Why Fascism ALWAYS Fails - Pt. II

Trumpist fascism will inevitably fail no matter how much chaos and violence it unleashes on America first.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Read part 1 here!

Why Democracies Are Better Than Autocracies

The pleasant thing about liberal democracy is that when there’s a gulf between the promises of leadership and the results of their efforts, free speech and voting allow a nation to try something or someone new before the wounded, ambitious leader can double-down and triple-down on their failures.

The numerous checks and balances foundationally designed into constitutional democracies, along with the legal requirement of at least a plurality of public approval, mean that democracies are much more institutionally protected from psychopaths than countries with violent regime change. Donald Trump is an admitted wannabe dictator who did in fact attempt an insurrectionist coup but, fortunately, America’s government is democratic enough that his most corrupt instincts and desires were curbed just enough for the transfer of power to happen. A second Trump term would obviously test American institutions much further, although—sadistic political violence from his underlings or frightened beta submissiveness from Republicans in Congress excepting—he’d only Constitutionally have four more years in power.

Checks and balances make governmental decision-making a bit institutionally slower in democracies, but the same conditions in autocracies that allow them to make good decisions fast also allow them to make bad decisions fast. And because dictators inevitably start to believe their propagandized mythology, their decisions inevitably turn bad fast.

Liberal democracies are also much better at ideologically handling occasionally necessary course-corrections because their penchant for free speech and term limits means that the state’s entire media apparatus is not based upon pretending the leader is a magnificent genius who is never wrong, and will never lead the nation astray as long as mindless loyalty is maintained above any other civic or moral value. Because there are consistent elections, leaders in democratic governments do not have to intrinsically personalize literally every development in domestic politics and foreign policy, and can more fluidly change with evolving current events and public opinion. This makes for better, more stable internal politics.

The Example Of Putin’s Russia

We can see the failures of authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia quite clearly. Personalized totalitarianism is obviously what’s driving Vladimir Putin’s historically unprovoked and sociopathic war in Ukraine. Decades of economic mismanagement and omnipresent corruption in Russia have forced Putin time and time again to invade nearby neighbors to reverse his sinking approval ratings, and this time it was Ukraine’s turn. Unfortunately Ukraine’s contemporary turn away from autocratic Russia and toward greater political and economic ties with the democratic West, and Ukraine’s subsequent rising prosperity, is humiliating for Putin’s domestic politics, and this latest brutal invasions and forced wartime patriotism are again his only political crutch to stay in power—along with his trademark arresting, poisoning, and pushing out of windows his political rivals. While Russia continues suffering from kleptocracy and a lower standard of living than virtually all the rest of Europe, Putin must distract the Russian people with hail mary attempts at territorial conquest while blaming America, NATO, the EU, and the West as a whole for Russians’s floundering standards of living.

As described in Pt 1 of this essay series, Putin’s inner circle has predictably filled up with brown-nosing yes men so conditioned toward surrealist, fascist flattery that Putin spectacularly and disastrously miscalculated and mismanaged his “special military operation” of Ukraine. Putin evidently received the doctored intelligence reports on Ukrainian capabilities and patriotism he wanted to hear—rather than the honest ones he needed to hear—and had no idea how much kleptocratic rot, theft, and fraud had hollowed out the Russian military’s readiness and effectiveness. Putin’s perfunctory conferences on the eve of the invasion with visibly nervous underlings endorsing his made up rationales for “liberating” Ukrainians in very large rooms with preposterously long tables made Putin look like a strong, smart leader, but only for idiots like Donald Trump who completely fell for it. Putin’s strongman theatrics with shirtless horse-riding jaunts, participation-award hockey games, military parades, huge electoral landslides thanks to stuffed ballot boxes and voter intimidation efforts by police forces have at last met reality with Putin’s invasion bogged down in eastern Ukraine crippling a generation of Russian young men and depleting the formidable Soviet stockpile of tanks, ammunition, and the other military equipment.

Meanwhile, the EU has become more politically solidified, NATO has become relevant again and been boosted with the entry of both Finland and Sweden. There is now more NATO presence on Russia’s borders than ever before.

All of this helps explains why successful authoritarian states are so hard to find. Autocracies and their nationalisms are mere façades for egotistical psychopaths to keep political power by any means necessary despite the inevitable subpar economic and social performances that come from just one temperamental person making all the decisions and allowing little or no dissension. Bad policies and worse ideas get repeated again and again as any dissent is seen as disloyalty and considered treasonous against the leader, the people, and the nation.

Unfortunately, voters in democracies occasionally flirt with voting for authoritarianism because wannabe dictators are able to fool gullible voters that they, and only they, can fix a country’s problems (Trump’s “I alone can fix it” quote is the perfect example). Of course, these voters often don’t understand how complicated some problems are, and don’t realize that it’s a positive attribute of democracies that political pluralism helps sort through all the possible solutions to problems and ultimately settle on some compromise that are as fair as possible for our wildly diverse populace and our myriad of sometimes diametrically opposed special interest groups.

For example, in America our objectively crappy healthcare “system” is the wobbly result of many disparate and inter-related issues such as hospitals and insurance companies bilking each other for every dollar possible, insurance companies not actually wanting to pay for people’s healthcare costs, most people getting healthcare from their employer, and a large cesspool of lobbyists and political ideologues fighting over whether government should be involved and regulate anything at all. The idea that some random “strongman” can just come in and give everyone cheaper and better healthcare that covers more people without the government paying more money is absurd. A dumb, irresponsible promise made by an idiot to gullible, healthcare policy ignoramus voters.

Many voters unfortunately do not realize that totalitarian strongmen who say things like that only appear as if they are effective, strong, masculine, or whatever other adjective they’re trying to project because they are simply lying, and because as they gain little amounts of political power, they immediately set out to intimidate and control every media source possible into helping them orchestrate their self-congratulatory, choreography of propaganda. It doesn’t take a full national saturation of intimidated and cowed media organizations long before a dictator’s cultists begin to truly believe that the dictator can do no wrong, and that the problems not fixed and promises not kept are the fault of an abstract, invisible yet omnipotent cabal of traitors domestic or international that warrants further oppression, suspension of rights, and infringements on civic liberties. Let a dictatorship go on long enough, as in North Korea, and gullible citizens will even begin to believe the dictator golfs nothing but holes-in-one and doesn’t poop. It’s not like dictators will ever allow media coverage of things that don’t glorify the regime, or permit dissenting opinions on the country’s policies or direction.

That so many American conservatives are enamored with Putin’s projections of strength and militaristic masculinity despite his government’s clear ineptitude shows how foolish they are for falling for Putin’s obvious fake news, and Donald Trump is chief among them. The US military might enlist female, gay and trans soldiers, have poetry readings on some base somewhere, and do any number of other things that conservatives feel aren’t “masculine” or “tough” enough but, if Russia is effectively stalemated against a Ukrainian military using America’s old, hand-me-down weapons systems built in the 90s, imagine what spectacular damage the US could do to the entire Russian frontline with a couple hundred sorties of F-22s and F-35s, stealth bombers, the Navy’s Mediterranean 6th Fleet, and the US military’s unparalleled combined arms capabilities. The US could find and destroy every piece of Russia’s military hardware emitting the faintest electromagnetic signals in a couple of hours, and Russian soldiers everywhere would be abandoning their transport vehicles, tanks, trenches, air fields, and bases to flee Ukraine on foot. That is real strength, not Putin’s propaganda videos of shirtless Russian soldiers that Trump, GOP members of Congress, and conservative media pundits have such a homoerotic fancy for.

Autocratic, nationalistic propaganda is ultimately a pandering carnival trick for morons, which is why it’s endlessly frustrating that voters in liberal democracies such as America, who enjoy the robust freedoms of consensus-driven policy changes, bureaucracy employee turnover, and law-based institutions, would be apologists for a murdering psychopath like Putin.

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