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

I don't actually have much to say, because I've refused to watch any of the 2024 clown show, so what little I know comes from headlines and chatter. Apparently it's a charm offensive and the whole thing seems so...scripted. "Assassination" (no I don't think it's legit) to get a boost of sympathy and a handy excuse for hustling Donald Trump further out of sight behind a wall of "security". A suddenly chastened mood, as if he were thankful to God for his deliverance! Meanwhile the sinister mercenary figure of J. D. Vance is ushered in. "Insurance," Elon Musk actually boasted, presumably clueless about the meaning of the word: Vance is like Spiro Agnew, so foul that he makes Trump look almost friendly in comparison. Superficially, though, Vance is a great American patriot and inspiring success story argle bargle. Who the fuck cares, right? I sort of want to see what Trump was like when he spoke but I'm afraid to find out that they'd somehow managed to get him to sound less garbled, for once, which means they score a win against the charge of senility.

Exactly one thing happened at the GOP Convention that actually got my special notice.

The more comfortable my older sibling Frisk and I feel with remembering childhood days of being political, eagerly following current events and investigative journalism, naïvely admiring the feats of Daniel Ellsberg and the Woodstein boys, the more estranged we feel from contemporary politics. We're still trying to get used to how different everything is today, even though I've been furiously trying to keep pace with it. When we were growing up, Watergate still felt somewhat novel, even though the 1980s papers were full of Reagan scandals. Frisk and I could read about Watergate, feel appalled by such a catastrophic breakdown of public trust, and try to make ourselves believe that such things were a rarity, a thankfully limited excursion from the routines of liberal democracy.

Then, uh, well, things happened, and now we're here in 2024, realizing that we were wrong to think of Watergate as a rarity. Now it's clearly a normality. U.S. politics and political media had hastily slammed the door shut on the Watergate scandal even though justice wasn't even nearly satisfied—Nixon went on to a lengthy post-Watergate period of propagandizing himself, and now he's practically a hero and model for others. Everyone decided that Watergate would never happen again, by which they meant they'd never let reporters threaten political stability again.

Once it was a massive scandal to report that a U.S. politician had a "slush fund", a secret war-chest to fund shady political activities. Now it's safe to assume that everyone has such a fund, and nobody calls it a "slush fund" any more but a "political action committee" or something else bland and corporate. It'll have a respectable brand name and liaisons with the press. Corruption is more fun than honest government, so long as there's a mutual agreement not to examine it closely; that way, journalism about corruption can stick to a lively and profitable and entertaining racket, a steady stream of political gossip that never adds up to anything actionable.

My sibling and I just aren't used to it yet. That sounds pathetic.

~Chara