The Fascists Are Wrong

The essential premise of fascism is that the individual has no existence save as part of the collective.

I've been wrestling with this ever since it became clear that Trump is going to get back into power last night. So much of my identity is wrapped up in the United States of America. I'm a constitutional scholar, constitutional philosopher as I fancifully title myself on this small, self-indulgent website. The thing I've devoted my entire adult life to the study of is now just... gone? A grotesque mockery remains, at most. So what am I? What's a constitutional philosopher when there's no Constitution anymore?

The thing is though, that the fascists are wrong – not just morally wrong, although of course they are that as well. They're just literally wrong. The collective is not prior to the individual, does not create the individuals, is not what gives them meaning. It is very much the other way around. Nations are fake – this is one of the core tenets of Yang Wenli Thought. People though, people are real. We exist. And we exist even when our political communities go up in smoke.

What's a constitutional philosopher without a constitution, then? A person. A human being. A living creature with wants and needs and cares and loves. I am trying to remember that for myself, and I think it's (unfortunately) an important lesson for all of us as we enter life in the Trump Regime: the thing to do is to live. The imaginary bonds holding America together as a political community are gone now, but the people are not. To live freely despite tyranny is itself resistance to tyranny. To the extent that there is nothing for it now but a measure of retreat from public life and focus on surviving, I don't think we should feel shameful about that. This doesn't mean retreating from one another, becoming isolated individuals: we can and should form bonds with one another that are not mediated through the abstract political construct of the "nation." Bonds of kindness, of community. We will need them now more than ever.

The dominant emotion that I feel emanating from last night's election results isn't even so much hatred as nihilism. I think people are just tired of having to care. Democratic life is a pain, you know? We are surrounded by all of these people who are different from us, who we disagree with, who have the capacity to hurt us, and we're all fighting over finite resources. Doing that on equal terms means an awful lot of accommodating those other people, of making due with less because taking more would be at another's expense.

And all of this tension got particularly heightened during the covid pandemic. The moment when Joe Biden's approval rating tanked to around 40% and never then budged an inch for the entire rest of his term was the Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021, but that was also the exact moment when it became clear that covid hadn't just gone away, that it was still something we were going to have to deal with.

I've had a sense throughout this election that there's a real strain of everyone just trying to repress all memory of the fact that the pandemic happened altogether: hence the utterly baffling tendency of the Trump campaign to go around asking "are you better off now than you were four years ago??" like it's some kind of gotcha to the Biden administration. Mutual obligation has been weighing on us all especially heavily these last five years, and it's tiring, and fascism promises sweet release from those burdens: wouldn't it be simpler if we could just not? If we could just stop caring, stop worrying about one another's wellbeing, stop treating one another as equals?

Here's the thing, though: the fascists are wrong about this, too. Democratic public life can be kind of a drag, but there has only ever been one alternative, and it's the War Of All Against All, wherein the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I think Donald Trump and his vile henchmen are about to remind us all of that central fact of human civilization. And in time that may create an opportunity to throw off their rule and make something better, again. It wouldn't astonish me, frankly, if that happens extremely quickly, maybe even within calendar year 2025. It also wouldn't astonish me if it takes decades. But the fascist mode of social organization is wrong, it is everlastingly wrong, it does not match the reality of the human condition and in time human beings will come to reject it. Or so I must believe.