How fascism works
An article about modern day fascism.

Fascism seen as technique, as a method of politics, use of rhetoric, a way of running for power. Of course, that’s connected to fascist ideology, because fascist ideology centers on power. And in this it applies not only on ruZZia, but equally on Trump and MAGA.

The key aspect is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.

If you think about fascism as a sliding scale, ordinary conservative politics is going to find itself somewhere on that scale — which is not to say that it’s fascist at all, any more than ordinary Democratic politics is communist. But just as extreme versions of communism suppress liberty on behalf of radical equality, so too do extreme versions of right-wing politics, namely fascism, suppress liberty in favor of tradition and dominance and power.

In the past, fascist politics would focus on the dominant cultural group. The goal is to make them feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.

This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss. The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.

It requires the destruction of truth. Truth is required to act freely. Freedom requires knowledge, and in order to act freely in the world, you need to know what the world is and know what you’re doing. You only know what you’re doing if you have access to the truth. So freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth. Nobody thinks of the citizens of North Korea as free, because their actions are controlled by lies.

Fascists are never content to merely lie; they must transform their lie into a new reality, and they must persuade people to believe in the unreality they’ve created, to disassociate them from reality.

You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader.

Propaganda and mass media are therefore essential. Fascists are always telling a story about a glorious past that’s been lost, and they tap into this nostalgia of the people. So when you fight back against fascism, you’ve got one hand tied behind your back, because the truth is messy and complex and the mythical story is always clear and compelling and entertaining. It’s hard to undercut that with facts.

This applies to Putin in Russia, Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, and also Trump in USA. There the blame is as much on the Republican Party as it is on Trump. So far, they’ve chosen loyalty to Trump over loyalty to rule of law.

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