Estimates for how many fascists there are in the US hover around 35% depending on who is counting and what criteria they are using for “fascist”. We have a couple of good metrics available to us today, at this dramatic point in US history where the sitting US President has incited a half-assed insurrection.
First, among US adults, 33% still approve of Trump as President. This is the lowest approval rating he has received, and is a tie for the previous low, but his approval has never gotten lower than 33%. It’s cute that the press describes a 33% approval rating as “cratering” — it seems like an awfully damn high approval rating for a fascist. Frankly, it’s embarrassing for America.
Based on that approval rating, it might be smart to guess that about 33% of adult Americans are fascists, because this is one of those points in time where everyone has clarity about the fact that Trump is a fascist and that he wants to be a dictator.
However, the problem with the 33% figure is that it doesn’t count fascists who disapprove of Trump because he is losing — not because they disagree with his fascism. A post-capitol-sacking poll by the ADL sheds some light on how many US adults that might be. They found that 40% of those polled believe that antifa are somehow responsible for the capitol insurrection.
The reason we’re seeing so much misinformation in conjunction with the Trump regime is that what we call “misinformation” is something closer to “crafting reality” from the fascist perspective. Generally, the term people would use to describe it is “will to power”. Will to power is the process by which people manifest the things they want into the world and is a philosophical concept that is attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Sometimes, this happens in a very literal, material way; for example, if I want a cup, I can find some materials and make a cup for myself. In this way, my will to have a cup is made into a material cup (manifested). This is pretty straight-forward and easy to understand.
The more important part of will to power is the social aspect of it. Sociologists sometimes refer to this process as the social construction of reality. To understand the social construction of reality, you first have to realize that many of the ideas people believe in aren’t real in an objective sense — they only exist because a bunch of people agree that they exist.
For example, Earth and the sun are both real things. We can observe them and see that they are real. And we can see that Earth moves around the sun one time for approximately 365 times that Earth completes one rotation on its axis. That’s all objectively true; everyone can make those observations and come to the same conclusion. But what about the New Year? The placement of both the western new year and the Chinese new year are completely arbitrary, having no relationship to any natural beginning or end of that trip around the sun. We could have chosen the winter solstice as the division between years, but we didn’t, and even if we had, it would still be just as arbitrary because we could have instead chosen the summer solstice. The “new year” is socially constructed.
Gender is also socially constructed. While there are broad differences is DNA, genitals and other attributes of what we usually identify as two genders, the objective truth is that our physical bodies are on a continuum of many different traits and so strict division into any number of genders is a construction. Furthermore, many of the traits we attribute to a gender are completely constructed. Most notably, the pink/blue gender color division is completely constructed and has no objective reality. In fact, the color pink used to be the color for boys.
Fascism takes the social construction of reality and weaponizes it. What non-fascists experience as misinformation is a fascist movement manifesting the reality it wants. And it works! A third grade teacher named Jane Elliot demonstrated this very effectively on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
Jane Elliot’s demonstration focused on race, but it works for anything. The question for fascists becomes not, “What is real?” but rather, “What do I want to be real?”
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Joseph Goebbels
What do American fascists want to be real?
- That Hillary Clinton is a criminal.
- That Joe Biden stole the election.
- That people of color are inferior to white people.
- That their failures in life are not their responsibility, but rather the fault of a vast conspiracy of Satanists and Jewish people.
- That capitalism will make them wealthy.
- That anarchy is the same thing as chaos.
- That George Soros is a socialist.
- That George Orwell was a capitalist.
- That the Cold War was a fight between good and evil, with the US being on the side of God.
- That they deserve to be served by others.
- That they are patriots and not fascists.
- That the pandemic isn’t real.
I could go on, but you’ve seen them claim all sorts of absurd things. Each absurd claim is made because they are motivated to believe it is true, and we can figure out how each one would benefit them if it were true.
They make these things real by simply claiming them and repeating the claim over and over. And we could say “they believe their own lies” but what’s happening is that they are manifesting things that they already believed. It isn’t — strictly speaking — a process of lying. I might say, “Trump wanted to believe that antifa is responsible, so he claimed that they were,” but that hides the fact that he already believed that because he’s not able to believe reality. Reality is often too painful for his narcissistic personality to accept, so he doesn’t even entertain it as a possibility.
It’s a lot like a psychotic break. Literally speaking, a psychotic break is when a person loses contact with reality — their senses are no longer providing information to their brain, and instead their brain is feeding back imagined sensations. Whereas a psychotic break is an organic malfunction of the brain, fascism is a social malfunction having to do with the denial of reality in favor of willing a false reality into existence. It’s possible because a big part of how we understand what is real is by working it out with other people.
What we are seeing, then, is that 40% of Americans (83.6 million people) are so narcissistic and hateful that they’ve successfully induced a kind of psychotic break in themselves and each other. This is a big problem in that a peaceful solution would be a few weeks of intensive psychiatric care. Not only does the American system not have the resources for providing that to 40% of Americans, but there’s no way you’d persuade them to get the care they need voluntarily. And, of course, “forced re-education” and “declarations of mental disability” are both big items on the long list of things that these fascists believe that “the left” (anyone who isn’t a fascist) is going to do to them (suspiciously, these are also things they’ve actually done to their perceived enemies).