Yesterday, I sat down over coffee to write an essay about an organized bombing campaign by a right wing extremist targeting the political opposition. But by the time I’d finished a gunman radicalized by the delusional, paranoid propaganda of an authoritarian movement had committed a mass murder at a synagogue. What a tragedy, what a loss. One of those killed was a holocaust survivor.

That, my friends, is an extreme pace of social collapse — one that should leave you profoundly unsettled. And yet while I’ve long had had the uncomfortable suspicion that fascism would rise in America during my lifetime — across the world in fact — I’ve also suspected that would be because Americans, many of them, enough of them, even especially the good ones were never really taught what fascism is.

What is fascism? This wave of violence, my friends, is fascism coming to life. Now I suspect when I say this, you feel conflicted. One part of you probably says, “I know that, you idiot!!” — while another one, trying to be reasonable, says “but this isn’t really, you know, fascism fascism.” How curious. Am I right? Do you have something like this unconscious inner dialogue going on? I’d bet that you do. But why?

The reason is that Americans have been badly miseducated about fascism. They have been told a terrible and stupid lie, that I will come to. That part of you that objects, “but this isn’t fascism fascism,” does so because somewhere, probably in grade school, and then all over again in college, you were taught the definition that every American is taught. Fascism is the “concentration of state and economic power.”

Now, let’s think about this for a second. If this is fascism, then Britain’s NHS, France’s retirement system, and Germany’s high speed rail network meet this definition, too — and all those kind folks working in them are…fascists. Lol. In fact, they are the precise opposite of fascism — goods designed explicitly to make everyone better off, regardless of their position in society, their caste, creed, place — which is why we call them “public” goods. And yet this definition — “the concentration of state and economic power,” or those like it — has no racial or ethnic component, nor one of violence, whatsoever. Isn’t that, well, strangely, bafflingly ignorant? After all, isn’t fascism at its core about exactly that?

I want you to see the point. The definition of fascism Americans have been taught is tragically and funnily backwards. So much so that it quite literally makes no sense at all — it falls apart on the merest examination. What is it really defining, if it’s not defining fascism?

Americans have been taught that socialism is fascism. Not even totalist communism, a la Soviet Russia — even lightweight social democracy. Quite literally, under the terms of this bizarre definition — “the concentration of state and economic power” — Americans are left badly, deeply, and profoundly confused. But wait! If we build that high speed rail line, or give people healthcare — isn’t that a step on the road to fascism? LOL — of course not: it is an inoculation against taking that step. I’ll come back to exactly why. Do you see how convoluted our logic grows, how dim our reason becomes, when our definitions begin from a backwards place? When we suppose fascism is a thing without a politics begin with, when we have reduced it to a ghost, a shell — then what are we to fight against?

Now. The interesting question is: why? Why were Americans taught that socialism is fascism — when in fact the diametrical opposite is true? The reason is quite simple, but to really understand it — and you will not like the explanation — we need to consider America’s gruesome, weird, and terrible history.

Fascism is best seen this way. A person who believes that there is a hierarchy of personhood — that some people are more human than others, and some fall below the threshold of being people entirely — and furthermore, that that hierarchy should be institutionalized, is a fascist. A movement composed of such people is a fascist movement. A government managing such a project is a fascist government. (The natural moral logic of such a hierarchy is that violence must be done to the weak by the strong, since they are not human beings at all, but parasites and predators.)

But that creates a very big problem for America. If that definition is true — you are welcome to think about whether it is — then America was a fascist country for a very long time, and many Americans have always been welcoming to fascist ideas, because the central organizing principle of American life was just such a hierarchy of personhood — and its institutionalization. Slavery and segregation, after all, was exactly all this, wasn’t it?

So now we come to a difficult truth — one that is perhaps too difficult for America to ever really face, and that is why it is where it is now.

You see, the problem is that fascism was an American creation. The Nazis didn’t begin by being America’s enemies. They were its great admirers. They openly studied America’s long history of slavery and segregation to model their own race laws upon. Now, Americans, quite naturally, wanting to disown this legacy, were left calling fascism “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” and so on. But these are inaccurate, sanitizing terms, which only hide a bitter and grim reality — and leave us unable to ever really improve upon it much, either. (Hence, I don’t say any of this to condemn, blame, or judge you, by the way. No nation has a virgin birth. I say these difficult things for the sake of democracy. As hard as that might be to swallow, or even accept. I wish only the best for you, really — which is the attitude democracy demands of us, I think, but I digress.)

Americans were taught that socialism is fascism, but slavery and segregation weren’t. Their echoes, ideals of supremacy and nationalism and so on, were something repellent, maybe, but also to be tolerated, in the “market” or “battle” of “ideas”. That legacy, that history of failed ideas, of poor thinking, is what made America ever more vulnerable to today’s fascist collapse. Because when one doesn’t know what is seeing, one is just as blind as if one cannot see at all.

Let’s consider the question now — is what we see today really fascism? You know, fascism fascism, the real thing, as our unconscious minds probably object — now that we have some criteria we can use. If fascism is just the concentration of state and economic power — then it is Europe who is fascist, not America. But it isn’t Germany, Switzerland, France, and Spain in which mass political violence against Jews, refugees, and immigrants is breaking out — and their heads of state and governments are not applauding, cheering, and promoting it. But if fascism is the institutionalization of a hierarchy of personhood, well, then, America is obviously the one who is well on the way to becoming fascist. But becoming is the wrong term. The right term is “reverting” — because that is what America was always built upon. Perhaps in the end history will sum America up this way, if Americans make the wrong choice in about ten days: it had just fifty short years of democracy between dark centuries of fascism.

(Now, there are qualifications and objections we can make — they go like this. One: fascism is a modern phenomenon, it’s sometimes said, because the machinery of the state is used bureaucratically to control and subjugate people, with accounting and ledgers and all the techniques of modern management. But these aren’t convincing ones, to me. Because precisely the same thing happened to black American slaves, and native Americans who face genocide — they were counted, tracked, parcelled, sorted, and valued by managers and underlings and administrators, too. Two: fascism is an organized campaign of genocide, and America has never done any such thing, and therefore it is not fascist. My friend, if you tell yourself this, you badly misunderstand what “genocide” is. When the child was sold, and the mother kept, or the family broken up, that too was genocide — because it is simply limiting the reproductive destiny of a group. It would be a foolish kind of ignorance to suppose America’s centuries of slavery were not one long, slow genocide — one of history’s greatest.)

And that brings us back to that very uncomfortable place — at least if we are American. Because now we are face to face with a shattering truth. We are backwards people, thinking backwards thoughts — and among these, one of the most backwards is that fascism is socialism, but slavery and segregation weren’t.

I don’t want to mince words, on this eve of a massacre. It is believing lies like these that have made us history’s great fools — easy, gullible marks for the worst among us, who never went anywhere at all. Where would they go? After all, we were taught that socialism was the idea never to be tolerated — but not supremacy, not violence, hierarchies of personhood. Those are ingrained in us as deep as our very pores. “Hey — maybe that billionaire really is just smarter, tougher, better!” Ah, I suppose that means, too, then, that the slave wasn’t. I suppose maybe we should arm the teachers — not take away the guns. Do you see my point?

Let me make that even sharper. Slavery and segregation were seminal, pioneering forms of fascism — but Americans have not yet understood that yet. Yet without understanding that, they are impotent to know what it is to truly be, and also stay, a democracy. What distinguishes fascism from “white supremacy”? Fascism is the superset of supremacies — it’s best to think about it that way. So in America, it might be whites who aspire to be supreme, and in Asia, castes or tribes of some kind, and so forth. Supremacies are just different forms of the category fascism. And the only real difference between them is the desire, appetite, and will to institutionalize such a hierarchy of the weak and the strong — but what supremacist doesn’t want to do that, really? Yet that is precisely what America did, for far, far longer than it has undone.

So Americans struggle to understand fascism because they have been taught to think about it not just poorly — but in a fatally backwards from the very beginning. They’ve been taught the stupid, foolish, lie that socialism is fascism, but supremacy, slavery, and segregation weren’t. Therefore, today, the echoes of the expressions of the idea that some people are more human than others, are quite alright (hey, I hear people talking about dirty, filthy lower kinds on Faux News all the time, what’s the big deal?) But a little bit of public healthcare, education, media, or retirement — my God, that way lies the abyss!

Do you see the setup for tragedy occurring here? It made it almost inevitable that America would fail at really becoming a modern democracy — and collapse right back into the fascism it had pioneered. Socialism, in the way of public goods, is the one thing that, by equalizing societies, prevents and mitigates fascism, just as it has done in Europe, where, of course, thanks to global economic stagnation, it has risen too, but has been much, much more successfully fended off. Nobody in London, Paris, or Berlin is killing people at synagogues and sending bombs to the opposition, inspired by a demagogue, who preaches hate in the open, after all.

So what was likely to happen when fascism began to rear its ugly head again in America — driven by a sense of frustration, the very first time after the end of segregation that the economy stagnated? People were likely not to see it as a monster at all. They’d been taught that “fascism” was socialism, not the echoes of slavery and segregation, supremacy, the notion that ethnic and racial hierarchies should order societies, all of which might be repellent but were to be tolerated as “free speech” and the “debate of ideas” and so on, expressed openly, everywhere. Over and over again, American received one message: socialism equals fascism, but institutionalized supremacy does not.

So, quite naturally, when the classical sequence of fascist collapse began — comically textbook style, no less — demagogue, demonization, scapegoating, camps, trials, mass violence — neither intellectuals nor populace could quite anticipate, comprehend, or prevent any of it. Instead, they were shocked, every single day, more or less. “How can this be happening to us?” They cried. “We are better than this!” they shouted — even as the mass killings began. But we were the ones who invented fascism to begin with, and, in perpetual denial of that terrible fact, remained altogether too comfortable with its expressions, ideals, and component thoughts. We had to tell ourselves it was the one thing it had never been at all — but that made it altogether too easy to stay just that thing. That’s always the price of denial, isn’t it?

So funnily, ironically, tragically, the sequence of fascist collapse began, picked up steam, and soon enough had wrecked the nation’s norms, values, institutions, rules, codes, expectations — and all this was because America, trying to run away from the ugly truth, made itself impotent to slow it, stop it, reverse it, too. If you think socialism is fascism, after all — you will fight socialism, but let fascism flourish. And that is exactly what America’s politicians, intellectuals, thinkers, and pundits did, at the crucial moment, upon the election of a demagogue. “The real threat to us is Medicare for all! And what about Hillary’s emails? Who cares if he calls some dirty, filthy Mexicans names? Grow up!!”

Society had been constructed by now on a terrible and stupid lie. Socialism was fascism, but supremacy never had been. Therefore, hate, spite, and violence, built to enforce hierarchies of personhood, were never really rooted out of society, torn up, and turned into dust for history to spread over the ocean. Soon enough, the hierarchies demanded the violence they always did. “The intruders and the subhumans”, cried the bomber and the gunman, “are taking what is ours!! We must put them back in their place, with the fist, the knife, the bullet!” The sad truth is that could just as easily have been settlers and slavers talking about the native American or the black, too.

Fascism didn’t come to America. It didn’t even come back to America. It was born here, nourished here with centuries of slavery and segregation — hence, the Nazis learned it from us — and only slumbered a few short decades, while Americans told themselves proudly that the real monsters were not the people they had once been, but the people they did not want to be.

It’s hard to face the truth of yourself. The guilt and shame and fear that come with it. Is this really who I am? And yet until and unless you do — you will stay just that person. If you ask me, that is what the lie that fascism is socialism, but slavery and segregation weren’t, has done to America. Made it incapable of ever really changing very much.

Fascism? It’s this, my friends. The rule of violence, committed to establish hierarchies of personhood, with the intent of institutionalizing them, with a little bit more intimidation and fear every day. The lie that fascism isn’t this, but socialism, is what the phase of turmoil America is collapsing into now, day by day, a little more explosively, almost inevitable. And I wonder — and you should too — whether we have learned anything yet.

Umair

October 2018