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Monday
While the Democrats currently are the big tent party, fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes that MAGA has a big tent of its own. One of MAGA’s superpowers, she notes, is how it
made room for Southern racists full of nostalgia for the Jim Crow South; people who distrust or feel hostile to anyone who is not White and Christian; neo-Nazis; and far-right extremists linked to Russia, Hungary, and other present-day autocracies. MAGA brought global and home-grown hatreds together and gave them a political home.
A recent indicator of this nostalgia is how the Coast Guard recently tried to roll back its absolute prohibition of noose drawings—and also swastikas–before public outrage forced it to retreat. By calling them only “potentially divisive” and classifying their display as only “a potential hate incident,” authorities were attempting to normalize them. As Ben-Ghiat points out,
The word “potential” does the normalization work here. It suggests that some people don’t have a problem with swastikas or nooses and don’t find them hateful. Maybe they have positive feelings about Nazis and their quest to create a Jew-free world, or see Blacks as undeserving of rights: if Blacks were lynched, they must have had it coming to them.
Normalization, Ben-Ghiat points out, serves MAGA’s agenda:
We should not be surprised that a U.S. government entity was attempting to make nooses and swastikas more acceptable. Each expression of racism has its own history in America, but in 2025 they come together to advance the goal of creating an American ethno-state supported by ideologies of White supremacy and Christian nationalism—a state in which racialized voter suppression, mass detention and deportation, and Fascist-style population engineering schemes reshape American governance and society.
Great literature resists normalization, showing us the truth in ways that sink in. In response to the Coast Guard, I could choose either Holocaust or lynching poems for today’s post, but I’ve chosen the latter as I live in a Tennessee county that, in 1918—which is to say, 36 years before my family moved here—had one of the most violent lynching incidents in U.S. history. You can read the Wikipedia article here if you want the full story, but suffice it to say that it all started with a Black man standing up for himself. It ended with acts of unimaginable horror.
Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday, draws its power from its disturbing comparison, which catches us off guard. Then it hits us with the contrast between “scent of magnolia sweet and fresh” and “the sudden smell of burning flesh”:
Strange Fruit
By Abel Meeropol
Southern trees bearing a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is a fruit for the crow to pluck
For the rain to wither, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Toni Morrison may have this poem in mind when she writes about a lynching in Beloved. The novel is about attempts to bury the past. No matter how much Sethe attempts to do so, however, the past keeps returning. Here she find her mind return to life on the Sweet Home plantation, where life for slaves was relatively good until a new master came upon the scene. Once again we are bludgeoned with the contrast between natural beauty and human bestiality:
[S]uddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shamless beauty It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful sloughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.
Here’s one more poem, in which Claude McKay begins with the victim but then shifts to the white witnesses who condone the hanging. This is the kind of normalizing that Ben-Ghiat fears:
The Lynching
By Claude McKay
His spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
Perhaps you think that this could not happen again in America. But then, did you ever imagine that a day would come when we would see masked police grabbing people off the street and sending them, unrecorded, to foreign concentration camps?
The good news is that pushback yields results. The American military is once again classifying nooses and swastikas as hate symbols.
