Fascism has always been with the species. From the moment our ancestors ventured out of the trees onto the savannas, someone called the shots. Without social organization, survival would have been impossible. The earliest form of organization was based on the Big Man model. The Big Man was just that, big.
Things have changed a little on that score. The new Savanna for Homo sapiens is Social Media. Since its emergence about 20 years ago, fear-mongering has been facilitated on a global scale. “The medium is the message,” and the new medium is fearsome.
Fear rearranges societies. It doesn’t matter if you are Polish, American, Russian, Turkish, or Israeli. Fear opens the door and rolls out the red carpet for fascist dictators. Social media has facilitated the rise of post-millennial Big Men who deploy fear to get power.
Social media’s global reach and easy access has allowed all manner of nonsense, both dangerous and humorous to spread instantly. When Trump suggested ingesting Lysol might kill the Covid 19 virus, some folks took up his suggestion and promptly ended up in the local ER.
Back to prehistory. As social groups expanded from kin, to tribes, to communities, control became more conflicted. Powers-that-were went from fending off enemies from without to cultivating enemies within. Our modern versions of Fascism double up too. Trump has focused on keeping immigrants and refugees out and warning of the Deep State within. His fascist intuition tells him such appeals work on those who feel they have no control over the conditions of their life. It’s about nurturing fear, the food of Fascists. What’s ironic about Trump’s spin on fascism is that even as he demands control he insists that he bears no responsibility. When things don’t go his way, it’s always the fault of others. He pretends to care as he promotes quack therapeutics (and the quacks that sell them). All the while he’s encouraging violent human instincts that ruled for eons before compassion came of age.
Social media has taken us backward to earlier stages in our evolutionary history. Instead of speaking to a few local groups through print and broadcast media, where there were still some constraints exercised by editors (along with the 10 second delay), communication is now a free-for-all, no holds barred, fuck-you-in-your-face affair at a scale beyond anyone’s control. Social media’s new Masters of the Universe are not clueless, but they are powerless in the face of the Fascist. From China to America, from Russia to Brazil, modern Fascism, as always, is a top-down affair. The President, the Prime Minister, the Governor, like the Kings and Emperors before them, sets the rules and then makes others responsible for their administration. A form of distributed accountability that ring-fences the Big Man, protecting him (it is always a Him), from having to accept any responsibility for the actions of their administrators or the public they administer. “There were some very fine people…on both sides,” said Trump, fearful things might get too out of hand. A blatant attempt to assuage the feelings of the losers, who might seek revenge. Trump, like other fascists, understands crowd control. He is not stupid about that.
All fascists share common traits and strategies. From outright lies to body language. They build their Towers of Babble on the same hard man foundations: Nationalism and national security through military force; Disdain for human rights; Media manipulation; Religious pandering; Corporate co-option and protection; Crime and punishment; Cronyism and corruption; Disdain for intellectuals; Fraudulent elections; and the suppression, or corruption of organized labor.
The portrait of Donald Trump, is the portrait of Dorian Gray. His followers believe in the infallibility of his leadership, and thus ignore the obvious. The self-assured language of The Sopranos seasons his servings of twitter trash talk. “He’s a dick-head,” says a friend of mine. How do he and his ilk do it? In chemistry laboratories scientists ask, “What is the Mechanism of Action?” This question is appropriate, as is another lab expression, “The Mode of Action.” These terms describe changes occurring in substances subjected to continuous exposure to something outside the substance.[1] Right now, we the people are the substance. What’s acting on us are Trump’s relentless lies and constant demonizing of others. One consequence seems to be mass acceptance of an alternate reality built on “alternative facts” so memorably announced by Trump’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway, in a Meet the Press interview at the beginning of 2017.
Trump has been so consistent that the new normal is no longer new. Hardly anyone is shocked anymore. (Expressions of shock have become conflated with virtue signaling.) The liberal media gives Trump as much airtime, if not more, than Fox News. Trump’s rejoinder to Michelle Obama’s Democratic Convention speech, that she and her husband laid the ground work for his election has a frightening grain of truth to it. The Obamas woke the sleeping racists and Civil War losers, reminding them that they were losers. Southerners quickly became shock troops for Trump.
One of Trump’s earliest supporters, the first senator to endorse him, Jeffery Beauregard Sessions, the embodiment of the Old South, was a meme for Trump. He was Trump’s first template for his subsequent campaigning techniques that identified groups of disaffected Americans who were still upset at having lost the Civil War. Losers, to use a favorite epithet of Trump’s. Why did Trump pick those groups as his target constituency? Because it is easier to sell something to those who have lost that something–in this case, their voice.
Sessions’ southern accent was key here, thanks to his twenty years representing disaffected segregationists and racists of Alabama and the rest of the not-so New South. Sessions gave Trump an in with a racist base that would fuel Trump’s drive to the White House. Without Sessions Trump might not have won the election. But fascists are ruthless. No one is safe. The moment Sessions recused himself from the Russian investigation he was doomed, dumped and trashed so hard that he lost his election and his career. Trump went out of his way to destroy Sessions, campaigning against him in Session’s effort to regain his old Senate seat. The fascist is vindictive.
The leader himself is fearful and that colors his every action beginning with the selection of his underlings. They must be loyal, they must be ruthless, they must accept the hook on which they are hung because they will be blamed for any failure of the leader who placed them in that position. Trump’s malleable apparatchiks–Steven Miller, Kellyanne Conway, William Barr, Mitch McConnell, and countless nameless, faceless others–hammer away at America’s foundation. Let’s hope that foundation is made of sterner stuff. At least the constant exposure to Trump has reinforced the truth, that he IS a fascist. A made-for-TV fascist. A dangerous clown who deserves to be driven out of the White House in a mock cortége.
Much ink and media time has been spilt analyzing the mind of Trump. Is he evil, is he a sociopath, a psychopath, a thug, a criminal? Does he have any empathy? Is he smart or dumb? All these questions really are not about Trump as much as they are about the public’s fascination with the deeper impulses of our species biology when it runs amuck. Serial killers, gangsters, grifters…we are drawn to them like rubberneckers, to the scene of an accident. Trump is one of those all-too-human disasters. Someone who has created a very successful television show based on the notion that disasters sell.
Just how our country got here isn’t a mystery. Since the invention of television we have been fed a steady diet of violence and fakery. We could start with The Marlboro Man who died from the very same thing he sold. First came the Westerns and their outright racism towards Native Americans. Then the airwaves with fantasies about urban tough-guys. (Even John Wayne had to go back East to become a Chicago cop in Brannigan.) But it was reality shows that gave Trump the surround he needed to sell his own persona to America. Public education has failed to give citizens the ability to see through his junk TV politics. We don’t teach critical thinking, moral philosophy, skepticism. Even Civics is gone. Conformity remains the goal. Students are expected to study the same subjects, learn the same facts, and be quiet. Public education is a breeding ground for social repression. From day one the game is, Follow The Leader. Schools tend to be part of the problem rather than the solution. From Forest to Savanna to Social Media–Fascism is in our genes.
Note
1 A clear historical example of the ultimate consequences of Fascist behavior is embodied in the story of the Chernobyl disaster. (See the recent HBO series.) There the supposed infallibility of leadership, along with total subservience of the individual to state leadership, produced disaster. Soviet apparatchiks had lied about the design of the reactor’s emergency shutdown switch. The mode of action relied on the engineers’ faith in the superiority of the State–a faith which has been cultivated in Russia since Czarist times.