Cascading Collective Traumas Have Activated Neofascism Here in the U.S.

A New Vision, Diverse Alliances, and a Strategic Approach Are Needed to Prevent Political, Social, and Ecological Catastrophe

(Note: this is a long article but I believe it all needs to be said)

Fascism, or more accurately neofascism, has taken hold here in the U.S. I never thought I would say that, and I am not using the term lightly. I also know that talking about neofascism can be frightening. But as this article will explain, it has clearly grabbed hold here, and there is a much greater possibility of overcoming it if we openly discuss and understand what is happening.

Many Republicans will likely be offended if they are called neofascists. They need to examine the differences between neofascism and conservatism, which are very significant. Then, if they realize they do not embrace neofascist ideology, they need to join others in speaking out and strongly opposing the neofascist thinking and actions embraced by many of their colleagues.

Also, just to be clear, this column is not an endorsement of the Democratic party. Many Democrats supported the policies and practices that produced some of the distresses that enabled the rise of neofascism. And few Democrats appear to understand the implications of their actions or what will be needed to resolve the crisis now.

Cascading Collective Traumas Have Activated Neofascism in the U.S.

One way to understand the rise of neofascism in the U.S. is that it resulted from repeated collective (or societal) psychological traumas. In psychology this is defined as a single event or a succession of blows that severely threaten or shatter the deep-seated worldviews held by a vast number of people.

Collective traumas can produce anxiety, depression, and other emotional issues. They also create a crisis of meaning for large populations that activates self-protective reactions such as hyper-vigilance to perceived threats, anger and distrust of others, and widespread social polarization that can fracture their culture as they struggle to process and make sense of their trauma.

As seen numerous times throughout history, relentless collective traumas can make millions of people susceptible to falsehoods and myths that enable the rise of neofascist movements. The U.S. is experiencing this now, and it not only threatens our Democracy, it also blocks meaningful actions to address the climate-ecosystem-biodiversity (C-E-B) crisis and thus threatens all of human civilization.

The Origins of Fascism

After WW I Italy experienced high unemployment and severe economic hardship that created widespread social unrest. Benito Mussolini capitalized on the distress to found the National Fascist Party. He co-published “The Doctrine of Fascism“ in 1932 to describe his ideology.

Mussolini called fascism a system that gives the state absolute authority over all aspects of life, including individual liberties, education, healthcare, religion, racial relations, and more. When people criticized it for being totalitarian, he embraced that term. Mussolini proclaimed fascism was necessary to restore Italy to the mythical greatness it had during the Roman Empire through unity and discipline.

To accomplish this he called himself “Il Duce,” meaning “The Leader,” to create an image of an omnipotent and indispensable modern day Julius Caesar, and by aggressively pursuing ultra-nationalism.

In his doctrine Mussolini said, “Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere.” So he dismantled Italy’s democratic institutions, initially tried to rig and then entirely abolished democratic elections, relentlessly promoted propaganda using misinformation, lies, and myths to convince Italians to obey him, and used threats and bloodshed to silence his opponents. He also used intimidation and violence, often by paramilitary “Black Shirts,” to culturally and racially “purify” Italy by attacking and eliminating “internal enemies” that included liberals, socialists, communists, and anarchists, along with people of color from Africa, the media, and after aligning himself with Hitler and Nazi Germany, Jews as well.

Big business in Italy initially collaborated with Mussolini to establish a corporatist economic system that enabled the government to control labor. The regime’s first economic policies favored big business through privatization, reduced regulations, and other actions that reduced the purchasing power of wage earners. Later, however, corporate power became subordinate to Mussolini’s nationalistic and militaristic ambitions.

Does any of this seem similar to what is happening now in the U.S.?

Does Trump’s desire to be exalted as an all-powerful King, his claim to want to return America to a former mythical greatness, and his administration’s efforts to incapacitate the federal government, manipulate elections, and control education, science, healthcare, and other aspects of society seem comparable to what occurred in Italy over 80 years ago? Does his sending masked ICE agents and federalized troops to Blue cities led by mostly Black Mayors to intimidate residents and rid the nation of people of color immigrants, his demand for obedience by the media, academia, law firms, and sundry others, and his efforts to harass and prosecute Democrats and other “enemies from within“ also seem analogous to Mussolini’s actions?

Note that, even before Italy joined Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the Axis powers in WWII, Mussolini’s fascism caused extensive Italian suffering and deaths. The war caused about 450,000 additional Italian military and civilians deaths. As a result, as historians have documented, in a public display of outrage over the pain and anguish he caused, after the war he and his mistress were executed and then hung upside down in Milan. That underscores how horrible fascism can be for the populace.

Definitions of Fascism

Numerous researchers have examined the growth of fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1930s, and the slightly new forms that have recently emerged in Hungary, El Salvador, and other nations, including the U.S. They offer different descriptions of the phenomena. Political theorist Hannah Arendt, for example, viewed fascism as a form of government. Others, like psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, called it a worldview shaped by a single ideology he called “totalism“ that gives people a simple unquestionable way to think about everything, and mobilizes them strike out at others in the name of the ideology.

More recently historian Robert Paxon wrote “The Five Stages of Fascism. Paul Mason’s book How to Stop Fascism builds on Paxon’s work and provides a useful way to understand the ideology. I will use the work of these researchers to describe why neofascism has emerged in the U.S. and what it entails.

Mason says fascism is more a process than a definitive set of practices or policies. Although the details of the process differ wherever it appears, it has a fairly common set of underlying causes and ideological precepts.

The dominant cause is broad-scale failure of economic and social systems that shatters the identity held by large numbers of people and leads them to embrace an ideology that gives them a new way to find meaning in life. In other words, fascism is an ideology that emerges when repeated collective traumas cause large populations to lose their psychological moorings. The disorientation makes them susceptible to believe falsehoods and myths that empower them to demean or harm others as a way to reclaim their identity and honor.

Multiple Collective Traumas Have Shattered Meaning For Millions of Americans

Far-right zealots have always existed in the U.S., and some began organizing to take over society in the late 1970s, However, Mason says the starting point of the societal disintegration that began the slide toward today’s neofascism occurred when the fatal flaws of neoliberal capitalism became evident after banking regulations were gutted and the subprime mortgage crisis occurred that led to the economic collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed.

Rather than the “free market” resolving the crisis on its own as neoliberals claimed it would, the federal government had to step in to prevent a global depression by bailing out big banks, Wall Street firms, and large corporations such as those in the auto industry. Many bank executives walked away with millions of dollars in bonuses and stock options, even as their firms received massive taxpayer bailouts to offset billions in losses. And despite their egregious behavior, no senior executive from any bank ever went to jail after the financial crisis.

Although the federal government also enacted some policies to help the general public, they were cumbersome and had numerous limitations. Millions of Americans consequently lost their homes, jobs, and life savings. People without college degrees, the working class, and black and Hispanic households were especially hard hit.

These events shattered the beliefs of millions of Americans that the government was on their side, that laissez-faire markets would self-regulate, and that banking and other corporate leaders would not harm them simply to make profit.

Following the economic crisis, with the support of policies enacted by both Republicans and Democrats, corporate America ceaselessly implemented high-tech automation, weakened unions, moved facilities out of the U.S., and consolidated businesses into monopolies. These actions led to large-scale losses of family farms, eliminated manual labor and skilled trade jobs, and prevented meaningful wage increases. The incomes and life-prospects of rural and working-class people were greatly affected, while the wealth of those on top escalated.

Economic inequality significantly increased, with lower-income, less educated, and minority households suffering the greatest losses. Today, almost 60% of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 emergency expense. The book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism describes how unconstrained capitalism has failed rural Americans and the working class, and how the distresses they feel have produced a dramatic increase in deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism.

Nevertheless, neoliberals, corporate executives, and other far-right proponents continually spread propaganda to convince less educated working class Americans that their struggles were the result of inevitable “progress,” liberals, environmentalists, labor union, and “others,” not decisions they made to increase profits. This led many rural residents and working class people to feel disrespected and demeaned by those “elites.”

The #MeToo movement added to the psychological traumatization of many American men because they felt punished for what they thought were perfectly normal ways of behaving around women. The women’s rights and feminist movements added yet another traumatic stress because it threatened the belief that the primary role of women is to have babies and provide domestic support for their families. The demands for equal rights among 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals imposed still another threat to the deeply-held worldviews of some Americans who, for religious or other reasons, see these people as sinful, or believe that humans are naturally heterosexual and anyone who is not is mentally ill or disordered.

Piling on to all of these traumatic stresses has been the psychological trauma experienced by many white Americans caused by the social and racial justice and #BlackLives Matter movements. They activated the longstanding racial resentment of many Caucasians. The movements also forced white Americans to confront the nation’s history of slavery and ongoing systemic racism, which many strongly oppose doing.

BLM also created fear among many white Christians nationalists who believe they are the superior race and that the U.S. was founded for and by them. This led a growing number to embrace the Great Replacement theory that claims certain groups have conspired to replace them with non-white immigrants and people of color for political gain.

These cascading collective traumas seriously threatened or undermined the worldviews of huge numbers of Americans and activated the backlash that often occurs when people who believe they are at the top of social hierarchy think inferior groups threaten their righteousness, status, and power.

The backlash was enflamed by the gun industry’s long-term campaign that, as leaked documents have shown, seek to enrich themselves by aggressively promoting conspiracy theories and lies to create fear of others coupled with the need to buy firearms to maintain their safety and personal identity. As a result, the U.S. now has more guns than residents, the highest overall rate of gun violence and gun deaths of all high-income nations, and leads the world in mass shootings.

The COVID-19 Pandemic greatly intensified all of these traumatic stresses. It was particularly disorienting because each of us were at risk of serious illness or death, while also being a danger to others. The quarantines, social distancing, and facemasks recommended to prevent contagion, school closures, and other impacts activated conspiracy theories and blame games that elevated the already high levels of social polarization as well as distrust in science, medicine, and government.

Encompassing and further deepening all of these traumatic stresses has been the explicit awareness of a majority of Americans, and the often unconscious yet growing sense by many others, that the climate-ecosystem-biodiversity (C-E-B) crisis is real and the destructive storms, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and other weather disasters it generates threatens them, their families, and all of society. Many Americans are also concerned about the personal sacrifices they believe will be needed to address the crisis.

These realities threaten the core beliefs held by millions of Americans that the existing economic system, use of fossil fuels, and high consumption levels can continue into perpetuity.

To prevent any change in this worldview, for years the fossil fuel industry, and more recently far-right organizations like the Heritage Foundation in its Project 2025 manifesto, have obfuscated, lied about, and outright denied climate science. Despite most Americans experiencing or seeing the impacts of the C-E-B crisis on an almost daily basis, the Trump Administration is now implementing Project 2025 step-by-step by gutting environmental regulations, asserting that fossil fuels are the only way to power society, and claiming that the C-E-B crisis is, as Trump recently told the UN, a non-existent “con job.”

The pervasive use of social media has aggravated all of these traumatic experiences. Rather than connecting people in positive ways, to capture users attention and reap massive profits, the algorithms used by high-tech corporations now encourage people to use their digital platforms to spread misinformation, lies, and conspiracy theories, abuse people online, and use doxing, all of which has coarsened public discourse, sowed social division, and eroded people’s sense of community.

Humans are meaning making creatures. The accumulating collective traumas have created internal terror that produces significant psychological threats or damage to the worldviews that give millions of Americans meaning in life. Their inability to make sense of, accept, and adjust to the many changes occurring in society produced the despair, disorientation, and hopelessness that made today’s neofascist power grab possible.

Today’s Neofascist Ideology and Its Outcomes

As seen by the different reactions to the numerous collective traumas many American’s have experienced, today’s neofascism is more a state of mind --a “totalist” ideology as Robert Jay Lifton called it-- than a definitive set of practices or policies. Just as Mussolini did, Trump and his neofascist allies relentlessly promote misinformation, lies, and myths to capitalize on the psychological distresses felt by millions of rural and working-class Americans and convince them to believe and do whatever they say.

Some of this ideology is shaped by white Christian fundamentalists--especially men--who see themselves as superior to everyone else, yet believe they are being victimized by “others” who must be forcibly returned to their inferior status or banished from society. Many of these same people also see those living in poverty and low-income individuals as lazy or moral failures who are expendable and don’t deserve healthcare or other public services.

Today’s neofascist ideology is also shaped by many corporate and Wall St. executives, especially fossil fuel and high-tech leaders, who believe social, scientific, economic, and environmental advances must be rolled back, and new ones blocked, to prevent challenges to their products, practices, and profits.

As seen in all neofascist movements, to give people an alternative way to think, Trump and his neofascist collaborators ceaselessly promote pseudoscientific, anti-rational, and often internally contradictory misinformation, lies, and myths. Individuals and groups that oppose their actions are deemed “internal enemies” that must be harassed, silenced, or worse. Trump’s need for revenge against people who have the gall to challenge his past and current illegal, unethical, and unconstitutional actions add to the push for retribution.

Even more frightening, as some researchers have described, is that many of Trump’s supporters, including some of the co-authors of Project 2025, embrace the fundamentalist Christian belief in apocalyptic or “end times” theology. This is the idea that a cataclysmic event of some type will occur that ends modern society and turns the U.S. into a white supremist ethnonationalist state. Trump is seen as their savior sent by God.

Thoughts On How To Overcome Trump’s Neofascism Power Grab

We now face two monumental challenges. To save our Democracy and prevent widespread societal harm, neofascism must be put back in the closet where it belongs. At the same time we must swiftly make the changes necessary to prevent civilization-altering climate catastrophe. These challenges are connected. We will not accomplish one without achieving the other. This will require an innovative comprehensive approach. Here are my thoughts about how this can be accomplished.

1. Articulate and Communicate an Inspiriting Vision of the Future

The first step must be to formulate and continually communicate a clear inspiring vision of the future that millions of Americans can rally behind because it offers them positive new sources of meaning, purpose and hope in life. The vision should explicitly seek to appeal to people from different economic, religious, cultural, and political perspectives by showing them how they find constructive meaning and direction by working together to create a flourishing ecologically regenerative economic system, build individual and collective resilience, and reduce the C-E-B crisis to manageable levels.

Promoting an inspiring positive vision of the future is essential. As discussed below, strong opposition to Trump’s neofascist take over is also crucial. But it is not enough. To move beyond fascist thinking and actions traumatized Americans need to see and hear an alternative vision of future that directly addresses their everyday needs and provides them with new meaning and purpose in life.

2. Actively Engage Communities Nationwide in Providing Mutual Support For All

Another key action is to engage neighborhoods and communities nationwide in providing Mutual Support For All. This requires forming resilience networks that actively engage local residents in regenerating local social, economic, and environmental conditions, help traumatized residents heal and remain healthy, and build individual and collective resilience for all types of toxic stresses, emergencies, and disasters.

To accomplish this, one key focus of local resilience networks should be to build social connections across their community. Neofascist movements always emerge when many people lack positive social connections and are alienated from others. Forming robust relationships is vital to overcome the social isolation and loneliness that is so toxic today and enables collective traumas to occur and remain unhealed.

Closely linked with building social connections is for resilience networks to organize Mutual Aid Teams throughout their area. These are voluntarily groups that provide practical assistance, food, water, shelter, healthcare, and other basic needs to help neighbors deal with stressful times. They also assist each other during and after emergencies and disasters. Providing mutual aid will motivate many residents to take stock of what is important and realize that helping others gives them meaning and purpose. This is essential because developing constructive sources of meaning is the most important protective factor for healing psychopathological thinking and behavior.

Another important focus of resilience networks is to engage residents in transforming their local economies from a linear take-make-waste system powered by fossil fuels into a “closed-loop“ circular system powered by clean renewable energy. This system has been found to spur tremendous innovation, upskill and reskill the workforce, and create millions of new meaningful family-wage jobs for rural, working class, and other residents.

This work should be closely connected with building external physical resilience for extreme weather disasters in local transportation, housing, water and power, and other infrastructure systems.

As residents engage in transforming their economy to create meaningful well-paying jobs and strengthening external physical resilience, local resilience networks should also actively help them heal their traumas and strengthen their capacity to prevent new ones. The involves organizing healing circles either in-person or on-line that allow people to share their distress and hear from others with similar experiences in a safe and supportive environment.

Over time, by sharing their distress, many people will realize the loss of meaning in life produced by shocks to their worldviews created disorientation that made them susceptible to the falsehoods and myths that led them to embrace neofascist ideology.

It will then be important to help residents move through the mourning process. This can be painful, but it is essential to release the trauma that is frozen in the nervous system. The grief is usually tied to the quest for meaning. They will ask themselves what happened that led them down this path, and how can they find new sources of meaning in life that help them overcome the past and live in a healthier way? Acknowledging, mourning, and moving beyond collective trauma often requires a good deal of time, which means healing gatherings should be ongoing.

As people move through this process, it will also be very beneficial to help them learn self-regulation and co-regulation resilience skills. The Community Resilience Model is an excellent way to do this. The Transformational Resilience approach I developed can also be helpful.

In addition to regenerating their community and healing collective traumas, the combination of these activities will significantly reduce the community’s contribution to the C-E-B crisis, and give many residents positive new sources of meaning, purpose, and hope in life.

3. Form Broad-Scale Unusual Coalitions to Oppose and Overcome Neofascism

As a new vision is being articulated and widely shared, and local networks are formed to transform the economy, build community resilience and heal collective traumas, many other actions must be taken to defeat Trump’s neofascist takeover. Paul Mason offered 5 recommendations for doing this. I will describe them below with information added specific to today’s challenges. They include:

· Learn from history: We must understand the conditions that have allowed fascism to take hold in the past and have enabled neofascism to emerge today in the U.S. We must learn from history to understand the causes of fascism and the horrors it can produce.

· Accept societal failure: Following from the above, we must all acknowledge that the collective traumas described in this article (and others) caused mass disorientation that made many Americans susceptible to neofascist ideology. We need to openly recognize what has happened.

· Practice “active anti-fascism”: We must then aggressively advance anti-fascist principles and actions to stop Trump and his neofascist cohorts. A diverse array of non-violent tactics will be necessary to accomplish this. They include constantly communicating the vision and challenging falsehoods and myths through social media, mainstream TV, print, and radio media outlets. The tactics should also include organizing protests, boycotting large corporations, banks, as well as mid-and small-size businesses and organizations that fund or support neofascism, organizing numerous types of strikes, engaging young people in discussions about the issues, and other actions that disrupt fascist activities. Speaking the truth and critical thinking must be emphasized throughout all of this to challenge the thoughtless acceptance of the Trump administration’s misinformation and lies that cause many people to submit to their neofascist directives.

· Form unusual political alliances: To accomplish the above, alliances must be formed between diverse conservative, centrist, liberal, and progressive groups that do not often work together. The groups include, for instance, conservative legislators, urban and rural civic organizations, religious institutions--especially Christian groups--labor unions, businesses associations, farming, education, neighborhood, healthcare, environmental and climate justice, and many other groups. All of these groups must rise above their own interests and realize that everyone’s health, safety, and wellbeing depend on their ability to mount a powerful cooperative campaign to overcome Trump’s neofascist movement. This will not be easy, but it is essential.

· Implement anti-fascist laws: Conservative elected officials should also join with centrists, liberals, and progressives to updated existing and enact new laws that protect our Democracy and stop the neofascist takeover. Policies to considered include those advanced by the UN General Assembly such as declaring the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and other relevant international instruments. Policies could also affirm that all fascist and neofascist ideologies based on racial or ethnic exclusiveness, hatred, or violence are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

In addition, policies should be enacted to: support and fund local resilience networks; prevent climate catastrophe by mandating large rapid reductions in carbon emissions, the restoration of ecological systems, and a shift to closed-loop circular economic systems that create meaningful well-aid jobs; increase taxes on the wealthy or in other ways significantly reduce economic inequality; establish universal healthcare that mirrors the effective and strongly supported systems that exist in Scandinavian countries; require all social media firms to eliminate algorithms intended to capture users attention by creating anger and polarization; and many others as well.

Conclusion

I hope this article helps you understand that Trump’s neofascist takeover resulted from a decades-long series of cascading collective traumas that shattered the worldviews of millions of Americans. The loss of meaning and hope that resulted created mass disorientation that left people susceptible to the falsehoods and myths that enabled Trump and his neofascist collaborators to take power.

As seen throughout history, overcoming today’s neofascism will require speaking the truth, and giving people inspiring new sources of meaning, purpose, and hope. This requires work at all levels of society--especially the local community level--to transform our economic and energy systems, create plentiful well-paid jobs, and reduce the C-E-B crisis to manageable levels. It will also require concerted efforts to heal collective traumas and prevent new ones, and build both external physical as well as human social, psychological, and emotional resilience for severe stresses and disasters. All of this will set our nation on a safer and healthier path.

This will be the fight of our lifetime. We must all engage--and we must win.