Normal Human Female

I think we can all acknowledge that “fascism” has been overused in the last 10 years, joining a chorus of insults thrown at right-wing leaders that is shrugged off as histrionics. But like townspeople might yell “Lion! Lion! There’s a lion!” as a lion circles their town, or a fire alarm goes off in a building at the hint of smoke – the repetition of it is in fact a warning and signal to an imminent danger.

Now many historians and experts on fascism – including Robert Paxton, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, and many others – agree that fascism is taking root in America – showing up in recognizable forms with on-the-nose comparisons to fascist regimes of the past. I agree with this, of course, and am not writing about the merits of this argument and evidence to substantiate it. Assuming it is happening, what do we do?

1. Leave

Leaving the US is a narrow, difficult path. Many Americans don’t realize that the same restrictions to immigration in the US also exist in most other high-HDI (human development index) countries in the world. You need to have citizenship or a visa to move to another country – citizenship is a “you have it or you don’t” asset – and the options for visas are limited or inaccessible for most people.

Even assuming one does have a clear path out, leaving brings many challenges financially, emotionally, culturally, professionally. If you stack that up against the day-to-day reality of living in the US, the trade may not be worth it. In many cases, the decision to leave is based on anticipation of what may come next for the US. Observing news and piecing together events as part of an overall story or direction – and not as disjointed singular events – can reveal patterns that match similar patterns in history. The future becomes more predictable and less of a surprise. If someone puts bread, jam, and peanut butter on the counter, you can deduce they will probably make a sandwich. This is pattern recognition and helps us plan for the future with information from the present.

2. Resist

Arguably harder than leaving is staying and fighting. Visibly resisting is opening yourself up to social, professional, or even governmental consequences. The entrenched powers would like resisting to be as uncomfortable as possible. This works in their favor. They can label you a domestic terrorist for protesting, or say you have “Trump derangement syndrome” in a childlike “No you are!” reversal when you accurately label them as cultists. But resisting is not about individual action. It’s a collective effort. A walk-out or protest or boycott is a reminder that people will not ignore this descent, and that they are not alone. This administration relies on a flood the zone strategy which feels like an avalanche of lies, confusion, and hopelessness. Resisting can mean maintaining a gleaming thread of sanity through awareness, standing rooted to reality like a tree in floodwaters – at the cost of exhaustion and anxiety.

3. Ignore

If multiple experts on fascism essentially agree that it’s here, how can it be possible to ignore? Well, unless people read the news, their everyday life is likely continuing on as it always has, even while fascism grows in the cloak of institutional legitimacy. All the forms and figures remain the same. We still have an elected president, a congress, a judiciary, even with the cracks emerging. Different historians have terms for this conflicting reality: the dual state (Ernst Fraenkel), the legal abyss, the zone of exception (Timothy Snyder). The idea is essentially that institutions, laws, and norms can remain intact for those that are not targets of the state. For those who are, civil liberties are quickly swept aside in the name of a higher purpose outside the law.

Therefore, it becomes quite easy to ignore this “zone of exception” or its effects if you are outside of it. For many, news and politics are a background scenery of real life – interesting to occasionally look at, maybe even worry about sometimes, but then life goes on. For many, immediate struggles in life are so consuming that it doesn’t make sense to expend limited energy on what ostensibly can’t be changed. Who cares about the political crisis of the week when the rent is due? For others, life is actually really great in the US. They may have a high paying job and endless things to buy, watch, or enjoy. Acknowledging that anything could be going wrong is to rain on the parade. In Upton Sinclair’s famous words, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary [happiness, comfort, personal success] depends on his not understanding it.”

4. Support

This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning this last response, which is also the one that got us all into this mess in the first place: the supporters of fascism. As it turns out, people haven’t changed in 100 years and the same proclivities exist in us all. In a changing and uncertain world where our democracy feels ineffectual or corrupt, people yearn for a strongman leader who tells it like it is and gets things done, damn the consequences.

Could this support change? This group tends to be disillusioned with the government in all cases, so when the current government goes too far (murdering citizens and starting wars) they can safely retreat into their turtle shells of “government is bad” or relativist arguments – “liberals are worse.” There are a whole lot of Trump-voting conservatives and moderates out there who “just aren’t political” or “don’t do politics” now when the consequences of their actions are unpalatable.

And then, there are supporters who truly deeply support everything that’s going on. They likely live in their own world of algorithmic media and hyped up fears about immigrants, trans people, and great replacement theory. All the words that come out of Trump or Leavitt’s mouth are taken as fact, even if they directly contradict each other – indeed, years of religious conditioning, subservience to authority, and lack of critical thinking primes people to live by blind faith and become a real-life case study in widespread doublethink.

So Now What?

Where happens from here? People who are likely to take option 1 have seen enough to make that decision and are in the process of planning to leave or have already left. This will likely present as a slow brain drain or dwindling of skilled immigrants in the US who have better options elsewhere, as the US loses the allure of long term stability.

Option 2 will wax and wane as people’s anger either falls beneath or outgrows the risk and discomfort of resisting. These factors will be constantly at odds, as the state has options on the table for increasing the risk and discomfort involved, all the while taking action that produces more anger.

Option 3 will be dominant for as long as bread and circuses exist. The vast majority of people will not react to the lion outside the town until it mauls them or someone they know personally. And by then, it will be too late to choose options 1 or 2. In the meantime, people are extremely adaptable – things may not go “back to normal” but their sense of normal changes and sense of alarm becomes muted. What was shocking news one year ago (masked men in unmarked vehicle abducting someone) is already an everyday occurrence.

Sadly, people in option 4 have the most power to change things for now. One of the cleanest off-ramps on this road of escalation is for the supportive voting base to turn on their party while democracy still works. A classic strongman leader mistake is disposing of experienced and level-headed leaders and replacing them with boneheaded loyalist lackeys that inevitably make dumb as rocks decisions. It can take time for this to filter down to the common man at a level high enough to counteract their ingestion of lies. With the weight of institutional inertia and cause/effect timescale, it can take years or even a decade+. In the meantime, the levers of democracy are attacked, and so it becomes a race: does the supportive base turn on their party while their vote still counts?

And Me..

I’ve spent the last year thinking about the above points. I am no stranger to making a decision that puts me in the minority and struggling to understand the motivations of the majority. I’ve come to understand that if I look around at what everyone else is doing, and use that to guide my beliefs or actions, I will betray myself. I have to believe something is right because it is right, and not because the consensus believes it to be right. Likewise, I like to understand why the consensus believes something to be right – follow that logic and decide if I agree with it.

I just started this blog but I already feel as though I’ve written most of what I would like to say regarding this topic (politics/gestures at everything). My family is gearing up to start packing our house and moving to Sweden soon, and over a year’s worth of watching this unfold will be replaced with a whole lot of work – finding a place to live, learning a new language, finding a preschool, adjusting to engineering work in Sweden, staying in touch with my family, building a life. I will probably write more about those experiences instead.

But I will never stop caring about what happens to the US and its future. I grew up here, my loved ones are here, my kids were born here, and it holds the hopes of dreams of millions of people who come here from around the world. At this moment I am typing, I am visiting my sister and brother-in-law who live in Boston. The other day we walked the Freedom Trail and I was reminded of the hopes and dreams of its founders who fought to be free from tyranny. Like them, I am a patriot, in that I believe in the ideals of this country and that it should and can be the shining city on the hill, if the people will it. In Snyder’s words:

A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.”
A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”