There's an idea I'm trying to put into better words, something about how "fascism" isn't really an ideology exactly, but more like an attractor for ideologies, or maybe a pit that ideologies fall into. There's some overall basic principles, like the so-called "Führerprinzip" or "leadership principle", that you can plainly see at work. But part of the fascist game is pretending not to be fascist. Nobody's outright declaring the equivalent of "Napoleon is always right!" these days, even if everyone acts on that assumption. Now, instead of some formally stated ideological principle of leadership, there's a kind of agglomeration and self-assembly of other explicitly stated principles that, taken as a whole, add up to a "Führerprinzip".
As a concrete example, I'll appeal to American Christian extremism, which deftly avoids an outright endorsement of autocracy by appealing to abstractions such as obedience, the absolute authority of God, and the strictly defined hierarchy of the nuclear family. It's hammered home again and again that disobedience or flouting God's representatives is sin, and sin is construed as bondage. Meanwhile total obedience to God is construed as freedom, and your dad is like the God of the household, so...there you go! Do everything your dad tells you without question and hey presto, you're "free" now. Of course you're "free" to disobey, but... 😬 ...I guess after that, the paterfamilias would feel himself "free" to take reprisal(s).
It's grotesque, it seems practically wide open in its commitment to authoritarianism, and yet there's just enough wiggle room in that farrago of hardcore-Christian rationalizations that they can claim, with a straight face, that they're not demanding unconditional obedience, oh no! They're just pointing out how important and "freeing" it is to be unconditionally obedient, with doublethinkful emphasis on "free": in this system, "freedom" both means "doing whatever you want" and "doing only what God wants", as necessary. None of these Christian fanatics will ever admit openly that they regard their precious President Trump as a proxy for God, demanding total obedience, but they'll act that way...as long as he's perceived as a winner, that is.
Surely there must be some language out there for abstract discussion of these...I dunno what you'd call them. Anti-principles? "Unspoken rules" has some of the flavor anyway, because the most important thing about these anti-principles is that you're practically prevented from acknowledging their existence, if you hold onto one of them. The reactionary and the fascist have no actual word for what they believe; they reject all the words that actually match, and often they evade the question altogether, pretending to be "nonpartisan" or "apolitical". Or they're "politically homeless", or they're simply "normal".
~Chara of Pnictogen
