Almost Half Of American Voters Are Fascists

Photo by C Drying on Unsplash

There’s no getting around it. It’s a three-part argument, with very little room for debate:

1. Donald Trump is a fascist. There’s room for some argument here, but he’s a quasi-fascist at best, and a full-blown fascist at worst.
2. People who vote for a fascist are fascists themselves. This is straightforward: by voting for a fascist, you confirm your support of a fascist agenda.
3. Almost half of American voters voted for a fascist.

But even if you cavil at the idea of labelling tens of millions of Americans as fascist, you can substitute in “authoritarian” or “anti-democratic” and the effect is similarly appalling.

Back in 2016, there was a narrow path of plausible deniability when it came to voting for Trump. Hilary Clinton‘s “deplorables” comment was held up as an example of how out-of-touch the Democrats were; the consensus among a lot of pundits was that while there was plenty to find objectionable about Trump himself, the people voting for him were not necessarily bad people. They were opposed to NAFTA, or they felt strongly about abortion, or they simply didn’t trust Clinton herself — these were otherwise fine and upstanding individuals who were just sick of politics-as-usual and wanted to try something different.

That excuse isn’t there any more. They got to try something different, and they liked what they got. Nobody voting for Trump could plausibly argue this time around that they didn’t know what they’d be getting. They were fully aware of what they were casting that vote in favour of, and they went ahead and voted for a fascist. Whether they did so because they were ill-informed, or because they were frightened, or because they were unapologetically fascist themselves, the fact remains that very close to half of American voters chose to support a fascist. That is, by any reasonable estimation, terrifying.

So what now?

This is the frightening question. America now has to figure out how to make itself less fascist; how to rework its body politic into something that isn’t actively hostile to the mechanics of the democratic process.

But that’s going to be an incredibly difficult task.

How do you undermine fascism when one of the two major parties has adopted it wholeheartedly? How do you rebuild institutions when half the country thinks they need to be torn down further? There is no clear roadmap available here; we don’t have many examples of states which managed to arrest the slide into authoritarianism. It may not be possible.

This is where a positive final thought would go, if I had one. But I don’t. The somber reality is that the United States of America is almost half-fascist, that its institutions are incredibly weak, and that the fascists will continue to attack those institutions. The awful truth is that even if Biden wins, his cabinet will need to pass muster with Mitch McConnell, one of the single worst politicians in American history. The grim task now facing America will involve breaking bread with criminals, accepting sordid backroom deals that let many of them walk away untouched in return for improved protections for the institutions of democracy. And the horrible future that awaits if America fails is a 2024 campaign from someone more disciplined and ruthless than Trump.