Fascism is Here: A Radical Unveiling of America’s Blooded Scaffold

Fascism—no longer confined to textbooks or distant historical epochs—breathes in the pulse of our streets, in the administration of law, in whispered family conversations, and in the ubiquitous gestures of power that insist on submission. To say “fascism is here” is an understatement remedied only by an interrogation deeper, and more unsettling, than many dare to reckon: fascism has been here. It is not a new visitor but the original architect, the primal blueprint embedded within the fecund soils of American society. This is not an ahistorical invocation; it is a recognition that the structural oppressions, and the psychic violences entwined with them, have always constituted the marrow of this nation’s social body.

This essay does not simply track the re-emergence of fascist political actors who parade with their racist regalia; it excavates the substrate beneath—the foundational fascism that has endured in America’s genetic code, particularly for Black folk and other non-white communities. It also honors the indelible connection between systemic authoritarianism and its first training ground: the microscopic, familial sphere where power dynamics are granular and profoundly formative.

Here lies a necessary split in our analytic gaze—a bifurcation that reveals the persistence of fascism not as anomaly, but as structure, spirit, and scaffold: (1) fascism as an enduring American inheritance that for many non-white Americans has never been absent or foreign but visceral and continuous; (2) fascism as a relational matrix instantiated through authoritarian family dynamics that function as proto-fascist laboratories, incubating future subjects and resistors alike.

Fascism’s Inescapable American Legacy: Blackness and Non-Whiteness as Sites of Perpetual Fascist Domination

Fascism is often cast as the product of European interwar turmoil—the racial purges, the nationalist demagogues, the pathological cults wreathed in hyper-masculinity and militarism. Yet, this Eurocentric optic occludes a far more profound history: fascism as a living inheritance in the Americas, an original sin and recurring pathology that shapes the existence of millions.

To confront this is to adopt a decolonial gaze: to see America in its totality, both statue and shadow, as a nation founded by femicides, genocides, and the chattel enslavement of African bodies. This is not metaphorical; it is literal fascism. Robert O. Paxton’s characterizations of fascism as state-driven exterminatory and exclusionary nationalism resonate with the historical and ongoing racial control mechanisms deployed here. The American state’s deployment of terror against Blackness—lynchings, race riots stoked by white mobs, surveillance via the slave patrols and later the police—registers as fascism’s prototype, not its aberration.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s schemas of fascist “strongman rule” illuminate the techniques by which regimes consolidate power through spectacle, propaganda, and punitive violence. Yet for Black Americans, these techniques were not a surprise arrival with contemporary authoritarian figures—they were lived realities, the choreography of terror performed daily from the plantation to the ghetto, from Jim Crow signage to stop-and-frisk policies.

What Timothy Snyder articulates as warning bells about modern tyranny are ancestral echoes reverberating for African-descended bodies under siege: patterns of disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and state violence replicated with ceaseless variations. The state’s monopoly on violence has been wielded selectively to reaffirm white supremacy via the criminal legal system—a paramount example of Jennifer Gandhi’s theorizing around authoritarian institutions that entrench inequality.

Jason Stanley’s dissection of fascism as a performative politics of “us vs. them” coded through language and media dovetails with the American racial narrative: the incessant “othering” of Black and brown populations through criminalization, demonization, and the myth of inherent threat. This is not incidental but systemic—a psychological warfare on whole populations that sustains fascist social orders.

Federico Finchelstein’s work reminds us that fascism adapts—it coats itself in populist rhetoric, patriotism, and appeals to fear. In America, this looks like calls to “law and order,” attacks on protestors demanding racial justice, and narratives that scapegoat immigrants, Muslims, and people of color. It is not a foreign import but a homegrown, historically continuous system of domination.

Yet, within this reality lies resistance, brilliance, and cultural survival. Black Americans have forged community, art, and political movements that refuse fascism’s grip. Recognizing this history of oppression and resilience side-by-side is essential to dismantling the myth that America is a purely “free” democracy disconnected from authoritarian legacy.

The Family as Fascist Cradle: Authoritarianism Writ Small in Intimate Space

To speak of fascism solely as a political or historical phenomenon is to elide the psychological dimension wherein fascism originates with devastating intimacy. The lineage of fascism stretches from the global stage to the living room and kitchen table, where power first instructs obedience and repudiates autonomy.

Wilhelm Reich’s early psychoanalytic insights highlight the family as a crucible of authoritarian subjectivity: where domination is learned, and the “obedience to authority” is first baptized in fear and submission. Erich Fromm deepens this analysis, asserting that fascism’s appeal hinges on the psychological need to escape freedom’s burdens by succumbing to an external, overpowering authority.

This is not an abstract theory but a material fact for many who endure abusive parenting and relational trauma. The home is the first arena where power dynamics analogous to fascist hierarchies are rehearsed and encoded. This “microfascism”—one might call it—frames the interiority of subjects for later interaction with larger authoritarian regimes.

The authoritarian parent, the familial tyrant, is a microcosm of fascist governance—the wielding of power through intimidation, humiliation, and capricious discipline. Children internalize these dynamics, developing relational scripts that normalize domination and fracturing. This formative residue moves quietly through generations, shaping how trust, dissent, and power are metabolized.

Jennifer Gandhi’s articulation of institutional authoritarianism links perfectly to this familial echo chamber, exposing how the social reproduction of obedience at micro-levels undergirds larger autocratic systems. Power’s social architecture is scaffolded by psychic worlds molded in childhood, where submission can become habitual, and resistance a learned risk.

George Mosse’s historical and cultural explications further illuminate the symbiosis between fascist ritual and family discipline—the regimented order, the culture of surveillance, the performative loyalty. This explains why authoritarian ideologies resonate with such intimate familiarity even in seemingly democratic spaces; they come freighted with uncompromising familiarity.

Yet to name the family as a fascist cradle is not to render the structure monolithic or inevitable in its violences. The family, like any social institution, is a site of profound contestation and possibility—mutating, resisting, and sometimes upending the very currents of authoritarianism it is said to reproduce. Here, queer and chosen family models offer luminous alternatives: interdependent, anti-hierarchical kinships forged by necessity and refusal, by the radical will to survive outside the scripts of normativity and domination.

Where the authoritarian family polices obedience and enforces boundaries with threat and shame, queer families have often elected to rupture these logics. In the face of biological kin’s rejection or silence, queer folk—especially those Black, brown, and trans—have created relational ecologies rooted in consent, affirmation, and shared struggle. These chosen constellations, unconstrained by blood or heteronormative roles, become sanctuaries for tenderness that dares not to cohabit with domination, for support unyoked from control.

In these alternative households, solidarity supplants surveillance, vulnerability is valorized over stoic discipline, and the scaffolding of care is built through intentionality rather than inherited dogma. The practices of mutual care, adaptive roles, and communal responsibility cultivated within queer families supply models for resisting the sedimented hierarchies of the patriarchal home. In so doing, they unravel the presupposition that the family must always serve as fascism’s laboratory; instead, they disclose what is possible when kinship is untethered from subjugation.

This is not a utopian gloss—queer family forms bear their own wounds, their own quakes. But their very emergence is anti-fascist refusal, an imaginative leap beyond obedience toward networked care and collective autonomy. In the cracks left by normative collapse, they teach us that the family, far from being an inescapable engine of domination, can also be a site of rupture and radical becoming.

The implication is profound: fascism’s eradication cannot rely solely on political revolution but demands psychic and social transformation. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s work on democratic erosion supports this: the death of democracy is as much about the erosion of internalized democratic norms as it is about external institutional decay. Citizens habituated to authoritarian relational dynamics—whether in their homes or communities—are more susceptible to accepting authoritarian states.

After the Imprint: Internalized Fascism and the Affective Afterlife of Upbringing

Building upon the family as a laboratory of authoritarian power, we must also reckon with the haunting legacy that such power imprints within the psyche—where fascism ceases to be only external domination and becomes the governance of self, lived and embodied across generations.

If fascism begins in the intimate sphere, it is not only enacted but also absorbed—lodged in the most interior regions of the self, where unexamined loyalty, guilt, and fear fester long after the authoritarian actor has receded. This is the terrain Reich and Fromm began to map but seldom traced to its ongoing psychic consequences: the embodied residues of domination that accumulate across generations, morphing into habits of self-erasure, moral submission, and affective numbness.

Fascism’s staying power lies not just in state violence or speech acts but in its colonization of feeling—how desire is shaped by fear, and how the need for order is sutured to a dread of being unloved or cast out. The family, then, is not merely a training ground but a haunting—its residue echoing through adult behaviors, intimate relationships, and political alignments. A child raised among humiliation, precarity, and compliance may not need policing later—they’ll enforce it themselves, from the inside out.

This is microfascism in its purest sense: the ongoing governance of the self by an internalized Other, where the authoritarian system is no longer external but habituated. The repercussions appear in people who romanticize “tough love,” who conflate care with critique, who mistake obedience for safety and domination for affection. These are psychological architectures dressed up as common sense.

What Levitsky and Ziblatt describe as the erosion of democratic norms is mirrored in the individual psyche when the capacity for difference, uncertainty, or vulnerability is viewed as a threat to coherence. Inner fascism fears contradictions. It clings to binaries, punishes ambivalence, and seeks safety through replication—political, relational, and emotional.

Healing from this inheritance cannot rely on exposure to information or policy reform alone. It requires deep affective reprocessing—a confrontation with the ways we’ve been shaped to betray ourselves in the name of love, belonging, or righteousness. Communities practicing trauma-informed care, somatics, and collective healing—often arising within abolitionist, queer, and BIPOC frameworks—offer not a wholesale curing, but a recalibration: an invitation to rewire the nervous system away from compliance and toward connection.

This is how fascism becomes more than a political formation. It becomes a nervous inheritance—encoded, enacted, and, crucially, unlearned.

Mutation and Camouflage: Fascism’s Adaptation to 21st-Century America

Fascism, in its relentless vitality, refuses to be pinned down to archaic forms. It moves with the swiftness and slipperiness of a shadow under shifting light, delaying recognition, adapting its tongue, and reconfiguring its apparatus. To reduce fascism to grotesque spectacle, uniforms, or explicit political rallies is a fatal error that helps it evade deeper scrutiny. Instead, fascism in contemporary America is a protean force, nesting within systems, languages, and technologies, wearing the guise of civility while orchestrating complicit silent violence.

The carceral state’s evolution offers a sober illustration. The trajectory from plantation slave patrols to Jim Crow policing to mass incarceration is an uninterrupted relay, and today's predictive policing algorithms are merely the latest instruments of a long-standing machinery of racial control. The technology’s cold, clinical veneer belies its embeddedness in systemic fascism—the complete normalization of racialized surveillance, state-sanctioned terror, and dispossession.

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s portrayal of “spin dictatorships” shows how modern autocrats avoid overt brutality, favoring disinformation, media manipulation, and legalistic façades that provide plausible deniability and normalize authoritarianism in polite conversation. In the American theater, this is perceptible in the insistence on “civility” as a weapon against truth-tellers, the politicization of tone policing, and the fetishistic invocation of law and order to sanitize repression.

The rhetorical rebranding of fascist principles occurs constantly. Patriotism—once a banner for liberation—is converted into a mandate for exclusion masked by cultural nostalgia. Nationalism mutates into the reclamation of an imagined past from which entire communities have been erased. The phraseology of “law and order,” “border security,” and “protecting the homeland” functions as coded obeisance to racialized fear-mongering, an extension of Jason Stanley’s identification of fascism's social mechanics that traffic in us-versus-them dichotomies.

Finchelstein’s analysis of fascism’s malleability through populist veneers underscores the extent to which contemporary authoritarian figures cloak themselves in the vernacular of democracy, reform, and grassroots empowerment, even as they erode the very institutions that guarantee these ideals.

This mutability also means combatting fascism requires a shift beyond reactive opposition to strategically dismantling its evolving networks—legal, technological, cultural—and understanding that fascism's modern incarnations are systemic rather than spectacular.

Resistance, Memory, and Radical Reimagination

Despite fascism’s deep roots—in history, family, and psyche—it is neither immutable nor unconquerable. Resistance operates as an ecosystem: individual ruptures multiplying into collective defiance, historic memory breathing life into present struggle, and art crystallizing the inchoate dreams of liberation.

The refusal to forget—documenting state-sanctioned violence, reclaiming erased histories, amplifying marginalized narratives—is an act of insurgency. Anne Applebaum’s depiction of authoritarian global networks as seeking to erase inconvenient truths foregrounds the urgency of local and global memory work. Community-led efforts to memorialize violence and re-articulate history disrupt fascism’s erasures, build solidarity, and charge futures with promise.

Black radical traditions wield memory and artistic expression as weapons of survival and revolution. The persistence of jazz, hip-hop, poetry, and storytelling performs a double function: hosting collective trauma while opening space for joy, complexity, and radical imagination that defies fascist simplifications.

Communities, both formal and informal, offer alternative socialities countering fascism’s atomization and fear. Mutual aid networks, co-ops, and transformative justice practices exemplify every-day anti-fascism by reclaiming care and autonomy in places where traditional institutions fail or reinforce oppression.

This reweaving of social fabric—from family to neighborhood—is essential to healing psychic wounds inflicted by authoritarian legacies. It fosters relational trust and dismantles fear, laying groundwork for emancipatory futures.

Anti-Fascist Futures: Embracing Abolition as a Total Liberation

Envisioning a future free of fascism demands reimagining not only political structures but socio-economic relationships, cultural forms, and subjectivities. Abolition is the lodestone here—far beyond prisons and police, abolition signifies dismantling, reconstituting, and imagining entire systems and relationalities that reproduce domination.

Black feminist, queer, and Indigenous frameworks illuminate abolition as a practice of generativity and interdependence: a transformative process of healing, reckoning, and collective re-creation. Dismantling fascism thus involves radical care, educational transformation away from hierarchy, and the cultivation of collective autonomy.

This requires praxis—thought in motion—wherein theory meets everyday action in schools, homes, movements, and moments of care. It demands ethical vigilance against complacency, reminding us that democracy must be actively anti-fascist, not merely tolerant of dissent.

To oppose fascism is to reclaim language, memory, and practice—to assemble new worlds in old ruins and reinhabit freedom as a lived, communal condition.

Fascism Is Inescapable: Its Reach Enfolds Us All

Fascism is no isolated pathology affecting select societies or identities alone. It is a systemic condition threaded into the totality of social existence, shaping power relations that encompass every human experience, whether directly recognized or not. While fascism’s most overt and violent expressions disproportionately devastate Black, Indigenous, and non-white communities, its psychic and institutional architectures extend their dominion over everyone.

This universality is not a matter of equal suffering but of pervasive exposure to the culture of domination. Everyone inhabits a social world where obedience is demanded, dissent policed, and hierarchy naturalized. As James Strachey Barnes wrote in his early analyses, fascism contains “universal aspects” rooted in human fear and the instinctual gravitation towards order and authority. It seduces by offering certainty amid chaos, belonging amid fragmentation.

In that sense, fascism is the toxic generational inheritance of authoritative family dynamics, the schooling of compliance in institutions, and the political theatre of control played on public stages everywhere. It produces both subjects and resistors, is embedded in our social structures, and seeps into personal interactions.

Recognizing fascism’s inescapability for all forces us to confront uncomfortable truths: that dismantling it entails collective transformation, undoing not only political regimes but the psychological mappings, social relationships, and cultural patterns that sustain it. It calls for a radical reorientation of power away from domination to autonomy and care, a reclaiming of democracy beyond performative rituals.

Fascism’s reach, though devastating, is neither eternal nor omnipotent. The cracks of resistance within communities—especially those living its harshest realities—offer openings for collective healing and reimagination. We are universally implicated in the struggle, and universally tasked with the labor of undoing.

Epilogue: Letters for Tomorrow

This body of words, entwined and laboring, is not mere warning but invocation. It is an invitation to see with the eyes of those long targeted by fascism: the children who read the world’s cruelty before they found its language, the elders who carry maps of survival encoded beneath scars, the dreamers stitching worlds from the ruin of the old, the families and communities choosing, stubbornly, to plant tenderness where dominion would rather see barren ground.

Fascism is not only here; it is in history’s bloodstream and in tomorrow’s threat. But as always, wherever there is fascism, there is accompaniment, and wherever there is accompaniment, there is also a crack—room for tomorrow to creep in, for the radical, luminous, collective labor of imagining, naming, and making the world anew.

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