10 keys to fascism, and how Republicans are using them

If anyone doubts Republicans want a dictatorship, all you have to do is look at their actions. They’re using 10 keys to fascism in the hope, conscious or not, of unlocking a future where they and they alone are in power.

It’s not just Trump’s big lie about the stolen election or the Jan. 6 insurrection. Those are just two of at least 10 elements in a strategy to dismantle American democracy and replace it with its antithesis. This is the Republican objective.

Fear

It’s no secret that fear is the most effective means of turning out voters, and Republicans have been using it effectively for decades. Fear of the bomb, of the Russians, of hippies, of foreign terrorists, of immigrants — you name it.

It doesn’t matter what they make you afraid of, as long as you’re afraid. The best evidence of this is the 180-degree pivot from directing our fear toward Russia in the 20th century to ignoring and even enabling Russian aggression under Donald Trump. This massive flip-flop exposed Republicans’ use of fear for what it really is: not an attempt to protect the country, but a naked power grab.

The next step in the process was to redirect the fear from some outside “threat,” and focus it on domestic political opponents. When “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat” replaced “better dead than red” as the Republican rallying cry, it was clear the corner had been turned.

Fear was no longer merely a means to winning elections, to be used when a convenient bogeyman like Nikita Khrushchev or Osama bin Laden presented himself. It was an avenue toward single-party rule in a nation where compromise was anathema and civil opposition, or even daring to question, was treason. And the bogeyman was the other party.

Nationalism

Wrapping yourself in the flag to cloak your own ambitions — and to direct hostility toward political foes — is another time-honored fascist tradition. If you can identify yourself with symbols of the nation as a whole, you can create the impression that your ideas are synonymous with patriotism.

Yours, and yours alone. By extension, this means that those who hold different ideas are traitors. They’re not real Americans, especially if they look different or speak with an accent. They should “go back to where they came from,” even if they were born in America.

Republicans have been exceedingly effective at appropriating the Stars and Stripes over the years. Trump merely took it to the next level when he began insisting that anyone who opposed him was guilty of treason.

Nationalism is a form of absolutism (see below). It’s manifest destiny; “my country, right or wrong.” It labels those on the outside as inherently inferior and resents them when they try to immigrate and “take what is ours.” Meanwhile, it creates an outsized mythology based on self-aggrandizement while refusing to acknowledge any mistakes or misdeeds, especially those directed at “the other.”

World War II Japanese internment camps. Native American land grabs and massacres. Slavery. Jim Crow. Denying women the right to vote. That’s just the short list. The sad fact is that acknowledging a country’s misdeeds and celebrating its greatness aren’t contradictory. They’re both a part of history. But nationalists and absolutists don’t see it that way. They prefer intellectual fascism.

Corruption

In this approach, principles are meaningless — whether they’re narrower principles that drive trade policy and health care, or broader principles such as democracy, human rights, and free expression. Loyalty is everything, as it was with Trump. And “unity” doesn’t mean fighting for something we all agree on; it means simply following the party line, as dictated by someone else, without questioning. (Sorry, Mitt and Liz.)

Trump’s unprincipled presidency became the ultimate field test for this approach, and it worked. Suppressing principle for the sake of “winning” is perhaps the most direct path to fascism there is, and it’s the path Republicans have remained on, even with Trump out of office.

It’s fashionable to believe that Republicans are being held captive by Trump, but that’s far too simplistic an assessment. They continue to support him because they agree with him — not his principles, but his goals and his methods of achieving them. They want power, and they believe his approach is the best way of attaining it.

It’s no accident that Trump is one of the most corrupt (if not the most corrupt) presidents in history. Unprincipled and amoral people aren’t just prone to corruption; they thrive on it.

Obstructionism

One of the most reliable methods of seizing power is through obstructionism. Refusing to work “across the aisle” creates resentment on both sides and stokes animosity.

Eventually, both sides get so sick of the gridlock that they begin to become more open to seizing power for themselves by any means necessary — and holding it without the consent of the governed. (This is why control of the Supreme Court, and attempts to remake it along partisan lines, has become such a potent tool — not as a way of protecting the rights of the minority, but of imposing the power of the minority over everyone else.)

Republicans’ insistence on obstructionism isn’t a secret. Mitch McConnell has said it directly: “One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration.” Not working together for a policy more people can agree upon. Not even crafting an alternative policy. Pure, unadulterated obstruction.

It’s basically my way or the highway, which is the exact approach taken by fascism.

Division

Obstructionism is built on division and, in turn, further feeds it, sending us further down the path toward fascism. No one in the modern era has been more successful in dividing the nation than Trump has, but Republicans were stoking division long before he arrived on the scene, by making compromise a dirty word, even though it’s one of the foundations of a successful republic.

The more attention is paid to hot-button issues that one or both sides see as all-or-nothing concerns (whether they really are or not), the less room or appetite there is for compromise. The only alternative to compromise is one side imposing its will on the other. The refusal of Republicans to even entertain the thought of compromise when it’s offered creates a willingness on the other side to go it alone and try to impose its will on the situation.

Which, of course, creates further resentment. Obstructionism is, at its core, Republicans going all in on a zero-sum game that can only result in fascism for one side or the other, or continued gridlock and the death knell of effective governance.

Absolutism

The means of getting to obstructionism is absolutism, an unwillingness not just to compromise, but to even consider other alternatives.

Those who embrace absolutism are convinced they already know it all and have nothing left to learn — least of all from those they disagree with.

Absolutists use confidence as a substitute for truth, which is why they’re so opposed to science. They see the scientific method as weak because it’s continually shifting course as new facts are presented. According to absolutists, this means science can’t be trusted. The only alternative is trusting in some authority (hence the term authoritarianism) who acts like he’s got all the answers: He’s the expert on everything, and he alone can fix it.

Ultimately, absolutism is just an excuse for laziness. If you already know everything, there’s no reason to actually think. You just pay someone else who claims to know everything pretend to do the thinking for you — even though he doesn’t really know much of anything except how to manipulate you into following him by claiming “I alone can fix it.”

Isolationism

It’s no coincidence that supporters of isolationism in the 1930s were often sympathetic to Hitler’s Germany. Father Charles Coughlin, the “radio priest,” was a prime example. A demagogue very much in the Trumpian mold, he shared Hitler’s antisemitic views and wanted to promoted “less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity.”

Trump’s friendly attitude toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia, ostensibly for the sake of “putting America first,” was eerily reminiscent of Coughlin’s approach toward Hitler’s Germany. Two demagogues supporting two dictators.

America-first isolationism has always been appealing because the idea of “looking after your own first” is deeply ingrained in the American, and human psyche. Moreover, the idea of staying out of foreign wars is, understandably, a popular one. But bringing the troops home (or keeping them here) is no more than a means to an end in this stratagem.

The real goal is twofold. First, numb listeners to the dangers of dictatorship by dismissing them (or even lauding them, as Trump did with Putin and Kim Jong). In doing so, you’re able to deflect attention from overseas threats by minimizing them, while refocusing the ire of true believers on domestic foes: anyone who thinks differently here.

This emphasis dovetails nicely evangelicals’ insistence on “separating yourself from the world” and its evils (a sort of spiritual isolationism), which helps explain why many evangelicals find this approach so appealing: Those on the other side are no longer the “loyal opposition,” they’re “tools of the devil.” Once this thinking becomes mainstream, another Rubicon has been crossed.

Suppression

If you distrust the other side, the next step is to strip them of their power. This has been done over the years through voter intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to strip voters who might oppose you of their rights.

Gerrymandering is another means of suppression. So is questioning the legitimacy of an election after the fact so confidently and persistently that democracy itself is suppressed.  

Those who feel threatened seek to gain or keep power by using suppression when they can’t win legitimately, because legitimacy ranks a distant second to winning.

But suppression is even broader than this: It involves suppression of free thought, as well. While Republicans rail against Democrats for engaging in “cancel culture,” they practice an even more extreme version of it. Instead of “canceling” people because of (real or perceived) ethical breaches, Republicans “cancel” people for simply not being one of them.

If they make waves, they’re “Republicans in name only,” who are effectively guilty of treason — there’s that word again. Again, principle means nothing; loyalty is everything.

Propaganda

It’s no accident that Republicans’ false claim that Trump somehow won the election has been labeled “the big lie.” It’s a page ripped directly from the playbook of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

This ties propaganda back to suppression, which is necessary in order to keep it going, which brings us to the next key to fascism.

Violence

To reiterate Goebbels’ observation, it’s “vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent.”

Suppression can only occur by brute force, because people don’t like being suppressed. But if the group that seeks power is in the minority, it can’t use the power of the state to impose its will. If it controls the White House, but not Congress, it can use executive power in an effort to create an “imperial presidency,” as both Trump and Richard Nixon have done.  

“I’ll do what I want, and the rest of you can go to hell.”

But if they lack even that mechanism, they need to find a different source of power, so they encourage violence by their supporters in order to create fear among the majority. That’s what happened Jan. 6. Then, if the majority responds in kind, they’re accused of acting like bullies or trying to suppress freedom (which is, of course, exactly what the minority is trying to do).

The Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol was the fruit of this, but violence need not be physical or even carried out to be effective. The threat of violence can be enough to cow opponents into silence. This is one reason, along with its appeal to their constituents, that Republicans support open-carry gun laws: You don’t want to mess with someone who’s packing, even if he’s dead wrong.

This brings us back to the concept of fear, where we started, and it becomes clear how these seven keys all work in concert with one another.

Could Democrats or any other group fall into this same fascist trap? Indeed they could. When you exchange principle for the pursuit of raw power, that’s what happens. Democrats, remember, were once the ones advocating for slavery.

None of this is about principle or policy or anything else that goes on in a thinking person’s brain. It’s nothing more than a thirst to rule without opposition, based prejudice, raw emotion, and manipulation. It’s a power grab. It just so happens that, right now, Republicans are the ones doing most of the grabbing.

Stephen H. Provost is the author of Trumpism on Trial, a three-book series on the Trump presidency available on Amazon.