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The core of the prepper fantasy: “What if the world ended in the
precise way that made
me the most important person?” The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their “leadership skills.”
The ethnographer Rich Miller spent his career embedding with preppers, eventually writing the canonical book of the fantasies that power their obsessions,
Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times:
Miller recounts how the disasters that preppers prepare for are the disasters that will call upon their skills, like the water chemist who’s devoted his life to preparing to help his community recover from a terrorist attack on its water supply; and who, when pressed, has no theory as to why any terrorist would stage such an attack:
Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that
you can solve, personally. It’s an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism’s mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual (“There is no such thing as society” – M. Thatcher). If we have a workplace problem, we must bargain with our bosses, and if we lose, our choices are to quit or eat shit. Under no circumstances should we solve labor disputes through a union, especially not one that wins strong legal protections for workers and then holds the government’s feet to the fire.
Same with bad corporate conduct: getting ripped off? Caveat emptor! Vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Elections are slow and politics are boring. But “vote with your wallet” turns retail therapy into a form of civics.
This individualistic approach to problem solving does useful work for powerful people, because it keeps the rest of us thoroughly power
less. Voting with your wallet is casting a ballot in a rigged election that’s always won by the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that’s never you. That’s why the right is so obsessed with removing barriers to election spending: the wealthy can’t win a one-person/one-vote election (to be in the 1% is to be outnumbered 99:1), but unlimited campaign spending lets the wealthy vote in
real elections using their wallets, not just just ballots.
Professor Jason Stanley, who studies fascism, says fascism is a set of tactics for gaining power. Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined fascism as the ownership of government by an individual, a group, or any other controlling private power—which is basically what happens you privatize government to the point where the government is essentially owned by private individuals.
Oligarchy, to define our terms, is when government is in the hands of a few people who own the government.
So oligarchy is a form of government that happens when a few people gain power and solidify their place at the top of the hierarchy and come to essentially own the government.
When fairness presidents go to work, they do things like create healthcare for everyone, expand voting rights, create progressive tax code. Things that help everybody, including people at the bottom.
Fascists and would-be oligarchs can’t do that because if everyone has equal access you don’t have a hierarchy anymore.
So how do they govern?
Russian philosopher Ivan Illyin explains how to do it. Timothy Snyder writes about Illyin in his book the Road to Unfreedom. llyin was a Russian nobleman who went into exile after the communist revolution. He admired Hitler and Mussolini. He admired order. The nation, for Ilyin, was like a body. The citizens are the cells. Each remains in its place. The foot cell doesn’t try to be a brain cell, and the brain cell doesn’t want to be a foot cell and wouldn’t even try.
He believed in a natural order. He also for this reason believed fascism would eventually replace both communism and democracy.
Illyin disliked the middle class, which was always striving for social advancement. He believed that this fractured society and created chaos. He thought the rulers at the top should rule, everyone else should be at the bottom.
He wrote guidelines for Russian leaders who would come to power after the fall of communism so they would know how to be good fascist. Putin followed these guidelines, and people like Trump have imitated Putin.
For Illyin, the task of the oligarch is to preserve the status quo, which means preserving their own wealth and power, and keeping others in their places.
But you can’t tell the people THAT. So you tell them a good story.
You tell them the oligarchs are “redeemers” with a mythic connection to the destiny of the nation, and that they will do battle with the nation’s enemies.
The fascist leader distracts everyone with these battle so they don’t have time to think about why they don’t have health care. They create crises.
Made up enemies are safest. We know that from George Orwell.
Twentieth century fascist really went war, and that was their undoing.
21st century fascists prefer harmless or made up enemies. That way the fascist leader doesn’t have to worry about getting hurt or having his property damaged. Trump preferred harmless enemies—those homeless migrant families at the border.
The followers are so busy cheering on their leader (the strongman) who is doing battle with their enemies that they don’t have time to wonder why they don’t have better healthcare or why they’re getting sick or and don’t have the same quality health care as people at the top, There is something they want more.
They want safety and order restored. They want their enemies vanquished. Now the enemy is Antifa.
No matter how low you are in the hierarchy, there are people lower trying to take what’s yours. The migrants at the border are perfect. They’re very low on the hierarchy trying to come up and take what belongs to “real” Americans.
What Trump did is basically what would-be oligarch do. He gave tax breaks to himself and his pals, and riled up his followers against Black Lives Matters implying that Blacks are trying to upset the natural order take over the top of the hierarchy.
There are so many things wrong with that, but the point is that hierarchy people see a desire for equality as a threat to order.
Crisis and spectacle is how fascists and would-be oligarchs govern.
The main way they gain and solidify power is through lies.
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