21st Century Fascism is Democratic

A deep dive into the evolution of fascism. And how understanding that evolution is the key to defeating it.

Note: This piece is long. About 9,000 words. (To my email readers, this will mean you’ll need to click the link at the end of the email to read the entire thing).

I wrote it this way because I don’t believe America (or the world) has fully grasped how fascism has evolved, or how we must fight it. This is a deep dive into both. I don’t think we can truly grapple with this moment without going this deep.

Yes, we must learn from the history of fascism. But just as crucial is understanding how the world itself has changed. How communication, power, and human connection have all been transformed. So while this piece is about fascism, it’s also about the world. About us. And about the future we want to build.

Thank you for reading.

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Fascism is here.

Not creeping. Not looming. It has arrived.

Donald Trump has reclaimed power, backed by a Republican Party in lockstep, a Congress bending the knee, and a Supreme Court that just granted him immunity to break the law at will. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned: he is now “a king above the law.”

How are we here? How is it possible?

We have heard the explanations again and again. Disinformation. Bigotry. Inequality. A weak Democratic Party. Propaganda. Echo chambers. Polarization. Tribalism. Lack of education.

They’re all true. But they are not the root cause. They are symptoms of a deeper and larger reality of 21st century fascism and of fascism itself.

Without understanding that reality, we can’t dismantle the new order, let alone create a new one.

This is not abstract for me. Ever since I left the Hasidic community, I have been fascinated by the question of authoritarianism and extremism. How does it happen? How did it originate in the first place? Why does it seem like no matter how much we have talked about cults and extremists groups in America and beyond they still proliferate?

What surprised me most, though, wasn’t only what I learned from that time. It was what I learned from my experience as a marketer.

That’s the missing link in our conversation.

But before we get there, we need to go back. To the beginning of power itself.

The Beginning of Civilization

Everything changed when we developed agriculture.

Up to that point, we largely lived in sync with nature. Simply because we had to in order to survive. Before the change happened, the worship of tribes varied, but tended to focus on the forces of nature they depended on. Animals, elements, fertility goddesses, celestial bodies, etc.

Hunter-gatherer societies mostly displayed a relative balance of roles, with men hunting and women gathering, though these roles varied across cultures. Not out of a high ideal but simply because it helped them survive.

Agriculture changed all that. For the first time in history, a species no longer adapted to nature: it controlled it.

It’s hard to overstate how massive that shift was. Everything changed.

Men didn’t need to hunt. Animals were no longer opponents to be overcome, but rather supplicants to be used. Tribes no longer moved from place to place; they stayed put, tied to the land that fed them. That land had to be protected. If they lost it, they starved.

And once land was no longer a temporary place to dwell, permanence began to matter. And thus began the concept of ownership.

Spirituality changed as well. Nature was no longer above us. It was beneath us. The gods were brought down to earth and conquered.

And since men no longer had jobs as hunters, they took over the labor required of agriculture. This meant that they were the ones who conquered and subjugated nature, and thus claimed ownership over it.

Because land was permanently held and resources were now static, food could be taken from others. Raids became a new way to gather food. And now since land was permanently held, it meant that areas with the best resources grew quickly in population, requiring even more resources. Territory would need to expand, leading directly to conflicts with other land owners.

This meant that men not only controlled the land, they had to defend that land (and/or attack the land of others). Thus they were transformed from hunters to warriors.

This transformation elevated men in status. They owned the land, the animals, and the food. They defended these resources, becoming both protectors and rulers. As populations grew, so too did the power of the men within the territories.

And so began hierarchy. And patriarchy.

Villages turned into towns, and towns into cities. With these larger, more complex societies came the need for centralized leadership to maintain order and manage resources. Power consolidated further, and eventually, only one man ruled at the top of the hierarchy.

To further consolidate their power, many of the men convinced their societies to worship them as gods.

Men had gone from hunters to warriors to rulers to kings to god-kings.

And so began authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism = Force

While we tend to think of authoritarianism from a modern vantage point, the historical approach matters because it is the only way to truly understand the unique nature of fascism.

This form of societal control—with a man at the top, other men below, women lower, and slaves at the bottom—became the societal structure for many civilizations after the rise of agriculture.

This form of control happened whether people liked it or not. Slaves, certainly, had no choice over their positions in life. Women as well. In truth, the only one with a true choice was the person in charge. All the rest lived on gradations of choice, but ultimately were stuck in their position within the caste system.

It was only when you got to the very top of the hierarchy that you could see struggles for power. Family and others close to the one in power struggling to get to that top of the hierarchy, but they started off close enough that it was realistic.

Authoritarianism, in other words, was built on force. To hold power was to compel compliance from those below and to suppress rebellion with violence when necessary.

This reliance on coercion was reinforced by a culture, spirituality, and language that revolved around hierarchy and control, embedding these values deeply into society. Over time, this system of authoritarian rule became entrenched, persisting in various forms across civilizations for millennia.

How Democracy Started

We think of democracy as a powerful example of the way common people took control of their destinies. Fascism is then described as a “reaction” to democracy by both leaders and the populace to this restructuring of power and identity.

That is all true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. In reality, neither could have happened without a more fundamental change in society that set the stage for their rise.

Authoritarianism has always thrived on disrupting the natural sociality of humans, something that existed naturally in tribes but was stolen during that cultural transition.

Slaves, serfs, and the rest were largely unable to coordinate due to the fact that they were individually oppressed. It was this separation and inability to socialize and connect that made people so easily governable.

But that was not unchangeable. Quite the opposite.

The printing press started the change.

(As you’ll see, many technological developments were not just steps into the future. They were also ways in which humans reclaimed abilities they had once lost.)

The printing press created an environment in which the lower classes of society were suddenly educated in politics and societal structure. It gave them access to discourse: through pamphlets, newspapers, and more. This ability to converse and coordinate had been the exclusive domain of the powerful. Now it belonged to the people.

In many ways, this was the beginning of democracy, even before democracy officially existed. The moment you put knowledge and communication in the hands of more people, you empower them to coordinate and work together. They can fight back, refuse to work, riot, and generally disrupt those in power. Over time, as people become more coordinated, they become less and less governable by force alone.

From the Protest Reformation to the French Revolution, humans began to challenge the centralization of power they had grown accustomed to for millennia. In so doing, they created societal power structures that reflected what was in many ways already becoming a reality: like the tribes of the past, societies could only act with their buy in. If the powerful wanted to stay in power, in other words, they needed the consent of the populace.

But this change was not in any sense absolute. Power dynamics still existed, the powerful still oppressed, hierarchies still maintained themselves.

Authoritarianism and democracy, then, can be better understood as a spectrum of autonomy. The more choice humans have in how they are governed, the more democratic their society.

Further Down the Spectrum: The Industrial Revolution

It is no coincidence that the Industrial Revolution coincided with the rise of democracy. Much like the printing press, this change not only pushed civilization forward; it also reconnected humans in ways they hadn’t experienced since the deep stages of authoritarianism.

It was the end of the age of agriculture as our primary form of economic organization. No longer were we working on large farms separated by others. No longer were we living in a world of pure physical labor, instead increasingly needing literacy to operate. No longer was travel a hard journey, pushing us even further away: trains, cars, and other forms of travel made the entire world much smaller.

The transformation away from agriculture, then, was just as massive as the change agriculture itself brought about.

While the Industrial Revolution created massive wealth for very few people (inequality that has persisted and worsened to this day) it also centralized workers in a way that had not occurred up to that point.

Urbanization brought working populations into close proximity, enabling them to communicate, collaborate, and organize in ways that were impossible when they were scattered across rural landscapes. This closeness forged new communities of shared struggle, where workers could collectively imagine and fight for a world in which those who created inequality did not hold unchecked power over them.

Despite growing inequality, the middle and working classes expanded, improving standards of living and fostering new expectations of freedom and rights. Workers, now concentrated in cities and factories, organized themselves, leading to unionization, labor movements, and demands for more representative governments.

In other words, societies increasingly required the consent of the governed. If workers and citizens were not represented, they could leverage their newfound communication networks and collective power to challenge authority through strikes, protests, and outright revolutions—reshaping political systems across the world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Industrial Revolution coincided with the rise of democracy. Because democracy as a form of government is simply an outgrowth of a democratization of society.

You can extrapolate what that means in today’s society. One with further centralization due to urbanization, literacy, and exponentially more communication between the masses.

So, why, then are we entering a Second Age of Fascism?

To understand that, we need once again to go back to the past.

Fascism

The democratization of society presented a new challenge for authoritarians: How do you control the masses when they can outmaneuver you?

It was becoming clear that the coordinated will of the people would always overpower the iron will of one man.

And so, a new form of authoritarianism was born: fascism.

While many leaders continued to take power through force, fascism represented a new form of taking and holding onto power.

No one better exemplifies this approach than Hitler. It is often forgotten that Hitler first attempted to take power through force. His failed insurrection, the Beer Hall Putsch, was a classic authoritarian approach to power: grabbing through force.

But it was in failing that he discovered a newly-minted approach to power.

He used his trial to grandstand and make himself appear to be a patriot and hero.

The new technology of the time, now far evolved from the printing press to the radio and newspaper, spread this message instantaneously throughout the country. This gave him more of a national stage and voice than he ever had.

In prison, he wrote Mein Kampf, a book that industrialization made easy to mass-produce and distribute. Through it, his ideas were broadcast not just widely, but emotionally: wrapped in grievance, pride, and belonging.

Of course, it wasn’t just mass media that fueled Hitler’s rise. Germany’s economic collapse, humiliation from World War I, antisemitism, and political instability created fertile ground for his message. But just as important was the backlash against democracy itself. The sudden shift from monarchy to democracy had disrupted traditional power structures, social identities, and community life.

Many Germans, particularly conservatives and the rural population, viewed democracy as unstable, weak, and alien, a system that had stripped them of their familiar world and failed to deliver security. All of this caused an almost primal desire to return to the “stability” of authoritarianism.

This was not unique to Germany. Many countries saw similar reactionary movements against democracy during this period.

Yet none of these motivators would have mattered without a crucial shift in how power functioned. The sheer scale of industrialized societies, combined with new media technologies, meant that leaders could no longer rely solely on brute force. They had to manufacture belief. Without it they would have been powerless, a complete reversal of the reality that existed only a century earlier and for thousands of years before that.

Hitler recognized this after the Beer Hall Putsch. His time in prison and on trial taught him that power in the new age did not come from simply taking control: it came from persuading people to surrender control to him. This realization shaped everything he did once he was in power. Nazi propaganda is infamous, but its real significance lies in this: it was not just about controlling what people thought, but making them emotionally invested in their own oppression.

The Cult of Fascism

Fascism, as much as it is defined by an authoritarian leader, is just as much defined by the deep oppression inflicted on the most vulnerable—particularly the scapegoats the fascist movement teaches its followers to blame.

And it may be hard to hear, but the German followers of the Nazis were oppressed as well.

It’s hard to imagine Germans as victims during the Holocaust, while Jews were being starved, deported, burned alive, and subjected to horrors beyond description. But understanding fascism means understanding how it devours everyone… including its own.

To make sense of this, I find it helpful to draw upon my time in a Hasidic cult. Cults and fascist movements share a psychological core: both require a voluntary surrender to authoritarianism.

Some examples:

1. Both often treat their leaders as infallible, messianic figures.

2. Both demand a belief in their “truth,” no matter how much evidence exists to the contrary.

3. Both work to insulate their followers from outside information in order to further ingrain the sense that they possess the only truth.

4. Both rely on black and white thinking, often framed as pure good and pure evil.

5. Both treat any form of dissent as betrayal, with punishment to match the sin.

6. Both see themselves as eternal victims of the outside world, heroically fighting for their tribe despite the efforts to destroy them.

7. Both depend on and define themselves based on their enemies in order to justify their actions.

8. Both use symbols, rituals, and narratives to create a sense of identity and cohesion.

In many ways, then, a fascist country and its true believers are simply cults using nationalism as their belief system instead of (or in addition to) spirituality.

All of these are tools that are, in essence, meant to hijack a person’s brain in order to convince them to give up their personal autonomy. This is the only way a fascist or cult leader can maintain power in a world where democratic systems still exist.

Yes, they also use fear and violence, but those only go so far. A voluntary loss of autonomy ensures cohesion.

Fascists, like cults, bleed their followers dry. The loss of autonomy is only the beginning.

Trump literally killed some of his most loyal followers during the early stages of the COVID pandemic. Not through direct violence, but through manipulation. He convinced them the vaccines were a deep state plot.People died on ventilators still believing they were victims of some grand conspiracy rather than of their leader’s negligence.

Yes, Hitler ultimately victimized Jews (and trans people and gay people and anyone who wasn’t Aryan) more than his own followers, but he also convinced those followers to go to war, to kill themselves for him. He also convinced people to act inhuman ways that turned them into monsters.

Any cult member will tell you that this, combined with the loss of autonomy, is its own form of hell. They either spend their time tortured by what they’ve done, or they delve further into this hell in order to convince themselves what they did was right. They may not even realize it, but their minds are imprisoned.

Ultimately, if I had to choose between being a Nazi or a Jew in 1930s and 1940s Germany, I would choose being a Jew without hesitation.

Because ultimately, fascism and cults are defined by self-oppression. Only one person benefits: the Leader.

We saw this in the first Trump presidency: his most loyal followers would be thrown to the wolves the moment they weren’t useful. As he takes true fascist power, that will become truer than it was at the time. His base will surrender more and more autonomy, forced to rationalize deeper and deeper horrors, while the billionaires he truly serves bleed them dry.

Just like any cult, fascism devours its followers. They are both its enforcers and its victims.

The Transformation of Communication. And Democracy.

Just as with democracy, fascism exists on a spectrum. Early fascism was not a one to one change from authoritarianism to democratization.

How much more so in the 1930s when the Nazis took power.

In the 1930s, and for much of the following decades, information and communication were close to monolithic, and even moreso once fascists took power.

Even as newspapers and radio expanded communication beyond physical force, all one had to do was gain control of those platforms to seize control of reality itself. Once fascists took power, so too did the entire flow of information. Radio, press, and public discourse were all tightly controlled, indoctrination was near-total, and narratives could be dictated without interruption.

That is no longer the case. The internet has taken those early steps towards democratization and transformed them. We live in an age of decentralization of communication, where a celebrity for one person is a complete unknown to another. Individual countries have gone from a few radio stations to 6 million podcasts, 114 million YouTube channels, 200 million active websites, and 5.2 billion social media users. Each one of these represents a form of communication, a new radio station in a sense.

Connections now defy borders: it is possible to control the flow, to an extent, but ultimately it is very hard to limit outside voices completely.

Just as importantly: the activity is not just one way. This is a participatory reality where people can comment, reply, mention, and generally interact with most of the content thrown their way.

A hundred years ago, a single voice—Hitler on a radio broadcast—could reach millions without challenge. Today, every person on the planet can reply, rebut, or challenge in real-time. The dictator’s voice is no longer singular. It is drowned in a sea of competing voices.

This is a level of change that is hard to truly grasp in its enormity. We have gone from agrarian societies that used physical control as the main form of power, to industrial societies where mass communication was the best form of gaining power, to information age nations that require participatory communication to gain and keep power.

In other words:

Agrarian Age Power: You control the land, you control the people.

Industrial Age Power: You control the newspapers, radio, and TV, you control the people.

Information Age Power: You no longer control the message. You must convince the people to control themselves.

More people than ever have a voice. It’s is easy to forget that today and to downplay in its significance. But the significance is massive: more people than ever need to be bought in for change to happen. And more significantly: more people than ever need to be part of the change for that to happen.

We are not just experiencing a new technological era. We are witnessing the single largest transformation of human communication since the invention of writing. The industrial age gave us mass literacy. The information age has given us mass authorship.

The Tribal Future

It’s tempting to see all this in a negative light: mass authorship has meant we no more share realities, for example. White nationalists were able to develop more of a voice than when we could shut them out of the mainstream: now they run our government. Conspiracy theories are everywhere.

Yes, this is all true, but it is because we are going through a transition caused by what is, once again, a return to a more tribal past.

Before authoritarianism, humans lived in small, decentralized communities. Communication was direct. Trust was local. Authority was earned, not assumed. We now live in a digital version of that world.

Yes, mass communication helped break us out of the unnatural authoritarian reality of enforced separation. But until now, participation remained limited. Mostly top-down, mostly controlled.

Without participation, that break from tribal reality was only partly broken down. Today, we exist once again in tribes, even if they are virtual. We are in group chats, we network around the influencers we follow, we have shared symbology and identity with those we are networked with. This has meant advantages for dangerous people in the short term, but in the big picture it really means a voice for us all.

The Democratic Future

If we’ve returned to tribes—fragmented, decentralized, and diverse—what kind of democracy can thrive here?

What does democracy look like when everyone has a voice and no one agrees on what’s true?

The return to tribalism and the leap into a globally networked world are hard to grasp but essential to understand. Because increased participation means more than just more agency.

We’re often told that fragmentation is a crisis: a collapse of shared truth, a breeding ground for extremism. But fragmentation is also freedom. It gives voice to the ignored, agency to the marginalized, and power to coalitions that never would have existed in the broadcast era.

Groups, large and small, have been given more of a voice. Yes, that is true for white nationalists, but it is also true for the disabled, women, Black people, etc. And within each of these exist many other micro-groups and communities that have more of a voice both in and outside of their groups.

Yes, cultural backlash is a big reason white nationalism has risen in concordance with Black Lives Matter, but it is also due to a simple result of fragmentation: all groups are given more of a voice. Whether we like them or not, whether they’re good or not.

In a sense, white nationalists were able to succeed because in the world of mass communication, white nationalism never left America. It was made more polite, quieted, and lost ground. But the internet forced us to face it and its most fanatical believers head on. That confrontation is painful, but it also creates the possibility of a deeper reckoning. One that wasn’t possible when hate could hide behind polite silence.

In order to spread your message to many people, a movement or leader must adapt and spread their message in ways that these other groups will be open to. That often means disinformation, but it just as often means changing and adapting to those groups’ needs to get them on board. Alliances, in other words.

Another way of describing that in the language we associate with progressivism: Diversity and solidarity.

It is easy to imagine this as specifically about various ethnic, religious, and racial groups working together to make bottom up change, but it is far more than that.

As much as tribalism has increased since the rise of the internet and the rise of democracy, it means that for groups to work together, the best way for them to create alliances is to align on shared values, as opposed to identity. It is far easier to communicate and coordinate between groups this way since it doesn’t require a change in identity, and instead focuses on what is shared outside of tribal markers.

Having shared values doesn’t mean you need to share all your values: just enough to achieve your goals. So unlike the Industrial Age, where the goal was to get everyone to be on the same page, and uniformity meant success due to the wide spread power of a single form of media, part of building successful coalitions means that disagreement is inherent to the process and does not need to be resolved. The shared values matter in creating alliances, but to maintain connection without constantly falling apart, groups must learn to accept that they will never get everyone to agree on everything.

Just as nations or tribes will create alliances even if they cannot agree on every detail, so too must we if we wish to create a truly democratic future.

This also means the groups within alliances must constantly adapt to changing conditions, new groups joining, and the way communication has so rapidly sped up. Rigid structures focused on top-down control depend on stability in order to maintain cohesion: in a democratic future, that is increasingly difficult to achieve.

Adaptability, alignment despite disagreement, diversity, solidarity, fragmentation all are impossible to maintain if we continue with the top-down construct of change of the Industrial Age. The only possible way to achieve all those is through empowering the various groups themselves to create change, even if it does not lead us to exactly the vision of the future we imagine.

What matters is that the process and mechanics of democracy are built by those who believe in them because that shared empowerment is the democratic world we’re trying to create.

All of this means that those who wish to gain power must at the very least communicate in the spaces where the people are. They cannot just beam a message into people’s brains, they must engage with them directly.

Change, in other words, will increasingly happen on the grassroots level.

21st Century Fascism

When the Arab Spring erupted, we saw the utopian vision of this new reality. The mechanisms of participatory communication—Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp—allowed citizens to organize mass demonstrations in ways never before possible. Regimes that had stood for decades collapsed in weeks. The decentralization of communication made it impossible to contain resistance.

America, for all its normal authoritarian leanings, elected its first Black president, a dramatic marker of change. The power of the internet helped make that happen.

Participation. Coordination. Communication. All hallmarks of democracy. The world seemed to be entering a new age.

We all know what has happened since.

But all too often, we talk about the fascism we are facing today in terms of its apparent goals: ultimate power, oppression of the weak, rigid hierarchy, etc. All the markers of cults as well.

But what we need to realize is that the same mechanisms that made the Arab Spring possible are what made fascism possible. And since those methods are inherently democratic, present day fascism gets its power from the same participation, coordination, and communication as the Arab Spring.

This isn’t new. In fact, it’s just the next stage of fascism that launched in the Industrial Age. Both are democratic in nature. The only difference is that 21st century fascism is more democratic.

That knowledge matters because if we ever want to escape fascism and build a true democracy, we’ll need to grapple with why the fascists are winning the fight for a democratic future. After all, even if it’s an adaptation to the present moment, one would think a democratic movement would inherently be more successful.

This is where we need to face the music: fascists are winning because they are operating more democratically than democratic movements. One only needs to see the way the elections were run to see this in action.

The Democratic Fascists

The right has not rejected democracy, they’ve weaponized it. In the age of participatory communication, they’ve learned to organize, diversify, and adapt better than those who claim to uphold democratic values.

It’s important to understand the origins of the current far right government. It didn’t start with Trump. It started online, initiated by far right extremists (grassroots). Trump is the symptom that has become its own disease, but his rise was only possible due to an aggressive and coordinated coalition of extremists who were able to slowly and steadily make their views more acceptable on the mainstream right.

Unlike liberals and the mainstream right, the far right was shut out of legacy news outlets. This forced them to adapt to the new reality of the internet much sooner than most of society. They started their own websites, publications, and even social media platforms (adaptive). Whenever a social media platform like Twitter or Reddit showed signs they wouldn’t be aggressive in moderation, they’d quickly infiltrate and use it to recruit and spread their messages.

They became effective at using code words and modifying their language to make it acceptable to people who wouldn’t be as used to their more extreme rhetoric. They would focus on one issue at a time in more mainstream settings, first talking about issues like immigration or crime that were entry points into their larger ideologies (shared values). And as the entry points were exploited and those numbers grew, they were able to build enough trust with their audiences that they could then bring them closer to their larger ideologies.

Their low numbers and fringe ideologies meant that numbers of believers and allies were the most important goals to achieve.

The thing to also understand here: the far right movement is actually many movements (diversity). Many of which you’ve now likely heard of. That was true even then. Neo-nazis, white nationalists, incels, “men’s rights” extremists, accelerationists, anti-government extremists, and others. Trump’s rise helped accelerate the growth many more, like QAnon, boogaloos, and others.

Individually, none of these groups could have gained traction. But they found solidarity in shared values (hatred, supremacy, grievance) and in their shared sense of exclusion from the mainstream.

This diversity has continued to today. Trump understood very well how much he needed to reach out to micro-movements instead of only to the legacy media. This is why he went on podcasts and other platforms: he and his team understood that diversity in channels of outreach would allow diversity of supporters. It was also why he reached out to Black men, Hispanic men, and young men.

Trump, and the far right, need diversity and solidarity to succeed. He adapted quickly to a new media landscape. He found overlapping values to achieve the diversity he needed. He created trust by repeatedly investing in these communities. And instead of trying to impose his views on his audiences, he understood that in order to win, he needed to make them all feel they were part of his mission (thus, for example, his outreach to the Muslim community due to Gaza).

All of these were essential strategies for success. They were also all inherently democratic.

The Authoritarian Democrats

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has clung to outdated, top-down strategies. They’ve rejected the messiness of real democratic participation in favor of control, message discipline, and hierarchy.

In terms of their campaigns, they have invested very little in their coalitions. Much of the energy was focused on winning over white moderate voters. And as those voters focused more on things like immigration and crime, issues that directly affect people in their coalition, Democrats took a right turn.

When it came to the war in Gaza, they purposefully ignored the cries of Muslims and Palestinians in places like Michigan.

Yes, they campaigned in those communities. But their method belonged to a past era: TV ads, broadcast messaging, celebrity endorsements. A top-down strategy that presumes people are passive recipients, not active participants. It’s true Republicans also spent big on ads. But Democrats outspent them by a billion dollars (and often more than double in key swing states) and still couldn’t win the narrative.

This approach was also reflected in the usual Democratic obsession with celebrities, people who once could help dominate the few airwaves available, but who now are just one of many popular voices, and ones that are not for the most part trusted in the same way an influencer who has built trust on the subject of elections.

Democrats still operate under the assumption that a few high-profile celebrity endorsements can shift an election. But the media landscape has changed: celebrities have mass appeal, but influencers have something far more valuable. Deep trust with niche communities.

Republicans figured this out years ago. That’s why they’ve invested millions into influencers on YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts. The very people who’ve built deep, ongoing trust with niche communities.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, avoids influencers. They don’t like that influencers have opinions. They don’t like that they can’t control the message. So instead of engaging, they pull away. And with every step back, they lose trust. And with that trust goes diversity.

In addition, the campaign’s message focusing most on fighting fascism in the final stretch, while important, also didn’t do much to provide a coherent vision of what it was for. General joy wasn’t enough either: it had to be about values.

If you are against fascism but you aren’t for anything besides “not fascism,” that means you will be seen as being inherently pro-status quo. A message that falls flat no matter what in an age where values are centered, but even moreso in a time when the status quo is the last thing most people want.

You may also note that while I introduced the previous section with the explanation of how the right’s movement brought about Republican success, I have largely only spoken about the Democratic Party itself.

That’s because Democrats are not part of any movement or affected much by people on the ground (with some exceptions like Alexandria Ocazio Cortez). They are far more beholden to donors than to any movement, while the right has been able to coalesce their donors, politicians, and grassroots into supporting the larger pro-fascist movement.

Republican donors don’t just fund influencers during elections but year round because they understand the power of democratic messaging: they are less controlling, largely aware that gaining power quickly matters more than agreement. Democratic donors and funders don’t invest at all.

Which means any true bottom-up movement is often in conflict with the Democratic establishment itself. That was survivable during the Industrial Age, when the grassroots had to fight for attention through mass protests. But today, when communication is constant, distributed, and participatory, the people in power at the top and people communicating from bottom are inseparable. The two are one.

In other words: the Democrats lost because they were less democratic than the fascists.

The Hope: The Unsustainability of 21st Century Fascism

It may be easy to feel downbeat about this all. It clarifies one very important thing that many people need to understand: more democratic participation does not necessarily mean a freer world. A cult can technically have the buy in and participation of its members, but ultimately they are simply participating in their own oppression. And, worse, they often are the agents of further oppression of their most vulnerable members, as well as those who dare question it.

21st century fascism is a grassroots movement. It is democratic in the sense that the people who most propel it forward are the people on the ground.

But that’s also where the hope lies. Because there is a difference between seizing power and holding it.

Fascism, as a form of authoritarianism, is ultimately about centralizing power. Yes, it seizes power through democratic means, but it is those very means that make centralizing power very difficult to maintain in the long term.

Since fascism depends on buy in and participation from many groups, it will require continued investment by almost all of those groups to maintain its power. As we can see in the United States, that was made possible by the slimmest of majorities in the election, and ultimately was more due to the weakness of the opposition than the strength of the fascist cult.

But fascism also is built on inherent premise of betraying its coalition. Its promises to the Black and Hispanic men, to white women, to the Orthodox Jewish community, to legal immigrants, and to many others all have an expiration date. At some point, the fascists will no longer even pretend to care for these groups and will instead outwardly victimize them.

As the betrayal of these groups spreads, so too is the very coalition necessary to keep the right in power.

There are many groups for whom the lies will be maintained, however. In particular, the white working class men, a group that is by far the most vulnerable to the fascist cult as the group that is the most racist, least educated, and least privileged relative to the other white groups. So too white women. Both groups are inherently oppressed and both are the ones for whom the lies must be made sustainable for fascists to stay in power.

This is where the fragmentation of media is so important. The very means that were used to bring more white people into the fold on the right are the same means the opposition can use.

There is no true seizure of mass media possible, as much as Trump and Musk would like to think (and would like you to think). Yes, Musk can buy Twitter. And yes, Trump can kick out the media he doesn’t like from White House press briefings. None of that means they have true control over the inherently participatory and fragmented reality of media in the 21st century.

Musk seizing Twitter allowed him, his cultish followers, and his coalition of neo-Nazis and others with aligned interests to spread disinformation and hate. It also allowed him to ban some of the key voices calling out the danger he represented. But the only way those in his coalition can have any impact is if they have people there who disagree with them to market their ideas to. And since social media derives all its power from participation, the targets of propaganda have a voice of their own as well.

When the environment gets bad enough, people have the option to leave the platform and join another. An option that has become more viable as entrepreneurs behind companies like Bluesky have ridden the wave of disaffection towards X and Meta.

Fascism may win power, but it cannot hold it easily. It is fragile in three ways: its coalitions are built on betrayal, its control of information is always incomplete, and its structure resists adaptability.

It is hard to overstate the power that we will have during the coming fascist age. A power that has been largely overlooked by people who have been fearing the age as harkening back to the 1930s. Yes, the ideology of 1930s fascism is alive and well, but the mechanism has changed. The difference between being able to seize media and transform the narrative quickly and requiring participatory platforms in order to maintain power is massive.

Facebook tried (to an extent) to stop disinformation on its platform at varying times and to varying degrees. None of that stopped disinformation from spreading. Part of that was due to the fact that it would hurt their profits to invest fully in stopping disinformation. The other part was that it is truly hard to stop any form of information and rhetoric to be spread online, correct or not.

And that’s significant for the coming age. Because it’s true whether liberals, conservatives, or fascists are in charge of the government and communications.

Just as it is harder to stop the spread of disinformation, it is also harder to stop the spread of truth.

And this goes even deeper: fascism depends on adaptability to rise, but demands rigidity to rule. That tension alone may be its undoing.

But now the question remains: if fascism is so unsustainable, why is it so popular? And where is the hope, really, if we can’t see it falling in the near-term?

The Revolution Will Be Democratic

It’s easy to believe fascism is winning because people are drawn to hate. That we are doomed to repeat history because something in us craves submission, violence, or tribal rage.

But the truth is simpler… and more hopeful. As in the 1930s, fascism only succeeds when democracy fails first.

In Weimar Germany, democracy collapsed not because the people loved fascism, but because elites refused to share power, institutions failed to protect the vulnerable, and the left was too afraid to offer bold alternatives. The center cut the very benefits people needed to survive, the right allied with Nazis, and the people were left with nothing but disillusionment.

Similarly, before Trump won, the establishment Republicans and Democrats insulated themselves from the economic devastation, acting slowly, failing to create a true alternative to the nationalist surge. And when 2020 and 2024 came around, the Democrats ultimately only united not to help the people but largely just to defeat Trumpism.

They were, in the end, institutionalists in a time when people had absolutely no trust in institutions. All this while Biden claimed success for a great economy, one that still largely benefited the rich. All of which helped make the case that immigrants were the real problem.

Just as in the 1930s, the people are disillusioned. Just as in the 1930s, minorities have been blamed for it.

But also, just as in the 1930s, there exists no true alternative.

Fascism takes root when people, especially those already prone to racism or disillusionment, feel abandoned by democracy and see no alternative. For the rest, the fight is hard to sustain when they only feel they are trying to stop the worst from happening instead of creating something better, a consequence as dire as support for fascism itself.

But this also offers us the exit ramp, one that is far easier to accomplish if people only open their eyes. We need to simply provide an alternative that is truly democratic both in ideology as well as in function.

Fascism is a broken ideology, one which cannot sustain itself. But if no alternative is provided, a new form of authoritarianism will take its place. Or, at best, a broken form of democracy, one that tries to resurrect the past instead of imagine the future. And that will fail as well.

Democrats, liberals, progressives, and the left don’t need to agree on everything, but they must agree on how democracy works and the shared values they want to bring into its next era.

Meaning, they have to agree that listening to the rich has destroyed democracy and to empower those who make up their movement. They have to agree that they cannot put their power in the few, but must instead invest in the many. They have to avoid purity politics, and instead focus on building the most diverse, actively engaged coalition possible. They must persuade rather than thinking they can ignore or silence those they disagree with.

All of these are functions of democracy, one that is both more likely to succeed as well as more likely to actually create a true democracy when that success comes.

But they alone will not be enough. They are the methods for building the movement itself, but they are not how the movement will succeed once it’s in motion.

For that, we need to revisit our journey from agriculture to today. From the power of force to the power of communication to the power of participation. From force to persuasion. To be more accurate: mass persuasion.

Otherwise known as marketing.

The Revolution Will Be Marketed

I haven’t used the word much until now, but the truth is: everything I’ve described, from worker pamphlets to Hitler’s trial to TikTok politics, is a form of marketing. Not in the corporate sense, but in its most essential form: the act of using communication to change minds and spark action.

Marketing is how movements win. It’s how fascists rose. And it’s how democracy will survive.

But knowing marketing is the battlefield isn’t the same as knowing how to fight on it.

Unfortunately, many movements still confuse popularity with impact. In the age of fragmentation, something can be quite popular but still only be seen by those who are more likely to agree with you or who are still not a big enough group to make a true impact. Either way, the goals in both cases assume that change happens monolithically and through big actions.

More to the point, the right owns their own media. Even when something is popular enough to penetrate their ecosystems, they can completely distort it in order to further fit their agenda.

So a protest can be turned into a riot, or even worse. Trans rights advocacy means grooming children. Vaccines are dictatorship or perhaps microchips to control the population. Student loan forgiveness is money to elites.

This is, of course, much of what the right has tried to do in the past, but as we know, they largely had to do it in environments where open discourse and debates occurred. Thanks to fragmentation, that is no longer the case.

We have been trying to solve this counter-productively, however. I, like many others in this field, have been working hard for a decade now to push social media companies to be tougher on their moderation. And while moderation matters, understanding these dynamics has helped me understand that our energies would have been better used focused on bottom up change instead of top-down through moderation.

And the way to do that is embrace fragmentation instead of fighting it. Because fragmentation is, in the end, just a tool for us to use in our fight for democracy.

Take a look at this chart, created by Media Matters only two weeks ago:

The red are right leaning, the blue are left leaning. In addition, almost every single right wing show is overtly fascist.

This is the core of our problem, but also the core of our solution. One of the biggest mistakes we have had since the election has been the idea that we need a Joe Rogan for the left. No. We need a Joe Rogan, a Russel Brand, a Charlie Kirk, a Tim Pool, etc etc. We also need very small shows that reach niche audiences.

Because it should be clear from this image: Joe Rogan’s podcast, the most popular podcast in America, is dwarfed by the cumulative audiences of smaller podcasts. And each one of those podcasts fulfills a different niche, a different part of the marketing goals for the right. This is what allows them to adapt.

This is what we need. Even more than mass protests. Mass protests are largely useless without a massive ecosystem of diverse media with various audiences and niches. In fact, until we have this ecosystem, it is likely that large protests will create the opposite effect we want to achieve and rather motivate people to turn even further to the right.

It is this that so confuses the commentators on the side of democracy, especially the moderates. They believe that the reason for concerns about immigration and trans identity are popular because of a problem in their message, and that all they need to do is adjust their message to attract moderates on the right.

Beyond the morality of the issue, they have the issue backwards: their problem is that they do not have a diverse ecosystem of people to amplify whatever their message is. They could have the best message on earth, one that may have motivated people in the age of mass media. It would still fail.

When trans people and immigrants are thrown under the bus, the issue is two-fold:

1. The message validates the fascist movement, by ceding ground to their message. And the more ground is ceded, the more they will take.

2. The very diversity and coalitions necessary to win the marketing battle are cut loose.

This matters in the age of fragmentation because ultimately, finding one mass audience is far less effective than many smaller, niche audiences.

Thus, instead of ceding ground, the pro-democracy movement could invest in these groups. Spread their podcasts. Uplift their messages. Let them disagree instead of cutting them out.

This issue of cutting people out is one of the core mistakes of the pro-democracy movement, and that applies just as much to the left as the Democratic Party. Those who refuse to work with or even reach out to centrists and the center-left are failing in their own marketing efforts.

Because ultimately, this is what it means to create change from the bottom up in today’s marketing atmosphere: there must be alliances between those who disagree specifically because it is not possible otherwise to achieve change. The idea that one can control a singular message is a relic of the past. An undemocratic, authoritarian one at that.

A great example of this issue was the treatment of popular Twitch influencer Hasan Piker. Piker boasts 2.7 million followers and is largely known for his progressive commentary. He is also, like basically all independent political influencers, his own person. He has created controversies, been temporarily banned from Twitch for using the word “cracker,” and has been outspoken in his opposition to the Gaza war and being anti-Zionist. His audience is also made of a niche that the right has largely overtaken: young men.

In a rare example of marketing prowess, the Harris campaign invited him to cover the Democratic National Convention. This despite internal pushback from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

But as the convention went on, he interviewed the Uncommitted delegates who called for a Palestinian speaker at the convention. He also spoke very angrily about the party cutting out Palestinians from the convention as a whole.

In short order, he was told to leave. He no longer had access.

The reason for this is understandable: it’s quite something to have an influencer you’ve invited criticize your party so harshly. But on the other hand, he was there and he was supporting the party and Harris ultimately. In other words, he was displaying the approach that was needed: an alliance despite deep disagreements. He did not cut out the party, even while others who shared his ideological alignment did. On the other hand, the Democrats did cut him out.

It is analogous, in many ways, to the way the far right’s various niches will work with the Republican Party despite their desire for it to be more racist or antisemitic or misogynist, etc. And the Republican Party has welcomed them in turn. It may feel disgusting to us, but it gained them power. We should be doing the same, but with those who believe in democracy instead of fascism.

The Democratic Party was operating in the model leaders of the 1930s to 2000s operated under: controlling the message, making it as unified as possible. So they kicked out Piker. In so doing, they actually turned off the very audience they needed to penetrate.

No, they were not older moderate Republicans or maybe even active voters, but they were one of many niche audiences that needed to be effectively targeted to win. The Trump campaign understood the power of niche audiences, and that was why they succeeded.

If we ever want to beat out the fascist movement and create a true democratic one, we will need to learn from these marketing mistakes because ultimately marketing is the main battlefield where the future will be decided.

If we fail to master marketing, we will lose. Not because we don’t have the truth but because we didn’t learn how to share it.

A Final Note

I understand that many might consider this piece naive. It may sound as if I am saying it is easy to accomplish this goal: all we need is to market! As if there is not a massive funding engine behind the far right. As if Trump will not use the full weight of his power to silence those of us who speak out. As if the fascist far right is not well ahead of us in this. As if there is not a massive ecosystem of lies we will have to penetrate.

I understand all this and I also think it is very important that we all absorb these dangers and difficulties. I do not mean to make it sound as if this will be easy. It will not. It will be hard, it will be dangerous, and it will likely lead to people being targeted or worse. All of these are the realities of fascism and authoritarianism, no matter whether it’s the agricultural, industrial, or modern age.

But this is precisely why I felt it was important for you to understand the evolution of democracy after humanity moved from hunting to villages. To understand: we live in a grand arc of history. And in that arc, authoritarianism is an unnatural aberration. It has existed for only 5% of our time as a species, at most.

Authoritarianism and fascism also aren’t human nature. We are animals shaped by millions of years of evolution to live, share, and decide together. To survive through cooperation. Democracy, then, is our human nature emerging when given the opportunity.

When we look at it this way, we can also see how blessed we are in comparison to others fighting for democracy in the past: we are living in a fascist age where we will have far more agency than the democracy believers in Nazi Germany had. Our voices may be targeted, but they cannot be snuffed out. There is no way to completely control us: we are all participants in a tapestry of revolutionaries fighting for a better world.

I want you to see that because there is often a fine line between hopelessness and bravery. Hopelessness sees the dangers, but feels there is no way to move forward. Bravery sees the dangers, but understands that change can happen, and is willing to pay the price.

Yes, we will need to pay a price. But far less than many of those in our past who had to sacrifice more than we can imagine.

But the price is worth the cost: we are buying freedom for ourselves and our children.