“We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world.”
Perhaps we should rejoice at the obviousness of fascism. Its mob today wear no disguises, rather red hats proclaiming intent, its demagogue is clear, even candid, in his disdain for human life, and its regime could not be louder in its violent rejection of the last, illusory, vestiges of democracy. The past 4 years have been an accelerating panoply of fascist spectacle, odd not in their content, but in their brazenness: images of state endorsed militia terror, violent repression of protests and the gradual hollowing of civil liberties endlessly compete to be trending, while the ticker charts the silent accumulation of mass death. And yet here we are, sitting comfortably on the precipice of crisis, unsure of how we got here, or even where we really are.
This paralysis arrives at a specific stage of development, in which humanity has become fully saturated in information technology. The internet and its subsidiary innovations enable an unprecedented level of species-connectivity and self-knowledge, and data finds itself finally and fully unbound from the temporality and spatiality of the printing press, possibilities now entirely assimilated into global society. A paradox surely here arises between the utopian potential of such a state of affairs and lived reality, between hyper-connectivity and total atomisation, but this can be quickly unravelled with an understanding of the toxic context within which we began such a developmental leap, which must poison each of its own achievements, deforming them into weapons of exploitation rather than liberation. The emergence of the digital commons was accompanied by a process of breakneck colonisation, enclosed within the space of a few years to an oligopoly of social media sites and media conglomerates with near hegemony over societies production and consumption of information. The Silicon Valley capitalists have won for the entire ruling class a decentralised archive of all human thought, which, manipulated in the image of their own interests, is used to manifest a false reality and extend their dominion indefinitely. An architecture is constructed around this now aggregated information and channels consumption of past knowledge and the construction of new ideas down predetermined pathways, authentic experience tempered in-line with the interests of the owner. Where the TV simply gave information, digital technologies enhance the illusion that the user is in control, and that the platform ideology is an organic creation of the user base in dialog with itself, rather than an adaption staged within the implicit bias of the medium. Through the smartphone and the computer, acting as a sort of crowbar used to pry open more of everyday life for exploitation, the owners can implant their self-delusions in the user, fostering a hypnotised deference to the status quo, with which they now identify. The gifts of the information age are significant specifically in their scale and their decentralised distribution, making possible the construction of a map which can radiate through each electronic pore and cover all the earth, both preceding and engendering the whole territory.
Information, in this state, is deployed not for understanding but perpetuation, served up as an endless buffet on which the consumer can gorge. Continual recirculation of consumption is the only motive, and thus each day must bring with it a fresh harvest of created desires, while maintaining the superstructure that animates their desirability. To keep the cogs turning, society becomes subordinate to a constant advert, an unceasing argument for its own continued broadcast, which freezes man in an endless present with the promise of a tomorrow that will never arrive. News develops within this logic, a filtration system passing down and packaging a given set of facts, each labelled with a tantalising headline, or slogan. The story must exist independently, relevant only for the day it lasts on the front page before it is gobbled up by the ouroboros of 24-hour news and consigned to a meaningless back-catalogue as soon as the next scoop makes it redundant. Isolated from yesterday or tomorrow it exists only within itself and becomes removed from whatever historical continuum it could represent. This culminates in a process of incremental hyper-normalisation: Interpretation is continually undermined by an understanding of society as fixed, which must see the days events as deviations from the norm to which the world will return, in reality a process of continually moving this norm to the right. Extended processes are fragmented into a thousand articles, doomed to be nothing more than a narration of what is happening, unable to connect the dots. With any real retrospect, the events of the last decade should indicate an exponential process of decay, but the tide doesn’t appear to be rising as long as you are in the water.
In its totality, this mechanism is engaged in the constant construction of a fantasy world, a hyperreal veil under which the system can sustain its savagery while appearing as righteous, necessary and unchangeable. The myth, of course, emanates from America, who appear on the world stage as the model, executor and arbitrator of the universal truths of Justice, Liberty and Freedom, the democratically elected leader of the Free World and the moral watermark by which all others must measure themselves, or be judged. Simultaneously it is staged as the eternal protagonist, confounded constantly by the forces of evil but arriving eventually, and by whatever means, on the ‘right side of history’. It hallucinates itself as part of a heroic lineage stemming from the canonised founding fathers, a continual unfolding of the values laid out in the constitution, and a restoration of a utopia achieved. It bequeaths itself an unlimited mandate, the embodied will of the invisible hand of the market which holds now a sceptre, commanding a fleet of drones. We are submerged in this reality, and these ‘self-evident truths’ are an infinitely adaptable defence to the leakages of the real. The events that can’t be covered up entirely are hung within a fixed narrative framework, between this base, taken entirely uncritically, and a ‘greater good’ which looms, formless, on the horizon. The stage is set, the good guys and the bad guys don their masks, and there is no blood that cannot be washed out of the American flag.
This hagiography runs in direct opposition to the real course of American history. The dawn of America must be understood not as a break from the tyranny of Old Britannia, but as a development of its worst excesses. Founded explicitly as ‘Nascent Empire’, it has been unafraid to pay the blood price for its realisation of manifest destiny, purchasing ascendency directly on its genocidal expropriation of land from the native population, and on the stolen labour of its slaves. These twin original sins haunt all proceeding American history, the domestic staging ground for an unbroken accumulation of power, and capital, which, having achieved global supremacy with the decline of the old powers, switched in goal from expansion to maintenance. At the head of the world stage, America’s post war role has been one of coups, massacres and secret wars, quashing unflinchingly any internal resistance movements and the emerging democracies of the post-colonial world, installing anaemic and authoritarian prop-governments in their stead and at the same time, with magnificent sleight of hand, appropriating vast mineral reserves. Invasions take on a central propaganda role and become an elaborate, particularly brutal, form of public discipline, a grand reassertion of global supremacy with napalmed corpses occupying the role of severed heads on pikes. All this must be backed by a continual flow of capital into its bloated military apparatus and thus the bipartisan consensus has overseen an unlimited budget poured into the military and prison industrial complexes, appearing now as a parasite-like network of military bases, the transformation of the imperial mainland into garrison state, and a nuclear Chekhov’s gun. Paranoid, now, by its own entropy, the Empire’s only concern is continuity at any cost, a psychotic drive to strangle the new in its crib.
Hiding its shame, America must, at the same rate as it cannibalises humankind, erect an effigy of itself in the shape of Lady Liberty, under which the entranced populace will still kneel, as sacrifice. Attempting to reconcile its appearances with reality, it finds itself forced to manufacture excuses (“The War on Terror”, “The War on Drugs”, “The Domino Effect”) for its crimes, increasingly contrived as it runs out of worlds to conquer. These excuses, and the whole of the hyperreality they are part of have succeeded in keeping the nation in stasis for at least half a century until, breaking free from the end of history, it has become clear that the centre can no longer hold, and the curtain hiding America from itself has finally been torn in two. In our present crisis, the antithesis between American dream and American reality is raised to the level of absolute contradiction.
The continuous internal tension that underlies American history is that the utopia it envisions is founded upon the racial class hierarchy that its prophets maintained, and that the ‘inalienable rights of man’ must be bought upon the alienation of rights from a black underclass and the indigenous people who occupy the land. In the silences of the constitution the American paradox hangs heavy, that the Age of Freedom was built upon the Age of Slavery. In the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, the paradox bursts open but in each case, the problem was simply sublimated, judgement deferred by amendment rather than full reconstruction. Swelling under the concealed pressures, we inhabit a new, greater moment of collision, where the old antagonism has exploded and birthed, once again, something new: the divide finds its resolution, this time, in Trump.
Trump should be understood as the confluence of American history into one malformed vessel, the aggregate mean of the ruling class. His pre-presidential life has been a sleazy tangle with the worst excesses of American capitalism, each tax evasion scheme, fraud and bankruptcy abetted entirely by the government and every sexual harassment happily muffled by the courts. Perhaps uniquely, Trump has a huge spectacular presence, and his prior position in celebrity culture has become key to his dominance of the political arena as a stage. He achieves a perfect symbiosis of the celebrity aristocracy and the traditional financial elite so that his televised and real selves become entirely merged and his business transgressions and thuggery are transformed into constant performance, an elaborate honesty about his continued moral bankruptcy and, by extension, that of the system that created him. It is here that Trump differs from the establishment he is about to supersede, in his absurd candour. Trump dispenses entirely with illusions and stubbornly remains exactly as he appears- senile, lecherous, racist and rich. In office, Trump is able to operate as such on a national level, forgoing the false pretences America has traditionally operated under and allowing, for the first time, the empire to go unmasked. Trump pierces the immaculate veil of ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ perfected under Obama, retroactively collapsing its legitimacy and allowing for an ultimate moment of de-sublimation, where America becomes fully unselfconscious and embraces the supressed current of exceptionalism that flows from the red of the Confederacy, through the white of the Klan hood to the blue of the Police. Through Trump, America admits itself, finally revealing what it was the whole time. The contradiction here is resolved, not through the reconciliation of racial inequality, or the exorcism of its past crimes, but through a conscious acceptance that ‘the land of the free’ of the forefathers can only be built on white supremacy. But this revelation also means that America is no longer compatible with the democracy it has abused for the last century, and capitalism must now ascend to its highest stage… Fascism.
After 4 years of disruption, Trump stands on the edge of a coup that will allow the monster of fascism to emerge from its chrysalis and back into history, this time as farce. All the cards are already on the table, but the old establishment continues to block its ears with the blind hubris of “It can’t happen here”. Since his election, Trump has effectively sown the seeds of doubt in democracy and signalled his intent to remain in power. Pre-emptively the election has been declared fraudulent and Trump has clearly and repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. Mail-in ballots, this year making up a record proportion of the vote total, have been essentially poisoned with Trump declaring them illegitimate, backed by his deliberate sabotage of the USPS and his demand that the vote be called on election night. With the recent victory in the supreme court, Trump also has a huge advantage when it comes to legally arbitrating the counting process. But these moves can only be backed by a powerful apparatus, and Trump has worked tirelessly to shore up the domestic military. In Portland we see the testing ground for the armed suppression of protest and the routine denial of civil liberties, carried out by an overfunded and hypermilitarized police force drawn from the border patrol and immigration agencies, both loyal to Trump. Fully embracing the exported violence of Empire, Trump threatens to standardise the logic of the colony throughout the Imperial centre, occupying itself with the same tools tested across Asia, Africa and South America. In breaking with any need to maintain appearances, Trump no longer needs to hide his violence across the ocean, and America can finally eat itself alive.
Ultimately, though, it is the popular core that Trump rests on that will set the tone of the events to follow, the radicalised voter base that makes it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part. The ideological thread epitomising Trump’s most reactionary followers, and the component furthest evolved from the previous election, is represented in QAnon, a new cult faction that has become an increasingly dominant part of the movement. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion it orbits around hoax documentation, this time a ‘Q-clearance patriot’ leaking intel on 8Chan. The world it builds has Trump at the centre, an infiltrator to the paedophilic, Satan worshiping, and implicitly Jewish cabal at the head of civilisation. It longs for, and works towards its Day of the Rope, the promised storm when all the Democrats are marched out in chains and tried, finally allowing paradise to be restored and America made great again. Like all past fascisms, it constructs an alternate reality, entirely unmoored from the one it resists, abolishing the participants ability to distinguish between truth or falsehood and teaching them instead to identify only with the fake logic of the fictitious world. It fosters a radical distrust for the Status Quo, a Red Pill that correctly identifies its inadequacies but forces an inculcation into a deeper hyperreal, one which bypasses the contradiction between appearance and reality by having the participant willingly sacrifice themselves to the myth of the state, repressing lived experience entirely for the party. Conspiracy succeeds by narrativizing a bewildering reality, substituting class interests for race interests, animating the emasculated, superfluous labour of the alienated and offering an easy solution to the existential crisis of the present. But this solution is entirely destructive, and it can only seek to purge the current world, expecting the promised land to emerge of its own accord once evil has been stamped out. This phenomenon too emerges and is defined by the internet, particularly in its uniquely fragmentary nature. Completely decentralised, the movement has succeeded in incorporating all past conspiracies theories into a total, hyper-conspiracy, infinitely malleable to the paranoid predilection of the individual, necessitating only a distrust of the real and its leadership cult. So to does it encourage members to ‘do their own research’, playing on the irresponsibility of big tech who have, through their exploitative recommendation algorithms, opened up endless rabbit holes of conspiratorial content, down which the vulnerable can fall, indoctrinating them as each video escapes further and further from reality, a kind of automated, self-starter fascism. Removed entirely from any common frame of reality and envisaging itself as a counter-conspiracy tasked with the destruction of an invisible force represented in all society, QAnon is primed to intervene in a conflict that within its laws represents a biblical clash of good and evil. But QAnon is only the most evolved form of the dispensing with reality that Trump necessitates, and every part of his support involves some engagement with an alternate universe, be that Fake News, Cultural Marxism or the ‘China Virus’. The other decisive component of Trump’s base are the explicitly White Supremacist and Accelerationist cells, more fringe but also more organised, who have already proven their willingness to involve themselves in vigilante violence with the prior BLM protests. In either case, Trump has been entirely unwilling to denounce the conduct of his supporters and the months preceding the election have seen him hone his message into one of law and order and become increasingly hospitable to his most reactionary elements, calling for them to ‘watch the polls’ as recently, and as publicly, as the first presidential debate. Trump, out of sheer egotism, has blundered his way to the top of a grassroots paramilitary force which now threatens to violently intercede in the democratic process.
On election night we find ourselves back in the gyre of history, proving once and for all that there was no lesson of the Twenty First century that did not go unheeded. The temporary salve of liberalism is sloughed off, and that eternal conflict, Socialism or Barbarism, again takes centre stage. America has succeeded, though, in rigging the dialectic, drowning the historical force of class consciousness in its frenzied anti-communism. The cultural Cold War has seen a people entirely inoculated against their own interests and, finally forced to demand change, they know nowhere else to go but into the warm embrace of Fascism, armed and allowed to thrive as a dying civilisation’s bulwark against historical progress. The scale of the crisis can not be overstated, and we are here only because the United States would rather see the end of the world than the end of Capitalism. But their hundred years of stockpiling, and the deliberate fermentation of a counter-revolutionary cult, cannot stand against the historic tide that will reverberate off the existential crisis’ of humanity, as each person is forced to stare into the realities of their lived experience and finds that if we have a world to lose, we also have one to win.