Naomi Wolf spoke with Steve Bannon about the Biden Administration's imposition of a nation-wide vaccine mandate. (Full video in link).
This seemed to be a moment of clarity for Wolf.
Though she is still trapped in the false paradigm wherein 'fascism
= things I don't like', which makes her term 'bio-fascism' silly; and her
diagnosis ultimately miss its target, she is at least open to critically
assessing the team she was on.
What the Biden administration is engaging in is certainly
medical authoritarianism, but it ain't fascist.
Now, Biden is making aggressive statements. He has stated that he'd use his powers, as President, to get uncooperative governors 'out of the way', that he'd force employers to hold employees to vaccine mandates, and that he'd also use the military, if necessary, to see these mandates through.
This isn't the first time Biden has threatened his own citizens. In June, he implied that attempts to over-throw the US government would be met with F-15s or 'maybe some nuclear weapons'.
One may argue that Biden wasn't threatening anyone, but just pointing out the disparity in arms that exist between rebellious citizens and their government. This seems a bit odd, though, when one considers how the US government has targeted and murdered its citizens in the past: from Waco, to Ruby Ridge, to Anwar al-Awlaqi.
The threat also seems misguided given Biden's statements on the Jan. 6th Capitol Hill riots. He has called it an insurrection, an attempted coup, and a breach of the 'citadel of our democracy'. Well, all of that was done with any weapons used. Also, Biden's threats are made even more misguided given the context of the US' loss to the Taliban, recently. This apparent disparity of arms, it would seem, isn't a deciding factor... So, credit where credit is due.
But despite Biden's inane blustering, what is actually going on?
Wolf is stating that what we're seeing is a violent, coercive, fascist coup that is stripping the US citizens of their rights, and undermining the duly elected politicians who represent them.
While some of this is certainly happening, I don't think that framing it in terms of 'fascism' is correct.
What we're seeing isn't the exercise of some fascist impulse, rather we're seeing the all-to-familiar logic of cosmopolitan neo-liberalism.
There is no strong leader, but rather an entrenched bureaucracy. There is no orderly vision imposed in the service of a national ideal, but rather anarcho-tyranny. There is no concept of the human spirit to aspire towards, but rather the dull grinding of the economy that the populace is subordinate to.
Biopower is a term coined by Michel Foucault that refers to the myriad ways by which for populations are managed.
Individuals, as well as populations are born, live, grow, and die, and biopower is used to administer to those entities. This is done through numerous and diverse techniques which form an anatomo-politics of the human body - health and bodies become a political concern. In order to do this, bio-power incorporates certain aspects of disciplinary power such as normalisation and surveillance. Nonetheless, there are major differences in both scope and method: if disciplinary power is about training the actions of bodies, then bio-power is about managing the births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a population.
By 'population', Foucault means 'a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality in which they live'. The population is understood naturalistically, and human beings are understood as biological entities that exist in tandem with other biological systems. Human beings were seen as a species, a biological being not over-and-above the natural world, but very much a part of it. In turn, this new understanding of populations led to the development of new techniques of governance and control.
According to Foucault, biopower is exercised through myriad channels such as medical institutions, welfare funds, insurance, the civil engineering of towns and cities, and the like. I wish to broaden these channels because it seems that biopower isn't only exercised by policy-makers and bureaucrats of the state, but also by doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, economists, et cetera. This is because these actors act within and in accordance to disciplines that have knowledge which can be exercised upon individuals and populations in order to bring them into a normalised mode of existence. In fact, these disciplines are often called into service by the state to normalise, enforce, and corral opinions and public action.
All of this has grown out of the long tradition of liberalism that arose in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Whereas an ordered society was maintained through a blunt practice of simply imposing the laws of the sovereign upon its subjects in the 16th-18th centuries, later developments in social management resulted in laissez-faire approaches that favoured the influencing the environment and letting individual self-interest play itself out.
People, therefore, are managed through the management of things so that they perform in the way they ought to perform when they are asked to consent to how they are governed under law. In other words, the individual is made to behave in the way various dominant institutions think that they ought to behave. This cannot be made any clearer than the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccination campaigns.
So, Wolf is wrong to claim that Biden - or any similar government - is engaging in some fascist coup. What Biden is doing is in fact engaging in a long-established process of managing populations and dealing with unruly dissidents. They're first use the carrot to entice compliance, and if that form of manipulation doesn't work, then they'll bring out the stick in the hopes that the dissident hold-outs will act in their self-interest and save themselves the abuse.
Whether or not the abuse will come from the government is yet to be seen. That said, there have been numerous instances of such abuse imposed by the private sector. People have had their jobs taken from them, had their bank accounts shut down, had police raid their homes, and all manner of abuse simply because they voice opinions the state doesn't like and mobilised others to their cause. Now, with a strong network of medical authoritarians who can make up and enforce rules, coupled with a compliant and desperate population willing to throw people to the wolves, it certainly seems likely that the abuse will come.
And if it does come, it isn't coming from fascists. Its coming from liberals.
