Techno-Fascism in Trumpworld: Let me out of here! (Short Version)
T-2Trump minus two days
This is a shortened version of an article first published on January 15, 2025.
I don't want to live in Trumpworld.
I don't want to spend the next four years reading and hearing about Trump’s latest acts of corruption and his latest efforts to hollow out the institutions of our democracy and to destroy the basic values upon which our culture and civilization are based.
Trump has corrupted America. It is like an ongoing train wreck. I don't want to watch as it unfolds.
Still, I am interested in fighting and defeating the growth of fascism in America and in the world.
We must launch a Rescue Democracy Movement.
We need to join forces and to come together as a movement. We need to support the writing and publication of books and articles which have as one of their important goals that of unmasking and defeating fascism in the United States.
Together, we have the power to defeat the growing influence of "Techno-Fascism" in the United States--or at least that is our hope.
It is Fascism because there is no other word for it. "Authoritarianism" is much too soft a term, which does not seem to penetrate the ideological and information bubble of Republicans and other Trump supporters.
It is Techno-Fascism because the billionaires who accumulated immense wealth and power through the unregulated growth of the Internet and Surveillance Capitalism1 have joined forces with the fascist movement of Donald Trump and the Republicans. Through their control of the flow of information and their mastery of propaganda techniques, they have manipulated information and shaped public opinion in ways that favor Trump and the Republicans, and which helped them win elections. Now, having helped Trump win the presidency, they seek to control the government which is rapidly becoming part of their power matrix.
For example, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has recently demonstrated that he now has the power to kill a bipartisan bill approved by the 435 elected Representatives of Congress.2
President Joe Biden explicitly warned us of these developments in his freewill address on January 15, 2025.3
Germans who lived through the Third Reich told us that the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler and Nazism could happen anywhere. Naively, we comforted ourselves with the belief that it was a specifically German phenomenon, a product of German history and culture. We failed to pay attention to the development of fascism in other countries, content in the belief that It Can't Happen Here, the title of Sinclair Lewis's chilling 1935 novel about the the triumph of fascism in the U.S.
Well, it has happened here.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote the famous American philosopher George Santayana in The Life of Reason (1905).
Sadly, we have not been able to remember the Nazi past, or the rise and history of fascism in other countries. Even when we saw it, as in Argentina and Chile in the 1970's, we were too naive to call it by its rightful name: FASCISM.
It is not clear how or whether we will defeat Techno-Fascism in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But it is absolutely clear that we will not succeed if we don't try.
And it is equally clear that our starting point must be to rescue the concept of Truth from the many assaults to which it is now being subjected.
How could anyone have spoken of a “post-truth” world?
Yet they did. Even journalists used the term.
The Rescue Democracy Movement begins here, supporting the publication of books and articles which preserve the truth of recent history, the facts, in the face of massive propaganda efforts by the Republicans to rewrite recent and not-so-recent history, such as the history of what really happened on January 6, 2021.4
The title of this essay expresses my feeling: "Tchno-Fascism in Trumpworld: Let me out of here!"
Yet surely at a deeper level of our being we also feel the urgency of fighting Trumpworld, of engaging in the battle to rescue all that we hold dear. Undoubtedly the people who lived in Europe during World War II wanted to escape the hell their world had become. But they did not give up. They stood up to fascism, against what in 1940 seemed to be very long odds, and in the end they triumphed and saved our civilization from the barbarism that threatened it
We must do the same.
And we must begin by launching a fearsome battle to rescue and safeguard the truth.
We must record the truth, and remind people every day of the truth.
See Soshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
See Michael D. Shear, Nnie Karni, Ryan Mac, andbMaggie Haberman, “Elon Musk Flexes His Political Strength as Government Shutdown Looms; The world’s richest man led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it,” The New York Times, December 19, 2024.
Erica L. Green ”,In Farewell Address, Biden Warns of an ‘Oligarchy’ Taking Shape in America; President Biden did not explicitly name President-elect Donald J. Trump, but his remarks went straight at the tension at the heart of the incoming White House.” New York Times, January 15, 2025.
See Steve Benen, Ministry of Truth,: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past (New York: Mariner Books, 2024).
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James Rowles is a former Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and professor of international law at other universities.
He studied the history of Nazi Germany at Stanford, and has studied and worked on human rights, judicial reform, and access to justice projects in many countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and in Afghanistan and Russia. At Harvard Law School, he taught a course on “Law, Human Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America”.
At the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS, he worked on human rights cases involving forced disappearances, executions, and torture in a number of authoritarian countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Recent Books by the Author
The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2021 (2024). Available on Amazon and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.
Don’t Be Stupid. Pay Attention, Damn It! Advice for Undecided Voters and Voters Leaning Toward Trump (2024). Available on Amazon and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.
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