“What is the spirit behind fascist politics?”

Initial Thoughts

Over the past year, the Jubilee media company has developed a “Twenty Versus One” video series. In these, they take one person with particular viewpoints about a topic, and they have them, in theory, discuss and debate with twenty others who have opposing viewpoints.

The key phrase is “in theory.”

There’s a July 2025 episode featuring Mehdi Hasan titled “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives.” It’s an eye-opening video for anyone who doubts the grip of fascism of our times.

Many of the twenty participants “debating” Mehdi Hasan argued for openly fascist positions: support for an authoritarian and unelected leader, disregard for the Constitution and US law if it contradicts a fascist agenda, increased power for a repressive government to punish dissenters, and the continuous assertion that all immigrants should be deported while asserting that only white people count as “Americans.” Many of the twenty conservatives also stated plainly that they were racists and fascists and - without shame - they insisted that Mehdi Hasan is not American and should be deported despite being an American citizen. Even when Hasan restated their incredulous positions and pointed out that they were being recorded so that others could view their “debate,” they didn’t back off their political views. 

Some may argue that these openly fascist participants are taking controversial positions and instigating conflict to increase their own publicity on the internet and social media. And though I recognize that such a move is not uncommon in today’s American media and politics, the openness with which these commitments are professed is striking. Also, for those progressives who claimed that the more violent ideas and projects of the right would disappear as the older generations die, here is a room full of younger people rejuvenating those allegedly anachronistic views. 

It took a few weeks for me to finish the video because of how difficult it was for me to understand what I was seeing and hearing. The goals of the fascists, however malicious and cruel, are straightforward enough to understand – they seek no-holds-barred dominance by their group over all others. 

But questions about how someone comes to desire fascism as a political model plagued my mind. 

Why does someone subscribe to fascist beliefs? How does this come to be? 

What can US history teach us about fascism? 

To avoid simply labeling human beings as something like “evil,” how can we understand the spirit behind fascism?

I venture to say it’s impossible to pinpoint any particular fascist’s why at a psychological level. Even with access to all the information we could want about such a person, we might still be unable to provide a compelling enough explanation for how fascist beliefs took hold in them. This is a limitation that comes with the search for the psychological roots of someone’s actions. However, this is not to say that thinking about why someone does what they do is a worthless activity. In fact, I think it is a tremendously valuable activity for living with openness and compassion for others. Yet any approach that claims to draw cause and effect between one’s psychological orientation and their actions – no matter how “scientific” such a method claims to be - always seems to have an air of speculation and assumption if we look closely at it.

Let’s return to the psychologizing of fascists in a moment as we pivot to what US history can show us about fascism. Before we dive into its manifestations in US history, let’s outline a tentative understanding of fascism for us to work with. I represent it here as a political project that endorses at least four things: 

1) Authoritarian leadership - elected or not - to head a repressive and all-powerful government 

2) Positioning dissenters as unpatriotic, violent, criminal, evil, and/or inferior, and this designation is used to justify their violent and dehumanizing treatment at the hands of the fascist regime

3) Blaming a segment of humanity for any challenges the nation faces, and positing this group of people as an enemy that the fascist regime is at war with. The category of “enemy” is created and recreated in service of the fascist regime’s agenda

4) Selective support for whatever is considered the rule of law, based on whether it is in support of the fascist regime’s goals

With this framing of fascism, if we look beyond the American individual to the larger society, a cursory glance at US history shows us a legacy of fascist activity: colonizing the lands of indigenous peoples while massacring or relocating resistors; importing, enslaving, and attempting to break a group of people and the generations that came after them to create a permanent set of workers considered property rather than human beings; the series of laws demonstrative of the discrimination of people of color for the benefit of those considered white, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Plessy v. Ferguson decision; violent interventions in the Western Hemisphere included but not limited to funding and arming rebel groups and supporting in carrying out coups that overthrew the government the US disapproved of; the violent repression of dissent attributed to the Red Scare and McCarthyism; the state-sponsored violence against and murders of those organizing themselves to challenge unjust conditions, as was the case of Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers; the violence faced by even the “peaceful” demonstrators such as Martin Luther King Jr.; wars on drugs instead of alleviating the conditions that cause people to seek refuge in such altered states of consciousness; and the ever-continuing scapegoating of immigrants for anything and everything that seems “wrong” with the United States. 

This list of political projects (that excludes so much more than it includes for the sake of brevity) shows the origins of today’s brand of US fascism: a series of us-versus-them political projects that sacrifice anyone and anything for its goals, actively discriminating by race and political ideology, using state-sanctioned violence including murder to defend and uphold unjust conditions, and the continuous blame of an Other for the issues the nation faces, as opposed to critically examining and reconfiguring the political projects that bring about the very problems Others are blamed for.

It is important to note that such destructive activity was met with opposition — there is a rich history of resistance that many intellectuals and academics work so hard to document. Nevertheless, it is also important to note that these violent and dehumanizing events did happen - that US history is ripe with examples of fascist and supremacist projects. In much the same way one could study US history for its legacy of resistance, one could also study it to modify and adapt a fascist project in the twenty-first century (I would speculate that this occurred in the creation of Project 2025).

So, if I’m contending that one can see the ingredients of today’s fascism in US history, and I am also asserting that it is near impossible to determine how or why fascist beliefs take hold in an individual, how can we talk about the spirit behind fascism? 

In my discussions with others about this topic, I became curious with how quickly some are to adopt language that fascists use to describe the fascists themselves — namely, designating them as “evil” and explaining away their actions as those of evil, violent people. And while for some this may be a satisfying enough explanation, there are questions I have that this approach doesn’t answer. 

If I reject the belief that there are “good” and “evil” people in the world, and I reject that “good” and “evil” are sufficient descriptors of a person’s actions, then what alternatives are there to discuss the behavior of fascists and their political projects? What ways are there, other than good/evil binaries, that can help us understand what brings about such convictions?

Though I began with the rejection of a cause-and-effect psychological explanation, there may be some promise if we take a broader understanding of psychology itself. Etymologically, we inherit the word “psychology” from the Greek, “logia” meaning “the study of,” and “psykhē” meaning “the soul, breath, spirit.”

While there are fruits to the way modern Western psychology is wielded in our current times, it also has given way to the “medicalization of everyday life” where the focus is most often the self: some people are arguably addicted to therapy at best, and, at worst, some are addicted to the constant ruminations over the self and one’s perceived ailments. If this wasn’t enough, there is a whole industry built up to sustain this obsession. 

But the focus here on psychology as the study of the spirit might let us psychologize in a different way, beginning with the following questions: What is the spirit that grips a fascist? What is the aim of someone possessed by such a spirit? And, if we are to coexist together, how do we address someone possessed by such a spirit?

I’ll return to the questions and assumptions I didn’t unpack in upcoming works, and please feel free to send me your own thoughts to be in conversation. If you prefer to share your thoughts privately, feel free to email: jrlopez.arts@gmail.com.