A Very American Fascism
The revolution will be televised and the ratings are off the charts
A recurring thought that has occurred to me so many times over the past six months about events happening in the USA is just how incredibly American this fascism is.
And you know it makes perfect sense that these guys aren’t wearing Hugo Boss. Back in February Ronke Babajide wrote the piece I’ve been too afraid to write for two years. It’s called Stop Calling MAGA Nazis and the reason I was afraid to write this is exactly the reason Ronke’s piece went viral—it really pisses people off. Everyone has this idea that every movement or ideology is ordered on a single scale from good to bad like integers on a number line and if you’re not calling something the worst possible thing you can think of then that is the same as endorsing it.
This mentality dismisses the idea that two things can be bad while not being descriptively identical. Fascism is a fiercely nationalistic ideology—a cancer of nostalgia, a desperation to return to a romanticized and often mythological former incarnation of itself, the Platonic ideal of a country’s identity. That Nazi Germany and Mussolinist Italy were both imperial projects modeled on European Identity, and yet they never entertained the thought of merging into a single country, speaks to the fact that fascism isn’t just one indistinguishable pile of slop.
Fascist movements are like viruses: There aren’t any good ones and they all operate through the same mechanism, so you can compare them and use some of the same strategies to fight them, but they’re also very unique in key ways and treating them like they’re identical is a bad idea in the same sense that taking the measles vaccine won’t do shit against covid.
Mussolini wanted to bring back the Roman Empire. Hitler wanted to bring back the German Empire. Putin wants to bring back the Russian Empire. All three of them are not equally invested in bratwurst, fettuccine, and borscht.
The fact that MAGA is a very specifically American fascism really drove itself home for me recently when I saw an ad for official “Alligator Alcatraz” merch.
Alligator Alcatraz is the GOP nickname for a concentration camp that the Republican government is building in the Florida Everglades in preparation for the coming rounding-up and detention of Hispanics and Muslims promised by the Trump administration. They have already started abandoning the idea that they only intend to remove illegal immigrants. Not only are legal immigrants already being detained and deported, but they have now begun acclimatizing the public to the next stage, which is stripping American citizenship from people of the incorrect ethnicities.
The sales pitch is that the detainees might get eaten by alligators. In some other country’s fascism the idea of a gulag where inmates get eaten by wildlife might be the kind of threat the government would let remain a rumor among its population. In America, it’s been made into a Mr Beast episode.
In truth, the Nazis hid their camps and the ghettos that preceded them because the world finding out the extent of their crimes wasn’t in their interest. They didn’t advertise their cruelty. Fascism with German characteristics was an efficient and systematic extermination.
Fascism with American characteristics uses cruelty as its selling point because this is entertainment. TV-ready influencer politicians slathered in red carpet makeup do photo shoots with migrants in battery cages for backdrop. Ideas have already been pitched for a joint project between the Department of Homeland Security and television production companies to develop a game show where captured migrants compete for the prize of citizenship. There is no word on whether the losers are eaten by alligators.
These men, extrajudicially imprisoned without charge in a foreign tin pot dictatorship, will be tortured in ways that wouldn’t be legal in the USA, which is of course the whole point. President Trump will gloat about coming up with this method to circumvent the laws of his own nation and his cabinet and his followers will reaffirm that this is why they voted for him—to run the country not just like a business but like an American business: Corrupt. He sends his political enemies to El Salvador for the same reason he sends his money to the Cayman Islands.
It couldn’t have been more appropriate if it were written in scripture that America, desperate for its own cultural version of Mussolini, would elect a slumlord and a game show host. These are the archetypes that American traditionalists have decided best define their culture. Who else, but the very man who defined the 80s slimebag yuppie, king of the talk show circuit, serial Hollywood cameo, reality star, and core member of the Epstein rat-pack, who else but the man in the golden penthouse could be crowned America’s first monarch, now that Hugh Hefner, John Wayne, and the Marlboro Man are all dead?
Fascism with American characteristics is proudly brought to you by Amazon. It has notes of the Russian version of fascism, sometimes called Ruscism, with its oligarchs. American Princes whose principalities are megacorporations rather than land territory. Aristocrats like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Rupert Murdoch, who have no official role in the government but nevertheless operate as its lieutenants and enforcers in return for protection and benefits.
Fascism with American characteristics is when America is a company town, its citizens filling the dual role of both employee and customer of America Inc. You will do what you are told, and you will make the products that will then be sold to you for a higher price than you earn. It’s when the government abdicates its entire responsibility to its most vulnerable citizens in favor of selling them perfume and cellphones with the president’s logo on them.
It's when the President of the United States is selling cars on the White House lawn.
It's when the guy running the Pentagon is a Fox News anchor and the guy running the FBI is a podcaster, and the entire government is cast like The Young and the Restless. The men selected for square jaws and strong masculine features, and the women for simply being the president’s type.
Fascism with American characteristics is when Dr Phil is going on ICE raids.
It’s when the top health official is a man with no experience or education in any medical field, but he is a Kennedy and Americans love that shit. He also doesn’t believe germs cause disease; a uniquely American flavor of Lysenkoism under which he feels validated to rip medical science up by the root and instead promote unpasteurized milk and—what else?—McDonald’s.
It’s when the entire vaccine board is replaced with influencers with anti-vax Substacks. It’s when the chief of Medicare is a daytime TV star sired by Oprah Winfrey whose contributions to the health of Americans include promotion of homeopathy and other magic incantations as well as hocking bogus dietary supplements.
It’s when the president dictates that he can unilaterally decide to whom laws apply—devise in-groups and out-groups—and that companies like Apple and Google are officially immune to them, citing “the nation’s best interest.”
Fascism is an embrace of a cultural identity taken to its absolute extent and then stretched and strained further until the membrane turns pale. America’s fascism, to that end, leans all the way into the tropes of Americana that foreign nations find the most obnoxious and comical—the fast food, the guns, the bombastic, loud, presumptuous entitlement of it. America isn’t a regimented and disciplined machine. It’s a fat, arrogant bully. When it attempts its own take on one of the more recognizable fascist tropes—the military parade—it’s not a chilling display of cold, raw, single-minded ambition. It’s soldiers plodding down the road like they’re walking home from a concert, while other uniformed officers embarrassingly hand out energy drinks by one of the administration’s favored companies.
American fascism is cruel and dumb, but it wants to be seen as cruel and dumb. It gets its kicks from showing the world exactly what it is. With luck, that might be a key to fighting it.
If you’re interested in learning how we got to a place in this world where militarized border control agents in war camo are pulling up to Home Depo equipped with Mark Zuckerberg’s AI powered Facebook glasses:
I'm writing a whole book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era tumbled down the fascism pipeline and set about smashing up the world out of hubris and spite, and how they worked their way into the deepest corridors of power.The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
its wild how reporting facts reads just like a sci-fi pulp novel of the recent past.
I live here and yup, you pretty much nailed it.
It's electing Biff Tannen president because you want the version of Hill Valley from Back to the Future II. It's thinking maybe the plot central to Running Man wasn't a terrible idea. It's thinking that maybe, just maybe, our version of AI won't turn into Skynet. It's every well-worn trope about how Idiocracy was somehow a documentary of America's future.
...
It's pretty depressing, really.