The Rise of Contemporary Fascism

Our society is rapidly changing – specifically, it is becoming more insular, closed-minded, polarized, deluded, and irrational. I believe we are following a path leading to an increasingly fascist society. Contrary to some, I am not of the opinion that our future President Trump is the sole embodiment of this trend; rather, the push towards fascism has been active for some time. Instead of seeing fascism as something abruptly appearing from mouth of Trump, I think the rise of fascism is better modeled as a candle burning at both ends – a hyper-extension of cancerous partisanship with the face of demagogue Donald Trump at one end, the dogmatism and isolating effects of Identity Politics at the other, Fascism at the center, and a wick of classist conflict tying everything together.

First, I would like to declare my terms and define ‘fascism’. The dictionary definition is fairly straightforward ¹, but I don’t think it really does a very good job addressing the term. Fascism is more than a system of government. When we speak about systems of government, we speak of republics, monarchies, democracies, and so on. There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a Fasciarchy or something like that. We don’t really have a term that encapsulates fascism as a system of governance – instead it is used as a modifier. We speak of fascist regimes, fascist dictators, fascist policies, and the system itself is usually described by the term ‘dictatorship’ . I think this points to a broader context for the usage of ‘fascist’ – anyone perceived as infringing social freedom as an authority can be called a fascist. But fascism does not start with a regime or policy. It begins with the populace at large. Thus, I prefer to define fascism not in terms of the traditional fascist leader, but instead in terms of us, the denizens of the state being affected. Fascism is the movement of authority over social and cultural values towards an increasingly centralized source. The opposite would be a certain understanding of Liberality – the diffusion of authority over social and cultural values to individual subjectivities. Fascism is thus a relinquishing of epistemological and moral authority. This may be coerced, as is the case in a military coup, but ultimately it is through the complicity of the people, not the presence of a dictator, that Fascism takes root². We all share the blame, collectively as a society, when fascism appears.

Considering this perspective, it is confusing how we have so abruptly turned towards fascist policy as a nation. After all, it was only the last two election cycles that the country turned out to strongly support a visibly “progressive” candidate in President Obama. Furthermore, I know many expected an easy win for Hillary this election cycle, and it seems like somehow, outside anyone’s control, we have come derailed from perceived progressive policy and descended into something else. Well, there are several factors at play here. First there are Donald Trump and his supporters. At face value, he does fit the traditional archetype of a fascist. He is lacking in self-awareness at times, yet shrewdly calculating at others. He shouts and blusters along with the most famous of fascists, and he is charismatic. More importantly, he has established his charisma publicly through both his success as a celebrity and his perennial presence in mass media. But I argue that at his core, Trump is not the same kind of fascist people want to see him as. His methods are sometimes fascist, but his actions are purely self-aggrandizing, not authoritarian. Trump is more an egoist than a fascist. Trump has zero interest in actually putting people in camps, or in real oppression and control as a dictator. He simply wants attention, to be a figurehead; he wants to be successful and powerful as their own ends. Trump has some nebulous vision for society, one rarely extending beyond his being perceived as the “right choice” – a good President³– and I believe in most matters he will divest his authority as President to his cabinet. What Trump wants is to be respected and, above all else, beloved, not feared. Trump discovered through his celebrity ventures how to tap into growing popular dissent.  He knows how to use that power to grow his brand and his own popularity. This is what all fascist leaders must do, but Trump must have done so accidentally. I say this because, every step of the way his candidacy was farcical in how it was run and represented. Trump had no detailed plans for his election, or for his campaign. He raised no money for most of the election beyond donations, and believed at the very end, by his own admission, that he would probably lose. Time after time the mainstream media dismissed him as a joke, because his campaign was a joke⁴. It was an excuse for Trump to lord his opulence over people, insult a bunch of unlikable GOP nominees, and get his face on TV. The media outlets were complicit in this and, believing him harmless, granted him near-unlimited free advertising in exchange for ratings. Inadvertently, through his purposefully shocking (and thus construed as honest and real) rhetoric, Trump became the face of a populist movement. I stress that this movement had been brewing long before he came to prominence. He is now, by a comedy of errors on his part, the mouthpiece of fascism, and distinct from the deliberate, often violent dictators of past and present. He sets policy only because he has to, and is inconsistent in everything except the frequency at which he expresses his thoughts (which is a lot, at least on Twitter). He is the Fascist of the Millennial age, too ironic and detached from actual personal responsibility to truly understand what he must actually do as President. It shows, and his willingness to retract many of his political positions before even becoming formally elected demonstrates how little he really cares about his own policy, the building of his own national vision, and the things a dictator “should” traditionally care about. He is primarily concerned with his image and consumption, and holds little concern for substance, value, and reality beyond the self.

In fact, I believe that Trump is actually exhibiting a great deal of individual liberality in contrast to the fascist movement that supports him. There is the sense that, through the lens of narcissism and egoism, he really believes he can make America great again, just by virtue of being the guy in charge. This is within the confines of the existing system; he is not overthrowing our current system. He does not seek to rule in fear.  He just wants to be the guy making the big decisions (which will obviously be the best decisions, believe me) so that the public will celebrate him.  For example, he is legitimately following his own judgment in selecting his cabinet. He honestly believes, in a quasi-Randian move, that the most capable people are the most successful, aka the richest⁵. When he is picking CEO friends, he is simply picking people like him; people he thinks will do the job well. To Trump, this is an important change that will make all the difference in MAGAing everything. In this sense, he has made few concessions to the Republican machine which is chained to his presidency, because he has had little actual policy to concede. He just wants to be at the top, calling the shots as they come. It is this individualist streak that hearkens back to the American Dream that individuals with bootstrapping and enough willpower can achieve anything, planning, education, and experience be damned. Trump’s association with the American Dream, which has often been tied to the image of the hyper-rich, cements his support. He has no objective understanding, no definitive plan for America, just his aforementioned charisma, his intuitive opinions on this or that, and the quintessence of the American mythos.

How Trump supporters can prop up a man who does not have a solid platform is complicated. We can be sure that Trump has tapped into the powers of myth and propaganda. But what of the people who buy it? His demographic is wrongfully assumed to be exclusively rural, white, Middle America. Exit polling alone does not bear this out. Donald Trump saw an increase in non-white (as well as white) votes when compared to the 2012 election, and nearly the same number of female votes⁶. Trying to paint Trump supporters as all one race or gender simply isn’t born out by the election statistics. Instead, I propose that the unifying factor among all those who supported Trump is that they wanted change. Specifically, they want the idea of change, because their reality is constrained and marginalized by the existing class structure. There is a race/gender component to this, but it is preceded by issues of class. It is the overwhelming force by which the highest class suppresses the lower classes, selectively permitting only a few to rise by force of policy, both legal and cultural, that generates issues of racism, sexism, etc. Donald Trump is as independent and individualistic as they come. The image he projects is very dissimilar from the traditional politician and his frankness, despite often communicating something undesirable, is nevertheless construed as expressing truth.  Notions that the system can change; that the repressed and silenced can have a voice again, whatever it may be that the oppressed want to hear. He positioned himself directly in opposition to those who wanted to perpetuate the status quo, a status quo that has long agitated a large percentage of the nation that feels marginalized and threatened. That he is an accidental fascist is irrelevant to the fact that he now represents a movement attempting to install a new centralized system of morals and laws. The sad irony of the situation is its all vapor – because of his nebulous policy claims, people believe even their wildest desires will soon become law, when the reality is lack of substance to the movement . Put another way, Trump has mobilized the lower classes, people who feel forgotten and persecuted, by promising them things will be different. The essence of change in its immediacy, no planning required. No matter what he actually does, how it is different, they will support it as in their best interests because their individuality is being suppressed by the existing system which seeks to keep them in a fascist, partisan apparatus of its own design.

For decades, both the Democratic and Republican parties have been priming our nation to produce citizens who cannot afford to think for themselves. They have been creating machines of disagreement, even hatred, to further their own ends and create a blindness among us that prevents action against the system. Trump has unwittingly tapped into that mechanism and commandeered it for his own personal ends. People seek no answers – they are desperate and blinded by willful ignorance bred within them from birth by a classist system that seeks to control their human individuality in the most effective and insidious way possible – the suppression of free, considered thought and debate. People seek no answers; they respond only to the call to rally them against the Bad Guys. This is the fascist movement – the popular cry to redirect their relinquished individual authority to a more centralized place, in this case from the Republican Party and the faceless political machine therein, to Donald Trump and the promise of change ⁷.

As I said many American citizens, now mobilized, feel forgotten and persecuted. This is by design. The party in charge always breeds resentment in the minority party in our system, because this is to the benefit of the perpetuation of the system.  Thus the major constituents of both the Democratic and Republican parties – members of the lower class – are prevented from seeing the truth, that they are actually largely the same, and not the enemies of one another. This is the goal of Partisanship – the notion that one should support one party or the other as such, simply because the other is evil or misguided. Through partisanship, our government has minimized the guiding power of rationality and debate. It is has manipulated people into acting against their own interests and for the interests of those who rule, because it prevents the processes of politics from entering their ideal sphere, the sphere of rational discussion and consideration, and denigrates the political process. Instead of enlightened citizens, we are mired in the dirt and mud of internal conflict and emotion⁸. There is no inherent reason, really, why any member of the lower class should be Republican or Democrat. Their policies are distorted images of one another, different faces of an overarching corporate capitalist structure. Libertarianism and Socialism, the right and left of this center, are all but dead movements in the US. This is not to say our system is evil or intractable. Perhaps with more honest, intellectual input it could be said to represent all our interests⁹. But as it stands, huge swathes of the population are set against each other by deception to maintain the status quo. I am no socialist, and I am no libertarian. I am neither Republican nor Democrat – my point is all these titles should hold little meaning for us beyond being convenient for classifying ideas. We should not feel disgust or revulsion at an idea, in and of itself, by its simply being called to attention. This is the force of partisanship at work in our daily lives. Fascism is not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem; it is a problem affecting us all, and has been for generations. Indeed, it seems that the machine works too well, and the matter has become worse, as people adopt fascist positions in increasingly idiosyncratic and insular matters.

The term I give to the granular application of fascist impulses in our personal lives (as opposed to the re-purposed fascism at work in the Trump movement as a national political force) is identity politics. Identity politics is in some ways born from the right place – the idea of giving a voice to those whose voices have been diminished or oppressed(sound familiar?). In this way, inequality, racism, sexism, gender-normativity, etc. could be overcome. Identity politics has had little success on this front,  but what has come from it is another movement of fascism, at face value diametrically opposed to the fascism of Trump, and yet sourced from near identical beginnings, and ultimately serving the same ends.  This new “personal” fascism has all the same elements of national partisanship, but with a social twist to further enable a sense of righteousness. I have discussed fascism on school campuses, called for by the students, before¹⁰. Without recapitulating the whole thing, suffice to say that any movement that seeks to hold one authority over all others, to centralize morality not in an appeal to reason but in staunch adherence to dogma and orthodoxy is fascist. When someone, as well-intentioned as they might be, insists on a safe space for their one belief, when they fully intend to insist that a group of people are categorically evil in some manner, when they refuse to debate alternative views instead instantly condemning others as wrong, they fall under the influence of fascism¹¹. Make no mistake, as a nation it is our duty to define, collectively, what is right and wrong for our society. We should all work for equality, reform, and education. There are always going to be people who stand contrary to the ideals of their society, and that is what the law is for. By staking personal passion and interest on willful ignorance and hug-boxes, we encourage no one to grow and adapt. We become insular and small and hateful. This is all parallel to the balance of the two party system that maintains the status quo; it is a microcosm of the national movement. As long as one side sees the other as absolutely bigoted and fundamentally stupid, and one side sees the other as an affront to core and unassailable values, there can be no realization that they are being blinded to the fundamental problems that set them all back. Racism and sexism are just as much blinders -set-backs to social progress- as identity politics, because they are two sides of the same coin – aggressive stereotyping and villainizing over arbitrary distinctions. In this way, we are set against one another for the purposes of obfuscation and misdirection¹².

From either direction, the rise of fascism rapidly continues. What unifies these two movements is class conflict. This is nothing new – the struggles between classes and cultural stratification have been sources of conflict since the dawn of history. I would argue all conflicts are reducible to class conflict ¹³, or the dialectic between the master and slave, the oppressor and oppressed ¹⁴. I submit that the purpose of human progress is to alleviate this disparity, with the goal that one day the differences between classes are at once trivial and pointed to productive ends. In that time plenty is provided for all, and the path to move between classes is transparent and open. To that end, can our existing system provide for these needs? Can a capitalist economy provide the solution? I am not equipped to answer that. But the need for change, change to the existing system, big or small, is the undercurrent that drives modern dissent. People feel restless, they are manipulated by mass media to feel fundamentally unsafe (another source of fascist opinion that I could write a whole other essay on), members of the lower and middle classes feel stagnant,. As we examine the artificial social strata we see this stagnation becomes outright oppression and persecution. But because the true opposition lies concealed beneath the flow of everyday life, these feelings of anxiety, anger, and desire lack direction. Precisely the climate that nurtures fascism. When people want something safe and well-defined, something to alleviate their uncertainty and lack of hope in a world that is incredibly complicated, much bigger than themselves, and sometimes out to get them, they look to a leader. That is just human biology; hierarchical organization is built-in for us. Deep down we crave rules and the organization of society. But the quickest route to rules and order is the easiest – the arbitrary adoption of what is Right as demanded by someone else.

Perhaps a better title for this piece would have been The New Face of Fascism. The system of oppression, selfishness, and corruption has been here, and in nations past, for a very long time. But through calculated intention on the one hand, and (un)happy accident on the other, fascism today has been redefined and mobilized in a way that was hidden in the prior decades. As long as citizens stand in conflict, in denial of their shared parentage, they will only serve to perpetuate, even exacerbate, the cycle of partisan governance that continues to widen the class divide and disparity. Only as a unified people, willing to set aside the powerful and seductive air of certainty and rightness that rigid adherence to dogma brings, will we be able to institute real change to our culture and governance, and really question our leaders, who we should hold to a standard completely divorced from party platforms ¹⁵. Only when we learn to prize reason and subjective valuation, debate, and most importantly respect for each other as thinking creatures, will we ever make progress.

1. I am saving you valuable time by providing this dictionary link!
2. I feel like we already know this. Yet time and again we blame the dictator, not the complicated socio-cultural premises upon which the rise of the fascist ruler was predicated. The dictator is merely a product, or symptom, of an overarching malaise.
3. Here I am reminded of just how petty some of his tweets are – he still complains about losing the popular vote!. He clearly cares most about being well-liked, not about establishing a Reich, or actually disposing of those who dissent. Otherwise, we would see some proceedings against Hillary, one of his most vocal detractors, instead of the very limp attempt to hold her up as a “great competitor” once his rhetoric against her had served its purpose. Trump just wants you to love him, damnit!
4. Compare how Trump talked about, say, Rubio to how he spoke while performing in those WWE specials. It is startling how obviously Trump treated the campaign as just another exposure opportunity
5. classism is a topic reserved for below
6. Once again, I am helpfully providing a link. So nice!
7. It is pretty amusing how one could easily compare this to the message Obama used to achieve great success in becoming and then retaining the Presidency in two terms. But he operated in the existing system which manipulates people more or less covertly.
8. A good simile to described this relationship is Political Parties are like Sports Teams – you root for them, ultimately, just because they are your team. It is tautological; a deception.
9. By this I mean, I can conceive of Capitalism as a just and acceptable system wherein our system of government can reside. There is nothing inherently wrong with Capitalism, or governance by Representative Democracy. It’s just our implementation that needs a good deal of work
10. Why yes, I can help you out again!
11. For instance, it occurs to me that some might think I am too privileged to discuss this topic; you’re actually experiencing cognitive dissonance with the very equality you seek.
12. Here I anticipate some questions about what to do with people who refuse to comply with social norms. If we lived in such an ideal world where we were universally free to use consideration and discussion, there would still be people who held harmful beliefs. Those people would be true Outsiders, subject to lawful punishment and recourse agreed upon by an honest and unfettered majority. This is more a Platonic ideal for a national government then a realistic interpretation, but surely a world where people are enlightened, where they are made aware of attempts to control, manipulate, and suppress them,  and giventhe opportunity to work together would be better than a world where people close their ears out of a misplaced sense of loyalty?
13. I don’t know if I am quoting Marx or some other smarter person here. Sorry!
14. Well, here I know I am referencing Hegel
15. Are they honest, do their statements reach a standard of fact we all find acceptable? All politicians should be expected to be open, transparent, and comprehensible. The worst thing we can do is try to elect X because “hey, at least she’s a Democrat and not Y, the hideous Republican scum” and vice versa