Fragile Fascism: Shattering the Idiocracy

Can a fascist dictatorship really be executed by morons?

Professor Jason Stanley is one of the leading scholars of fascism, a man who literally wrote a book called “How Fascism Works” and has his quote next to the definition in the dictionary.

Professor Stanley has decided, along with Dr. Timothy Snyder and his wife Dr. Marci Shore, both also preeminent scholars of fascism, to leave the United States. Here’s what Professor Stanley told Jim Sciutto yesterday.

“My reading of the situation is that it's quite likely that we're headed into a fascist dictatorship. It's not clear what the brakes would be. It's not certain, the future is not certain. But right now we're 50, 50 or whatever.”

If that does not convince you we’re in trouble, I just can’t help you. However, Professor Stanley does find some optimism in Harvard not caving to Trump and adds this note:

“I think people now see that standing up is much more effective. You don’t respond to a domestic abuser by trying to satisfy them. Their demands just get more extreme.”

Exactly. An autocrat is just an abuser; is just a bully; is just a person who has not developed emotionally. But what if they’re also an idiot? What if all the people around him are idiots too?

In my five years of focusing on the subject of American democracy’s tipping point, I’ve researched a wide variety of history’s fascist governments, dictatorships, and autocratic ideologies, but this one truly seems unique in how catastrophically stupid the whole thing is. Even Mussolini was smart enough to promote the myth that he “made the trains run on time” — even though he didn’t.

For example, Signalgate ringleader Pete Hegseth, while he’s a dangerous white supremacist psychopath, he’s also a stone-cold moron. He has made an absolute shitshow of the Pentagon, having nearly his entire staff leave out of frustration, or be fired for “leaking” about him.

The people he’s putting in these roles as replacements seem like rejected extras from Hannah Montana, not people to put in charge of defending the most powerful nation on Earth. Honestly, if I were Canada, or Greenland for that matter, I would think about a preemptive invasion of America right now — because it sure feels like we couldn’t do anything about it.

Another example that stuck out was an evaluation by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which reports to the Director of National Intelligence, that concluded the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua does not coordinate with the Venezuelan government to commit terrorism in the United States.

Although this finding was inconvenient to the Trump regime because it further invalidates the illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act, which has been used as a pretense for hundreds of unconstitutional renditions, 17 of 18 intelligence agencies agreed that Venezuela is not intentionally sending terrorist cells into the US (duh), and that Tren de Aragua is a gang, like a lot of other gangs.

The 18th agency, Kash Patel’s FBI, waved its hands and said maybe there was a connection.

Despite the overwhelming conclusions of the report, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, who oversees all of these agencies and the NIC, said that the report was “deep state actors resort[ing] to using their propaganda arm to attack the President’s successful policies.”

Imagine being this dumb.

I should say, by “dumb” I don’t mean that she isn’t being intentionally deceptive and manipulative, I just mean that she can’t think of anything better than this transparently illogical gaslighting.

These are the most senior members of Trump’s military and intelligence apparatus — who are also absolute ninnies intentionally dropping our defenses against sabotage, cyber attacks and numerous other threats. It’s going to be a four year Field Day for our enemies. But is it also a sign that this brand of fascism is especially fragile?

Fragile fascism in this way of thinking is fascism that is distinctively unstable and chaotic at its core, because the people executing it are actually very dumb — people who are not actually zealots, but circus performers who don’t believe, or even understand, what they’re doing. The question then is: Can very dumb people do the kind of evil they’re planning? Maybe, but I think it does give some hope that the stupidity can be exploited.

For example, as a counterpoint, the longest-lasting arguably fascist regime in history, the Estado Novo or “New State” in Portugal, survived from 1932 to 1974. It’s founder and president for nearly the entire existence of the dictatorship, António de Oliveira Salazar, was described this way:

Howard J. Wiarda argues that Salazar achieved his position of power not just because of constitutional stipulations, but also because of his character: domineering, absolutist, ambitious, hardworking and intellectually brilliant.

The “bookish dictator” Antonio Salazar

Franco’s regime next door in Spain started seven years later in 1939, and ended a year later, in 1975. Franco was even more brutal than Salazar, but he was similarly not an unserious man, or a stupid one.

Dictatorship and fascism are doomed ideas to begin with, ultimately unsustainable simply because life, and I mean actual biological life, does not like to be tamed, even in primitive forms. Human beings are a very complicated form of life, so managing them is also very complicated, and controlling them is even harder.

In the first Trump term, which no one would call intellectual, there were always a few people who could form coherent thoughts. But this one truly appears to have purged its ranks of anyone willing or even capable of playing grown-up.

As a fitting a bit of good news — hopefully — I had been concerned that the regime might use tomorrow, 4/20, to invoke the Insurrection Act and martial law. It looks like, for now, they have postponed it — mostly because they can’t get their logistics figured out.

At the same time, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 (Alito and Thomas dissenting, of course) to enforce its earlier 9-0 order that ICE should not deport people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia with no due process.

For now at least this is a fragile fascist idiocracy and honestly—I think we can take ‘em.

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