Neo-Fascism is Alive and Well in The U.S.A. Kelson Maynard

 

According to the Trump administration, imperiling the lives of African descendant people, other peoples of color, trans and queer people, gay and lesbian people, feminists, and migrant communities of color, will make the United States of America great.  What psycho-social phantasm folly?  If fascism is defined as a far-right authoritarian political ideology and praxis characterized by ultra-nationalism, dictatorial power, the suppression of dissent, under the political leadership of the Donald Trump administration, the United States of America has become a site of danger, tyranny, and new form of fascism for the above-mentioned peoples. 

The rationale given for this new form of fascism is that these groups and communities pose a dangerous threat to United States of America Christian civilization.  They are responsible for whatever is wrong in this society.  Thus, they must be criminalized, erased, excluded, eliminated.  They must be deprived of fundamental freedoms, even reproductive freedom and the right to gender self-identification. 

The political and social demands of these groups and communities, their very existence, are categorized as destructive forces, a social virus that must be destroyed.  The strategies of rights-stripping, historical and social erasure, deportations, incarcerations are all intended to destroy these harmful others.

Paradoxically, these strategies aimed at defeating and destroying harmful others, this neo-fascism, are justified as their commitment to political, social, and religious freedom.  The perpetuators of these anti-gender political and social strategies advance the idea that being gay is worse than being a Nazi.  Thus, the open display of nazi salutes, and the normalization of Nazi ideology are tolerated, while gays are demonized as a social virus, and anyone defending gay and other marginalized peoples and communities is perceived as an intellectual virus.  Both must be destroyed.

This new form of fascism is aligned with neo-liberalism’s practice of social abandonment poor and marginalized groups and classes within thew social order and process of white supremacist hetero-patriarchal capitalism.  The Trump administration is actively withdrawing government funding for health care and education that these communities and classes desperately need.  They are weaponizing government funding to social institutions to achieve their objectives of reordering society along fascistic lines.

These strategies of stripping the rights of African descendant people, other peoples of color, trans and queer people, gay and lesbian people, feminists, and migrant communities of people of color, and using the denial of government funding to revise history and control narratives along hetero-patriarchal white supremacist lines, are in accord with the history of fascism.  Neo-fascism is alive and well in the United States of America.