Fascism’s pedagogy

A time-lapse of late fascism

The students who voted for Trump the last time he won in 2016 gave off an air of transgression, almost as if they couldn’t believe what they unleashed. This time though, in their eyes something altogether different: an eerie normalcy, as of inveterate gamblers at the casino bar, perhaps all the more uncanny in their manic nihilism. Their faces swollen with anticipation as if having received a long-hoped for windfall, as a scion would awaiting the death of wealthy grandfather.

We discussed Trump’s plans to deport all immigrants, end birthright and naturalized citizenship, incarcerate refugees, traffic asylum seekers, rev up fossil fuel production, gut education, repeal healthcare, destroy food and drug regulations, legislate and judicialize torture and murder by police and the military, take bloody revenge on real and imagined enemies… They smirked. Entitlements, long frustratingly out of reach, now ready to hand. Of the many fascinating if unbearably grotesque manifestations of fascism, perhaps the most horrific is the way it makes available a time-lapse of children tutored into the pleasures of plunder.