America is Already Fascist

It’s 4:30 AM here, America, and it’s your fault I had to wake up in the middle of the night to write this. And I don’t even fucking live there. And I have a seven-hour drive to get through today, so this will be quick and dirty. The reader is tasked with inferring a readable article out of this mess.

The US is already fascist. It’s a place in the world where a cop will shoot an unarmed black man that’s a healthcare worker, that has been lying on the ground for minutes. The black man will survive to ask the cop “why’d you shoot me?,” to which the white cop will reply, “I don’t know.”

The cop doesn’t know because he’s in a haze. He’s shooting people without knowing why. He’s operating by a cultural impulse to cleanse and to restore order that has always been there, but that a delicate balance was keeping “under control” or in low-intensity mode, that the media and the other designer distractions could hide. He’s brainwashed, operating from an unholy sense of unity, law and order.

America itself IS a kind of The Wave, and has always been.

“What if we could make Fascism work; what if we could design systems to hold its power in place without it self-destructing? What such a country would look like? It would look like a beautiful, perpetual machine of hierarchy, law, order and class; where the employees in the machinery have a multi-layered illusion of the possibility of power and cling to it, even when their epidemically depressed hearts scream that they are actually residing in an open-air hierarchical corporation that doesn’t belong to them. Where everything ‘just works,’ and where the streets are always sterilized, sparkly clean. It would be capable of such inner order that it would be able to take on the world with a formidable machine of war and propaganda.”

I was there. I saw it. I lived it, and my heart felt it. My words may suck, but my heart and my insight don’t lie. The concept was just lacking in me. But now it is clear as day. America is an empire run by inner propaganda, double-think and obscured language. It calls itself a “democracy,” but the carefully-constructed electoral system, full of opportunities for elite intervention, is there to allow an illusion of choice between two strands of low-intensity, controlled fascism, while having “third parties,” that are “un-electable” due to the FPTP voting system and the mortal fear and hatred the partisans of the two strands of fascism, Liberals and Conservatives, have been fed of each other. The third parties exist to ritualistically represent people’s ignoring of any political alternatives that lead the country away from fascism.

Perhaps America doesn’t fit the Mussolini archetype of “fascism.” And I know it doesn’t, because it is a vastly superior, evolved form. America is the flowering of fascism: it achieved a pure corporate-hierarchical society. A society that works like clockwork, like an hierarchical corporation. A place where you punch out of elite rule in the corporate-fascist, classist “workplace,” only to arrive at an outer social context that’s corporate-fascist exactly like it, but where at least the elite puts an enormous amount of effort in helping the citizens to get distracted from and numbed out of that reality.

You can probably write an argument now; that using the word “fascist” to describe the US is a basic mistake, or implies some sort of lack of analytical capacity in my brain, or of intellectual dishonesty, self- or otherwise. Whatever; I can write that argument myself. But words are secondary. What matters is the insight I had, and if you want to share of my insight, you’ll try to see what I’m talking about, instead of doing the easy critiquing of someone’s choice of words — when there are, in fact, no words readily available to describe what I see. Which is, surprise, one of the effects of being born and educated in a propagandized society.

If you can see what I see, then we can come up with a better term later. But if you’re going to “school” me in proper political analysis: fuck off.

Meanwhile, let’s have some fun and hammer Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism rounded peg into America’s alleged square hole.

Cult of tradition. “The founding fathers,” or people-heroes dead for hundreds of years, are brought up on television debates to win arguments.
Rejection of modernism; irrationalism. Everything about “Conservatives.” But also Liberals as well, who reject e.g. non-hierarchical workplaces, and political alternatives as “fantasies.”
Cult of action for action’s sake. Holy shit Batman. Do I have to say anything here really? Perhaps Americans can’t see it, but coming from elsewhere, I can. If there’s a place for a culture of compulsive “do first, think later,” that would be the US.
Disagreement is treason. Chelsea Manning, anyone? Publishing video evidence of your country’s own clear war crimes being an internal crime? The actual use of the term “Un-American” to describe people who disagree?
Fear of difference. The Conservative branch of culture is actively racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic and queerphobic, whereas the Liberal branch will settle for internalized racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and queerphobia. Also the ridicularization of any non-corporate political belief as immature or dangerous.
Runs on the frustration of a middle class. Here we have to improve Umberto’s definition. The stable version of fascism, the professional, corporate version, has the middle class alternating from comfort to peril, in decades-long cycles, so it is periodically disciplined to its function of obedient gatekeepers of the elite and of the social control structure the executive class wants to keep in place, while extending the longevity of the scheme as a whole. The cycle just has to adjust to the span of generations, so faulty memories will do their job. As a bonus, the generations of middle-class people themselves will comically name and blame each other.
Citizenship is Being Physically Born Here, and the ultimate source of pride. Obsession with a fuzzy, eternal plot from those Not Born Here to destroy Us. By God, even the name of the country is “US.” Us, vs “them.”
America’s enemies are at once ridiculous, weak, pathetic and primitive, and mighty, dangerous, powerful, very scary. Seriously, I have a lot of shit to do today. I believe you can fill in for this one. Regular corporations are also just like this: our competition is weak, we can overcome them, but at the same time dangerous and will destroy us.
There is no struggle for life; life is lived for the sake of struggle. Again, holy shit Batman. Americans never settle; their lives are the struggle itself. Being struggling with an unmanageable workload until you have a non-fatal stroke and afterwards get to write endlessly about it on the Internet is the American notion of being socially accepted.
Militaristic elitism and contempt for the weak.
Everybody is educated since childhood to become a hero. The entire culture for boys is about law-enforcing super-heroes running around with technological or God-given superpowers. As the cracks in the system started to show up on the Internet, the super-hero stories evolved to become “grittier,” and to make the heroes look more “human,” “flawed.” I’m not perfect, but I’m still the superhero. Let me do my job.
War and sexual repression. Sexism, homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia. Sexual fetishization of weaponry.
“Selective populism.” There is no “Democracy” in Capitalism, Umberto. You say, “the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view.” That is Capitalism itself, that’s what being an employee in a Dilbert society looks like. You don’t matter at all; you’re an obedient resource to be directed and exploited. “Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People.” In America, you have something very close to an illusion of the power of delegation. Since America is run by Capital, and people have almost none of it, people influence’s is close to zero percent.

Now very serious people who actually write about these economics and politics thingies for a living are saying: “Trump is the Rise of Fascism in America.” Meaning America is not Fascist right now, but it will be, quite literally, if Trump’s electoral rhetoric is to be taken literally.

I don’t see it that way. Not anymore. What America really is, is a system built in the same fashion that its hierarchical “workplace” corporations are built. An hierarchical corporate workplace is a cyclic entity that perpetuates itself by alternating between poles of crisis and prosperity. During prosperity, it starts to evolve, to question its own structure, and the shareholder elite class — who owns a stake on all the “competing” companies — has to create a crisis period which then resembles Fascist mobilization, and they do so by ordering the crisis down to the executive branches of the various “competing” corporations. The latent Fascism is brought back into the fore, to make employees hate each other and denounce each other, looking for “waste,” dissent, “slackers” all around; people who are not “toeing the line.” The society is then “downsized” of some made-up minority, and the climate of fear is internalized, and the images from the horror show will hopefully last for decades during the next “prosperity” period, so that a “crisis” will not be needed for some years. The message, gotten: this place has owners, and if you start to wake up and become a threat to the owner class, with ideas about workplace democracy and shit like that, the boogeyman of competition, of economic crisis, of terror will loom again in the horizon.

The Corporate structure is roughly split into three broad groups: the executive layer, the managerial layer, and the worker layer. The corporate, or hierarchical workplace, is an Ur-Fascist workplace, and is a classist structure. Corporate society reflects this organization with this upper (executive), middle (managerial) and lower (worker) classes. Everything is ultimately run, in a passive fashion, by and for majority shareholders or, socially, the “0,01%” or “0,001%.”

If Actual Mussolini Fascism was Step 1, and 20th century Corporatism was Step 2, the new “automated” utopias are to be Step 3. The design is being reworked as the “managerial” layer becomes obsolete. In the “work” world, the “manager” class and its primitive surveillance methods are already being replaced by employee surveillance AIs, while both remaining classes cheer on it as any semblance of human temperance and mediation in the surveillance apparatus of the executive class is removed. In the social sphere, the “middle class is imploding,” or so I’m told by people who understand about economics, and guess what, the other two classes are also cheering quite enthusiastically on it. After the middle buffer-layer all but disappears and is automated by 100% reliable surveillance machinery, it will be the time to mostly replace the lower layer as well with automated workers.

America is not alone in the evolutionary journey of Fascism. Quite the contrary.

In a sense, this evolution of fascism all stems from Statism. Other “States,” and their people, just envy America’s position. Its power, its riches. They resent their primitive Mussolini-level expressions, or even worse, medieval forms of direct, e.g. religious social control. States like Brazil resent being shitty Dilbert-level corporate societies, being shitty copycats of other successful, powerful corporations. The loser states resent just having lost the game and having become secondary or subordinate corporations. All executives and “their people” have the same masters, but not all are in the same level of favor.

Whatever. I’m not supposed to be thinking about this shit. I’m doing someone else’s job here.

Clicks “Publish,” literally goes back to sleep, and later on literally wakes up to go on and try to have some sort of life.