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.

How Did We Get Here?

Sitting here at what may well be the end of American democracy, it seems fitting to look back over our 200-year fling and ask, what went wrong? How did a democratic republic of, by, and for the people become a plutocracy in which corporations dictate terms to the government and join with it to hypnotize the people into throwing away their rights like smokers tossing away cigarette butts?

Many forces have contributed to the disaster. A few salient examples:

• Enormous power and wealth have been concentrated in a military-industrial complex that depends for its survival on keeping its customers, including us, frightened. Ike warned us about this one, and he knew what he was talking about.
  

• Advances in communications technology, especially television, have been combined with advances in applied psychology to develop machinery of propaganda that Goebbels and Hitler could only dream about.

• Floods of advertising have created the first culture in history where lies are an ordinary and accepted part of social intercourse. This has corroded the commitment to objective truth as a common goal, one of the bedrock Enlightenment values on which our system was built. It has culminated in the infamous ridiculing of "fact-based reality" by a functionary of the current administration. A related phenomenon is the enormous growth of militant and intolerant religious sects based upon ecstatic illusions of power and freedom derived from the capacity to will a belief in things contrary to observed fact. This has all contributed to a widespread sense that one's ideas are simply a matter of personal taste, like one's choice of deodorants.
  

• The public has come to rely for its information on an industrialized media complex in which professional journalism has entirely given way to bean counting. Worse, because of their immense size and the privileged status of their owners, the mass media inevitably favor entrenched interests over minority ones. A culture of groupthink reminiscent of high school cliques is used to police the journalistic workforce and marginalize anyone asking questions or reporting facts that jeopardize the consensus.

• Public education has been crippled at all levels. Grade school pupils do not learn to read; many college students graduate with nothing resembling a liberal education and hence never learn the habits of thought on which Jeffersonian democracy depends.

Many other forces could and probably should be cited, but these are some of the structural ones that occur to me. Such a list raises an interesting question: Which of these, if any, is a sine qua non for the current mess, without which it could not have occurred? This question in turn suggests a thought experiment: If you were empowered to go back in history and attempt to avert the present crisis by a single act, what would it be? Obviously, some fuzziness surrounds the notion of an "act" in this context. But I'm thinking of things like enacting or repealing or amending a law, electing or defeating a leader (or even assassinating one, or saving one from assassination), ordering the armed forces to fight a war, or not to fight one, or to fight one differently.

The question is interesting not because of its answer -- it doesn't really have an answer -- but because of the opportunities it provides to think about how we got here, and who knows, maybe even how to extricate ourselves -- or at least give a warning to others who might stray into the tar pit where we seem about to go down to join the saber-tooth tigers.