Beware the fascist everyman

The New York Times published an article on Saturday profiling a white supremacist – or separatist, as he would have it – who reckons Hitler was just doing his best for his people. It was a lifestyle piece. Tony Hovater – a 29-year-old welder with a hipster beard, married, four cats, plays guitar – spoke about his beliefs, whipping them as smooth and gobstopping as peanut butter. He marched at Charlottesville; he is proud of what they did that day, of what they are doing, all those young white men fighting back for poor, misunderstood white patriarchy, for Stepford wives and the black man knowing his place.

Hovater is one of the young foot soldiers of the emergent extreme right, a Holocaust-denier, an extremist, the neo-Nazi next door.

He owns a pineapple slicer, he cooks pasta, he watches Seinfeld, he used to play in a heavy metal band. He’ll flog you a swastika armband for twenty bucks.

Now the newspaper is getting a lot of flak, not because they made him seem wonderful – they didn’t, though they did say he was “polite and low-key” – but because they spoke at length about his “normal” life: the fascist everyman.

But here’s the thing: Hovater’s “normalcy” represents something much scarier than a horror movie, much truer than fiction.

This is “the banality of evil,” as journalist Hannah Arendt called it when she covered the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s.

Evil does not come neatly packaged, wearing white and stroking a cat; evil does not usually laugh maniacally from inside a bunker.

Evil creeps up on ordinary folk and whispers into their ears, softly, softly, sprinkled with reason; evil wears the mask of the plausible as it draws people in.

And its proponents will change your tyre for you, be polite to strangers, black and white.

I know this firsthand because I have a white supremacist amongst my kin.

“I don’t think white is superior,” he says, “just different,” although he can’t explain how without resorting to “facts” gleaned from the far reaches of the internet.

He hands me an ice cream, asks how my children are …

Nobody wants to think of themselves as bad; even evil does not recognize itself in a mirror.

I hope that’s what the New York Times was reminding us: Hitler was a vegetarian, a patriot, loved his dog … don’t be fooled again.