Challenging Fascism: Why traditional methods aren't working — and what might

This was the biggest shellacking of all. It's going to take a long time to figure out what's going on or where we live anymore and since it's obviously not where we thought we lived, there's going to be a strong impulse to double down on our identities and values. I bet we're in for an onslaught of self-righteous certainty from all of us would-be pundits when actually this is a good time to get more curious and expansive than we have been.

Here then are some guesses, nothing more. They're ones I've been exploring for a while now because I've long thought that what we're doing isn't working.

People rarely change when what they're doing is getting them what they want. You can't just reason people out of satisfying habits. That what they're doing isn't working for us isn't going to keep them from doing it if it's working for them. If someone is hurting you in ways that satisfy them, you won't get very far appealing to their empathy and compassion.

Instead, you have to invest yourself in a different kind of empathy and compassion. I have great respect for marketing. The customer isn't always right—in this case, they’re dead wrong. Still, you'll tend to have more leverage over them if you put yourself in their shoes and remember ways in which they've been your shoes, too.

We tend to shun the dark arts of empathy and compassion. Torturers put themselves in their victims' shoes to figure out how to inflict pain on them. It's not Kumbaya empathy and compassion. It's not sympathy and charity, but it is how you change people. Sometimes you have to humiliate people to change them.

I don't think it's working well for us to appeal to the sympathy and charity of those drawn to fascism. It's bad marketing. It's appealing to our needs to feel virtuous. It ignores where they're coming from. I have no sympathy or compassion for these fascists. I'm trying to figure out how to hurt them because otherwise, I don't think they'll be moved to change. They have long had a way to interpret our softness as evidence that they’re right. It rewards their sado-narcissism. Give and inch and they reliably take a mile.

I see three basic ways to deal with any conflict: Variations on assertion, accommodation, and distancing. I was an enthusiastic participant in the counter-culture’s peace movement toward accommodation and distancing. Give an inch and they’ll reciprocate and if they don’t, live and let live elsewhere. I was plenty smug about it, like those peaceful solutions solved reality

I now think of our peace movement as a fleeting, situation-dependent fad. We lived in a briefly peaceful and abundant time and place. We were momentarily safe enough that we could afford to be soft. We extrapolated stupidly, as though everyone everywhere could do that like if we all got nice on the count of three the world would live as one.

We thought that with sympathy and charity, everyone could always turn every win-lose into a win-win. It worked where we lived. We thought you could just roll it out worldwide, like the people in developing countries should just lighten up as we did in Northern California. We came across as pretentious and misguided. It invited a fascist response and has left us unprepared to resist it.

For the past few years, I’ve been focused on assertion, verbal combat, and psychological warfare as our underdeveloped skills. I’ve thought of them as necessary bulwarks against the physical violence that is upon us sooner than we ever expected.

On this, I’ve had very little traction with my peaceful anti-fascist allies. In the comment sections on my videos, I have exchanges with Trumpists and liberals. Hundreds of commenters have counseled just be nice and just don’t talk to them. Accommodation and space-taking aren’t working but we’ve been squeamish about tainting ourselves, as if fighting would make us no better than they are. The fascists are the first to tell me that.

I’ve gotten thousands of comments from Trumpists accusing me of hypocrisy. It’s like if I assert in response to their relentless assertion, I’m the problem. They tell me aggression doesn’t work. I keep in mind that the whole object of the fascist game is for nothing to work. Which is why I keep exploring. The make-or-break question for humankind is how to humbly humble humans who will say and do anything to avoid humility. It’s a very hard question to answer.

I think it’s very late for us to develop verbal combat skills, but maybe not. At least it’s useful to learn from our mistakes in case we ever get another opportunity.

Sado-narcissism is a human thing. We’re an anxious species for reasons I explain elsewhere. Humans need reassurance and affirmation the way hummingbirds need nectar every 15 minutes. We get by comparing ourselves to others. We can either self-elevate or put others down. In a way, sado-narcissism is redundant. Status is relative. Narcissism includes putting others down. Still, I think it’s useful to get explicit about it, and to recognize it in ourselves. Trump mesmerized us all, those who wanted to self-elevate like him those like us who self-elevated by thinking of him as beneath us.

I want to put the fascists down. I want to humiliate them though not for my therapeutic self-satisfaction which would be a distraction grounded in my values not theirs. I aim to be strategic about it.

To motivate fascists to change, you have to demean what elevates them and interpret what gives them strength as a sign of weakness. We call their macho posturing toxic masculinity. That doesn’t work. Again, it makes us look like snowflakes. It’s bad marketing. It holds them to our standards instead of preying upon their standards.

Karl Rove rightly said you don’t attack your enemy’s weakness; you attack their strength. Wrong enemies but I think he’s right. For the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with bold, unshakable accusations of gynophobia and homophobia. Their bravado is fear of women and fear of gays. I’ve been accusing them of a homoerotic man crush on Trump. A fascist movement is not macho; it’s weak. Fascism and Fag originally meant a bundle of sticks. Fascism is a weak man’s way to hide within the safety of numbers.

I’m not tentative in my delivery. Though I’m experimenting, I talk to fascists as though I’m stating the obvious. It riles them up. I’m relentless and unshakeable. I’m not trying to persuade them; I’m trying to confuse, hurt, and disappoint them so I state my opinion as fact.

It goes against my values to poke fun at their femininity and homosexuality, but this is marketing. This is psychological combat. My version of the golden rule is whatever you do unto others is fair game for them to do unto you. They’ve been psychologizing us and calling us weak for decades. I have no problem acting that out with them. I don’t lose my bearings. I respect women and gays lots. They don’t, so I pick at that by performing my humiliating assertion, mirroring their style.

I’m way too late. As always, I’ve squandered my whole life learning things I now already know. I don’t know if I’ll have the balls to keep poking at them this way. The world has changed suddenly. Things that were safe to try are suddenly not. I don’t want to die. Still, I don’t want to shrink either. I’m strategizing for a long game, both into the past and the future.

I have a dream. I can imagine a society inoculated against fascism because everyone knows that bravado is gynophobic homoeroticism. I envision a society where people ridicule the fascist urge.

Granted, what I’m doing here is what everyone does in a crisis, claiming that what they’ve long believed would have solved it. Still, that’s my guess and it’s a foreign one to most of my allies. So I thought I’d share it in the hope that our brainstorming gets a bit more expansive. Because what we’re doing clearly isn’t working.