Healthy societies revel in who they are. Unhealthy societies view themselves in terms of either an ignominious past, current enemies who endanger them, or internal elements degrading the true, virtuous nature of the commune and sapping its strength. The United States through most of its history was in the first category. Today, it is clearly in the second. Therein lies our national tragedy – and our precipitous slide into Fascism American style.
This historic shift – with profound implications – has not been driven by tangible factors, originating within itself or externally, but strikingly by intangibles. The country has not experienced any traumatic shocks. No ruinous, humiliating wartime defeat and occupation. No economic crash. No civil war. No deeply rooted conflicts between Church and secular forces. Think of inter-war Europe: by comparison, the United States has been living in a benign environment. American exceptionalism. Stresses and strains, yes – nothing, though, of the magnitude that could explain so drastic a transformation.
YET, there is a pervasive feeling that things are not quite right, vague feelings of dread hover, that something awful may happen that we can neither anticipate, avert nor cope with, that America is ‘losing it.’ Free floating unease and apprehension. A United States that senses it is losing control, losing mastery of its environment and of itself, naturally will look for scapegoats. Why? Corrective action to straighten out what’s gone wrong requires constructive ideas, rigorous thinking, self-confidence. They don’t exist. Little is positive or constructive. Tearing down, destruction, perverting, corrupting predominate instead. The negative prevails. Let’s look at current scene – at public discourse, politics, the dominant themes, the level and type of citizen engagement.
What marks the landscape are: emotions eclipsing thought, intellectual aridity, the erasure of all boundaries to words or actions, the triumph of crude willpower. The rapid success of the Trump-led MAGA movement in putting in place the building blocks for a quasi-fascist regime is stunning testimony to how potent are the forces of negativity, to how pathetically weak the resistance of institutions, of organized political opposition, of civil society.
Instead of deliberate reflection, we round on “enemies” – abroad and at home.
Abroad
Today, there is near unanimity in the vilification of Russia cast as a reincarnate Soviet Union, in portraying China as a menace bent on supplanting the U.S. as a global hegemon by foul and illicit means, in denouncing Iran as fanatically dedicated in its attacks on American interests. Then, there are the Arab terrorists – an all-purpose label to be stuck on whichever groups in the Greater Middle East fight against American/Israeli domination and defy American dictation: inter alia Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, the Houthis, al-Shabab. Al-Qaeda, which authored the trauma and humiliation of 9/11, has lost its pride of place on the enemies list now that Washington has joined with its Syrian branch to topple Assad, head of Syria’s anti-Israel Arab nationalist government.
They are the hostiles who we say are conniving to bring America low. They represent an unprecedentedly multi-pronged threat to the national interest, to American self-esteem. They are assailing us ruthlessly in ever domain – military security, commerce and finance, our moral authority, even the political integrity of our impeccably democratic system by campaigns to disrupt and manipulate its workings.
These propositions enjoy the allegiance of almost the entire American political class. Nary a single influential member of the Congress (Sanders, Yes; AOC, No) disputes them – as evinced by endorsement of Trump’s arbitrary sanctions warfare despite a Constitutional stipulation that only Congress has the authority to impose sanctions, by drastic boosts in the Pentagon/Intelligence budgets, by sustained applause for the homicidal fanatic who has lured us into a genocidal campaign against Palestine’s Muslim Arabs, and by blanket support for war preparations against the PRC. Not a single MSM outlet submits this hard core of the nation’s foreign policy precepts to skeptical examination. The major think tanks supply endless justifications. The only debates focus on tactics and priorities. Moral considerations are banned by common – silent – consent.
[Stroll along Washington’s think tank rows of Massachusetts Avenue and ‘K’ Street and an attentive ear hears one uninterrupted declamation issuing from the minds that shape and propel American thinking about the world.]
Noticeably absent is the ideological component. In the Cold War, the historic contest between democratic capitalism and Communism overshadowed all else. In its place, we have the contrived effort to promote a specious – and mortal – combat between Democracy vs Autocracy. In the American camp are such paragons of democracy as Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Zelensky, Bukele (el Salvador), Mohammed bin-Salman, the Gulf sheikhs, and Abu Mohammad al-Jalani – ex-al-Qaeda emir installed as President of Syria. Democrat Netanyahu bombed Democrat Jalani’s capital Damascus a week ago. If Washington does anything to calm that intramural ruckus, Trump no doubt would cite it as the capstone to his fabulous record as peacemaker to claim the Nobel Prize. Donald Trump is the lodestar for all of these faux democrats, the cynosure of Democratic values.
American elites and the citizenry overall seem to have no inkling as how far the country’s standing in the world has fallen – that we are seen as moral hypocrites and bullies everywhere outside the Collective West (its political class, anyway). That our reputation as a model of enlightened government and generator of public goods is shattered beyond restoration.
We are living in a fantasy world of our own imaginings that is only tenuously connected to reality. In that fictitious domain, fixed consensus exists in believing the most outlandish – and reckless – notions. So, we are mistreated to an extraordinary array of misconceptions about declared foes and what we can do to subdue them. Most dangerous of these unsupportable propositions are those that vastly exaggerate – indeed, misrepresent – the threat that they pose. Those articles of faith, in turn, evoke extraordinarily extreme actions and plans for war. In the former category, we find these gems: Putin’s ambition is to wash his boots in the English Channel; Russia will crumble under the stress of sanctions and defeat by Ukraine’s ‘liberation’ forces; Putin’s regime will be replaced by a West-friendly, oligarch-led sober version of the Yeltsin-era set-up; Russian weaponry is significantly inferior to American weaponry; Russia can be split away from China and/or China split away from Russia. China is weaker than it looks; Beijing can be coerced into yielding its claim to Taiwan as an integral part of China – an agreed principle dating back 50 years, abrogated unilaterally by Washington; the U.S. has the upper hand in any economic duel with the PRC; therefore, we can impose a Maginot line of technological deprivation that will put an end to China’s challenge to American global dominance. A prideful India will hamstring its growing economy by boycotting Russian energy supplies at Washington’s command; prideful Indians eagerly will sign up as Sepoy auxiliaries in the American campaign to yolk China. Unlimited, unqualified backing for Israel’s imperial ambitions serves American national interests; there is no reason to modify that judgment in the face of its genocide of the Palestinians – nor should it be modified in the face of its military aggressions in Lebanon, Syria and its unrelenting (successful) attempt to embroil the U.S. in an all-out war with Iran. The answer to Iran’s resistance to Israeli-American hegemony in the Middle East is regime change in Tehran. Airborne attacks will trigger a popular uprising. American precision weapons can destroy Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, its centrifuges and related nuclear facilities. {They have not. They never reached the inner chamber where the centrifuges were located – according to the most astute, neutral scientific assessment. Anyway, the High Enriched Uranium (HEU) and most of the centrifuges probably had been removed beforehand. Claims to the contrary emanating from the White House, the National Intelligence Agency (Tulsi Gabbard) and the Pentagon (Pete Hegseth) are outright lies referencing no pertinent data. Closer to home, there is the convenient belief that America’s drug addiction problem will disappear if we could dam the flow of narcotics from Mexico.
Our faith-based supposition is that the outcome of these intertwined projects will be a stronger, more secure United States; elimination or grave weakening of our enemies; and enhanced respect/influence round the world. The exact opposite has occurred.
Actions to achieve that outcome match the extremity of ambition. Policy elites are monolingual – they know only the lexicon of coercion, especially military coercion. Diplomacy is a dirty word, negotiations abhorrent. We dictate, we make demands, we intimidate, we set deadlines – we don’t discuss. We envision the outcome of a successful negotiation as resembling the Japanese surrender on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. An unwitting parody of Tom Lehrer’s “Send In The Marines.” Failure – repeated, ignominious failure – is filtered out.
The consequences have been dire: costly for American well-being, murderously destructive out there, disintegrating of those international institutions and accords, arduously accomplished, that have lent a modicum of order and stability to inter-state dealings, and portents of nuclear war.
Let’s turn our attention to the last mentioned. Over the post-war years, the great powers came to the common conclusion that there was no such thing as victory in a nuclear war. Therefore, they bent to the task of controlling “The Bomb,” i.e. taking concrete measures to ensure that there could be no activation of nuclear weapons by miscalculation, technical error, or accident. Stability and control were the aims codified in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – all now abandoned or ignored by Washington.
They were complemented by clear understanding that the ‘rules of the road” governing their rivalry called for extreme caution in avoiding conflictual situations involving the U.S., the USSR or – later – China. Proxy wars, yes, but with restrictions. There was only one episode of Russian and American forces exchanging fire. That occurred in occasional dog fights between jets over the Yalu River separating Korea and the PRC. (A famous participant was Ted Williams of baseball legend).
Today, Washington leaders – civilian and military – have deviated from the path of prudence. Senior officials speak openly about the inevitability of a Sino-American war over a Taiwan Straits crisis. That scenario tops the list of the Pentagon’s strategic planning aims and purposes. Military budgets and force structures reflect it. A slew of articles and documents are emerging from government security bodies, affiliated think tanks (e.g. the Hudson Institute), institutes and Establishment journals like Foreign Affairs that analyze in minute details how that war could be conducted under diverse circumstances. Most often, the prospect of it escalating to the level of strategic nuclear exchanges is minimized. Some even talk about which side would have an advantage in the event.
The hard truth is that any conflict that entails American munitions hitting China proper has something like a 90% chance of escalating to nuclear war; 95% if the scatterbrained psychopath is in the Oval Office. That should be the premise incorporated in any plan for war against China. The casual way that these ‘strategists’ contemplate great power combat testifies to the fact that once minds, and emotions, take up residence in a fanciful universe of their imagining the prospect grows of their divorcing totally from reality.
[“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if the bomb blast don’t get you, the fallout must” – pithy words of a renowned nuclear strategist]
In regard to Iran, the United States has markedly increased the likelihood of its building a nuclear capability by giving up the international controls incorporated in the JPOA, by our implacable hostility and sanctions, and now by the heavy attack on Iran itself, an attack that has done little damage to Tehran’s nuclear capabilities while vastly strengthening incentives for it to go nuclear.
Most alarming are the unprecedented American strikes against Russia proper. At this moment, and as has been the case for two years at least, serving officers physically in Ukraine play the critical role in the launching of a variety of missiles supplied by the U.S.: HIMARs, (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) and ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System). They provide the critical targeting Intelligence, they insert the codes that activate the weapons, and initiate the firing. Ukrainian military men do nothing more than “press the button.” In short, we are waging war against Russia – carrying out direct attacks. on Russian soil. Moreover, we have encouraged the British, the French and the Germans to do exactly the same – some employing American provided weapons whose use requires explicit approval from Washington. It is the Kremlin’s restraint that has prevented this provocation from leading to dangerous escalation – up until now.
Set in this context, it should have been apparent that the Trump administration could not accept the humiliating defeat represented by a Ukraine settlement on any terms that met Russia’s core demands; nor could it engage seriously with Iran; nor could it consider reining in Israel; nor could it address China as an equal. No more than Biden or Trump in his first term.
At Home
The domestic scene offers a variation of this dismal reality. The Trump-led corps of suited militants and disciples are using coercive force of various kinds in random acts of destruction propelled by emotional drives for unfettered power, control and domination. The United States is being pushed down the path of Fascism American-style with stunning rapidity. Already, in critical respects we have ceased to be a Constitutional democracy.
Daily, the Trump Falange takes truthless, arbitrary actions that defy the law and the Constitution, that shut down entire departments of government duly established by Congress, that suppress programs dedicated to preserve public health and other citizens’ services, that reject guarantees of due process at every level of government. The Bill of Rights is being gutted – the 1st and 4th Amendments already are null and void. Trump cavalierly uses the Department of Justice as a weapon in vendettas against whomever he dislikes.
These literally mindless assaults on state infrastructure put in place over more than a century are accompanied by attacks on scientific knowledge, on our most notable research institutions, on our universities. Trump and his henchman are literal “know-nothings” who indeed know nothing, and don’t want to know since knowledge is a constraint on the destructive impulse and the lust for absolute ‘freedom’ to do as they please. It follows that there is no tolerance for an official who speaks factual truth without first checking that it conforms to whatever wavelength the boss is on that day. Thus, Tulsi Gabbard is admonished that she will walk the plank unless she immediately contradicts herself on the “obliteration” of Iranian nuclear facilities. She, another D.C. careerist, obliges without hesitation. Both parties are pleased by the outcome. Thus, Erika McEntarfer – the poor woman who directed the Bureau of Labor Statistics – is kicked out unceremoniously because she innocently believed that arithmetic is politically uncontroversial. One party is pleased by the outcome.
This rampage subjugates one institution after another like the German blitzkrieg overrunning hapless cities. In Congress, the Republicans are cowed into regimented automatons who resemble Prussian infantry or deputies to the old Supreme Soviet; the Democrats have reached the terminal point of their passive political suicide – comatose for so long that one barely notices their vanishing act; Barack Obama, who was the nation’s leader for 8 years, amuses himself producing documentaries for Netflix while the country descends into perdition; the Supreme Court majority under John Roberts are a tacit, yet vital accomplice – rewriting the Constitution as suits them; the economic powerhouses – financial barons, business moguls, Silicon Valley buccaneers – are licking their chops at the feast spread before them by the Trump-Musk-Bessent pillage of the national economy; the MSM are shills or neutered; church denominations and civic society play mute or mumble sotto voce; Trump’s lucrative extortion-protection racket targeting blue chip law firms and Ivy League schools would make Vito Genovese blush; universities in particular are disgracing themselves in their abject surrender. The great debates at the highest reaches of our elite universities appear to be on whether to deal with Trump from a kneeling position or a supine position.
A striking feature of this descent into unbridled autocracy, is that there is no ideological passion fueling it, no doctrine, no philosophy, no religious zeal. It is all about discharging emotions spawned in the depths of their roiled psyches. Just raw, crude tantrums committing flagrant acts of destruction and hurt. We must keep in mind that it is not only Trump. He has ignited and assembled a crew of wackos and misfits such a Robert Kennedy jr. who seemingly spends his waking hours devising ways to impair the health of Americans: cannibalizing the Center for Disease Control, slashing the National Institute of Health, restricting development and distribution of vaccines, suppressing scientific research at universities, demeaning those who actually know what they are talking about. Not surprisingly, this is someone who was diagnosed with worms in his brain and whose previous acts of civic behavior include strewing parts of a dismembered bear around Central Park in NYC Civilization has experienced nothing like this since the Dark Ages dropped the curtain on classical learning in the 6th and 7th centuries.
[The Democrats, for their part, are equally non-ideological. They offer no coherent refutation of Trump’s amputations of the national government or his recission of every enlightened federal program initiated over the past 90 years. This tragic turn was foreshadowed by Bill Clinton’s public declaration in 1997 that “the era of big government is over,” and his promotion of the Bowles-Simpson Commission’s plan to cut deeply into Social Security and Medicare in his 2012 speech at the Democratic Convention renominating Barack Obama. Today, their message in opposition is nothing more than an anti-Trump screed.]
Instead of ideology or doctrine we have a perverted Americanism. An artless blend of myth, doctored history and chauvinism, it has been inflated into an encompassing revelation that explains all, inspires all, justifies all. A one-size-fits-all creed cum faith that embraces every person, every circumstance, every act. Americanism acts as a Unified Field Theory of self-identity, collective enterprise, and the Republic’s enduring meaning. When one element is felt to be jeopardy, the integrity of the whole edifice becomes vulnerable. The drama of the American experience, our collective pageant of progress, used to be the great booster of morale and imparter of meaning. That tonic has lost much of its potency- in good part because it’s not the same country, and we no longer reign supreme in the world. So, crude attempts at restoration become the imperative for a shaky collective identity and impoverished individual self-esteem. In the past, American mythology energized the country in ways that helped it to thrive. Today, it is a dangerous hallucinogen that traps Americans in a time warp more and more distant from reality.
[At the psychological level, this approach is understandable since it plays to the United States’ strength: overweening self-confidence coupled to military power – thereby perpetuating the national myths of being destined to remain the world’s No. 1 forever, and of being in a position to shape the world system according to American principles and interests. The tension for a nation so constituted encountering objective reality does not favor heightened self-awareness or a change in behavior. Today, there is no foreign policy debate whatsoever. In addition, our vassal governments in Europe and elsewhere either have a national interest in preserving the warped American view of the world (Israel, Poland) or have been so denatured over the decades that they are incapable 0f doing other than to follow Washington obediently – despite already having tumbled over a number of cliffs and staring at a potentially fatal abyss re. China and Russia]
MAGA Dynamics
To understand what forces are turbocharging the MAGA war on pre-Trump America, one must face squarely the abnormal elements in the movement’s make-up.
A. A cult-like movement such as MAGA can do without a god “but never without a devil.” For the neo-Fascist, the devil(s) on whom you focus your wrath is far more important than a prophet who offers a vision of a New Jerusalem or some other utopia. Just as the gratification of destruction eclipses any impulse to construct – other than restoration of some starry-eyed vision of an America that never existed.
B. There are Devils galore. Enemy states, clandestine networks of evil-doers at home and abroad, the racial “them,” and all who manipulate or facilitate them by not joining the paranoid crusade to purge those malignant forces. In a bizarre way so it is with the Palestinians whose tragic fate is to become the surrogate for all the above objects of scorn – permitting our complicity in their inhumane treatment. They are stand-ins for every social grouping that we – or some segment of us – hate, fear, despise, scapegoat. At once Islamo-terrorists, the Iranian mullahs, Russian saboteurs, Commies, drug cartels, illegal immigrants from inter alia Mexico, South America, Haiti, Afghanistan, Somalia, blacks, gays & transgenders, liberal elitists, abrasive feminists etc. etc. etc. All loom behind the Palestinian face in the mind’s eye of those in thrall to the demons of violent prejudice. When the mix of inchoate emotions reaches a critical mass, and demands discharge, they find a substitute for whatever fixates them. The unrecognized Palestinian becomes a blank canvas on which to paint the bête noir that obsesses you. In a bitter coda to this tale of depraved humanity, might there be vestigial bigots – in Europe and America – who in their twisted psyche project onto the anonymous Palestinian an image of “The Jew” – getting his comeuppance? For most, it is remarkable good fortune that the murderers and torturers are Jews – thus shielding them from stray pangs of conscience since we can congratulate ourselves on making up for the 2,000-years persecution of them.
C. Displays of belligerence in word and deed tug on the emotional strings of those in the movement – even those who themselves lack the courage to act. Hence, the heroic savior is encouraged to raise the level of hostility and castigation of enemies in the rhetoric. He knows that “violence breeds fanaticism begets violence.”
D. The unspeakable has become the vernacular for Trump, his henchmen, his shock troops. Aggressive, hostile words – like violent deeds – nourish the lusts of the initiates while emboldening their prophet. Blind trust in the demagogic leader requires no collateral.
E. In the light of the above, a fanatical mass movement can only intensify and reach new heights of extremity. It can be suppressed – but it cannot moderate. Once it reaches a certain threshold its own momentum will propel it to a climax of one sort or another – invariably a destructive climax.
Conclusion
Fascism or neo-Fascism does not emerge spontaneously from the depths like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Conditions must be ripe, the ground prepared: combustible militants nursing their resentments must reach a critical mass, an inert populace must be numbed, a political class turned in on themselves, innate moral instincts sublimated, conventional norms of decency discredited. In this sense, Trump’s MAGA is the culmination of a degenerative process – not its cause.
We seem to have experienced a unique case of an auto-immune political cataclysm. The body politics’s instinctive mechanisms for reacting against (false) signs of a (fictitious) threatening invader become disoriented and begin to attack the host itself. A case of self-generated – if unintended – iatrogenic suicide. What was the perceived/felt threat catalyzing this process? 9/11 twenty-four years ago? There’s the puzzle.
In truth, there are no tangible, overt threats to the American body politic which, by any reasonable measure, should cause such an extreme reaction. We must look elsewhere – into the minds and emotions of a disturbed society. One with a defective gyroscope. One where nihilism has blurred cultural and social reference marks, fostering a cult of selfishness – one of whose manifestations is the fashioning of fantasy worlds wherein delusional imaginings have no consequences – backing Trump as a sort of projected wish fulfillment – just as millions embark on a project of self -reinvention or play games of make-believe like ‘Fantasy Football.’ Those are the conditions that have generated the perversions, and the infirmities, that have led to the present perilous state-of-affairs.
To be clear, we are not dealing with flaws of structure or procedure that could be remedied, mistaken policies that could be corrected, or sins that could be atoned. Rather, it is a pervasive corruption of our country’s societal software.
If this interpretation is correct, there is little chance of a reversal or of rectifying the situation. Societies are incapable of close critical self-examination except, with great rarity, under the most extreme circumstances. A complete breakdown as Germany and Japan experienced in WW II. In those cases, it was made possible by the guiding hand of a relatively benevolent external party. We Americans are on our own – tragically, we are lacking the self-awareness to ward off disaster and to regenerate a measure of collective construction.
Endnotes:
Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. He was the Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner is the author of numerous books, and over 80 articles and published papers. His most recent works are: Democracy Promotion and Islam; Fear and Dread in the Middle East; Toward a More Independent Europe; Narcissistic Public Personalities & Our Times. Read other articles by Michael. 
