The Seeds of Fascism

“The Conditions leading to fascism do not exist in some ethereal space outside of history. Nor are they fixed in a static moment in the past.” –– Henry A. Giroux

Fascism has become synonymous with tyranny and authoritarianism, depleting democracy and threatening the free world. As history has shown, however, fascism is not a regime that springs out of nowhere. It takes years and even decades to foster an environment in which it thrives. It is an insidious virus seeded in othering, loneliness and fear, slowly spreading under the guise of democracy.  It is through the weakening of democracy that fascist figures gain ground in implementing authoritarian regimes. In the modern world, fascism starts with democracy. Since fascist leaders are voted into office, the population is led to believe democracy is at work, but elections are where the democratic process ends. It is through the exploitation of an ever-weakening democracy that fascism takes root. A fragile population characterized by anxiety and fear are the fertile grounds from which fascism grows and flourishes. The markers of fascism appear out of certain social constructs such as capitalism, terror, loneliness, erosion of civic responsibility, and the restriction of education and public intellectuals. These constructs are not independent factors but work in tandem to facilitate the foundation of neoliberal fascism.

Capitalism is a glaring component of the atomization of a society, which leads to fascist theocracy. The divisive nature of capitalism gives rise to a dog-eat-dog mentality among the population in which civic responsibility is eroded. The focus on the individual is central to producing isolation among people in society. The competition of every person for themselves and the centralization of family units instead of the community break down the social bonds that once strengthened society. The myth of meritocracy is another tool for the erosion of civic responsibility.  The sentiment that hard work is all it takes to ascend the ranks of capitalism is just a ruse to keep the poor, working class, and middle class on the hamster wheel to nowhere while the upper echelon cashes in on the work of the lower classes, widening the wealth gap. Like the rest of the world, the upper class believes that hard work puts them at the top, but most of the time, generational wealth, long-established connections, and privilege give them a leg up.

The myth of meritocracy does double-duty, informing and feeding racist ideologies that those on government welfare are lazy and would rather live off the government than work, perpetuating a positive feedback loop of idleness. Ronald Reagan made welfare reform a cornerstone of his campaign both for governor of California in the 1960s and for the presidency in the 1970s. Reagan told the invented story of what would be dubbed the “welfare queen” (Crafton 27). This was a racialized woman scamming the system by receiving thousands of dollars in assistance by using fictitious names and buying things like fur coats and colour TVs. The “welfare queen” encouraged white opposition to the welfare system; however, as Jason Stanley states in his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, “there is widespread ignorance of the fact that the majority of those who benefit from welfare programs are white” (159). Capitalism and the myth of meritocracy generate fear of civic responsibility, a step in the fascist direction. The fear that some people, specifically black women, were living off the system disproportionately was enough to convince people to take away crucial aid for individuals and families.   

The homeless epidemic is an example of a failure of civic responsibility in society. The blame for homelessness is placed on the individual for not having the work ethic to succeed. It is a direct link to the myth of meritocracy. In a press conference in September 2024, Premier Doug Ford told unhoused individuals living in encampments: “Get off your a-s-s and start working like everyone else.” The insensitive comment made by Ford is a direct reflection of the disregard fascist-leaning political leaders have for the citizens they were voted in to protect. The comment is completely devoid of any sympathy. Doug Ford has probably never had to apply for a job without a permanent address, unable to meet his most basic sanitary needs while trying to keep warm, wondering where his next meal would come from. The seeding of fascism is not just an American phenomenon but appears to be spreading its tendrils beyond the American border.

Like capitalism and the myth of meritocracy, racism is at the heart of fascist ideologies. Fascism thrives on the othering of immigrants, people with disabilities, members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and people of colour. White nationalism emboldened by neoliberal fascism creates an environment of xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and racism, forming and widening the schism of us and them. It is evident in the dehumanizing language used by Donald Trump to mobilize millions to support his unabashed white supremacy and notions of white grievance (Giroux 5). Humanizing language is imperative in the formation of ethical and moral outcomes. It builds civic responsibility and empathy for those underprivileged in society. Whether the disadvantage is permanent or temporary, physical or emotional, it is critical for a healthy, functional society to care for members of the community. The use of dehumanizing language is a tool of fascism meant to produce fear of an outsider or other. In an interview with Truthout called “The Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism,” Giroux says, “He [Trump] has called Latinos ‘animals,’ Mexicans ‘rapists,’ and ‘drug dealers,’ and a number of African nations ‘shithole countries,’ all which echoes the dangerous, racially charged rhetoric of Nazis in the 1930s” (Giroux 9). In the 2024 election, the racial rhetoric of fear was taken a step further when Trump’s campaign propagated the “misinformation” or “alternate facts” that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. The false claim detrimentally affected the lives of thousands of Haitian immigrants, some of whom feared for their lives after the assault on their character and the subsequent threats of violence. The dehumanization and othering of marginalized communities is exactly how the Nazi party was able to justify the atrocities of concentration camps during WWII.

Capitalism, the myth of meritocracy and othering are all obvious elements of neoliberal fascism, but there are nuanced tools used by political leaders to implement fascism. The exploitation of the epidemic of loneliness is an undercurrent of neoliberal fascism that works to pull under an already weakened society. Manipulating a population suffering from loneliness offers an answer to a problem that is predominantly set on the shoulders of the sufferer. It is touted as a mental health issue, which is an easy answer to a complex problem. Mental health is an obvious and severe issue, but who is responsible? Society tells us it is our job to take care of our mental health. Self-care is one suggestion; the feelings of anxiety, overstimulation, stress, and exhaustion can all be washed away with bath bombs and scented candles. This does nothing to address the mechanisms in society that cause the affliction. The self-care answer reeks of a capitalistic agenda, just another way to sell items no one really needs. The root of the problem needs to be addressed. As Chauncey DeVega notes, the elements plaguing society are: “extreme wealth and income inequality, economic precarity, loneliness, and social atomization, pathocracy and the culture of cruelty, and a form of predatory capitalism that has financialized all areas of life, fueling false needs, endless consumerism and feelings of spiritual and emotional emptiness which, by design, can never be fully satisfied” (1). Fixing these issues is complicated and will take the combined efforts of many, especially the efforts of the healthcare system, psychologists, academics, and public intellectuals. To suggest the struggle to overcome these obstacles is entirely on the individual and can be resolved by self-care is ludicrous.

The formation of these problems has led to extreme outcomes, namely suicide. Suicide is another problem plaguing society as a “mental health issue.” The easy answer to suicide is to place the onus on the victim, but what is society doing to prevent this epidemic from spreading? The implementation of suicide prevention lines, mental health resources in school, and therapy that health insurance providers may or may not cover is a start. These are all helpful resources, but they are salves for the symptoms, not a cure for the cause. Loneliness, both actual and subjective (the feeling of being alone), has been cited as a factor contributing to suicidal tendencies (Shoib S. 125). Humans would rather die than endure continuous loneliness. The epidemic of loneliness is fertile ground for authoritarian governments to step in and offer a place of belonging, a place in which racism, disregard for civic responsibility, fear and fascism thrive. 

In Stella Morabito’s 2022 book The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer, Morabito outlines the innate fear humans have of being alone and how that makes us vulnerable to tyrants. Morabito writes with regards to the many effects of loneliness, “it erodes our sense of agency, making us thoroughly vulnerable to the dictates of others. The hidden danger is that we are all subject to having this vulnerability exploited” (18). This brings to mind the feeling of not wanting to speak up in a group when your opinion may differ from those around you, or the fear of cancel culture. The fear of isolation is a powerful weapon that forces conformity on people no matter the cost. Humans would give up rights, ethics, and morals to remain part of the group and avoid social and literal isolation. Loneliness is weaponized in many contexts: it is done on school playgrounds by bullying tactics and by people who use gaslighting as a tactic to control their partner by separating them from their family and friends. On a larger scale, cult leaders do this by creating a family-like environment where recruits must adhere to every requirement of the leader to evade ostracization (Morabito 24). On the grandest of scales, this is done by tyrants and dictators to control the population with fear. One of the ways they do this is by making examples of people who do not conform, turning them into pariahs. Social atomization is the crux of totalitarianism, dictatorship and fascist theocracies.

Additionally, the erasure of social sites that once facilitated close community bonds have been replaced by digital spaces, another contributing factor of loneliness. People are now spending more time on their phones than in social spaces. Instead of going to the movies, people stay home and watch Netflix; instead of going out to eat, people order food from UberEATS; instead of playing ball or street hockey, kids now play Fortnite with their friends from the comfort of their bedrooms. Social activities and spaces have not completely disappeared, but it appears they are slowly creeping towards extinction. It is becoming less and less common for people to socialize in communal spaces. This was exacerbated during the pandemic. It seems society depends more on digital spaces for communication and social interactions, but there is no replacement for human contact and in-person interaction; just ask any university student who had to do classes over Zoom. There is something so stimulating about discussing topics in a classroom setting that cannot be replicated from a computer screen. In an essay called “How Economic Dislocation and the Plague of Social Isolation Ruptured Our Communities,” Chris Hedges recounts his experience of dislocation when Covid shut down his gym. He writes: “These ecosystems knit the social bonds that grounded our community. The economic dislocation of the past few decades, aggravated by the pandemic, have weakened or severed these bonds, leaving us disconnected, atomized, trapped in anomie that fosters rage, despair, loneliness and fuels the epidemic of substance abuse, depression and suicidal ideation” (4). The pandemic also fractured the bonds fostered in the workplace. During the pandemic, people came to the realization that it is more convenient to work from home than to commute to work every day. The workplace is yet another site of social interaction that has far-reaching implications beyond a mechanism for capitalistic growth.

Economic dislocation is a dominant component of loneliness. In a capitalistic society, much of a person’s inherent value is placed on their income. More and more non-college-educated men are leaving the workforce due to a shift in demand for their college-educated counterparts (DeVega 2). In a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Pinghui Wu writes of the period from 1980 to 2019: “During this period, non-educated men’s weekly earnings fell 17 percent, while college-educated men experienced a 20 percent earnings gain, increasing the weekly gap nearly 150 percent from $280 to $687” (7). A decrease in pay and job loss translates to a decrease in self-worth for men and can feel like an assault to their masculinity, as well as the loss of the social bonds that stem from workplace environments. This has hugely impacted the stability and mental health of many American men, making them easier targets for totalitarian rhetoric. How can we as a society start to mend these rifts in our social spaces? An easy step would be to nurture what DeVega calls the “public sphere,” the spaces that foster social interactions and recognize the social capital that they produce (4). A grander and much more intensive approach is to disentangle ourselves from capitalistic ideals that are no longer serving our personal and social good. We need to stop defining ourselves by the money we make, the car we drive, or the things we possess; it is atomizing us, making us lonelier and more fragile than ever before. Loneliness is not only killing us but also making us prey to a system that wants to take our rights, our ethics, our morals and our freedom.

Loneliness and fear work in conjunction in the slow march to fascism. Terror is a device that pushes society into conformity and to give up rights, especially those related to personal privacy. In the chapter titled “Atomization of Man” in Leo Lowenthal’s book False Prophets, Lowenthal writes, “Those who live with terror are under powerful compulsion not to speculate about it or to increase their knowledge of it” (175). On September 11, 2001, America was rocked by one of the most horrific events in its history; America went into a tailspin, not knowing what had happened to take down two of the most iconic buildings of the American economy, the World Trade Center. It did not take long for the news to spread that this was a terrorist attack. The fear that this could happen to any building in any city across America put the public into a state of immediate fear and anxiety. Americans were faced with a choice in the coming weeks, months, years, and even decades of how to respond to such an attack on American soil. Just as humanity is willing to conform to stave off loneliness, so are we willing to give up liberty in exchange for a sense of security.

It was assumed in the days after the attack that something had gone terribly wrong in the security apparatus of America, resulting in the success of the attack (Bethorn 17). The balance between liberty and security was under intense scrutiny after the attack on September 11^th.  The intense fear and anxiety Americans felt after the attacks made them vulnerable to choosing security over liberty. The September 11^th attacks are just the most recent incarnation of legislation revoking the rights of citizens in the name of security. There are several instances in American history where the government enacted laws to retract the rights of law-abiding citizens in the name of safety.

The first instance of the law tipping the balance between liberty and security goes back to the early days of America, only 20 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  The Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime to criticize the government. The target of this bill was members of the opposing political party to then-president John Adams; this was done under the guise of the mounting war between America and France. Less than 75 years later, The Habeas Corpus Act of 1863 suspended the constitutional writ of habeas corpus. The government led by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War no longer needed to prove the legality of the imprisonment of a person (Bethorn 19). This allowed for the detainment and trial of anyone who was perceived as a threat to the Union. The Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 gave the government the power to suppress and punish anyone who was disloyal or subversive. The act particularly affected written publications and persons who questioned the government. The Smith Act of 1940 made it a crime to advocate for or encourage the overthrow of any governmental institution. The Smith Act was the spark that sent nearly 110,000 people of Japanese descent, some of whom were American citizens, into internment camps (Bethorn 20).

COINTELPRO: 1956-1971 was another attempt to suppress dissent and restrict civil liberties, which was meant to expose communist sympathizers. In actuality, it targeted the civil rights movement, labor unions, environmental movements, the women’s liberation movement and anyone opposing the war in Vietnam (Bethorn 21-22). These were all precursors to the USA Patriot Act, which appears to be a case of history repeating.

A little over six weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, George W. Bush signed into legislation the USA Patriot Act. A little over a year after that, Bush signed the Homeland Security Act into legislation, tying up any loose ends left by the Patriot Act. The acts severely hampered many civil liberties and ushered in a new era of police and intelligence power directly into the hands of the executive branch of government, all in the name of thwarting terrorists, domestic and foreign. For all intents and purposes, it appeared to target terrorists, but the implications were far reaching. The crime of domestic terrorism gave the government the power to designate any person or political group as a threat to security. Like the Smith Act, it could target anyone the government did not want to challenge its authority. This included but was not limited to political and welfare activists and free-thinking academics. It effectually silenced anyone who would critically engage with the act, as the government considered this to be dissent. If an assault on critical thought sounds familiar in 2024, it should. This is strikingly similar to what we are seeing in anyone who questions the motives of the Israeli government in Gaza. To question the Israeli government is to be antisemitic and unsympathetic to the victims of the attack on October 6^th. Antisemitic and antipatriotic rhetoric are tools to mute any sort of thought about what the government is doing and why. This is why historians, university academics, public academics and activists are crucial at this moment before the next bill or act comes to suppress critical thought.

The rationale for the Patriot Act was that American intelligence agencies had failed to identify and prevent potential and real threats to American security. In 2013, Edward Snowden, an NSA analyst, came out and exposed the abuse of the act by intelligence agencies under what was referred to as “secret law” (Roberts 2). Up until this point, the Patriot Act had been in place for over ten years. On June 1^st, 2015, almost a decade and a half after 9/11, the USA Patriot Act expired and was not renewed by President Obama. This was due to the concerted efforts of critics of the bill, the revelation by Snowden, civic libertarians and a group of representatives led by Senator Rand Paul and Senator Ron Wyden. On June 2^nd, 2015, the USA Freedom Act was signed into law, replacing the USA Patriot Act, restricting the government’s ability to collect data. The United States has a long and sordid past of using fear as a weapon to strip the rights of citizens, especially academics, activists, or any group that would potentially critique the infringement of people’s civil liberties. It may seem that we are past this with the enactment of the Freedom Act, but how long will it be before terror strikes again and fear is once again weaponized? It may be closer than we think with the mounting tensions around the world and with the instability of the United States in the past eight years; the threat may come from within, and it already appears to be moving in that direction after the latest presidential election. Fear and loneliness have already wreaked havoc on the minds and emotions of Americans; we are at a pivotal moment. It is up to us to pull ourselves back from the brink and not allow the rhetoric of fear to tear the nation apart, as history has shown it cannot be left up to politicians.

The elements of fascism, capitalism, terror, loneliness, civic duty degradation, atomization, the restriction of education and a charismatic leader offering solutions in exchange for our liberty and unquestioning conformity are all there. The question is, will history repeat itself, or will democracy prevail? It is hard to say at this moment in time, as Trump is set to take office in January. Now is the time to take what we know from history and learn from it. If we do head down the path of fascism, history also shows us that it will not last forever. As long as there are critical minds willing to confront the conditions of fascism, democracy has a fighting chance.

Bibliography

Bethorn, Fred H. “Post 9-11 Terror Hysteria: Social Work Practices and The U.S. Patriot Act.”    Advances in Social Work 2008: 17-28.

Crafton, William. “The Incremental Revolution: Ronald Reagan and Welfare Reform in the 1970s.” Journal of Policy History (2014): 27-47.

DeVega, Chauncey. “America’s epidemic of loneliness: The raw material for fascism.” Salon 3 January 2023: 1-5.

Giroux, Henery A. The Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism Mark Karlin and TRUTHOUT. 10 June 2018.

Giroux, Henry A. “Introduction.” Insurrection: Education in an Age of Counter-Revolusionary Politics. London: Bloomsbury Collections, 2023. 3-8.

Hedges, Chis. “How Economic Dislocation and the plague of Isolation Ruptured Our Communities.” Alternet.org 23 January 2023: 1-4.

Lowenthal, Leo. “Atomization of Man.” False Prophets: Studies on Authoritarianism. New York: Transaction Books, 1987. 175-185.

Roberts, William. “Spying, Lying, and the End of the US Patriot Act.” TCA Regional News (2015).

Shoib S., Amanda T.W., Saeed F., Ransing, R., Bhandari S.S., Armya’u A.Y., Gürcan A., Chandradasa M. “Association Between Loneliness and Suicidal Behavior: A Scoping Review. .” Turk Psikiyatari Derg. 2023: 125-132.

Stanely, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House Trade Paperback, 2020.

Wu, Pinghui. “Wage Inequality and the Rise of Labor Force Exit: The Case of US Prime-Age men.” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Department Working Papers September 2022: 1-45.

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