Beware of Mutagenic Fascism!
It was a bright tropical day in November and all the clocks were striking thirteen.
A question to stump the political scientist: does neoliberalism revert to fascism? Or had neoliberalism been fascist all along? While the fact that genocide is supported by both parties would seem to indicate the latter, I do think that something in fascism is mutagenic. When Howard Hughes referred to the “ghouls” in The Night of the Living Dead (1968) as “locals,” we know what he means.
Yes there are the stone cold white-supremacists hiding in plain-sight, armed, down at the Cracker Barrel, but now we also find Christian mom and pop suburbanites, bank-managers, yoga-teachers and disaffected youtube twenty-somethings, who, never having been particularly vocal regarding their bigotry before, become violent fascists, as if overnight. Slogans encouraging the assault of women are normalized as viral memes. It is cool to threaten those whom you hate with death. The nation breathes a sigh of relief: finally we can be the assholes that we’ve always wanted to be: it is our heritage after all, our birthright given to us by Father God; haven’t you heard of Manifest Destiny?
This slide into barbarism is no freak anomaly but rather a feature of capitalist progress itself. If neoliberal capitalist society unknowingly produces a class of victims—the wage-slave, the immigrant, the inmate, the homeless person (not to mention destroyed rivers and forests)—mutagenic fascism, primed and made viral through algorithmic media owned by the technocrat, raises these victims to the level of the blood sacrifice. The ills of society must be paid for by the lives of those who are the most vulnerable among us. The wealthy elite (who caused the breakdown of society in the first place) maintains and obscures their accelerating extortion of society and the earth by inflaming rank xenophobia. This amounts to a veritable biohazard, transmitted over the internet, and acting upon paranoid and superstitious psyches. Unconscious hatred of the other becomes conscious and loud. Violence that was once only unconsciously desired, is now consciously celebrated.
This is mutagenic fascism in a nutshell.
