Summary:
Fascism involves self hatred, directed at outgroup others under the guidance of a leader seeking total power and total support. The leader generates hatred of the outgroup, in order to build cohesion in the ingroup, and stop members of the ingroup talking with members of the outgroup, and getting different perspectives. This hatred may further help to reduce anxiety by distracting people from the real challenges their society faces and which the established elites don’t want to face either.
The Fascist leader
The fascist leader is always important. The leader tends to claim that he is insightful and clever, and able to benefit the nation through mysterious means; maybe God, fate, or The sacred Market is on their side? However, beyond raising hatred their actual policies and means of implementation of those policies are usually not very clear, or involve vague feel good statements: “We will build the economy to be strong again,” “we will restore true liberty,” “We will bring unity and might back to the country,” “We will avenge our fallen,” “We will stop [outgroup X] from destroying the country” etc.
The people who support the leader become special by supporting the leader’s heroic work and imagining they belong to that leader’s ingroup. Through this bonding and sense of shared labour, they become essential to the recovery of the pure Nation. They have purpose and meaning in their lives.
One certain thing is that although the Leader may attack the elites who he claims are persecuting and holding the populace down, the Leader will always seek the support of a large part of the establishment by rewarding them, and showing people what will happen to people who don’t support him. The wealth and power elites will be fine, as long as they don’t inspire his hatred, by challenging him or mocking him. They will also support him financially as it’s a worthwhile investment, if they judge he has any hope of winning.
Background to Hatred
The important thing is hatred. The Leader identifies those who are to be hated, and justifies that hatred along with the followers, who support the hatred. This builds the ingroup and its loyalties through dismissing other people.
There is always a background to the hate. Hatred does arise out of nowhere. The people have to be desperate, or motivated to embrace hatred against fellow citizens.
However, as well as vague hatred towards the elites who have failed in their job of helping the people, there may well be widespread and painful self-hatred.
In the contemporary USA, for example, the promise is that everyone can get rich. That promise is no longer true, if it has ever been true. However, at one time upwards mobility was possible for a lot of the population so it is part of the story and of people’s experience or their parents experience. Nowadays many of the middle classes may perceive their status as precarious and that they are facing a downward trajectory, or their children will be going down, due to education debts, increasing housing prices, costs of medical procedures, costs of energy, lack of wage increases above inflation, etc.
The only common explanation allowed by mainstream capitalist politics for this perceived decline in possibilities of prosperity, is personal failure or lack of hard work, not economic structures, not the real power and wealth elites, not ecological collapse, not business failure, not ‘free markets’ leading to plutocracy, or whatever. So they main option to explain things is self-hatred for that failure. They have failed their families and in their lives, by not doing what is expected or demanded for survival. If they are religious, then they may have to hate themselves for sinning, of for not getting God to bless them with money, as well. Personal failure often generates self-hatred, which acts to reinforce this resolution, and it is likely to be common in this kind of situation. Self-hatred is a powerful, discomforting and unacceptable force.
Formerly reasonably well off people may also see, or think that they see, that minorities are receiving help and gaining a status that they feel they were never offered. Employers may say, “you did not get the job because you are white”, rather than you did not get the job because we wanted to give it to the boss’s nephew, or because you did not have any experience. This ‘pleasant’ excuse builds added resentment against outgroup members. Or people may see that those who would not have received work, such as women, can now get better work than they do. The formerly well off have gone downhill, and hatred is easily shifted from self to others if people are given an excuse, or if the hatred against others is shared and reinforced by the ingroup.
The Force of Hatred
The fascist leader relieves people by saying the problem is not the result of personal failure but because of outsiders: communists, gay people, transgender people, feminists, Jews, immigrants, Muslims, atheists, Black People, Chinese people, etc. These people as groups, realistically have almost no influence on what happens in society, they are minorities. However, the leader tells their followers that the presence of these foul people explains why their prosperity has declined, their survival is threatened, and why they feel displaced from their own culture. The leader may also attack some people who might be real obstacles to the leader such as opposition parties, the media that is not 100% behind them and so on. These people can also be threatened and used in order to create the sense of a vast noxious conspiracy from which the leader will save ‘us’ good Americans (or whatever).
Self-hatred transformed
Under the Leader’s direction self-hatred can be suppressed, transformed and projected onto the scum he has identified, while the faithful validate themselves by working to reclaim the country’s glorious past. The point of projection, and why it works as a defense mechanism, is that it allows people to stop feeling self-hatred through feeling hatred for others.
As the leader keeps harping on how the outsiders are corrupting, destructive and evil, and need to be removed, no one need feel guilty about their hatred or about attacking the scum themselves. Attacking these people is perhaps distasteful as people might rather not engage with the vile creatures at all, but it is heroic. People who fight against the outgroups are glorious self-sacrificing martyrs to the great cause. If supporters are arrested and convicted it is because the minorities have corrupted the legal system, into a system of witch hunts, or they are really hostages to the corrupt order, held captive until the leader can free them, and welcome them back into the fold. Judges who convict well-intentioned fellow fascists are among the real enemies of the Country, and will have their comeuppance under the new regime of the Leader.
The Fascist leader promises to break the destructive power of these minorities, to restore the image of the perfect citizen, male, straight and of the right race and religion.
Women
Women who are affiliated with the brave and honorable men who attack corrupting scum are acceptable, as long as they recognise the prime function of women is motherhood and caring for the family. They too must show their purity by supporting their men, hating the minorities, oppositions and women who support minorities, or who want other things than motherhood and family and who are not chaste.
Hatred serves the movement and blocks communication
The hatred not only builds a more relaxed psychology for the haters (they are now justified and hating others not themselves), and they have been given a promising (if vague) imagined future, but it forges ties between the faithful and gives them a simple unity of purpose to get rid of (or break the power) of those the Leader has identified as evil. This purpose fills the previous self-hating aimlessness of their lives. As said previously, the hatred they share for these outsiders bonds them to the leader, to the ingroup, and to the vision of the future they choose.
This hatred further blocks communication as the fascists know that the outgroups have nothing worth listening to, and that anything people in the outgroups might say would, at best, be corrupting, and therefore to be rejected automatically. Likewise, people in the outgroups refrain from trying to communicate with fascists, because they think fascists are vicious and stupid. Fascists name call the opposition and the opposition responds similarly.
The abuse may trigger existing self-hatred, but this time the fascists know they are in the right, and can strike back transferring their hatred onto the abusers. This kind of action reinforces the lack of communication and the lack of mutual respect or mutual empathy. It keeps groups apart.
Calling fascists names serves the fascists, and helps them to build and rigidify the ingroup and outgroups and helps justify their cause – people will not listen to their real grievances. When outsiders call the Leader names, this also shows that the Leader is one of ‘us’ suffering the same condemnation and persecution as ‘we’ do. This abuse shows the greatness of the cause, and its necessity, and justifies action against other citizens.
The cycle of hatred becomes a positive feedback cycle, which then helps reinforce and justify the hatred, which is one of the bases of the Leader’s power.
Political Hatred as Defense Mechanism
The mutual hatred may also distract people from real and overwhelming challenges the society faces, such as climate change, predatory capitalism, growing differentials in wealth, alienation from the state etc. allowing the situation to get worse, and allowing the elites to avoid doing anything to solve the problems that people face. The elites may encourage the fascism, precisely because it allows this avoidance, and the Leader does not appear to face up to the real problems either. This also helps reduce the stress of fascist followers. They can relax, knowing that their are no problems the leader cannot solve, by getting rid of the evil outgroups that arouse anxiety.
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