The real appeal of American fascism
Take a closer look at the vision below:
“We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth — a future with affordable health care, affordable child care, paid leave,” Harris told a crowd in Atlanta last week, when for the first time in her nascent campaign, she put out details around her economic platform. “All of this is to say: Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.”
She pledged on “Day 1” to take on “price gouging.”
What’s being offered above is an easier road to raising a family and the ability to distinguish yourself in society by building “intergenerational wealth”. If you follow that vision for America then eventually, after a few generations or so, the descendents of everyone hearing Harris’s speech are happy and wealthy. Except it’s not that simple:
By definition “everyone” cannot be wealthy any more than “everyone” can be above average. So this vision requires an ever growing population base.
An ever growing population base means that America must either buck the trend of more educated populations having fewer children or allow much more immigration.
Fascism is running on a much simpler (and evil) vision. Everyone hearing a fascist speech can, in his own lifetime, be distinguished in society by bullying people who are younger or have the wrong gender or skin color. In addition you can bully people who don’t have the right social connections regardless of their skills or intellect.
Much of this bullying will be available to fascists, “Day 1”, without the years of effort normally required to distinguish oneself. With racial nationalism you can “fulfill their duty to their Fatherland and the community of the people and are valued accordingly” as Hitler explains:
Every truly national idea is in the last resort social, i.e., he who is prepared so completely to adopt the cause of his people that he really knows no higher ideal than the prosperity of this — his own — people, he who has so taken to heart the meaning of our great song ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles,’ that nothing in this world stands for him higher than this Germany, people and land, land and people, he is a Socialist! And he who in this people sympathizes with the poorest of its citizens, who in this people sees in every individual a valuable member of the whole community, and who recognizes that this community can flourish only when it is formed not of rulers and oppressed but when all according to their capacities fulfill their duty to their Fatherland and the community of the people and are valued accordingly, he who seeks to preserve the native vigor, the strength, and the youthful energy of the millions of working men, and who above all is concerned that our precious possession, our youth, should not before its time be used up in unhealthy harmful work — he is not merely a Socialist, but he is also National in the highest sense of that word.
Why work hard building anything when you can be “valued accordingly” immediately after declaring fealty to your local strongman?
Of course such fealty will only lead to ruin but for those desperately needing to be valued by society, there isn’t a good way forward. In a world of 8.2 billion humans and growing, you won’t be valued for raising children unless those children are special — like “Aryan” or something.
You won’t be valued for your contributions to science unless your society values science and few do. You won’t be valued for making a lot of money because it's an achievement you would share with some of the worst people in the world. You won’t be valued for your piety as religion is on the decline.
In a rational world people aren’t “valued accordingly” and you just live with the fact that raising large groups above others isn’t reasonable. In a rational future you live a comfortable life “with affordable health care, affordable child care, paid leave” and other benefits but you aren’t recognized as special by your community.
When you combine lack of valued by society with rampant inequality, you suddenly have a truly toxic environment ripe for fascism. The comfortable life is unacceptable when others are being raised above you. Then to console yourself the only rational choice is to give up rationality.
Not that fascism’s support is coming solely by rabble rousing. Those already higher up in the social strata can also feel less valued than those above them and in general not very valued anyway. So why not blame women, Jews, immigrants, people with different skin color, or whomever?
Certainly building up the middle class will greatly help fight fascism but it’s not a cure-all. That’s because the available societal valuing of people is still declining. Social media is probably still increasing people’s desperation for recognition. It’s a perfect storm.
Even now with an election where American democracy hangs in the balance there is little recognition of this storm. “Affordable child care”?!? Even free child care might not be enough but let’s start there. “Paid leave”?!? Sure pay for leave but Japan is already offering a child rearing allowance — wake up and smell the coffee.