Why The Real Test of American Exceptionalism is Now

America Was a Perfect Petri Dish for Fascism. Can it Be Uniquely Swift, Strong, and Smart Enough to Beat It, Anyways?

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These strange, unmoored days, the economist in me says something that the human in me — laughing at him like he’s a simpleton — challenges. I’ve come to call it the test of American exceptionalism. It’s a little hypothesis, if you like, or just a series of thoughts, which goes like this.

If you were to imagine a society which was the ideal, the perfect breeding ground — something like a Petri dish, packed with tasty nutrients — for fascism and authoritarianism, then that society, sadly, ironically, would be America. Why? The two things that we should expect to predict fascism and authoritarianism most are: a) prolonged, severe economic stagnation for the average person, and b) a long history of institutionalized supremacy.

Let’s take those one by one.

Stagnation predicts fascism for a reason so simple it often hides in plain sight. As their incomes, savings, and assets flatline, and then dwindle — because a stagnant economy means that prices rise, but earnings don’t, so inequality spikes, and the middle collapses back into poverty, things coming undone — people come to live in a world which they feel is unsafe, hostile, and threatening. Just keeping that job, feeing and educating your kids, paying off that mortgage, going to the doctor — all the basics — become exercises fraught with dread, anxiety, and fear. The result? People lose faith in their systems and institutions and norms and values. Such societies are easy meat for demagogues — who promise desperate, broke, and frustrated people what they are seeking most again: a sense of safety, security, belonging, mattering, counting.

Now, all of that is precisely where America is — or, better said, the point that America’s fatally mismanaged has been allowed to reach, by a class of staggeringly incompetent elites. 80% of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck. 70% can’t raise $1000 in emergency savings. A full third struggle to afford food, shelter, and medicine. These are shocking statistics — but they barely begin to tell the story. The old don’t retire, and the young don’t move out of their parents’ homes, the ill crowdfund insulin, kids wear bulletproof backpacks, and so on — what the statistics don’t tell us is more frightening still. Life became just the kind of exercise in fear and anxiety which predicted that people will flee to safety in strongmens’ arms. Hence, trust in every single kind of institution except violence fell catastrophically — and on the flipside, as a natural consequence, people don’t expect life to get better anytime soon, or maybe ever again. That vacuum of power, optimism, and cohesion is the dark seed of authoritarianism and fascism. Do you see how these things are related?

But you are correct to think, “well, that only takes us so far. I can understand why people would be frustrated, even angry — and why they’d turn to demagogues and strongmen. But I don’t understand why they’d go full on fascist.”

That brings me to the second element in my little mental model — a history of institutionalized supremacy. When a society has a long history of racial strife — not just “tension,” as we often say, but real exclusion, like slavery and segregation — that also means it will have been unable to build true public goods. Working systems of healthcare, education, transport, media, finance, and so on. Those are the hidden price of bigotry, which bigots don’t often see — because these things must belong to everyone or no one, constitutionally, legally, formally, and so on. A society predicated on exclusion thus cannot ever really develop them.