The American Empire is in decline. That’s the issue we need to discuss, how we arrived here, how our priorities and myths were failures of principle and imagination.
Trumpism is a violent denial of the decline and our mistakes, a double-down on our sins of white supremacy.
Trumpism is a violent denial of the decline and our mistakes, a double-down on our sins of white supremacy.
Fascism festers in failing powers. It’s an alternative to accepting and understanding and learning from mistakes. It’s an angry delusion centering in conspiracy theories and scapegoats that demands the failures be reinforced by more forceful failures.
If we unburdened ourselves with empire and the white supremacist project of hegemony, if we disabused ourselves of the myths of exceptionalism and hypercapitalism and focused on bettering peoples lives instead of conquering we could make something real and true.
Trump and Republicans deny the reality that their choices have brought us to a point of decline and crisis. Their alternate world is a projection of their mistakes, their flawed, inhuman projects. It is angry, violent denial, the essence of fascism.
As long as this country continues to deny the severity of its situation we will not only be susceptible to fascism but actively foster and empower it. Trump is a symptom of a larger and everpresent disease. This country has been heading here for a long, long time.
