The Freedom Illusion — Part IV
What happens when a nation loses hope
In Parts I through III, we traced the architecture of neo-slavery: the extraction system that harvests our wealth through debt, suppressed wages, and engineered crises—while keeping us too divided to fight back. Now we need to talk about what that system produces. Not in the abstract. Not as economic theory. But in bodies. In deaths. In the slow-motion collapse of everything that makes a society worth living in.
What follows is four centuries of extraction—slavery, convict leasing, Jim Crow, and their echoes today. Deaths of despair among white workers. Mass incarceration of Black and brown people. Violence against trans people. Cruelty toward immigrants. A loneliness epidemic. Climate catastrophe. We’re used to encountering these as separate crises—each with its own causes, each demanding its own policy solutions, each belonging to someone else’s movement.
That’s the trap.
We’re taught to care about “our” issues. To join movements. To advocate for policies. To fight battles one at a time—and to see other people’s battles as separate from ours, maybe even competition for attention and resources. That fragmentation isn’t accident. It’s neoliberalism’s design.
As long as we’re focused on single issues, trying to fix symptoms with disconnected policies, we never see the machine producing all of them. We never build something that can counter it. And the machine hums along, burning through us—all of us—as fuel.
What follows is the body count. Pay attention to the pattern underneath. That’s what they don’t want us to see.
Reader Advisory
This series is written more like a short book released in parts than a set of blog posts. Each installment is long, dense, and (at times) dark.
That’s not because the goal is despair. The goal is clarity—because hopelessness thrives when the pattern is felt but never named.
Please pace yourself. Read in chunks. Stop when you need to. Come back when you’re ready.
If you stick with it (even in chunks), this is what you’ll get:
A usable map + real receipts — the story of how the system was built, with specific “wait… what?” facts you can verify, share and even change minds with.
Pattern recognition that changes how you see the present — so chaos stops feeling random and starts looking like the predictable output of incentives and institutions operating as designed.
Language for hard conversations — a way to understand how ordinary people get pulled into harmful narratives (explanation, not justification) without instantly collapsing into partisan/culture-war traps.
Grounded hope + a strategy frame — proof the system is bendable, and a clearer sense of where leverage actually is: what must be constrained, what must be rebuilt, and what a real solution looks like if we actually want out of the extraction loop.
The Historical Body Count
Before we document what’s happening now, we need to be honest about what already happened.
The extraction system’s first victims were Black bodies. Four centuries of them.
The numbers are almost incomprehensible. Roughly 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic; about 10.7 million survived the crossing.1 For two and a half centuries, enslaved people were worked to death building a nation that denied their humanity while extracting every ounce of their labor.
Then came the “freedom” that wasn’t. Reconstruction’s brief promise was crushed within a decade, replaced by convict leasing—a system some historians argue was worse than slavery, because the enslaved had been capital worth protecting, while convicts were disposable and replaceable.2 Thousands died in mines, on railroads, in conditions so brutal that mortality rates exceeded anything seen on antebellum plantations.
Then came Jim Crow. The lynchings. The terror campaigns that drove millions north in the Great Migration3—only to find Northern versions of the same cage: redlining, restrictive covenants, urban renewal that was really “Negro removal.”4 The systematic denial of the GI Bill, FHA loans, and every other ladder the government built for white Americans to climb into the middle class.5
The body count from four centuries of explicit racial extraction is uncountable. Tens of millions of lives shortened, stunted, stolen. Generations of wealth blocked from accumulating. Communities built and then burned, built and then bulldozed, built and then redlined into decay.
This is the foundation the current system stands on. This is the debt that’s never been paid.
The Current Body Count
The extraction system has never stopped producing bodies. It’s just gotten more sophisticated about how it harvests them—and more clever about dividing its victims.
The White Working Class: Deaths of Despair
In 2015, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton made a discovery that should have shattered American politics: white Americans without college degrees were dying at unprecedented rates.6
Not from the usual suspects—not cancer, not heart disease in the traditional sense. They were dying from what Case and Deaton called “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease, and suicide.
The numbers are staggering. Deaths from these causes have increased between 56% and 387% depending on the age group over the past two decades.⁶ We’re now averaging 70,000 deaths per year from despair alone—and that’s likely an undercount.⁶
That’s more Americans dying from despair every year than died in the entire Vietnam War. It’s a 9/11 every two weeks, year after year, with no national memorial, no war on terror, no moment of silence.
And here’s what Case and Deaton found that matters most: this wasn’t happening in other wealthy countries. It wasn’t happening to college-educated Americans. It was concentrated among people without degrees—people whose economic prospects had been systematically destroyed over the previous four decades.
The opioid epidemic wasn’t a random tragedy. It was a symptom. When you strip away economic security, when you eliminate paths to dignity, when you foreclose hope itself—people self-medicate. They drink. They take pills. They check out, one way or another.
Black and Brown Americans: Mass Incarceration and Over-Policing
While white working-class Americans were dying of despair, Black and brown Americans were dying in different ways—and being caged in numbers that would have made Jim Crow blush.
The United States incarcerates nearly 2 million people—more than any nation on Earth—and has the highest incarceration rate of any democracy.7 The racial disparity is staggering: Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.⁷
This isn’t about crime rates. It’s about policy choices—choices made deliberately, starting in the Nixon administration and accelerating through Reagan’s War on Drugs and Clinton’s crime bill. Choices that turned minor drug offenses into decade-long sentences. Choices that built a prison-industrial complex that profits from caging human beings.
The over-policing of Black communities produces its own body count: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and thousands of names we’ll never know. The constant surveillance, the harassment, the threat of violence for existing while Black—this is extraction too. It extracts safety, dignity, freedom, life itself.
The Marginalized: Violence Against Trans People
Trans people make up roughly 1% of Americans.8 Yet when YouGov asked people to estimate, the average guess was 21%—a twenty-fold overestimation.9 That gap isn’t accident. It’s the product of a deliberate campaign.
In 2014, Alliance Defending Freedom—the legal network founded by James Dobson and other architects of the religious right’s political machine—partnered with Focus on the Family to draft model “bathroom bills” and email them to every school district in America.10 The legislative explosion followed immediately: from a handful of bills to over 500 anti-trans bills in 2023 alone—all targeting less than 1% of the population.11 Same institutions. Same “protecting children” rhetoric. Same manufactured panic that turned abortion into a wedge issue in 1979.
The violence is real. Since 2013, at least 335 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed in the United States.12 Black trans women are disproportionately targeted—comprising 62% of all known victims, with an average age at death of just 30 years.¹² Many more deaths go unreported or misclassified.
This is the extraction system’s scapegoat machine working exactly as designed: take people’s legitimate suffering, point them at a tiny minority, and watch them fight each other instead of the hands in their pockets.
Immigrants: Scapegoats and Cash Cows
The treatment of immigrants reveals the extraction system’s core contradiction: the same people blamed for America’s problems are essential to keeping it running.
Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.13 More than a third of that—$33.9 billion—went to Social Security and Medicare, programs they’re barred from accessing.¹³ In 40 states, undocumented immigrants pay higher effective tax rates than the top 1% of households.¹³ They’re not draining resources. They’re subsidizing them.
But the extraction system doesn’t need gratitude. It needs scapegoats.
So the same people who pay billions into systems they’ll never benefit from become targets of a cruelty machine designed to make voters feel like something is being done about their economic despair—even though immigrants aren’t causing it.
The results are already visible. “Alligator Alcatraz”—the tent camp in Florida’s Everglades—became a model that states are racing to replicate: Indiana’s “Speedway Slammer,” Nebraska’s “Cornhusker Clink,” Louisiana’s “Dungeon” at the notorious Angola plantation prison.14 Detainees disappear from ICE tracking systems entirely, held incommunicado. Attorneys can’t find their clients. Immigration judges declared they had no jurisdiction. Bond hearings were canceled for weeks.¹⁴
This is what happens when immigration becomes theater—when the goal isn’t enforcement but spectacle. The cruelty is the point.
And for those sent abroad, the treatment is even worse. Human Rights Watch documented what happened to Venezuelans the U.S. shipped to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison: “You have arrived in hell. Here you will spend the rest of your lives.”15 Nearly half had no criminal history whatsoever. Only 3% had been convicted of any violent offense.¹⁵ Dozens were asylum seekers who had passed their initial screening and were awaiting hearings—hearings they’ll never get.¹⁵ Inside, guards beat them daily. Three reported sexual violence. Some were punished for speaking to the Red Cross.¹⁵
The U.S. paid El Salvador millions of dollars for this.
Everyone: The Loneliness Plague and the Life Expectancy Gap
The extraction system doesn’t only kill through despair and violence. It kills through isolation.
In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an 81-page advisory with a stunning conclusion: America is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness.16
Half of all American adults report experiencing measurable loneliness.¹⁶ Young people aged 15-24 reported a 70% drop in time spent with friends.¹⁶ The average American now spends just 20 minutes per day in person with friends—down from 60 minutes two decades ago.¹⁶
This isn’t a mystery. It’s a math problem.
Half of all American renters are now “cost-burdened”—spending more than 30% of their income just on housing.17 That’s 22.4 million households, an all-time high.¹⁷ Since 2001, rents have risen 21% in real terms while incomes rose just 2%.¹⁷ For workers earning under $30,000—the people who stock our shelves, serve our food, clean our offices—the average money left after rent and utilities is $310 per month.¹⁷ Down 47% from two decades ago.¹⁷ That’s $10 a day for everything else: food, transportation, medicine, clothing, emergencies. Life.
Now add healthcare. In 1980, the average worker spent 8% of their paycheck on health insurance premiums. Today it’s 25%—and that’s before copays, deductibles, and the prescription costs that make people ration insulin.18
The math doesn’t work. So 8.3 million Americans are working multiple jobs just to survive—the highest number on record.19 When you’re working two jobs to afford rent and rationing your insulin money, you don’t have time for friends. When you’re one missed shift from losing your apartment, you don’t have energy for community.
And whatever time remains gets harvested by the attention economy. Social media platforms are engineered—deliberately, by design—to extract engagement. Their business model depends on keeping you scrolling, and loneliness makes you scroll more. The algorithms that serve you outrage and division aren’t bugs. They’re features. They’re how the extractors monetize your isolation.
The result: a nation where people spend more time with screens than with each other, more energy on parasocial relationships with influencers than on actual friendships, more hours working for the extraction machine than building the relationships that make life worth living.
And many of the community spaces that do remain have been captured. Churches pulled into culture war politics. Online groups organized around grievance. Movements that channel isolation into scapegoating. The machine doesn’t just destroy community. It replaces it with something that keeps you divided.
The health consequences are devastating. Social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 29%—equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.¹⁶ It increases heart disease risk by 29%, stroke risk by 32%, and dementia risk by 50% for older adults.¹⁶
And the life expectancy gap tells the whole story: the United States is the only wealthy nation where life expectancy has declined.20
In 2023, U.S. life expectancy was 4.1 years shorter than the average of comparable countries.²⁰ We rank dead last among peer nations—despite spending more on healthcare than any of them.²⁰ By 2050, the U.S. is projected to rank 66th in the world—below countries with a fraction of our wealth.²⁰
This is what extraction looks like in aggregate: a country that is literally killing its own people faster than any comparable nation.
Climate Change: The Ideology You Can Breathe
In Part III, we called the extraction ideology “the water we swim in”—so pervasive it becomes invisible, shaping everything while appearing to be nothing. Climate change is that water made physical.
Climate change isn’t separate from the extraction system. It is the extraction system—its logic operating at planetary scale. For a century, the fossil fuel industry extracted wealth from the earth while externalizing the costs onto everyone else. The atmosphere became the ultimate dumping ground, and the bill is now coming due.
They Knew
This wasn’t ignorance. It was strategy.
Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted global warming in the 1970s and 1980s.21 Their internal models projected temperature increases with remarkable precision—projections that have proven more accurate than even NASA’s estimates from the same era.²¹ They knew what was coming. They knew what they were causing.
And they chose to lie.
Instead of warning the public, the fossil fuel industry spent decades funding climate denial through the same network of think tanks that serve the extraction system everywhere else: the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute.22 The playbook was identical to tobacco—manufacture doubt, fund fake experts, delay action until the profits are extracted and the executives are dead.
The result: fifty years of inaction while the window for easy solutions closed. The extraction system couldn’t stop extracting even when the science was clear, even when their own scientists told them the truth. Because stopping would have meant the extractors accepting less. And the system is not designed to accept less.
The Body Count
Climate change is already killing people. This isn’t a future threat—it’s a present reality.
Extreme heat kills more Americans than any other weather-related cause—more than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.23 Heat-related mortality among people over 65 increased by 167% compared to the 1990s.24 The 2023 summer was the hottest in 2,000 years,25 and the records keep falling.26
Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion kills an estimated 8.7 million people globally each year—roughly one in five of all deaths.27 In the United States alone, air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes approximately 350,000 premature deaths annually.²⁷ These deaths are invisible, attributed to heart disease and respiratory failure rather than their actual cause. The extraction system kills, and the death certificates hide the murder weapon.
And as always, the burden falls hardest on those least able to bear it. Low-income communities live closer to pollution sources. Poor neighborhoods have fewer trees and more heat-absorbing concrete. When disasters strike, the wealthy evacuate while the poor shelter in place. Climate change is class warfare conducted through the atmosphere.
The Multiplier
But the direct body count is only the beginning. Climate change is an accelerant—it makes every other problem documented in this series worse.
Migration and scapegoating: The World Bank projects that by 2050, climate change could force 216 million people to migrate within their own countries—with international migration expected to increase as climate impacts intensify and current pathways remain inadequate.28 29 Where do you think the politics of climate migration will land? The same people who demonize immigrants now will have millions more to scapegoat. Every refugee becomes proof of “invasion.” Every border becomes a battle line. The extraction system creates the refugees, then harvests political power from the fear of them.
Resource scarcity and conflict: Water shortages, crop failures, and competition for habitable land are already destabilizing regions around the world.30 The federal government has identified climate change as a “threat multiplier” that will increase the frequency and intensity of conflicts.³⁰ Syria’s civil war was preceded by the worst drought in the region’s recorded history, which drove a million farmers into cities that couldn’t absorb them.³⁰ This is the future: climate stress creating the conditions for violence, displacement, and authoritarian response.
Economic disruption and despair: Climate disasters cost the U.S. $93 billion in 2023 and $183 billion in 2024—more than a quarter trillion dollars in just two years.31 Insurance markets are collapsing in climate-vulnerable regions. Property values are cratering in flood zones. The economic disruption will fall, as always, on those without the resources to adapt—feeding more despair, more deaths, more people looking for someone to blame.
Democratic stress and fascism: When systems are stressed, people turn to strongmen who promise simple solutions. Climate change is a compounding stressor. It will test every institution, strain every resource, and tempt every democracy toward authoritarian shortcuts. The fascist formula—scapegoats, mythic restoration, leader over law—becomes more attractive when the world feels like it’s ending.
This is why climate change belongs in this series. It’s not a separate issue. It’s extraction logic operating at global scale—the same ideology that treats workers as resources to be exploited until exhaustion, now treating the atmosphere as a free dumping ground.
And like every other consequence we’ve documented, it was entirely predictable, entirely preventable, and entirely the result of a system that couldn’t stop extracting even when the science was clear.
This is the water we swim in, made visible. And just as you can’t change the ideological water with a few policy proposals, you can’t solve climate change with carbon taxes and regulations alone. The same forces that hide the extraction ideology from view have spent fifty years hiding climate’s connection to their profits. As long as the underlying system rewards externalizing costs and hiding consequences, any policy that threatens extraction will face the same gauntlet. We’ll see why in Part V.
What’s missing is an ideology that changes the incentives—one where hiding the connection between extraction and its casualties isn’t rewarded but recognized as the self-sabotage it is. That ideology doesn’t exist yet. But it could. And building it is the only path forward.
Democratic Collapse
In 1958, 73% of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.32
Today, that number is 17%.³²
This isn’t cynicism. It’s pattern recognition. When the government bails out banks while letting families lose their homes, people notice. When politicians promise change and deliver more of the same, people notice. When both parties serve the extraction system while performing opposition, people notice.
The collapse extends beyond government. Trust in media, in corporations, in religious institutions, in each other—all of it has cratered. More than 80% of Americans believe elected officials don’t care what people like them think.³²
And they’re right. The officials don’t care. The system isn’t designed to care. It’s designed to extract.
Here’s what happens when trust collapses: people stop believing that collective action can change anything. They retreat into private life—or into online echo chambers that offer the simulation of community without its substance.
The extraction system doesn’t just steal your money. It steals your faith that things could be different.
The Army’s Warning
In March 1945, while American soldiers were still fighting fascism in Europe and the Pacific, the U.S. War Department published a remarkable document: “Army Talk, Orientation Fact Sheet #64: FASCISM!”33
It was a manual designed to help soldiers understand what they were fighting—and how to prevent it from happening here.
The document asked a question that remains the most important question in American politics: “How can we prevent fascism from developing in the United States?”
The answer, from the greatest fighting force in human history, in the middle of the deadliest war ever fought:
”The only way to prevent fascism from getting a hold in America is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.”³³
Read that again.
This is the hammer—the greatest hammer ever built in the history of mankind—saying that the biggest problem they were facing was not a nail.
This was the U.S. Army, in the middle of World War II, saying that the solution to fascism lay not in war, but in economics. Not in military might, but in democracy that actually delivers for its people. Not in destroying foreign enemies, but in building a society where fascism has no fertile ground to grow.
The manual goes on to explain exactly how fascism exploits economic despair:
“Lots of things can happen inside of people when they are unemployed or hungry. They become frightened, angry, desperate, confused. Many, in their misery, seek to find somebody to blame. They look for a scapegoat as a way out. Fascism is always ready to provide one.”³³
Sound familiar?
And then the soldiers’ final warning:
“Only by democratically solving the economic problems of our day can there be any certainty that fascism won’t happen here. That is our job as citizens.”³³
The men who wrote this had stared fascism in the face. They had seen what it did to nations, to families, to human beings. They had watched their friends die fighting it. And they understood—with the clarity that only comes from combat—that fascism isn’t defeated on battlefields alone.
Fascism is defeated when democracy works. When people have economic security. When they have hope.
And fascism grows when democracy fails them.
What is Fascism and Why It Matters
The word “fascism” has been overused to the point of meaninglessness. It’s become shorthand for “politics I don’t like”—applied so indiscriminately that it’s lost its diagnostic power. At the same time, some insist on freezing the term in the 1940s, arguing that unless someone is literally building concentration camps and invading Poland, the label doesn’t apply.
Both approaches are dangerous. The first cries wolf until no one listens. The second waits for the wolf to finish eating before acknowledging it exists.
We need to be able to identify fascism—actual fascism—as it emerges, not after it’s fully metastasized. That requires a definition rigorous enough to mean something and flexible enough to recognize fascism in new configurations.
Scholarly definitions vary, but a consensus has emerged. Umberto Eco’s framework remains foundational.34 Eco grew up under Mussolini’s Italy and spent his career studying how fascism actually operates. His key insight: fascism isn’t a rigid ideology with a manifesto. It’s a syndrome—a cluster of features that combine in different configurations. As Eco put it: “It is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
Roger Griffin contributed another key insight, identifying what he called the “fascist minimum”—the core that distinguishes fascism from generic authoritarianism: a myth of national rebirth fused with extreme nationalism.35 Robert Paxton added that fascism isn’t a coherent philosophical system—it arises specifically in failed democracies, coalescing around charismatic leaders who promise to restore national greatness.36
What follows is a framework built on their foundations but focused on observable outcomes—what fascism looks like when those beliefs take power and operate at scale. You don’t need to read anyone’s mind. You just need to watch what happens.
The Fascism Syndrome:
Not every feature must be present. But the more of these outcomes you observe clustering together, the clearer the diagnosis becomes.
Mythic restoration: The movement frames policy through rhetoric of returning to a “lost” greatness rather than building toward a defined future. The “lost” era always privileges one group at the expense of others.
Identity-based scapegoating: Specific groups are targeted based on who they are—ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexuality, gender identity—not what they’ve done. These scapegoats are simultaneously framed as existential threats to the nation and too weak, inferior, or lazy to contribute to it. Cruelty toward them is celebrated as strength.
Cult of the leader: The movement centers on an individual whose persona supersedes ideology, institutions, or even the movement’s stated goals. Followers develop emotional attachment to the leader personally—defending them reflexively, interpreting their contradictions as strategic genius, treating criticism as betrayal. Officials pledge loyalty to the person rather than the constitution. Laws are enforced or ignored based on the leader’s preferences.
War on reality: Official sources contradict verifiable facts. Independent media is labeled an enemy. Followers believe the leader over their own eyes. Shared reality fragments into tribal truths.
Capture of the state and elimination of accountability: Career officials are replaced with loyalists. Independent agencies lose independence. Institutions serve the leader’s interests rather than their statutory mission. Oversight bodies are gutted, watchdogs are fired, and those who expose wrongdoing are prosecuted rather than protected.
Weaponized justice: Investigations target political opponents. Allies receive pardons, dropped charges, or no prosecution. “Law and order” applies selectively based on political alignment.
Erosion of due process: People are detained, deported, or stripped of rights without normal legal protections. Courts are bypassed, stacked, or ignored. Rights depend on group membership rather than citizenship or humanity.
Normalization of political violence: Violence by supporters is excused, pardoned, or celebrated. Opponents face threats with inadequate protection. Armed intimidation at civic functions becomes routine. Dissent is increasingly met with force.
Consolidation of economic power: Government contracts, regulatory relief, and favorable treatment flow to loyalists. Economic participation increasingly requires political alignment. Corruption becomes a feature, not a bug.
Aggression as virtue: Dominance is celebrated at every level—from personal conduct to foreign policy. Cooperation is framed as weakness. Diplomacy gives way to threats and coercion. Allies are treated as subordinates; international institutions are undermined or abandoned. Strength is measured by the capacity to inflict harm, not the ability to build.
The first three features—mythic restoration, identity-based scapegoating, and cult of the leader—are particularly important for distinguishing fascism from other forms of authoritarianism. Many authoritarian regimes wage war on reality, capture the state, weaponize justice, and consolidate economic power. But the specific fusion of backward-looking nationalism, racial or identity-based enemies, and leader-worship is what makes fascism fascism.
This framework isn’t a political weapon to be deployed against anyone you disagree with. It’s a diagnostic tool. Democracies can have bad policies, corrupt leaders, even unjust laws—without being fascist. What distinguishes fascism is the syndrome: multiple features clustering together, reinforcing each other, forming a system.
When you see one or two of these features in isolation, you have problems to solve. When you see six or seven operating together, you have a pattern to confront. When you see all ten entrenching themselves simultaneously, you are no longer asking whether fascism could happen here.
You are asking what you’re going to do about it.
The Fascist Turn
The Army warned us: when democracy fails to deliver, fascism fills the void. We didn’t listen.
Nearly two-thirds of white working-class Americans now have an authoritarian orientation—37% scoring as “high authoritarian.”37 This isn’t because they’re stupid or evil. It’s because they’ve correctly identified that the system isn’t working for them, and they’re looking for someone—anyone—who will fight.
Donald Trump didn’t create this. He exploited it.
His appeal isn’t mysterious if you understand the extraction system. He offered what no mainstream politician would: the appearance of fighting. He attacked the institutions that had failed people. He named enemies. He promised to burn it all down. “Make America Great Again” is the latest version of the psychological wage—a promise of restored hierarchy where your whiteness, your Christianity, your “real American” status meant something again.
The research is clear: Trump voters aren’t primarily motivated by economic distress in the narrow sense.³⁷ Their median income actually exceeded Clinton voters.38 What they’re experiencing is relative deprivation—the sense that they’re losing ground, that the world is changing in ways that diminish them, that the future will be worse than the past.³⁷
That feeling isn’t wrong. The future will be worse—for them and for most Americans—unless the extraction system is dismantled. The error is in where they direct their rage: at immigrants, at minorities, at “coastal elites”—at anyone except the extractors who are actually robbing them.
This is how fascism becomes attractive. Not as ideology, but as emotional release.
Fascism offers what the extraction system has taken away: meaning, belonging, enemies to fight, a story that makes sense of suffering. It channels despair into rage and rage into violence. It promises that someone will pay for what’s been done to you—even if that someone is a scapegoat who had nothing to do with your actual exploitation.
This is the fascist formula in action: the enemy who is simultaneously too powerful—”invading” the country, “replacing” Americans—and too weak, too subhuman to deserve basic rights. Remember the immigrants paying $96.7 billion in taxes while being shipped to Alligator Alcatraz and Salvadoran torture prisons. They’re not the ones extracting your wealth. But hurting them feels like fighting back.
Extractors have historically tolerated—even enabled—this turn, because fascism redirects working-class rage away from those doing the extracting and toward racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. It’s the psychological wage taken to its ultimate conclusion: you may have nothing, but at least you can hurt them.
We’ve seen this before. Weimar Germany wasn’t ancient history—it was a wealthy, educated, democratic society that collapsed into Nazism within a decade. The conditions were similar: economic devastation, loss of status, democratic paralysis, a population looking for someone to blame.
I’m not saying America is Nazi Germany. I’m saying the mechanism is the same. When you break people economically and then offer them no path forward through legitimate politics, they will find illegitimate ones. That’s not a moral failing. It’s a predictable output of the system.
Trump is a symptom. The disease is a system that has made democratic politics incapable of delivering for ordinary people. The Army knew this in 1945. We’re living the proof in 2025.
The Pattern
Here’s what we’re supposed to miss: these aren’t separate problems.
Deaths of despair among white workers. Mass incarceration of Black and brown people. The demonization of immigrants. Violence against trans people. The loneliness epidemic. The life expectancy collapse. The climate disasters. The gap between the insured and uninsured, the housed and homeless, the fed and hungry.
When you trace each of these to its deepest root, you find the same thing: neoliberalism—the ideology that subordinates all of human life to market logic, that treats people as inputs to be optimized and discarded, that externalizes its costs onto the vulnerable while hiding who’s actually responsible.
The white worker dying of an opioid overdose in Ohio. The Black man serving twenty years for possession in Louisiana. The trans woman murdered in Texas. The immigrant family ripped apart at the border. The elderly woman dead in a Phoenix heat wave. The farmer who put a gun in his mouth in Kansas—all casualties of the same ideology. One that extracts their labor, denies them dignity, and offers them someone to blame who isn’t the actual perpetrator.
Here’s the darkest irony: no foreign adversary could do this to us. No military on Earth could hollow out American life expectancy, gut our communities, addict our workers, cage our minorities, and turn our citizens against each other with this kind of efficiency. We’ve done it to ourselves. Neoliberalism is the most successful psyop in history—and we’re both the target and the perpetrator.
On the surface, the metrics look fine. GDP grows. The stock market hits record highs. Billionaires multiply. Politicians point to these numbers as proof the system works. But underneath, the country is rotting: people dying younger, trusting less, connecting less, hoping less. We’re becoming a hollow shell—gleaming on the outside, collapsing within.
And when all of that suffering compounds—when generation after generation watches democracy fail to deliver relief—trust collapses. People stop believing the system can work for them. And that’s when fascism stops being a historical warning and starts being an attractive alternative.
Neoliberalism needs us to see these as separate problems—as “white problems” and “Black problems,” as “urban crime” and “rural despair,” as “culture war” issues and “economic” issues and “environmental” issues. Because if we ever saw them as one problem—as the predictable outputs of a single ideology—we might stop fighting each battle in isolation and start questioning the belief system that makes all of them inevitable.
That’s what neoliberalism cannot survive. The thing that defeated monarchism wasn’t the beheading of kings and nobles, or attacks on feudal economics, or resistance to the church’s blessing of royal power—it was defeating the idea of divine right that made all of them possible. Fragmented resistance to individual symptoms keeps the ideology intact. A unified challenge to the belief system that produces them all is what breaks it.
If we care about any of these issues, we have to reckon with a hard truth: fighting them in isolation is how they persist. Neoliberalism doesn’t fear single-issue movements—it feeds on them. Every fragmented campaign that ignores the larger pattern leaves the underlying ideology unchallenged. Until we build something unified, every victory will be temporary, every defeat will compound, and the people we claim to fight for will keep suffering.
What the Defenders Will Say
This portrait of American decline will provoke objections. Let’s address them.
“Things aren’t that bad. The economy is growing. Unemployment is low.”
GDP is not well-being. Unemployment statistics don’t count people who’ve given up looking. The economy can “grow” while life expectancy falls, while despair deaths climb, while loneliness becomes epidemic. The extraction system is very good at producing numbers that look healthy while the people producing those numbers die younger and more miserable than their parents.
“This is just doom and gloom. People have always complained about decline.”
Show me another wealthy nation where life expectancy is falling. Show me another period in American history with 70,000 despair deaths per year. Show me a time when half the population reported chronic loneliness. This isn’t generalized pessimism—it’s measurable, unprecedented collapse in human well-being, happening in the richest country in human history.
“You’re blaming the system for individual choices. People choose to take drugs, to kill themselves, to be lonely.”
And fish “choose” to die when you drain the lake. Humans are social animals who require economic security, community, and hope to thrive. When the system eliminates these conditions, people sicken and die. Calling it “choice” is the final insult—blaming the victims for responding predictably to conditions designed to destroy them.
“If things are so bad, why isn’t there more unrest? Why aren’t people rioting?”
Some are. And the rest are medicated, exhausted, isolated, and convinced their actions can’t change anything. Learned helplessness is powerful. The system has gotten very good at producing just enough comfort to prevent rebellion while extracting everything else. The frog boils slowly.
The Path Forward
This series has been a diagnosis so far. Four parts documenting an extraction system so vast, so entrenched, so cleverly designed that it can feel insurmountable. The numbers are crushing. The body count is real. The machine has been running for four hundred years.
But here’s what the extractors don’t want us to understand: they’re not that strong. We’re that divided.
The extraction system doesn’t survive because it’s invincible. It survives because we fight it in fragments—each movement isolated, each coalition temporary, each victory reversed when attention moves elsewhere. The machine doesn’t need to defeat us. It just needs to keep us from seeing that we’re all fighting the same enemy.
The moment we stop fighting symptoms and start fighting the ideology that produces them all—that’s when the math changes. Not reform. Replacement. An ideology of human flourishing built to defeat an ideology of extraction, the same way liberalism defeated divine right.
The Army told us in 1945: “The only way to prevent fascism from getting a hold in America is by making our democracy work.”
That prescription hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that now we have to build it from the ground up—because the institutions that were supposed to deliver it have been captured.
Part V is about what we build instead. The values. The structures. The mechanisms. The strategy. Not a wish list—a replacement operating system for a society that’s forgotten what it was supposed to be for.
This is where the diagnosis ends and the construction begins.
If this work—documenting what the extraction system has done to us and why—feels worth having in the world, please consider supporting The American Manifesto. Paid subscriptions make it possible to keep telling the truths that explain why everything feels so broken.
Your Move
This article argues that the social collapse we’re witnessing—the historical body count, deaths of despair, mass incarceration, loneliness, climate disasters, declining trust, authoritarian appeal—is the predictable output of the extraction system, not a collection of unrelated problems.
Does this framing help explain phenomena that previously seemed disconnected?
Have you witnessed the consequences documented here in your own community or family?
What’s your response to the Army’s 1945 warning? Does it change how you see the current moment?
Is there a path out that doesn’t require making democracy actually work for people?
The comments are open. We’re in this together—even when the system wants us to forget that.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, “Estimates“, SlaveVoyages.org.
Comprehensive database documenting the forced transportation of approximately 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1900, with roughly 10.7 million surviving the crossing. The database represents decades of scholarly collaboration to document the scale and human cost of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Equal Justice Initiative, “Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade“, EJI, 2018.
Documentation of how convict leasing after the Civil War often exceeded the brutality of slavery, because enslaved people had been capital investments worth preserving while convicts were seen as disposable and replaceable. The report traces how the South’s economy remained dependent on coerced Black labor through the convict leasing system that lasted into the 1920s.
Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror“, Equal Justice Initiative, 2017.
Comprehensive report documenting the history of racial terror lynchings in America. EJI’s research documents 4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950—plus more than 300 additional lynchings in other states. The report shows how lynching was used as a tool of racial terrorism to enforce Jim Crow and maintain white supremacy, creating a climate of terror that drove six million Black Americans north during the Great Migration. The U.S. Department of Labor identified “insecurity from mob violence” as a primary cause of this mass exodus.
NPR/Fresh Air, “A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America“, NPR, May 3, 2017.
Interview with Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, documenting how federal, state, and local governments deliberately created and enforced residential segregation through explicit policy. The FHA’s Underwriting Manual stated that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities” and recommended highways as a tool to separate Black from white neighborhoods. The government created color-coded “redlining” maps marking any area where African-Americans lived as too risky for mortgage insurance, while simultaneously subsidizing builders to create whites-only subdivisions. The result: African-American wealth today is approximately 5% of white wealth—a gap almost entirely attributable to these deliberate federal housing policies.
Stephanie Hinnershitz, “The GI Bill and Planning for the Postwar“, The National WWII Museum, March 13, 2025.
Detailed analysis of how the GI Bill’s benefits were systematically denied to Black veterans through deliberate policy design. Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi inserted language ensuring state-level VA agencies administered benefits—guaranteeing that Jim Crow states could redirect funds away from Black veterans. Black veterans could only attend approximately 100 “Colleges for Negroes” in the segregated South, facing strained resources and fierce competition. The discrimination extended to housing: restrictive covenants and redlining meant that of 3,200 government-backed loans in 13 Mississippi cities, Black veterans received only two. The GI Bill created the white middle class while systematically excluding the Black veterans who had fought alongside them.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism“, Princeton University / Brookings Institution, 2017-2024.
Landmark research documenting the unprecedented rise in mortality among white Americans without college degrees. Deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease, and suicide have increased between 56% and 387% depending on age cohort, averaging 70,000 per year. Case and Deaton link these “deaths of despair” to decades of declining economic opportunity, falling marriage rates, and deteriorating physical and mental health among successive birth cohorts of working-class Americans.
Prison Policy Initiative, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025“, Prison Policy Initiative, March 2025.
Comprehensive analysis documenting that nearly 2 million people are confined in America’s prisons, jails, and detention facilities on any given day—the highest incarceration rate of any democracy on Earth. Black Americans represent 41% of the incarcerated population despite being only 14% of U.S. residents. The Sentencing Project’s data shows a national Black/white incarceration disparity of 4.8:1. The system costs at least $182 billion annually while devastating communities and families—113 million American adults have had an immediate family member incarcerated.
Jody L. Herman, Andrew R. Flores, and Kathryn K. O’Neill, “How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?“, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, June 2022.
Comprehensive demographic study estimating that 1.6 million adults (0.6%) and 300,000 youth ages 13-17 (1.4%) identify as transgender in the United States—approximately 1% of the total population aged 13 and older. The research shows transgender identification is higher among younger generations, suggesting increased social acceptance rather than any change in underlying prevalence. This data establishes the baseline for understanding the disproportionate political and media attention directed at less than 1% of the population.
Louis Jacobson, “How many trans people are there in the US, and why do surveys show people perceive they make up 20%?“, PolitiFact, July 13, 2023.
Analysis of the perception gap between actual transgender population (0.5-1.6% of Americans) and public estimates. A 2022 YouGov poll found that Americans on average believe 21% of the population is transgender—a twenty-fold overestimation. Researchers attribute this to “salience bias”: minorities become cognitively memorable due to media coverage, creating false impressions of prevalence. The gap demonstrates how manufactured moral panics distort public perception far beyond reality.
Southern Poverty Law Center, “Alliance Defending Freedom“, SPLC Extremist Files, 2024.
Comprehensive profile of Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal network founded in 1994 by James Dobson (Focus on the Family), Donald Wildmon (American Family Association), and Bill Bright (Campus Crusade for Christ)—the same architects of the religious right’s political infrastructure documented in Part III. In 2014, ADF partnered with Focus on the Family to develop the “Student Physical Privacy Policy”—model bathroom legislation they emailed to every school district in America. This coordinated campaign preceded the explosion of anti-trans legislation at the state level, demonstrating how the same network that manufactured abortion as a wedge issue in 1979 manufactured the trans panic using identical “protecting children” rhetoric.
ACLU, “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures“, ACLU, 2023.
Legislative tracking documenting the explosion of anti-LGBTQ bills at the state level. In 2023, over 510 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced across 49 states—more than tripling the previous record. More than 75 became law, with 21 restricting gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth. 2023 marked the fifth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans legislation. The scale of this legislative campaign—hundreds of bills targeting less than 1% of the population—demonstrates the manufactured nature of the panic and the coordinated infrastructure behind it.
Human Rights Campaign, “An Epidemic of Violence: Fatal Violence Against Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People in the United States“, HRC, 2023.
Annual report documenting fatal violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people in the United States. Tracks known killings while noting significant undercounting due to misgendering by police and media. Black transgender women face disproportionate rates of violence. Since 2013, at least 335 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed, with 62% being Black transgender women and an average age at death of just 30 years.
Carl Davis, Marco Guzman, and Emma Sifre, “Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants“, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 2024.
Comprehensive analysis of federal, state, and local tax contributions by the estimated 10.9 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Finds they paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022, including $33.9 billion to Social Security and Medicare—programs they are barred from accessing. In 40 states, undocumented immigrants pay higher effective state and local tax rates than the wealthiest 1% of households. Demolishes the myth that undocumented immigrants are economic burdens, showing instead that they subsidize public services they cannot access.
Shannon Heffernan, “The Next Alligator Alcatraz Could Be in Your State“, The Marshall Project, August 2025.
Investigation into how the Trump administration is expanding the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention model across multiple states. Documents the opening of new facilities: Indiana’s “Speedway Slammer,” Nebraska’s “Cornhusker Clink,” Louisiana’s use of Angola prison’s notorious “Dungeon,” and Florida’s “Deportation Depot.” Reveals that detainees disappear from ICE tracking systems entirely—held incommunicado with no access to courts. Immigration judges declared they had no jurisdiction over detainees, and bond hearings were canceled for weeks. The facilities currently hold 59,000 people with plans to expand to 80,000 beds.
Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, “‘You Have Arrived in Hell’: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison“, Human Rights Watch, November 2025.
81-page investigation documenting the treatment of Venezuelans the U.S. government shipped to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. Nearly half (48.8%) had no criminal history; only 3% had been convicted of any violent offense. Dozens were asylum seekers who had passed credible fear screenings and were awaiting hearings. Documents systematic torture: daily beatings, sexual violence, punishment for speaking to the Red Cross, and the prison director’s greeting: “You have arrived in hell. Here you will spend the rest of your lives.” The U.S. paid El Salvador millions for this arrangement, demonstrating how immigration cruelty has become a feature rather than a bug of the system.
U.S. Surgeon General, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation“, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, May 2023.
The Surgeon General’s 81-page advisory documenting America’s loneliness epidemic. Half of U.S. adults report measurable loneliness. Time spent with friends dropped from 60 minutes daily to 20 minutes over two decades. Social isolation increases premature death risk by 29%—equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day—and significantly increases risks of heart disease, stroke, and dementia. Young people aged 15-24 reported a 70% decline in time spent with friends.
Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, “America’s Rental Housing 2024“, Harvard University, 2024.
Comprehensive 56-page analysis of the U.S. rental housing market documenting an affordability crisis at historic levels. Half of all renters (22.4 million households) are now cost-burdened—spending more than 30% of income on housing—an all-time high. Since 2001, rents have risen 21% in real terms while renter incomes rose just 2%. For households earning under $30,000, the average residual income after housing costs is just $310 per month—down 47% from 2001. Even 8.0 million fully employed renters remain cost-burdened. The severely burdened spend 39% less on food and 42% less on healthcare than their non-burdened counterparts, demonstrating how housing costs cascade into every dimension of economic security.
Willis Towers Watson, “The Big Paycheck Squeeze: The Impacts of Rising Healthcare Costs“, WTW, July 2023.
Analysis of how healthcare costs have consumed an ever-larger share of worker compensation over four decades. In 1980, employer-sponsored health insurance premiums represented approximately 8% of the average worker’s take-home pay. By 2020, that figure had risen to 25%—before accounting for copays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs that can add thousands more annually. The report documents how rising healthcare costs have effectively offset wage gains for millions of workers, contributing to the sense that hard work no longer translates to economic advancement.
Self Financial, “The Number of Americans with Two or More Jobs“, Self.inc, 2024.
Analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data on multiple jobholders in the United States. As of 2024, 8.3 million Americans—5.2% of the employed population—work multiple jobs, the highest number on record. The data reveals that multiple jobholding has been climbing steadily as wages fail to keep pace with housing, healthcare, and other essential costs. The phenomenon represents a structural shift in the American economy: for millions of workers, a single full-time job is no longer sufficient to afford basic necessities.
Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, “How does U.S. life expectancy compare to other countries?“, Peterson-KFF, 2024.
Comprehensive comparison of U.S. life expectancy against peer nations. The U.S. ranks last among comparable countries despite having the highest healthcare spending ($13,432 per capita in 2023). Life expectancy is 4.1 years shorter than the comparable country average. American women’s global ranking fell from 19th in 1990 to 47th in 2021. The gap is explained primarily by preventable causes: heart disease, drug overdoses, firearm deaths, and motor vehicle crashes.
Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections“, Science, January 2023.
Landmark study analyzing Exxon’s internal climate projections from 1977-2003 and comparing them to actual observed warming. Exxon’s scientists accurately predicted global warming with “chilling accuracy”—their models were more precise than even NASA’s projections from the same era. The study proves that Exxon had the scientific knowledge to understand the consequences of its products and chose to fund denial instead of warn the public.
Robert J. Brulle, “Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations“, Climatic Change, 2014.
Analysis of the funding network behind climate denial, documenting how fossil fuel companies and conservative foundations channeled hundreds of millions of dollars to think tanks and advocacy organizations specifically to manufacture doubt about climate science. Traces the direct connections between the tobacco playbook and climate denial, showing how the same organizations—Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Heartland Institute—and often the same individuals led both campaigns.
National Weather Service, “Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics“, NOAA, 2024.
Official U.S. government statistics on weather-related fatalities compiled from NWS forecast offices across all 50 states. The 2024 data shows heat as the deadliest weather hazard, killing more Americans than any other weather-related cause—including hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and lightning combined. The 30-year average (1995-2024) confirms heat’s position as the leading cause of weather-related death, with 2024 fatalities exceeding 200. Data sourced from NOAA’s Storm Events Database.
Marina Romanello et al., “The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: facing record-breaking threats from delayed action“, The Lancet, October 30, 2024.
Annual assessment tracking the health impacts of climate change globally. Documents that heat-related deaths among adults over 65 years increased by 167% from the 1990s to 2023—compared to only 65% that would have been expected without anthropogenic climate change. This represents a record high for the observed period, demonstrating that climate change is already a public health emergency with impacts falling disproportionately on vulnerable populations.
Jan Esper, Max Torbenson & Ulf Büntgen, “2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years“, Nature, May 14, 2024.
Peer-reviewed paleoclimate study using tree-ring reconstructions to show that “2023 was the warmest Northern Hemisphere extra-tropical summer over the past 2,000 years exceeding the 95% confidence range of natural climate variability by more than ca. 0.4°C.” The analysis found that the 2023 summer was 3.93°C warmer than the coldest reconstructed summer (536 CE, following a volcanic eruption). Researchers from Cambridge and Mainz universities note this extreme “emphasizes the urgency to implement international agreements for carbon emission reduction.”
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, “2023 was the world’s warmest year on record“, NOAA, January 2024.
Official confirmation that 2023 was the warmest year in the 174-year instrumental climate record, surpassing the previous record (2016) by a significant margin of 0.27°F. Global average temperature was 1.35°C above the pre-industrial average. The ten warmest years since 1850 have all occurred in the past decade, demonstrating that climate records continue to fall as greenhouse gas concentrations increase.
Karn Vohra et al., “Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion“, Environmental Research, April 2021.
Harvard study finding that air pollution from fossil fuel combustion causes approximately 8.7 million deaths globally each year—far higher than previous estimates. This represents roughly one in five of all deaths worldwide. In the United States, the study estimates approximately 350,000 premature deaths annually from fossil fuel-related air pollution. These deaths are largely invisible, recorded as heart disease and respiratory failure rather than attributed to their actual cause.
World Bank Group, “Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration“, World Bank, September 2021.
Comprehensive modeling of climate-driven internal migration across six world regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America, East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Projects that by 2050, climate change could force up to 216 million people to migrate within their own countries due to slow-onset climate impacts including water scarcity, declining crop productivity, and sea-level rise. The report emphasizes that early action—reducing greenhouse gases, closing development gaps, restoring ecosystems, and helping people adapt—could reduce climate migration by up to 80%, to 44 million people by 2050.
International Organization for Migration, “World Migration Report 2024“, IOM, 2024.
Chapter on climate change and migration analyzing the complex relationship between environmental change and human mobility. While avoiding specific cross-border projections due to methodological challenges, the report emphasizes that “human mobility is likely to increase in upcoming years due to the rate of environmental change” and that “current policy pathways remain inadequate.” Documents how climate-induced displacement increasingly transcends national boundaries as slow-onset impacts like drought and sea-level rise make entire regions uninhabitable, supporting the article’s argument that the 216 million internal migration figure represents only part of the coming displacement crisis.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “2014 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review“, DHS, June 2014.
The federal government’s assessment of homeland security threats, explicitly identifying climate change as a “threat multiplier”: “Climate change and associated trends may also indirectly act as ‘threat multipliers.’ They aggravate stressors abroad that can enable terrorist activity and violence, such as poverty, environmental degradation, and social tensions.” The review warns of increased population movements, disaster-driven migration, and infrastructure disruption. The Syria drought claim is separately verified by peer-reviewed research (Kelley et al., PNAS 2015) documenting the “worst drought in the instrumental record” that displaced 1.5 million people to urban centers before the civil war.
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, “Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters“, NOAA, 2025.
Tracking of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the United States. The U.S. experienced 28 billion-dollar disasters in 2023 ($93.1 billion) and 27 in 2024 ($182.7 billion)—more than a quarter trillion dollars in damage over just two years. The 2024 total makes it the fourth-costliest year on record, with Hurricanes Helene ($78.7B) and Milton ($34.3B) alone causing over $100 billion in combined damage across six states in a two-week period. The frequency and cost of these disasters has increased dramatically: the last five years (2020-2024) averaged $120 billion annually, more than double the 44-year inflation-adjusted average.
Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025“, Pew Research Center, December 2025.
Tracking of public trust in the federal government over nearly seven decades. Trust has collapsed from 73% in 1958 to approximately 17% today—among the lowest readings ever recorded. The decline accelerated after Vietnam and Watergate, never recovered above 30% after 2007, and has continued falling through both Republican and Democratic administrations. More than 80% of Americans believe elected officials don’t care what people like them think.
U.S. War Department, “Army Talk, Orientation Fact Sheet #64: FASCISM!“, U.S. War Department, March 24, 1945.
Official U.S. military educational document published during World War II to help soldiers understand fascism and how to prevent it. The manual explicitly states that “the only way to prevent fascism from getting a hold in America is by making our democracy work”—an extraordinary acknowledgment by the greatest military force in history that the solution to fascism lay not in warfare but in building a functioning democracy that meets the needs of its people.
Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism“, The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.
Eco’s seminal essay on the nature of fascism, written from the perspective of someone who grew up under Mussolini’s regime. Identifies fourteen common features of what he calls “Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism”—a syndrome rather than a fixed ideology. His key insight: these features need not all be present simultaneously; “It is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” The essay remains the most cited scholarly framework for identifying fascist movements in their early stages.
Roger Griffin, “The Palingenetic Core of Fascist Ideology“, excerpted from The Nature of Fascism, Routledge, 1991.
Griffin’s foundational work establishing the “fascist minimum”—the core essence that distinguishes fascism from generic authoritarianism. He defines fascism as “a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” The key concept is palingenesis: a myth of national rebirth after a period of decay, fused with extreme nationalism. This theory has become the standard framework in fascist studies, describing what Griffin calls the “new consensus” on identifying fascism across its varied historical manifestations.
Robert O. Paxton, “The Anatomy of Fascism“, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Paxton, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, argues that fascism is not a coherent philosophical system but a product of mass politics that arises specifically in failed democracies. Central to his analysis is the role of charismatic leadership: “Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people.” He identifies among fascism’s “mobilizing passions” the need for “a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny.” His emphasis on fascism’s dependence on democratic failure and the cult of the leader complements Eco’s focus on the syndrome of beliefs and Griffin’s identification of the mythic core.
PRRI, “Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump“, PRRI/The Atlantic, 2017.
Research on authoritarian orientation and Trump support among white working-class Americans. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of white working-class Americans have an authoritarian orientation, with 37% classified as “high authoritarian.” The research found that Trump supporters weren’t primarily motivated by narrow economic hardship but by relative deprivation and fears of cultural displacement—the sense that “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” “Make America Great Again” functioned as a promise of cultural restoration rather than purely economic revival.
Nate Silver, “The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support“, FiveThirtyEight, May 3, 2016.
Analysis of exit poll data from 23 primary states debunking the narrative that Trump’s base was economically struggling. The median household income of Trump voters was $72,000—higher than Clinton supporters ($61,000), Sanders supporters ($61,000), and the national median ($56,000). Only 12% of Trump voters had household incomes below $30,000, compared to 20% of Clinton voters. Trump voters’ median income exceeded the statewide median in all 23 states surveyed. The data demonstrates that Trump’s appeal was not to the economically desperate but to relatively affluent voters experiencing status anxiety and cultural displacement.
I’d also add Native Americans to the first section — this land wasn’t empty. I do think more people are becoming aware of the scourge of neoliberalism. Unfortunately the majority of politicians still run away from any real critique of the system.