The Age of the Scapegoat (and the Fascist)

Why We’re Clutching at Straws For a Future — While the World Is Stuck Going Nowhere

Image Credit: BrainyQuote

So…what kind of a start is your 2023 off to? If you’re like a lot of people I know, it’s not terrible, it’s not great, it’s just…there. Kind of grinding away in the background. It’s like we’re all enduring a visit to the dentist that lasts forever these days. There’s the drill, whirring away, and we’ve done our best to numb our nerve endings to the pain, but really, we’re wondering: “when the hell is this going to be over?” This, of course, meaning this period in history. This weird, strange, and bad one.

If I had to put a word to it, I’d say: everything feels stuck. And there’s a good reason for that. It is. From the world, which is making little to no progress on its big challenges, to our civilization, which is making no progress at all, but regress, to your life and mine, because, well, we’re like swimmers trying to stay afloat in stormy seas. And hoping, maybe, that the rescue party’s on the way. But…is it?

So what is it? What’s making everything…stuck? I think an answer goes like this. This is the Age of the Scapegoat. Everywhere you look, people have become obsessed, ruinously, maniacally, with scapegoats — not you and me, but the kind of people who seem to have lost their minds, and plunged down a deep, dark rabbit hole of lunacy. In the middle of all that is left a void of chaos, because, of course, such people still wield very real political power in our societies…but when half of a society has gone off the deep end, as in literally fallen into a rabbit hole of lunacy, and the rest of us are hitched to them, what is there left to do but pull for dear life, and hope your muscles don’t give way? Maybe you see the point of my little metaphor a bit.

Let me put all that a little more formally. Inequality and downward mobility are causing a widespread loss of confidence, trust, and faith in institutions, as people who give up on them get radicalized by disinformation, misinformation, and Big Lies. And that, in turn, destabilizes democracy. At the center of this vicious cycle lies the figure of the…scapegoat.

And scapegoats, in this day and age, come so fast and furious that this week, you might have forgotten last week’s. Was it just a handful of days ago that the Creepy Billionaire Who Bought Twitter was scapegoating…Fauci? Nor are scapegoats just people, as that example itself illustrates: now, in a sinister turn, scapegoats are becoming institutions, systems, ideas, things-in-themselves. Vaccines. Being gay. Books. Classes, as in, the kind taught at school. Right down to words.

Scapegoats have always been symbolic, but this day and age is that of the scapegoat because they are crossing red lines, bright ones — going from “just” being people, which is bad enough, to being abstractions themselves, like, say, vaccines, or theories, and when that line is crossed, my friend, well, bad things, like Inquisitions, tend to happen. I’m not saying there’s about to be an Inquisition. Far from it. I’m saying that lunatics already sit on the…Homeland Security Committee. Or run entire states, like Florida. Or have driven entire societies out of their minds, like…

Let’s start with today’s most shocking story of a rich, developed nation that…threw it all away: Britain. If you needed a perfect example of this being the Age of the Scapegoat, you could do little better than Britain. Britain’s conservatives — fanatical ones, lunatics — have been in power for twelve years. How did they manage that? Through a kind of political sleight of hand: they managed to convince and persuade Brits that the biggest threat to their society was…immigrants. But not “immigrants,” really, in that sense of the word: “foreigners,” “aliens,” dirty uncouth things who were poisoning society, the economy, culture, all of it. The unwanted, the sinister, the dangerous. Immigrants? They weren’t doctors and lawyers and surgeons and nurses — they were human traffickers and job-stealers and benefits scroungers and so forth.