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Ok here's my actual attempt to impress @jasonintrator - here's my Take on characterising the general position he's been developping these past few years, in one convenient twitter thread shaped place...
... the big message is: now's a very dangerous time in the US (and other places especially Turkey, Brazil, India, but I'll focus on the US). There's a serious chance of meaningful democracy being seriously eroded or destroyed, and hard authoritarianism stepping up its violence...
... to understand why that is, there's four interconnected lines of thought Jason has been pursuing. First, there are some near-perennial psycho-social principles about how people can be attracted to responsive to certain fearful, violent, and authoritarian forms of governance...
... these Jason has studied by looking at the history of the rise of fascist regimes in Europe. The familiar message is that by playing on people's desire for an idealised image of a mythic unified and virile past that can only be reclaimed through violent imposition of purity...
... and which it is claimed that intellectuals and demographic or cultural minorities are intrinsically threatening to, one can get people to support an authoritarian imposition of a sort of LARP-y version of traditional hierarchies. ...
... What's worse, since these fascist tactics are rhetorically effective, there is always temptation for any politician in a democracy to deploy them even if not themselves ideologically committed to fascism, but in doing so thereby strengthen fascist movements...
... the second theme is the particular history of American authoritarian racialism. The thought is that the aforementioned rhetorical tactics can easily be adapted and deployed in the US context because there is a "rich" tradition of local barbarism to draw upon...
... the reservation system for Natives is an obvious example of governance through sheer militaristic brutality, but for an example of getting a broad population to accept obvious cruelty in their very midst the tradition of deploying white identity to defend slavery...
... and the later terrorist campaign to undermine Jim Crow along with propagandistic efforts to paint Reconstruction as a failure which we need to overcome for the sakes of unity, then finally the Southern Strategy under Nixon, have all created a population and institution set...
... which are basically already primed to accept cues to the effect that state violence to impose (racialised) purity would be good, actually, along with a vast physical and bureaucratic infrastructure that facilitates this in the prison system. ...
... third, there is the state of contemporary American capitalism as the Empire crumbles and climate change advances. Jason has been studying the situation in Flint, Michigan, and the use of emergency governance powers there. ...
... it's a model of how to protect the interests of capital in a situation wherein Nestle caused environmental disaster, they were able to rely on tacit endorsement of theories of black racial inferiority, plus barely-disguised rank authoritarian anti-democracy from government...
... to none the less set up and get away with for some time a new form of deadly authoritarian government. As the advantages of being in the imperial metropole are less and less felt by every day workers, and climate change imposes ever more costs...
... politicians will be tempted to draw on the fascist tradition and the aggrieved white petite bourgeois familiar who can be primed via the aforementioned tradition to recall their glory days and blame it on the blacks or the climate refugees that prosperity escapes them...
... and in this way a local American form of quasi-fascistic government could become ever more popular. Finally, the fourth aspect, is that the present cultural-intellectual taste maker class in America is wildly unprepared to fight the cultural fights they need to avert this...
... they are not sufficiently familiar with general fascist tactics, events on the ground under "emergency powers" governance, or the true history of racial authoritarianism in the US. So they're liable to not see what is before their eyes...
... what's worse, in How Fascism Works it was argued that substantial material inequality always makes the fascist rhetoric tempting, and in How Propaganda Works it was argued that fascist rhetorical tactics are peculiarly good at short circuiting the market place of ideas...
... but meritocratic hierarchy and liberal/Millian ideas of the market place are both deeply held beliefs for much of the American liberal intelligentsia, so they are unlikely to will the changes that need be made....
... What hope there is can thus only come from activist movements with a different social base from America's liberal intelligentsia, who therefore deserve our support and solidarity, even if we sometimes have qualms...
... this, then, is my take on @jasonintrator's overall theory of now. I sometimes see people describe it as just saying everything is fascism, or as shallow. I just don't think that's fair. Right or wrong, it's a developed body of systematic theory re authoritarianism in the US.
