Fascism’s Easy. But Democracy and Civilization? They’re Hard Work.

Why the Bad Guys Are Winning — And Why We Have to Do Better

Image Credit: Octavio Jones

How do we fight it? This tide of ugliness, stupidity, and hate sweeping our world, drowning our nations, ravaging our everyday lives? 

This is the question I get most often. I’m reluctant to answer it, because I think that people want easy answers to this question. I don’t blame them. It’d be nicer that way. But as with so many things which matter most in life, the answers might be simple — but rarely are they easy.

I’m talking about it all, of course. The bigotry. The prejudice. The fascism. The way the far right emerges to take away the rights of anyone and everyone it considers inhuman, subhuman, inferior, lesser — and for that, it’s rewarded with power, fame, and fortune. The cases are too numerous by now to really debate, from the creepy misogynist sex trafficker who became a global celebrity, to the gross dude who bought Twitter, to Fox News, to the way that media will by and large portray such figures as geniuses, revolutionaries, or both — not vulgar, ugly, regressive, hateful crackpots.

Where do we go from there? What do we do with that? With a world that seems to…embrace…fascism? To, more and more, at least large parts of it, adore not just its attitudes and values, but cherish its figures and potentates, as statesmen, intellectuals, great leaders, worthy of respect, not contempt? Where does that leave…the average sane person…like you and I?

In a tough spot. Go ahead and admit it. It’s infuriating to, I don’t know, open a newspaper, and see some crackpot who wants to take everyone’s rights away presented on the same level as all those who don’t want to take anyone’s rights away. To see lunatics who who want to set fire to basic freedoms — like during Brexit, or the ongoing transformation of American conservatism to fascism proper — painted as totally legitimate vis-a-vis people who want to expand freedom. It’s crazy-making. It feels as if power itself is playing a game with us.

Let me give you a simple example. There’s Ron DeSantis, banning books. Meanwhile, he just published one of his own. LOL. To the tune, probably of several million dollars. This is how badly our institutions don’t even not just check the abuse of power — but aid it, really. I mean…seriously…paying Ron DeSantis more than the average American will see in a lifetime…to publish a book…while he’s banning them? The mind boggles.

It feels crazy-making because it is. A game is being played with us. We’re pawns, puppets, numbers, commodities, nothing at all, less than that, to power at this level, and it shows us that over and over again. It doesn’t not just care about us — that’d be fine, at least, on one level of dysfunction — but this? This is different. It places the bad guys on a pedestal, and tells us all that we should respect and listen to them, that they’re legitimate and worthy, that their viewpoints are perfectly worth hearing and considering, when we know that…they’re not.

That’s not me saying anybody should be censored. But it is to point out the absurdity of a figure who bans books earning multiple millions for…LOL…publishing his own. It is to point out the BBC saying that its employees — this used to be the finest broadcaster in the world — have to be “impartial,” which means equivocating truths and Big Lies, and never talking about the difference.

What even is all that? Well, on one level, it’s hypocrisy. Pretty simple — hey, I get to earn millions by publishing a book while I’m banning your books. Ha-ha, suckers. On another level, the more crucial one, it is the legitimization and institutionalization of…everything bad and inimical to democracy that there is. Lies. Hate. Bigotry. Stupidity. And on a level even deeper than that, it’s the institutionalized denial of history, so that some people are above others. Let me explain that for a second: we know from history where this slippery slope leads. Why don’t we want to ban, books, take rights away, hate on people — all of us on the side of good and decency and reason? Because we know that what starts there doesn’t often end anywhere but ashes, violence, and ruin. So there’s nothing, but nothing, more dangerous than that — I mean, this was Orwell’s point, and it was Sartre’s and Brecht’s, too.

But what is a simpler word for that — “so that some people are above others”? Power. We are talking about power, in its raw, Stone Age form. What do the fascists, bigots, idiots, lunatics — all really want?

Power, in its rawest form. Now, there are different kinds of power, and what I want to teach you is that those of us on the side of good must seek another kind. But let’s talk about this one first. What is raw power? Well, it’s power over. It’s control, not liberation. It’s domination. It’s the production and reproduction of ignorance, by way of Big Lies — not truth, setting people free, from the follies and mistakes and ugliness of the past, doomed forever to repeat it.