Fascism, American style, is based on the incoherence of empire. As the clock ticks out on late stage capitalism, aka neoliberalism, the problem of empire becomes more and more desperate. The only strategy left to prop up our enormous political and economic rot is to go full-on Orwellian. Good students of language and politics see this at once.
But many do not. In fact, most do not- even educated elites. American politics has been drifting to the right for decades. So much so, Democrats are now way to the right of Republicans, historically considered. There is no major- or even minor, party (except for the Green Party, which has never gotten more than 2.6% of the vote in a general election) which now represents the working class. There is no significant party which represents democracy or egalitarianism, let alone a party that can articulate the compelling argument for promoting peace and going green.
Both parties are fully in thrall to corporatism and militarism as the defining basis of both domestic and foreign policy. The malignant trillion dollar defense budget, most of which is outsourced to corporations, sets the agenda for political and domestic life. And the rhetoric of patriotism has doubled down on the need to return to a mythic America that has only existed in the fervid brains of jingoistic marketers.
There is the overarching lie of the free market, when there is no free market. The economy is totally rigged to benefit the rich and powerful, i.e. corporatists. There is the overarching lie of the need to protect “the American way of life”, a life based on “freedom” which is under perpetual attack, when the opposite is true: the US perpetually foments war to fill coffins and coffers by all means violent, overt and covert. Our elections are touted as democracy in action, when they are an extremely bad joke. We claim to be peaceful and law abiding but have the world’s largest gulag of prisons and have the highest per capita incarceration rate as the direct result of a racist criminal justice system.
We claim- that is the president and Congress, to champion human and civil rights, and to especially eschew and condemn anti-Semitism, when we support decades-long virulent and vicious apartheid in the case of Israel (remember, Arabs are Semites). We claim to champion freedom of speech and religion but endorse the world’s greatest Spy Machine and have supported raging Islamophobia as a foreign and domestic policy for decades.
In fact, America is run on Orwellian conspiracy theories which despite being fantastic, are acted upon with the greatest gravity and patriotic zeal. Liberals champion Russiagate as a narrative of choice as it absolves them from complicity in King Baby’s reign. Conservatives protest that government is useless, after kneecapping it. Big Media loves the bitter political polarization and perpetual crisis for the fantastic revenue it generates, like manna from heaven. But the net result is a weary and angry public which knows it is being relentlessly lied to, but can’t prove it. It doesn’t really want perpetual war and the surveillance state; it doesn’t really want an America armed to the teeth, engaged in massacres and suicide; it doesn’t really want an insufferably low minimum wage, employer based health care, oligarchy, the ravaging of environment, denial of global warming and looming global catastrophe.
But the incoherence of fascism, American style makes it so.
