The Three Types of Fascist

Not all fascists are created equally

There is a belief that fascists are fanatics. That, in some way, they are deeply committed to some sort of belief (albeit a warped one). The truth is that most fascists are not fanatical.

Group 1 - the fanatics

That being said, fascism can’t exist without fanatics. Be it the racist fanatics who believe in superior “races” or God’s “chosen people”. Or the religious fanatics who believe the world is spiralling into a moral oblivion, all because they haven’t followed the preachings of the church. Or the neoliberal fanatics, driven almost exclusively by the need to acquire more power and wealth, they seek the concentration of power in the hands of the few merely for efficiency purposes - why convince a democratic public that you are worthy of their shared wealth, when you can simply bribe a crooked leader?

So, the fanatical fascists are most certainly present. They are, though, the minority. Few people genuinely believe that there is such a thing as a superior race. Anyone even vaguely familiar with science or basic common sense can see that the colour of one’s skin or one’s religious creed confers no natural claim to being better than another. We bear in mind that psychopathies account for less than 5% of society, true psychopaths, less than 1%. As such, true racist fanatics are rare.

The same is true for religious fanatics. Most people have experienced religion in some way or another. Most of us have either dabbled or know someone with faith. It’s not hard to see that most religious folk are decent. They have little need to push their religion on you - they don’t think you are going to hell simply because you don’t go to their church or fail to pray each day. Again, those who genuinely believe that it is the lack of attachment to religious doctrine that has caused societal decay are few and far between.

Neoliberal fanatics are also uncommon. Unfettered greed is not attractive and very hard to defend in discussion with anyone who has had a decent upbringing. Yeah, I’m not impressed that you have exploited your workers and consumers and have managed to hoard more money than a medium-sized country. Didn’t your mother teach you about fairness and playing well with others?

So, that is the first group of fascists: fanatics. They are only a few of them, but they certainly are driven to see power shift from the public to the few. For the racists, they hope that it will mean greater cruelty to non-whites (you don’t want to ask why they achieve satisfaction by hurting other people!). For the religious extremists, they feel that if people can be forced into following their teachings, the world will be better, more ‘godly’ - leading by example isn’t rated as highly as simple authoritarianism. And for the neoliberals, they simply want more freedom to extract more wealth from society - deregulate, remove workers’ rights, end consumer rights, allow them to have free rein to con whoever they like. In their eyes, those who get conned are lesser humans anyway - social darwinism never went away.

No doubt that without the fanatics, there would be no direction to the fascist uprising.

Group 2 - the angry lemmings

The second group we will call the ‘angry lemmings’. These are the foot soldiers. As I say, there are not enough fanatics (“true believers”) to shift society into a fascist authoritarian state. The extremes of beliefs are on the extremes of society. So they must convince others to follow them and do their bidding.

Those who have grown up in a relatively stable environment where they are taught the basic values of human decency tend not to fall for such indoctrination. Those who are insecure and angry are perfect targets.

It is this group, the majority of fascists, that has a problem with accepting responsibility. They are angry with their life but don’t want to take responsibility for what part they played in such failings, and, if successfully indoctrinated, don’t want their “group” to take the blame either. Blame the other.

These are the same kind of folk who eat nothing but processed junk food, weigh 150kg, drink and smoke, then blame their doctor when they need a triple bypass.

Fanatics need these foot soldiers. They spend massive amounts of money trying to indoctrinate them. Social media has made this easier. Microtargetting permits direct access to the easy-to-manipulate angry lemmings without the accountability of public discourse. Many of those indoctrinated see a completely different world than we do.

Group 3 - the grifters

Let’s call them the ‘morally incontinent grifters’.

Grifters defend their position as ‘hustling to do better’. They conflate the hustle of working hard with the solicitation of their voice to the highest bidder. The key difference is the absence of morals.

In part fueled by the false belief that everyone is out for themselves, these morally vacuous grifters amplify the fascistic indoctrination and shield the fanatics all for a few pennies.

You know them. They are slimy, slippery, cunning. They prey on the dramatic and are comfortable speaking in half-truths. While they will protest that simply being the lapdog of the fanatics doesn’t make them fascists, their actions do, and the reality is that without them, there would be no fascist uprising.

Final Word

Trump is actually in Group 3, in my opinion. He isn’t a fanatic. I don’t think he has any strongly held beliefs at all. He is not a psychopath - he simply isn’t smart enough. He is a sociopath who believes he can do whatever he wants to satisfy his urges and desires, including getting rich and powerful. He is a tool of the fanatics.

I think Musk started in group 2 - an angry lemming. Unable to resolve the dichotomy of being the richest man in the world while also being one of the loneliest, he accepts no responsibility for his own role in isolating himself, blames the world for the challenges of relationships, and is someone easy to convince that it would all be better if he could simply control everyone around him and win the argument.

In this way, Musk has also moved into Group 3 - a world-class grifter. He isn’t grifting for money (albeit it certainly motivates him); he grifts to be accepted, to belong, to stop being alone. It is a shame that no one has told him that you can’t feel belonging if you can’t experience what someone else is experiencing - empathy, compassion, and sympathy. He thinks the route to feeling less lonely is to force others to believe what he believes - a similar ideology to a virus.

As for Farage, he is a world-class grifter. Yes, he probably is driven by a racist ideology too, but he has no problems taking money from people of colour. Indeed, I am quite sure that if Al-Qaeda paid him enough, he would be their spokesperson and imbue the benefits of Sharia Law on his angry lemming followers. He is, in my opinion, firmly in group 3 - a morally incontinent grifter.

The vast majority of those we see, propping up the fascist regimes and figureheads, are not the fanatics driving the fascist uprising. Miller is a classic angry lemming. Noem is a classic morally incontinent grifter. Those who are driving the uprising are behind the scenes, pushing funds one way or another to achieve their ultimate goal of consolidating our collective human power into the hands of a few.

Last word. It will fail. The fanatics are in agreement just now. They all believe that the public has too much power. But their ideologies clash significantly. Religion ultimately doesn’t tolerate racism or unfettered greed. Racists can’t tolerate the inclusivity that most religions crave - everyone should convert. And the neoliberals will shift their allegiances with each opportunity that presents - they will be loyal to neither rascist or religious extremist.

Fascism will, as it always does, fail to convince the majority of decent people to surrender their power to fanatics, lemmings, and grifters. How long it takes to fail depends on us all, but fail it will. Perhaps this time, when it does, we finish what we started after the Second World War: redistributing the collective power back to the people.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash