American Democracy’s Under Authoritarian Assault — And It’s More Lethal Than Ever

umair haque · Jun 25 · Medium.com

Orwell would have been proud of Pennsylvania’s fanatical conservatives, for taking doublespeak to a whole new level.

On the face of it, Pennsylvania’s bill doesn’t look too bad. It makes it prohibited to “each, advocate or encourage the adoption of racist and sexist concepts” at schools and universities. It’s even forbidden for students to “adopt or express racist and sexist concepts.” Good news, right? Wrong. When you understand that this bill is drafted by American ultra-conservatives, you might get the suspicion something is very wrong here.

Their definition of “sexist and racist” concepts isn’t…anyone sane’s. They mean things that are “anti-white” and “anti-men.” For example, something like “America was a racist country during the Jim Crow era” Is now a “racist concept.” What the? Or something like: “America was the world’s largest apartheid state until 1971.” Or even: “American Blacks suffered history’s longest genocide, which is what slavery was.” Even saying “men unconsciously perpetuate patriarchy” is now considered a “sexist concept.” They’re literally trying to cleanse history of all its follies, sins, and errors — by flipping the meanings of everyday terms on their heads. By preventing schools from teaching it. How Orwellian is that?

Teaching American history is now “racist.” Teaching feminism is now “sexist.”

Pennsylvania is trying to memory-hole history. To whitewash it away. As if it never existed. Why?

But Pennsylvania is just one state where a fanatical frenzy by conservatives over “critical race theory” is going into overdrive. Serious legislative overdrive. In other States, the game is much, much more easier to see clearly. Missouri’s bill, for example, simply prohibits teaching “divisive” concepts. Like, presumably, evolution, science, reason, logic, not to mention equality and democracy.

What’s going on here?

Fascism is.

None of this, really, is about “critical race theory.” That’s totally uncontroversial, at least to any thinking person. All it says is a) race is a social construct, not a biological reality b) which gives rise to hierarchies of power and money and class. Easy enough to understand — and self-evidently true. Race didn’t exist in the Bible — it was invented during the Enlightenment, and like many theories invented then, like the sun spinning around the earth, it was dead wrong.

This is about something much bigger than a mere theory.

This is the second coming of American fascism. What’s really going on here is this. America’s conservatives are blossoming into a full-blown fascist movement. The Trump years proved they could attain authoritarian power, and reshape society in grotesque ways — along racial and ethnic lines of hatred and supremacy. But those years were also marred by incompetence, chaos, venality, and outright stupidity. This movement — in its second phase, its post-Trump phase — has grown more organised, sophisticated, tough, and smart.

You can think of it as the third coming of American fascism, if you like — if you begin with the Nazi sympathisers during the 30s, of which there were a lot. I mean second in the modern sense though — fascism after Trump.

What’s happening now is that America’s fascists understand that they can reshape society from the state level. Since they don’t have control at the national, federal level anymore, they’re attempting to grasp power at the state and regional level. So a huge wave of bills is washing on the shores of legislatures like poisonous hazardous waste from a doomed shipwreck.

These bills all share the same intention. What did Orwell really warn of, in 1984? Truth ceasing to matter. History disintegrating. Reality turning inside out. Control that, and you control everything. Because you can make people see and think whatever you want. That’s fascism’s most sophisticated way of seizing power — something far, far more dangerous than mere coups and putsches. You don’t need to fire a bullet if you can make people see a hateful reality — and cheer for it.

So legislatures across America are now facing a strategy from the hard right which is far more sophisticated, organized, and smart than Trump’s ham-fisted hammer blows. This strategy is about eviscerating basic freedoms — and even the things which underlie them, like the freedom to think, know, understand, care. The freedom to act like and be a decent human being. They’re doing that by sanitising history, and doing what fascism always does, which is to say that a) there are the pure blooded and true of faith among us b) they’re the chosen people, the Nietzschean ubermen c) they rightly deserve to be atop all others and d) they have never done anything wrong, because they are inherently perfect.

The only problem with that is there goes history, truth, and reality. A nation confronted by fascism’s ultra-nationalist lies is also one incapable of learning from its mistakes, seeing its errors, understanding its failures, because, of course, there aren’t any. It’s easily seduced by those lies, too, because, well, who doesn’t want to be one of the chosen people? Bang. That way lies social collapse, brutality, violence, and ruin.

So this second coming of fascism is much more sophisticated and more organized and smart in three ways. It attempts to control what people can think and how they can interact. It attempts to do that at a local level. And it often does an Orwellian inversion of reality — being “anti-white” is what’s really racist, not, say what minorities and Black people go through — to achieve its end. That end is what it always is: absolute power. Only now we’re not just talking political power, but something more potent still — mental power, psychological power, the power to shape history, truth, and reality.

The closest analog for what’s happening in the States as this second coming of American fascism accelerates is, ironically, what happened to the Muslim World. Americans don’t like to hear that, but it’s true. The Muslim World wasn’t always a place of Sharia law and repression. Tehran was the Paris of the East once, just as Lahore was the Paris of South Asia — literate, sophisticated, humane places of artistic expression, philosophy, thought. And then along came the fascists.

They didn’t just contest political power. They contested something deeper. We could call it “cultural power,” but that seems to understate the point. They contested norms, values, ideas. Right down to history, truth and reality. They made it seem to the average person like the intellectual and artists and anyone foreign or strange or different was the “real” threat, with careful propaganda campaigns of demonisation and hatred. Eventually, they were successful enough that these societies fell as ones even aspiring to democracy, mostly. The average person came to accept and even want institutions like Sharia Law, religious and sectarian hate, ethnic violence, teaching science, indiscriminate brutality, repression, the stifling of any dissent against it all.

The fanatics taught a desperate, impoverished people that modernity itself — openness, democracy, freedom, respect, dignity — was their real enemy, and that regressing to a bygone age was their best hope for the better life they’d been promised, but never had. The people — enough of them — broken mentally, emotionally, financially — believed them. Bang. A huge wave of social implosion happened, and the Muslim World regressed to a fictional, nostalgic, utopian reality of caliphates and empires, which in truth had never really existed at all.

Sound familiar? It should. That’s what American conservatives want to do to America. And are doing.

The second coming of American fascism’s going to be more dangerous than the first. There’s every chance that the GOP’s grass-roots attacks on democracy will succeed. And, like people around the globe, Americans find themselves living in an authoritarian fascist society faster than they think. Don’t get complacent. Recognise the danger. This isn’t a drill, and the fascists are still right there, striking hammer blows at the idea of a free society. The question is how far Americans will let them go — this time.

Umair
June 2021

WRITTEN BY

umair haque

vampire.

Eudaimonia and Co

Eudaimonia & Co