The rise of end times fascism
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
The two authors have gone to the trouble of delineating the unifying philosophy of the far right elite. It's fundamental properties are a fear of regulation that puts limits on massive wealth acquisition, and the construction of refuges from the apocalyptic future which they are responsible for facilitating.
Michael Tomasky in The New Republic asks:
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?
He goes on to assert that:
"The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win."
and, "...I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action."
That observation about the tidal wave of right-wing media is not inaccurate. I would suggest however, that it leaves something to be desired as the basis for an action plan in the moment. It seems to me that focus on media is something of a distraction right now, and that it is a prescription mostly for tinkering with the status quo. It also overlooks the fact that fascist regimes of the past achieved power without the benefit of social media.
What is most needed right now is a strategy for survival, including identification of the most obvious threats and feasible plans for harm mitigation. Rather than trying to build a bigger and better social media response, financial support would be better devoted right now to supporting immigrant defense organizations.
There is no question that Trump and his allies will be working to put the right-leaning billionaires like Musk in charge of the country. However, that is a long, slow process. In the near term, the executive powers available to the Presidency will enable an immediate massive assault against millions of immigrant families.
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See also: Rebecca Solnit on Hope in the Dark ( A podcast at The Nation)
We went to dinner with friends on a Sunday afternoon at a restaurant beside Albuquerque's Central Avenue. Sitting in the restaurant's outdoor patio gave us front row seats to the parade of motorcycles and cars with disabled mufflers which goes on day and night through the weekend. At times the noise drowned out our conversation.
Of course the conversation turned briefly to the passing spectacle. Our dinner host, who spent most of his life in law enforcement, observed that the police really could not do anything to quiet the noise given the priority to deal with the torrent of violent crime which besets the city. I had to agree, though I suggested that making a noise check part of the yearly vehicle inspection might lower the volume a little bit.
Another source of day and night cacophony we are all subjected to now is the endless stream of political ads aimed at convincing voters who should next represent them at the local, state and national levels. The Republican candidates in particular assure us that they will clamp down on crime by hiring more police and locking up more offenders. Just as assuredly, close to half the voting population will forget that such promises have been made every year since the beginning of Time with no demonstrable effect on crime rates.
I think it is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about who the people are that are racing their noisy machines around the city. It is a challenge to come up with a convincing profile of the group members, though they seem to constitute a significant portion of the population. Newscasters occasionally show clips of the police trying to cope with congregations of street racers and bystanders to little effect. However, I don't recall anyone trying to interview the participants with an eye toward understanding the motivations behind the behavior. I suppose some academic researchers - perhaps a novelist - have undertaken such a project; I'll try to look for some of that.
Meanwhile, it seems safe to conclude that an adrenaline rush abetted by some substance abuse is fundamental to the perpetuation of the machine-related noise pollution, and that it is greatly facilitated by cell phones and social networks. Beyond the organizational particulars, I suspect that the noisy drivers and their sympathizers are simultaneously enjoying a defiance of authority and proclaiming solidarity with a like-minded if rather ill defined social group.
I will speculate further that the social group in question includes many individuals left behind by our society's tolerance for an economic order that has concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny elite at an ever increasing rate over the past half century. Feelings of powerlessness, desperate gestures of defiance, political movements characterized by grievance, racism and xenophobia, and support for authoritarian regimes are some of the possible outcomes. Whac-a-mole tactics are not the answer to complex antisocial behaviors.
