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A distinguishing mark of fascist politics is the targeting of ideological enemies and the freeing of all restraints in combating them.
When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.*2
Fascist political tactics employed by an election’s winner materialize in the resulting state apparatus, not only between individuals.
ignoring the state apparatus erected by those who entered into office through fascist politics, we behave as if fascist political tactics cannot transform once-democratic states into fascist ones. This is a thesis that history, as well as common sense, rejects.
With the advent of a public health pandemic like COVID-19, the attacks on expertise, science, and truth that are the lifeblood of fascist politics imperil much more than just our political system.
Fascist politics exploits crises to advance its ideological agenda.
Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.
Fascist politics includes many distinct strategies: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and a dismantling
of public welfare and unity.
The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.
Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.
The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.
If one can convince a population that they are rightfully exceptional, that they are destined by nature or by religious fate to rule other populations, one has already convinced them of a monstrous lie.
While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized. These invented histories also diminish or entirely extinguish the nation’s past sins. It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s actual history in conspiratorial terms, as a narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimize the people of the true “nation.”
Erasing the real past legitimates the vision of an ethnically pure, virtuous past nation.
Fascist politics repudiates any dark moments of a nation’s past.
Such attempts to legislate the erasure of a nation’s past are characteristic of fascist regimes.
When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotion of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish unreflective adulation of the nation’s glory.
Historians who advance a false narrative for political gain under the treasured ideals of truth and objectivity, according to Du Bois, are guilty of transforming history into propaganda.
Historically, fascist leaders have often come to power through democratic elections. But the commitment to freedom, such as the freedom inherent in the right to vote, tends to end with that victory.
It is often noted, rightly, that fascism elevates the irrational over the rational, fanatical emotion over the intellect.
Trump voters
Burke writes, “those who attack Hitlerism as a cult of the irrational should emend their statements to this extent: irrational it is, but it is carried on under the slogan of ‘Reason.’
Whenever fascism threatens, its representatives and facilitators denounce universities and schools as sources of “Marxist indoctrination,” the classic bogeyman of fascist politics. Typically used without any connection to Marx or Marxism, the expression is employed in fascist politics as a way to malign equality.
The dominant perspective is often misrepresented as the truth, the “real history,” and any attempt to allow a space for alternative perspectives is derided as “cultural Marxism.”
The priorities here make sense when one realizes that in antidemocratic systems, the function of education is to produce obedient citizens structurally obliged to enter the workforce without bargaining power, and ideologically trained to think that the dominant group represents history’s greatest civilizational forces.
Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space. A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence. By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard. The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.
Conspiracy theories are a critical mechanism used to delegitimize the mainstream media, which fascist politicians accuse of bias for failing to cover false conspiracies.
Conspiracy theories are tools to attack those who would ignore their existence; by not covering them, the media is made to appear biased and ultimately part of the very conspiracy they refuse to cover.
These conspiracy theories are effective nevertheless because they provide simple explanations for otherwise irrational emotions, such as resentment or xenophobic fear in the face of perceived threats.
Once a public accepts the comfort of conspiracy thinking as an explanation for irrational fears and resentments, its members will cease to be guided by reason in political deliberation.
Ahhh
Fascist politics feeds off the sense of aggrieved victimization caused by loss of hierarchal status.
White men
Fascist politics thrives off the resulting sense of aggrieved loss and victimization that results from the ever more tenuous and difficult struggle to defend a sense of cultural, ethnic, religious, gendered, or national superiority.
Rectifying unjust inequalities will always bring pain to those who benefited from such injustices. This pain will inevitably be experienced by some as oppression.
Yup
These ideas also reflect a somewhat nostalgic longing for that past world, when men believed they could simply take their places among the nation’s elite, simply by working hard and applying themselves. Alas, such a world never existed; economic elites have always managed to reproduce themselves despite the ideals of a meritocracy. But that hasn’t stopped men from believing it.
It is the American Dream.
And when men fail, they are humiliated, with nowhere to place their anger.7
Red pill men
Fascist politics feeds the insulting myth that hardworking rural residents pay to support lazy urban dwellers, so it is not a surprise that the base of its success is found in a country’s rural areas.
In fascist politics, everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a
way of life, a set of customs. The diversity, with its concomitant tolerance of difference, in large urban centers is therefore a threat to fascist ideology. Fascist politics targets financial elites, “cosmopolitans,” liberals, and religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities.
In fascism, the state is an enemy; it is to be replaced by the nation, which consists of self-sufficient individuals who collectively choose to sacrifice for a common goal of ethnic or religious glorification.
Maga
The essential characteristic of fascist propaganda was never its lies, for this is something more or less common to propaganda everywhere and of every time. The essential thing was that they exploited the age-old Occidental prejudice which confuses reality with truth, and made that “true” which until then could only be stated as a lie.3
In this way, as a prelude to ethnic cleansing or genocide, governments will artificially create the conditions inside the state that seem to legitimize the subsequent brutal treatment of the population.
But there is no disagreement that the combination of harsh, punitive crime policies for black American communities coupled with drastic cuts to social welfare programs and job training has led to tragic consequences and a self-reinforcing pattern of repeated stereotypes and policies.
Never thought of it this way
It has an unstated purpose—to create the conditions that allow racist stereotypes to flourish, so that politicians can continue to exploit fascist tactics for electoral gain. ...
Labor unions create mutual bonds along lines of class rather than those of race or religion. That is the fundamental reason why labor unions are such a target in fascist ideology.
Ah this is why they are going after labor unions
Labor unions are a powerful weapon against the development of an unequal economic sphere. Because fascism thrives under conditions of economic uncertainty, where fear and resentment can be mobilized to set citizens against one another, labor unions guard against fascist politics’ gaining a foothold.
“Right to work” is an Orwellian name for legislation that attacks workers’ ability to collectively bargain, thereby robbing workers of a voice. After right-to-work laws passed in the Midwestern bastions of American labor, Wisconsin and Michigan, the states’ politics subsequently swung sharply right, especially during the racially divisive U.S. presidential campaign of 2016.
The pull of fascist politics is powerful. It simplifies human existence, gives us an object, a “them” whose supposed laziness highlights our own virtue and discipline, encourages us to identify with a forceful leader who helps us make sense of the world, whose bluntness regarding the “undeserving” people in the world is refreshing.
How true
Fascist politics preys on the human frailty that makes our own suffering seem bearable if we know that those we look down upon are being made to suffer more.
2024 and tariffs
When universities are as expensive as they are in the United States, their generous liberal visions are easy targets for fascist demagoguery.
