We’re long past the point of wondering why Donald Trump’s most ridiculous statements don’t cause his adherents to question their support, or his sanity. The tragic truth is, they want to believe in what he says, whether it’s about immigrants eating pets, toilets that need to be flushed a dozen times, or windmills causing cancer. It’s all part of a fascist fever dream.
Fascism is primarily an aesthetic movement. It’s about myth, not policy. Those myths include both hagiographies and demonologies that are as believable as what motivated the witch crazes of a few centuries ago. “They’re eating the dogs” is just as credible as, “Goody Proctor’s astral projection is tearing at my entrails.” Both are absurd, and yet people want to believe in them. Or, perhaps more accurately, because they are absurd, some people want to believe in them, as long as these absurdities feed their dark fantasies of the world, the flesh and the devil.
The fascist fever dream holds the dreamers tightly in a narcotic embrace. They won’t awaken because you point out the ridiculousness of the dream logic, or present controverting evidence, or make an appeal to just snap out of it. These dreams are too powerful, playing to vulnerabilities in the dreamer’s psyche, assuaging their fears without actually addressing the reasons behind them.
In short, they want to believe.
It’s important to remember that. We shouldn’t be stumped why this election is close, no more than Germans should have been baffled by the appeal of a ridiculous band of misfits, clad in comic opera uniforms, screaming about Jewish conspiracies. Certainly, there are people who support Trump for less fevered reasons, from the transactionalists who focus on a single issue at the risk of destroying democracy and the rule of law, to the careerists who just want a seat at the table (or in the bunker). But the real core of Trumpism, the hypermassive black hole around which all of these other groups orbit, is the army of somnambulists who want to believe.
In a previous age, fever dreams like these were harder to create and sustain. The Salem witch trials flared up and burned out in a couple of years. The witch craze in Europe lasted longer, in part because of the active encouragement of religious and secular authorities. But there were no mass media to constantly promote these fantasies. (Texts like the Malleus Malificarum were more instructional manuals on how to deal with witches and their demonic masters than widely-read propaganda tracts.) But eventually, after exacting a tool paid in fear, persecution, torture, imprisonment, and murder, it faded.
Now, of course, we have both one-directional mass media and multi-directional social media. On the blog War By Other Means, the author argued that Twitter has turned into a non-stop machine for producing “fascist slop,” 24/7 misinformation at a mass scale. By “misinformation,” of course, we don’t mean occasional factual errors. Instead, we’re talking about a kind of political pornography. It doesn’t resemble real human beings and how they relate to one another. Instead, as with all forms of pornography, it depicts the subjects in the most exaggerated ways possible, to give people the fastest and strongest jolt of what they really want.
We can debate to what extent to which the MAGA faithful actually believe in a cabal of child-killing Democratic elites, hordes of murderers and rapists crossing the border with the encouragement of the White House, or microchips hidden in vaccines. Maybe people believe in this nonsense in the same way that they’re willing to indulge in the kayfabe of “professional wrestling.” The important thing is that a large number of Americans want to believe in the semi-lucid nightmare over the waking world.
Elections don’t dispel fascist fever dreams, nor do inaugurations. However the events of the next couple of months play out, many dreamers will want to continue to dream, and they will find a ready supply of exciting new hallucinations on their phones, tablets, and laptops.
