The Anti-Extremist Case for Revolution

How our culture itself is leading us directly to fascism and how our misunderstanding of extremism is contributing to that process. And why the only answer is a revolution.

“Escaping, evading, and avoiding are responses which lie at the base of much that is peculiarly American — the suburb, the automobile, the self-service store, and so on.”

- Philip E. Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point

America is on the brink of fascism. There is no denying this fact: Donald Trump himself has said this explicitly without using the word itself. But his plans make it clear. He plans to destroy independent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and replace the employees with loyalists. He plans to do the same with intelligence agencies, the State Department, the defense bureaucracies. Anything and anyone who isn’t disloyal will be transformed or destroyed. 

In the words of a Trump loyalist, “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

Of course, all of that is a precursor and enabler for the actual plans: to enact a sweeping effort to persecute Democrats and all who, in his mind and the minds of his followers, “wronged” him by daring to hold him accountable. To round up undocumented immigrants and keep them in massive concentration camps before possible deportation. To send the army into Democratic cities. To transform education in America to enforce “patriotic education.” To only recognize two genders and a broad crackdown on gender-affirming care. To require local governments to use stop and frisk policing policies if they want federal funding, in an attempt to crack down on Black communities. 

Now, if you are reading this article, it’s likely that you are aware of at least some of these potential policies. I’m sure you are also at least slightly concerned with the rise of fascism and end of democracy in America. I have no desire to convince people of this danger. We are beyond that.

In fact, it seems likely that while fascism is a looming threat, we have a far more insidious issue that is contributing as much to this threat as the fascists themselves.

Distracted

Note: From here on out, I am including myself in this analysis. My goal is not to describe individual failings but to explore cultural patterns, ones which affect all of us in varying ways.

How is it possible that after each plan proposed by Trump, our entire country (the part against fascism, at least) was up in arms? More specifically, how is it possible that these issues weren’t front page news, blaring, for weeks or months? It seems that the person who has a 50-50 shot of winning the presidency claiming he will be a dictator, even if only for a day (come on), is the kind of thing that would at the very least be the top news item, or even on the front page. Well, that’s not what happened.

The day after Trump declared his intent to be a dictator, it was nowhere to be found on the New York Times front page, for example. Instead, the top stories were Biden hoping to get funding for the Ukraine war, police training, and Jewish generational divides on Israel. The top Trump story was actually about Nikki Haley.

As I’m writing this, Trump has yet again repeated his intent to be a dictator “on day one” (of course, two seconds later claiming he won’t, the same exact strategy he employed in 2016 when describing the most extreme policies he would later try to enact). Although the story has been reported, it cannot be found on the front page of a single news source, be it The New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, NBC News, Reuters, the Associated Press, or anywhere else. In fact, the only mainstream places it was even reported was MSNBC and The Independent (a British news source). CNN briefly mentioned it but, incredibly, framed it as “moderating” his tone.

Of course, this is just one example, and as detailed above, just about every day since Trump announced his intent to run he has declared some intent to turn America into a dictatorship, along with the support of the entire party, the strategic minds behind the Heritage Foundation, and the massive support of billionaire oligarchs.

All of this means that Trump is far more likely to achieve his vision than he was in 2016.

And still. The media covers Trump’s race as a horse race with views on his potential dictatorship largely relegated to the opinion pages.

It’s not just the media. Our entire culture seems to be sleepwalking towards fascism. Watch a TV show or movie, read a book, go to work, attend a concert, and it’s as if it’s another day, not a historic moment that will decide all of our fates, the fate of the world itself, the fate of the climate, and on and on. 

I would even argue that for many, the focus on the Israel-Gaza war is its own example of American distraction. As vital as this activism is, the vast majority of Americans who participate in causes jump from cause to cause in the same way that social media has trained us to. We treat each cause, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to MeToo with an obsessive focus that disappears suddenly when the next one comes. 

( The exact opposite is the case for the activists and organizers who devote themselves to these essential causes. Sadly, they are often abandoned as soon as the viral sensation dies down, leaving them to wonder when the spotlight may return.)

For many Americans, the cause of the moment is, in fact, its own distraction. A way to feel like we are part of a cause without fully committing. Like cleaning our room when underneath we know we should be working on a work project.

In that sense, outside of the committed activists who commit themselves to the cause, the Israel-Gaza war is the latest viral sensation. 

So what is happening? Is it truly possible we are all obsessed with just about everything except for the most looming danger in America today?

Of course not.

Avoidance

To understand this particular moment as well as how to address it, it’s important to understand how America operates on a deeper level. This is larger than any one critique of behavior. It is a mass delusion and one we have an urgent responsibility to wake ourselves and others up from. Not just in our minds but in our actions. Time is ticking.

In the once-famous sociology published written in 1970 by Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness, this level of distraction we are seeing is described as a core American trait. Well before social media, phones, and viral causes, Slater noted that Americans actually use avoidance as their way of dealing with the world. And this avoidance applies to much more than the arrival of fascism. It has to do with just about every institution and way of operating.

“The institutions we provide for those who cannot care for themselves are human garbage heaps — they result from and reinforce our tendency to avoid confronting social and interpersonal problems. They make life ‘easier’ for the rest of society, just as does the automobile.”

He goes on:

“Our approach to social problems is to decrease their visibility: out of sight, out of mind. This is the real foundation of racial segregation, especially its most extreme case, the Indian ‘reservation.’ The result of our social efforts has been to remove the underlying problems of our society farther and farther from daily experience and daily consciousness, and hence to decrease, in the mass of the population, the knowledge, skill, resources, and motivation necessary to deal with them.”

Various activists and experts have pointed this out in a number of contexts. Our recent approaches to COVID have largely involved ignoring or segregating the people most vulnerable to it so the rest could go about their business. Houselesness is largely dealt with through keeping the people suffering it away from those who aren’t. And racial segregation has persisted through housing discrimination and policies and incarceration inequities.

In other words, our national, institutional, and cultural refusal to look at fascism directly and through active measures is not an accident. It is purposeful.

Avoidance is as American as apple pie. It is our national pastime, built into our national psyche as much as our belief in the value of independence. Most of us choose it in at least a few ways in our lives, and even if we don’t, it is so infused into the way our country operates that it is almost impossible to see unless you are one of the people who are ignored.

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