We here in the United States find ourselves once more in the throes of overt fascism. Right-wing extremists, led by a textbook strongman persona, have won a decisive victory in our federal elections. Their explicit agenda is to dismantle the federal government, place plutocratic lackeys in the highest position of power, deregulate private industry, suppress our bodily autonomy, abolish freedom of the press, further destroy our education system, isolate the country from the global community, institute a police state with no accountability, swiftly conduct mass deportations, institute radically conservative Christian theocratic policies, and generally inflict greater pain and suffering on the lower classes regardless of their race or creed.
This is their explicit agenda.
And they won resoundingly.
[EDIT: For accuracy, the final vote counts show that the Democrats only lost by about 2 million votes, and that voter turnout was much closer than originally reported immediately following the election, when this essay was first published.]By all accounts, Trump had only marginally more voters than in 2020, but Harris and the Democrats had substantially fewer votes than before, almost 20% fewer according to early numbers. That means that 1 out of every 5 people in the United States who opposed Donald Trump in 2020 then decided to implicitly support him and his even more radical agenda four years later.
Let us set aside the vileness of Donald Trump himself; Trump, the most boorish, mush-brained, sleaziest, physically weakest and most mentally unfit, crassest, egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, and transparently psychopathic criminal to hold elected office. Let us ignore the individual and instead use a placeholder strongman: one who identifies powerless scapegoats for the country’s problems, uses violent rhetoric, promises to have solutions for all– literally all– of a country’s problems, glorifies a nostalgic past that never existed, and speaks in absolutist terms about “evil” and “enemies.”
Why does this strongman persona continue to intoxicate people of supposedly modern and intelligent societies? Why do Christians abandon the compassion and pacificism taught by Christ and instead fill their hearts with hate and anger? Why do citizens vote against their own self interests, ignore verifiable facts, and happily accept unfounded propaganda and admitted lies? And why does the opposition demand ideological purity from its candidates and refuse to build coalition and take small gain victories?
There will be thousands of thinkpieces written this week about why this happened. Conservatives dug in their heels when they were continually ridiculed and looked down upon. Religious radicals embraced the false messiah that will nevertheless usher in their desired theocracy. The rust belt continued to feel ignored. The progressives sat out as a protest to the genocide in Gaza. The leftists are still betting on accelerationism to somehow magically propel them into power at some indeterminate future date. Bad messaging. Unlikable candidate. Disinformation. AI. Fox News. Russia. They will all stop short of calling out the core, uncomfortable truth.
We, as a species, are all idiots.
All of us. You, reading this. Me, writing this.
Even the most educated, most traditionally intelligent amongst us are shockingly vulnerable to facile manipulation tactics, to groupthink and self-delusion, to inconsistent beliefs and irrationality. None of us see ourselves for what we really are. None of us introspect deeply enough and honestly enough to understand our motivations or the consequences of our actions.
We are all indoctrinated from birth into this system that discourages critical thinking and reinforces our desire for hierarchy. Grown-ups, gods, coaches, officers, judges, bosses, presidents, priests. We are taught to revere and defer to those in positions of authority but only when that authority is upheld by force, either over our corporeal bodies or our eternal souls. Authority by knowledge or subject matter expertise doesn’t seem to hold much cache.
We are conditioned to trust “the system” for justice, no matter how frequently it fails us, how obviously it is stacked in favor of the rich and powerful, how consistently it is blatantly against people of color and marginalized groups. We watch as billionaires amass obscene amounts of wealth and brazenly flaunt their power and influence in our faces, and we parrot the same angry memes and missives on social media rather than taking decisive action. We are more informed than ever and yet more docile than ever towards the horrors of the world.
This is what we are as a species. Space exploration and quantum theory doesn’t change the fact that we are stupid, angry, semi-autonomic creatures driven by our limbic systems and our herd mentality, and that we will happily cede our autonomy at the first chance to any self-proclaimed “alpha” who exudes an image of strength and promises to take care of us.
Nearly all people are content with these passive, routine lives. They want to be given some semblance of free will, some predefined set of choices from which they can craft a personal identity. They want stability and predictability, to do as they are told and to progress along the traditional milestones of life with their prescribed belief system. The desire for novelty and “Nietzschean danger” varies from one person to the next, but very few fall outside of a thin band of deviation from this.
And so the ones that rise to power are the most psychopathic amongst us, those that lack empathy and know well enough to ignore criticism and ridicule and shame and decency and to simply persevere in their egoistic will, because eventually they will addle enough of our weak minds that they will amass power, and then they are basically immune to consequence.
The experiment of liberal democracy is really still just that– an experiment. It is one that requires us to become fully-formed individuals, well-versed in critical thinking and capable of making informed, rational decisions based on indisputable facts. It takes work and makes us confront difficult truths. It either leads down a path to nihilism, or it requires tremendous effort to attain a state of spiritual enlightenment, where one can unify with everything without requiring a patriarchal godhead.
Capitalism made this virtually impossible. By rewarding ever-greater production, it created a system in which people had no choice but to devote the majority of their waking hours and their energy to labor, depriving them of the luxury of time and energy to learn and think and analyze. By rewarding ever-greater consumption, it created an increasing number of “comforts” to salve our discontent, just enough to keep us committed to the system but not nearly enough to nurture our souls.
So, as Marx observed, we have become alienated and feel the loss of our innate humanity. We are discontent, living in a state of constant stress about entirely fictional constructs– such as the economy– and entirely real tragedies– such as genocides and the destruction of our planet.
Recent surveys show that younger generations are skewing significantly more conservative, likely in large part because they recognize– consciously or otherwise– that the current consumer capitalist system is bereft of any spiritual meaning and is also rapidly making life materially worse. So many turn to religion and extreme conservative ideologies, lured by curated propaganda that makes the sacrifice of liberty seem like a noble decision, to willfully subjugate themselves in service to a higher calling. Young men are enticed by the promise of privilege and young women with the promise of virtue, and both with salvation in some contrived eternal afterlife.
And the left has failed to offer a compelling counter-narrative. They have ultimately become an ideology of identity politics and hedonism. There is no spiritual salvation on the left; there is only science and intellectualism. Life is meaningless and nothing happens when you die, so you should do whatever you want while you’re here. This is incomplete.
Fascism and ultra-conservatism will continue to rise to power as our material conditions get worse. And our material conditions will most certainly get worse as fascism and ultra-conservatism continue to rise. As people remained uninformed or misinformed, as our rights are taken away, as consumption and is accelerated for the benefit of the elite class, as environmental collapse leads to increasing instability, so too will people become more desperate and more incapable of the self-actualization that is necessary for our liberation. And so we will continue to flock to the next psychopath that promises to save us from the last one.
