Why are so many Americans fascists?
Why are so many Americans fascists? Among the hundred reasons, here are four.
Fascism suits a crowded world as humans compete for resources, space, and belonging. As we saw last time, it’s a movement that couldn’t get started until the planet was massified: mass population, mass production, mass markets, mass communications, mass ignorance. With three generations of collapsed k-12 education in America — now ranked near bottom in the industrialized (OECD) world — America is a profoundly ignorant country. While ignorance doesn’t mean stupid, it can mean gullible, and gullible people are easily steered by conmen. As Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” And as Thomas Jefferson said, “A nation that thinks it can be ignorant and free is a nation that never was and never could be.” American ignorance plays a massive role in why so many are fascists.
While our ignorance grew, our grievance was building. Nearing the end of their own republic, the Romans knew by 122 B.C. that the people must be placated. “Bread and circuses” were their solution with gladiatorial battles to the death as bread was thrown to spittle-speckled tongue-wagging crowds in the Colosseum. The 1789 French Revolution, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Nazi takeover of Germany all happened because economic grievance of the masses reached its load-bearing limit while the elites of each era were doing well. In France, 17,000 had their heads removed as a result. In Russia and Germany, millions of human carcasses piled up; “just a statistic,” Stalin called it. Turns out, “bread” is really important. So, in America, we decided to press our own load-bearing limit when economic, management, and financial wizards decided, “Wouldn’t it be nice to export China’s unemployment to us?” Thanks to management titans like General Electric’s Jack Welsh (G.E. is no more), the corporate focus shifted from what makes a stock valuable to the value of the stock. R&D, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and labor were all expendable (just ask Boeing), while investors were not. Stocks skyrocketed, corporate profits broke records, and CEOs took home 400 times more pay than labor underpaid or out of work. This is called “fuel” waiting for a match. Economists and their ilk played a massive role in why so many Americans are fascists.
Meanwhile, on the radical New Left, the professors were busy. They smashed the American melting pot and any remaining sense of national unity, exchanged for multiculturalism, identity politics, victimology, and relativism’s rejection of objectivity. Claiming all things are social constructs, even the sexes, even science, they ignited today’s Culture War. Born from the Marxist Frankfurt School, postmodern critical theorists in the humanities departments would save the world by “decolonizing” it of Western bigotry initiated by “those dead white males.” The Right didn’t much care for that “white male” part, but they had an identity brewing, waiting for consolidation, justification, and a liar. With Ronald Reagan’s removal of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987, one year later, America’s best liar was born on radio as Rush Limbaugh using what Kellyanne Conway would later label “alternative facts” — leftist relativism leveraged by the Right. Limbaugh spawned an industry — domestic and foreign — by leveraging the money in, and market for, upheaval with incendiary morsels provided by the New Left. From Alt-Right radio to FOX RT, lie factories on the New Right were institutionalized in media as New Left lie factories had been institutionalized in the humanities on campus. While the Left published lies, the Right took them out of the Ivory Tower, off the page, and converted them to action. The New Right is the Liar’s Party now, unable to answer even the simplest questions without lying. Lies are an indispensable part of fascism.
Beneath all this was that great Enlightenment advance of individualism for the soundest of reasons: to escape Church/king abuse. With social evolution, individualism became autonomy, and autonomy became isolation. Community perished as the disconnected nature of American life — coddled by our gadgets — lost its sense of belonging. But now, what Americans want most is their belonging back, and we don’t much care how we get it or from who, even if it’s faceless A.I. bots from Putin’s troll farm in Moscow. His bots tell us we belong to… something, a movement, an uprising, a giant mass correction to Make America Great Again. As “all great ideas commit suicide through excess,” we Americans made ourselves a needy people, desperate for belonging. We’ll join anything, no matter how inane; easy recruits to fascism.
Ignorance, grievance, lies, and loneliness. Then came the combination of all these in just one man. That match to light the fuel. An adulterous, draft dodging, money laundering thief and conman. One of the biggest failures in business history (Trump Shuttle Airline, New Jersey Generals, the Castle, Plaza, and Taj Mahal casinos), and at almost 80 years old, still that little boy molested by his father. A father who produced mental deformations in his son, the likes America had never seen in high office — but Russia, Germany, and China had. With American Christianity stabbed by the immoral practice of his Christian followers, this man assumed the role of Savior and proved it by returning that sense of belonging. Inane as they are, his rallies quench his need for ceaseless affirmation as his disciples get their fake salvation, singing hymns from the fascist playbook. Another small man, like the others labeled “strong men,” the weakest among us — physically, intellectually, morally.
Like all Reaganites, I voted against the Russian asset. But with Harris polls in retreat, after the Trump/Putin/Xi chaos sure to follow November 5, it looks like America’s fascists may end the Founder’s experiment in self-governance. (Update: chaos didn’t happen, didn’t need to, Putin won.) Termination of a stumbling republic, which half of America couldn’t separate from a fascist kleptocracy or a kumquat. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea will celebrate open season on planet Earth.
Buckel up.
Learn Chinese.
