How to Install a Fascist Government in Four Easy Steps
The Republican playbook is stupidly simple.
I was talking recently to my friend, who is a former Army Sergeant and historian, about politics in America. We are pretty similar ideologically but have dramatically different life experiences in a number of ways, so we often have unique takes on the same point. It’s always enlightening to talk to him about politics, particularly from a historical lens.
During this conversation, I asked him how the hell we got to this point in American politics where the right was so up in arms against the left that they would do anything to cement their power. This includes lying, cheating, stealing, and anything else up to and including literally taking up arms against us in a second Civil War.
Before he could answer, though, I qualified that I know the answer, but it is complicated and would take plenty of breath that would be wasted because we’ve been over the history of the past 40 years or so together more times than I can count.
To my surprise, he said that no, it’s not complicated, actually, and proceeded to list the steps that led us here. These steps are tried, tested, and true, and have been used with varying degrees of success at various points throughout history by a wide variety of generally self-serving people across many political ideologies.
I have to hand it to him, it’s really, really simple — so simple, in fact, that you can count the steps on one hand and still have a finger left over. That said, I will leave it to your imagination which finger I choose to leave up for those on the political right in America.
So, without further ado, here are the four easy steps to setting yourself up as the leader of a totalitarian or fascist government.
Step one: Spread dissatisfaction and distrust of the government.
This takes a bit of time, depending on how good you are at it, and it can be accomplished in a number of ways. For the American right, their method of choice is fear. Fear of immigrants and BIPOC folks, fear of LGBTQIA+ folx, fear of crime, fear of drugs, fear of atheists and secularists, fear of a lot of things.
The Republican party got in bed with the evangelical church to add a moralistic component to this fear, which helps them feel like their fear is backed by a higher power and is therefore righteous. Not only are their enemies wrong in their eyes, they are wrong in the eyes of god as well.
Then, the Republicans got in bed with the NRA. The NRA stoked the fear of the various others — BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, feminists, whatever — and took it a step further by encouraging them to defend their homesteads from the interlopers. These bad guys want to take what you’ve worked so hard to get, they said, and the only way to defend yourself is by force. Anyone left of center in America (which is to say “politically moderate” by most rational standards), is the enemy.
Eventually, the political left was assigned the bearer of big government, and the things they wanted were one and the same with what the government wanted. The government is going to make gay marriage legal and destroy the sanctity of your straight marriage! Feminists are going to overrun the government and turn men into second class citizens by force! They were going to open the borders and let all the illegals overrun our states with crime and undesirables!
We can’t let them do that!
The left is the party of big government, and big government wants to take away your rights and your guns! We can’t let that happen!
And so, through fear of the evil leftist big government, the Republican party has positioned itself as the party of Real Americans — rugged individualists who love freedom, liberty, and guns and hate liberals, socialists, and big government. The government is not a force for good to help its people, it is a force for evil that is meant to strip away our rights and individuality through bureaucracy and rules. They’ll take away everything that we’ve fought so hard to earn, through force if necessary, and make us into second-class citizens!
Then, once they sowed enough dissatisfaction in the government, they were able to start on the second step…
Step two: Portray yourself as an outsider to the system.
We all know how this went. Trump came down the golden escalator, made a blatantly racist and bigoted speech, came up with a number of catchy, jingoistic slogans, and swept to an unexpected victory. He was the ultimate outsider, an “expert businessman” who had zero political experience, against the ultimate insider, Hillary Clinton, a lifelong politician.
Hillary Clinton was and still is a competent politician. She would’ve been a serviceable president, good, even, and would’ve likely done a good job by most standards. That said, she was part of a potential political dynasty, the wife of a former president who was well-liked by many who just so happened to lead the political left during the height of the culture wars.
Hillary was not one to be trifled with, and while she was an active and tenacious politician, she also put forth the charisma of wet cardboard. This was by design, as all things Clinton are — she wanted to appeal to as many people as possible, and a loud, strong woman is threatening to many potential male voters. Still, it didn’t have the desired effect in the slightest.
Trump came out swinging with his catchy soundbites and political incorrectness. He was good at slogans — Make America Great Again has caught on so well that MAGA is an ingrained shorthand in America these days. The other big one, though — drain the swamp — is the sleeper here.
As the political outsider, Trump referred to Washington, DC as a swamp full of political crocodiles and portrayed himself as the only candidate with the ability to drain that swamp and make the seat of American power less corrupt and awful. This was the root of the MAGA promise — draining the political swamp as an outsider who has no intention of making friends.
Trump would do anything to drain the swamp, root out all the crocodiles, and, I dunno, turn them into boots or something, the metaphor is convoluted like many things spouted by Trump. Still, “drain the swamp” is punchy and conveys the point well. It clearly establishes him as the political outsider that can really make a difference in the corrupt, leftist government machine that, again, is untrustworthy, evil, and wants to take away your rights and guns.
Trump was a racist, bigoted, misogynist asshole who encouraged violence among his followers against their political enemies and was clearly only interested in grabbing as much power for himself as he could. His platform was politically incorrect by design — politics was a dirty game, he said, and he wasn’t playing by the rules anymore. He was the ultimate outsider in a government filled with insiders.
Step three: Get yourself and your supporters into power.
We all know how this went. Trump got elected in a squeaker thanks to low turnout, lack of enthusiasm from the left due to infighting, and support from a number of surprising demographics. He lost the popular vote by a huge margin, as is expected of any Republican presidential candidate in the modern age, but the Electoral College pushed him to victory like it’s reliably done for decades. I don’t have to rehash this because there are countless people who have done it better than I could.
He spent the next few months after getting into office installing as many loyalists as possible into positions of power. Bolstered by a favorable congress, he shoved through as many far-right people into positions of power both large and small as he possibly could. It helped that Mitch McConnell had stonewalled Obama’s last two years of political appointments and created a backlog that was neatly and quickly filled by a bunch of alt-right whackos.
The news covered a lot of the big ones — all of his cabinet, all of his political advisors, the high-level government positions, and the first Supreme Court seat of three all got a lot of play in the news cycles. Much hay was made over people like Jeff Sessions, General Michael Flynn, and other much more questionable appointments and advisors.
Only later would most of us realize the vast damage he did by installing hundreds of far-right judges at all levels, recommended by the Federalist Society and rubber-stamped by a Republican Senate. The makeup of the Supreme Court, and with it the makeup of America’s laws and government, will be fundamentally different for decades because Trump became the most powerful person in the world.
Step four: Change the rules so you can’t be removed.
This has been the Republican method since Obama got elected. Rather than try to work with him, Mitch McConnell got up in front of the cameras and publicly stated that they were going to do everything in their power to make him a one-term president. And they did.
What resulted from that was a major push to get as many Republicans elected into statehouses as possible. It worked quite well, actually, and while they used their standard “fear the government” playbook described above, it still got them what they wanted.
From there, they gerrymandered the districts in their favor and changed rules in a variety of different ways to keep them in power. They made it harder to vote for minorities and other reliably left-leaning voters and changed procedural rules to make it harder to oust them from the power they’d grabbed.
Trump accelerated this effort by demolishing every precedent that was set forth by other presidents and rewriting or removing as many rules and regulations as possible. This was further enabled by his cronies that were installed in positions of power who rubber-stamped anything he wanted. As long as it served their own interests, they didn’t care if Trump was destroying America’s democratic norms built over two and a half centuries.
With a favorable congress, a cabinet full of sycophants who would do whatever he said, and a group of advisors who only had their own interests at heart, it was a perfect storm. The Trump administration did massive amounts of damage to our systems of government, enabled by the fear machine that the Republican party has been pushing for decades. Some of that damage runs so deep that it will take years or decades to undo.
While it is uncertain what kind of race 2020 would’ve been otherwise, it would’ve been Trump’s race to lose had he not bungled the COVID response so badly. Even still, it was another squeaker — inasmuch as the Electoral College was concerned anyway. Biden ran away with the popular vote as expected — again, the Democratic presidential candidate has won the popular vote in all but one election since 1992, which should tell you something.
Even still, in the months leading up to the race, Trump was readying his plan to hold onto power. It has recently come out that the whole “rigged election” gambit took shape months before the election was actually held, and in the event that Trump lost (which he eventually did), they would push the message that Democrats rigged the election to get him out of office. Again, he’s a political outsider, and the establishment big-government Dems want him gone so they can refill the swamp.
Trump was not hesitant to try and weaponize all of the assorted lackeys he’d placed into positions of power to get what he wanted, and he would’ve gotten away with it had it not been for a handful of resistors. Bill Barr, of all people, refused to go along with Trump’s nonsense, and as much as I loathe the man’s policies and politics, Mike Pence stood firm when he knew that Trump’s supporters literally wanted him dead.
I cannot say what caused him to do that — whether it was wanting to uphold the principles of democracy, having a sense of decency, or a simple, selfish need to not be on the wrong side of history, I couldn’t say. But if you’d told me after the 2016 election that Mike goddamn Pence would, at one fateful point in history, be the last bastion of democracy against Donald Trump, I would’ve laughed in your face.
And yet, the grab for another four years of Trump ultimately failed and we got a calm, quiet, old white guy of a president that, frankly, we kinda needed after all of that.
None of this has stopped the wheels of this power grab, of course. The first three steps are still in full swing — the Republican fear machine is cranking at 100% power, the right is firmly entrenched in a number of powerful positions across the country, and Trump is still the ultimate outsider.
A solid majority of Republicans are lined up behind Trump and are working as hard as they can to get him back into power, whether to support and enhance their own power, to oppress others, or simply out of sheer ignorance. And, thanks to the fear machine, Republican voters are heavily armed and ready for an all-out shooting war against the liberals.
Because of this, there is a legitimate chance that Donald Trump might be elected (or otherwise installed) as President of the United States as a convicted felon. That’s horrifying.
This has been the playbook since the Regan years, when the right got in bed with the evangelicals and the NRA and started cranking the fear machine into high gear. It has always been there to some degree — the bigoted, misogynist, racist right has always been big on sowing fear of minorities, feminists, queer folx, and Jews, among others. But good ol’ Ronnie really kicked it into overdrive with his “moral majority” nonsense.
This whole movement won’t last. It’s been running at full speed for decades and is starting to run out of steam at this point for a variety of reasons — demographic shifts and dropping church attendance being two big ones. There is only so far that hatred and fear will take your efforts before the whole thing falls apart and better judgment sets in; that is only amplified when young people won’t join your party and your older supporters keep dying off.
Still, this four-step process has been proven to work time and time again — the Nazis and the Communist Revolution in Russia are just two recent examples of many — and it might still work here too. I can’t predict the future, and unless we keep vigilant and fight this fascist movement, it will just come back stronger next year.
There is progress, though — Michigan and Minnesota are showing what can be done with liberal majorities, having undone much of the regressive right’s damage in recent congressional sessions. Again, the demographic winds are shifting, and even young Republicans are moving leftward in their views on climate change and LGBTQIA+ rights, among other things.
And of course, the majority of voters simply prefer Democrats, with Republican gerrymandering and the Electoral College hampering the left’s ability to win in many cases. Not that the left has a hard time with losing — we’re really good at self-sabotage, after all.
As I said, this fascist movement is based on historical precedent, but that means we know the playbook and how to counter it. And counter it we must, because we cannot let a wannabe dictator gain power in America, which is ostensibly the bastion of western democracy. We have no choice but to fight, and one of the best means we have to fight is to vote.
Aside from that, speak out, call out the right for their naked power grabs, and keep pushing to save the democratic process. Speak truth to power, call out fake news on all sides, and never stop fighting those who might oppress others. People who ban books and say “this group is not equal” have never once found themselves on the right side of history, and that will not change now.
Fight the fascists at every turn. They have a powerful playbook, but we have history on our side, and future historians will not look kindly upon them. We must stop their naked power grab with everything we have. There is no other option.
Be well out there.
