Now That Fascism is Here...

Fascism isn’t coming to America; it’s here.

We are long past the warnings of an approaching existential threat looming on the distant horizon of our story, which many of us spent the past decade imploring people not to ignore. The nightmare is no longer a future improbability but a present reality.

The current President is keeping his campaign promise to be a “dictator on day one,” wiping out decades of protections and partnerships with the stroke of a pen.
He has filled his Cabinet with the absolute moral dregs of humanity, people committed to nothing but him, and the power and wealth that sycophantic devotion affords them.
He and his sycophantic accomplices are quickly dismantling every system and safeguard that, up until a few months ago, were established givens.

And the only question left is: do we have the strength to stop them?

History is a really good teacher.

If we pay attention to her, she reminds us that populations don’t become monstrous overnight, that nations don’t abandon humanity in a single moment, and that generational human rights atrocities don’t form in an instant or a vacuum.

Collective sickness is never sudden. There is always a slow, deliberate, almost imperceptible pattern, and we’re seeing it now:

Manufacturing fear: misinformation, fake emergencies, and abject lies all designed to create an unnecessary urgency in the heads of easily manipulated people and to make them feel hopelessly assailed.

The crafting of surrounding enemies: encroaching threats to tangibly embody the nightmares they have made in their heads; someone to go to war against, to take back their country from—someone these leaders can save them from.

The weaponizing of religion: making the manipulated believe that their mission is not just important or right, but holy; that they are being obedient to God while eradicating other human beings.

In that state of frantic, perpetually terrorized self-righteousness, they begin to allow everything. They can justify all manners of cruelty, all denials of care, every act of violence, because they are purifying and protecting their divinely curated country.

Once this happens, once-ordinary, rational, decent, even compassionate people begin to lose their ability to see the humanity in front of them—it’s too late to help them see clearly.

This is how holocausts and genocides happen.

This is where historic national malignancies grow.

These are the first steps down a road that at the beginning seems unthinkable.

Decent Americans, we need to listen to History right now.
She is warning us that we are on the precipice of a free fall.
We can’t afford to go to sleep now.
We need to wake ourselves up.

America is not yet near where Germany was at the peak of Hitler’s power, but Germany wasn’t always there either, and that is the point.

That hideous transformation (like so many before) required targeted propaganda, fake news streams, dehumanizing rhetoric from leadership, an uninformed electorate, coercive religion, and a marginalized population to serve as the focal point for the holy war.

Most of all, it required a large number of decent people to be silent.

It would be completely irresponsible and reckless to suggest that Portland or Chicago in 2025 is Berlin in 1941, but it could very well be Berlin in 1933.

We cannot let the myth of American exceptionalism numb us into imagining we are above devolving into inhumanity. We have every ingredient in place to abandon the best of ourselves and to become something monstrous, something History records as yet another shocking failure of the center. It can and will happen here unless we refuse to allow it.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that America will give birth to something as tragic and sickening as we have seen. Still, we’re stupid and arrogant if we don’t believe ourselves capable, and that we aren’t already seeing the warning signs of bigotry and prejudice irreversibly taking root.

The question is, whether or not we have enough good people who are willing to push back and to move together across lines of politics and religion and race and nation of origin and orientation—and to declare our interdependence from fascism.

Do we have the desire and the energy and the diligence and the courage to join our disparate voices into one singular, furious choir that refuses to stop loudly singing songs of freedom for everyone?

Do Americans have the attention span and intestinal fortitude to fight like they’ve never had to fight before because they’ve never had to go to war with their government in this way before?

Will we refuse to tolerate injustice in the name of national greatness or divine will, to reject and oppose denials of people’s worth and humanity, even when it comes from our party or our church or our families?

And perhaps most of all, do we have the humility not to imagine that we are too intelligent or spiritual or informed not to become as hateful as we have seen other people become?

May we be our best selves in this moment, so that History one day tells our story as one where disparate humanity twisted the plot.

Now that fascism is here, let’s pray we have what is needed to drive it back to the hell it came from.

What do you see as the most helpful and effective individual and collective practices to push back against this authoritarian regime? Let me know in the comments.