The Myth of Strength: Authoritarians, Power, and Crisis As Opportunity
When I started researching for my new book American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People I had a working knowledge of history. Some of it came from the reading I had done, some from experience, and a great deal of it from oral storytelling. Much of our history is transmuted this way, whether it’s from history professors, grandparents, or our peers. These stories are varying degrees of true and are often tinged with bits of assumed knowledge.
I knew I’d find where my own understanding of history fell short by diving into the documents of the time and reading the experts, but what I didn’t expect was to have my understanding of fascism and authoritarianism to change completely. What I had learned came from my grandparents who had lived and fought through World War II, as well as books on the Third Reich and fascist Italy and popular culture in the form of video games and movies.
But these remembrances and narratives are less than accurate and, at times, dangerously misleading. We have, as Americans, forgotten the true nature of fascism and authoritarianism, and, consequentially, opened the door for these poisonous philosophies to find root here.
Myth 1: Authoritarians are cruel, but competent
“They make the trains run on time” is a constant reprisal in any conversation about authoritarians, but the truth is that they are inherently incompetent. By nature, authoritarians suffer from debilitating insecurity. This would be bad enough personally, but the authoritarian projects their personal foibles on society at large, and their rules are expressions of this debilitating insecurity. Unfortunately, once authoritarians get into power, they repeat a deadly cycle of forcing their societies into crisis and then using those crises to consolidate power.
From the perspective of the authoritarian, they are the only individual capable of ordering the world. Occasionally they find solace in other authoritarians, but these are suspicious relationships and transactional at best. Those who serve under them, even their most trusted lieutenants, fail to escape their insecurities, and authoritarians continually place their subordinates in competition with one another for power and favor. This breeds an environment of suspicion and distrust that sabotages any working group or organization, creating a fractured, tempestuous body that often contradicts itself and enjoys neverending upheavals.
Inside the fascist state the members of the ruling party are consistently at odds with one another and never certain from where orders or directions come from. In Nazi Germany the managers and bureaucrats often wouldn’t know who to contact or which orders to follow. There are firings. Killings. Trusted friends locked up. We’ve seen this from everyone from Hitler to Stalin to Mussolini and others. The authoritarian needs religious-like devotion from his sycophants, and even the desire and willingness to die isn’t enough.
By this same token, authoritarians constantly contradict themselves. They hate experts as they are evidence that they do not have infinite knowledge, and so they “follow their guts.” Decrees can change by the minute because the authoritarian, with their insecurity, is locked in their own personal battle with themselves, fluttering one violent moment to the next from total personal certainty to self-loathing.
This myth has survived as authoritarians and fascists have been used by the United States to carry out his hegemony around the world, particularly in Second and Third World countries that have financial and power-based roles to play within the American system. And business is firmly aligned with these principles as they are post-political structures that seek to undermine the rights and dignity of humans in order to achieve whatever goal might profit them in the short term.
Myth 2: Authoritarians have a firm set of principles and beliefs
Ideology motivates action for those who have it. With authoritarians though, the main thrust is personal empowerment and the feeding of the self.
The focus and action of the authoritarian changes from moment to moment. There is any number of principles or beliefs they could express depending on the moment. Most often they are a hodgepodge of collected musings from different philosophies, including capitalism, communism, and any number of religious or occultish beliefs. They change parties and movements quickly, deciding on a whim which might better serve their interests. They can believe something in the morning and then contradict themselves in early afternoon.
Like a cult leader , authoritarians guide their acolytes through a confusing worldview that is so contradictory and confusing that their followers often lose sight of themselves and their own beliefs. This is how apocalyptic cult leader can predict the end of the world and then seamlessly shift the date. The followers becomes so entangled in their cult of personality that to allow doubt to seep in would leave them without so much as a self. And that existence is as good as death.
While the authoritarian switches ideologies and beliefs by the second, the party beneath them scrambles to conform, the diehards like cultists, the suspicious aware of the change but continuing to play for power and wealth.
What we’re watching now, with outlets like Fox News constantly changing their coverage of Trump’s incompetence and gaslighting the entire nation by denying what they have said only hours before, we are watching the modern media world carry out this very concept and erase history before the ink is even dry on the page.
Myth 3: Authoritarianism is like a spell that happens suddenly
The familiar refrain when observing totalitarian societies is to ask how the people under them got there. For someone like Hitler, his “charisma” is always cited, as if he was a magician weaving a spell who suddenly sprung Nazism on the culture.
The truth is that fascism hides in the shadows, feeding off the culture’s worst parts, the corruption, the prejudice, the nationalism that has been there for generations. As democratic institutions suffer, as they inevitably do, it grows in power, festering like a disease. It infects everyday life, even if it isn’t fully announced or in total control. It is there the best of days, waiting for the worst.
When society suffers crisis, whether it’s cultural or financial in nature or a war or a pandemic, fascism finds its way to the forefront. It grows as insecure men search for meaning and avenues to power. It grows as a political majority recognizes the minority might threaten its dominance. It grows and grows and grows.
With the Third Reich, Hitler’s sway over culture was aided by the wealthy and industrious Germans who saw opportunity to enrich and empower themselves. In large part, the rise of Nazism was due in part to the development of mass culture, particularly through radios and the printing press. Hitler, an artist, and his partner Joseph Goebbels were master propagandists who slowly infected Germany with their ideas and slogans and images and relied on mass culture and the aid of media barons to control thought in a country until there wasn’t any room for thought outside of their own.
The formula is easy enough. Societal crisis leads to a breakdown of faith, a group arises to grasp that faith, pushes its message through media channels aided by the wealthy and powerful, society begins to change and reflect the manipulation, and then violence and force frighten anyone unconvinced with retaliation.
Myth 4: Fascism is a European phenomenon relegated to a specific moment in time
The myth of American exceptionalism tells us that America and the Allied Powers defeated fascism in World War II and made the world safe for democracy. That story is way, way more complicated than what we have been told, and the need to tell a story where fascism was simply defeated is part of why we find ourselves in cultural crisis now.
The truth is that European fascism was strongly informed by colonialism carried out by England and the United States. So many of the ideas of subjugation, torture, and dominance were lifted from this tradition, so much so that fascist leaders openly expressed admiration for how the English Empire and America dispatched of minorities and ruled via racist law. The strain of nationalism that ran through Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s also ran through America, creating the concept of Manifest Destiny and leading to the genocide of the Native American people.
In the years leading up to the Third Reich, American eugenicists and lawmakers traveled to Germany to help them establish the laws and ideas that would lead to the Holocaust and their terror on human society, their influence so great they were lauded with effusive praise from Hitler and his associates and crowned with one medal and title after another. Back home in America, fascist organizations pushed to either stay neutral in World War II or join Hitler’s cause, most notable among them Charles Lindbergh, who penned several essays about the need of white people to join together in common cause.
The attack on Pearly Harbor quickly put this to rest and changed the narrative of history, but America has been rife with fascist thought from its very beginning. The Founding itself was hampered by classist, racist, misogynistic design that more or less put authoritarianism in as its central operating procedure.
Again and again, in moments of crisis, from the War of 1812 to Iraq, from the administration of John Adams to the presidency of Donald J. Trump, America has reacted to moments of crisis with a revealing of underlying fascist ideology that breeds on corruption and racism, the two making a deadly cocktail that threatens society as a whole. It is our inability to reckon with our past, our continued reliance on false myths that protect our idea of American exceptionalism, that allows fascism to grow among us.
Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. He is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. Currently he is an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.