🔒 A Very American Fascism

A recurring thought that has occurred to me so many times over the past six months about events happening in the USA is just how incredibly American this fascism is.

 And you know it makes perfect sense that these guys aren’t wearing Hugo Boss. Back in February Ronke Babajide wrote the piece I’ve been too afraid to write for two years. It’s called Stop Calling MAGA Nazis and the reason I was afraid to write this is exactly the reason Ronke’s piece went viral—it really pisses people off. Everyone has this idea that every movement or ideology is ordered on a single scale from good to bad like integers on a number line and if you’re not calling something the worst possible thing you can think of then that is the same as endorsing it.

 This mentality dismisses the idea that two things can be bad while not being descriptively identical. Fascism is a fiercely nationalistic ideology—a cancer of nostalgia, a desperation to return to a romanticized and often mythological former incarnation of itself, the Platonic ideal of a country’s identity. That Nazi Germany and Mussolinist Italy were both imperial projects modeled on European Identity, and yet they never entertained the thought of merging into a single country, speaks to the fact that fascism isn’t just one indistinguishable pile of slop.

 Fascist movements are like viruses: There aren’t any good ones and they all operate through the same mechanism, so you can compare them and use some of the same strategies to fight them, but they’re also very unique in key ways and treating them like they’re identical is a bad idea in the same sense that taking the measles vaccine won’t do shit against covid.

 Mussolini wanted to bring back the Roman Empire. Hitler wanted to bring back the German Empire. Putin wants to bring back the Russian Empire. All three of them are not equally invested in bratwurst, fettuccine, and borscht.

 The fact that MAGA is a very specifically American fascism really drove itself home for me recently when I saw an ad for official “Alligator Alcatraz” merch.

 Alligator Alcatraz is the GOP nickname for a concentration camp that the Republican government is building in the Florida Everglades in preparation for the coming rounding-up and detention of Hispanics and Muslims promised by the Trump administration. They have already started abandoning the idea that they only intend to remove illegal immigrants. Not only are legal immigrants already being detained and deported, but they have now begun acclimatizing the public to the next stage, which is stripping American citizenship from people of the incorrect ethnicities.

 The sales pitch is that the detainees might get eaten by alligators. In some other country’s fascism the idea of a gulag where inmates get eaten by wildlife might be the kind of threat the government would let remain a rumor among its population. In America, it’s been made into a Mr Beast episode.

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