Maybe some of the answers you’ve come up with are things like: terrible people, moral weaklings, disgraces, and so on. Moral answers, in other words. That’s a start — and yet there’s a much simpler and more straightforward answer, that some part of you is still defending against, preventing you from saying or thinking. That answer is this. What kinds of people build camps and commit torture and genocide? Fascists do.
America is the canary in the coal mine of global collapse.
It is very regressive for a democratic society to slide towards authoritarianism. One big reason for this change is fear. Donald Trump and Steve Bannon understood the psychological effects of fear and they weaponized it to take power. Consider the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal, where data got into the hands of Bannon [who] used it to manipulate voters. With Trump’s campaign, it seems like they perfected the a strategy of fear mongering to manipulate people into some other type of reality.
Do you see what I mean a little bit? We are laggards, us Americans. Our definitions of what a high crime is are totally obsolete, way out of date. The fact that we Americans don’t consider modern ideas genocide, torture, hate, and fascism high crimes — but only 18th century concerns like obstruction and collusion — says to the world that we are not civilized people, that we have not really understood history, and that we have not really joined modernity. We are still backwards and behind — and, for us, that also means that our democracy is less robust, more fragile, that we are all the more vulnerable to extremists, lunatic, and fanatics, precisely because their malicious intentions and acts aren’t high crimes.
When I look at America, here’s what I see. A country where the extreme, fanatical right wing takeover of its institutions — all of them — is almost complete. From laws to courts, representation to presidency, norms to rules, from press to public sphere — America is now controlled almost entirely and exclusively by the most fanatical kind of right wingers the rich world hasn’t seen for decades, probably since Nazi Germany. Yes, I mean that. Let me make my case — and you can judge for yourself whether my words carry any weight.
So who are we trying to please, by refusing to call all this what it is? Why won’t we say the words we should, must, say? We must be trying to please someone — because we are letting everything we cherish and treasure be destroyed by thugs and mafias. We are watching democracy be raped by fat men with little hands. We are watching fascism be reborn in our very own country, as little children are caged. But they are braver than us, my friends. We are the ones afraid to utter the name of the beast. But the beast only snarls and laughs, because he knows now how much he has frightened us.
In doing these things, evangelicals are advocating a religious extremism that is no different from muslim extremism, which projects religious authority over all people in their domain, which limits the rights of women, controls and limits education, and enforces strict adherence to a moral code, which naturally rejects and punishes all forms of “decadence,” including; “deviant sexuality,” science, reason, and any questioning of authority. Christian fundamentalists, if given the power, will do the same things.
In such a society, there is only one route left — each stratum, each caste, must prey on the one below it, punching it down further, for the illusion of prosperity to appear. Bang! Already, perhaps you see the problem: now, such a society is descending into the abyss. There is nowhere to go but lower when everyone is pulling the next now down a little further. Where is the bottom, exactly?
Fascism is a political label but, like any such label, it has a psychological foundation. That is, the political behavior of those who are fascists can be explained by understanding their psychology. Of course, all behavior can be explained by psychology but I will focus on the psychology of fascist behavior here.
