How Fascism Made a Fool Out of You

Why You Believed It Couldn’t Happen Here — and Maybe Still Do

This is going to be a strange, difficult, and complicated essay to read. And yet, if I am successful, perhaps you will understand the world — and your part and place in it — a little better. But that is for you to judge. Let me begin here.

I used to say that the rise of fascism would be the defining event of our adult lifetimes. And I wouldn’t blame you if, when I said it five years ago, you laughed and thought I was a little strange, when I said it three years ago, you frowned and rolled your eyes, when I said two years ago, you bickered, and when I said it one year ago, still, you nitpicked.

Glimpse the world today. Is there still really any doubt, my friends, that a a planetary mega-tsunami of fascism is roaring across the globe — wrecking everything in its path? A proud fascist just won the election in Brazil. In America, political mass violence by paranoid delusional fantasists — whose masters pretend to have nothing to do with it— is now a grim reality. (Do you see yet how these two things are linked? Denial — and impotence? Where does complicity’s line lie, exactly? But my purpose isn’t to make you feel ashamed, or to pretend I am especially smart — I am not. It is just to go on thinking, asking questions, forming crude, incomplete answers to share with you.)

Let me do so by way of another observation. This juncture of history, right now, is the fascist moment, the moment when democracy shatters for a generation, when the world’s path to war and atrocity is sealed, when the future is written, the mouldering dead’s graves already dug by the hand of folly. And so perhaps it is time to begin asking another question: why were you made such a fool of? So much so that you assented to minimizing and pooh-poohing the rise of fascism away — “come on, don’t be hyperbolic! It can’t happen here!” — at the precise moment you needed to safeguard your society against it most?

Enough of us, many of us, perhaps most of us have — if we are brave enough to admit our own folly — badly underestimated the swiftness, severity, and intensity with which fascism grows. Snap! Two years — and mass murders, genocide, infant trials, and camps are realities in America. Unimaginable — or…