A Fascist State of Mind

Naomi Wolf was talking this morning on Democracy Now about her new book, "The End of America," in which she sets out the ten-step pattern by which open, democratic societies become closed, fascist ones. It's a chilling conception, of course, because the United States appears to have somnambulated far down that well-trodden road, and shows no signs of awakening from its fatal slumber before it walks off the cliff and tumbles into darkness.

In trying to talk myself out of the gloom this interview engendered (or more precisely, intensified), I found myself returning again and again to the idea that few if any of the agents of our decline can really be called fascists. Nobody gets up in the morning and recommits himself, in so many words, to building a fascist state. Presumably most of these guys believe, at some level of abstraction, in the idea of American democracy. Surely even Dick Cheney does not think Hitler had a better idea than Jefferson.

This led me to the hypothesis that fascism is not a belief system at all, but a (highly toxic) state of mind. It is not actuated by any theory about the optimal state for human realization, as Marxism or Christianity or Islam are. To be sure, there have been attempts to articulate a belief system in its support, but I suspect they are best explained as post-hoc rationalizations for its defining characteristic, which is a lust to gather all power unto oneself, or a tiny elite with which one identifies. It is defined not by any objective model of how things are or should be, but by an overwhelming need to have one's own way. "Triumph of the Will," indeed; fascists want to make themselves gods—or the next best thing, emperors.

In a sense fascism is a kind of collective enactment of the Shadow, the unmoderated all-consuming solipsistic self, the inner sociopath that denies all connection to fellow beings—except as they become, by tribal or other allegiance, extensions of it. And like the Shadow it feeds, in a lethal paradox, on resistance to it. Its lust for power is closely linked to an all-pervasive fear. The lust feeds on the fear, and the fear feeds on the lust.

Fascism is a kind of cancer, not only social and moral but personal. It eventually destroys any but the most vacuous host. When it takes hold of society it expresses itself in a paroxysm of madness, carrying the seeds of its own destruction like a pyromaniac starting a forest fire without leaving himself an escape route. Unfortunately, as we have seen, this kind of mass insanity can kill countless others before the fever subsides and the ruins are left to smolder. Let us hope that if it comes again, someone will remain to rebuild and try, yet again, to prove that ours is a species worthy of survival.