Fascist Propaganda on a Post-Industrial Scale
The world fascism constructs in its propaganda is nonsense; or worse, the removal of sense. Fascism ultimately relies on the flooding of the public sphere with this propaganda, similar to the way that capitalism relies on ubiquitous advertising and hawking. Capitalism and Fascism both create a world in which your attention is stolen and molded at all times. Fascists in particular fashion a world through slogans repeated ad nauseam with modifications as necessary (MAGA becomes MAHA, for example).
Until the wide-spread adoption of social media, say, around 2008, the fascist had to rely on communication methods that could be avoided by the careful person. Books do not force themselves upon you, and both the radio and the TV can be turned off if you don’t want to hear them (for now, anyway).
Our discursive world was already impossibly broken, largely due to the democratization of the means of information production and the increasing emphasis on algorithmic presentation of content. Social media has exacerbated this – a control society that monitors and limits your resistance into passivity and encourages you to participate in the repressive function itself – to devastating effect.
A further comparison must be made between the ideal end state for the capitalist and the fascist: for the capitalist, the entirely free labor of individuals, machines, computers, which will increase profits and eliminate the pesky expense of wages; and for the fascist, an unthinking, homogeneous, drone-like populace that executes whatever commands are handed down, complying without question. What better, then, for the fascist, than having access to the world’s most powerful tool for mass production, with the ability to tune messages to any micro-audience necessary? The force multipliers in the discursive onslaught, bots and AI, have made the fascist’s wet dream a reality.
Capitalism and social media have produced micro-audiences, each striving for increasingly niche aesthetics and content streams. Consider the sheer volume of furniture items available on sites like Wayfair, each with only minor differences, designed precisely to match a specific aesthetic taste. By pushing people into these algorithmically-generated micro-aesthetics, the user gets to feel special. Every company uses this “special” feeling online (and increasingly offline as well) to attempt to reach the broadest popularity they can – largely, to serve as many hyper-specific, targeted ads as they can.
This same concept explains how echo chambers on social media have become increasingly prevalent. The conspiracy theorist can glob onto their hyper-specific microcosm of the conspiracy realm and be subjected to unceasing propaganda meant to atomize them into ever-increasingly specific categories. To the fascist, this severe compartmentalization serves also to make one more malleable, and to recruit them into an aimless, angry mass, without any clear goals beyond the infliction of pain on others, ostensibly in order to ease their own pain and suffering, regardless of how real or imagined that pain or suffering is.
Consistency is a luxury that fascists do without. We currently see a disconcerting, but all too common, trend of the adoption of Trump’s classic “word salad” style by many of his loyalists, who, seemingly without coordination, defend his every utterance without care for coherence or relation to the real world–Mussolini ha sempre raggione! (Mussolini is always right).
Fascist discourse destroys discourse itself, rendering words meaningless and the world inscrutable. Those defending the rights guaranteed constitutionally to all Americans are labeled insurrectionists, cities with declining crime are called war zones, opposing the regime in any way becomes an act of domestic terrorism. Those with a grip on reality must devote a great deal of time to understanding not just the real world, but also to tracking and debunking the ever-changing non-world that fascists create. And much of that time is, frankly, wasted, as the world will change entirely tomorrow (Trump being in the Epstein Files is fake news, he was actually an informant all along, he made a deal with the deep state and is using the files as blackmail on the Satanist Democrats, and so on).
This destabilizing and overwhelming effect is key to fascism’s success. If listeners have insufficient time to analyze each one, they will instead default to subservience, rather than engage with information themselves. Stephen Miller, for one, knows this. The fascist cannot create something new, so they create symbols and slogans, each of which must be destroyed and abused for the ends of the moment; these symbols also act as pre-understood shorthand for what the fascist is trying to get across.
The fascist sympathizer, on the receiving end, juggling in their mind hundreds of disparate, contradictory ideas handed to them piecemeal, each of which they accepted at face value, will also unthinkingly accept this propaganda as truthful. Increasingly, worryingly, presenting facts to the conspiracy-riddled mind of a MAGA devotee will not change their heart or mind, and indeed risks further entrenching them in their beliefs.
The ubiquitous, insistent, constant, interminable forcing of fascist discourse seeping into every moment of our waking lives is a novel development seemingly without a clear solution. How do we ensure views, even objectionable ones, are protected by free speech without allowing hate speech and dog whistles to spread? How do we ensure fact-checking becomes a basic, required feature of social media without suppressing contrarian views? How do we get the populace to recognize that AI content is almost always worthless and used towards nefarious goals, and should therefore be rejected out of hand? Can we afford to simply wait until the collapse of the AI bubble?
There certainly must be a way to create a functioning, useful social media platform that does not rely on forcing people, witting or not, into echo chambers that reward hyper-conspiratorial thinking. A renewed focus on the elimination of bot accounts and foreign interference that, in tandem, serve to undermine discourse, is necessary. And, finally, should we not be more concerned that the President of the United States owns his own social media platform, and that others are owned by the richest men on planet earth, who have all seemingly kowtowed to white nationalism? A renewed America will have to face these challenges immediately, or continue to face the consequences.