2024 Anarchism, Fascism, and the Staus Quo

 

2024- anarchism, fascism and the status quo

Defining political terms is one of the hardest intellectual exercises around. Everyone has an opinion of what should or should not be. And that’s just under normal circumstances, not an election year, like we’re in right now, 2022, with perhaps the single most defining election in american history coming up in 2024.

Why is it so defining?  The election of Donald Trump took many so called liberal/left leaning/ and some real conservatives by surprise. The reason is simple. Trump represents a clear representation of a real rising american fascist party, that is still ill defined, unorganized (for elections), though with his election in 2016 it is apparent the manipulation of the media, the resounding acknowledgement of a middle class and working- class tipping toward a fascist ideal of tear it down first, then we’ll think about rebuilding, have made the usual foolishness of a fascist movement in america more possible than it’s ever been.

Five years after candidate Trump campaigned, then won the election, upheavals in the Departments of Justice, Legislative disengagement, and judicial tampering, six years later we still are unable to tell how big the problem is. With Trump, at this moment, being hounded by the Justice Department, NY tax investigations, and Jan 6^th panels, it appears that what once seemed like unswerving loyalty to him a year ago has transferred to the mini-Trumps running state houses and legislatures across the country. Certainly, food for thought as to what the future holds in American society.

America has seen many right and left radical movements in its relatively recent status as a world power. According to Paxton, America may have been the first nation state to experience the first, real fascist organization, in the KKK. However, despite the ideals of the KKK that continue to live on in most southern states and millions of white supremacist lexicons, most people have learned from their history books that fascism is a european thing, circa world war 2, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. All the other demagogues in the world before and since merely represent themselves as “dictatorships”, which by itself covers a lot of ground in trying to distinguish between types of nation states.

One real difference between the dictatorship and the democratically elected authoritarian state, like what we have in America, is that fascism doesn’t care about any of that. Fascism has one basic goal. Destroy whatever institutions the public puts its faith in and take power by deinstitutionalizing the society in whatever way the movement dictates.

With all this, the coming mid-term election of this year and general election campaign trail opening up in less than a year for 2024, the american public will once again be asked to choose between the lesser of an infinite number of evils with little good in sight.

It is with a certain amount of trepidation that we progressives for the lack of a better term begin to try and sort out how it will work. As journalists, artists, historians, intellectuals, writers we feel it is our obligation to attempt to discern the various motives, politics, and movements that will pass by in this parade of old, traditional, meandering political philosophies, and working-class ideals, including both the real and imagined ways government does not work for you.

We have to start at a point of definition. Trump and his ism is a fascist movement, fashioned from a Mussolini type of fascism that utilized all the socialist, individualist, power-based ideals and models defined by those who analyze political movements. It is personality (cult) based, it has no agenda other than the above mentioned ideal that the state should be destroyed by any means necessary, which can include using the very mechanism the state uses, such as voting, enforcement of the law, waiving of pre-determined rights already established by tradition etc, or by violence in the streets, creating chaos, doubt, and confusion of long-standing public truths.

We will examine these phenomenon as we progress through the electoral process, using the media, actual examples of the ways violence and the media work hand in hand in leading the public conscience on.

It is important to understand many of the media outlets, the general public at large, religious organizations, political groups, all use, unintentionally or not, resources designed to influence the one main entity, the public mind to vote, not from an actual engagement in the electoral process, but as a fearful, disengaged, uneducated, unthinking electorate.