour. But the general point should be understood: the Nazis enslaved the Jews, for labour, because especially as war broke out, shortages began to happen, and armaments were needed. Whether or not this forced labour slavery provided much in the way of arms and missiles and tanks and so forth is besides the point entirely. What is the point is that the Nazis, too, practiced slavery — with the cynical slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
They did so for a reason — not just the proximal reason that they needed manufacturing capacity. But for a deeper reason: they admired and studied the American south deeply. They investigated it, examined it, when they were studying how to build a Reich, a society of the pure and true, in which the rest, hated subhumans, weren’t to exist. They modeled many of their policies after Jim Crow America — like the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which expropriated Jews’ property, belongings, possession, and then segregated them into ghettos. It’s hardly a surprise, in this context, that the Nazis thought of forced labour, of slavery, as a…key social institution.
And that brings us back to today. When we see figures like RDS defending slavery, we should be repelled and disgusted, morally, true — but we should be profoundly alarmed, for democracy and society. Because this isn’t just some kind of abstract intellectual debate we’re having. This is institutional reconstruction.
RDS has rewritten an American state’s educational curriculum. More are almost sure to follow. Kids will grow up learning that…slavery wasn’t so bad. Why not?
Because…Arbeit Macht Frei. Let’s examine the claim for a second. It doesn’t take more than a moment to debunk. Slaves gained skills that “benefited them personally.” Let me give you the simple version — that’s easy: slaves were forced into labour. To speak of “benefits” is a joke. Even to say that “later on,” when they were free, they “benefited,” is still a joke, because of course, what price is taking away someone’s self-determination, family, autonomy, and basic liberties for half…three quarters…more…of their lives? There’s no calculus here we can use to equivocate. These things aren’t like one another. Me giving you a “benefit” doesn’t cancel out me taking away your freedom, family, liberty, and abusing you like you weren’t a person at all. This is just a way to do exactly what it sounds like: defend the indefensible, and morally exculpate it, with a false calculus of rights and wrongs that falls apart at the merest touch.
But there’s a deeper version of this. Amartya Sen, one of the world’s great economists, won a Nobel Prize for it. I discussed it briefly last time — let me delve in a little deeper. What RDS is offering — and now the GOP’s beginning to adopt the line, you can see Faux News joining him — is a utilitarian defense of slavery. Hey, they benefited — so it wasn’t so bad! In utilitarian logic, just this — “usefulness” — can cancel out, if you like, past wrongs and harms. There is a simple scale of justice this point of view asks us to adopt. But is it a correct one, one that’s true?
What Sen won the Nobel Prize for his critique of utilitarianism. He literally came up with a thought experiment that’s now famous — at least in academic circles. If you go to a good grad school, and you don’t know Sen’s thought experiment, you didn’t go to one. It goes like this: imagine that you have a slave. He’s a “good” slave. So you reward him. He used to sleep on a stone floor. You give him a bed of straw. He’s better off now, right? According to utilitarianism, he is. But Sen said: no, he isn’t. He’s still a slave. He still has none of the following: self-determination, autonomy, true liberty. For those reasons, his potential will never fully be realized.
This thought experiment was revolutionary. The impact’s hard to overstate. You know the UN’s “Development Goals” and “Millennium Goals”? They came from this. Because what Sen was saying was that people’s capabilities are what matter. They are what make us genuinely free. If I don’t have the capability, for example, to take medicine, have an education, trust my neighbour — in what sense am I free? All this became known as “the capabilities approach” — and it changed the world.
It’s why — and more to the point, how — we began to eradicate things like extreme poverty and disease. It provided the impetus and motivation and reason to do so. Until then, the world was trapped by utilitarianism, you see — and utilitarianism has no reason to make a poor person better off. To give someone a vaccine against a deadly disease. Unless that person can offer something first, utilitarianism says: forget about them. To it, people have no intrinsic worth, dignity, or even humanity.
That is why despite the fact that it was a major leap forward in human thought — still, it justified everything from slavery to bondage to forced labour. Britain’s Victorian social contract was utilitarian — and in it, everything from child labour to workhouses to debtors’ prisons were all now infamous social institutions.
Now. That’s a brief tour through how philosophy changed the world. Let’s come back now to reality. RDS’s latest idea appears perilously similar to “Arbeit Macht Frei.” In its reduced form, it’s: “Slavery made slaves better off.” Where else, the implication is, would they have learned to be blacksmiths or coopers or what have you?