Are We Fascist Yet?

Are We Fascist Yet?

By Dan Corjescu
Dissident Voice
January 9, 2019

To characterize modern day America as a fascist state is at one and
the same time both ahistorical and close to the present truth.

In order to resolve this apparent contradiction we must understand
that modern day fascism displays certain rough, jagged continuities
as well as discontinuities with its interwar past.

Operationally, fascism was, at least initially, an alliance between
ancien regime conservatives, socially and economically insecure
elements of the middle classes, and a significant fragment of
alienated, radicalized workers.

Ideologically what united these disparate groups was a utopian
belief in the nation as a higher structural unit uniquely suited
to the aims of both internal corporatist social organization and
external expansive force as expressed in high stakes international
conflict.

Looked at from this historical perspective, modern day American
fascism is a completely different beast.

Firstly, its general, overall class organization is vastly different.

Secondly, fascism in America is not primarily about specific
categories of class support at all, as it was for historical fascism.

Rather, the sources of American fascism are broadly structural,
class cutting, organizational, and have their ideological basis in
a faux or unserious, artificial belief in the nation.

Today’s American governing elites (Trump included) do not possess
a messianic or utopian belief in the nation or white race.

Here, as Marx once famously remarked, history first plays itself out
as tragedy then once again as farce.

Indeed, one would be hard pressed to imagine a more hyper-
farcical character than the current president.

For the elites, nationalism is long dead. It has no content.

It is an emotively reflexive phantom that haunts the financial flows
of present day capital.

However, it must be, from time to time, managed and utilized for
their (global elites) benefit much as an advertisement campaign is
used to sell a particular brand.

Thus, nationalism is, at best, a nostalgic brand name, not a fervent
faith. Hence, the comic-surreal quality surrounding its reappearance.

Also, unlike past Fascisms there is no current, specific group that is
marked out for total chiliastic destruction, rather certain groups
are administratively, if not always systematically, excluded from
national borders.

The flows of immigration become the main ideological target rather
than the immigrants themselves.

It is not that the immigrant is consistently held to be “intrinsically
evil” (despite some famous Trumpian comments about Mexicans)
but that his entrance to the national community must be regulated
and controlled.

This much is relatively uncontroversial.

Modern day Fascism does not overtly offer up a national elite whose
mission it is to violently eradicate a national, ethnic, or class
“other” nor does it embody a rabid expansionist foreign policy (on
the contrary it purports to look and turn inward).

At most there are weak echoes of the past here; modern civil
society is, after all, not as racist, xenophobic, or generally
intolerant as it was during the inter-war years and there is the
internationally tempering factor of atomic weapons to consider
as well.

Thus, if we are to look for current fascistic elements in society
we must look elsewhere.

Where modern day fascism does intersect with its past image and
practice is in the strict maintenance of absolutized hierarchy and
total surreptitious systems of domination.

By this we mean, that the US is an ingeniously hermetically sealed
vessel of elite control that expertly gives the appearance of
freedom, equality, and justice.

To be sure though, there is indeed a certain level of all three of
those highly desirable social and political goods in the society; far
more than in classical fascism.

However, the steerage of the system is in the hands of hidden
actors who are the de facto elites but have no need or desire to be
identified as such, since they too look primarily to enjoy the fruits
of a dynamically regulated civil society which nevertheless, and
crucially, does not, in the slightest, threaten their actual
dominance and elite status since it is unseen and thus publicly
unquantifiable.

Thus our fascism tends to lurk in the shadows; in the unseen spaces
where our well trained/conditioned eyes cannot see the markings
of hidden power, privilege, and control.

The trappings of democracy hang loosely over hardened structures
of domination that we can but dimly see.

https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/01/are-we-fascist-yet