“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”
—George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
“Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
“Fuck me gently with a chainsaw.”
—Heather Chandler, Heathers
PART ONE: THE MAN
My first experience of true, unfiltered drudgery came in my mid-20s, when I took a job at New York City’s landmark Strand Bookstore. This was back in 2005, when the shop still mostly sold books, rather than the the knick-knacks, novelties, t-shirts, and tote bags that had commandeered the sales floor on my last visit a few years back. I worked in the warehouse, which at the time comprised the entire fifth floor of the 10-story, sand-colored stone building on the corner of 12th and Broadway, where I spent 8 hours each day putting price stickers on books. The job was pure, relentless tedium—alleviated only slightly when I splurged a portion of my meager pay on a small, battery-powered FM radio that came with a set of black earbuds, which I could hide under my shirt so I could secretly listen to WNYC while I labeled book after book after book after book. For a job with so little to it, there were a surprising number of rules.
As I settled into this routine, getting the full force of my first broiling New York summer among the stiffing shelves of the dusty warehouse, where the opened windows let in not the least ripple of a cooling summer breeze, management was meeting in the newly-remodeled, air-conditioned offices below. The daughter of the Strand’s owner—who was himself the son of the store’s founder—was famously anti-literate among the staff,1 and was working hard that season to make her mark on the family business. Her first target was the long-abandoned physical therapy office on the building’s 10th floor, which at some point in the store’s 80-year history had become an ad hoc secondary warehouse for books nobody knew what else to do with. When some of the managers resisted clearing out the space, she got straight to the point. “Real estate is more valuable than books,” she said.
Repellant as that attitude may be, broadly speaking, with regard to the cache cluttering up the upper floor of 828 Broadway, she might actually have had a point. Most of the volumes that had made their way into this unlit purgatory had been considered unsalable for one reason or another. Many had water damage or some other kind of disfigurement; most, like the hundreds of signed first-edition copies of Regis Philbin’s ghost-written memoir,2 couldn’t be given away even in mint condition. By the time the decision had been made to return the space to something approximating its original shape so it could be rented out to a paying tenant, the 10th floor had come to resemble an archeological site, some recently-excavated but worthless library that had been moldering underground for a couple of centuries. Boxes of books were heaped floor to ceiling and wall to wall in this denuded office from which even the light fixtures had been removed. The long-dry toilets held towers of boxes reaching all the way to the ceiling, the shattered wooden stalls belching forth landslides of cardboard and paper, and the empty wooden pit that had once housed a whirlpool was now flooded with loose and tattered tomes. Suspicious chips of old paint lay over the stacks and piles like a heavy November snowfall, and the suffocating New York summer made the intertwining perfumes of dust and aging paper sharp and pungent in the heavy air. This was a dark, crumbling place where unlovable books had been sent to be forgotten, and many of my coworkers assumed that I was sucking up to our bosses when I volunteered to work on the crew assigned to clear it out—though in truth all I was after was a temporary reprieve from the monotony of the pricing tables.
Still, I loved working on the 10th floor. The labor was strenuous and sweaty, the climate sweltering and almost smoky as we disturbed the probably asbestos-and/or-lead-laden dust left behind after decades of neglect. But it passed the time, and gently scratched the deep corner of my psyche fascinated by lost and decaying places that had in the past driven me to wander the grounds of any abandoned building without enough cyclone fencing to keep me out. We spent the days deconstructing walls of books and sifting through the crap for anything salable,3 which we sorted into great stacks by the freight elevator. While we were expected at all times to be neatly pricing books in the warehouse, in this forsaken literary graveyard nobody cared what we did as long as the next load of boxes was ready to go when the elevator eventually returned. And so, for the only time in my tenure at the Strand, I read, voraciously, beneath the skylight over the old whirlpool, nested comfortably among sloping piles of loose books: Dalton Trumbo, Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, JD Salinger, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, even Winston Groom’s unexpectedly vulgar comic novel, Forrest Gump.
There was a fair bit of animated discussion regarding the fate of those other books too wretched to find a home even on the $1 racks set outside the store each morning, especially among those of us without the power to do anything about it. I hoped that they could be donated to prisons, or some other place in equally desperate need of anything whatsoever to read—even the crap we were clearing out of the attic—but the cost of transporting the masses of books upstate was prohibitively expensive. For most of the junk volumes, the only financially responsible thing to do was to hire a series of open-top dumpsters and throw them away. One afternoon, a bigger group than usual was sent to the 10th floor to retrieve a garbage truck’s worth of books bound for the trash. We each stacked boxes six feet high on wooden dollies and stood in a rough semicircle in a sort of vestibule that divided most of the floor from the workings of the ancient freight elevator. There were four or five of us, all young warehouse employees well-read enough to have passed the bizarre literature quiz that was then a part of the store’s employment application, wiling our 20s away in New York, the country’s loudest, most cosmopolitan dumpster. As we waited for the elevator to return, talking idly about this or that, one of the warehouse managers came suddenly up the stairs.
Lonnie was tall and lanky and I guessed from his graying, balding afro and his staggered, professorial laugh—each “ha” clearly and distinctly pronounced—that he was somewhere in his fifties, though he carried with him a world-weariness that might easily have lead me to assume he was older than he actually was. It would have been easy enough to picture him in a faded tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, but he dressed like any stubbornly aging gen-xer. Whatever the weather, he wore a long-sleeve, plaid flannel shirt. Even in the dead of summer I don’t think I ever once saw the man’s forearms. He was shrewd and he was clever and he was genial and he was wry and among all the many supervisors in the warehouse he was the only person I even vaguely respected, let alone actually liked. And I liked him very much. Never one to offer an unsolicited opinion, he was nonetheless like the upper floor’s wise elder, someone you could feel confident in asking anything about the workings of the great, sprawling bookstore, or the great, sprawling city in which it sat. I’m not sure what I expected him to say as he stepped quietly into the vestibule and shut the door behind him, as if to stop anyone hiding in the stairwell from listening in—I just know it wasn’t the question he put to us once he was sure he had our attention.
“So,” he said, turning to face us. His face was hardened, without his usual warm smile or the mischievous glint in his eye. “Tell me. What are you guys going to do about the Man?”
He spoke quietly, conspiratorially. We said nothing, but stared at him in confused silence. “The Man?” he continued, “You know, Big Brother? The people in power, pulling all the strings? Have you thought about it?” We hadn’t. “Well, what are you going to do about it?” We didn’t have an answer. Through the open windows we could hear the constant susurration and honking of the cars along Broadway amid the brash, carrying voices of our fellow New Yorkers drifting up from the sidewalk ten stories below. “My generation,” he went on, “our time has passed. And we failed. Nothing has changed. We’re all still slaves to the same bullshit system. Look at me, I’m just another boss now. To you, I’m the Man. So you don’t have to listen to anything I say. You don’t have to take me seriously, but you do need to take this question seriously. For yourselves. For all of us. Your generation needs to do the work mine couldn’t. Or didn’t. Or wouldn’t. You’re our last, best hope. The system is near a breaking point. Things are going to get a lot better if you make them better, otherwise they’re going to get a lot worse. It’s as simple as that.” He reached for the doorknob. “So you have got to ask yourselves: what are you going to do about the Man?”
And with that, he opened the door and headed back down the stairs, leaving us to figure out what the hell had just happened. A few weeks later, Lonnie abruptly quit the Strand, and I never heard from him again.
I have been haunted by that strange, brief encounter for the last 20 years.
PART TWO: NO ESCAPE
I never came up with a satisfactory answer to that question—and had long given up on trying when the American people first elected Donald Trump to the presidency, and I, in turn, disappeared into the woods.
The two weren’t directly related; I had been drawn to the Appalachian Trail ever since I’d watched my cousin walk off into the forested mountains of northern Georgia in 1997. It just so happened that life hadn’t granted me the opportunity to hike for five months straight until shortly after Trump had first assumed power. When I began my inaugural thru-hike, he hadn’t yet been in office 100 days. While clearly a threat, particularly to more vulnerable populations than people with the wealth, health, and time to spend half a year living out of a backpack, this president still seemed at the time like a joke—a malevolent, half-assed clown wielding a sledgehammer, but one just a bit too heavy for him to lift. It was all too easy to hike in beautiful, peaceful ignorance.
I never had cell service on the trail. In town, once I was cleaned, bandaged, fed, and resupplied, my priority was catching up with family and friends more than the news. Working in Antarctica between trails was little different, at least in that regard. In my old life, I’d followed current events with an addict’s insatiable thirst for more—now that I’d all but gone cold turkey I would find myself taken occasionally by complete surprise. I remember clearly walking a ridge along one of the sky islands through which the PCT meanders as it snakes its way through the southern California desert, listening to a podcast I’d downloaded in town a few days before. One of the stories centered around some of the young children separated from their families by immigration enforcement, underfed and unwashed and left to sleep on a cold concrete floor with only a mylar fire blanket for bedding. How the fuck did this happen? I thought.
I sporadically documented my AT and PCT thru-hikes on facebook and instagram, but I was determined to capture the CDT in brutal, painstaking detail. I kept a meticulous diary every day of that hike, and rediscovered something simple, something I’d lost sight of some ten years before:4 writing is fun. It’s in the nature of the 20-something auteur to care intensely about their audience, how big or small it is, and what type of people they are—but there is a real kind of freedom in being a moderately well-read 40 year old without a following.
You’re at a stage in your life when you’ve developed some intuitive understanding of the way language works, but without the pressure of anyone paying for your words, you can simply play. You can write about anything, in any style you like. So I wrote about hiking, over thousands of miles, for thousands and thousands and thousands of words, because I liked writing and I liked hiking and I liked writing about hiking. Writing, as much as walking, was a diversion. A distraction. An escape.
But of course, there was no escape. There never is. We are in the world that we’re in even if we choose not to look at it. Children were being caged whether or not I chose to pay attention, and more to the point, whether or not I chose to call attention to it. “…No book is genuinely free from political bias,” George Orwell says in his essay “Why I Write.” While some writing is transparently political, and some is obliquely political, any piece of writing that chooses instead to dodge the current state of affairs entirely is effectively reinforcing it. To accept the status quo is to say that the status quo is acceptable—and to ignore it is, in essence, to endorse it. As Orwell goes on to say, “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” To continue to write only about the trails I chose to walk while brushing aside the world around them as it burned was to sanction that burning. And trails are, notoriously, flammable. There is no safe path through a wildfire.
There is a framework for understanding how a modern democracy slides into autocracy, originally conceived by Hungarian academic Bálint Magyar as he watched several former Soviet states follow the same choreography from elected self-government to authoritarian rule. This dance is a three-step, each movement distinct but leading directly into the next. The first phase is the autocratic attempt, when would-be dictators push against the limits of the democratic state, but ultimately the existing institutions keep them contained. In the autocratic breakthrough, those institutions fail, and the authoritarians act as they please without regard to law or popular will. The effects of a breakthrough are by their nature devastating, causing lasting damage to the structures of society that cannot be repaired or rebuilt through a simple election. And it is in the final phase, autocratic consolidation that this ruling elite remakes the institutions, the laws, the government, and ultimately the country in their own image. If the effects of a breakthrough are hard to undo, a consolidated autocracy requires a fundamental remaking of the society in order for a democratic state to recover. In other words, a revolution.
In Masha Gessen’s book on the first Trump administration, Surviving Autocracy, they describe Trump’s entire first term as his autocratic attempt. This interpretation was, for me, a revelation: when I’d first come across this three-fold architecture in some dusty, nerdy corner of the internet, I’d understood it as a means of interpreting singular events. January 6, I’d thought, was an autocratic attempt. The would-be dictator had pushed against the defenses of the country’s laws, and they had bent, and they had cracked, but ultimately they had held. This wasn’t wrong, exactly, but Gessen describes each stage as more of a process, something continuous and cumulative. The phases are long—sometimes stretched so thin the patterns can be hard to see—and often they overlap, with some events properly understood as a part of one step taking place alongside others that belong to another. But if Trump’s first term was his autocratic attempt, the moment the conservative supermajority on the current supreme court granted him extra-constitutional immunity from prosecution for his crimes against the federal government itself in Trump v. United States was the artillery shell start to his autocratic breakthrough. Before he’d even returned to power, the institutions were falling to his will, the state already being broken and reshaped into something harder, crueler, and more self-serving, something no simple election could fix.
Hardness, cruelty, and self-serving government were not new flavors for my home country, of course, nor even for its supreme court. In 1857, that august institution issued a 7-2 ruling that black Americans were not, in fact, US citizens. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney said, “A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a ‘citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.” Black Americans, he continued, “can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides.” Even at the time the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford was controversial, and was viewed by those who did not support slavery as outside the bounds of the US Constitution. But it nonetheless entrenched the established power of the anti-democratic South. This decision, widely considered to be the worst in the court’s history, gave slavery a new claim to legitimacy at a time when its popularity across the rest of the country was waning, and all but ensured the need for the horrific violence of a protracted civl war to finally break that institution’s grip on the nation. An authoritarian state with a strict caste system is explicitly what a society with legal slavery is, and a return to this sort of feudalist framework has been the project of the American far right since the end of that conflict.
For no apartheid regime can truly be considered a democracy, and there is a clearly identifiable genealogy that stretches from the pro-slavery movement of the country’s early years, through the Confederacy, and into the neo-confederate movements that ruled the Jim Crow era and exist still in America today. Today’s neo-confederates march with torches through the streets of Charlotte where they chant proudly that “Jews will not replace us,” and they sit on the supreme court, where they work diligently to neuter and erase the Civil Rights Act, anti-discrimination laws, and affirmative action. They are anti-democracists, who gerrymander majorities for themselves they could not win fairly, and stymie the appointment of anyone to the judiciary who has not proven themselves to be hard-right wackadoodle. They are conspiracy theorists who murder cops while storming the US Capitol dressed like drunk college football fans, and they are conspiracy theorists who work in the media to crown those thugs as heroes while they vilify the country’s political underclass using the latest in dog-whistle newspeak. The philosophical and political descendants of the Dred Scott right are still among us, only today they are running the fucking country. Even now, they are doing everything they can to expand what power they already have, and to hold onto that power forever. The autocratic attempt is long in our past, the breakthrough has already happened, and now they are working to consolidate that takeover in perpetuity.
I never wanted to write about politics. I only ever wanted to write about the things that interested me: sex, and love, and music, and the burning torment of passion, thru-hiking, and the exquisite solitude of the great and empty wilderness, and shitting into a hole I dug myself into a spectacularly scenic mountainside, and working a long and brutal day in the terrible Antarctic backcountry with icicles stuck in my beard. But politics touches every one of those things, binds them, warps them, and ultimately ruins them. So I turn to writing directly about this thing that all writing touches indirectly, because I don’t believe any longer that there is any other reasonable choice. The barbarians aren’t at the gate anymore. They’re inside the fucking living room, setting fire to the couch, and I can’t pretend that this isn’t happening. I can’t keep saying nothing; if I’m going to keep writing, at some point I have to write about this—though to what end, I don’t know. We have come to a point in our history where words simply are not enough. It took a bloody civil war to overturn the monumentally stupid and cruel decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford; it looks increasingly that it will take an equally cataclysmic movement to overturn Trump v. United States.
In other words, a revolution.
PART THREE: AMERICAN FASCISM
The term fascism is notoriously difficult to define. The word is sculpted by its user into whatever shape they choose, often warping it all out of proportion with reality. The only thing most speakers can agree on is that it has become pejorative—an insult, a dirty word that even those whose politics it most accurately describes reject as an epithet, often lobbing it directly back toward their critics. Even the German Third Reich, to most modern Americans’ minds the purest, square-one example of a fascist regime, would not have fit the mold in its original form. Nazi Germany was distinct from Fascist Italy, but the two shared enough in philosophy and action that the word as it has come to be generally understood applies equally well to both.
The novelist Umberto Eco grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, and was raised to see Italian fascism as a natural fact of the world, like gravity or the change of the seasons. When the fall of that regime brought a deluge of alternate political philosophies, he was forced to confront everything he thought he understood about the shape and scope of government. When, later in life, he watched the word grow into something far beyond its original intent, he sought to understand it anew, and to define it once and for all. In the mid 1990’s, he published an essay in the New York Review of Books in which he tried to sketch an outline of what the hell, broadly speaking, fascism is. Titled “Ur-Fascism,” its crux is a list of 14 traits that any instance of fascism may or may not have. Here was a definition of the term that embraced its complexity, and encompassed both its breadth and its essential ambiguity. As Eco explains:
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola. But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
This was the most honest, most nuanced, and easily the most useful definition of term I’d ever come across. When I rediscovered this essay early into the second Trump administration, what struck me immediately was how easily you could replace the term fascism with the phrase the present-day government of the United States in any sentence and it would be exactly as accurate.
So that is what I’ve done—attempted to distill each of Eco’s original 14 points down to its essence, and then examine it through its current, specifically American lens. It has been too easy for too long to dismiss alarms of a rising American fascism—or any sort of creeping authoritarianism—as melodramatic and overblown, but we have come to a point in our history where the conclusion of what the United States government has become is inescapable to anyone willing to be the least bit intellectually honest with themselves. The evidence is all around us, each and every day, but we still need to see it before we can do anything about it. Whether or not we live in a fascist country is not the real question, but it is one you have to settle before you can ask the one that really, truly matters.
1. Fascism is obsessed with the cult of tradition.
The far right’s project to paint the left wing of American politics as some form of liberal fascism has always been relentlessly, inescapably idiotic, as fascism is, by definition, a conservative ideology. Though the past pointed to by the American fascist slogan Make America Great Again is an insubstantial fiction, the moral framework it idealizes is not. Every conservative politician makes a point of running their campaign on traditional values, or traditional family values, or traditional christian values, or even traditional American values—and with little variation these are presented as flowing directly from one of several distinctly American forks of fundamentalist christianity, every one of which bizarrely prizes wealth and guns, along with an inflexible fetishization of the heterosexual nuclear family and a rigid enforcement of traditional hierarchies.
It is the blending of contradictory elements, such as the forced spread of conservative christian orthodoxy and the lionization of the country’s founding fathers, who sought to create a specifically secular government, that Eco identifies as being particularly characteristic of fascism. “Truth has been already spelled out once and for all,” he writes, “and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.” This is true whether the source is in the arcane text of the King James Bible or the arcane text of the US Constitution.
You’ll notice the preservation and expansion of voting rights is not among the values that these fascist politicians see themselves as called upon from on high to defend. You need only look at the zealously religious segment of the American far right to see why they would appreciate democracy not as a good in itself, but only as a means to their ends—why would you give two shits about the freedom of self governance when your model of the universe is fundamentally autocratic? God, after all, is not elected to preside over the Constitutional Republic of Heaven. Neither, they believe, should his people submit their own political will to the trial of public opinion. There is no value more traditional than obedience to authority.
2. Fascism rejects modernism.
In many ways fascists haven’t even gotten as far as modernism, as they’ve been busy rejecting the fucking enlightenment for last 250 years. You can see it in their counterfactual insistence that the United States was founded as a christian nation, in their rejection in principle of both scholarship and progress, or in the way they reject self-governance in practice by continually working to undermine the democratic process. You can see it, too, in their attacks on so-called woke or gender ideology, elements of a decadent society that has strayed too far from the guiding paternal hand of traditional American values.
There is a selective celebration of certain forms of modern technology, but it’s also in this arena that the American fascist’s rejection of modernism is at its most aesthetic and its most petulant. Just look at Trump, almost literally tilting at windmills as he works feverishly to dismantle any policy or piece of infrastructure that hints even slightly of green energy. Global warming, after all, is a modern idea—one at odds with view of a universe that remains unchanged since the moment of its creation—and any technology invented to mitigate it is thus inherently heretical. In an age when electric vehicles have become a definitively proven technology and have already permanently reshaped the global automobile market, the government of the United States is banking heavily on the manufacture of gas guzzlers.
3. Fascism rejects intellectualism.
Eco explains that, to the archetypal fascist, “thinking is a form of emasculation.” It has always been ridiculous to take the far right at their word that they are seeking to root antisemitism from higher education—why then would they choose to ignore, or even embrace, antisemitism in their own ranks? But it is also a mistake to think that they are merely trying to purge America’s colleges of progressive ideals. The target is education itself; the enemy is critical thought. There is no demand that any university can meet that will satisfy the appetite of this government. Just observe the way Columbia University has been pushed farther and farther into submission every time it has acquiesced to Trump. The ultimate goal is the institute’s effective destruction.
The nation’s museums will be scrubbed of any history more complicated or controversial than a recitation of the “Star Spangled Banner,” while the Kennedy Center, captained by the president, celebrates the boring and the blandly patriotic, and the White House is, literally, turned into a venue for mixed martial arts.
4. Fascism insists on conformity of thought.
While fascists chase the newest in weapons technology like a gang of overprivileged teenagers waiting in line for the newest iphone, they can never accept the true practice of science, as it depends fundamentally on a diversity of opinion—and such is anathema to the American right.
Much has been made of the way Donald Trump spent his first term working his way through a field of institutionalist advisers whom he fired, one by one, as they thwarted his confused and backward-facing agenda. At the start of his second term, he was ready to staff his administration with an army of vapid yes-men until the entire federal bureaucracy became little more than an extension of his will, a weapon to be hurled at anyone he choses. Now, like a cranky toddler with a handgun, he throws the full fury of his arsenal against anyone who dares to stand up him. Eco sums up this mentality, almost word for word, the way Trump himself occasionally has: “Disagreement is treason.”
5. Fascism is racist.
Two quotes:
“The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.”
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably, probably from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.”
The first quote is Eco. The second is Trump, who launched his first bid for the presidency by stoking fear of an influx of brown-hued foreigners—intruders, in Eco’s words, or, in the language of the second Trump administration, an invasion. Choose to ignore, as some do, the president’s overtly racist speech, and you’re still left with a collection of policies that deliberately disfavor both immigrants and Americans of color, supported by a base that embraces avowed white nationalists. The American far right believes deeply in the concept of natural hierarchy, and has always supported a legal and political framework that reinforces this belief. There is no meaningful distinction between the terms American fascist and neo- confederate.
6. Fascism exploits the frustration of the working class.
The way republican rhetoric blames the low wages and high cost of living of the working class on a vast wave of non-assimilating immigrants has long been a tired cliché—but of course the only solutions offered by a xenophobic interpretation of the problem do nothing to lower the cost of groceries or housing, or to raise wages of the loyal, American-born prole.
No less common than the substitution of race-baiting for reasonable domestic policy is the way their propaganda imagines a cultural elite that thrives on humiliating the rank and file. Not only are particular minority groups singled out for resentment and scorn—people of color, immigrants, transgendered people—but they are portrayed as enjoying an elevated position above the common white, native-born, cisgendered person. Thus the endless war against affirmative action, the rabid drive for mass deportation, and the piece de resistance of the 2024 presidential campaign, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
7. Fascism is hyper-nationalist, and uses manufactured threats to bolster national identity.
Eco says, “To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, [fascism] says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.” And as if using Eco’s template as a guide for his July speech at the Claremont Institute, noted couchfucker/vice president JD Vance elaborates, “Now, part of the solution, I think the most important part of the solution, is you first got to stop the bleeding. And that’s why President Trump’s immigration policies are, I believe, the most important part of the successful first six months in the Oval Office. Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It’s hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.”
There is nothing measured or subtle in this analysis. Every in group must define itself in opposition to an out group, and every group defined by a fascist as out is presented as a danger to the core identity of the national character. Members of the in group must feel under threat by people on the outside, thus the nation-wide assault on immigrants is referred to as “stopping the bleeding.” Similar rhetoric is used for the other demons defining the boundaries of fascist nationalism: trans folk, non-christians, non-partisan media, and progressive activists.
Or, as Eco goes on to say, “The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. Fascism portrays its enemies as simultaneously strong enough to be an existential threat and weak enough to be destroyed.
There is no competent or sane analysis that can view the decayed state of the current Venezuelan government as a legitimate threat to the United States, let alone its far-flung citizenry who have fled their homeland seeking only an escape from its cruelty and incompetence. And yet, the propaganda coming from the American government seems to paint the continued reality of Venezuelans on this earth as an existential crisis. So we murder them at sea as we send the Venezuelan diaspora within our borders to concentration camps overseas, both on the thinnest of possible pretexts.
The people whom the majority find it the easiest to dispose of make the ideal enemy to the fascist, as the possibility of an overwhelming (if eventual) victory must always hang just out of reach, but remain clearly visible, like the carrot at the end of the stick—no matter how dangerous or unstoppable a foe the rhetoric describes them to be. Trans people are, plainly, identifiably, transparently, and overwhelmingly the victims of violence in America and rarely its perpetrators. And yet, when neo-confederate influencer/wackjob dipshit Laura Loomer calls to “designate the Trans movement as a terrorist movement,” she is noticeably not rebuked by anyone on the right.
9. Fascism relies on, and glorifies, violence.
In the action sci-fi mockumentary Starship Troopers, the planet Earth is run by a fascist world government at war with an alien race of giant, intelligent insects. There is a scene early in the film where the main characters, then in high school, are sitting through a lecture on civics which neatly summarizes this point: “Violence,” the professor explains, is “the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.”
Violence is foundational to every fascist political movement. They see it as the only legitimate basis for any and all political power—not popular choice, the rule of law, or even some conveniently interpreted divine plan. It is their ability to wield physical force that grants them the right to rule over others, whether the threat of violence comes from law enforcement in the form of ICE, CBP, or the FBI, the military both in the form of the National Guard and the active branches, or extra-legal armies of misfits, racists, morons, and clowns such as the Proud Boys. Having access to such a deep well of lethal pressure obviates the need for niceties like democracy, justice, or the law, and fascists therefore behave with the sort of open disregard and contempt for all of these things that you would naturally expect.
It is not an accident that as ICE has increased its presence and activity across the country its tactics have become more brutal. And the invasion of democratic cities by nationalized federal troops is textbook authoritarianism—in which the threat of violence against the citizenry is politically tantamount to its actual use. Though unsuccessful in its most immediate goal, the failed coup d’état of January 6, 2021 is an extremely clean illustration of the fascist belief that force is a more legitimate foundation for authority than the will of the public, which is to say democracy. “Life is permanent warfare,” says Eco. There is no ultimate goal to be achieved by violence but more of the same.
“That’s why pacifism is so naïve and dangerous,” according to vapid TV personality/meticulously sculpted hairdo/Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “It ignores human nature and it ignores human history. Either you protect your people and your sovereignty or you will be subservient to something or someone. It’s a truth as old as time. And since waging war is so costly in blood and treasure, we owe our republic a military that will win any war we choose or any war that is thrust upon us. Should our enemies choose foolishly to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision and ferocity of the War Department. In other words, to our enemies, FAFO.”5
10. Fascism enforces a strictly hierarchical society.
The world is a hard and sharp place. Human bodies and human souls are soft and frail, easily punctured, ripped open, broken, and destroyed. On this, if not much else, the American left and right tend to agree—though their perspectives on what to do about it are fundamentally at odds. The left seeks to soften the world, to use the power of the government to care for the sick and raise the poor out of squalor, and to use the power of culture to make the language we use to describe our society kinder to those who have been most abused by it. The right, generally speaking, doesn’t believe that the brutality of the world can be blunted, and that even to the extent that it could be, it shouldn’t.
The natural order divides the people within it into winners and losers, and it is both the privilege and the duty of the members of each caste to look at those beneath them with contempt and work to ensure that it is they who bear the weight of the world’s harder edges. The cruelty is, itself, the point. “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” asks O’Brien in the climax of Orwell’s watershed novel 1984, “…By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”
In the identity politics of the right, this hierarchy is built from a web of interconnecting pairs—what academics on the left refer to intersectionality, though from the fascist point of view each dichotomy has one identity that is clearly good and one that is clearly bad: rich and poor, male and female, white and person of color, native citizen and immigrant, cisgendered and transgendered, heterosexual and homosexual, christian and non-christian, republican and democrat, the rulers and the ruled. And of course sitting at the top of the fascist social order is the bestest, most special boy in all the land, the president, who does not respect anyone whose will he can influence or control—which to his view is quite literally everyone—but who demands respect from each and every person under his vast carriage, however grossly undeserving of it he6 may be.
11. Fascism indulges in hero worship.
Beyond the grotesque spectacle that was the American right’s gleeful opportunism in using Charlie Kirk’s appalling murder as a catalyst for persecuting their political opponents was the way they turned that smarmy neo-confederate demagogue in a hero, an example to be followed even unto his end. Such was the nation-wide push to lionize him and punish his critics that even self-described liberals like Ezra Klein, who were well aware of his bad-faith “debates” and his long history of supporting christian nationalism, wrote after his death that “Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way.”
He was then described at his memorial service by several high-ranking government officials as a martyr—often literally. Trump himself said, “and so, on that terrible day, September 10th, 2025, our greatest evangelist for American liberty became immortal. He’s a martyr now for American freedom. I know I speak for everyone here today when I say that none of us will ever forget Charlie Kirk, and neither now will history.”
There is no greater reward offered by fascism than dying in its name.
12. Fascism is hyper-focused on the performance of traditional masculinity, and uses misogyny and homophobia as vehicles of this performance.
And transphobia. In modern-day America, especially transphobia.
13. Fascism is anti-democratic.
As Trump’s sense of extra-specialness was greatly magnified by surviving an attempted assassination, and by his triumph over the US constitution in the courts, his longtime use of the royal we absolutely exploded. Louis XIV is supposed to have said “L’État, c’est moi.”7 during an address before the French parliament. While haranguing the governor of Maine for refusing to comply with a discriminatory and illegal execute order, Trump told her “We are the federal law.”8 Fascists, like all authoritarians, view the leader as the only true voice of the the people—far and above either the individual or collective voices of any of the actual people they rule over.
Even among the working people in the republican base, democracy is simply not a value. They have their view of the way the world ought to be, and if democracy can get them there, that’s great—but if not, that’s fine too. Equal representation is fundamentally not important. The ends always justify the means, and it is frankly easier to institute your will when anyone who might oppose you is denied the opportunity to cast their vote against it.
But, ultimately, fascism robs all the people of their power, dismantling the institutions of the democratic state in their name. In the name of democracy, the far right has worked hard to gerrymander a Republican victory in 2026, knowing that the agenda they’ve been aggressively pursuing is widely unpopular enough to have ensured the loss of a free and fair election. They have been equally zealous in their demolition of the so-called administrative state, the means by which most Americans interact with the federal government—for not only must the government not represent the will of the people, but neither can it serve them. In the fascist hierarchy, the role of the public is to support the powerful, while they toil without aid, reward, safety, or comfort. No medicare or insurance subsidies; no safe food, medications, or water; no clean air to breathe; no free or cheap transportation; no food stamps; no public lands for public use. Desperate people have neither the time nor the mental space for political organization. Desperate people do not think clearly. Desperate people are easier to control.
14. Fascism reshapes language for its own political/propagandist purposes.
Eco focuses on fascism’s reliance on Newspeak9 as a means of keeping the populace stupid and compliant, and while he isn’t wrong about that, there is a bit more to it. Fascists always tell on themselves, attributing to their enemies their own attitudes and behaviors. “The Democrat Party [sic] is not a political party,” said famed bigot/glistening forehead/deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, speaking on Fox News as a member of the only major political party in the country whose mainstream has been taken over by its radical fringes, “It is a domestic extremist organization.” This from the man most directly responsible for turning ICE into America’s redneck, bumblefuck version the Gestapo. Fascists lie, and they lie aggressively—but, as the old cliché goes, whenever they point a finger in accusation toward their opponents, they point three back at themselves.
Deception isn’t even the goal. Most of the lies pushed by American fascists are too outlandish, ridiculous, or transparently fraudulent to be believed. Making others parrot your falsehoods is an exercise in raw power, a way separating the loyalists from potential troublemakers. This warping of reality is also a long-established way that modern autocracies undermine the public’s faith in the news—when nobody can trust anything they hear, when facts are pliable and truth has finally been memory-holed, then the state is free to create the world exactly as it wants to. America is under siege by Venezuela. Trans activists are violent extremists. The democrats are a threat to democracy. Trump won the 2020 election. Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
PART FOUR: THE MAN (REPRISE)
Lonnie’s generation failed to stop the Man.
So did mine.
It was a ludicrous assignment to begin with. It can’t be left up to any one generation to take on the established political order by themselves—let alone four or five sweaty and confused 20-somethings who can’t yet comprehend the scope of what it is they’re being asked to do. Even so, I can’t honestly say that we tried terribly hard. Some people have been trying, of course, working incredibly hard against impossible odds, and having to do so with the knowledge that they would likely not live to see the fruits of their efforts. “Freedom and liberation,” Eco writes at the close of his essay, “are an unending task.” All this time, people have been organizing, mobilizing, investigating, reporting, protesting, and working to better the lives of the downtrodden and despised.
But most of us have been content to eke out our own quiet living, putting our faith in our institutions to keep things from getting, at the very least, any worse. Life is hard, after all. Life is complex, and moves without a pause, and time and energy are rare and fleeting resources. But we built our house of cards on what we thought was a solid slab of granite, only to watch as as that foundation blew away like ashes when the wind picked up. The institutions we trusted to hold us up have fallen. They have been captured and corrupted, by actual, literal fascists, and we are too late to protect the imperfect, failing world that we knew. That world is gone forever, and if we ever actually had the chance to save it, we fucking biffed it.
We did not stop the fascists, the neo-confederates, the authoritarian fringes of the American far right from coming to power. So we have to stop them now. What other choice do we have? The guardrails are gone, we are in terrible, terrible trouble, and no one is coming to save us. I don’t know how. Twenty years after that dusty, bewildering conversation with Lonnie, I still don’t have an answer for him. I don’t know how to start a revolution, organize a resistance, change the world for the better. All I know is that we’ve got to fucking figure it out, just as every movement before us has had to. If we are clear-eyed and honest, we understand how bad things have gotten, how much worse they still could become. The autocratic breakthrough has come; the consolidation is well underway. The fascists have taken control of the country, and they will not willingly give up power. That leaves us each with one question. It’s a hard one—maybe impossible. It’s certainly one without any specific right answer—but it’s also the only question that matters, and every one of us is going to have to keep wrestling with it, from now on, every day, into the terrifying and uncertain future.
So.
Tell me.
What are you going to do about the Man?
Thanksgiving, 2025
See footnote10
NOTES
- The current owner of the bookstore since her father’s death in 2018, at the time she was rumored to be motivated in all her actions by a lifetime of resentment against books in general and the book trade in particular. Her father, it was said, had such an extensive personal library that his wife had forbidden him from bringing home any new books without returning a comparable number to the store. In contrast, those among the warehouse staff occasionally dispatched to her 5th Avenue apartment to do odd jobs, like rearranging the furniture, reported a complete and total absence of reading material of any kind in the vast living space of the New York literary establishment’s most prominent heiress. The resultant vibe of the place was typically described as “creepy.” ↩︎
- I’m Only One Man! Regis Philbin with Bill Zehme, 304 pages, published September 1995 by Hyperion ↩︎
- The one find I distinctly remember was a mint-condition, first American printing of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which was no doubt worth a fair bit on money, but which, upon realizing what I held in my hands, I dropped onto the grime-coated floor, kicked under the radiator, and left for someone else to deal with. This utter disdain for the products of Nazi ideology combined with an entitled apathy toward taking a more active role in their refutation feels depressingly irresponsible now, of course. Some people regret not investing early in Bitcoin, or never speaking to their secret crush or whatever; I wish I could go back and punch all the dipshit skinhead wannabes I knew in high school in the fucking nose. ↩︎
- When I’d read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and realized that I wasn’t nearly smart or disciplined enough to create something as intricate, beautiful, or powerful as that book was, and had given up whatever lingering ambitions I had as a writer. ↩︎
- Fuck around and find out, a well-known pop-cultural phrase Hegseth would actually say out loud if he wasn’t such a fucking pussy. ↩︎
- And rest assured, no matter who that person may be, their pronouns will always be he/him/his. ↩︎
- “I am the state.” ↩︎
- Trump is a fascist who longs to be a king with the sincere desperation of a little boy peeing onto a lit match who wishes he were a real-life fire fighter—though the only trait he shares with old-world autocrats like the Sun King is a gaudy and embarrassing fetish for gold decor. ↩︎
- New Speak, or Newspeak, is the official state language of Orwell’s 1984. It’s worth mentioning again that while not all authoritarian regimes are fascist, all fascist regimes are authoritarian, and so will still share much in common with nominally leftist dictatorships such as the English Socialism (or Ingsoc, in Newspeak) of 1984. ↩︎
- “Your Politics are Stupid,” written and recorded alone, late one night in the music room at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, during a single session of anger/despair in the midst of the 2016 presidential election, and never publicly released before now. From what I can decipher/remember, the lyrics are as follows:
Your politics are stupid
Your politics are ignorant
Your politics are stupid
Your politics are full of shit
Your politics are stupid
They’re empty and they’re meaningless
Your politics are stupid
[unintelligible]
Your politics are stupid
They’re petty and they’re cruel
Your politics are stupid
[unintelligible] devoid of thought
You think you’re doing right
You think you’re saying right
You think you’re thinking right
You think you’re doing right
But your politics are stupid
Your politics are ignorant
Your politics are stupid
Your politics are fucking shit ↩︎