Deny fascists respect and you deny them their most powerful social tools

I want to re-emphasize a point made here by Gwen Snyder, and it's a drum I've been beating for, sigh, 20 years or so now.

Can I just say that I love these mass booings so much.

Even more than money these fascists want the fearful respect of the people who have historically disrespected them.

Refusing them that respect is a meaningful show of resistance, especially in places that traditionally fetishize decorum.

Snyder's referring to the hilarious footage of the forever weird JD Vance getting boisterously booed when he dared show his face at a National Symphony Orchestra concert at the Kennedy Center. And she's right, it's glorious.

But the point is an important one. The core premise of fascism is "strength." The would-be strongmen attempt to project an aura of invincibility, a hyper-masculine, hyper-nationalist facade that portrays them as the most powerful figures of the era. It is that premise of omnipotence that attracts the fascist's base to begin with, and in interview after interview members of that base bluster about how Dear Leader is making the nation "strong" again by doing things they don't understand—but Dear Leader is being extremely loud about it, so that must mean "strong."

It is damn hard to project an aura of omnipotent strength, however, when you're being booed by symphony patrons.

Refusing to show "fearful respect" to would-be authoritarian leaders is a vital show of resistance. It undermines the entire fascist premise of "strength," and presents visible proof to the rest of the public that these leaders are not omnipotent figures who have transcended the boundaries of normal politics—they're just politicians. Mean-spirited, quite possibly ignorant politicians, at that.

Showing public contempt for such figures accomplishes two things. It demonstrates to other members of the public that there is real, widespread resistance to whatever atrocities the authoritarians have last unleashed. And, in doing so, it creates the permission structure necessary for those other members of the public to reevaluate their own assumptions about the strongman. It undermines the strongman's aura of strength and replaces it with an aura of conflict, or disapproval, or bumbling.

That's fatal, for a fascist movement. The audience for authoritarianism is attracted to it because it projects an omnipotence they want to be associated with; "strong" is the point. A political figure who is widely asserted to be sexually attracted to furniture is not strong; a man who can't muster even half the public respect that the clarinet section enjoys is not a transcendent figure worthy of being handed extralegal and violent powers.

You can't look "strong" while being booed. That's what broke Elon Musk's brain and heralded his spiral into Nazi-adjacent authoritarianism in the first place. Showing mere disrespect for Donald Trump is enough to have him ask military figures to shoot the protesters doing it, even if only "in the legs"—authoritarian-minded thugs, whether in management or in politics, viscerally understand the dangers that public shows of resistance present to their authority.

Stopping fascism requires treating fascists with infinite public scorn. Elon Musk's companies should not see a day's peace; protests at Tesla dealerships have been some of the most effective public displays of resistance around. Not belittling Trump's various toadies at every opportunity should be considered a sin. There is no respect due to the people who deport severely ill American citizen children in their odious attempts to project maximal cruelty; they should become pariahs.

This is something you can do, in your daily life. Perhaps you will have few opportunities; perhaps you will have many. But the courage needed at this time is the courage to pick at every scab, every day, making good trouble as a demonstration to others that Trump is weak, not strong. He is a fool; he is ignorant; he is mentally unbalanced; he is a coward; he cannot exist except in his thick shell of sycophants. Musk is the same.

Personally, I would take all of this further: The notions of comity and respect for the office are, when aimed at persons unworthy of such treatment on their own merits, poisonous. That's something I've muttered about for a very long time, to little avail. All political figures use their offices to claim a dignity they may themselves not be remotely worthy of. It is the central conceit of the profession; in real life you might be a crooked serial adulterer who's made their fortune through insider trading or worker exploitation or because daddy died at a very fortuitous time, but one election later all of that is forgotten and you become a senator—a walking, talking honorific.

It's poisonous because it whitewashes behavior—actions—in favor of the theater performances we see daily in the House and Senate. It pretends that those who do the most violent damage to the American public are equals of those who attempt to do good; the media treats both the same, their colleagues treat both as the same, and the public is browbeaten into the same performances. And we have seen where it leads, because it leads here, to the current moment. A time when lies and truth are deemed of equal value, and when protesting genocide is considered malevolent but deporting an American child with cancer is considered bold.

Fuck all of that, very much. It is long past time for incivility..