The radical right wing is becoming more and more fascist - from the former Republican president who spent his four years in office defying the rule of law all the way up to his attempted coup (which continues today) and including the Republican Parties in many red states overtly impeding the votes of brown and black citizens and installing electoral systems that can and will ignore actual vote counts and replace them with Republican appointed fictitious vote counts instead.
Why? Why are fascists fascists? We have nearly two and a half centuries of contentious democracy behind us and why are we now confronted with authoritarian takeover of our democracy?
Ezra Klein has a podcast dated May 17,2022 with Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Anne Applebaum, discussing the Hannah Arendt's 1951 book "The Origins of Totalitarianism" where the German holocaust survivor Arendt presented her brilliant understanding of how the Nazis and Soviets emerged. Here are some essential points that they made:
- Loneliness - it starts with young men and women being in a deep state of loneliness, feeling alienated, dispossessed
- Belonging - this creates a desperate longing for belonging - to be part of people
- Meaning - the craving to be part of something meaningful, something larger than their own isolated disconnected lives, a cause, a movement, something more than themselves
- Corruption - they see the existing established power structures as deeply corrupt and imposing its corrupt mandates in their own powerless lives
- Violation of norms - since the existing power structure is itself corrupt, actions that violate the norms of that structure are considered morally acceptable and even necessary - for example be violent since that is a norm breaking act, cheat since that is a norm breaking act, steal since that is a norm breaking act, destroy property and kill since these are norm breaking acts
- Myth - The authoritarian/autocratic/tyrannical/dictator leaders provide belonging, meaning, and channel the violence to their own ends by creating a Myth to capture a political/anarchic/violent movement that empowers the tyrant - Hitler had the Myth of the white supremacist Third Reich that would last a millennium - Lenin and Stalin had the Myth of a New Man that would emerge in a Communist Utopia once the corruption of Capitalism was overthrown - Trump and Putin have the Myth of Making America Great Again and Restoring a Russian Empire to what the Soviets and Peter the Great did
- Threat of Civil War - the tyrant tries to create a sense of life and death stakes inside the country to normalize the idea of violence in his movement and the need for the followers to be safe from dangerous "others" inside the movement
- Guns, flags, Military parades and rallies - using elaborately staged military displays of power and strength to invigorate and propel the newly recruited cult followers to follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow
It all starts with lonely people needing to belong, saturated in their own pain and alienation, willing to strike out and destroy it all, just like their lives have already been destroyed.
America is in trouble and Trump rode the wave of alienation and destruction to his own power, but the MAGA Cult does not need the Former Guy, they are charging with a full head of steam toward the American Autocracy where the white man with a bible and a gun is "once again" in charge of everything, and democracy becomes just an empty hollow word, a fig leaf for pretend elections.
But, we can expose it, we can stop it, and we can call upon the Spirit and Soul of America to triumph in the face of incipient despotism.
We need to wake up. Vote. This election could be the last actual election in American history. Wake up, please.
