How the fascism that affirms identities destroys bodies and thinking

The affirmation and defense of Identity and affect lead to mass murder and the silencing of dissent against it. Professionals will be dismissed from employment, plebeians protesting in the streets will be murdered.

Fascism starts with your identity, based on your community membership, linked to a kind of property right as well as to the culture of authenticity. Fascism is populist and communitarian, though its idea of democracy is that of team work and unity around opinions established by leaders and bosses who must be obey and whose statements cannot be criticized, nor their demands resisted or disobeyed. Do that and immediate violence results. This was done to me under "liberal" auspices. (The forces organizing this are savvy and know what they are doing, and how easily many people will be deceived.).

Political life in America is a media-driven affair that consists of performative position-takings which are then evaluated by audiences in the same manner that candidates are voted on. This means that argument of any kind is mainly rhetorical and is about persuasion and how people feel. If people disagree with a statement, they will feel personally affected and threatened, and if they can possibly believe that their identity is at stake, then they will feel it is, and the hearing of statements they disagree with becomes an existential threat. All words then are fighting words.

(Certainly, the effect of this is of course to shut down whatever remained of free speech, starting with college campuses and starting with what the governmental and business interests in power think is the easiest target now that is also relevant to American foreign policy and preventing or punishing dissent from it, which is framing opposition to America's war in Gaza as an attack on the comfortable identity of American Jews affiliated with religious institutions that have made Israel central to what they do.)

Since statements are only evaluated for the effect they have on the feelings of those hearing them according to how those feelings are linked to their ideological commitments, the ground is clear to suppress any speech that anyone disagrees with, which means any meaningful speech, since statements that are not controversial at all are in a sense not statements at all, as they do not assert anything that would make any difference to any worldly matter and any persons who care about it. It is both cause and consequence of this that our culture today places little value on rational argument. The news media, including television, are not organized to use it at all, except with certain elite audiences. College classrooms supposedly are, but when the ideas and arguments of professors are monitored by concerned audiences through the media, and social media, rational argument of course counts for little. The function of the news media is the propaganda of opinions, with a possible but weak connection to rational thought of any kind. The dominance of this mode of discourse in our culture largely explains the election and popularity of Donald Trump, because it accounts for the possibility of his discursive style. Our democracy is one of fighting words and fighting about words. Ours is a democracy that does not think. The only government bodies that are required to do so are the higher courts, but they only do so by interpreting legal declarations that have been adopted by votes and popular acclaim, which gives them the status not of rational truths but popular opinions.

Social control is not rational because it is not democratic. The people subjected to it are expected to comply. The system of (corporate) governance is not ours; we do not own it. It operates according to market imperatives that depend not on debate but on selling people what they enjoy, need, want, and are willing to accept under the terms offered, which are not determined by them. Social control thus being essentially affective, it is psychological. How you feel determines what is considered true and right. The managers will try to govern my making you feel good, and will use blatant force only if necessary. Social interactions are governed by market norms and not rational ones, which means there is no operative idea of justice. People do not have to be treated fairly in this society, and it would be foolish to expect to be, and everyone knows that. We have liberty in a society controlled by the market; solidarity is contingent in fascism on sharing the group’s identity and project, which typically is the company’s objective or that of war.

Otherwise, love of the neighbor is a fantasy or a nice idea you can believe in that is credited to your membership in a religious organization with its communitarian identity and your proclamation that you believe in the (official, Protestant) idea of God identified with a totalizing governmental power of bosses and markets so that you should have faith in the authorities and what happens that you and others will be treated justly (not for you to judge, since it is not an option for it to be considered not applying) and thus a willingness to submit absolutely to the authority of the bosses and the state. This means that some neighbors and strangers count while others do not (foreigners targeted in one of our government’s wars, or immigrants officially not wanted by it). The American God that everyone is supposed to obey in their way is a boss commanding faith and obedience, not love, and the only justice is about the government’s ability to punish lawbreakers and of some people with wealth to quarrel about it with others. Not requiring love of the stranger, this God is therefore not Christian, and identified with the state and an ideology, it is fully protestant but certainly not, among other things, Jewish. Though you may pray in your own church, identify with your collective private community, get anxious about threats to it and your identity, and above all support the American war in Palestine since our government is officially ordering all Jews and other Americans to recognize that officially defending this kind of war is what it allowably means to be Jewish. Since the Jews I knew growing up were political dissidents of one kind or another, I conclude that our government doesn’t like them very much but I don’t think it ever did.