The United States and the Normalization of 21st-Century Fascism

I never cease to be amazed at our tremendous capacity to swallow the 21st-century fascism represented by Donald Trump and, in the process, to normalize what just a century ago led to one of the worst episodes in human history. The pathetic image of European leaders at the Trump-Putin summit on Ukraine is evidence that the EU finds it harder to establish its own position than to remain subservient to the United States, no matter how much the latter may run counter to European interests, as has also been seen with the tariffs.

Since the pandemic, the fascistization of American society and politics has proceeded at full speed, driven by propaganda and the concentration of capital and media power. Trump himself is a media mogul, a shaper of public opinion in a country where the Democratic Party has been unable to emancipate itself from the same capital that brought Trump to the White House, and where social unrest is as deep as it is unresolved.

The relationship between the "land of the free" and fascism is not new, and it takes us back to the racial segregation that prevailed well into the second half of the 20th century, preventing black people from accessing education, public transportation, and political representation, among others. Nazism also had a wide echo in American society a century ago, when figures like Rockefeller financed the eugenics experiments of the Third Reich, and Henry Ford became an "inspiration" for Hitler himself, as he explains in the Mein Kampf. He Führer applied the mass production chain to the concentration camps of the Reich, and decorated Ford in 1938.

Although the official entry of the United States into World War II on the side of the Allies meant the prohibition or limitation of activities of Nazi and fascist organizations in the country, the truth is that during the years the West strongly persecuted people accused of sympathizing with communism: from artists like Chaplin and Orson Welles to scientists like Oppenheimer and Einstein. Today's communists would be all those considered woke, not to mention those who pose any minimal criticism or alternative to the reactionary Make America Great Again (MAGA).

Trump's America perfectly embodies the definition of fascism of intellectuals like Paxton: the conversion of immigration into the internal enemy and the invention of external enemies like Islam and Venezuela; the denial of both climate change and science, summarized in Vice President Vance's maxim that "universities are the enemy"; a nationalism as exclusionary as it is contradictory to a nation built on immigration; the criminalization of feminism and all diversity hand in hand with an aggressive virility; and the concentration of powers, after the Supreme Court has limited the power and autonomy of the federal courts; and the recent creation of ICE, an armed force parallel to the CIA and the FBI, in charge of raids against racialized people... Without much critical spirit, we swallow, as if they were anecdotes, extremely serious events that occur there, but that also radiate into our society, not only through think tanks of the far right connected with Trumpism but also and above all of culture.

Of course, the material conditions of the people and the transfer of capital to the richest are in the background, but culture is the main variable in terms of the naturalization of fascism, and Hollywood, the tool that makes us continue uncritically considering the United States as the "good guys" in the movie... saves the entire world from the umpteenth alien threat... And what happens in the United States – where the welfare state no longer exists, where armed and systemic violence is part of everyday life – sooner or later ends up happening here, although resistance may also arise.

Therefore, the response to fascism, in addition to being political, must be cultural. And this begins with decolonizing ourselves from American mass culture, so present in our daily lives. Not by vetoing it, as the West has done with Russian creators, but by looking at it critically. But it also means being able to collectively imagine a non-dystopian society in which everyone can enjoy a life worth living. A society in which the aspiration of the impoverished is not to become millionaires, nor of women to reproduce patriarchal power roles, nor of environmentalists to take refuge in their private gardens. A society in which bullies are not the leaders of either the world or a community of neighbors. And where culture is a tool to set us free, not to indoctrinate us.