American Fascism Is Becoming More Delusional — And More Dangerous
Banning Michelangelo? Creating SS-style forces? America’s Fanatics Are Learning How to Turn a Society Authoritarian From the Bottom-Up
by umair haque
By now, you can see it happening in plain sight. What do I mean? Maybe you heard about this…funny…absurd…story. A principal of a Florida school has been forced to resign after a parent complained that sixth-grade students were exposed to pornography. Terrible, right? In what form, you might ask? “The complaint arose from a Renaissance art lesson where students were shown Michelangelo’s statue of David.”
The principal of the school was then fired by the school board. Now, all this will probably make you chuckle on one level. Michelangelo’s David is, after all, one of the masterpieces of Western art. Banning it on the grounds of pornography is…fanatical, deluded, ignorant, backwards, all the cliches you can think of, and probably are right now. But this is where America’s at. Michelangelo’s a pornographer, and if you show kids a masterpiece — you’re fired.
And yet all this comes in a certain context. Ron DeSantis’s. His attacks, of course, on the education system. Can’t say gay. Can’t teach kids that different kinds of people exist. History? Can’t teach that, either, just his version of it. Teachers, criminalized — not to mention kids and parents, too. DeSantis is spearheading a classically authoritarian-fascist move: to pervert institutions. Now, Florida schools don’t really exist to teach kids so much as not to — at least when it comes to the basic values of democracy, like equality, freedom, justice, and truth, their history, resonance, their expression from art to coexistence itself.
The double irony here, of course, is that David’s a Biblical figure — so imagine how extreme those that banned him really are.
But this is hardly isolated. This is example of a larger strategy, approach, idea. Which one? To empower the lunatics from the bottom up. To give them, or at at least let them wrest, control of institutions. Which are then turned inside out. Perverted. Institutions don’t become servants and defenders and pillars of democracy — they’re used to shatter it.
Democratic institutions exist to enact certain values — and now they come to deny those, and enact their precise opposites. Let’s take the example of schools. What values do they enact? Truth and equality, at a bare minimum — and no, I’m not saying that school’s fun or easy or some kind of utopia. But now? In Florida? It’s hardly enacting truth and equality when students aren’t taught history, and gay people aren’t allowed to openly exist, and teachers who might hint at all the above are “groomers” who are punished by the state. Under DeSantis, the point of Florida’s schools is to socialize kids into old, tedious, ignorant lies — bigotry, prejudice, discrimination, a sanitized version of history. Do you see the point I’m trying to make a little?
America’s fascists have learned to empower the lunatics — and tear at democracy from the ground up. This, too, comes in a context. Think of recent events. What happened on Jan 6th? It was the culmination of a series of coup attempts. First came the legislative ones, then the procedural ones, and finally, a brutal assault. Open violence happened when textbook “soft coup” approaches had failed. That’s a classic pattern — when soft coups fail, fanatics don’t give up — they try hard ones instead.
But there’s another classic pattern of social destabilization, too. When top-down approaches don’t work — bottom-up ones are tried. So think about what happened in America. Trump and his ilk pulled out all the stops — all of them — trying to overthrow democracy from the top down. Right down to the peaceful transfer of power itself. It didn’t work. Biden was elected, despite the Big Lie that “the election was stolen.” And those attempting the coup, at least some of them, found themselves in hot water — even if Trump, so far, has skated away, on thin ice, scot-free.
And so now this force in America, this movement, appears to have refocused. Not just on top-down approaches, but on bottom-up ones, too, working hand in hand. Take DeSantis, for example. His approach is to encourage fanatics to empower school boards — for which he then rewrites the rules. The school boards are given leeway and latitude to decide what’s against the rules and what’s not. This is classic example of bottom-up authoritarianism brewing. Now, fanatics who’ve packed said boards can go out and do things that make the world gawp in astonishment, like firing school principals for teaching kids about…artistic masterpieces. Because of course now that DeSantis, the Governor, has said that “groomers” are at work, and schools must be cleansed of any “wokeness” and so forth, well, that’s not a statue of David by Michelangelo, that’s a groomer. LOL.
See the point though, because this is the strategy America’s fanatics are using now. Let me give you another example, that’s even more chilling.
So Texas is creating a force of specially selected vigilantes, under the direction of a “chief” selected by the governor. The members of that “force,” which appears to have no checks or balances on it, will be able to use force in whatever way they like, against whomever they like — but also have immunity from its consequences. Think about how dire that really is for a second.
You know what happens with “forces” like this, or at least you should. They become fanatical paramilitaries. All those lunatics, toting guns, shouting bigotry, screaming openly that they want to do violence? They’ll be the first to sign up. The true believers in the cause of annihilation. The ones who enjoy and delight in violence and brutality. Given a badge and an official looking uniform — not to mention weapons and immunity — they will go out there and do their absolute worst. More likely than not, a vigilante force of self-selected fanatics will brutalize and terrorize innocent people, because. If you think I exaggerate, let me put in perspective how genuinely bad this is.
This is exactly how the SS was created.