For a few months now, I have read articles and listened to interviews on the US slide into fascism under Trump’s second presidency, including the one above.
HOW IT’S FRAMED
One thing that stands out to me is that most of these frame it as a slide from democracy into authoritarianism and fascism.
That’s not wrong, of course, but what it leaves out is equally, if not more, important.
They don’t mention the threads of fascist-like dynamics throughout Western and US history, maybe because “others” (indigenous, minorities, foreigners, nature) have usually been at the receiving end.
They don’t mention that fascism is just one of many faces of Western domination culture, maybe because that would be an uncomfortable – and unpopular – topic.
DOMINATION CULTURE
What are some of the expressions of Western domination culture?
We have the familiar ones: Colonialism, genocide, slavery, bigotry, discrimination of minorities, extraction, and externalizing costs of all kind.
And they are rooted in something more basic, which is the idea of separation. Humans are separate from nature. Mind from body. The divine from nature and daily life. We are separate from them.
This typically comes with the idea that one end of the polarity is more desirable, valuable, or good than the other. Men are better than women. Humans are more valuable than nature. Westerners are more valuable than people from other places.
And this, in turn, allows for domination, extraction, externalizing cost, and so on.
WHO IS AT THE RECEIVING END?
When the painful consequences of domination culture are directed at minorities and the “other”, it’s typically seen as OK or a marginal issue, something to be concerned with for those especially interested.
Now that Trump is creating a regime that puts the rest of the population at the receiving end, it’s suddenly more of a mainstream topic of concern. For instance, now, white educated people are speaking out about it in videos from the New York Times.
Fascism is an extreme expression of the typical dynamics of Western domination culture, and directed at the population as a whole – rather than minorities, people in other places in the world, and the web of life we are all part of.
Of course, everyone in a domination culture are at the receiving end no matter what. Everyone pays some of the cost of living in, and internalizing, that kind of culture. It’s just that with fascism, the consequences are clearer to more people.
A TASTE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE
The US is now getting a taste of its own medicine.
What they have externalized – to people around the world, their own minorities, web of life, and their own quiet and often misunderstood distress – they are now doing to themselves.
It doesn’t make it any better. But it does mean that the culprit is not Trump, his voters, or the Republicans. It’s not even the Democrats who, in their embrace of neoliberalism, abandoned the working and middle class.
The culprit is the culture as a whole.
Fascism is not an anomaly. It’s a predictable, although extreme, occasional expression of a culture that embraces a domination orientation.
It can be seen as feedback on those aspects of the culture.
It’s a mirror.
A MIRROR
Fascism is a mirror for us collectively, in our culture
To be recognized as feedback and a mirror, it has to be seen in this bigger picture, and it often is not. Maybe because it would be uncomfortable. Maybe because it would ask us to create profound changes in our culture, even after fascism is gone.
Fascism is also a mirror for us individually, since we all have internalized aspects of our domination culture, filtered by our upbringing, subculture, personal experiences and inclinations, and so on.
Recognizing this requires one of two things. Either, to recognize domination culture and that we all have internalized it. Or, to recognize the world as a mirror in general.