Disgust and the Rebirth of Fascism
Sometime in the mid-2010s a chill wind swept over the political landscape. It hadn’t been felt for some time, but if you stuck your finger up into the wind you noticed that it was now blowing distinctly in the direction of nationalism. And not just passport nationalism, but real nationalism, which is to say ethnonationalism. All of a sudden, long-dead ideologies like fascism and National Socialism were suddenly, if not popular, then at least thinkable, and so, a credible threat to liberal ideology.
But why did this rebirth happen when it did? Why not in the early 1990s, or the middle of the 21st century? If you zoom out far enough, all contingencies disappear—there are no accidents in history.1
We think of our society as secular, but the truth is that no society is or ever will be truly secular. Every ideology, secular humanist progressivism included, is a stunted theology, and is parasitical upon some theological foundation.2 Our modern society is no different. Every society has a mythos, and in the case of the modern West, that mythos is WWII.3 The shape of our modern world was forged in a titanic struggle between the forces of Good and Evil, with Good ultimately triumphing and Evil banished to the lower realms of Tartarus. There are two things you’re allowed to kill in video games without feeling the slightest guilt: zombies and Nazis. This is because neither are fully human.
Mythos is a powerful thing, but it’s not ironclad. As we discussed last time, taboo is the ultimate form of ethics, and one of the most important taboos is blasphemy—this keeps conscience, thus ethics, within its proper bounds by regulating what is and is not thinkable.4 Mythos is an inoculation against blasphemy, and inoculations have to be re-administered every generation. Anti-fascist mythos works like any inoculation: you expose the body to a dead version of a contagion that can’t fight back, so when the body encounters a live version that can fight back, it has learned to fight it ahead of time. But your immune system only works if it recognizes a threat.
Enter the internet.