letterhead

Zen-ish Thoughts About Fascism

There Is No Talking Them Down: Responding to Fascism in the Contemporary United States

I have an acquaintance I respect a lot, who is convinced that the proper response to the rise of fascist governance in the United States today is empathetic dialog. In so many other scenarios, I think this is the right approach, but not in this. I will briefly explain why we should consider that path worse than useless, and what we should do instead.

If we construe fascism as a disease, and attempt to treat it with something that doesn't work against it, we end up cooperating with fascism by giving it more time to become worse.

How can anyone, least of all an empathetic, compassionate person, take the position that respectful persuasion is an act of collaborating with rather than challenging fascism? Because, as we on the left are fond of saying, facts matter. There are pertinent psychological and historical facts about the conditions giving rise to fascism, the people who support it, what has ever been successful in ending fascism, and what happens in the aftermath. In taking a Zen-ish approach to any subject, any challenge, we do our best to being with understanding what is so.

Supporters of fascism exhibit a high need for certainty, order, and sameness over complexity or ambiguity (Kruglanski, 2004). They exhibit high scores on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, which measures submission to authority, conventional and conservative thinking, and aggression toward out groups (Altemeyer, 1981). These traits are not softened by dialogue. They are intensified by diversity, dissent, and social change. "The more threats people perceive – moral decay, immigration, globalization – the more they support authoritarian solutions." – Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005)

Contrary to what we would hope, supporters of fascism are not simply misinformed. Fascist movements draw their power from a distinct psychological profile – a deep preference for order, conformity, and submission to authority. Fascism is not an opinion. It's the way a lot of people's brains happen to work. It's a hunger for order, simplicity, and control that dominates all other concerns. Cruelty, facts, infliction of devastating harm on others and even against oneself are all just part of what is necessary to restore and preserve order, simplicity, and control. This is why they quite reliably vote against their own self-interests.

Supporters of fascism often believe they are being persecuted by elites, minorities, or liberal institutions, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This "paranoid style" is central to American right-wing politics (Hofstadter, 1964). They are both aggrieved and emboldened, seeing themselves as righteous defenders of a threatened nation. Trump's base consistently expresses a combination of cultural resentment and vengeful entitlement (Cramer, 2016; Hochschild, 2016).

Changing your mind in a fascist movement faces tremendous inertia. It means abandoning your tribe, identity, and cosmology, which few of us can do. Most of us have trouble admitting to an error even when none of those things are at stake. As such, to question one's group identity is an existential threat. Who am I if this is not true? Who am I if this is not true and I have done what I've done?

To be clear, group and personal identities are fused to varying degrees in all of us. Group identity tends to anchor, define, or at least deeply contextualize one's sense of self. In times of stress or threat the tribal (group) identity frequently overrides the personal. This is the mechanism by which, both for good and bad causes, people will give their lives for a cause, or a family member. This is why voting against one's own health, economic well-being, education, … anything is commonplace among the GOP base.

Tribal identity routinely trumps personal self-interest because both tribal and personal identity are the existential core of who I am, and the tribal edges out the personal most of the time. As the most socially inter-dependent species on the planet, this is simply how most of us are, and how all of our heroes must be. Heroes are defined by sacrificing for a principle, cause, or group greater than themselves, not because they lack a personal identity, but because their personal identity is deeply bound to that of the greater good or the group. Loyal members of evil groups typically have given too much of their personal identity over to the group.

As such, challenging facts and empathy don't bring enlightenment. They bring threats that give rise to fear and anger. As Arendt observed, the totalitarian personality prefers a consistent fiction to a confusing reality (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951).

If Talking Doesn't Work, What Does?

Historically, authoritarian movements end only through:

Note that even the defeat of fascism does not change the minds of its supporters. Instead, they employ defenses such as:

Or they join reactionary groups that continue the "cause".

The United States has already lived through the collapse of the authoritarian system of slavery, and we failed to properly reckon with it. After the Civil War, there was no truth and reconciliation, no cultural or psychological confrontation with the horror of slavery. Instead, the nation embraced a false narrative of reconciliation without justice, allowing former Confederates to reenter power, enacting Jim Crow apartheid, and sanitizing history through the Lost Cause / States' Rights myth. The result is a country where the ideology of racial hierarchy was never fully discredited, only rebranded.

As Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, notes: "Slavery didn't end in 1865, it just evolved." This failure offers a blueprint of what happens when we refuse accountability: the past festers, mutates, and returns. If we allow modern American fascism to collapse without truth, memory, and structural change, we will repeat that cycle again. This time with even greater technological and institutional force.

We also have an example of how to do it right. Germany's Vergangenheitsbewältigung – the painful confrontation with its Nazi past – remains the extraordinary exception to the usual failure to post-process fascism successfully (notwithstanding that Nazism has not been entirely vanquished there or in other countries).

If we cannot persuade them – and we can't – then we must contain, outmaneuver, and outlast them. Here are key steps we must take now, while we still can:

Fascism Cannot Be Debated – Only Defeated

Let go of the fantasy that we can change fascist minds. This is not about changing minds. It's about changing outcomes without changing minds. If hope remains, it lives not in persuasion, but in solidarity, memory, and unyielding courage. Begin now.

Citations

Adorno, T. et al. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Harper.

Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-Wing Authoritarianism. U. of Manitoba Press.

Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Cramer, K. (2016). The Politics of Resentment. U. of Chicago Press.

Greenberg, J. et al. (1997). Terror Management Theory.

Hochschild, A. (2016). Strangers in Their Own Land. The New Press.

Judt, T. (2005). Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

Kruglanski, A. (2004). The Psychology of Closed Mindedness.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die.

Stenner, K. (2005). The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge University Press.