The corrosive rigidity of fascism

Is America something fixed or something fluid? Is it a country founded on a perfect set of ideas or a country that has struggled to become perfect? Is it a system that works or one that sputters, one that’s being damaged or one that’s being fixed?

This debate undergirds an enormous part of the political conversation. It manifests in disputes about the Constitution, in the fight over immigration, in attacks on government spending and research. At the risk over being overly concise — particularly since this is mostly meant to be a rumination on Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “One Battle After Another” — it seems likely that some part of this is rooted in the idea that America achieved and now risks losing a position as the most dominant nation on Earth. The America that was, won. Can the America that is?

The position of the administration is that America is deviating from its path, led astray by deviants. Rhetoric from the vice president and Trump allies centers on the idea that the United States is a nation built centrally by 18th century writers and 19th century frontiersmen (the “White” descriptor not always left as subtext). That trajectory of greatness led the country to where it is, a path forward as unswerving and inevitable to their eyes as the Democratic Party’s historic embrace of Southern racism.

To protect the nation, they argue, we must protect that path. We must more tightly control how Americans think and who enters the country. We must return rigor and rigidity to the American system.

To a significant extent, this narrative is often used as post hoc rationalization for the centralization of power. But the rigidity is always there. The inflexible understanding of what constitutes America sits at the root of the effort. Make America great again, as it was.

The opposing theory is that the union isn’t perfect. That it doesn’t follow clean lines and never has. And, in fact, that this is what makes America great. America is a social experiment that shifts ingredients and approaches and achieved success through experimentation and flexibility. It is not and has never been a perfect machine, as any even cursory assessment of history will attest. But it can be made more perfect, by continuing to explore and test and adjust.

”One Battle After Another” is a terrific film, and an astonishingly timely one. I won’t get into the plot since if you’ve seen it there’s no need and if you haven’t I wouldn’t want to spoil it. But I will say that this tension between rigid and flexible is at its core: from the explicit tension between the fascist regime and opposing revolutionaries, to the search for racial purity in our national melting pot, to the question of what constitutes a family. The overarching national battle between rigid and flexible isn’t resolved in the movie, but the others are — with the forces of rigidity losing. Even, at one point, they lose to more rigid versions of themselves.

As a work of fiction, we shouldn’t see the outcome as particularly reassuring. (It’s telling, though, that some on the real-world right view the story as threatening.) What we might take from the movie instead is its reminder that fluidity is natural, if not unavoidable; uncertainty seeping out of and into order. Love strengthens a family more than DNA does. Inclusion strengthens America more than exclusion does.

American ideals and American success require defense. Improvement means eternal adjustment and improvisation. Creating a more perfect union means fighting one battle after another, indefinitely.

Photo via Warner Bros. Pictures.