American fascism is its very own brand. It is distinct from the European fascism of the 1930’s and ’40’s. The reluctance to call it for what it is lies in the reluctance to clearly understand American history and to account for what has happened, especially since the end of the last great war- and most especially in the last twenty plus years.
In classic fascism the jingoistic state, in the person of a charismatic demagogue, assumes control of the military and economy. The state through the agency of a talented demagogue corrupts the political process by enlisting the military, police, industry and church to resurrect past greatness.
The appeal in fascism lies in a demoralized populace due to economic despair; incompetent and ineffectual politics; the collapse of authentic religiosity; and exceptional collective tension and anxiety which contrives a scapegoat. Fascism draws upon the irrational.
The unusual thing about American fascism is that the corporate sector on the basis of lobbying has corrupted electoral politics and assumed control of government. This represents an inversion of European fascism. This is fascism by stealth. It did not require a demagogue to effect; it did not require, initially, a demoralized public to succeed and it did not require initially the explicit compliance of the church, police or military. This is the most important point to understand.
American fascism has been a long time in the making. All fascism requires nationalism, a call to patriotism in the service of some past ideal, and against some enemy of that ideal. This has always been in fact the American genius: to always have an enemy that opposes its expansion and success as a (thinly disguised) racist enterprise drawing upon exalted humanist democratic rhetoric as the basis for its existence.
America’s very founding depended on the calculated violence of settler colonialism. (Israel shares this distinction.) Genocide and slavery are at the very root of American culture. Jamestown, the first permanent British colony in the Americas, was in fact a corporation chartered to return a profit on the basis of exploitation; this requirement quickly adopted slavery as the most expedient way to provide the labor that the English were not themselves willing to provide. (The Native American proved comparatively useless in this regard. They had nothing but contempt for capitalism).
But history is always written by the victors, and the real history of genocide and slavery has been whitewashed to create the fantasy of an idealized past that serves as the basis, in our time, for the development of fascism. The American obligatory homage to its past as a humanist, democratic and egalitarian striving for political freedom is total bullshit but which Americans generally look back upon as the gospel truth. This is who we want to think we are.
Americans have accepted the legacy of Jamestown as an entirely appropriate guide to an exalted future of democratic capitalism: Wall Street is the apotheosis of Jamestown. The slavery of Blacks has been replaced by the slavery of the working class.
What this means is that the basic elements of European fascism have been so well socialized here in America that they are not commonly identified as such. The telltale qualities of fascism such as hyper-masculinity, the propensity for violence, the fervent belief in an exalted mythic past that that must be restored, the hatred of corrupting foreigners, an ardent espousal of martial virtue in both police and military, the cult of patriotism as the defining American virtue, and the enshrining of materialistic values as the sign of a beneficent God are permanently entrenched in the American psyche.
The end of the 2nd WW, the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 all served to confirm the most exalted and exceptional destiny of America to rule the world by projecting the myth of democracy and egalitarianism. The potent legacy of America’s racism and exploitation was unleashed upon the world with the rationalization that it is our destiny to ennoble man with a supreme militarized and implicitly religious (pure) corporate based nationalism.
Or, in other words, fascism, American style.
