Leftists note a strong historical tendency of liberal democracy to lead to fascism, and the US appears to be undergoing such a transition currently. What is it about a liberal democracy that leads to fascism?
- Liberal democracies uphold the hierarchy of wealth as a valid hierarchy, in contrast to traditional hierarchies (based on, for example, race, gender, or religion) which they see as invalid.
- Since the hierarchy of wealth as seen as valid, owners of capital are allowed to amass great power relative to working class people.
- Once a small minority of people holds massive power over everyone else, they are able to leverage that power to control the democracy itself, making it an anocracy. The correct term for those people is “elites”.
- This massive power differential between the elites and working class people creates an environment of increasing dissatisfaction among working class people as well as material deprivation regarding necessities like food and housing.
The typical response of the elites to these conditions is to:
- Deny that there is a problem with material conditions (i.e., the economy). The Democratic Party did this just the other day: They tweeted out the results of a survey that asked respondents about current economic conditions and labeled responses that indicated dissatisfaction with the US economic climate as “wrong”. While their statistics were probably accurate, they were certainly misleading (e.g., there’s been a substantial improvement in the financial position of upper middle class and wealthy people since Biden took office and that drags the median up, even while blue-collar workers are experiencing a worsening crisis). Typically, they will also try to get working class people to compare themselves to citizens of some other nation (typically, a country suffering under the yoke of empire; i.e., conditions caused by our own country’s elites) and make the argument that working class people here are comparatively well-off. Part of this is response involves subtle propaganda, like a piece I saw a while back about a 20-something couple and the trendy-looking apartment they had purchased in New York City (here’s another one I found with a quick googling); without any explanation as to how young people could afford something so expensive, the (intended) implicit message is that young people are doing fine financially even though the typical young American is not. See also: “They are eating avocados.“
- Deny that there are elites. They will literally laugh at you if you use the word and then go on a bizarre, rambling monologue about democracy, the complexity of the real world, and the rewards of “hard work” while strongly implying that you are a crazed conspiracy theorist. A strategy of the Democrats is to say that they are not elitists, but rather than they believe in doing what “the experts” say (a kind of technocracy); it’s just that the experts always seem to say that the path which benefits the elites is the right one. Meanwhile, the elites are not a conspiracy theory because they aren’t even hiding what they are doing.
- Provide bread and circuses. The circuses would be entertainment media, and Americans are awash in entertainments, plus the economic relationship between the US and China means that Americans can afford the devices required to receive those entertainments more than they can afford food. The US economy is set up in such a way that tasty but harmful foods are relatively cheap (thus creating a correlation between poverty and obesity), but right now, all food prices are very high. Both of these strategies are at a breaking point because the elites want to provide these metaphorical opiates (and literal ones, too!) but they want the working class to pay for their own subjugation, and working class people are running out of credit and cash. Moreover, trashy food and pointless entertainment does not provide a rewarding, meaningful life and adds to the dissatisfaction of the working class.
Those are not responses from the elites that would improve conditions or even bolster stability. In fact, there’s nothing that would help the situation that the elites are willing to do. For example, they could:
- Aid working class people in gaining more control over their workplaces and working conditions by, for example, supporting unions.
- Provide enough pay to working class people to allow them to thrive.
- Use the massive wealth of the elites to fund projects that benefit all instead of making working class people pay for them and letting the elites pay nothing in taxes.
- Stop creating environmental conditions that harm working class people.
- Nationalize industries (like healthcare) that provide a collective benefit in a way that reduces costs and simplifies the process of receiving services (e.g., instead of Obamacare/ACA, which benefited private health insurance companies more than working class people, they could have let anyone buy into Medicare; aka, Medicare for Anyone).
In the case of current-day America, the elites are neoliberals and are best represented by the core of the Democratic Party and the left edge of the Republican Party. Far-right Republicans (i.e., fascists) see opportunity in the failures of the elites, and throw out various non-solutions that further the cause of fascism:
- They claim that the government itself is the problem, and attempt to flatten progressive taxes (like income tax) by lowering the tax rate on the most wealthy and, through a mostly-hidden sleight of hand, increasing taxes on the middle class (e.g., the Trump tax cuts expired for middle-class people, but did not expire for the very wealthy), while also attempting to increase the amount of government revenue from regressive taxes, like sales tax. When successful, this increases material problems for working class people and provides the elites with even more power.
- Again, because “government is the problem”, they will attempt to privatize functions of government or sabotage government functions that are working well. For example, Trump put a man who owns a private delivery service in charge of the US postal service, and that man has sabotaged it (Biden did not remove him!). Republicans are always trying to privatize Social Security (a program with nearly universal approval), which would mean putting those funds under the control of private investment bankers. When successful, this strategy takes power away from the government and puts it directly into the hands of the elites, giving them more power (though it sacrifices the plausible deniability of having the government do your dirty work for you).
- They “invoke acute hatred against some hapless minority groups, treating them as the ‘enemy within’ in a narrative of aggressive hypernationalism, and attribute all the existing social ills of the ‘nation’ to the presence of such groups” (from Neoliberalism and Fascism by Prabhat Patnaik) and then attempt to create legislation that reflects the logic of that narrative (e.g., ending protection of minority groups, or criminalizing the existence of a minority group). All elites, whether fascist or neoliberal, benefit from this ruse in the short term; in the longer term, a frenzy of murder tends to destabilize a nation and can result in a change to the power structure that threatens the power of current elites.
The intent of these fascist responses is to replace legitimate villains and complaints with those that are nonsensical. It is not typically designed to attribute legitimate complaints to nonsensical villains because that risks someone figuring out who the real villains are. So, for example, fascists would prefer something like, “The Jews (nonsensical villain) are instituting Cultural Marxism, which will make your children trans (nonsensical complaint),” rather than, “The Jews (nonsensical villain) are using capitalism to siphon wealth away from working class people (legitimate complaint),” because if you examine who is using capitalism to siphon wealth away from working class people, you would see that it is not any one ethnic group but rather an economic class (the very wealthy) and system (capitalism). So, importantly, the fascist response protects capitalism. Fascists intend to eventually use the power of capitalism in their favor, and they always favor capitalism if their side controls the capital. This is why the essence of fascism is “complete unreason” — the agitation of the people must be fully misdirected toward nonsense to accomplish the fascist’s goals.
The elite response to fascism is very interesting. From a normal, ethical, working-class perspective, fascism is very alarming, but from the perspective of the elites, fascism is a helpful tool toward maintaining control of society. It is the left that is truly terrifying to the elites; only the left denies them a strategy for maintaining minority control of society (the minority in this case is specifically very wealthy people). As a result, the elites respond to fascism by:
- Going through the motions of opposing fascism without taking any kind of action fitting the scale and velocity of the threat. See, for example, the very slow, by-the-books prosecution of Donald Trump’s many crimes. We all know that the Biden administration controls the CIA and FBI, don’t we? Consider, in contrast, how executive branch institutions have historically come down on the left with speed, precision, and mercilessness. If Trump were a leftist, they would imprison him immediately — partially to induce attacks from his supporters so they could implement open warfare and slaughter the supporters; but he’s a fascist, so they continue to let him make terrorist threats against government officials.
- Encouraging everyone to adhere to a strict policy of non-violence. (Violence creates chaos that can change power structures, which they explicitly do not want.) See, for example, everything the Democrats say, and the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Chenoweth and Stephan. Does civil resistance work to change power structures? No. Never. At best, it can only succeed in forcing the existing power structure to change some detail of how it functions, and usually only temporarily.
- Equating the threat of the left to the threat of fascism. The purpose of this is to shift the balance of public opinion against the left so it never appears to be a solution to the larger problem of liberalism; i.e., if Democrats oppose both, and Republicans only oppose the left, the balance is against the left.
- Engaging in debate with fascism over the details of their hatred against various hapless minority groups; for example, when the fascists say that trans people are pedophiles who threaten our children and must be destroyed, elites might explain that actually, biological gender is very complicated, and trans people are less likely than cis individuals to do sex crimes. That’s all very nice, but now we are engaging with a fascist which creates the illusion that their ideas are worthy of consideration (rather than an active hallucination).
There are two important results to all these facts:
- Elites want to support fascism just enough to be beneficial but then put the brakes on it before it turns into an orgy of violence. The coming fascist dictatorship in the US is likely to be horribly oppressive, but might not include widespread extrajudicial murder. It needs to be orderly and relatively “nonviolent” (i.e., with violence that is ultimately directed by elites and their agents [police] and not at elites) to serve their purposes. In addition to the direct benefit to elites of limiting chaos, this kind of control also allows them to continue to villainize any defensive leftist violence (and thus the left itself); such violence is necessarily extralegal and would be punished more than violence initiated by fascists.
- Is voting for the Democrats really a solution? To anything? It seems like a vote for a Democrat is really just a vote to put off fascism a little bit longer rather than a vote for the opposite of fascism. The opposite of fascism is leftism — a fun fact that most Americans can no longer understand thanks to a decades-long propaganda campaign against, in essence, democracy. Voting for a Democrat is not the same as voting for democracy; what Americans call “left vs. right” is truly not that at all — what they call “left” is a near-fascist neoliberal order, and “right” is a squarely fascist, traditional order. Every time the Democrats have had an opportunity to move the country left, they have paused dramatically and done nothing. The most egregious example would be the 4 months that the Democratic Party had total control of both houses of Congress and the presidency (yes, it was technically only 4 months) but chose to use that advantage to pass the Affordable Care Act, a repackaging of a proposal from the right-wing Heritage Foundation that bolstered private insurance, instead of just letting Americans buy into Medicare at a break-even rate or doing something more substantial, like fixing the tax code or the Constitution. What could the left have done with those 4 months?
The comparison of liberalism to fascism is mostly hyperbole — except when it isn’t. There this saying on the left that liberals are opposed to genocide except for the current genocide and support social movements except the current social movement. In essence, liberalism tends to allow or even encourage things that would otherwise be considered fascism as long as those actions are directed against poor people who threaten the liberal order or worldview, then, later on, they celebrate successful movements and pretend they were always on the right side of history.
For example, the US liberal order needs Israel as a military stronghold to keep oil-rich Arab nations in line, so it will support genocidal actions of the Israeli government up and to the point where those actions might destabilize the region, thus threatening the flow of oil. Their genocidal actions will be justified and minimized, whereas the actions of poorer people that threaten US interests (by threatening Israel) will be condemned and exaggerated.
In the same vein, the US and its allies decided to go to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990 because his invasion of Kuwait gave him control of 20% of the world’s oil reserves — not for any other reason. Ultimately, well over a million people died to ostensibly protect the Kuwaiti government — a monarchy. Today, the government of Iraq is a democracy on the surface, but the CPA (the official representatives of western colonial powers that defeated Iraq) has the right to veto any legislation the government produces.
Another example would be how homeless people are treated by major liberal metropolitan areas. The existence of homeless people is prima facie evidence that neoliberalism has failed; though the issue is complex, the much longer explanation ends with: neoliberalism has failed. As a result, homeless people have to be villainized, hidden, and terrorized.
Yet another example is the Democratic Party’s fixation on “creating jobs” and, in particular, their insistence on solving the problem of working people needing to care for their children by proposing that the government pay strangers to take care of our children rather than just giving people who want to be full-time mothers to their own children a salary. The liberal approach converts children from people to be loved and nurtured into future labor resources to be grown up like wheat or rice. They wish to force everyone into the liberal paradigm — where all work becomes a transactional component of capitalism — with the threat of homelessness and starvation for those who refuse to comply or cannot comply. How is that not violence? (It is.)
Finally, we can talk about John Brown, the man who had to oppose both the racist slavers of the south (equivalent to today’s Republicans) and the complacent liberals of the north (equivalent to today’s Democrats). Now, of course, liberals are on the side of freeing the slaves, but at the time, they refused to do anything about it because it was too inconvenient and scary, and gosh, those slavers do make some good points about their property rights and the economy. Plus, they were racist, just less overtly racist than southerners (Lincoln himself saw freed slaves as a problem, and favored deporting them even 4 days before his death). The real abolitionists (like John Brown) were the equivalent of today’s leftists.
“Scratch a liberal and fascist bleeds.”
But — you know — don’t forget to, “Vote blue no matter who.”
Notes
Medicare for Anyone is substantially complicated in this article at HealthInsurance.org, but the article does a nice job of explaining the political situation around health insurance in the US. A simpler solution would be to allow anyone to buy into Medicare at a reasonable rate without any kind of overall subsidy (i.e., this portion of Medicare would not be subsidized as a program, but individual cost would vary according to ability to pay). Then, it would become a contest between government, which lacks the overhead of needing to produce profits to give to shareholders, and private industry, which is supposedly extremely efficient, but really is not. The more people who signed up for Medicare, the more the insurance risk would be spread out, and the cheaper Medicare would become; private insurance would become a historical curiosity from a past, barbaric age. The key here is that Medicare lacks the profit motive, making it inherently less expensive and more oriented toward customer care (rather than producing profits) but that if I’m wrong about that, this solution would allow the private insurance industry to prove itself and continue unabated.