People’s mistake is thinking fascism is an evil ideology that uses any tactics necessary to achieve its goals.

What they don’t realize is that “ideology” and “tactics” need to be reversed in this statement: fascism is a cynical tactic that uses any ideology necessary to achieve its goals.

It will hate groomers on Tuesday and find grooming “the only way to raise responsible, patriotic citizens” on that same exact Tuesday, later in the afternoon.

It will hate nepotism and family connections in the same breath as it calls Ivanka “smart” for wielding her presidential clout to enrich herself.

It will defend the sanctitude of the life belonging to a fetus right up until the main threats to that fetus are poor access to medical care, financial stress leading to miscarriages, and our unsustainable car infrastructure killing off pregnant mothers right alongside every other type of person. THOSE fetuses were killed by the laws of nature of course, (and they certainly lack a level of sanctity that competes with Americans’ right to be forced to drive twenty minutes to the nearest grocery store and ninety minutes to their place of employment on threat of homelessness. That “right” is inviolable.)

There’s no ideology here. No utopia on the map. No belief about how to improve society. There is merely the last, dying , defiant warcry of a certain subset of corporations. A subset that profits more from maintaining underclasses than they do from providing a product to a stable society. A subset that needs to keep reminding black people that if they don’t like working for dirt wages at Amazon, they can always get the police involved and die with a police officer’s knee on their neck.

And the question isn’t, “can our ideology defeat theirs?” Because there was never a single belief to defeat in the first place. The question here is “can democracy survive?”

And so far, it’s holding up better than it did in Italy and Germay. 1930s Germany wouldn’t have thrown the Patriot Front in jail. Wouldn’t have convicted the Wolverine Watchmen, either. Certainly wouldn’t be prosecuting the Proud Boys who showed up to Jan 6.