Why do so many white youth in America think fascism is “cool”?
Last fall, a few blocks from my apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a gang of neo-Nazis gathered in Harvard Square on a Sunday afternoon. The videos showed A recent Anti-Defamation League poll found that 85% of Americans believe in “at least one anti-Jewish trope,” an increase since 2019. Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of VICE Media and founder of Proud Boy, has gained legions of followers on YouTube and other platforms and amassed hundreds of millions of views, tapping into a wronged male psyche few other outlets reach. Fascists are united by their love of violence, their hatred of progress, and their sinister sense of entitlement that America belongs to them. In Italy, as in the rest of Europe in the interwar years, fascist parties won more and more votes, giving people not only a political cause to live for through the state but also carnivals, parades, fairs and other forms of social bonding. A huge effort went into creating the aesthetics of fascism and Germany in both 1930s and 1940s, creating a strong, masculine society reminiscent of the Roman Empire.
公開済み : 2年前 沿って Margaret Moran の
Last fall, a few blocks from my apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a gang of neo-Nazis gathered in Harvard Square on a Sunday afternoon. The videos showed a group of masked white men yelling, spitting, swearing homophobic slurs and beating the chest of the students. They were part of the Nationalist Social Club, a local neo-Nazi group, nicknamed the “131 Crew,” as if it were a sneaker collective and not a gang.
In researching the rise of the fascist movement in the United States, I found disturbing parallels with 1930s Italy and Germany. From cult-worshipping and rising anti-Semitism to hatred of minorities and birth rate theories steeped in of eugenics, the overlap between the fascist ideas of the interwar years and our own is too marked to ignore.
Why are so many white youth, particularly my generation, turning to fascism and the far right?
A recent Anti-Defamation League poll found that 85% of Americans believe in “at least one anti-Jewish trope,” an increase since 2019. Whether it’s the 131 Crew or Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of VICE Media and founder of Proud Boy, or even the lower reaches of QAnon, Andrew Tate-land, and the 4chan message board — the angry, alienated man finds fascism not only attractive, but cool.
In the McInnes case, his Proud Boy affiliates are on trial in federal court for sedition or trying to overthrow the US government by force. McInnes hails from Ottawa, Canada, wears a polished mustache and glasses; when he appears in American newspapers, he looks like a hipster. “We don’t start fights,” McInnes has said, “but we will end them.” Far-right influencers have gained legions of followers on YouTube and other platforms and amassed hundreds of millions of views, tapping into a wronged male psyche few other outlets reach. This is before even considering alternative forms of social media where the far right congregates. If we do not recognize this fascist cult it is because it exists in plain sight.
The word “fascism” is often used loosely, and some may feel that applying this label is too dramatic. But its current manifestation in the US reflects its incarnation ages ago: an ideology that glorifies the traditional masculine, believes in a spiritual right to impose violence, and calls for an authoritarian takeover of government. Fascists are united by their love of violence, their hatred of progress, and their sinister sense of entitlement that America belongs to them.
Fascism feeds on culture wars, exploits psychological insecurities, and uses deep-seated resentments to convert the impressionable. At a time of intense polarization and cultural battles over race, gender, and democracy, it’s no surprise that fascism has found young adherents, this time as a lifestyle, with cosplay.
In Italy, Benito Mussolini, in the first pages of his “The Doctrine of Fascism,” noted that fascism is not simply a political doctrine but “a spiritual attitude.” In Italy, as in the rest of Europe in the interwar years, fascist parties won more and more votes, giving people not only a political cause to live for through the state, but also also carnivals, parades, fairs and other forms of social bonding. For tens of millions of Europeans, fascism was fun. And for a few years, it was seen as a legitimate alternative to liberal democracy.
Fascists, then as now, placed a special emphasis on propaganda. In fact, at a meeting of radio announcers in Berlin in 1933, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, gave some urgent advice to state broadcasters: “The first law is don’t get boring!”
From the beginning, fascism focused on culture. Mussolini wanted a strong, masculine society reminiscent of the Roman Empire. Hitler was also fascinated with the imagined past, and in the memoirs of Albert Speer, its chief architect, Hitler is found poring over architectural designs and building plans for hours on end. The buildings had to be neoclassical, they had to be strong, they had to be grotesquely gigantic. The Nazis targeted “degenerate” and “Jewish” art in particular, raiding museums and galleries, destroying any hint of modernism.
A huge effort went into creating the aesthetics of fascism in both Italy and Germany: the performances, the carnivals, the theater shows, the youth rallies, all duly filmed, edited and exposed to the public on social media. Hitler himself preferred night marches with torches because they added a sinister, subterranean feel to his movement. Pageantry and symbols were key tools in promoting the ideology.
Today’s fascists are malleable and take different forms, some more racist than others, some more sexist. But they are drawn to propaganda and symbols of racial and sexual brutality. For many white youth, fascism begins as a cultural identity, rather than a political ideology.
Culture shapes thoughts that, if poisonous enough, will have dire consequences. In the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the mass murderer wore a jacket emblazoned with the flags of Rhodesia, a racist former British colony that became Zimbabwe and apartheid South Africa. The emblems of white supremacy and fascism were woven into his clothing. The mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand in 2019 was broadcast live on social media. Last November, the killer who killed five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs ran a neo-Nazi website and used racial slurs while playing video games.
On the spectrum of toxic sexism, Andrew Tate is the prime example of a propagandist who has gained an audience of millions of men by feeding them authoritarian and sexist ideology. A white nationalist influencer, who goes by the nickname “Baked Alaska” and loves both marijuana and assaulting Jews and people of color on the street, recently pleaded guilty to his involvement in the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
The reach of these men has been expanded exponentially through algorithms and social media platforms geared toward outrage and emotion. Fascists of the 20th century could only dream of such easy propaganda tools. The fight ahead will not be easy. It will require a generation that does all it can to roll back fascism and reinvigorate democracy, this time at home. Nazis marching through Harvard Square are a reminder that fascism is here. We ignore it at our own risk.
Omer Aziz is a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and the author of the upcoming memoir, “Brown Boy.”