‘Trumpism is escalating: its new wave of young guns is openly committed to hardcore authoritarianism, theocracy, and fascism — they don’t even bother to hide their bigotry and hate anymore. Think of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley, who openly call for ethnic cleansing, in far less pretty terms than even trump did. Think of all the fake “audits” and efforts to repress and manipulate the vote underway in state after state. That’s escalation: trumpism’s now gunning for from the bottom up what it couldn’t get from the top down — the collapse of America as a free society aspiring to be a modern one, in the steps of Europe or Canada. trumpism now wants a totalitarian society — where every thought, action, relationship, and possibility is controlled, according to a theocratic-fascist blueprint of purity of blood and soil.

trumpism’s hardening: at the same time, this new wave of young guns openly espouses violence, aggression, and brutality as just means to its totalitarian ends. They don’t even pretend to care about democracy anymore — again, think of all those fake vote audits or vote repression efforts. Think of the way figures like MJT and Hawley and their ilk openly harass and bully and threaten their fellow members of Congress. Think of the way that the deadly coup of Jan 6th — which just claimed another two lives — is shrugged away as “tourism,” which is a way to say, “Hey, people died? Good! Great! Maybe they’ll learn their lesson. We don’t care. That’s fair game.” And probably worst of all, trumpism’s retaliating. trump is back on the campaign trail. And he’s openly obsessed with vengeance for a “stolen” election. Jan 6th wasn’t something to be condemned for, to feel shame over — to hide and never come back from. It’s something to avenge. It wasn’t something shameful — it was something humiliating. There’s a big difference. trumpists openly want a repeat of Jan 6th, only a successful one. As numerous scholars of authoritarianism and fascism have pointed out, that’s exactly the pattern by which the Nazis seized power — a failed coup, then, a few years, later, having learned vital lessons, a successful one. What, though, let the Nazis go from failed coup to successful one? It wasn’t just that they learned. It wasn’t just that their movement hardened and escalated and grew committed to avenging the failure of the first one — just like trumpism is getting obsessed with now. Something else — something even more crucial — happened, too.

Society downplayed the dangers…’

— Umair Haque via Eudaimonia and Co

‘They possess a deep sense of anti-establishment angst, along with a need to feel superior to everyone else. They’ve bought so much stock in rugged individualism, they can’t tell the difference between communism and cooperation anymore. Anything that even hints at a shared purpose or common goal gives them mental hives. Anti-vaxxer propaganda appeals to that hidden desire some of us have to be the underdog and fight the system. That’s the narrative that makes them feel special. This problem calls for a flank approach…’

—  Jessica Wildfire via Medium

‘…The person who believes in cultural degeneration – a declinist philosophy by nature – will argue that this democratisation and other factors, such as lowered standards of education and failures of taste-inculcating institutions, have decreased the quality of what is produced. Culture used to be complex and highly developed; now it is rudimentary and bland.

I will push back against this pessimistic reading, offering a short history of cultural degeneration and highlighting the flaws of this way of judging the transformations that make a society look different tomorrow than it did yesterday…’

— Christy Wampole, essayist and professor of French at Princeton, via Aeon