You Know It When You See It

Truth is the enemy of anti-democratic movements of all types. Attacking truth is the way they consolidate their power.

Photo by Andy Chilton on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve noticed that some discussions of the present political moment get bogged down in definitional disputes. Should we call it “competitive authoritarianism” or “new authoritarianism” or “authoritarian populism” or “illiberal democracy”? Is it an incipient dictatorship? Are those really concentration camps? Much of the debate circles around the “f-word”: fascism. Inevitably, questions arise along the lines of: Does it count as fascism if they’re not wearing arm bands and brown shirts?

I’m not interested in wading into a classification dispute. The fascist governments of the early 20^th century certainly emerged from their own historical circumstances and differ in many ways from the most reactionary regimes around the world today. The important thing to understand is that old-school, jackboot fascism and modern-day “neo-fascism”—to use a crude, provisional label—are fruit of the same tree.

First, they are pathologies more than ideologies. Fascism and its modern variants are political dynamics that afflict political systems, not policy programs. They are something that happens to modern liberal democracies in the industrial world (among other places), not simply a catalogue of proposed political reforms. They’re more like a virus than a manifesto.

The second common factor is that they are fundamentally anti-democratic. This doesn’t mean that the rotating menu of policies these systems embrace are unpopular, or that all the laws and norms are suspended for all people. The point is that these systems derive their power and wealth at the expense of the large majority. They take your money and well-being and turn it over to the cronies and sidekicks that will keep them in power. They are therefore structurally opposed to democratic self-government—which will always make the attempt, at least, to hold its governing individuals and institutions accountable to the people.

Which brings us to the third and most important thing that today’s authoritarians have in common with yesterday’s fascists: no society can govern itself democratically in the absence of reasoned public discourse. Truth is the great enemy of anti-democratic movements of all types. The attack on truth is the way they consolidate their power.

Remember the pre-2016 American domestic political world, populated with what today look like micro-scandals, from Watergate to Hillary’s Clinton’s alleged profiteering in Whitewater of a few hundred thousand dollars? The mantra of the time—“it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up”—was an indirect way of saying that the truth still matters. It sounds quaint now. There are no cover-ups anymore. There are just crimes.

The state of play in America now is evident in the extraordinarily muted response to the sewer of corruption that now runs through the White House. There is no parallel in American history to the crypto-scams, meme coins, family business tie-ins, and countless other grifts that Trump and his family use to convert public office into billions of dollars in private riches. There is no parallel to the miracle of DOGE, where one of the government’s biggest contractors (along with his 19-year-old minions) is put in charge of all contractors across the government. JD Vance, as we are now learning, brought his investment portfolio with him into the White House, and companies in which he had a stake won millions in federal contracts. To compare all this with Watergate, or even Teapot Dome, is to say that serial killers are just fine because we’ve had some shoplifters at the corner store in the past. In a functioning democracy, this degree of corruption would be on the front pages every day and adjudicated in court.

It is not just the degree of corruption that matters but also its function. In a world where democracy is taken for granted, the unstated assumption is that corruption is mainly a matter of personal venality. In today’s America, it seems corruption is the form of government. One of the hoariest myths about fascism is that it makes the trains run on time. It doesn’t. It just makes the train operators fork over cash to cronies, who then use the money to gain still more power. (FEMA’s apparently shambolic response to the Texas flood that has taken over 120 lives, and Noem’s and Trump’s denials of incompetence, is a more representative example of fascism in action.)

There’s plenty more evidence on the state of democracy, and it is not good: depriving undocumented residents with no criminal record of due process rights, promising to extend that unconstitutional practice to citizens; defying the courts; converting the DOJ and FBI into agencies for attacking partisan enemies; usurping the legislative authority of Congress; using the power of the federal government to co-opt law firms, educational institutions, media, and other elements of civil society. This is how fascism always operates, whatever name you give it, and the assault relies on denial of truth.

How did we get here? A sector of the oligarchy invested its wealth in an apparatus of disinformation, and their most helpful allies in their struggle against democratic accountability have been the New Right and the Christian nationalist movement. I wrote a book about that, so I’ll skip the details here.

What is to be done? The first step is to reject the cynical efforts to deflate the threat. Some people say that politicians have always lied, that presidents have always tried to pull one over the other branches of government, that our system has always been for sale. This is a bit like saying that you’ve heard the neighbors shouting at their kids from time to time; so it’s no big deal if they start breaking their legs.

Another form of denial is to suppose that the rot will stop through some natural process of self-correction. The guardrails will hold, or maybe the regime will stop breaking things once they achieve their supposed policy aims. This is wishful thinking. Fascism isn’t a program, it’s a political dynamic. Today’s crimes pave the way for tomorrow’s crimes. Fascism thrives in a state of emergency, and it often succeeds through its own malfeasance and incompetence in bringing about precisely the emergency it needs.

Yet another form of denial is to blame the victim. In this case, that tends to mean blaming the Democratic Party. If only they had done this or that, if only they had “listened to me,” none of this would have happened, or so the comforting line of argument runs. There is one big mistake that the anti-MAGA world has made, and it is the same one that opponents of fascism in the early twentieth century made: They failed to unify. They failed to recognize that their genuine enemy was not the person immediately to the left or right of them but the person who was trying to tear down a democratic system and replace it with strongman politics.

If we are lucky enough or organized enough to overcome these denials, two things are critical: The first is to mobilize enough voters to shift course. Our electoral system is fragile, but enough of it remains in place that we can still hope to vote for a different future. This is what we have to do. The second is to prepare for the deep, structural reforms that will be necessary to revive democracy in the face of a threat that will undoubtedly outlive its present incarnation.