The New Year’s Day inauguration of avowed authoritarian strongman Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil signaled an ominous start to 2019. Brazil, as the fifth-largest country by landmass (larger than the Australian continent), the sixth-largest by population (larger than Russia) and the ninth-largest economy (larger than Canada), represents global fascism’s biggest gain in recent history. The rise of Bolsonaro follows the recent consolidation of power by reactionary nationalists Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungry and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

We start out 2019 with neo-fascists and assorted other “populists” and ethnonationalists holding office in 11 European nations and scoring recent double-digit vote tallies in Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands. Marine Le Pen’s French ethnonationalist National Front garnered one-third of that country’s 2017 vote for president. Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s governing PiS Party, described migrants arriving in Europe as being physically different than Poles, with an ability to carry “various parasites and protozoa, which don’t affect their organisms, but which could be dangerous here.” Duterte celebrated New Year’s Eve boasting of his childhood molestation of his family’s maid. Bolsonaro praised genocide against Native Americans and, on his first day in office, issued an executive order putting agribusiness interests in charge of Indigenous reserves. He also told a fellow member of Brazil’s congress, on the floor of that house, that she wasn’t good enough for him to rape and promised to jail his opposition. 2019 is promising to be ugly.

In the United States, while Republicans lost ground nationally, reactionaries solidified domination of the party, with moderates and constitutionalists retiring or losing primaries in 2018. Despite a large popular vote loss, Republicans added two seats to their Senate majority, giving them continued power to appoint activist right-wing judges.

After losing statehouse races in Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican legislatures in both states moved to curtail the authority of the incoming Democratic governors-elect, as they did two years earlier in North Carolina. Resistance to ceding power after losing an election is a critical warning sign of a failing democracy. Nationally, the Republican Party has been doubling down on its efforts to suppress voting while embracing propagandistic misinformation campaigns and xenophobic dog-whistles often associated with the rise of fascism.

Resistance to ceding power after losing an election is a critical warning sign of a failing democracy.

Trump isn’t leading the party to fascism — he’s the product of a sustained GOP effort to subvert voting rights and democratic norms. By the time this New York City sideshow authoritarian ran for president, the Republican rank-and-file was well groomed to receive him and the fascism he represented.

Here are five forces that are driving this rise of fascism.

1) Surveillance

The reality of fascism is that, historically, it has always sucked for damn near everyone falling under its authoritarian jackboot, including those who supported its rise. How’d things work out in Germany, Italy, Chile, Argentina? Fascism is always embodied by repression of freedoms and kleptocratic corruption. The reality of what fascists do and how it plays out is never good news. Which is why quantifiable reality is fascism’s primary enemy. Propaganda-wise, rising fascists must crush reality. Thanks to data analytics, many platforms are now weaponized to do just that with pinpoint precision.

Personal data is now plentifully available through social media posts, “likes” and internet use patterns. Google and Facebook are primarily in the business of not just harvesting, but analyzing, and thus, monetizing this data to sell micro-targeted advertising, knowing the innermost desires of each consumer.

Your time you spent reading this column, swiping Tinder, playing Candy Crush, paying bills or reading product reviews is all captured. Myriad Google services and apps spy on your every move. Your internet-connected cars, smart TVs, household appliances, thermostats and fitness trackers also contribute to your intricate data profile.

Big data companies cross-reference and analyze this data, creating your unique psychographic profile – used to craft your irresistibly perfect dopaminergic bubble and effectively micro-market products and political ideologies specifically to you while predicting your future behavior.

Of course, you can monkey-wrench this system by disappearing off the grid and walking away into the woods. But even then, chances are your car will narc you out or your hiking partner will post a Yelp review of the trail. At the end of the day, Amazon will market you boots.

Moreover, surveillance extends far beyond the internet for people of color and other targeted groups. Between predictive policing algorithms, the proliferation of cameras and other police surveillance technologies, and the rise of electronic monitoring, the current criminal legal system provides many tools that are a perfect match for fascist tactics, and are already being deployed against marginalized communities.

The techno-dystopian fascist potentials here are boundless.

2) Mega-Monopolies

Corporate monopolies have been rebounding since Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department relaxed antitrust enforcement. The current consolidation of tech giants heralds a previously unimaginable rise of monopoly power, with Amazon, Google and Facebook gobbling up and assimilating competitors, growing to control the very platforms upon which commerce and communication, including free speech, exist.

Free speech is the life force of democracy. Monopolies that have the power to pull the plug on free speech, by their very existence, stand as an existential threat. Monopolies may now tolerate corrupted “democracies” that allow their existence. The question is, will they be as tolerant of resurgent democracies that threaten their power? Or put more bluntly, can you count on Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, now a subdued counterpoint to the Republican Party’s Fox News operation, to not cozy up to authoritarians when, say, a Sanders or Warren Justice Department applies antitrust laws against Bezos’s Amazon monopolies?

The history of European fascism in the 1930s and ’40s warns us that such conglomerates had no problem supporting fascism when it supported them. Let’s not forget the roles of IBM in providing technology supporting the Nazi Holocaust, or Ford and GM in arming the Nazi military. With monopolies purchasing American political assets on “both sides of the aisle,” their unfettered growth and continued consolidation of power is all but guaranteed, and the window of opportunity to rein them in is quickly closing. History has given us reason to worry.

3) Migration Xenophobia

Global warming promises to send more climate change refugees fleeing famine, flood, persistent wildfires, deadly heat waves and rising oceans, while persistent poverty, the rise of fascist regimes and the political collapse of civil societies are causing millions to join the migrations. The linguistic, cultural and religious differences that migrants represent has become weaponized in the arsenal of fascists who work to sow fear of the unknown (xenophobia) in populations they wish to control.

Syria provides an example. The 2011-2012 uprising against the repressive Assad government in Syria and the subsequent violent chaos brought on by seven years of a five-way war, caused 6 million Syrians to flee their country, with about a million heading to Europe. The arrival of these Arabic-speaking, primarily Muslim Syrians in Europe provided an opportunity for previously fringe ethnonationalists to sow xenophobia. Simply put, the Syrian war, fueled by foreign invaders, drove fleeing Syrians to Europe where neo-fascists exploited their presence to undermine European democratic concepts of liberalism and multiculturalism. These fascist movements are now threatening the political cohesion of the European Union, in whose creation Europeans envisioned a united front against the resurgence of fascism.

2019 promises to see more migrants and more fascists.

4) Attacks on Education

The best defense against fascism is an educated population with the ability to think critically. This is why newly formed democratic governments usually invest in education while authoritarians slash education.

Education level is also a marked determining factor in voting in the United States, with college educated voters favoring Democratic candidates by significant margins in recent elections – which is a reversal from the mid 1990s. The Republican Party, with an established record of targeting demographic groups for voter suppression based on their voting patterns, can’t help but target educated voters. But education empowers people, making them more difficult to target for suppression. Less access to education accomplishes the same goals, which might explain the GOP’s stinginess when it comes to student financial aid and its opposition to free higher education. Meanwhile, disinvestment from education continues in communities of color and low-income communities. As in other realms, already-marginalized people will be hit hardest by this fascism-driving force.

5) False Equivalencies

As of December 30, The Washington Post’s fact-checkers have documented 7,645 false or misleading statements (a.k.a. lies) made by President Trump since taking office. For Trump and many of his enablers, lying comes as naturally as breathing. This creates a problem for journalists. Call out liars for lying, which is the job of journalism, and it looks like bias to the untrained eye. The problem is that one group is doing almost all of the lying. So, if you report on lies, you’re essentially reporting on Republican lies, or just “attacking” Republicans. Reality is biased.

The corporate news media in the United States are not in the business of keeping us informed. They’re in the business of capturing and selling our attention. If they appear biased, in this case by reporting the truth, they risk alienating viewers. To appear less biased, they rhetorically balance the White House’s most egregious lies against oversimplifications or rhetorical generalizations from their opponents.

This causes a false equivalency — a “he said / she said” narrative with everyone fibbing — which has no bearing on the reality that one group is doing almost all of the lying. The end result is, instead of outrage and anger directed at the liars, we get a general antipathy toward politics, which leads to a disempowering apathy and yielding of the political area to fascists. We’ve got to demand better media — or make it ourselves — and stop supporting media outlets that can’t quite call out liars and fascists.

Our Movements Can Triumph

Donald Trump is trolling us every day. That’s who he is. I never wanted to write about him, but here we are. Republicans have been depressing for a while, but the Trump presidency brings their obnoxiousness to a historically unprecedented level, with dozens of outrages each week since CNN began promoting him as a serious presidential candidate in 2015. Trump and his enablers have declared a war, not only on ideologies and groups of people, but on the future itself. Meanwhile, we see multiple new arms races, bellicose threats against world leaders, new alliances with fascists and the emboldening of racists that want us dead at home. There’s no doubt we are in the middle of an unprecedented crisis brought on by a sadistic bully and his enablers. Don’t just think you can ignore Donald Trump, and that he won’t get inside your head. He’s already there. And he’s the driving force behind the rise of fascism in the United States.

To ignore him is to allow him. We can’t drop the ball in this struggle.

It’s time for us to seek out solace in community and liberation in activism. We can move beyond the fascist threat. Our movements can gain momentum. The complacency of the Obama years — where things slowly got worse while a brilliant, personable orator captivated our hopes — are over. Rather then foolishly trust the old Democratic Party to fix the problems it was complacent in making, we’re hitting the streets with a level of vigor not seen in over a generation. Let’s keep at it. The forces driving fascism are strong. We have to be stronger. Historically, anti-fascism always triumphs in the end. Let’s do this quickly.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.